Chapter 1: Checkmate at the Kitchen Table
The queen slid into place with a small, dry click, and Diego's king died on the square. He stared at the board, jaw working, his hand still hovering over the knight he'd meant to move three turns ago. Across the worn wooden table, afternoon light lay in a long gold bar across the scattered pieces and her coffee cup.
Joan leaned back in her chair. Her grin arrived slow, like she'd been saving it.
"Checkmate," she said.
Diego exhaled through his nose. "Best of three."
"We agreed. One game, one weekend." She reached across and trailed a fingertip along the edge of his sleeve, tracing the seam at his wrist. "You know what losing means, don't you?"
He did. That was the problem. His dick had been half-hard since her bishop cornered him, and she knew it, because she always knew. He'd lost, and the whole weekend belonged to her, and the prospect sat low in his belly like a swallowed coal.
"Say it," she said.
"You own the weekend."
"Good boy."
She stood and walked around the table. Her dress was that hot little red thing, the one with the thin straps, and the fabric whispered against her thighs when she moved. She stopped behind his chair, leaned down, and spoke close to his ear.
"Take your clothes off."
Diego turned his head. "Here?"
"Are you going to make me repeat myself?"
He wasn't. He stood, and the chair legs scraped the tile. The chain at his collarbone caught the light as he pulled the gray t-shirt over his head and dropped it on the chair. His belt buckle clinked. He stepped out of his jeans, then his boxers, and stood naked in the kitchen with the sun on his chest and his cock lifting away from his thigh, honest about everything.
Joan walked a slow circle around him. She didn't touch, just looked, and the looking did more than touching would have.
"Sit," she said, pointing at the chair.
He sat. The wood was cold under his bare ass.
She left the kitchen. He heard drawers in the bedroom, the soft thud of one closing, and then she came back with something black pinched between two fingers. Lace. A thin strip of it, small enough to be a handkerchief.
"Lift your feet."
He looked at it. "That's not going to fit."
"Lift your feet, Diego."
He lifted them. She crouched and worked the thong up over his ankles, past his calves, up his thighs. When she got to his dick she had to tuck it sideways to get the fabric past, and her knuckles dragged along the shaft, once, deliberate. He sucked in a breath through his teeth.
"Sensitive," she said, like she was filing it away.
The thong settled against his hips. The waistband cut into his skin. The lace cupped his balls, and his cock pushed out over the top of it, straining the front panel, absurd and thick and leaking a bead onto the black lace.
Joan stood back and looked at him for a long moment. Then she laughed, not unkindly, her head tipped to one side.
"You look perfect," she said. "Get up. Bedroom."
He walked in front of her with the lace riding up his ass and his cock swinging, and he could feel her eyes on the back of his neck the whole way.
The bedroom was dim and warm, curtains half drawn, the sheets still rumpled from the morning. She opened the nightstand and took out four lengths of black nylon webbing, the soft ones with the wide cuffs, the ones they'd bought together months ago and used maybe twice.
"On your back. Middle of the bed. Arms up."
He got on the bed and stretched his arms toward the headboard. She took his right wrist first, wrapped the cuff, cinched it snug but not tight, and clipped it to the slat. Then the left. She worked methodically, without hurry, and every second of it built the pressure in his chest.
"Legs," she said. "Wide."
He spread them. She cuffed his ankles to the posts at the corners of the frame, and when she finished he was strung out in a long X across the mattress, heels down, knees open, everything on display and nothing within reach.
He tested the slack. There was almost none. The lace strained across his hips when he pulled.
"Too tight?" she asked.
"No."
"Should I leave you like this for an hour and come back?"
He knew better than to answer that one fast. "Your weekend."
"Mm." She climbed onto the bed on her knees and settled between his spread legs, and the mattress dipped and rolled him toward her. Her fingers walked up the inside of his thigh, light, unhurried, leaving goosebumps. "Look at you. Hard already, and I haven't done a thing."
"You did the thong."
"I did the thong." She hooked a finger under the lace and snapped it against his hip. The sting made him jump. "That was just getting you dressed."
Her hand closed around his cock then, no warning, a firm warm grip from base to head, and she squeezed once, slow, watching his face while she did it. Diego's arms pulled against the cuffs and got nowhere. His hips tried to rise and she rode them down with her weight on his thigh.
"Fuck," he said.
"Stay still."
She started to stroke him. Long pulls, root to tip, her thumb smearing the slick down over the head each time, then a twist at the top that made his vision gray at the edges. Her other hand rested flat on his stomach, holding him to the mattress.
"You're going to come on my hand and get it all over your pretty lace," she said. "Aren't you."
He gritted his teeth. "Not if you don't want me to."
"Oh, I want you to." She sped up, knuckles blurring over his skin, the wet sound of it loud in the quiet room. "That's the thing. You don't get to decide anything for the next two days. Not when you come, not how, not what goes in you. Isn't that right?"
"Yes."
"Yes what?"
"Yes, ma'am."
She smiled down at him and tightened her grip, and Diego closed his eyes and pulled uselessly at the straps, hips trembling, the lace dark and wet where his cock lay against it. Then she stopped. Her hand went still at the base, thumb pressed hard under the head, and she held him there, right at the edge, while his breath came in ragged pieces.
"Not yet," she said. "You'll come when I say. Welcome to your weekend."
She held him there one heartbeat longer, thumb pressed hard under the head, and Diego's whole body shook with the effort of not moving. Then she let go. His cock slapped wet against his stomach and he made a sound, high and thin, that he would have been embarrassed about if he'd had any room left for that.
"Breathe," she said.
He breathed. The cuffs creaked.
Joan sat back on her heels and looked at him spread out on her sheets, chest heaving, the black lace stretched and gleaming. She reached behind her neck and found the tie of her dress. One pull, and the straps slid off her shoulders. The red fabric pooled at her waist, then she lifted her hips and shucked it off the side of the bed.
No bra. Small dark nipples, already hard. She'd been getting off on this too, he realized, which should not have surprised him and did anyway.
She peeled the black panties down her legs and tossed them after the dress. Then she moved up the bed on her knees, and he knew where she was going before she got there.
"Joan."
"Shh."
She straddled his chest first, light, then walked her knees up past his collarbones until she was over his face. The warmth coming off her was incredible. She smelled like soap and like the afternoon. Her thighs closed around his ears and the whole world narrowed to the dark between them.
Her hand came down and gripped his hair, tilting his head back against the pillow.
"You want to come, don't you."
"Yes."
"Well." She lowered herself, unhurried, until she was an inch from his mouth. "You don't get to yet. First you have some work to do."
His tongue came out and found nothing. She stayed just out of reach, and he strained up against the cuffs at his wrists, straining, and got nowhere at all.
"Please."
"Please what?"
"Please let me."
She settled onto his mouth.
He went to work. She was already slick and hot and he ran his tongue flat up the whole length of her, slow, tasting her, and her thighs flexed against his ears. She tasted like salt and skin and a little like the coffee she'd been drinking. He did it again, longer, and this time she made a low sound in her throat and rolled her hips down into his face.
"Better," she said.
He found her clit with the tip of his tongue and worked it in small tight circles, the way she liked and he knew she liked, and she rewarded him by rocking against him in time. His jaw ached. He didn't care. His nose was buried, his mouth full, and he couldn't see anything but the underside of her breasts and the ceiling past her shoulder, and it was the best he'd felt all week.
Then her hand found his cock.
She did it lazily, one slow grip from base to tip and back down, no hurry at all, and Diego moaned into her and the vibration made her gasp and press down harder.
"That's it," she said. "Keep going."
So he did, because his mouth was busy and because she'd started stroking him in long even pulls, root to head, and every one of them felt like a small electric shock after the edging. She was using his own slick to slide her fist, and the wet click of it reached his ears under her thighs.
She was getting close. He could feel it in the little jerks of her hips, the way her breathing had gone shallow and fast, the way her grip in his hair had tightened until it hurt. He pushed his tongue harder, faster, and drove her through it.
She came with her hand braced on the headboard and her thighs clamped around his face, shuddering over his mouth, and he licked her all the way through it because she hadn't told him to stop. His cock was leaking all over her fist now and her strokes had gone rough and quick, matching the roll of her hips.
He was right there. Ten seconds more, five, and it would be over.
She stopped.
Her hand let go and came down flat on his belly, pinning him, and she rode out the last of her orgasm on his tongue with her eyes closed. Diego arched up off the mattress and found nothing but air. His cock jerked against her palm and nothing happened, nothing, and the pressure sat at the base of him like a fist he couldn't open.
"No," he said, into her.
Joan lifted off his face and sat back on his chest, flushed and damp, breathing hard. She looked down at him over her own knees.
"No what?"
He swallowed. His mouth tasted like her. "I was close."
"I know." She smiled and patted his cheek twice, light. "That's the whole point."
He pulled at the cuffs, both wrists at once, and the slats of the headboard creaked but held. She watched him do it, mildly, like a cat watching a bird behind glass.
"I didn't say you could come," she said. "I said you'd come when I say. And I haven't said."
"Joan."
"Say it right."
Diego closed his eyes. His whole body was one long hum, strung from his wrists to his heels, cock standing up off the wet lace with nowhere to put it. "You own the weekend."
"That's my boy." She climbed off him and went to the kitchen, and he lay there alone on the ruined sheets, listening to the fridge open, the clink of a glass, water running. His cock didn't go down. It never would, he thought, not for two whole days.
She came back with a glass of water and drank it leaning in the doorway, watching him. She was still naked. Sunlight from the hall caught the side of her hip.
"When you're hard like that," she said, "does it hurt?"
"You know it does."
"Good." She set the glass on the nightstand and sat on the edge of the bed, and her hand rested on his thigh, just resting, warm and casual. "Because it's Friday evening. We've got all weekend. I want to see how long you can hold it."
"Held or edged?"
"Both. Every time I touch you, you're going to lose a little more of that temper." She traced one nail down the inside of his thigh. His leg jumped. "By Sunday night you'll beg me for it and I'll still decide."
She stood and started rummaging in the drawer again. Diego stared at the ceiling with his heart hammering and his dick aching and understood, with a clarity that felt close to fear and nothing like it, that he had lost an entire weekend of his own life to her and would do it again next Friday without being asked.
What she pulled out of the drawer this time was a folded black square of cloth, soft at the edges and worn smooth from washing, with a thin drawstring running through one side. She laid it on his sternum and smoothed it flat with two fingers.
"Here's the rule," she said.
Diego turned his head to look at it. From that angle it was just a black lump rising and falling with his breath.
"There's a party in this apartment tonight. Girls. One of them gets married in three weeks, and her friends want to send her off properly." She tugged the drawstring, testing it. "You're the present."
"Whose party is it?"
"Mine to host. Hers to enjoy." She folded the cloth once, then unfolded it again. "You wear this over your head. She doesn't see your face and you don't see hers. You don't speak unless she asks you something directly. You don't say my name, you don't say yours, and if anyone asks, you're nobody."
He lay there with his wrists still clipped to the slats and felt his heartbeat move down into his cock, which was still straining up out of the black lace, wet at the tip.
"You want to know who she is?" she asked.
"No."
"Good answer." She stood and unsnapped the cuffs at his ankles, then his wrists, and rubbed the marks on his forearms with her thumbs. "Shower. Cold if you need it. Put the thong back on after and nothing else. Be in the bedroom by eight and don't come out."
He showered cold and it did nothing. In the mirror his chest was still flushed, his dick still heavy and stupid and unreasonable, and he put the black lace back on and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark listening to the apartment fill up.
They arrived in a wave of heels on tile, bottles clinking, a shriek of laughter near the fridge. Someone said the word bride four times in ten seconds. Ice went into glasses. Music came on low, something brassy, and under the door he watched the light change as the kitchen lamp got switched for the one over the table.
At nine Joan opened the bedroom door and didn't turn on the light.
"Stand," she said.
He stood. She came close and he smelled wine on her breath and something sweeter on her skin. She pulled the black cloth down over his head, worked it past his ears, and cinched the drawstring at his throat, snug but not choking. The kitchen light came through the weave as a warm orange fog.
"Walk where I put you," she said. "And remember the rule."
She took his wrist, the way you'd lead someone through a dark house, and walked him out into the noise. The music dipped as heads turned. He heard a glass set down. Someone said, "Oh my god," and someone else laughed, and there was a low appreciative hum from more than one mouth.
The floor was the same tile. Joan stopped him in the middle of the living room and pressed down on his shoulder, and he knelt because that was what the hand wanted. Knees on cold tile, arms loose at his sides, hard enough that the lace was doing nothing to hide it.
"Heels on at the door, please," Joan said to the room. "He's got a thing about shoes."
Somebody laughed. Heels started coming off, thudding in pairs against the baseboard, and he knelt in the middle of a ring of bare feet he couldn't see.
A hand touched his shoulder. Cool fingers, thin rings. Then a second hand, lower, flat on his chest, walking down over his stomach until it found the waistband of the thong and hooked a nail under it.
"Is this him?" a voice said. Low, amused, a little drunk.
"That's him," Joan said.
"Christ." The hand slid down the front of the lace, cupped his balls through the fabric, and weighed them. "You said he'd be pretty. You didn't say he'd be like this."
The women had arranged themselves around the room and he could hear them settling, a couch creaking, ice rattling. Someone said get comfortable and someone else said, "Can I keep him?" and the room laughed, and the hand on his balls squeezed.
"Not tonight," Joan said.
The fingers left the lace. Then a knee pressed against his shoulder and the woman was on the floor in front of him, close enough that he could smell her, warm skin and perfume and wine and the faint bite of hairspray. She took his jaw in one hand and tilted his face up toward where hers must have been.
"You like that, don't you?" she said.
"Yes."
"Say it like you mean it."
"I like it."
She laughed, low. Then her hand slid back into his hair, gathered a fistful, and pushed his head down. Not hard. Just far enough to tell him where he was going. He went.
She was already wet. He got his mouth on her through her underwear first, cotton or silk, and she made an impatient noise and pulled her panties to one side herself, and then his tongue was on bare skin. She tasted sharp and clean and she'd shaved, so it was all soft and hot and direct. He worked her clit with the flat of his tongue, slow, then faster when her hips pushed, and above him the room kept talking like he wasn't there.
"He does that well."
"Joan trains them."
"She's had practice."
The fist in his hair tightened. She rode his mouth in short rolling pushes, one thigh over his shoulder, and he kept his tongue moving, steady, listening to her breath go short and ragged over the sound of someone pouring more wine. When she came she did it quietly, a long shudder and a hand clamped hard at the back of his skull, and he licked her through it because nobody had told him to stop.
Then she was up, and her glass was in her hand again, and there was a pause like the room changing its mind.
The next thing he felt was a heel on his shoulder, pushing him backward onto the rug. He landed on his back with his legs open and the lace rucked up around his hips and his cock standing straight up off his belly, slick at the head, absurd.
"Do you want him on the rug?" Joan said.
"The rug's fine." The bride's voice, up close, and then a knee landed either side of his hips and her hands came down on his chest. She was warm and damp from the wine and from him, and she dragged herself down along the length of his cock, once, a long wet slide of her cunt over the whole shaft, and Diego's hands came up off the rug on instinct and then went back down because he hadn't been told.
"Do that again," he said, and it came out wrecked.
"That's a question you're not allowed to ask." She lifted up and put him at her opening, just the head, and stopped. "Beg."
"Please."
"Please what?"
"Please put it in."
She came down on him in one stroke, all the way, and the sound Diego made was not a word. She was tight and hot and wet and she took him to the root on the first push, and then she braced her hands on his chest, and the room behind her made a sound like applause.
She rode him fast, no preamble, thighs working, and every drop of her weight drove him into the rug. His hands spread flat on either side of his head, palms sweating. He could hear the girls on the couch, glasses, a murmured commentary, one of them saying something filthy that made the others howl. He didn't care. He was inside a woman whose face he would never see, in a room full of them, with his own girlfriend somewhere behind him watching him do it.
His balls drew up. She was grinding down on him now, short hard strokes, and he could feel it start at the base of his spine, that turn, that rise.
"Joan," he said, because he couldn't think of anything else.
"Don't you dare," Joan said, from somewhere near the window.
The bride laughed and kept going, and brought one hand around her own hip and started working her clit with two fingers while she fucked him, and Diego lay there with sweat in the hood and his teeth clenched and rode the edge of it for twenty seconds that felt like a year.
"Don't you dare," Joan said, and the bride went still on top of him, hands flat on his chest, breathing hard.
The room made a disappointed noise. Someone said oh, come on. Joan crossed the rug barefoot and put a hand on the bride's shoulder.
"Off. Wall to wall. Not on my rug."
The bride climbed off, and Diego's cock came free and slapped wet up against the lace. He made a small, broken sound at the loss. Nobody looked at him.
"You're cruel," the bride said, but she was laughing.
"He's got two days ahead of him." Joan crouched at his head. "Up. Bedroom."
He got up on legs that didn't want to hold. His knees were crease-marked from the tile and the rug, and his cock stood out of the thong like a bruise. Two of the girls watched him walk. One of them actually applauded.
In the bedroom Joan switched the lamp on and pulled the curtains shut. She opened the nightstand again and took out the cuffs, black nylon, wide and soft.
"Back on the mattress."
He got on. This time she didn't spread him into an X. She put his wrists together above his head and wrapped them as one, cuff to cuff, then clipped the pair to the middle slat where he couldn't reach a knot.
Then the ankles, one to each corner post. Knees up and open. He lay there bent and bound and completely unable to close anything.
"Whose idea was the ropes?" the bride said from the doorway.
"Mine," Joan said. "Everything's mine tonight."
"Then you won't mind if I do this."
The bride came in and got on the bed. She was naked now, and in the lamplight he could see her shape, small-waisted, a ring on her right hand, a garter on her thigh with something silver clipped to it. She walked up the bed on her knees until she stood over his face.
"I heard you're good at this."
"Ask him properly," Joan said, and sat down in the chair by the wall, ankle over knee, still naked, watching.
The bride looked down at the hood. "Do you want to lick me?"
"Yes."
"Say please."
"Please."
She swung a leg over his head and came down slow, and the first thing he got was how hot she was, and how wet, because she'd already been on him and that was her own slick mixed with his spit. She settled her weight down onto his mouth in one long press and stayed there, not moving, letting him breathe through the lace and get used to it.
He started with flat licks, up the whole seam, root to clit, and she tasted like both of them together, saltier now, bitter at the edges. She hummed and rolled her hips an inch.
"Slower," she said.
He went slower. He dragged his tongue up and put the tip to her clit and made small steady circles there, and she stopped telling him what to do.
Above him the room filled back up. Heels, without the heels, bare feet on the boards. The mattress dipped at the foot and someone sat down. Someone else lay across the bottom of the bed with a glass of wine and her chin on her hand, close enough that he could feel her breath on his shin.
"She's going to take forever," a voice said. "She always does."
"Let him work."
Joan said nothing at all, which he heard anyway.
The bride got a hand into the hood and grabbed hair through the cloth, and her hips started to move in a slow grind. He kept his tongue flat and hard against her clit and let her fuck his face at her own pace, and he could hear the wet noise of it and a low murmur of approval from the girls along the bed.
Her first one came quiet and small, just a tightening of the thighs, and she stayed on him through it and pushed down harder when he tried to ease off. So he kept going.
She came the second time with a fist in the cloth at the back of his skull and one heel dug into his shoulder, and this one took. She shook over him for a long count, and the girls on the bed made noises like they were watching something expensive.
When she finally lifted off, the air on his face was cold and he sucked at it.
"Jesus," she said, and slid down his body, and kissed him.
That was the first time anyone's mouth had been on his all night, and it was hers, a stranger's, tasting of her own cunt. She held it a while, then sat up straight on his thighs.
"Now," she said to the room. "Which of you wants a turn?"
The mattress moved everywhere at once.
"One at a time." Joan's voice, level, from the chair. "He's not furniture. Line up."
Somebody laughed. The girls rearranged, and he could hear them negotiating, and then a weight came down on the bed beside his head and a thigh settled warm across his shoulder.
This one was different. Broader hips, softer, and when she put herself over his mouth she did it lazily, like she had all night and knew it. She smelled of wine and something green, and she was wet already, wet for reasons that had nothing to do with him.
"Lick," she said.
He licked. She didn't grab his hair or steer. She just rested, one hand on her own breast, and let him work from underneath, dragging up her cunt with long easy strokes, and every so often she'd shift an inch so he had to find her again.
To his left, another knee knocked against his arm. Then a hip. Then somebody's fingers got into the drawstring at his throat and loosened it a notch, and cold air came in, and he could finally breathe right.
Two of them, then. One over his mouth and one kneeling beside his head with her thigh pressed along his cheek.
"Shift over," the second one said.
"There's room."
"There isn't. Get up here so he can only reach one."
They shuffled. Elbows. An argument about whose turn it was, settled by Joan saying "She's next, she's been waiting," and a heel thudding on the mattress in irritation.
Then it went quiet, and the woman over his face sat up onto her knees so that she was off him entirely, and he lay there in the dark with his tongue out and nothing on it.
"So," she said. "Here's the thing."
He felt them both, one on either side, closing in. Warmth on both cheeks. Two cunts a few inches from his mouth, and him with his wrists clipped together above his head and his ankles tied to the posts and no way to move toward either one.
"We're both right here," she said. "Go on. Which one do you want?"
Behind the chair, back at the wall, he heard Joan shift her weight. She didn't say a word. She didn't have to. That was the whole game, and he knew it, and his cock was so hard he could feel his own pulse in it, and there was no answer that wasn't a loss.
He wet his lips. Then he turned his head, deliberate, slow, and put his mouth where he chose.
He turned his head into the hip on his left and put his mouth where he'd chosen. Behind him, somebody made a small, offended sound in her throat.
"Fine," she said. "Then I get the other end."
He didn't follow. Then the mattress shifted, weight slid down along his side, and fingers hooked the waistband of the thong and peeled it down over his hips.
Cold air on his balls. His cock stood straight up off his belly, the head wet and dark, and for a second nothing touched it at all.
Then her mouth came down on him. Just the head. A kiss, held, her lips sealed and warm around the ridge, the tip of her tongue flat on the slit.
Diego came up off the mattress an inch and the cuffs snapped him back down.
"Don't stop," the woman over his face said, and he remembered his tongue and put it back to work.
He licked her in long flat strokes while the other one kissed her way down his shaft. Lips on the underside, wet and slow, down to the root and back up. She did it like she had all night and no interest in hurrying any of it.
Someone on the bed poured more wine. Someone else said, "He's leaking," and the room laughed.
He found the woman's clit and worked it in tight circles, and she rewarded him with a slow roll of her hips that put her deeper onto his tongue. She tasted like wine and salt and herself. He was so far into it that he almost missed what happened next.
The chair creaked.
Bare feet crossed the boards, unhurried, and stopped at the foot of the bed. The lamp threw her shadow up the wall.
"Are you going to sit in that chair all night?" the girl between his legs said.
Joan didn't answer. The mattress dipped on the other side of him.
Then her hand was flat on his thigh, and her mouth was beside the other one's, and Diego stopped breathing.
They worked him together. The girl kept her tongue on the underside of his shaft, long strokes root to head, while Joan took the head in her mouth and went down on him. Not teasing, not this time. Her lips dragged the whole length of him until her nose pressed into the lace and her throat closed around him, and she held it there.
The sound he made was not a word.
Up for a breath. Down again.
The girl slid lower, licked his balls where they hung out over the edge of the thong, took one into her mouth and rolled it. Wet heat on both sides of him at once. His hands were sweating against each other above his head and the headboard creaked every time his shoulders pulled.
He could hear all of them watching. Little noises, ice in a glass, one of them saying something filthy under her breath. He couldn't have named a single one of them.
It had been building since the kitchen table. Since the bishop. Since the black lace. Now it stood at the base of his spine with a hand up, and he was seconds out.
"I'm close," he said.
Joan pulled off him. Thumb and two fingers clamped around the base of his cock and squeezed, hard, and cut the whole thing off.
Diego's heels dug into the mattress. His mouth opened and nothing came out.
"Not yet," she said.
The girl sat up and wiped her chin with the back of her hand. "You're a bastard," she said, but she was grinning.
Joan kept the grip. She looked down the length of him, at his chest, at his wrists, at the hood rising and falling with his breath.
"Do you want to come?"
"Yes."
"What do you say, Diego?"
"Please let me come, ma'am."
She held him another three seconds, right on the edge of it, watching his face through the cloth.
Then she bent and put her mouth back on him, and this time she used her hand with it. Mouth on the head, fist working the shaft in short fast pulls, wet and loud, and the girl leaned back in and licked his balls in time with every stroke.
Diego came so hard his heels came off the mattress.
It went on longer than it ever had. Rope after rope into Joan's mouth, and she swallowed it, and kept her fist moving through the last of it until he was twitching and pulling at the cuffs and saying her name without meaning to.
She didn't stop for that either. She worked him until he was soft in her hand, and the girl beside her laughed at the noise he was making, and somewhere behind them somebody actually clapped.
Then Joan sat back on her heels and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.
The room exhaled all at once. Glasses clinked, somebody refilled somebody else's wine without being asked, and the mattress bounced as the girls shifted off him and found new places to sit. Diego lay there with his arms still clipped above his head and his cock going soft against his belly, wet from her mouth, and listened to them talk over him like he was a lamp.
He was glad of the dark under the cloth. His whole face was hot.
"Water," Joan said, and put a glass against his mouth. He drank everything in it. She loosened the drawstring another notch while he was swallowing and cool air moved over the wet skin of his throat.
Somebody played with his hair. He didn't know who.
"So," the bride said, from somewhere near his knee. She sounded lazy and pleased and a little drunk. "Now that you've had your fun with my present, I want something."
"He's not spent," Joan said.
"He's not who I meant." The mattress creaked under her. "I get one thing. That's the deal. You said so at the door."
"Ask."
The bride took her time. Diego heard her set her glass down on the nightstand, heard the little wet sound of her fingers, and understood without being told that she was touching herself while she thought about it.
"If it were my last night on earth," she said, "I'd want all three at once. Mouth, cunt, ass. I want to be so full I can't breathe around it. I don't care who does what."
Nobody laughed. That was the thing he noticed. The room went quiet the way a room goes quiet when somebody has said something true.
"That's a specific order," one of the girls said.
"I know what I like."
Joan stood up. He heard her cross the boards and open the bottom drawer of the dresser, the one that stuck and had to be lifted. Nylon clinked. He had never once looked in that drawer.
"Then we'll need the harness," she said. "And I hope you're not squeamish about it."
A beat. Then the bride laughed, low and pleased. "Knew there was a reason I liked you."
They worked it out around him with the efficiency of people setting a table. Somebody went to the bathroom and came back with lube and a towel. Somebody unclipped his wrists from the slat and put one of the wide cuffs back on, and told him to keep his arms down this time. He did what he was told.
"Up," Joan said, and a knee landed on either side of his chest. The bride came down over him, facing his feet, her thighs outside his ribs, her cunt settling warm over his mouth. Her weight pressed at his sternum. Above him her back was a long curve in the lamplight, and past her shoulder he could see Joan stepping into the harness.
It was black leather and two straps, and a slim ribbed dildo sat in the front of it, maybe seven inches, slicked already. Diego had never seen her wear it. She knew that. She looked at him while she cinched the buckle.
"Two rules," Joan said. "You don't stop with your mouth until she tells you to. And you don't come."
Diego said nothing. His cock said plenty, standing up off his hips like it belonged to someone with better luck.
Somebody tied the bride's wrists behind her back with the spare webbing, snug, and clipped them to the slat at the top of his head so she couldn't rise off him. Somebody else spread her knees wide over his shoulders. Then the girls arranged themselves at the edges of the bed with their wine and their opinions and left the middle to the three of them.
Joan came up behind the bride and knelt with her knees outside Diego's hips. He could feel the shift of her weight through the mattress, through the bride, through his own body. A cold drip of lube landed on the bride's ass and ran down between her cheeks.
"Breathe out," Joan said.
She worked the head of it in slow, watching the bride's back. The bride pulled against the webbing once, hard, and then made a low, long sound that Diego felt against his mouth, because she was pushed down onto his face when she strained, and her cunt had gone wet and open an inch from his tongue.
"Tongue," Joan said.
He put his tongue on her.
She was slick with her own lube and with the wine she'd been drinking, and she tasted rounder than before, softer, and the more Joan pushed into her from behind the more she swelled and shifted and ground down onto his mouth. Diego worked her clit in flat slow strokes and felt every thrust as a pressure coming through her body into his. The bed frame started its rhythm against the wall, thud, thud, thud, and the girls on the edges started making noise again.
"Fill her up," someone said. "She said all three."
"She's got all three," Joan said, breath starting to catch. "She's got me in her ass and his mouth in her cunt. And she's got his cock right there staring at her."
The bride got a hand free somehow, or somebody gave her one, because suddenly her fingers closed around Diego's shaft and dragged it down toward her mouth. She took the head between her lips and stopped, breathing through her nose, letting him sit there. Then Joan drove in deeper and the bride took him the rest of the way in one wet, easy slide.
Diego had his mouth on a stranger's cunt, his cock in a stranger's throat, and his girlfriend buried to the hilt in a stranger's ass a foot above his face, and the room was watching all of it. He pulled at the webbing at his wrists and got nothing, and the give of nothing was somehow better than being free.
He kept his tongue moving. That was the one thing he could control, and there wasn't much of it under her weight, so he did it well. Long drags, tight circles, the shape of the alphabet he never finished. Her hips started answering him, little grinding pushes down onto his face between Joan's thrusts, and her throat closed around his cock every time Joan slammed home.
"Squeeze him," Joan said, and the bride did, throat working, her tongue flat along the underside of him. Diego's heels came off the mattress and his arms came up, and the cuffs caught him and he lay there straining and shaking and didn't come, because he'd been told not to, and that turned out to be a wire he could actually feel humming in his chest.
The bride came on his face, noisy this time, jaw and mouth and hands all going tight at once. She shook down onto his tongue and Joan didn't slow, just kept the long hard strokes going, riding the bride right through it, and the two of them pushed Diego flat into the mattress under the weight of it.
Then, finally, Joan pulled out. The empty sound of it was obscene. The bride sagged off him with a groan, and Joan unclipped the webbing and peeled her off and laid her on her side on the sheets, and two of the girls moved in immediately to pet her, which was apparently part of the arrangement.
Diego lay where he was, bound, mouth wet, cock purple and straight up off his belly. Nobody had touched it since the bride let go. His balls ached like a bruise.
Joan unlaced the harness and set it on the dresser. Then she came back and sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on his stomach, flat, just resting there.
Joan sat on the edge of the bed with her hand flat on his stomach, and for a while nobody said anything. His breathing had come back down to something like normal. The lamp threw a warm circle on the ceiling and the rest of the room was in shadow, and somewhere out in the living room a cork came out of a bottle.
"Water," she said again, and held the glass to his mouth. He drank half of it.
The girls filtered out the door one at a time, dressed, laughing, smelling suddenly of perfume and cigarettes. Heels clicked down the hallway. Somebody said she'd call a cab. Somebody else said she'd walk. The bride's voice carried in from the living room, thanking Joan twice, warmly, and Joan answered her the way she'd answer a colleague about a meeting.
The front door shut. The apartment got very quiet.
Joan unclipped his ankles first, then pulled the cuff off his wrists and rubbed the blood back into his forearms with both thumbs. He flexed his fingers and felt pins and needles in his hands. She put the cuffs in the nightstand drawer and closed it.
"Shower's yours," she said. "Ten minutes."
He got up on legs that felt borrowed and stood in the hot water until his skin went pink. When he came out she'd changed the sheets and put on one of his t-shirts, and she lay on her side of the bed with her phone face-down on the nightstand.
"Sleep," she said.
He slept hard, the kind of sleep that swallows you whole, and woke once in the dark to the sound of the shower running again and Joan's side of the bed empty. He turned over and went back down.
The knock came some time after two.
Two soft raps, then a third, patient. Joan lifted her head off the pillow and looked at the door, then at him. She didn't seem surprised. That was the part that stuck with him later.
"Stay," she said, and got up, and pulled the t-shirt down over her hips.
The door opened on the chain and voices traded low words he couldn't make out. He heard the click of the chain coming off. Then the door shut and two sets of bare feet crossed the boards, and the bedroom lamp snapped on.
The bride stood in the doorway in a coat over nothing. Same short dark hair, same gold ring on her right hand, a fade of mascara under each eye. She'd been crying at some point. She also looked like she'd been drinking water and walking it off for an hour, and had come to a decision.
"Sorry," she said. "I know it's late."
"You walked here."
"I live four blocks."
Joan leaned on the dresser with her arms folded. "Why are you here?"
The bride looked past her, at Diego in the bed, at the sheet pulled to his waist, at the shape of him under it. Then she looked back at Joan and asked the question like an adult.
"Do you want him again?"
Diego's stomach dropped and filled at the same time.
Joan took her time with it. She walked to the bed and sat down by his hip and put her hand on his chest, and she watched his face while she said it.
"He's still mine until Sunday night."
"I know."
"You don't get his cock in you. Not tonight. He's been used enough."
"May I, Joan?"
Joan turned her head and looked at the bride for a long count. Then she looked back down at him.
"He's still got a rule running," she said. "He doesn't come unless I say. He's going to want to break it about four minutes in."
"That's not my problem."
"No," Joan said. "I suppose it isn't."
She got off the bed and took the chair by the wall again, and pulled the throw blanket off the footboard and wrapped it around her shoulders. The lamplight caught the side of her throat. She crossed her ankles and settled in.
"Go on, then," she said.
The bride shed the coat on the floor and climbed onto the mattress naked. She knelt beside him and dragged the sheet down to his knees with one hand. He was already half-hard from nothing but the sound of the plan being agreed, and she looked at it and made a small noise in her nose, nearly a laugh.
"Sit up against the headboard," she said. "I want to do this properly."
He slid back and sat with the slats at his shoulder blades and his legs out flat. She arranged herself across his lap, knees outside his thighs, and settled her weight onto his knees. Her cunt pressed warm against the top of his thigh and left a wet print there.
"How long can you hold it if I don't use my hands?"
Diego's mouth was dry. "You're going to use your hands."
"I asked how long."
"Long."
She smiled at that. Then she leaned forward, took the base of him in her fist, and licked him from root to head in one flat stroke, unhurried, tongue gone flat and wet.
His head hit the slat behind him.
She wasn't in a rush. She kept her fist loose at the base and worked the head with the flat of her tongue, wet and patient, then took him into her mouth an inch at a time until her lips sat just past the ridge. She breathed out through her nose and let the heat of it sit there while her tongue moved in small circles underneath.
"Look at her," Joan said from the chair. "She's not even trying yet."
The bride pulled off long enough to say, "I'm trying," and went back down.
She went slow for a long time. Down to the root until his cock pushed at the back of her throat, then off, then down again, with a twist of her wrist at the bottom that made him grip the sheet in both fists. She gathered spit and let it run, and used her fist in short slick pulls while she licked his balls one at a time, and the sound of her mouth on him filled the whole room.
Every time he got close she read it. She'd feel the swell under her tongue and pull off and rest her cheek on his thigh and look up at him, breathing, letting the pressure drop. Twice. Three times. His balls had drawn up tight and his lower back ached with it.
"You're good at this," he said, wrecked.
"I know."
Joan hadn't moved. When he glanced over, she was watching him and not the bride, which was worse, and better, and he couldn't tell which.
"Can I come in your mouth?" he asked.
The bride lifted her head off him. She looked over at Joan first. It was the bride who did that, not him. That was the detail he'd remember.
Joan considered it while the clock on the nightstand ticked over another minute.
"Yes," she said.
The bride didn't say anything. She put her mouth back on him and took him deep, and this time she didn't slow down. Her fist and her mouth worked together, root to head and back, wet and fast, and her other hand came up and pressed flat on his stomach to hold him still against the slats. He felt the base of his spine turn over like a key.
He came with his heels skidding on the mattress and his hands in her hair, and she stayed down on it, throat working, swallowing everything he gave her. It went on and on. Every pull of her mouth took another spasm out of him until his legs were shaking and he was making sounds that weren't words, and she kept her lips sealed at the ridge and her fist moving slow through the last of it until he had nothing left at all.
When she finally let him go he slid down the headboard flat onto his back, chest heaving, sweating through the sheets.
The bride sat up, wiped her mouth with two fingers, and looked at Joan.
"Best one he's ever had," she said. "No offence."
Joan stood up and let the blanket fall. She crossed to the bed and looked down at him with her arms at her sides, and there was something in her face that hadn't been there before, something quiet and careful that he didn't have the strength to read.
"Get dressed," she told the bride. "I'll call you a car."
The bride found her second shoe under the chair Joan had been sitting in and hopped once to get it on. The gray coat did nothing to hide that she had nothing under it. She checked her phone and winced at the time.
"Cab's two minutes," Joan said from the doorway. She was still in the t-shirt.
"Am I allowed to say thank you?"
"You just did."
The bride laughed through her nose and looked back at the bed where Diego lay with the sheet bunched at his hips. He couldn't read her face at all in the low light, and then she was gone down the hall and Joan shut the door and put the chain back on.
The bolt clicked. She stood there a second with her palm flat on the wood.
Then she came back and sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled the hood off him, working it up over his ears the way she'd put it on. The orange kitchen light went away all at once. The room resolved into lamp and shadow, and he blinked at her.
"Are you all right?" she said.
"Yeah."
"Words."
"Yes, ma'am."
She rolled the cloth into a band and set it on the nightstand beside her water glass. Then she hooked a thumb under the waistband of the thong and peeled it down over his hips and his thighs and off his ankles, and dropped it on the floor. The elastic had cut a red line into him that would still be there in the morning.
"Shower," she said. "Hot. Ten minutes, then sleep."
He got up on legs that didn't entirely belong to him and stood in the water until the steam filled the room. He leaned his forehead against the tile and let it run down the back of his neck. His wrists had rings on them, faint pink, and the drawstring had left a crease under his jaw.
He dried off with the good towel and brushed his teeth and looked at his own face in the mirror for a while, then wiped the steam off it and looked again.
The bedroom was dim when he came back. Joan had the lamp down low and her phone face-down on the nightstand, and she was sitting up against the pillows with the sheet across her lap. She held the corner of it up for him without saying anything.
He got in.
"Do you want the light off?" she said.
"Leave it."
She left it on. He lay flat on his back and stared at the ceiling, and she turned onto her side facing him and put one hand flat on his chest, warm, nails blunt and short. She didn't say anything for a while. Neither did he. The fridge hummed out in the kitchen and the building settled.
"You watched the whole time," he said finally.
"Yes."
"Did you like it?"
"I liked it more than I planned to." She said it evenly, like a score.
He turned his head on the pillow to look at her. Her hair was flattened on one side and her mouth was doing something he couldn't name. He'd known her two years and could usually call it. Not tonight.
"You're not going to ask what tomorrow is," she said.
"You'll tell me."
"I will."
He was nearly under when she spoke again, and her voice had gone quiet and close, the way you talk to someone you think is asleep.
"Diego."
"Mm."
"I almost told you to stop. Earlier. When she had her mouth on you."
His eyes came open in the dark. He didn't move and he didn't answer, because there wasn't an answer that helped, and she knew it. Her hand stayed flat on his chest a moment longer. Then she took it away and rolled onto her back, and the mattress took her weight.
"Sleep," she said.
He did.