The Only Man in the House

Chapter 3: The Bathing Ritual

Katherine rose off him last, unhurried even now, and stood at the foot of the lounger surveying the wreckage of her family. Jordan lay gleaming and spent, painted in oil and milk and all three of them, his chest still rising in long slow pulls. She touched his damp hair once.

"Look at the state of him." Not a complaint. An inventory. "He'll be sticky by the entrée. Bath. The big one."

"I'll start it," Maren said, already up.

"You'll start it together. Vanessa, go with her. Water hot enough to steam the windows. The lavender oil, the good one, and the milk jug from the fridge." She looked down at her son, and her smile came slow. "He's earned a proper soak. So have we."

The master bathroom took ten minutes to fill and it filled like an event. The tub was marble, sunken, big enough for six, and the taps thundered while steam climbed the mirrors and killed them to fog. Maren dumped in a swirl of amber oil and then, standing on the step in nothing, poured the jug of Celeste's milk in a white ribbon across the surface, where it clouded and spread and turned the water faintly sweet.

"That's wasteful," Vanessa said from the doorway.

"That's luxurious. Get in."

Katherine arrived with the last of the iced tea and her hair pinned up with a clip, and she took the bench at the head of the tub like a throne. "Jordan. In."

He stepped down into the heat and it closed over him, milk and oil and lavender, and every muscle he owned let go at once. He sank to his chin and his eyes half closed, and the water slid in white slow currents around his shoulders, and for a full minute nobody touched him at all. It was the longest nobody had touched him since six that morning.

Then Maren waded in, and the water climbed her body, and she dropped to her knees in front of him with a washcloth.

"I get his hair."

"You get his feet," Vanessa said, sliding in behind him. "I'm doing his hair. You don't wash hair, you scrub it like a rug."

"I was going to be gentle."

"You were going to be fast, so you'd get the rest of him first. Sit down."

Katherine sipped her tea. "Share."

So they shared. Vanessa knelt behind his head and worked shampoo into his scalp with her fingers, unhurried, thorough, her nails dragging light lines that made his eyes roll shut. Maren took the cloth and started at his ankle. She was gentle. Slower than she needed to be, agonizingly slower, the cloth wrung out warm and dragged up his calf in long strokes, wrung again, up over his knee.

"He's got oil in places oil shouldn't reach," she said.

"He has oil everywhere. That was the point." Vanessa tipped his head back against her shoulder and cupped water over his hair, careful of his eyes, her breast soft against his ear. "Lean back, sweetheart. Let me."

The rinse ran off his forehead and down his temple, and Maren's cloth arrived at his thigh, and stopped being tender. She wrung the cloth and set it aside and used her hand instead, slick with milky water, gliding up the inside of his thigh to the heavy weight of him where he floated.

"He's still soft," she said, fond, disappointed. "Look at him. All tired."

"He came three times in four hours, Maren."

"He's twenty-four."

Katherine set down her glass. The sound of it on marble was small and both daughters went still with their hands on him. "Nobody's asking him to perform. He soaks. You wash. If he rises to the occasion, that's his generosity, not your assignment." She looked at Jordan, half submerged, boneless, water beading on his collarbone. "Do you want your sisters' hands, Jordan?"

He opened his eyes. Seven faces around a tub full of clouded sweet water, steam on the ceiling, his mother watching him from the bench with her tea.

"Yes," he said.

"Then have them."

Maren's hand closed around him under the water and she made a small happy sound, low in her throat, and he did rise to the occasion, thickening in her fist while Vanessa kept washing his hair as if nothing were happening below her chin. The water sloshed gently against marble. Maren stroked him slowly, letting the heat and the slick milk-water do the work, her thumb circling the head on every pass, and his hips gave one small helpless tilt before he caught himself.

"There he is," she whispered. "There's my big brother."

Vanessa rinsed the last of the shampoo and pushed his head upright, and then her hands came around from behind and slid down his chest, palms flat, until they met Maren's wrist. She didn't push her off. She covered her hand and guided the grip, tightening it, slowing it, the two of them working him in tandem through warm white water.

"Up a little," Vanessa murmured. "Higher. He likes it higher."

"You don't know what he likes better than me."

"I've had him inside me twice today, so."

The water lapped. Somewhere behind the fog the friends' voices drifted from the hallway, laughing about towels, and Priya's head appeared around the doorframe, curious, and Katherine waved her off with two fingers. This part was family.

Jordan's breath went shallow. Maren leaned in and kissed the hinge of his jaw, then his throat, then the pulse in it, her small mouth hot against skin gone soft from soaking. His cock stood rigid out of the water now, red-dark, dripping milk-white when it broke the surface, and Maren bent lower with evident intent.

"No," Katherine said.

Maren froze with her lips an inch away. "Mom."

"He's washed. He's had his hands. If he comes again it won't be in a bathtub before dinner like a boy sneaking time behind the shed." Katherine set her cup on the ledge and stood, and the clip caught the amber light in her hair. "Pull the plug. Towels. Everyone out."

The drain gurgled. Cold air rushed in where steam had been. Maren released him with a look of pure injustice and Vanessa stepped out first, wrapping her hair in a towel, then handed him one, and he stood dripping on the gilded mat while three women dried him in overlapping territories, Maren doing his legs with theatrical slowness, Vanessa his back, Katherine his chest, her palms pressing the towel against his heart a moment longer than drying required.

"Dinner's at seven," she said. "It's ten past six. I want the grill lit, the table on the terrace, and this one dressed in something that makes my friends behave, which will fail." She swatted his ass, light, proprietary. "Maren, salad. Vanessa, wine. Go."

Maren went, wet-footed, throwing a look back at him. Vanessa lingered at the door, towel around her shoulders, and met his eyes.

"You heard her," she said. "And Jordan. Wear the grey shirt. The one I bought you."

She was gone before he could answer, and Katherine held out his jeans with the patience of a woman who had already decided what the evening held.

He dressed in the bedroom she steered him toward. The grey shirt hung on the closet door, ironed, tags off, which meant Vanessa had planned it before today had even begun. He pulled it on over his bare, still-damp skin and the cotton settled soft against his chest, and in the mirror the color made his eyes look darker. His jeans went on over skin that smelled faintly of lavender and milk no amount of water had fully claimed.

Katherine waited in the hallway. She'd dressed too, a wrap dress the color of dark honey, her hair loose over one shoulder, and she looked him over from collar to belt with the thoroughness of an appraiser.

"Turn around."

He turned.

"Good." She took his elbow, not his hand, her grip firm and elegant, and guided him down the corridor. "Walk with me. The friends are setting the terrace. I want them to see you arrive with me, not stumble out later looking rumpled."

"And if I'd rather not be displayed?"

"Then you'd have said so this morning, and you didn't." Her thumb moved once along the inside of his elbow. "You like being ours, Jordan. You've never once said otherwise. You just get quiet and start washing dishes."

The glass doors at the end of the hall stood open, and the evening came through them, gold and low, the light thickening over the garden. The terrace had been transformed while they soaked. The long table wore a white cloth that lifted and fell in the breeze. Lanterns were lit along the railing, six of them, small fires in amber glass. Someone had put out the good plates, the ones with the silver rim his mother only used when she wanted a night to be remembered.

The friends moved through it half-dressed. Celeste wore one of Vanessa's silk robes knotted high on her thigh. Priya had pulled a sundress on with nothing underneath, the fabric translucent where the light hit her back. The small blonde carried a platter of figs past them wearing only a towel and Jordan's own discarded shirt from the pool deck, knotted under her ribs, and she grinned at him without stopping.

"You smell like my milk," Celeste said as she passed with a bundle of cut lavender. She leaned close on the way by and breathed it in at his throat. "In the water. Whole jug. Maren's idea?"

"Maren's idea."

"Of course it was." She went on toward the table, hips unhurried, and Katherine's hand tightened a fraction on his elbow.

Maren was at the grill with her salad done, wearing a slip the color of cream, arguing with the flames. Vanessa stood at the table's head uncorking wine, hair loose now, feet bare, and she looked up when they came out and her eyes went straight to the grey shirt and stayed there.

"You wore it."

"You told me to."

"I know." Something crossed her face, brief and satisfied, and she poured a glass and held it out to him. "Here. You'll need it. Everyone at this table has been drinking since four."

Katherine drew him past both of them to the far end of the terrace, where the stone balustrade overlooked the drop to the garden. The sun sat heavy and red above the tree line. She set her own glass on the rail and turned to face him, and the wind took a strand of hair across her mouth and she brushed it back.

"There's an hour before dinner," she said. "Look at them."

He looked. Vanessa directing the seating order with two fingers. Maren sneaking figs off the platter and blaming the blonde. Six friends laughing, arranging chairs, milk-sweet shadows moving on the stone. His family, plus them, and every one of them glittering in the last light.

"You made this table beautiful this morning before any of us were awake," Katherine said. "Pancakes. Juice poured. You did that while we slept, the way you do everything, quietly, so no one owes you anything." She picked up her glass but didn't drink. "I noticed. I always notice. So does Vanessa. That's why we fight over you the way we do, in case you ever wondered."

"I never wondered."

"Liar." Her smile was slow. "You've wondered since you were nineteen and found Maren's diary. Don't look shocked. Nothing in this house stays hidden, least of all from me."

Below the terrace the garden lamps came on one by one, an old automatic thing, small pops of light down the slope. Katherine stepped closer, close enough that the honey silk brushed his shirt, and she straightened his collar with both hands, an old gesture, one she'd been doing since he was small, and let her hands rest there at the end of it.

"Tonight is different from this morning," she said. "This morning we took you. Tonight we keep you. Everyone sits near you. Everyone feeds you. You don't lift a finger except to be adored, and if you try to clear plates I will have Celeste hold you down." Her thumb smoothed the collar seam flat. "Do you understand the assignment?"

"Adored."

"Completely. It's harder than it sounds. You're bad at receiving." She tipped her head, studying him. "That ends tonight."

Vanessa called from the table, wine bottle in hand, "Mom, are you going to monopolize him out there all evening, or do I get to sit next to him?"

"You're on his left," Katherine called back, not turning. "I've already done the chart."

"There's a chart?"

"There's been a chart since Tuesday, darling."

Maren's laugh rang off the stone. Katherine took Jordan's hand properly now, lacing her fingers through his, and led him toward the table where the lanterns burned and the cloth billowed and seven women turned to watch him come.

"Sit," she said, and pulled out the chair at the center of the long side, the seat with every other chair angled toward it. "Your throne, sweetheart. Try not to look so terrified."

He sat. Six wineglasses were raised toward him before he'd settled, and Maren was already leaning across to put the first fig on his plate.

The fig was honey-soft against his lips before he'd finished sitting. Maren held it steady and watched him bite, juice running down her thumb, and she caught it with her mouth when he was done.

"He eats," she announced, delighted, to the whole table.

"He does everything," Katherine said. She stood at the head of the table and let her gaze travel down the length of it, seven faces lit by lanterns, all of them turned toward the center seat. "Before we begin. House rules for dinner."

Vanessa reached for the corkscrew again. "Mom."

"A uniform was required this morning. None is required tonight." Katherine slipped one strap of the honey dress off her shoulder, then the other, unhurried, and the silk whispered down her ribs. "I want the table the way the table should be. All of us. Nothing between us and him."

The dress pooled at her feet. She stepped out of it and stood in the lantern light in nothing but the gold band, her full breasts heavy and dark-tipped, and sat back down at her end as if nothing had happened, lifting her wine.

Maren had her cream slip over her head in four seconds flat, laughing, her small athletic body flushed from the grill's heat. Celeste untied the borrowed silk robe and let it slide off one bronze shoulder and then the rest. Priya's sundress went in one motion, thrown over the back of a chair, her red hair spilling down over pale nipples already tight and beading white. The small blonde dropped Jordan's knotted shirt on the terrace stones and sat down in her towel, then reconsidered and dropped the towel too.

Only Vanessa hesitated. She set down the corkscrew and looked at Jordan in his ironed grey shirt at the center of the table, and something old and satisfied crossed her face.

"Keep the shirt on him," she said. "That's mine. Everything else comes off."

She pulled the sweater over her head, unbuttoned the white collar shirt beneath it with quick fingers, and the last of her went with her slacks over bare feet. Seven women naked at a table dressed for a magazine. The lanterns threw long amber shadows over all of it, milk already glistening at more than one nipple in the cooling evening air.

"Now we eat," Katherine said.

They ate. It began as dinner and stopped pretending fast. Celeste carved the roast across from him and laid the first slice on his plate with tongs and then leaned over the table and dragged her nipple through the red wine in his glass by accident or not at all, and Priya laughed so hard she had to grip the table. Maren fed him by hand, everything, figs and torn bread and roast balanced on her fingers, and when he closed his lips around her thumb she left it there a moment longer than feeding required.

"Open," she said, and held a cold strawberry dripping against his mouth, and let her milk fall onto it from her breast in a thin white line before he bit.

"That's my girl's trick," Katherine said, watching. "She learned that watching me nurse her, I'd wager."

"I learned it an hour ago," Maren said. "It's delicious. Jordan, tell me it's delicious."

"It's delicious."

Vanessa poured more wine and then didn't drink hers. She reached under the table instead and her hand found his thigh, slid up the denim, and stayed. She ate her own plate one-handed, unhurried, her fingers walking higher by degrees while conversation moved around them. Across the table Celeste caught Priya's chin and turned her face and kissed her slow, milk-sweet, and the small blonde reached across two place settings to cup Celeste's breast from behind and milk jetted onto the white cloth, a starburst of it, and nobody reached for a napkin.

"This tablecloth is doomed," Vanessa observed against Jordan's ear.

"It was doomed at the fig."

Her hand found the fly of his jeans and worked it open under the cloth, patient, and the cool air and her warm palm arrived together. He stiffened in her grip and she made a low pleased sound and didn't stroke, just held him, cradling his length in the dark under the table while she speared a piece of roast with her fork and ate it.

"Vanessa," Katherine said. "Hands where they're visible at my dinner table or finished with him by dessert."

"Almost finished." Vanessa pumped him twice, slow, root to crown, her thumb gathering the wet at the tip and smearing it, and then she withdrew her hand and brought her fingers up into the light and licked them clean, one at a time, looking at him across the length of the table. "Later, sweetheart."

"You're all terrible," Maren said, squirming in her chair.

"You're jealous because you thought of it second."

"I thought of it first, I just got shushed."

Celeste stood, naked in the lantern light, and came around the table to stand behind Jordan's chair. Her hands settled on his shoulders the way Vanessa's had that morning, and she bent and pressed her milk-heavy chest against the back of his neck, cool and leaking, and rested her mouth by his ear.

"Your mother said everyone feeds you. She didn't say we'd stop at food." Her nipples trailed wet lines across his skin. "When dinner's done, the grown-ups are taking you inside, and Maren is included because she'll make a scene otherwise."

"I can hear you," Maren said.

"You're meant to."

Katherine watched all of it down the length of the table, wine in hand, her silver hair loose over one bare shoulder, and Jordan met her eyes across the candles and she smiled at him the way she had over the breakfast table, slow, total, satisfied. She lifted her glass.

"To the only man at this table," she said. "He cleared our plates this morning. Tonight we clear his."

The glasses rang, seven of them, and Maren was already leaning across him with the cream, spooning it over his dessert while her milk dripped into it from above, and Vanessa's hand returned under the tablecloth without asking permission from anyone.

Vanessa's hand had barely found its rhythm under the cloth when the terrace door slid open behind them.

Six girls came in. Young, barefoot, entirely naked, arranged in a nervous wedge behind the tallest of them, who carried the wine bottle like a shield. They were college-age, fresh-faced, and every one of them flushed from walking through the dark hallway without a stitch on. Their breasts were varied and unlaced by any bra, and several nipples had stiffened in the night air, the tips dark and swollen. One of them, curvy with a black braid down her back, was pressing her thighs together so obviously that the walk looked like an ordeal.

"Are we too late?" the tall one asked, and her voice cracked on the last word. "Celeste said eight. We rushed."

Celeste was up and across the terrace, draping an arm around the tall girl's shoulders. "You're right on time, Naya. Everyone, these are my sister's girls from the dorms. They've never been with anyone. Tonight we fix that."

The girls shuffled in a loose line at the edge of the lantern light, arms drifting up to cover themselves out of habit and then drifting down again as if they'd been coached. They hadn't. The one with the braid caught Jordan looking at her and turned red from her throat to her ears, and her hips shifted, and a small damp shine caught the lantern light on her inner thigh. Aroused. All six of them, visibly, nervously aroused.

Jordan looked at his mother. Katherine had already risen from her chair, wine in hand, and was circling the table to inspect the new arrivals with the unhurried thoroughness she gave to silverware.

"Young," she said.

"Eighteen," Celeste said. "All six. Legal and eager, and virgins to a girl. They've read everything Maren sent them."

"You sent them reading material?" Maren said, delighted.

"Maren sent them a list," Celeste corrected. "Don't interrupt."

Katherine stopped in front of the braided one and tipped her chin up with one finger. The girl's breath went ragged. Katherine studied her face, then her nipples, then the tremble in her thighs, and something in the assessment softened.

"You're trembling," Katherine said. "Fear?"

"No, ma'am." The girl swallowed. "I've been like this since Celeste told us what we'd be walking into. I've never even kissed anyone."

"Then you're in the right house. We start everything gently." Katherine turned to the table, and her voice took on the tone she used for seating charts and schedules. "Jordan. Center seat. These six are your guests tonight. They came here for you."

"For me." He said it flat, testing it.

"For you. They've heard about you all month. They're untouched and they chose this house to stop being that way, which means they chose you." Katherine set her glass down. "Dessert's done. Plates can wait. Girls, sit."

The six arranged themselves around him with a flurry of bare skin and whispered negotiations, two on the bench at his left, two at his right, the braided girl and another settling onto the bench directly across, facing him. The table was crowded now, thirteen naked women and one man in an ironed grey shirt, and the new ones smelled of soap and nerves and the faint sweetness of arousal.

The braided one, Naya, couldn't stop looking at him. Her gaze went from his face to his collar and back down, and when Maren leaned over and unbuttoned the top button of the grey shirt without asking, Naya's mouth fell open slightly.

"They touched him already today," she whispered to the girl beside her.

"Everyone touches him," the other whispered back. "That's the whole thing."

"What does it feel like?"

"Find out," Maren said, having heard every word, and she took Naya's wrist across the table and set her hand flat on Jordan's chest, over his heart, where the cotton was warm and his pulse knocked under her palm.

Naya went very still. So did he. Her fingers curled into the fabric, just a little, holding on.

"He's warm," she said. "He's so warm."

"He's been in a bath and a pool and three of us," Maren said. "He's warm because he's generous. Go on. Unbutton the rest. He's yours for this part."

"Mine," Naya repeated, and her voice came out thin, and she stood up on her knees on the bench and reached across the table and undid the second button. The third. Her hands shook. The shirt fell open over his chest and the silver chain caught the lantern light, and she made a sound that was half laugh and half something else entirely, and sat back down hard on the bench.

The girl beside her, small and dark-haired, bit her lip and reached over too. Then the twins across the table. Then the last two. Six sets of hands over his chest and shoulders and throat inside a minute, none of them knowing where to settle, all of them touching him anyway, and his breathing went slow and deliberate the way it did when his body was being sorted out by strangers and family at the same time.

"Look at him," Celeste said from behind Naya's chair, fond. "That face. That's the face we've been coming back for."

Katherine stood at the head of the table and watched her son disappear under eighteen years of waiting. She didn't interfere. She refilled her wine.

"Naya," she said at last, and the braided girl raised her head from where she'd been breathing against his collarbone. "Your hands are shaking. Come around here. Kneel next to him and look at him properly, and then decide what you want your first thing to be. A kiss. A touch. Anything at all. He won't rush you. He was raised to wait."

Naya stood. She came around the table on unsteady legs, past Vanessa's smirk and Maren's wide-eyed attention, and knelt on the bench beside Jordan's chair. Up close she smelled like some cheap, sweet body spray and nerves. Her eyes were big and dark and fixed on his mouth.

"What do you want?" he asked her. Quiet. Just for her.

"I want," she said, and stopped, and her hand found his bare chest again. "I want you to show me everything. I don't know any of it."

The table went quiet around them, thirteen women waiting on one sentence.

"He knows all of it," Maren said softly.

Naya leaned in. Her first kiss landed half on his lips and half on his chin, and she pulled back, mortified, and he caught her face in both hands and turned her straight and kissed her properly, slow, and she melted against his shoulder with a sound like she'd been waiting her whole life for the permission. When they broke apart her eyes were glassy and her hand had slid down his open shirt to the first button of his jeans, hovering.

"Can I?" she whispered.

"Open him," Katherine said, "and the rest of you take notes."

Naya's fingers found the button of his jeans and fumbled it twice before it gave. The zip came down tooth by tooth under her trembling hand, and the whole table leaned in, thirteen women and the lantern light, and when she drew the denim open over his hips nobody breathed.

"Oh," she said. Just that. Her palm settled over the cotton of his underwear and the heat of him came up through the fabric into her hand, and her mouth opened and nothing else came out.

"Take them off him," Vanessa said from his left. "All the way. If you're doing it, do it properly."

Naya stood on the bench and worked the jeans down over his hips, and Maren and Vanessa lifted him by the shoulders so the denim could slide free, and then his underwear went with it, and he sat naked at the center of the table in nothing but the open grey shirt and the silver chain, hard, flushed dark, the tip already shining.

The small dark-haired girl beside Naya made a sound in her throat. One of the twins crossed her legs hard on the bench. The braided girl, still pressing her thighs together, whimpered outright.

"He's bigger than the diagram," she said.

"There was a diagram?" Priya asked, delighted.

"Maren's list had appendices."

"Of course it did," Vanessa said. "She made charts for her pony camp when she was nine."

"Where do I," Naya started, and her hand hovered over him without landing, trembling. "Where do I even."

"Wherever you want," Jordan said, quiet. "There's no wrong place."

Katherine had settled back at the head of the table, wine in hand, watching her son be uncovered by six pairs of inexperienced hands, and Jordan saw her over Naya's bent head, and her eyes were dark and unhurried and entirely satisfied.

Then Maren stood up on her bench.

"Wait. Wait wait wait. Before anyone starts." She was already gone, bare feet slapping the terrace stones, her cream slip abandoned on her chair, and she came back from the house with a small amber bottle cradled in both hands like something rescued from a fire.

"Maren." Katherine's voice, one degree cooler.

"It's not what you think. It's what Celeste brought. Celeste, tell them."

Celeste laughed low in her chest. "The droplets. Yes. My sister's formulation. Two drops under the tongue and in a minute you'd come if the wind touched you. I brought it for the girls. A first time should end well."

"It's safe?" the tall one, Naya, asked, eyes going from the bottle to Jordan's face.

"Completely. It's just a fast, hard, shared finish. Everyone at once." Celeste took the bottle from Maren and held it up to the lantern light. "The trick is timing. You take it, you count your heartbeats, and when it lands, it lands for everyone in the room together. I've done it at three of these dinners. You will remember this night for the rest of your life."

"Everyone takes it?" the small dark-haired girl asked.

"Everyone," Maren said. "That's the whole point. Jordan too. All thirteen of us and him, one wave. I've been planning this since the bath." She looked down the table at Katherine, chin up, stubborn. "Please, Mom. It's dinner theater. It's the perfect ending."

Katherine looked at her youngest daughter for a long moment. Then at the bottle. Then at her son, sitting open-shirted and dripping want at the center of thirteen women.

"One dose each," she said. "And Maren does not administer his. Celeste does. Go on."

The table came alive. Celeste walked the length of it with the little bottle and a dropper, and each woman tilted her head back and opened her mouth, two drops under the tongue, and the room filled with small nervous laughs and the scent of the stuff, something dark and floral and faintly sweet, like figs and night air. The girls took theirs with widening eyes. Naya's hand shook so badly Celeste steadied her jaw with two fingers.

"Chin up. There. Hold it under your tongue and don't swallow."

Vanessa took hers without blinking. Katherine took hers sitting perfectly straight, and when the drops hit her tongue her nostrils flared once, the only tell she allowed herself.

Then Celeste came to Jordan.

She stood over him, bronze and shining in the lantern light, milk already beading at both dark nipples from the heat of the room, and she cupped the back of his head with one hand and tipped his face up.

"Open, sweetheart. This is from all of us."

He opened. Two drops fell onto his tongue, cool and sweet and heavy, spreading backward toward his throat, and the taste went through him like warm smoke.

"Now everyone," Maren said, climbing back onto her bench, flushed, her pupils blown wide. "Nobody touches themselves. That's the rule. Hands off. The first person who gives in, we all fall, and we all fall together."

"Who made that rule?" Priya asked.

"I did. Two seconds ago."

They waited. Hands lay flat on thighs and the white cloth. Thirteen women and one man, all of them breathing a little faster than a minute ago, all of them feeling the slow bloom of it under their tongues, down the spine, a low spreading heat like standing too close to a fire. Jordan felt it reach the base of his cock and sit there, humming. Naya's hand was still on his bare chest, fingers curled in the grey cotton, and he could feel her pulse through her fingertips, hammering.

"How long," the braided girl whispered.

"Till it lands," Celeste said. "You'll know."

It took eleven heartbeats.

Jordan counted them. At the eleventh the heat in his spine went off like a struck match, racing up through his stomach and down into his balls, and around him in a widening ring he heard it land, breath catching in thirteen separate throats, chairs scraping, a glass of wine knocked over and rolling red across the cloth.

"Oh no," Maren said, and it was the last complete sentence anyone managed for a while, because her hand had shot between her own legs despite her own rule and her whole small body seized, and her nipples, swollen and aching from the drug, let go.

The milk came out of her in hard white jets, arcing over the table, spattering the roast, the cloth, Jordan's open shirt, and the sight of it broke the room.

Naya came two seconds later. Her hand was still on his chest and her orgasm went through her untouched and enormous, and she cried out, a raw surprised sound, hips grinding down on the bench, and her own breasts, full and aching, released across his stomach in thin white ropes, her first letdown ever, spraying him with her milk while she shook.

"God, oh God, it's everywhere," the small dark-haired girl gasped, doubled over the table edge, her milk hitting the plates in bright white lines.

The twins went together. Of course they did. Both of them arched back on the far bench, breasts thrust up, and twin streams crossed in the air over the center of the table and rained down on the figs and the broken wine.

Priya and Celeste collided reaching for each other, mouths finding each other's nipples mid-orgasm, and Celeste's gush hit Priya full in the face and throat and Priya drank it while she came, milk running down her chin onto her own heaving chest and jetting off her nipples in pulses that matched Celeste's fingers inside her.

Vanessa had lasted four seconds. She'd grabbed his thigh with one hand and the table edge with the other and her orgasm tore through her loud, hips bucking against air, milk spraying in hard white arcs across his chest, across Naya's back, over the shattered cloth, and she was saying his name over and over, low and ragged.

Katherine came last and loudest. She'd held her composure to the final second, wineglass still in hand, and then it fell from her fingers and she gripped the table with both hands and threw her head back, silver hair streaming, and her release flooded down over her full breasts in thick white rivers that ran her ribs to her hips and dripped from her onto the chair, the floor, everything, her cry echoing off the terrace stone.

Jordan came hardest of all. No hand on him. The drug reached him at the same instant as the sight of thirteen women erupting around him, and his orgasm ripped up through him untouched, his cock jerking against his stomach, come striping his chest over the milk, over the open shirt, in long pulses that seemed to go on and on while the room sprayed and moaned around him.

The terrace was white. That was the first thought that formed in anyone's head afterward. The white cloth was plastered with milk and wine and come, the roast glistened, the plates wore starbursts, and thirteen women sat or lay or slumped around the table, chests heaving, every nipple still leaking in small tired after-pulses, dripping onto thighs and stone.

"Two seconds," Priya said eventually, to nobody, from where she lay across three chairs. "She said two seconds. She undersold it."

"It's still going," Maren said, and indeed a last thin jet left her nipple and joined the mess on the cloth. She looked down at herself, at the table, at Jordan stripped and striped and dripping in the center of it, and started laughing, helpless, whole-body. "Look at dinner. Look at what we did to dinner."

"This is the best dinner party I have ever attended," Celeste said, milk running in twin lines off her bronze nipples, her voice husky. "I've hosted worse."

Naya was still slumped against Jordan's side. Her hand had never left his chest. Her milk had soaked through the grey shirt over his heart, and her braid was white at the tip where a stray arc had caught it, and she was staring at the disaster of the table with an expression close to religious awe.

"I came," she said. "I didn't touch anything and I came, and it, I sprayed him. I'm so sorry, I sprayed him."

"Don't apologize," Vanessa said, wiped her forearm on the ruined cloth. "Look around. That's the point of this whole house."

"He's covered in me," Naya said, softer, and her fingers spread against the soaked cotton over his heartbeat, and she looked at him with glassy dark eyes. "Can I taste it? Off you?"

"Naya," Katherine said from the head of the table, recovering her voice by degrees, and the girl went still. But Katherine wasn't scolding. She was studying her, milk-dripping and spent, the way she'd studied the silverware. "You'll want a great many things tonight. That one you may have."

Naya leaned down and dragged her tongue slowly through the white stripe on his chest, through her own milk and his come, and shivered, and made a small helpless sound against his skin.

"It's good," she whispered. "It's all good."

"I want a bath run," Katherine said, standing. Milk ran down her inner thighs and she did not acknowledge it. "The good tub. Everyone in this room is a disaster, myself included, and I refuse to serve dessert to thirteen women dripping onto my floor." She looked down the table at her son, boneless and gleaming and spent, at the six exhausted girls ringing him. "Jordan. You're soaking with five women's milk and your own. Up."

"Yes, Mom."

"And the rest of you." Her gaze swept the ruined table, Celeste still laughing, Priya boneless, the girls clutching each other. "Dessert is moving to the bathroom. Bring the strawberries and the cream and nothing else. Naya, you too. You're not done learning, and I don't send students home early."

Maren was already on her feet, hauling the tall girl up by the hand, milk still streaking the floor behind her.

"Best family day ever," she announced. "And it's not even ten."

The master bathroom swallowed all fourteen of them like a warm mouth. Steam climbed the marble walls in slow ribbons, and the tub, the huge sunken one Katherine had imported whole from a closed hotel, filled with water scented of something floral and expensive. The girls stood at its edge in a row, staring.

"In," Katherine said. "All of you. There's room if there's no modesty."

There was no modesty. There hadn't been since breakfast. The water rose as bodies slid in, milk blooming off skin in white clouds, and Jordan went in last, down three wide steps into heat that took the ache out of his shoulders in one long exhale. The grey shirt came off him somewhere on the way, Naya's hands peeling it from his soaked chest, and his chain stayed.

Vanessa worked the taps with one foot and settled against the marble at his left. Maren found his right, wrapping around his arm like a barnacle. The six girls clustered at the shallow end, knee-deep, giggling when the warm water hit skin the drug had left oversensitive, flinching and laughing and holding each other's waists for balance.

"Start with his hair," Katherine ordered. She stood in the deep end, water to her ribs, silver hair floating dark-wet against her back, and she looked like something carved and set there on purpose. "He's been milked on since six this morning. I want him clean."

Priya took the pitcher. She tipped his head back against the marble lip and poured, warm water sheeting over his scalp, her fingers working soap into his hair in slow circles, and Jordan's eyes closed and he let the day wash off him in rivulets of oil and salt and dried white.

"Careful," Maren said. "He goes boneless when you do his head. Look at him."

"I am looking at him," Priya said. "That's why I'm doing it."

Celeste climbed the steps and straddled the ledge behind his head and worked the knots out of his shoulders with oiled thumbs, pressing down into the muscle while the water lapped at his chest. Katherine crouched at his knees and drew the loofah up his shins. Vanessa claimed his left hand and scrubbed each finger individually, unhurried, like a jeweler. Maren got his right hand and simply held it underwater between her thighs and pretended that was washing.

The girls watched all of it. The small dark-haired one, Sef, knelt closest, and after a while she reached out and laid her palm flat on his sternum, just to feel it move.

"He breathes slow," she said.

"He breathes slow when he's being cared for," Katherine said. "You'll learn the difference. It matters."

The bath went on too long on purpose. Katherine told them to rinse, and the water went from white to merely cloudy, and the candles she'd had lit before dinner burned down by a finger's width while thirteen women soaked and stroked and drank small glasses of water someone brought and laughed at nothing. Jordan sat in the middle of it all, warm to the point of drowsiness, hands full of women, and he thought distantly that he should be exhausted and instead felt wrung open and humming.

It was Katherine who stood first. Water sheeted off her body, and she stepped out onto the marble without hurrying and held out one towel and waited, sovereign, for the room to organize itself around her.

"Bed," she said. "All of us. The big one. I've had it made since Tuesday."

The master bedroom took the whole crowd without strain. The bed was enormous, a low dark platform wide enough for ten to lie shoulder to shoulder, turned down in white linens that smelled of cedar, and the seven lamps along the wall threw amber circles over everything. The girls came out of the bathroom flushed from toweling, hair dripping, still holding each other's hands. Katherine stood at the foot of the bed with the towel wrapped loose around her hips and nothing else, and Jordan saw the moment her patience snapped like a held breath.

"Rules," she said. "Listen once. Everyone in this bed. Nobody sleeps alone tonight and nobody leaves it until I say. Jordan lies in the center because he is the center." Her eyes moved over him, damp and gleaming in the lamplight, and something in her face went from matriarch to something much older and hotter. "And he finishes inside every woman in this room. That includes the guests. That was the arrangement, Celeste?"

"That was the arrangement," Celeste said. She'd shed her towel and crossed to the bed already, crawling up the linen on her knees, bronze and heavy-breasted and certain. "We brought them here for exactly that. Some of them have been counting down since Thursday."

"Then we begin." Katherine dropped her towel and pointed at the mattress. "Jordan. Middle. On your back to start. Girls, arrange yourselves along the sides. You're going to watch the first one closely, because you're all getting a turn and I will not have fumbling."

He lay down. The sheets were cool under his back and the room was warm and the amber light pooled over his stomach, over the chain, over the slow heavy rise of his cock already thickening against his thigh. Thirteen women arranged themselves around him in a loose ring of knees and shoulders and wet hair, the family at his head and sides, the six girls in a nervous line along the foot of the bed. The mattress dipped everywhere at once. It was like lying in the middle of a warm sea.

"Who's first?" Maren asked, already climbing over his legs.

"Guests first," Katherine said. "You and your sister have had him all day. Naya. Come here."

Naya came on her knees across the linen, braid swinging, and she stopped astride his thighs and looked down at him and her whole face was a struck match.

"I don't know what to do," she whispered.

"Your body does," Katherine said. "Lift up. Use your hand and put him inside you and then just breathe. Slowly. Everyone goes slow tonight, everyone, there is all the time in the world."

Jordan reached up and steadied her hips. Her skin was furnace-hot under his palms. She wrapped her small fingers around him and stroked once in wonder and then guided him down, and the blunt head of him pressed against her, and she was so wet that the first contact made a sound in the quiet room and half the ring of women groaned at hearing it.

"Slow," he told her. His voice came out rough. "However much you can take."

She took the tip. Her mouth fell open and her breath came out in a thin whine and she froze there, full of an inch of him, trembling, and the whole bed leaned in.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's, he's splitting me, he's so warm inside."

"Deeper when you're ready," he said. He rubbed slow circles on her hip bones with both thumbs and watched her face and kept his own hips absolutely still. "You set the pace. All night, that's the rule for you six."

She sank by degrees. It took a long time, and the room let her take it, every woman silent, Maren chewing her own knuckle, Priya's hand between Celeste's thighs without either of them noticing. When Naya finally sat fully down on him her eyes were brimming and her mouth was open and she couldn't make a sound at all.

"There," Katherine murmured from beside his head, her hand resting on his chest over the chain. "Now move. Small. Like breathing."

Naya moved in small rocking pushes, learning, and her walls dragged around him in tight velvet pulses, and she bent forward and put her mouth on his collarbone because she needed to bite something, and he felt her teeth and her gasp and the slick slap of her hips starting to find rhythm.

"Talk to her," Vanessa said from his left, low. "She needs to hear you."

"You feel incredible," he told Naya, and it wasn't flattery, his voice broke on it, and she shuddered all over and rode faster. "So tight around me. You're doing perfect. Look at me."

She looked at him. Dark eyes, glassy. That did it. Her orgasm took her mid-stroke, her cry cracking off the ceiling, hips slamming down, and she clamped around him in hard rhythmic squeezes and milk sprayed from her swollen nipples in thin white jets across his chest, her first letdown on purpose, her first orgasm ever with someone inside her.

"That's it, that's it," Celeste crooned behind her, rubbing her back. "Milk him while you come, good girl, soak him."

"Don't stop moving," he gasped, right at the edge himself, holding her hips down. "I'm close, Naya, stay on me."

"Inside her," Katherine said. "Now. That's the rule and it's a good one."

He thrust up twice and went off like a struck wire, pumping into her in long pulses, and Naya felt it and screamed softly into his neck and came again around the heat of it, shaking, flooded, and he emptied everything he had up into this stranger while thirteen women watched it happen.

She collapsed onto his chest, boneless, still twitching, and lay there panting while his come and her milk mingled on his skin.

"Off him when you can," Katherine said gently. "Someone help her to the side. Sef. You're next."

Sef was already crawling up the bed. She was small and dark-haired and steadier than Naya, and she swung over his hips and reached between her own legs and spread herself with two fingers and sank down onto him in one smooth push, both of them hissing at the slick mixture of Naya's come still coating him. She bottomed out and sat there, eyes rolling.

"God, he's deep," she breathed. "He's in my stomach."

"Ride him," Maren said. "Hard if you want, he likes it."

She rode him hard. Her small body slapped down on his thighs, her breasts bouncing, milk leaking in bright threads with every impact, and Jordan gripped her waist and met her on every stroke and the room filled with the wet sounds of it. She came in under a minute, loud, and he followed on her heels, thrusting up through her climax and holding her down while he filled her, her milk spraying his chest in white ropes.

The twins took him together. He didn't have to leave his back; one knelt over his mouth and one sank onto his cock, and the one on his face ground down on his tongue while he licked her through her orgasm and the other one rode him to hers and he came up into her with his mouth still full. Both girls gushed milk down onto his chest at the same moment and he came hard enough to see white at the edges of his vision.

He had lost count by the fourth. His hips were slick and his cock was sore in the best way and the bed smelled of sex and milk and cedar. The tall one with the nervous voice went second to last of the girls, riding him slowly with her head thrown back, and he sat up to meet her, and she wrapped around him and he drove up into her while she shook, and her come and his ran down over his lap when she lifted off.

Celeste climbed on before the tall one had fully moved aside, hungry, sinking onto him with a groan of pure relief.

"There's my boy," she said. "Save the deepest one for me."

He gave it to her. He sat up fully, wrapped his arms around her, and fucked up into her from below, hard, her heavy breasts crushed between them leaking down both their stomachs, and she bit his shoulder and came around him in long rolling waves and he poured into her on the last stroke.

Priya rode him facing his feet, milking her own nipples over his chest as she moved, and he reached up and played with her clit until she seized around him, and her come pulled his out of him in a weak, almost painful spurt, his balls aching, still enough.

"You're doing beautifully," Katherine said, and her voice had gone ragged, finally, her composure fraying at the edges. She was on her knees beside his head with two fingers working herself, watching him get drained by her friends, watching her son's body used exactly the way she'd planned it. "Maren. Vanessa. Family next."

Maren went first, straddling him and sliding down with a familiar sigh, and she knew him, knew every angle, and she rode him slow and grinding with her forehead pressed to his.

"Third time today you've been inside me," she whispered. "You feel like home, Jordan."

He pulled her down against his chest and thrust up and came inside his little sister while she shivered and milked down his chest, and she stayed on him, kissing his jaw, until Katherine tapped her hip.

Vanessa took her turn facing him, legs wrapped around his waist, riding him with the long deep strokes she liked, hazel eyes locked on his.

"Mine," she breathed. "All of it. Come in me again."

He did, the last of what he had left, a thin aching pulse that made him moan out loud, and she clenched around it and came softly, her milk running down onto his chest to join the layers of everyone else's.

Then Katherine. She pushed him flat, mounted him with a hand around him, and sank down on his wrecked, overworked cock and rode him with her silver hair curtaining down around his face.

"One more for your mother," she murmured. "You've given it away all night. I'm taking what's left."

She ground down on him, rolling her hips, her breasts heavy over his chest, and his body obeyed her the way it had obeyed her his whole life. He came inside her with nothing left, a final dry-aching clench that made them both gasp, and she felt it and tipped her head back and shuddered through her own climax around him, milk dripping onto his chest in slow exhausted drops.

The bed went quiet in stages. Naya was already asleep against a pillow, braid fanned white-tipped across the linen. The twins had found each other's shoulders and gone down tangled together. Sef lay curled at Jordan's left hip with her cheek on his thigh. Priya sprawled across the foot of the bed with one leg over the tall girl. Celeste and Vanessa and Maren had all collapsed into a warm knot against his right side.

Katherine lifted off him last. She looked down the length of the bed at what they'd made of it: thirteen naked women, sated and dripping and spreading into sleep like spilled honey, and her son in the middle of all of it, chest glazed in milk, chain glinting in the lamplight, eyes already closing.

"Look at him," she said softly, to no one awake. "Tired out by his family."

She pulled the sheet up over the mountain of bodies, settled herself against his other side with her hand flat over his heart, and lay down.

"Nobody moves till noon," she murmured, and the last lamp went out.

The dark lasted a long time. When it thinned, it thinned into amber, the first lamp relit low, and the room was a landscape of breathing women. Jordan surfaced from sleep slowly, warm under the sheet, tangled in limbs that were not all his own. Someone's hair lay across his shoulder. Someone's knee pressed his calf. He couldn't have said who without opening his eyes, and he didn't want to yet.

Then he felt the sheet move.

It slid down his stomach in one slow pull, cool air on his skin, and a hand settled on his hip, heavy and deliberate. He knew the hand before he knew anything else. The gold band dragged a slow line across his belly, and he was still half asleep and half hard and the two states were merging fast.

"Mom," he murmured, eyes still closed.

"Hush." Her voice came from below his ribs, low and rough with sleep. "Noon isn't here yet. This doesn't count as moving."

Her mouth closed over him.

He gasped. She took him soft, just the head, her tongue rolling lazily under the ridge, and she wasn't in a hurry. She never was. The wet heat of her mouth sealed around him and she sucked once, slow, deep enough that his hips lifted off the mattress without his permission, and she pressed them back down with one flat hand, holding him there.

The bed shifted around them. He heard Maren stir on his right, a small sleepy sound, and then go still again, watching. He could feel the watching the way you feel sunlight through a window.

Katherine worked him with her mouth the way she did everything, with patience and total ownership. Her tongue mapped the underside of him in long slow drags. She pulled back until he slipped free with a wet sound, kissed the tip, traced the slit with the point of her tongue until his thighs tensed, then swallowed him again, deeper this time, the head of him pressing into the tight back of her throat. Her hum traveled up through his whole body.

"Jesus," he breathed. His eyes opened finally. The lamp threw her shadow across his stomach, her silver hair loose and dark with sleep, and her dark eyes were already on his face, watching his expression break apart under her mouth.

Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.