Chapter 25: The Basement Reveal
Three days passed in a blur of contractors and receipts, and on the third evening Alex stood at the top of the basement stairs with his hand on the new brass knob and told the four of them to close their eyes.
"That's a lot of trust you're asking for on a staircase," Lola said, but she closed them anyway, one hand on the rail.
He had kept them out of the basement entirely. That had been the hard part. The contractor had come and gone with a crew of six, the electrician had run new lines, the plumber had tied the wet bar into the water heater's supply, and every evening Alex had stood at the door wiping drywall dust off his hands and lying to their faces about how far along it was. Amber had tried to sneak down twice. He had caught her both times and carried her bodily back up the stairs over his shoulder while she shouted that he was a tyrant and a fascist and also very strong.
The stairs were finished now, real treads instead of the raw stringers, and the light at the bottom of them was doing something warm.
"Okay," he said. "Open."
The room breathed amber.
He had gone for low light, low and everywhere, so that there was no single overhead glare, just layered pools of gold from recessed fixtures and a strip of hidden LEDs running under the lip of the bar. The bar itself was reclaimed wood over a dark stone top, six stools, a fridge glowing faintly from behind a glass door, shelves of bottles backlit so the liquor threw colored shadows onto the wall. The floor was polished concrete, sealed to a wet sheen, with two deep rugs in charcoal and rust thrown over it. The couches were enormous and low and velvet, the color of dried blood, three of them arranged around a sunken pit with a heavy wood coffee table in the middle.
And at the far end, under a paired spotlight that Alex had angled himself over an hour of fussing, the pole.
Chrome, floor to ceiling, anchored into the timber joist above and bolted through a steel plate into the slab below. Amber saw it first. She made a sound like she had been punched and walked toward it with her hands out in front of her like a sleepwalker.
"The joist takes it," Alex said. "Lola was right. It's not going anywhere."
Amber put both hands on the chrome and pressed. Nothing moved. She turned to look at him over her shoulder and her face was lit up like a stadium.
"You built me a pole," she said.
"I built us a pole."
Blossom had drifted to the bar. She ran her fingers along the wood, turned a bottle of good tequila to read the label, and set it back down exactly as it had been. Stacey was standing in the middle of the room with her arms folded, doing the slow turn Alex had watched Amber do three nights ago, cataloguing, and when her eyes came back around to him they were soft in a way she did not often let them go in company.
Lola walked the perimeter. She checked the wet bar's plumbing by turning the tap on and off. She ran a palm along the polished concrete. She stood under the pole and looked up at the joist and nodded once, a tiny motion, and then she turned and looked at Alex and said nothing at all, which from Lola was a standing ovation.
"Glasses are in the cabinet under the bar," he said. "Ice is in the freezer. There's lime and salt on the shelf and I don't want to know what you're going to do with them."
"We're going to do something with them," Amber said.
"Right," he said. "I said I don't want to know."
Lola went to the bar, took down four glasses, and poured without asking anyone what they wanted, which was the correct way to handle it. Then she turned, glass in hand, and looked at the three of them.
"Tour's over," she said. "Go get changed."
"Changed into what," Stacey said.
"Stripper clothes. Lingerie if you don’t have a stripper outfit.” Lola sipped her drink. "You all have something. I've seen it in your closets. Go put it on and be back down here in ten minutes, and Alex stays exactly where he is.
Alex stayed where he was, at the foot of the stairs, one shoulder against the newel post, and listened to them scatter through the house above him. Feet on floorboards, doors, drawers, the particular clatter of Amber's closet being excavated at speed. Lola's voice, once, flat and carrying: "Ten minutes means ten." Then quiet, and the low hum of the basement settling around him, bar fridge ticking, LEDs throwing their amber wash across the velvet.
The first step creaked at nine minutes.
Amber came down fast, the way she did everything, and she had put on a black satin slip that barely covered the top of her thighs, held up by two thin straps and nothing else, her blonde curls piled up off her neck with a clip. Her tits were half out of it, the slip sliding off one shoulder already, and she was barefoot with red polish on her toes and a fresh coat of lip gloss. She hit the bottom step and stopped, chin up, presenting herself.
"Well?" she said.
Alex looked her over slowly, from the toes up, letting her watch him do it. "You look like a girl who's about to get ruined and knows it," he said. "Turn around."
She turned. The slip rode up and showed him the underside of her ass, and she made a little show of looking back over her shoulder at him, chewing her lip.
"Come here," he said.
She came, and he took her by the back of the neck and kissed her, hard and open, tongue in her mouth before she had time to be cute about it, and she melted into it with a small satisfied noise and pressed herself up against his thigh. When he let her go her gloss was smeared and she was already breathing heavier.
"Go pick your drink," he said. "You're going to need it."
Stacey came next. She had gone for the opposite of Amber, all the way dark: a black lace bodysuit that held her tits high and cut away at the hips, sheer panels running down her stomach, and the straps of a garter over bare thighs because she had skipped the stockings on purpose. Her dark hair was down out of its ponytail for once, loose around her shoulders, and she had put on the gold earrings she only wore when she wanted to be looked at.
She walked to him like the stairs were a runway and stopped close enough that he could smell whatever she had put on her skin.
"Stacey," he said.
"Alex."
"You know what you look like."
"Tell me anyway."
He reached out and hooked a finger under one of the lace panels at her hip and tugged, just slightly, just to watch it snap back against her skin. "You look like you're going to stand right there and make me beg," he said. "And you look like you'd enjoy it more than I would."
"Both true." She took his jaw in her hand, tipped his face up, and kissed him, slower than Amber, deliberate, the kind of kiss that was a claim. Her tongue traced his lower lip and then she pulled back and left him leaning after her.
"Ten minutes," she said. "You said wait. You didn't say what for." She went to the bar.
Blossom did not so much arrive as resolve out of the dim at the top of the stairs and drift down them with her auburn hair loose to her waist and almost nothing on. It was a sheer gauze robe, the color of weak tea, open, and beneath it a thong and a band of thin gold chain around her waist that caught the amber light every time she moved. Her nipples showed through the gauze like something behind a fogged window. She was barefoot and unbothered and she came down the last steps with her hands at her sides and let the robe hang open the whole way.
"You didn't dress for the occasion," Alex said.
"I dressed for the occasion exactly," Blossom said. "This is what I wear when I want to be seen and not hidden. Which is most of the time." She stepped in close and tilted her head. "Say something filthy to me, Alex. You've been saying it to the others."
He put his mouth near her ear, close enough that his breath moved her hair. "You look like dessert," he said, low. "You look like something the four of us are going to eat off each other."
Blossom laughed, warm and pleased, and kissed him with both hands framing his face, tasting faintly of lime already, which meant she had been into the bar shelf before she ever came down. Then she slid past him with her fingers trailing across his chest and left him standing there with his heart going.
Lola made them wait. Of course she did.
When she came down she had changed into something black, because Lola did not wear colors after dark, a strapless lace corset that cinched her wide hips into that hourglass and pushed her tits up into a shelf of skin, matched with a high-cut thong and black stockings held by two front straps. Dark hair still sharp at her jaw. The gold chain at her throat. She descended the stairs at her own pace, unhurried, and every step was a decision.
She stopped two steps above him, which put her eyes level with his, and looked down at him with that flat, assessing expression she wore when she was doing arithmetic.
"Well?" she said, because that was the line of the evening now, apparently.
"You," Alex said, "look like the reason I moved into this house and signed a lease I didn't understand."
"Flattery."
"Truth." He reached up and put his hands on her hips, sliding them over the corset's boning, thumbs finding the warm skin above the thong. "You look like a woman who owns this whole room and every person in it, and you look like you know that if you said 'kneel' right now, I'd do it."
Lola's mouth curved, slow and real. "You would."
"I would."
She bent and kissed him, hard and quick, and bit his lower lip on the way out, and then she stepped down past him and into her own basement like it had always been hers, and he supposed it always had.
"Drinks," she announced. "Pole. Amber, you're first, because I know you'll be insufferable otherwise. Alex, sit."
So he sat, in the deep velvet couch at the end of the room, and the four of them spread out around him with their glasses, and the evening started in earnest.
Amber set down her glass, stood, and started peeling the slip off before she was even halfway to the pole. She took it slow on purpose, dragging the satin down over her tits an inch at a time, letting the straps catch on her nipples and then fall, then stepping out of it with a little shimmy of her hips and dropping it on the floor like a tip she expected someone else to collect.
"We are not picking that up for you," Lola said.
"Nobody asked you to." Amber turned, planted both hands on the chrome, and hopped up.
She was good. Alex had watched her practice in the doorway of the living room and she'd been good then, but this was a different animal entirely. She caught the pole between her inner thighs and swung around it once, hair fanning out, and came out of the spin with her ass pointed straight at Alex and her back arched.
Stacey whooped. Blossom applauded flat-handed, which somehow sounded dirtier.
"Look at her," Lola said from the couch, low and dry, sipping her drink like a woman judging a horse. "Six months of doorframe practice and suddenly she's a professional."
"The doorframe," Amber said, upside down, thighs locked, "never let me do this," and she let herself fall backward into a cradle, hanging by one knee with her pussy on full display, shaved slick and pink under the amber lights.
"There he is," Stacey said, and Alex looked down and found that he had reached into his own lap without being aware of it, hand fisted around his cock through the thin cotton of his shorts. He didn't stop.
"Told you," Amber said, still hanging, grinning at him upside down. "Told you the pole was non-negotiable."
"Keep going," he said.
She kept going. She did a climb, hands and thighs working the chrome in alternating grips, and stopped herself near the top with her cunt at eye level, slowly scissoring her legs open and shut like she was doing it on a trampoline and not eleven feet of polished steel. Somebody whistled. Somebody else said something filthy that Alex didn't catch because he was watching the sweat come up on her back.
"Off," Lola finally said. "You'll pull something and then I'll have to hear about it for a week."
Amber slid down the last six feet in one long careless drop, catching herself an inch off the floor, and landed with both feet flat and both hands up like a gymnast. She took her bow. Then she walked straight to the coffee table, flipped the cap off the tequila, and poured three fingers into a rocks glass.
"Salt," she said, and Blossom was already holding the little ceramic dish out to her. Amber licked her own wrist first, then shook her head. "No. Come here, Alex."
He stood up and she pushed him back down onto the velvet, straddled his lap, and licked a wet stripe from the notch at the base of his throat down to the middle of his chest. She sprinkled salt into the wet and bent and took it up with her tongue, slow, working it until it was gone.
"Limes in the fridge," Blossom said.
"Not yet." Amber picked up the glass, threw the shot back, and shuddered all over, her tits bouncing against his chest. "Now lime." She reached over him without getting off his lap, fished a wedge out of the bowl on the table, bit it, and then pressed her mouth to his and made him taste it. Tequila, lime, salt, her tongue in his mouth, her bare cunt grinding down against his cock through his shorts.
"Whose turn," he said, when she let him breathe.
"Mine," Stacey said, and got up.
Amber climbed off him with a slap on his thigh and went to the bar, where she poured herself another and then, without being asked, started working the cork out of a second bottle. Stacey took the pole the way she took most things, which was to stand in front of it for a second and let everyone look at her first, back straight, arms loose, black lace over all that long muscle. Then she reached up, gripped, and pulled herself into an invert that made Amber stop mid-pour and say "okay, no, that's not fair," because Stacey had been a hockey player for a decade and her core strength was absurd.
She didn't do tricks so much as she posed, slow, deliberate, moving her body around the pole with the kind of confidence that made the tricks unnecessary. She crossed her ankles and rolled her hips and looked down the length of her own body at him. At one point she caught the chrome between her tits, squeezed, and slid down it with a friction that had to be painful and clearly wasn't.
"Say it," she said, from halfway down.
"You're the best-looking woman I've ever touched and I will do anything you tell me for the rest of my life," Alex said.
"Better."
Blossom was on her feet before Stacey had finished her dismount. She didn't grip the pole with her hands at all. She just walked up to it, turned, leaned her whole back against the chrome, and used it as a place to be seen, opening the gauze robe wide and letting it fall off her shoulders entirely, sliding down. Her body was all long pale lines and the gold chain riding on her waist, and she moved against the steel like it was water, like the whole thing was a stretch, and Alex understood suddenly that she was not performing for him, she was simply being watched, which for Blossom was the same as being fucked.
"Filthy," Amber called out, sweetly. "Absolutely disgusting. Do it again."
Blossom did it again.
Then it was Lola's turn, and Lola did not do the pole. She got up, walked across the room with her corset cinched and her stockings hissing, and instead of the pole she came and stood in front of Alex with one hand on his shoulder and one foot up on the coffee table, and said, "Everyone's had a turn at the chrome. I want mine here."
She pushed him back until he was flat against the velvet, straddled his chest, and lowered herself until her thong was an inch from his mouth. Through the sheer fabric he could smell her, hot and salt, and above it a sweet trace of the tequila she'd been drinking.
"Open," she said.
He opened his mouth. She reached past him, took the tequila bottle off the table, tilted her own chin up and poured a thin line down the front of her throat, between her tits, over her stomach, into the waistband of the thong. It ran everywhere. It wet the lace over her cunt and dripped off her onto his chest.
"Lick it up," Lola said. "Slowly. And while you do, everyone else is going to take their clothes off, and when I'm finished with you, you're not going to have any say in who gets you next."
Blossom laughed, low and warm, and the glasses clinked, and somewhere over his head Amber said, "I've got first claim, I called it," and the lamp under the bar threw its amber wash across all of them.
He started at her throat, where the tequila had pooled in the notch above her collarbone. He licked it up in one slow stroke of his tongue, and it was warm from her skin and sharp on his tongue, and Lola made a small sound above him that she did not mean to make. He chased the trail downward, over the shelf of her tits where the corset pushed them up, and the liquor had run into the crease between them and gone sticky. He licked that clean too, lapping at the salt of her skin until she had to brace her hand on the back of the couch.
"Lower," she said.
He moved down, tongue flat against the smooth muscle of her stomach, catching the thin runner of tequila where it had followed the line of her ribs and collected at the waistband of her thong. He dragged his tongue along the lace, slow, and she tasted of tequila and heat and the lace itself, and above him he heard her breathe out hard through her nose.
"There," she said. "That's where it all went."
He pulled the thong aside with his teeth, just far enough, and put his mouth on her, working the tequila off slick skin with long flat strokes. Her hand came down onto the top of his head and held him there, not pushing, just holding, and her hips tilted once, small and involuntary. He licked her from the bottom of her cunt up to her clit and sucked, and Lola's hand tightened in his hair and she let out a low noise that was half approval and half a warning.
"Enough," she said, when he would happily have kept at it. "I said lick it up. I didn't say finish me."
She rose off him and swung her leg back to the floor, and he looked up and found that she had not been lying: the others had used the time. Amber's second drink was on the table and Amber's slip was gone, and she stood by the bar with one hand on the rail in nothing but her pendant and her red toenails, watching him with her lip between her teeth. Stacey had pulled the bodysuit strap off one shoulder and left it hanging. Blossom had let the gauze robe fall the rest of the way and was stepping out of it with the unhurried grace of a woman who considered any clothing an unfortunate temporary condition.
"Now," Lola said, and retreated to the end of the couch with her own glass, crossing her legs, taking up her post as judge again. "You called it, Amber."
"I called it," Amber agreed, and she was already moving.
She came at him from the bar and did not bother with the pole this time. She climbed straight into his lap on the velvet couch, knees on either side of his hips, and put her tits in his face, and behind her he heard glass on glass as someone poured. "Open your mouth," she said, which was apparently the command of the evening, and when he did she took the shot glass out of Blossom's hand and poured it into him, slow, so he had to swallow in parts around her body heat.
Then she tipped salt onto her own collarbone and leaned down and made him eat it off her, and then she took the lime wedge and held it between her teeth and kissed him with it until it was pulp and juice and she had licked the last of the sour off his tongue.
"Good boy," she said, and took his cock out of his shorts.
Blossom arrived at his side with the bottle while Amber's hand worked him, slow and greasy with the salt on her fingers, and Blossom poured a thin stream of tequila down the outside of his throat and over his chest, watching it run. "Now we drink from him," she said, and did, tongue flat on his sternum, licking upward to his shoulder, and then Stacey leaned across from the other side and caught the line of it at his nipple, teeth grazing, and he groaned and his hips bucked up under Amber.
"Oh," Amber said. "Oh, he likes being the shot glass."
"He likes being the table," Lola said from the end of the couch. "Look at him. Four women and he's just lying there getting licked. You've made your own worst enemy, Blossom."
"I've made exactly what an honest man should get," Blossom said, and licked the salt off his hip.
What happened after that happened mostly in the sprawl. Amber gave up the lap after a while because she wanted to see the pole again, and got up and did it again with a drink in her hand, spilling half of it down her own stomach and off the edge of her wrist, and Stacey followed the spill with her mouth while Amber hung off the chrome by one thigh and laughed. Then Stacey took his jaw and turned his face to her and kissed him while Blossom knelt between his legs and kept working his cock with her hand, slow, and Stacey said into his mouth, "Hold it. Don't you dare come yet," and he ground his teeth and held it.
Tequila did not stay in its glasses. By the second bottle it was going on bodies first, which Alex assumed was the point. Blossom poured a line down the middle of Stacey's back and had Amber lick it up while Stacey stood arched against the pole and called them both disgusting and did not move a muscle to stop them. Amber poured a shot into her own navel and made him drink it out of her. Lola, who had declared herself merely observing, came off the couch at last when Blossom tipped the bottle over her chest, corset and all, and stood dripping and indignant for two full seconds before pulling Blossom's face down onto her by the hair and making her clean it off her tits.
"Filthy," Amber said, delighted, from the floor. "Every one of you."
"You started it," Lola said, with Blossom's tongue still working the lace.
"I start everything."
Alex lost track of who had the bottle and who had the lime. Somebody took his shorts off the rest of the way and threw them somewhere, and somebody else's mouth was on him, warm and wet and slow, and when he lifted his head to see, it was Stacey with her dark hair falling around his hips and Lola's hand fisted in it, guiding her down. "Not yet," Lola said to him, watching his face. "You do exactly what she says, and what I say, and you don't come until somebody gives you permission, and I promise you that tonight it will be all four of us in one way or another. Do you understand me?"
"Yes," he said, and it came out wrecked, and Lola smiled the slow true smile he had only seen a handful of times, and sat back with her drink and let Stacey have him.
Stacey took him the way she took everything, which was all the way, no preamble. She came off the floor and climbed onto the couch over him, one knee planted on either side of his ribs, and settled her weight down onto his chest so that his arms were pinned under her thighs and his face was at exactly the height she wanted it. Her bodysuit was still on but the bottom of it was not, the crotch unsnapped and hanging loose, and her cock hung heavy and half hard over his mouth, close enough that he could feel the heat of it and smell the clean skin of her thighs.
"Open up," she said, and he did, and she fed it to him slow.
He took the head on his tongue and sucked it in, and Stacey's whole body settled an inch. She braced one hand on the back of the couch and one on her own thigh and started to move, not thrusting, just a slow rolling of her hips that pressed her cock along his tongue and then pulled back, an inch at a time, letting him learn the weight and the shape of her. Amber's lip gloss was still smeared on his mouth and the salt was still on his chest and now Stacey was on his face, and all of it at once was a lot, and he did not want any of it to stop.
"Look at that," Amber said. She had come up off the floor and was standing at the arm of the couch with her drink, watching them, and her voice had gone soft and filthy the way it did when she was genuinely turned on and not just performing it. "Look at his mouth. Stacey, he's actually good at it."
"He's been practicing," Stacey said. "On me."
"On you."
"Every chance he gets. He begs for it." She rolled her hips again, deeper this time, and Alex gagged a little and swallowed and took it, and Stacey made a low sound of approval that he felt in his cock. "Good. Relax your throat. There. Like that."
Blossom had come to his other side, and she knelt on the floor beside the couch so her face was level with his, close, and she watched his mouth work with an open interest that had nothing polite left in it. "Tilt your head back," she told him. "You're fighting it. Let your neck go soft and let her use it. She'll be careful with you."
"She'll be careful with him," Lola said from the end of the couch, dry, over the rim of her glass. "Listen to yourself."
"She will. She loves him." Blossom reached out and brushed a strand of hair off his forehead with a tenderness that was somehow worse than the filth, and then her hand slid down and cupped his jaw and held it steady. "There. Breathe through it."
Stacey's hips picked up their rhythm. She was fully hard now, and there was no pretending this was gentle; she was fucking his mouth in slow measured strokes, holding his head where she wanted it with the hand that had been on her own thigh, and every time he took her all the way down she breathed out hard through her nose and her thighs tightened around his ribs. Amber's hand came down onto Stacey's back and stroked up her spine, feather light, and then did it again, and Stacey's rhythm stuttered for half a second and then caught.
"You're doing so good," Amber said, to both of them, to the room, and her other hand found his hair and stroked it the same way she had stroked Stacey's back, matching, like she was petting a pair of animals she was proud of. "Both of you. Look at him take it. He doesn't even have his hands on her, he's just lying there letting her fuck his throat like a good little cock-sleeve."
"Say it again," Stacey said, low.
"Cock-sleeve," Amber said. "That's what he is tonight. That's all he is. He's a warm mouth the four of us are going to pass around until we're bored."
Alex groaned around Stacey's cock and it came out as a noise he had never made before, muffled and desperate, and Stacey heard it and her hand in his hair tightened.
"You like that," she said. "You like being called that."
He nodded as much as he could with his mouth full, and she pulled back to the tip and let him answer. "Yes," he said, ruined, hoarse. "Yes."
"Then be one." She pushed back in and he took it, and this time when she bottomed out he got his nose into the dark hair at the base of her cock and stayed there, breathing through it, and she held him there long enough that his eyes watered, and then she let him up.
The tequila came back around. Blossom picked up the shot glass and poured a measure, and then, holding Alex's jaw still with one hand, she poured it down the length of Stacey's cock where it vanished into his mouth, and the liquor ran over his lips and his chin and down onto his chest, and Stacey laughed breathlessly and Alex swallowed what had run in and choked on the rest. Amber licked the spill off his collarbone. Stacey pulled out and let it lie glossy and wet against his lower lip for a second, then pushed it back in.
"That's it," Blossom said. She had her hand on his throat now, thumb pressed down into the hollow of it, feeling herself, feeling him swallow around Stacey. "That's it, take her, you're so good at this. Let her have it. She's been waiting all night."
"All week," Stacey said. "Every time he looks at me I want to do this to him."
"So do it. He's not going anywhere." Blossom leaned down and kissed the side of his neck, open-mouthed and wet, while Stacey used his mouth, and the two sensations crossed somewhere in his chest and he pushed his hips up into nothing, into the air, hopeless.
Lola set down her glass and came off the couch at last. She walked around behind Stacey and put both hands on the lace over Stacey's hips, gripping, and leaned in close to her ear. "Slow down," she said. "Don't finish in his mouth yet. You've got all night. Make him work for it."
"I am making him work for it."
"You're making him happy. That's different." Lola's hands slid around to Stacey's front, up over the flat muscle of her stomach, and took hold of her tits through the lace, and Stacey's rhythm went ragged and then evened out again, slower now, deliberate, long strokes. "There. Like that. Now he has to be good instead of just enthusiastic."
Amber crawled up onto the couch behind Alex and lay her body along his, her tits pressed to his side, her mouth at his ear. "They're going to keep you down here for hours," she whispered, conspiratorial and delighted. "Me and Blossom are going to hold you and they're going to take turns with your mouth until you can't see straight, and then when you think it's over, it's Blossom's turn, and you know how long Blossom takes." She bit his earlobe. "You're in so much trouble."
Stacey pulled out one more time, all the way, let the wet head rest on his lower lip, and looked down at him past her own body, dark hair loose, tits pushed up under Lola's hands, and her face was soft in the way it only got for him.
"You're doing so good," she said, quietly, for him and not for the room. "You okay?"
"Yeah," he said, wrecked, and meant it. "Keep going."
She put it back in his mouth, and Amber held him, and Blossom licked the tequila off his throat, and Lola watched them all with her hand stilling on Stacey's chest, and somewhere above them the house creaked gently on its hundred-year-old bones, indifferent and unworried, while the amber light pooled on the polished floor and the pole in the corner threw a long thin shadow across them all.
Stacey kept it up a while longer, long enough that his jaw ached and his throat had gone thick and numb with use, and then she pulled out slow, holding the head on his lower lip and letting him feel every inch leaving him. Alex lay there gasping, salt drying on his chest, mouth slick and open, and Stacey leaned down and kissed him, tasting herself on him, and then sat back on her heels over his chest and looked at Lola.
"All yours," she said.
Lola stood up. "Amber, Blossom. Hold him."
They moved like they had been waiting for the instruction, which they had. Amber slid off the couch and went around to his head, dropping to her knees and taking his wrists and drawing his arms up over his head and pinning them there, both his hands in one of hers, and Blossom came and knelt at his side with the bottle and the little dish of salt, and between the two of them he was stretched out flat on the velvet and going nowhere. Lola kicked off her shoes and stepped out of them and took hold of Stacey's shoulder as she passed.
"Go pour yourself something," Lola said. "You've earned it."
Stacey went to the bar. The amber light glazed the sweat on her back.
Lola stepped over Alex's legs and knelt, bringing her knees down on either side of his chest and folding her stockings under her, and she did it unhurried, making him watch the whole production of it, the corset cinched and the black lace thong and the black stockings and the gold chain catching the light at her throat. She had drunk more than he had and it showed in the lazy heat around her eyes and in the slow way she settled her weight down over him until the front of her thong was an inch from his mouth and he could smell her, plain and hot and unmistakable.
"You've had Stacey in your mouth for the better part of an hour," Lola said. "Now you're going to show me what you learned."
She pulled the thong aside herself, no ceremony, two fingers hooking the lace out of the way, and came down onto his mouth.
He went at her with his tongue flat and open, working up from the bottom of her cunt to her clit, and Lola let out a long breath through her nose and did not move at first, just sat there and let him do the work, knees spread, one hand braced on the back of the couch. Amber's grip on his wrists tightened pleasantly. Blossom poured a thin line of tequila into his navel and licked it out of him while he worked, which made him jump under Lola and made Lola shift her hips a fraction to keep him where she wanted him.
"Slower," Lola said. "You're eating me like it's a chore. Slow down and mean it."
He slowed. He put his whole mouth to her, lips and tongue, and licked her in long slow strokes, and found her clit and closed his lips around it and sucked, gently, and Lola's hand came down onto the top of his head. It was the opposite of Stacey's grip. It was a weight, not a command. She rolled her hips once, twice, into his mouth, and her thighs tensed against his ears and she let her head fall back.
"That's it," she said. "That's it. Right there. Don't move your tongue, just stay on it, just keep it there."
He stayed there.
"Look at her," Amber said, and her voice had gone low and admiring. "She's so fucking wet, Alex, you can hear it. That's all you. That's what your mouth does to her."
"Quiet," Lola said, without heat, breathless, and Amber laughed and shut up and kissed the inside of his pinned wrist instead.
Blossom rose up on her knees and took the bottle and poured a small measure into the hollow of Lola's throat, and Lola tipped her head back and took it in her mouth and swallowed and shuddered all the way down into Alex's face, which pushed her cunt harder against his tongue, and he groaned into her and she felt it and made a low sound back. Then Blossom refilled the shot and held it to Alex's lips, and Lola said, "Not yet," and took it out of Blossom's hand and drank it herself, and licked the last drop off her lip, and then set the glass down on the floor so she could put both hands in his hair.
"Amber," Lola said. "Let his hands go."
Amber let go. Alex brought his arms down and put both hands on Lola's thighs, gripping the stockings, holding her there, and Lola looked down at him over the shelf of her own tits.
"There," she said. "Now you can hold me. Now you can pull me down onto your face like you actually want it, because I know you want it. I've listened to you across this house for a month. I know exactly what you want."
He pulled her down. He ate her like he had a hunger he had been ignoring, mouth open and filthy, tongue working her clit and then dipping down into her cunt and back up, and Lola stopped being composed, which he had never seen, not once, not the whole time he had lived here. Her hips started moving on him in real earnest. Her grip in his hair tightened to something that was nearly pain. She stopped saying anything clever and started saying his name, low and rhythmic, and then just breathing hard through her teeth, and Blossom watched her with the shot glass forgotten in her hand and Amber watched her from the floor with her mouth open, and even Stacey had come back from the bar to stand at the end of the couch and see it.
"You hear her," Amber whispered. "You hear the noise she makes? None of us have ever heard her make that noise."
"Shut up, Amber," Lola said, and came.
She came on his face with her hips grinding down and her thighs clamping tight around his ears and her hand fisted in his hair hard enough to hurt, and she came for a long time, in waves, shuddering forward over him with her chin down and her tits nearly out of the corset, and he held her through all of it and kept his tongue working on her until she went oversensitive and pushed at his forehead and swung her leg off and sat down on the floor beside the couch, breathing hard, flushed to her collarbone, the only time he had ever seen her look undone by anything.
Nobody said anything for a second. Alex lay there with his mouth wet and the taste of her all over his chin and did not wipe it off.
Lola got her breath back. She reached over and picked up her glass off the floor and drank what was left in it and set it down, and then she looked at him, and the composure came back onto her face like a shutter coming down, except her eyes were still soft at the corners.
"Right," she said. "Blossom."
Blossom was already setting the bottle down. She had a look on her like a woman who had been given a present.
Blossom came and knelt over him with the bottle in one hand and the look still on her face, and she set the bottle on the floor beside the couch with a kind of care that suggested she had already decided nobody was going to need it for a little while. Then she shed the last of what she was wearing, which was nothing at all, and swung one long leg over his hips and settled onto him with her knees on either side of his body and her hands braced flat on his chest.
She did not go straight down onto him. She sat there for a moment with her cunt an inch above his cock and looked at him, and her pale green eyes were calm and open the way they always were, and she was smiling slightly, the way she smiled when she was about to say something that the room was going to have to sit with.
"You've been good all night," she said. "Do you know what you look like right now?"
"I have a guess," Alex said. His voice was wrecked from Stacey and it came out low and rough.
"You look like someone who has been used by three women and is still hard because the fourth one hasn't touched him yet." She reached down between her legs, took his cock in her hand, and held it upright against her, not stroking, just holding it there, measuring. "That's a good thing to be. I want you to remember you were that tonight."
"Blossom."
"Mm."
"Please."
She laughed, soft, entirely without cruelty. "Please what?"
"Get on me."
"Ask it properly."
"Fuck me," he said. "Get on my cock and fuck yourself on me."
"That's better." And she did.
She came down onto him slowly, taking him an inch at a time with her hand still wrapped around the base of him, and she watched his face the entire way down, and Alex watched hers. She was tight, and slick, and hot the way she always was, a heat he had felt under his mouth in her bedroom weeks ago and had not stopped thinking about since. She took him all the way to the base and settled her weight down on him, and her back arched a little and her hands closed on his chest, and she breathed out once, slow, through her teeth.
"There," she said. "Hello."
"Hi," he said, and she laughed again and started to move.
She didn't bounce on him. She didn't take him fast, the way Amber would have, and she didn't take him deep and measured the way Stacey did. Blossom ground. She planted her hands and rolled her hips down onto him in slow circles, working him in and out in quarter inches, staying on him and staying there and pressing down, and the whole length of her moved over him in a rhythm that had nothing to do with thrusting and everything to do with the fact that she wanted to feel him inside her for as long as she could keep him there. Her tits hung forward as she leaned over him, her waist-length hair swinging with the motion, and the gold chain at her waist slid back and forth over her skin with every roll.
"Jesus," he said.
"That's the point," she said. "This is the slow one."
Amber had gotten up off the floor and come to sit on the arm of the couch by his shoulder, drink in hand, watching Blossom's back with real fascination. "She does this every time," she said to Alex. "I've watched her do this to Lola. She'll be at it for forty minutes and not break a sweat."
"Twenty," Blossom said, not stopping, not looking away from Alex's face. "He's already worked up. He'll be lucky if it's twenty."
"Twenty," Amber repeated, and took a sip. "That's still a threat."
Lola, from the floor, had finally found her feet and wandered to the bar to pour herself something fresh, stockings wet at the knee, corset still on. She came back with a glass of the good whiskey and stood at the end of the couch and watched Blossom ride, and her face had the same flat assessing look it always had, except everything behind the look had gone soft.
"Look at him take it," Lola said. "He's not even moving his hips."
"He's not allowed to," Blossom said. "He's on his back. He knows his job."
Alex's job was to lie there and not come, and it was immediately the hardest thing he had ever done. Stacey had brought him close twice without finishing him, and now Blossom was grinding down onto his cock with a slow deliberation that got past all the places he usually put his discipline, and every roll dragged the head of his cock past something inside her that made her breath catch, and every time her breath caught her hips did it again. She was getting wetter. He could feel it, the easy slide of her over him, and hear it, a soft wet rhythm under the clink of glasses.
"You feel that," she said. "You feel how wet I am for you."
"Yes."
"That's not the tequila." She leaned down over him, hair falling onto his chest, and pressed her forehead nearly to his. "That's you. That's what you did to Lola with your mouth, and it's what you're doing to me now. I want you to know that. I want you to know you do this to people."
"Blossom," he said, ruined.
"Say thank you."
"Thank you."
"Good." She sat back up and picked up the pace.
It got faster by degrees, the same roll but shorter strokes, grinding down hard and then up and then down again, and her hands left his chest and came down on his thighs instead, using them as leverage, and she threw her head back and let her hair swing. Stacey had wandered back over with her drink and stood behind the couch, and Amber had set hers down, and both of them were watching Blossom's ass work over him with the same squinting attention they'd give a televised final. Lola said nothing at all, which was its own kind of comment.
"Don't come," Amber told him, entirely unhelpfully. "I haven't had you yet."
"He knows," Blossom said. "He's being so good. Aren't you."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I'm being good."
"You're being so good." She was breathing hard now, the words coming out between rolls. "You're lying there with three women watching you and you haven't come, and you're not going to, because I'm going to finish first, and you're going to hold it, and then I'm going to let you breathe for exactly as long as it takes me to pour a drink, and then Amber is going to ruin you."
"Yes."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
Blossom's rhythm broke up. She stopped rolling and started riding, real strokes now, up and down with her whole weight and her hands braced on his chest, fast and sloppy and without any of the carefulness, and Alex got his hands onto her hips, not to move her, just to hold on, and she let him. Her tits bounced hard with every stroke. Her mouth was open. The gold chain had come loose from her waist entirely and was swinging somewhere near her navel, and she didn't notice and didn't care, and she started saying things that were mostly not words.
Then her back went tight and her eyes shut and she ground down onto him one last time and stayed there, hips circling, chasing, and she came with a long low sound that was almost quiet and entirely honest, shuddering over him in slow waves with her nails digging into his chest. Her cunt clenched around his cock and squeezed, once, twice, three times, and Alex had to bite the inside of his cheek and stare at the ceiling and count backwards from ten in his head to keep from following her straight over the edge.
He held it. Barely. His whole body was shaking with the effort and he heard himself make a noise like something wounded.
Blossom came down from it slowly and sagged forward over him, hair everywhere, breathing hard against his shoulder, and after a moment she lifted her head and kissed him, soft and wet and without any performance in it.
"Good," she said. "That was good."
She climbed off him carefully and got to her feet, and Alex lay there with his cock slick and his chest in shreds and his heart going like a drum, and watched her walk naked to the bar and pour herself a glass of water, drinking it standing up, unhurried, exactly as she'd said.
Amber slid off the arm of the couch and onto his lap.
Amber landed on his lap with the confidence of a gymnast, knees planted, one hand already braced on the back of the couch so she could get her hips over his cock in one motion. She had been waiting through two full performances and she was not going to pretend otherwise.
"Hi," she said. "You remember me."
She took him in her hand, guided him up, and dropped onto him all the way in one wet stroke, and Alex's whole body arched off the velvet with a sound that came out closer to a sob than anything else.
"Oh," Amber said, pleased. "Oh, he's close. He's so close. You're not going to last a minute, are you."
"No," Alex admitted.
"Good. I want the easy one." She sat down on him flat and ground, exactly once, deep, and watched his face do something she apparently liked. "Blossom does that slow beautiful stuff, that's her whole deal. I do not have her patience. I have a practice at six tomorrow."
"So finish fast," Lola said from the end of the couch.
"I intend to." Amber peeled her slip the rest of the way off over her head and threw it at the pole, missing. Underneath she was wearing nothing and had not been the whole time. "Look at me. Both hands, thank you."
He put both hands on her ass. She was small and hard and entirely muscle under his palms, and he got a grip and she started to ride.
It was nothing like Blossom. Amber took him fast and short, bouncing, using his chest for leverage, and her tits swung with every stroke and her pendant knocked against her own collarbone. He could hear Blossom behind him sit down on another couch with her water. He could hear Lola's glass settle. He could hear his own breathing going ragged underneath Amber's easy, chirping rhythm.
"Okay, so here's the thing," Amber said, mid-bounce, conversational, "Sophie landed her back handspring yesterday, finally, and she was crying in the gym about it, and I almost cried too, and I thought, I should tell Alex that, he'd get it. Because you get it, don't you. You get that it's not about the stunt, it's about the part where you thought you couldn't."
"Amber," Alex said, strangled.
"Right. Not now. Talk after." She rode him harder. "But you do get it. God. Look at you. You're supposed to be the guy who lies there and takes it and you're doing this face the whole time like you're thinking about something."
"Hold on," Stacey said.
Stacey had crossed the floor from the bar and put her drink down on the low table. She had wrapped her hair up off her neck at some point, and her bodysuit was still hanging open at the shoulder, and she had that particular quiet look on her face that meant she had been watching and deciding and had now decided.
"Move up," she said to Amber.
Amber stopped mid-stroke and blinked at her. "I called it."
"You're still getting it. I'm not taking him from you." Stacey stepped around the couch and knelt between Alex's legs, and she put one hand flat on his knee and pushed it outward, then the other, opening him up, and slid her palms up the inside of his thighs with an unhurried ownership that made him stop breathing. "Keep riding. I'm going in behind you."
Alex's heart tried to leave his body through his throat. "Stacey."
"Shh." She was already reaching out to the low table for the little dish of oil that had come down with the bar stuff, the one nobody had used yet, and she tipped a measure into her palm and warmed it between her hands while Amber sat very still on his cock with her lips parted and her eyes enormous.
"Oh," Amber said. "Oh, we're doing that."
"Keep riding," Stacey said.
"I am going to keep riding." Amber started up again, slower this time, watching over her shoulder. "God, Stacey, I've wanted to see you do this to him since he left your card on the table."
"He's ready now," Stacey said, matter-of-fact, and pressed her thumb, slicked, against him.
He bucked under her hand, and Amber's knees clamped in on his ribs to hold him in place.
"Easy," Stacey said. "Breathe out."
He breathed out. She worked one finger in, slow, curling, and Alex stared at the ceiling and listened to the wet sound of Amber riding him and the small clink of Blossom's water glass and Lola's complete silence from the end of the couch, which somehow was the loudest thing in the room.
"Good," Stacey said. "Again."
Two fingers. He made a noise. She worked them in and out of him in the same rhythm Amber had set, matching her, and when he looked down past Amber's shoulders Stacey was watching his face with the same soft, steady attention she used when she was stretching him out with her tongue in her own bed. He dug his heels into the velvet.
"Now," she said, and withdrew her fingers and came up onto her knees over him.
Amber knew without being told. She stopped bouncing and rocked forward instead, up onto the balls of her feet, taking Alex's cock deep and staying there, held, giving Stacey the angle. Stacey braced one hand on Alex's thigh and the other on the cushion beside his hip, and put the head of her cock against him and pressed.
"Push back," she said.
"They're already doing the thing where they talk around me like I'm furniture," Amber marvelled.
"You are furniture," Lola said. "A very noisy chair."
"Push back," Stacey said again, and Alex did, and she slipped into him with one long slow stroke that took all of it and stopped his heart for the length of it.
He got a hand back onto the arm of the couch and held on.
"You know what to do," Stacey said, and Amber did, because Amber had clearly been waiting all night to do exactly this. She started riding again, and every time she dropped onto him her weight pushed him down, and every time she came up Stacey was already there, filling the space she made, so that he was never empty for a fraction of a second. The two of them found each other's rhythm inside of a minute, Amber high and fast, Stacey low and grinding, two forces working his body from both ends and both of them enjoying it openly.
"That's it, that's it," Amber was saying, breathless, bouncing. "Stacey, is he tight? Please tell me he's tight, I demand information."
"He's a fist," Stacey said.
"Excellent."
Alex stopped being able to form much. He got a hand into Amber's hair and she bit his thumb. He looked at the ceiling. Amber's pendant clicked. Somewhere behind him Blossom said something low to Lola and Lola answered, and he heard the two of them get up and come near, and then Lola's hand was in his hair, tilting his head back so he had to look at her upside down, stockings and corset and her face entirely composed except for her mouth.
"Not yet," she said, affectionately, and let go, and the amber light went on pooling around all of them on the polished floor.
Lola let go of his hair and straightened up, and she looked down the length of his body at the two of them working him and made a small, satisfied noise in her throat. The amber light caught the sheen on her corset and the wet at her knees.
"Amber, keep your rhythm," she said. "Stacey, don't stop for me."
She stepped over his shoulders and turned, and she did it facing away from him, facing down the couch toward the two women, so that her back was to his face and her cunt was over his mouth. He watched her thighs come down on either side of his head.
"Here's what I want," Lola said. "I want your mouth when I come. Not before. You wait for me."
She pulled the lace aside and came down onto him.
He knew her now. He put his mouth to her without hesitation, tongue flat and slow, and she settled her weight onto his face and let her head fall forward. Amber's hips stuttered for half a stroke and found the rhythm again. Stacey leaned into him from below.
Then Lola found his left hand where it lay on the velvet and picked it up.
She brought it down in front of her, between her own legs, and pressed his fingers against her, guiding two of them in, and closed her cunt around them and started to ride both at once. His mouth on her clit, his fingers deep inside her, her hips rolling slow and heavy over his face. The wet sound of it was very close and very loud.
"That's it," she said. "Both. Keep both."
He did. His tongue found her clit and stayed, and his fingers curled inside her in a slow come-hither rhythm, and Lola's breath came harder. Above him Amber was bouncing and chattering and not making any sense. Below him Stacey was grinding in long strokes, unhurried, watching him.
"Lola," Amber panted. "Lola, you look so good, your whole back is shaking."
"Concentrate on your own work."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.