Chapter 29: The Morning Strap
Amber woke at 5:40 with the ceiling fan turning slow above her and a thought already fully formed in her head.
She lay still for a minute and listened to the house. No pipes. No footsteps. The hallway light was off, which meant Lola was up but hadn't left her room yet.
Amber had bought the harness in August, the same trip she'd bought the vibrators. The clerk had asked her what size O-ring and she'd said "the big one" and the clerk had not blinked, which she respected. It had lived in the bottom of her gym bag since then, still in its plastic sleeve, waiting on a reason.
She got up and found it in the dark. The nylon straps were stiff and the buckles were loud, so she took it into the bathroom and closed the door and did them up in there, one hip, then the other, pulling the leather backplate snug against her tailbone. She fitted the silicone dildo through the ring and tightened the set screw with her thumbnail. It hung off her like a question.
In the mirror she looked ridiculous and also exactly like herself. She turned sideways once, approved, and killed the light.
Lola's door was unlatched. It always was. Amber pushed it open with two fingers and stood in the doorway.
The room smelled of coffee and the cedar sachets Lola kept in the dresser. Morning was coming in grey through the lace, laying stripes across the velvet coverlet. Lola sat propped against the headboard with her hair flat on one side and a thick white mug in both hands, reading her phone. She was wearing a thin grey t-shirt and nothing else.
She looked up. She took in Amber, the doorway, the straps, the dildo hanging heavy between her legs. She set the mug on the nightstand without hurrying.
"Do you know what time it is?"
"Five forty," Amber said.
"You're up early."
"I was up thinking."
Lola's eyes went down Amber's body and back up again, unhurried, the way she read a contractor's invoice. "Where did you get that."
"Baltimore. It was eight months ago. I've been sitting on it."
"Not on it."
"About it." Amber crossed the room and put one knee on the mattress. The mattress was still warm on Lola's side. "You left the phone open."
"I did."
"You said I read the rules right."
Lola's mouth did something small at one corner. "I said you read them creatively."
"Same thing." Amber got the other knee up and swung into the bed, and the harness creaked. "Move down."
Lola didn't move. She reached out and caught the front strap of the harness with one finger, hooked it, and tugged, like she was testing a knot. "You came in here to fuck me."
"Yes."
"In my bed."
"Yes."
"Before I've finished my coffee."
"You're not finishing it."
Lola looked at her for a long three seconds. Then she let go of the strap and slid down the headboard, unhurried, and rolled onto her front because she was Lola and she decided things. She propped herself up on her elbows with her knees drawn under her and looked back over her shoulder, hair in her eyes, and said nothing at all, which was the most permission Amber had ever gotten from her.
Amber shifted up behind her and put a hand flat on the small of Lola's back to feel the shape of her. Warm skin. A little softer here than the rest of her. She dragged two fingers down between Lola's legs and found her already wet, slick all the way to her thighs, and something hot went up the back of Amber's neck.
"You've been awake a while," she said.
"I was reading."
"About what."
"Get on with it."
Amber spat in her palm and stroked it over the dildo, and then lined up and pushed in slow. Lola's back dipped. She took it an inch at a time, easy, and let out a breath through her nose that turned into something lower at the end.
"God," Amber said, mostly to herself.
She got a rhythm going, hands on Lola's hips, and the harness pulled flat against her clit with every stroke, which she had not fully anticipated and had no complaints about. The bed frame knocked against the wall. Lola's elbow slipped off the mattress and she dropped onto her forearms with her fists full of the coverlet.
"Harder," Lola said.
"No."
Lola's head came up. "What?"
"No." Amber kept the same pace, deep and slow and infuriating. "You don't get to call it. Not this morning."
"You're in my house."
"I'm in your cunt." Amber moved her hands up from Lola's hips to her shoulders and leaned her weight in, and Lola made a sound she clearly hadn't planned on. "I'm in your bed and I'm in your cunt and the door was open."
And then Lola moved, fast, the way she did everything. She twisted under her and got a hand up and locked it around Amber's wrist hard enough to hurt, dragging her forward off balance. Her knee came up. Her face was already turning to the light.
Amber had spent eleven years of her life getting thrown around by other gymnasts. She knew exactly how much a wrist could take.
She wrenched the arm free and got both hands on Lola's shoulders and shoved her flat onto her back. Lola's heel caught Amber's thigh and Amber straddled the hips, took both wrists, and pressed them into the mattress above Lola's head, one hand wrapping both of them neat as a cable tie. Lola bucked once, hard, then twice, then stopped, and lay there breathing with her teeth showing.
"Let go of me," she said.
"No."
"I'm telling you to let go."
"You can tell me after." Amber scooted up the bed, knees walking, the dildo dragging wet up Lola's stomach. She stopped with her thighs on either side of Lola's head and her cunt an inch off her face. "Do you want to get up?"
Lola stared up past her at the ceiling fan. Her tongue came out and dragged flat across the wet dildo without being asked, and Amber's hips flinched down on their own.
"That's not an answer," Amber said.
"You're not going to like my answer."
"Say it anyway."
"Not until I've had my coffee," Lola said.
Amber lowered herself down.
The screen door of Amber's thighs came down over Lola's mouth and she didn't ease into it. She settled all at once, full weight, knees planted in the pillow either side of Lola's ears, and the harness strap dug a line into her back.
Lola's hands came up on reflex and got nothing. They were still pinned under one of Amber's, wrists crossed above her head, thumb locked over the top one.
For about four seconds, nothing happened. Amber sat there with her hips snug and her clit pressed flat against Lola's upper lip and waited.
Then Lola's tongue came up and dragged through her, slow, deliberate, the way she did everything. Amber's breath went out of her in one piece.
"There it is," she said.
Lola worked uphill in flat strokes. She'd do it properly or not at all, and she did it properly, tongue broad and steady, chin grinding up into Amber's cunt with every pass. Her nose went into the wet and she breathed through it. Amber rocked once, testing, and Lola's tongue followed the rock.
The bed was quiet under them now. No headboard, no knocking. Just a mouth and a woman kneeling over it, and outside the window a truck going by on the street below, brakes hissing at the light.
Amber looked down her own chest at the flat of Lola's t-shirt and the rise and fall of her ribs underneath and the muscle in her forearm where she was holding her wrists. Lola's eyes were open, aimed up at her the whole time, and that was the thing Amber hadn't expected. She'd expected her to close them.
"You're watching me," Amber said.
"You came in with that thing on and you think I'm going to look away."
"I think you don't get a choice right now."
"Please," Lola said, into her, and the vowel vibrated straight up Amber's spine.
She took her free hand off the mattress and got it into Lola's hair, not pulling, just holding, fingers spread against the scalp like she was keeping a book open. Then she started moving.
Not fast. She lifted, dragged her cunt from Lola's chin back up to her mouth, and set back down, and did it again, and each time the flat of Lola's tongue hit the same spot and her thighs shook a little harder. The harness hung heavy and useless between them, swinging against the inside of her own thigh, and she didn't care about it at all anymore.
"Where did you learn to pin a wrist like that?" Lola said, between strokes, mouth wet.
"Practice."
"On who."
"Sophie. She had a back handspring and no core." Amber ground down, hard, and Lola's words stopped coming. "Ask me about Sophie again."
Lola didn't. She got her chin up and her mouth open and took it, tongue flat and quick now, and Amber's hips started doing a thing she wasn't steering, short tight rolls with no space in them. The window light had gone from grey to thin gold. The lace threw a stripe across Lola's bare shoulder and up onto the headboard.
"You've been awake since five," Amber said, breathless. "You had one hand in your underwear while you were reading. I could smell it when I walked in."
"Fuck you."
"You're doing it."
Lola's laugh came out of her nose and turned into a groan and then into neither. She hooked her chin and pulled Amber down with her mouth, no hands, all neck, and Amber felt the whole thing walk right up to the edge.
She didn't hold back for the drama of it. She came with her eyes open and her jaw locked and her fist full of Lola's hair, thighs clamped so hard that Lola's ears had to be ringing. It rolled through her in three waves and the third one squeezed a sound out of her that the neighbors probably heard.
Then she stayed there. She didn't lift off. She let her weight sag down and rode out the last shivers with her cunt pressed flat over Lola's face, and Lola kept licking through it, slow, until Amber flinched and had to come up.
She lifted one knee and got off and knelt back on the mattress, and Lola sucked in air and did not wipe her face.
"Do you want the truth or do you want me to say something nice?" Amber asked.
"There's no version of this where you say something nice."
"The truth is I've been thinking about this since the game night."
Lola turned her head to the side and breathed. Her wrists were still above her head, unbidden, like she'd forgotten they were free. When she noticed, she put them down slowly, one at a time, and flexed her fingers.
"You left the phone wide open," Amber said. "You went upstairs for a pie and left a loaded app in a room full of people. You knew exactly who was going to pick it up."
"That's a big claim."
"Am I wrong?"
Lola pushed herself up onto her elbows. The t-shirt had ridden half up her stomach and she didn't fix it. Her face was a ruin of Amber's wet and her own hair and she wore it the way she wore the silk camisole, like a woman who had chosen it.
"Blossom's still holding the phone," Lola said. "She won the round and she hasn't named her prize."
"I know."
"Which means anything that happens downstairs for the next week goes through her."
"Then I'd better get in early."
Lola looked at her for a long second. Then she reached out and took hold of the front strap of the harness, exactly where she'd hooked it before, and gave it one slow pull that brought Amber up onto her knees.
"Take it off," Lola said. "And put it in the drawer."
Amber unbuckled both hips and dropped the straps, and stepped out of it, and carried the whole rig across the room in one hand. The top drawer was the underwear drawer, and it was full of grey and black and one red thing she'd never seen Lola wear.
She laid it on top, flat, plain as a folded shirt, and closed the drawer.
Downstairs, a door opened. Somebody was up and running water in the kitchen, and the pipes knocked twice in the wall.
"Somebody's making coffee," Amber said.
"I know."
"Are you coming down?"
Lola swung her legs off the bed and picked her mug up off the nightstand. The coffee in it had gone cold two hours ago. She drank it anyway, looking at Amber over the rim.
"In a minute," she said. "I want to stand here first and decide how much of this I'm going to admit to."