Chapter 37: The Lucia Report
Lucia came back on a Sunday evening, smelling of train and cheap hotel soap, her suitcase thumping up the stairs ahead of her. She found Nat at the kitchen table with her laptop and two empty mugs.
"Rooftop. Now. Bring the wine you've been hiding from me."
Nat closed the laptop without arguing. She'd been waiting for this all weekend, though she'd never have admitted it.
The rooftop was warm still, the city humming below them in a haze of orange streetlights. Lucia kicked off her sandals, poured two glasses of the cheap red Nat had smuggled up, and sat on the low wall like she always did, bare feet dangling over forty meters of nothing.
"So," Lucia said. "Annika texted me something weird on Friday. Something about you walking Chris around on a leash."
Nat took a long sip. "Annika talks too much."
"Nat." Lucia's eyes were narrow, amused, patient. "I've been away for three days and this apartment apparently reorganized itself around you. Spill. All of it. I got sunburned in Valencia, I've earned this."
Nat held out for exactly one glass of wine. Then it all came out in a rush: the kitchen, the first time she'd seen what Chris could do to a woman with nothing but his voice. Erna on her knees. Conzi. Bambi. The edging in the kitchen. The way he'd knelt on command, the way the word "no" worked on him like a leash made of nothing.
Lucia listened with her mouth slowly curving upward, and when Nat finished, she laughed so hard she nearly fell off the wall.
"Oh my God," she wheezed. "Oh my sweet God, Nat."
"What's funny?"
"You're treating this like you discovered a new country." Lucia drained her glass and poured another. "I've been hooking up with that man for three years. Three years, since before Micha, since I moved in. You think I tell you about every hookup for gossip?"
Nat's stomach dropped. "You never said he was..."
"Submissive? Obedient? Leashable?" Lucia waved the glass. "He wasn't. Not at first. He was exactly what you saw: charming, lazy, good with his mouth and unreasonably big everywhere that matters. I thought that was the whole picture."
"But?"
"But I always suspected there was a switch buried under the charm. He'd give me these moments. I'd push a little, test a little, and he'd let me. Just enough. Like he was waiting to see if I'd push harder." She took a sip. "I never pushed hard enough. I wasn't sure I wanted what was behind the door. Then I go away for one weekend and you, little Nat, my prudish little control-freak Nat, blew the door off its hinges."
"I'm not prudish."
"You alphabetize your spice rack." Lucia grinned. "Tell me the Bambi thing again. Slowly. He knelt when she summoned him?"
"Immediately. He was in his room. She called and he came and knelt and just waited."
"And when she rode him and told him not to come."
"He shook. Held the whole bed down with his hands shaking and he didn't come until she said."
Lucia set her glass down on the wall. The grin had shifted into something sharper, and Nat recognized it, because it was the same expression she caught in her own mirror lately.
"Okay," Lucia said. "Here's my problem. I've had this man in my bed a hundred times and I never found the switch. You found it in a week and you're hoarding it. That's rude, honestly."
"You've had him whenever you wanted."
"Past tense applies to you too now, doesn't it? You've had him since Tuesday." Lucia turned to face her fully, knee pressed to Nat's knee. "So let's do an experiment. Both of us. Tonight."
"Tonight?"
"Midnight. Call him up here. You and me, two glasses of wine, and him on his knees on this roof." Lucia's voice had gone low and warm, the way it did when she talked about men she wanted. "You've trained him in your style. Permission, denial, the no. I have three years of my own style. Teasing, charm, making him think it was all his idea. What I want to know is what happens when both styles hit him at once."
"Like what?"
"Like contradictory commands. I tell him one thing, you tell him the opposite, and we watch whose voice wins. Or whether he cracks and has to choose. Or whether he just... breaks in the most beautiful way." Lucia was already smiling at the thought. "You do control him through denial. I could order him to fuck me and watch you take it away. Or the reverse. I could let him have everything and watch him not know what to do without the wall."
Nat felt heat crawl up her neck, and not from the wine. "He obeys me. Completely. I've tested it."
"I believe you. But obedience to one voice isn't the same as obedience under pressure." Lucia picked her glass back up. "Unless you're scared."
"Of Chris? On his knees?"
"Of sharing him. Of finding out your method is one tool in a box instead of the whole box."
The night breeze moved between them. Somewhere below, a tram sang past. Nat looked at her best friend's face, at the three years of experience she'd never known about, and felt the same hunger that had started all of this, the need to know, to map him completely.
"Midnight," Nat said. "I'll call him up."
Lucia raised her glass. "Then we see if he kneels for two."
They clinked. Nat pulled out her phone, typed the message, and paused with her thumb over the send button.
"He's probably in his room," she said. "Cold showered and waiting, like I told him."
"Then he's had three hours to think about what you'll do to him next," Lucia said. "Send it. Let's ruin his expectations."
Nat hit send. On the rooftop, the city glittered on below, indifferent, and both women turned toward the stairwell door to wait for the sound of footsteps.
The footsteps came eleven minutes later. Bare feet on concrete stairs, unhurried, then the door swung open and Chris stepped onto the roof in sweatpants and a t-shirt, hair still damp from the shower.
He saw them. He saw the low wall, the wine, the two women watching him, and something in his posture already began to change, the easy slouch draining out of his shoulders.
"Come here," Nat said. "Stand in front of us."
He crossed the roof and stopped three paces away, head slightly bowed, hands loose at his sides. Lucia whistled softly.
"Look at that," she said. "In my bed he strolls in like he owns the place. You've got him standing at attention before he's even naked."
"That's the shirt," Nat said. "Take it off, Chris."
He pulled it over his head and dropped it on the concrete. Lucia leaned forward on the wall, wineglass forgotten, drinking in the lines of his chest with new eyes.
"God, I've seen that body a hundred times," she murmured. "It's different when he's waiting for permission to exist. Okay. My turn." She raised her voice, playful and warm. "Chris. Touch yourself. Get hard for us. Now."
His hand moved to the waistband of his sweatpants without hesitation.
"No," Nat said.
His hand froze exactly where it was, fingers hooked under the elastic, caught between two commands. He didn't look up. His breathing changed, went shallow, and Nat watched a fine tremor start in his forearm.
Lucia laughed, delighted and a little cruel. "Oh, that's gorgeous. He's not choosing. He's holding both. Look at him shaking." She set her glass down. "Chris, sweetheart. Whose order do you follow?"
"Yours," he said to Lucia, quiet. Then his eyes flicked to Nat, and his voice dropped lower. "Hers."
"Can't be both, baby."
"Yes I can," he said, and Nat felt the words land somewhere low in her stomach.
He pulled his sweatpants down over his hips in one slow motion, obeying Lucia completely, baring himself to the night air. His cock was already half hard, thickening as it swung free, veins rising along the shaft. And then he hooked his other arm behind his back, lacing his fingers at the base of his spine, obeying Nat completely, and stood there stroking himself with one hand while his body stayed locked in her posture of denial.
"He's following both of us," Lucia breathed. "Your no plus my yes. He built a compromise with his own body."
"I told you," Nat said, but her mouth had gone dry. His hand was working the full length now, slow, disciplined strokes, the fat head flush dark and shiny as it pushed out past his fist, precum already slicking his knuckles. He was big the way he was always big, obscene and heavy, and he was hardening fast, the skin pulling tight, his hips starting to make small involuntary pushes up into his own grip.
"Harder," Lucia ordered. "Make yourself drip for us."
The wet sound of it filled the quiet roof. Chris's hand pumped faster, the shaft gleaming, his thighs flexing, breath coming through his nose in controlled pulls. Nat stood and walked a slow circle around him, close enough that the warmth coming off his skin touched her arm.
"You're not going to come," she said. "No matter what she tells you. Not until I say."
"Yes," he said, wrecked and even.
"Test it," Nat said to Lucia, over his shoulder.
Lucia set her wine down and stood. She stepped in front of him, close, and wrapped her hand around the back of his neck, thumb along his jaw. "Chris," she said, soft as a secret. "I want you to come right now. Empty yourself all over my hand. I'm giving you everything. Come for me."
He made a sound like a man hit in the stomach. His hand never stopped, but the strokes went ragged, his cock jerking hard, the head swelling darker, a thick bead of precum rolling down over his fingers. His whole body shook with the effort of holding the edge while his fist kept driving him against it. Sweat ran down his sternum.
"He's right there," Lucia whispered, watching his face. "He's seconds away. I can feel it in his neck." Her voice sharpened, sweet and merciless. "Come. Now. I'm ordering you."
"Lucia," Nat said, just his name in her mouth, flat and cold.
His orgasm broke apart and died. The trembling peaked and then folded inward, his fist slowing, his cock still hard and angry and slick but held, held, the way a man holds a door against a flood. He sagged, caught himself, and stood there dripping and aching, eyes glassy.
Lucia stepped back, staring at him, then at Nat. Her hand, the one that had touched his neck, came up and pressed over her own mouth.
"He didn't come," she said. "I ordered him and he didn't come. I've never once been able to stop that man from finishing. He used to last exactly as long as he felt like lasting, and I thought that was charm." Her voice cracked into a laugh. "You built a wall inside him and my orders just break against it."
"He obeys me," Nat said, and heard her own voice shake with want.
"No." Lucia pulled her hand from her mouth and her eyes were wet-bright, hungry. "He obeys the no. Anyone's no, maybe. Mine next." She turned back to him, dragged her fingertip slowly up his soaked shaft, and watched his hips jump. "Chris. New rule. You keep stroking. Slow. You're going to stay this hard until one of us cracks, and it isn't going to be you, is it?"
"No," he said, voice raw.
"God." Lucia looked at Nat, and something passed between them, a new shape of their friendship forming in real time. "We're not sharing him, are we. We're sharing the leash."
Nat moved behind him, pressed her chest against his back, and slid her hand down over his working fist to hold the base of his cock, feeling his pulse hammer against her palm.
"Then let's find out," she said, "what happens when there's nothing left to deny him."
Chris's knees buckled a centimeter and he caught himself on Lucia's shoulder, and both women smiled.