Chapter 74: The Drive Home
The tyres crunched on the gravel for the last hundred yards, and Odette slowed to take in the house properly for the first time. It sat low and dark among the pines, stone and timber, the sort of place that had been built to keep the weather out and everything else in. A pale blue light showed at one downstairs window. Sulphur-yellow lamplight leaked from another.
She switched off the engine. For a moment she simply sat there, one hand still on the wheel, listening to the tick of the cooling block. All weekend she had imagined this drive in the other direction, with Paul beside her, and now that she was finally here the imagining felt small and underfed. She had no idea what they had done to him. That was the point, she supposed.
Clarissa opened the door before she knocked. Tall, in her fifties, dark hair pinned back, dark green wool dress cut expensively, the sort of confidence that came from never having been contradicted in her life. Clarissa looked her over with frank interest and stood aside.
"Odette! Come in. You're early."
"I did not want to be late."
"Very French of you."
The hall smelled of woodsmoke, cold stone and something faintly animal underneath. Clarissa took her coat and hung it without asking. Odette followed her through a corridor, past a closed door she decided not to think about, and into a long drawing room where a fire had been built up high enough to hurt the eye.
Suzette was already there, seated in a wing chair with a glass of white wine, blonde bob severe, blazer buttoned. She gave Odette a small, unreadable nod. Between the two chairs, on the rug, two people knelt on all fours.
Paul was in a linen smock that came to his thighs. His hair had been cut shorter since Friday, or perhaps it was only cleaner. He didn't look up when she came in. Beside him was a dark-haired woman in the same smock, maybe twenty-five, with red welts visible across the backs of her thighs when she shifted her weight. She was crying, quietly and steadily, the way people cry when they've been at it long enough that it's become breathing.
"Sit," Clarissa said. "Here, by me."
Odette sat. The leather of the armchair gave a small sigh under her.
Clarissa clicked her fingers once, softly, not even a command really. Both of them moved. Milly crawled first, slow, knees and palms, and lowered her face between Suzette's legs. Suzette set down her glass and lifted her skirt a hand's width with two fingers, enough, no more, and let her head fall back against the chair.
Paul crawled to Clarissa. His hands came up to part the wool of her dress, which was already pulled up over her hips, so that either she'd been waiting or she simply never had it down. He put his mouth to her, and Clarissa hummed something that wasn't quite a word and laid one hand flat on the back of his head like a woman resting her palm on a windowsill.
"You see," Clarissa said to Odette, "he's very good at this. It's not a difficult thing to be good at, and yet so few men are."
"He has had practice."
"He has. More than ever."
Odette watched. It made no sense, the flush that went up her neck, the tight, hot pull low in her belly. She had sent him here. She had undressed him in a car park and watched Puddles gag him and put him in a boot.
"He's been used by thirteen women since Friday evening," Clarissa said. "I've kept a list. It seemed only proper."
"Thirteen."
"Thirteen. Of whom eleven were new to him. That's rather a lot of novelty for one weekend, I'd say."
Suzette made a small sound, either agreement or something Milly had just done. Clarissa didn't look over.
"There was an Indian woman on Saturday night, a solicitor from Leeds. Very quiet, very particular about exactly how she wanted it done. There was an American, a loud one, a friend of Nadia's from New York. There was a Saudi woman, which surprised me, but she's been part of our little circle for two years and her English is better than mine. And there was an Italian, a girl called Bianca, who I don't think you know."
"I do not know a Bianca."
"No. She's back in Milan now." Clarissa's thumb moved once, slowly, at the base of Paul's skull. "The eldest was sixty-seven. A widow. The youngest was twenty-one"
"Sixty-seven," Odette said.
"You'd be surprised. Some of them have spent forty years being told they're finished and then they get a tongue on them and remember what they were like at twenty." Clarissa smiled slightly. "The sixty-seven-year-old came twice. I had to give her a blanket and a cup of tea afterwards."
"And the young one?"
"Wanted to be watched. We watched."
Odette crossed her legs. The fire was doing something to the backs of her thighs now. Paul's shoulders moved under the smock in a steady, unhurried rhythm, and the wet sounds of it reached her across the rug in a way that was almost worse than watching.
"There was also Tim," Suzette said, without opening her eyes. "You should count Tim."
"Tim is not a woman," Clarissa said.
"Tim has a vulva and a clitoris the size of my thumb knuckle and more testosterone in him than my husband ever had. He came three times in one sitting. If he doesn't count, I'd like to know what your criteria are."
Clarissa considered this with a faint, amused tilt of her head. "Tim counts."
"What is he?" Odette asked.
"Tim? He's mine. He runs the house and the furnishings and the accounts.” Clarissa looked down at Paul between her thighs and pressed his head a little harder.”
"Then he is not the only one."
Suzette laughed at that, one flat note, and pushed Milly's head back down, and Milly went, sobbing into her and licking regardless, the whole of her shoulders shaking with it.
Odette felt the room tilt, just slightly, the way it did when she was becoming certain of something she already knew she'd do. She had thought of this weekend as a loan. She'd had a folder of conditions in her head: no lasting marks, no photographs that leave this house, tongues only. She had been so careful with him. And Clarissa had simply opened the door to eleven strange women and let them each have their turn, and Paul had knelt there and taken it and been good at it.
"Thirteen," she said again, aloud this time, tasting it.
"Plus Milly here, if she finishes today, but she's married and goes home on the eleven o'clock Sunday train, so I'd call her an extra rather than an entry." Clarissa lifted her hand from Paul's head and looked at Odette properly for the first time. "Does that number please you?"
Odette uncrossed her legs and stood, and both Paul and Milly froze at the sound of the chair creaking. Paul turned his face sideways. His mouth was wet, his chin, the tip of his nose. He looked at her the way a dog looks at the person who left it in kennels.
"Yes," Odette said. "It’s good." She stepped out of her shoes, one and then the other, and said at last, "Come here."
"Come here."
Paul lifted his head from Clarissa and pushed himself up onto his knees, and his body was already moving before his mind had caught up, the pavlovian thing, the tightness in his jaw, the wet anticipation of it. His cock stirred uselessly under the smock. He had spent the whole weekend with his face in strange cunts and he still wanted nothing on earth the way he wanted the one woman in the room he actually wanted, and there she was, standing barefoot on the rug with her shoes kicked off by the chair.
Then Odette crooked two fingers at the other woman. Not at him. At Milly.
"Toi. Viens."
Milly's face was a wreck, eyelashes clumped together, mouth open. She crawled across the rug on her hands and knees and Odette sat back down in the leather armchair and spread her thighs, unhurried, and hiked the grey wool of her skirt up over her hips with one flat hand, and she was wearing nothing underneath. Milly put her face between them like a woman putting her face into water.
Paul had not known he could feel this. It came up through his chest like a hand squeezing, and there was nothing to do with it, nothing to say, because he had no right to say anything and Clarissa was sitting there with her dress up over her hips waiting for him and her thighs still wet with his own spit. He crawled back to her and put his mouth on her.
"Does he always come when you call him like that?" Clarissa asked, above him.
"Always."
"And that, just then, when he heard his name in your voice and I was the one he had to lick. Did you see his face?"
"I saw it."
He kept his tongue working, flat and slow, up through her folds and around the hood of her clit, the way she had liked it an hour ago and the way she had flogged him when he'd gone too fast. Above him Milly was crying and licking and Odette was making a small, polite sound, the way Frenchwomen did, as though she were being served at a table and the wine was good. He could not see it. He could hear every wet stroke of it.
Clarissa's hand came down on the back of his head again and pushed him harder into her. "There. Stay."
He stayed. She tasted of salt and the ghost of the wine she'd drunk, and under his tongue the ridge of her clit came up thick and hot, and she took her time. She always took her time. Her thighs closed a fraction on his ears and he heard his own blood and his own breath and beyond that the small, rhythmic noise of Odette's approval, and he hated the noise. He wanted to crawl across the rug and take the French cunt from the other woman's mouth with his teeth.
Clarissa stretched out one arm to the side table and picked up her glass of red and drank and then set it down and settled back, and her breath started coming in longer, rougher lengths. Paul pressed the flat of his tongue to her and kept it still and let her grind down onto him, the way she liked at the end. Her heels dug into the rug. She came with a long, low exhalation, almost bored, and her cunt pulsed against his face and into his mouth and he swallowed it because he had learned to swallow it.
Across the room Odette said, "Encore," in that small cutting voice.
Milly went back to it, sobbing, and Odette's thighs closed around her head and she came too, in under a minute, gripping the arms of the chair with both hands, eyes shut, mouth a flat line, and then said, "Bien," and pushed Milly's head away with the heel of her hand.
Odette's fingers were wet and she wiped them on the arm of the chair without thinking about it. She looked at Paul kneeling between Clarissa's legs with his chin shining.
Suzette set her glass down and Milly stopped and staggered back onto her heels, her face slick to the eyebrows, breathing hard. Suzette looked at Paul and then at Odette and said, "So he's never had her."
"Who, Milly?"
"Milly. She's been here since Friday and she's never once had his tongue. I'd have remembered. It's the sort of thing I'd have given him."
"No," Odette said. "He has not had her."
"Then that's a round dozen of new cunts in one weekend, not eleven." Suzette picked up her wine again. "I like the number twelve. It's a proper dozen."
"I like it too," Odette said.
She stood up out of the chair, and both Paul and Milly lifted their faces to watch her, the way dogs watch a woman pick up a lead. Odette walked to the fire and stood with her back to it, warming the backs of her bare legs, and looked down at the rug.
"Go on then," she said to Milly. "On your back."
Milly wiped her face with the back of her wrist and did it. She lay back on the rug with her knees up and open, her smock rucked up around her waist, and the welts on the backs of her thighs pressed into the wool and she whimpered once when they did. Her cunt was a dark swollen smear in the firelight, half-mast, wet from her own crying. Two red marks from the trestle crossed her belly.
Paul looked at Odette. She looked back.
"You heard me," she said.
He crawled across the rug. Clarissa watched him go with her head tilted and her mouth amused. Suzette shifted in her chair to see better. Odette stayed by the fire with her arms crossed, the firelight behind her making her outline dark, and Paul got his shoulders between Milly's knees and put his mouth on her and she started crying again the moment he did, and she was so wet from the crying and the licking of Odette that his tongue had almost nothing to push against.
He worked anyway, because Odette was watching, and because he wanted her to see that he was good. He found Milly's clit with the tip of his tongue and rolled it and she bucked, so he pressed his hands flat on the insides of her thighs and held her open. He licked her long, then short, then in circles, and each time he changed she made a sound like she was being hurt and the sounds went straight into the floor of his own stomach and settled there.
"Careful," Clarissa said. "She's going home on the train. Don't bruise her legs."
He eased his grip. Milly's hips rolled up and back, up and back, and her crying had gone hoarse and rhythmical, and Paul felt her hand come down and grab the short hair at the back of his head and hold him there, and he let her, because Odette was watching and Odette liked that.
Odette walked over from the fire, unhurried, and stood over them both with her arms still crossed, looking down at Paul's back and the working of his shoulder blades under the linen smock. Suzette watched her watch him. Neither of them said anything for a while, and Milly kept climbing toward it, and the fire spat once, and Paul kept his tongue on her exactly the way he'd keep it on anything else Odette pointed him at.
He worked her without mercy. Long flat strokes from her opening up through her folds and back down, then tight circles on her clit with just the tip, and every time she got close he'd change and she'd lose it, and she was too wrung out to complain. Her thighs shook against his ears. Her crying had thinned into something dry and rhythmic, like a woman counting.
Suzette stood up.
"You're wasting your time," she said. She set her wine on the side table and crossed the rug, and she took hold of the hem of Milly's smock where it had rucked up under her arms and peeled the whole thing off her, over her head, one quick motion, the way you'd strip a bed.
The linen came away and Odette stopped breathing.
Milly's body was a grid. From the tops of her thighs to the underside of her jaw, the skin was laid over with welts, long and thin and red, crossing at right angles, some of them still raised and angry, some gone dark plum at the edges, and three or four at the crease of her hip that had split open and dried in thin brown lines. The pattern wasn't random. It was a purse seine, a net, an even mesh, and it covered her the way a dress covers a woman.
"Mon dieu," Odette said. She had crossed her arms and now she uncrossed them. "What is that?"
"That," Clarissa said from her chair, "is Milly's education."
Paul's mouth had come off her for a moment. He was staring up at the mess of her belly like a man at a road accident. Suzette put a flat hand on the back of his head and pushed it back down.
"Keep working," she said. "Nobody told you to stop."
He went back to it. Milly's heel skidded on the rug and she arched and cried out, but the cries had a frustrated edge to them now, the sound of a woman pushing at a door that has been locked from the other side.
"Explain it to her," Suzette said.
Clarissa recrossed her ankles. "Milly came to us four months ago. She was a perfectly ordinary submissive, she liked a flogging, she liked to be tied. Her husband picks her up from the station on Sundays and she has marks on her when she gets home, and he fucks her with the marks on and neither of them says a word about it. It's a good arrangement."
"And now?"
"Now she can't come without it." Clarissa watched Paul's shoulder blades move under the linen. "We spent six weeks on it. The first fortnight we'd let her come any way she liked, and then we took it away. She gets her tongue licked and her fingers worked and a cock inside her whenever she wants it, and she doesn't come. Not once. Not anymore. It only happens when she's being hit."
"That is not possible."
"It is possible. We were very patient."
Suzette had gone to the side of the fireplace, where a low rack stood against the panelling. She picked up a riding crop, black, short, the leather keeper at the end worn pale with use. She slapped it against her own palm twice, testing.
"Watch," she said.
She did not ask Milly to move. Milly was already laid out flat on the rug, knees up, smock gone, every welt catching the firelight, and Paul's face buried between her legs with his hands on the insides of her thighs. The first stroke came down across the tops of her thighs, over the welts that were already there, and Milly's whole body jackknifed and she screamed, high, no words in it, and then lay back down and pushed her cunt up against Paul's mouth.
"There," Suzette said.
"You see," Clarissa said to Odette. "She hates it. Look at her face."
Milly's face was a wreck of it. Her teeth were bared, her eyes screwed shut, tears running back into her hair, and every time the crop came down she wept harder. She was weeping like a woman being robbed. And her hips would not stop. They rolled up into the licking and dropped and rolled again, an animal motion that had nothing to do with the rest of her.
Suzette struck her again, low, on the crease under her belly. Milly shrieked and came up off the floor an inch.
"Elle déteste ça," Odette said quietly.
"She does. Completely. She's not pretending." Clarissa sipped her wine. "She'd get up and walk out if we let her. We have let her, once, as a test. She got as far as the door and turned round and came back and asked Suzette to hit her. It took her twenty minutes to ask."
Suzette laid three strokes in a rising line, thigh, hip, ribs, and Paul had to brace his hands flat on the floor to keep his position. Milly was grinding against his mouth now in a way that had stopped being about him at all. Her clit was out and hard against his tongue and she was chasing it with everything she had, and he could feel it in her, the climb, the whole length of her body coiling, and then it would go and she'd sob with her mouth open and it would start again.
He kept going. He was good at this and he knew he was good at this and it was not working. Nothing he did to her was working. He tongued her cunt from the inside out, he rolled her clit soft and fast, he held her open with both thumbs and buried his tongue in her, and she climbed and slid back down every time, weeping, hating it.
"Fuck," he said into her, the first word he'd spoken since he entered the room.
Suzette raised the crop and brought it down flat across the inside of Milly's thigh, and Milly came.
It was not a gentle thing. She came with her whole back bent off the rug and her heels drumming and a long torn screaming sob, and she kept coming while the crop landed twice more, and Paul's mouth filled with it as she clenched and gushed over his tongue, and he swallowed and swallowed and did not stop licking until her thighs fell shut on his ears and she lay there shaking.
Nobody spoke for a moment. The fire spat. Milly's hand came up and covered her own mouth and she lay with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling, tears running sideways into the wool.
Odette began to clap. Slow, three or four times, the way a woman applauds at a small theatre.
"That is beautiful," she said.
Clarissa lifted an eyebrow. "You think so?"
"I do. That is the finest piece of work I have seen in a long time. She hates the whip. She fears it, you can see it, she flinches before it lands. And she can only come while it is landing." Odette looked down at the wreck of the woman on the rug and then at Suzette, who was slapping the crop against her palm again, unhurried. "You have taken a thing she loathes and you have tied it into the only hole she has left to come out of. She cannot get her pleasure without her punishment. She cannot even want one without the other."
"It wasn't my idea," Clarissa said. "It was hers. She asked us to do it to her."
"Then she is cleverer than she looks."
"She's married," Clarissa said. "Her husband thinks she spends one weekend a month on a yoga retreat." She set her glass down and looked at Odette with frank, warm interest. "Would you like yours done like that? It takes six weeks. We could start him on a Monday and have him finished by the middle of next month."
Paul stayed where he was with his face between Milly's cooling thighs, his lips and chin slick to the jaw, the crop marks on her skin pink and new beside the older ones, and he listened to the two women above him discuss his body as though he had gone out of the room.
"No," Odette said.
"No?"
"That is not where my interests lie." She uncrossed her arms and looked down at him. "Come here, Paul. You have work still to do."
He crossed the rug on his knees, and the wool scraped raw against them, and he stopped at her feet. Odette sat back down in the leather chair. The leather creaked under her. She looked at him from a height, the way she always did when she had decided on something, one eyebrow slightly up, mouth flat.
"Up," she said. "On your knees properly. Straight."
He straightened his back. His hands stayed flat on his thighs because he had not been told to move them.
She reached down and hiked her skirt the rest of the way up over her hips and sat with her thighs apart, and the firelight painted the inside of them the colour of tea. She had shaved nothing. It was dark and neat and faintly wet at the opening, and she set her elbows on the arms of the chair and looked over his head at Clarissa and said, "You may continue with your questions in a moment. First I want him occupied."
"You could have him anywhere in this house," Clarissa said. "You brought him a hundred and thirty miles for it."
"I brought him a hundred and thirty miles so that he would remember it. That is not the same thing."
"Suzette," Clarissa said. "Bring Milly."
Suzette set her crop on the side table and pulled Milly up by one arm. Milly came on her knees, swaying, wet to the eyebrows, the welts dark on her back in the firelight. Suzette walked her round behind Paul with a hand at the base of her skull and put her mouth against Milly's ear and said something Paul could not hear.
Then Milly's hands came onto his hips.
He flinched, mostly at being touched at all, and Odette's hand came down on the top of his head and turned his face back to her.
"Eyes here," she said. "You have work."
Behind him, Milly pushed the linen smock up over his back. The cloth came away and the room's air reached his skin, and then her palms were on his arse, both of them, spreading him, and he felt the cold first and then her breath, and then her tongue on his hole.
He made a sound into Odette's cunt. It was not a word. His hips shifted back a half-inch into it before he could stop them.
"You like that," Odette said. She was not asking. She said it flatly, the way she might read out a date.
Behind him, Milly's tongue circled. She was thorough and she was unhurried, and there was nothing clumsy in it at all. She worked the rim of him with the flat of her tongue and then pressed her face in farther and made small wet strokes at the centre, and Paul's whole pelvis loosened under it. His cock had come up rigid under the hanging smock, pressed against nothing, pulsing into the linen every time she licked.
"Do you like that, Paul?" Odette said. "Answer."
"Yes."
"Say it properly."
"I like it." His voice came out wrecked. "I like her tongue in me."
"Of course you do. Every man in this house would." Her fingers wound into his short hair. "Work. You are not being paid to talk."
He put his mouth back on her.
She was hot and she was slick from the second she opened, and she tasted of herself and of the day, and he went into her slowly the way she liked at first, low down at the opening, tongue flat, then up. She was not Milly. She did not have to be chased. Her clit came up under his tongue soft and then firmer, and when he found the right angle with the tip of his tongue and stayed on it she made the small noise in her throat, one note, and put a hand on the back of his head and simply held him there.
Behind him Milly's tongue kept going, and the two rhythms ran against each other, and Paul had never had anything like it in his life. His jaw worked in one woman and his arse was worked by another, and his own cock hung untouched and dripping onto the rug, and nothing had ever been as good as this and nothing had ever been as humiliating, and the two things came up his spine together in one single current.
Then Clarissa said, "Suzette. The jar."
Suzette left off. Her heels crossed the rug and stopped at the low sideboard and Paul heard a lid turn, glass on glass. She came back.
"Lift her face out of him," Clarissa said. "She can keep licking. Just her face up where I can see it."
Suzette put a hand under Milly's chin and tipped her head back. Paul felt Milly's tongue come free of him and then go back, blind, groping, and find him again. It stayed on him. Her breathing had changed. It had gone shallow and fast.
"Now the welts," Clarissa said.
Suzette unscrewed the jar the rest of the way and the room took the smell at once. Vinegar, sharp and old, and under it a harsh chalky salt smell, like the inside of a bath house.
"What is that?" Odette said. Her tongue had stopped her, briefly. She kept his head down with the heel of her hand.
"Sit still, Paul," Clarissa said. "Watch. You'll want to learn this one."
Suzette dipped two fingers into the jar and came up with a handful of pale, greasy stuff, and she began at the top of Milly's back and worked down.
The effect was immediate.
Milly's whole body convulsed. She screamed into Paul's arse, a full-throated, ragged scream he felt on his skin, and her tongue came off him. Suzette's free hand caught the back of her neck and pushed her face back in, hard, until her nose was against him and her mouth was on him again. Milly screamed into it and licked and screamed and licked, and the wet strokes restarted and kept starting, shaking and unsteady, but they did not stop.
"Fuck," Paul said into Odette's cunt. "What is it doing to her?"
Odette's hand tightened on his head. "That is not yours to ask."
Suzette kept going. Down the long welts on Milly's ribs, then the underside of her arm, then the whole even grid across the small of her back. She was generous with it. She scooped again and again and pushed the stuff into every raised line. Milly's shoulders bucked so hard that Suzette had to pin her by the hair.
"Salt and vinegar," Suzette said, mild as a nurse. "Mostly. There's a little chilli oil in it and a little something for the smell. It's for the marks, that's how I use it. It doesn't heal anything. It goes in and it burns like a fresh cut under the lemon."
"Does it hurt, Milly?" Clarissa asked. "Answer."
"Yes."
"Say it again."
"Yes. It hurts. It hurts."
"Do you want her to stop?"
Paul felt Milly's whole head shake against him, side to side, against his own arse, and her tongue kept working at him the whole time she did it, and he heard himself groan out loud into Odette, kneeling there between them with his mouth full and his arse full and his face in a woman's lap.
Now the lower welts. Suzette went to the creases at the top of Milly's thighs and the ones that had split and dried, and she took her time. She put the flat of her greasy palm over them and pressed and held. Milly's scream came up in a pitch that had nothing human left in the top of it. Her hips drove forward against Paul's back. Her whole cunt was bearing on his hip, slick, and Paul felt the wet of her run down his own thigh. She was dripping. There was no mistaking it. She had soaked a wet stripe down the side of him and it had nothing to do with any tongue at all.
Clarissa saw it at the same moment Odette did. There was a pause in which four people in that room all looked at the same thing: Milly's thighs, greased and stinging, with the wet running down them.
Odette began to laugh. She did not do it the French way, teeth covered, small. She laughed with her head back against the leather chair, one hand on Paul's skull to keep his tongue where it was, throat full of it, and Clarissa laughed with her, a low dry laugh like a woman agreeing with a joke she's heard before.
"Look at her," Clarissa said. "You'd swear it was the tongue doing it."
"It is not the tongue," Odette said. "Nothing he has done in the last ten minutes has moved her. She hates this and she is fucking to the wrist with her own pussy." She ground herself down onto Paul's mouth once, once only, and stayed. "Suzette. Do the insides of the thighs."
"That'll bruise her for the train."
"Her husband will think it is the yoga."
Suzette smiled for the first time that evening. She took a third scoop of the jelly and put her hand flat on the outside of Milly's left thigh and drew it down the whole length of her, top to knee, one long greasy stroke, and Milly screamed and came.
It happened at once, all of it. Milly's tongue went flat and useless against Paul and her hips ground against his hip and she came off into the air with nothing touching her cunt at all, shaking, teeth in his skin, her mouth gone wide and wet against his arsehole, and Suzette held her down through it with a flat hand between her shoulder blades.
The smell of vinegar hung in the room, thick enough to taste.
Paul lifted his mouth off Odette for one breath, because his jaw had locked, and Odette's hand came down and put his face back on her.
"Did I tell you to stop?"
"No."
"Then do not." She settled into the chair and looked over him at Clarissa. "I want that jar."
Clarissa raised an eyebrow. "You can't have the jar."
"I want the recipe, then. Claire, I am entirely serious. I am going to take him home tomorrow and I want to be able to do this to him on a Tuesday night with the television on."
"He's the one who comes, not the one who gets it."
"For now." Odette's thighs closed a fraction around Paul's ears and she looked down at the back of his head, into him, past him, at a point on the far wall. "I have been giving it thought all weekend. What I want next."