Chapter 2: The Cage and the Countdown
The click woke him. Metal, small and exact, pressed to skin that had no business being cold.
He came up out of sleep with his hips jerking and his eyes still shut, and the weight of it was already settled. Something curved sat over him, snug down to the root, and a band behind his balls pulled tight underneath.
"Don't," Joan said. She was kneeling over his thighs with her hair still wet. "Don't move."
He opened his eyes. Flat gray light through the blinds.
She had both hands around the thing and it was already on him, and he could feel the fit of it like a hand closed too tight. Brushed steel, cool. The seam ran up the top of his cock where the two halves met, and the head sat back in a little chamber with a slit cut through the end.
"What is that," he said.
"You know what it is."
He pulled his knees up and she rode with him, unbothered, and let her weight keep him flat. His cock had woken before the rest of him did and it was thickening inside the cage, which stopped it about halfway. That was the worst part. The pressure had nowhere to go.
"Joan."
"Lie still."
She worked the halves together and the seam closed with a click. Then she reached over to the nightstand and picked up a small brass padlock, four dials on the face, and hooked the shackle through the tab at the top of the cage.
Her thumb turned the wheels. One. Two. Three. Four. She didn't let him see.
"Look at it," she said, and held it up so he could. The little window on the padlock showed nothing. She'd already scrambled it.
"Say the number."
"No."
He reached for it anyway and she caught his wrist, easy, and put it back on the mattress beside his head.
"What's the number," he said.
His cock was straining now, hard against the inside of the steel, and the ridge of the head was pressed up against the slit and there wasn't room, and it hurt like a bruise being pressed. A thread of wet came out of the end and smeared on the inside of the plate and stayed there.
"There," she said, and looked down at it and smiled the way she smiled at a good opening. "That's the whole trick of it, you see."
She climbed off him. Sheets went cold where she'd been.
"Kitchen," she said. "I made eggs."
He found his shorts on the floor and put them on and the weight of the cage swung with him, swinging badly, a heavy loose ache with every step. He adjusted himself twice on the way down the hall and it didn't help either time.
The kitchen was full of sun. It came in low off the fire escape and lit the scratched table and the two plates and the coffee going dark in the pot she'd already made. She'd put on his gray shirt again and nothing else, and her legs were still pink from the shower.
He sat. She put a plate in front of him.
"Yolks are soft. Eat."
He ate three bites and couldn't taste any of it. She drank her coffee standing at the counter with her back against it, watching him chew.
"Your ex called last night," she said. "Around eleven."
His fork stopped.
"Gabriela?"
"She wanted to know if the invitation to the party was a real one. I told her it was. She asked what happened. I told her the truth, mostly." Joan set her cup down. "She got quiet in a way I recognized."
He waited. He'd learned to wait for the rest of it.
"She's coming at noon," Joan said. "I told her you'd be here."
He looked at his plate. The eggs had gone from yellow to something he didn't want in his mouth anymore.
"Why."
"Because she asked. And because I want to see two things." Joan came around the table and sat down across from him and set both forearms on the wood. "One. I want to see what a woman does when she wants your cock and finds out she has to go through me to get it. She's never had to do that. She got it for free for two years."
"And two?"
"Two," Joan said, "is whether you can watch it happen and keep your hands off yourself."
His mouth had gone dry. He took the coffee anyway and it didn't fix it.
"There's a number in that lock," she said. "Four digits. I know it. You don't. She doesn't. If she wants you unlocked before Sunday night, she has to get it out of me."
"Out of you how."
"Any way she dares."
The fridge hummed. Out on the street a delivery truck went by and shook the glasses in the cabinet.
"Any way," he said.
"She can ask nicely. She can beg. She can get on her knees and take me in her mouth if she's got the stomach for it, which I doubt." Joan turned the cup a slow quarter turn on the saucer. "She can sweat me for six hours if she wants to. I've got nowhere to be."
"And me."
"You stand at the frame and watch every second of it and you don't say one word to help her."
He looked over at the corner of the kitchen, by the window where the paint peeled.
The frame was already there. Black steel, square, bolted straight through the plaster into the studs, two uprights and a crossbar and a pair of cuffs hanging off it by short chain. He hadn't seen her put it up. That meant she'd done it while he showered last night, or the night before, and let him walk past it both times.
"You had it made," he said.
"I ordered it three weeks ago." She stood and carried her plate to the sink. Water ran. "It came Tuesday."
He sat there with his hands flat on the table and the cage weighing on him under the shorts, warmer now than the room, and the thread of wet he'd left inside it going tacky against his skin.
At eleven fifty the buzzer went.
Joan dried her hands on the towel and looked at him, and there was nothing on her face but the mild interest she got before a game began.
"Cuffs," she said. "Now."
He stood up so fast the chair scraped the boards.
Joan tipped her chin at the corner by the window. "Shorts. Off."
He stepped out of them and kicked them aside. The cage swung when he moved, a dull heavy drag with every step, and the flat gray light made it look worse than it felt. The wet had dried inside the plate and left a tacky seam.
"Come here."
He crossed the kitchen barefoot. The floor was cold where the sun didn't reach. The frame sat against the wall with its two uprights and its crossbar, black steel, bolted through the plaster into the studs. It had been there for days. He'd walked past it twice.
"Wrists."
She had the cuffs already open. He held his hands out and she closed each one, snug, and the click of the locks was a small sound in a big quiet room. Then she lifted the bar over his head. It took both their weights, hers up and his down, and she hooked the ring at the middle of the bar onto the hook under the crossbar.
His arms came up straight. His heels came off the floor and settled back down.
"Too high," he said.
"It's fine."
Then she went to the drawer under the counter and came back with the spreader bar. Black steel, three feet end to end, a cuff at either end, a ring welded at the middle. He'd never seen it before. She knelt at his feet and cuffed one ankle, then the other, and he had to walk his feet wide apart to give her room, and once both cuffs were shut he couldn't bring them back together at all.
She took the little chain off the middle ring and clipped it to the eye bolt at the base of the frame.
He tried his stance. There was a pull through his groin and down the back of each thigh. He could stand. He couldn't close anything.
The cage hung off him in the middle of all of it, heavier in daylight, the head pressed up against the slit with nowhere to go.
"Spread your weight," Joan said. "Otherwise your knees will go in twenty minutes."
"Whose fault is that."
She took the hem of his t-shirt in both hands, the one she'd been wearing, and pulled it over her head. Under it she was in gray cotton. She hooked her thumbs in the waistband and drew them down her legs, stepped out of them, and stood there naked for a second while he watched, and he wasn't sure which of them she was doing it for.
Then she balled the underwear in her fist and came up close.
"Open."
He opened his mouth. She pushed the wad in and pressed it flat behind his lower teeth with two fingers, and it was still warm and it tasted of her, salt and cotton and faintly of soap from last night's shower. She held it there until he closed his lips around it.
"If you push it out I'll know."
The buzzer went again, long this time. She wiped her fingers on her thigh and went to the door.
Chain off the door. Two voices in the hallway, one flat and female and close to the mic. Boots on the boards.
Gabriela stopped in the kitchen doorway with her keys still in her hand.
"Jesus, Diego."
She looked at him the way you look at a truck that's come off its jack. Long dark hair down over her shoulders, hoop earrings, a black coat buttoned wrong. She'd come straight from her apartment four blocks over and she hadn't fixed her face.
"What have you got on him?"
"A cage," Joan said.
She crossed the kitchen slowly and stopped a foot away. She looked at his wrists first, then the bar, then the spreader, and then finally down at the steel between his legs.
"You locked his cock."
"I did."
"Does it hurt him?"
"Yes."
Gabriela put out one finger and touched the front of the cage, light, right on the plate where the wet had dried. His hips moved before he could stop them. The noise he made went into the wad of cotton and came out wrong, and she pulled her hand back fast.
"Sunday night," Joan said from the sink. "That's when it comes off. Unless."
Gabriela turned. "Unless what."
"Unless you get the number out of me first."
"What number."
"Four digits. It's on a padlock, and the padlock's holding the halves together."
Silence ran through the kitchen. Out on the street somebody wheeled a crate along the sidewalk.
"So give it to me."
"No."
Gabriela laughed once, short and humorless, and it wasn't a joke she'd started. She looked at Diego hanging in the corner with his arms overhead and her own question dying in her mouth.
"You're serious."
"I'm standing here in his shirt, aren't I."
Gabriela set her keys on the table with a clink. She unbuttoned the coat and hung it on the back of a chair, and under it she was in a brown sweater and jeans, and she took a chair and turned it around and sat down on it backwards with her forearms across the top rail, facing Joan. It was a move Diego knew from two years of arguments. She used it when she'd decided to stay.
"You had me at the invitation," she said. "I want to know what happens when I say yes to the rest of it."
Joan came off the counter and sat down across from her. She poured a second cup and pushed it across the wood. Gabriela didn't touch it.
"Rules," Joan said.
"Whose?"
"Mine, because it's my house and my lock. You want to try something, you try it on me. He doesn't get a vote and he doesn't get a word. He stands there and watches."
Gabriela glanced over at him, and the look went the length of him, wrists to ankles to the steel.
"And if I don't like your rules?"
Joan picked up her cup and drank. The sun had moved across the table and was in her eyes and she didn't blink.
"Then you drink your coffee and take your coat and he stays locked until Sunday either way."
Gabriela sat with it. She chewed the inside of her cheek, which she did when she was doing arithmetic. Then she stood up, walked over to the frame, and stopped in front of him close enough that her coat sleeve brushed his hip.
He could smell her. Almond, cigarettes under it. She used to wear that in the winter.
She looked at the cage for a while without touching it. Then she looked up at his face, at the cotton in his mouth, at his arms locked overhead.
Gabriela watched the way the cotton pushed his cheek out, and something moved behind her face that he couldn't read. She lifted her hand as if she might pull it out, then didn't.
"The invitation was one thing," she said. "This is another."
"Nobody's making you stay." Joan said it from the table without looking up.
Gabriela turned from him. She crossed the kitchen slowly, and she didn't stop at the chair she'd been sitting in. She stopped in front of Joan instead, close, with the sun on her shoulder and her hoops swinging.
"You asked me what I'd do."
"I asked what a woman would do."
Gabriela leaned down and kissed her.
It wasn't a soft kiss. His ex knew how to kiss. She got a hand on the back of Joan's neck and her thumb under Joan's jaw and turned her face up into it, and Joan let her for a full second doing nothing at all. Then Joan's mouth opened and Gabriela's tongue went in, and the wet click of it carried across the whole room.
Diego stood in his cuffs with his arms overhead and watched his girlfriend kiss his ex, and the cage pulled tight and the ridge of his cock jammed up against the slit and got nothing for it. A slow line of pre-come beaded in the little window and sat there shining.
Gabriela put her knee on the chair between Joan's thighs. She kissed down the side of her mouth and took the lower lip between her teeth and pulled, and her free hand slid flat down Joan's chest to the shirt, and under it, and Joan's breath came out uneven through her nose for the first time all morning.
Then Gabriela came up for air. Her mouth was wet and her cheeks were pink under the mascara.
"I can use any technique," she said. "Right?"
Joan sat with her shirt pushed up to her ribs and one nipple out in the cold kitchen air and said, "Any one you can stand up after."
"Answer the question."
"Yes."
Gabriela stood back and let the shirt fall. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. She looked at Diego, still hanging, then back at Joan, and her arithmetic face came on.
"Show me your toys."
Joan drank the rest of her coffee before she stood. That was the whole answer. She went down the hall barefoot and they heard the closet door.
Diego didn't say anything, because he couldn't. The wad of cotton was down to a knot of wet cloth and his jaw ached around it.
She came back with a black case the size of a briefcase and set it on the table between them. She flipped the latches. The lid came up and she turned it to face Gabriela and stepped back with her arms folded.
Gabriela looked down into it for a long time.
The harness lay coiled on top, black leather straps and a steel O-ring at the front and the dildo still clipped into it, ribbed and purple-dark and used. She worked it out with one finger and lifted it, and the straps hung off her hand and dripped a little.
"You wore this on him."
"On the bride. He watched."
Gabriela set it aside on the table and went back in. The glass plug. The small silicone one with the flared base. The stainless wand with the ball at the end, cold even in the warm room. A paddle in oiled walnut, no holes. Four spring clamps with rubber tips. The black cloth rolled in a band. A flat tin of balm. Two bottles of lube, one half gone. The spreader bar's empty slot where it had lived until this morning.
She picked up the clamps and clicked one open and shut, close to her ear.
"Any technique," she said again, mostly to herself.
"Within reason."
Gabriela put the clamps back and her hand moved to the bottom of the case. She came up with the chain. Silver, fine, twenty links with a clip at each end, and she turned it over twice in her palm and set it down flat beside the harness.
She looked at Joan's throat. Bare, no chain, nothing on it anywhere.
"Put this on."
Joan didn't move for a second. The fridge hummed. Diego watched his girlfriend's face go through something small and quick, and it was the closest thing to doubt he'd seen on her all weekend.
"That's mine," Joan said.
"I know." Gabriela pushed it an inch across the wood. "You want me to beg for a number you already picked. Fine. I'll get there. But first I want to see what a lock looks like on you."
Joan looked at the chain on the wood for three long seconds. Then she picked it up.
She worked the clip open with her thumbnail, unhurried, and reached it around behind her own neck. The clasp clicked at her nape. She let her hands fall and the links lay across her collarbone, fine and silver, catching the sun off the window.
Diego watched from the frame with his jaw working around the wet knot of cotton. The chain sat on her like it belonged there. He'd never seen her wear anything on her throat.
Gabriela stayed in her chair with her forearms on the rail and her eyes level. "Is that how you wear it?"
"That's how it goes on."
"There's no key in it."
"No."
"So it isn't a lock at all." Gabriela stood up. The chair legs scraped. "It's jewellery."
"It's mine."
"I heard you the first time." Gabriela walked a slow half circle around her, boots on the cold boards, and stopped behind her shoulder. She hooked one finger under the chain at the nape and gave it the smallest pull. Joan's chin came up an inch. Neither of them said anything.
Diego's cock pressed flat against the inside of the plate and the little window went wet again. He couldn't take his eyes off the fine line of silver across her skin.
Gabriela let go and came around the front. "Take the shirt off."
Joan's mouth did something small. "You don't give the orders in this kitchen."
"I'm not giving an order. I'm asking." Gabriela's voice stayed flat. "Am I going to have to ask again, or are you going to take it off yourself?"
The fridge clicked off. The room got quieter. Joan stood with her arms at her sides and the gray shirt hanging to her hips, and for one second her weight shifted like she might walk back to the sink and pour herself another cup and let the whole thing die on the table.
Then she took the hem in both hands and pulled it over her head.
Gabriela didn't move. Joan balled the shirt and dropped it on the floor by the chair, and stood there in the sun with her hair still damp and her nipples going hard in the draft off the window. The chain lay on her bare collarbone now, silver on skin, and it read completely differently.
"All of it," Gabriela said.
Joan's jaw tightened. She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of the gray cotton and pushed them down her thighs without hurrying, stepped out of one leg and then the other, and kicked them aside with the shirt. She straightened up with her hands loose at her sides.
The kitchen light came in low and laid across her, hip and belly and one thigh, and Diego hung in his cuffs and looked at his girlfriend standing naked on the kitchen floor with another woman's chain on her neck.
Gabriela walked one full turn around her. Slow. She stopped behind her and put two fingers flat on the small of Joan's back, just resting them there where the sun wasn't.
"You don't blush."
"I don't."
"Not even a little." Gabriela's fingers slid down over her ass and stopped, and came away. "That's what I always wondered about you. The two of us in the same room at that work thing, and you shook my hand like we were strangers, and you didn't look at me once the whole night."
"I looked at you twice."
"I know. I counted." Gabriela came back around to the front and stood close enough that their breath met. "He used to say you were the calmest person he'd ever met. He said it like a prayer."
Joan said nothing. Her hands stayed at her sides.
Gabriela's eyes went down the chain and the bare skin under it and back up. She reached out and took the chain at the front and reeled Joan in half a step by it, and Joan let her. The links bit a faint line into the back of her neck.
Diego made a sound around the cotton that neither of them turned to hear.
"You want the number," Gabriela said. "You picked four digits and you're holding them like a card. Fine. That's your game." She let the chain go. It settled back warm against the bone. "But you put this on when I asked you to, and you took your clothes off when I asked you to, and you didn't do either of those because I'm scary."
"Go on."
"You liked it. You've had your hands on him all weekend, you've had a room full of women in your living room doing what you told them, and now there's somebody in your kitchen who won't do that." Gabriela stepped back and picked up her coffee at last. She drank it cold. "So you're going to stand there and see how this feels for a while."
Joan's mouth curved, just at one corner. "Is this the technique?"
"This is the warm-up." Gabriela set the cup down. "You want to know what I'd do to get a number out of you. You asked the whole room that question an hour ago." She walked to the black case on the table and turned it and looked down into it, and her hand moved over the coiled harness and the clamps and the steel wand without landing on any of them.
Then she looked up at Joan, and past her, at Diego on the frame.
"You want to know what I'd do? This. How long has it been since anybody put their mouth on you and made you come?"
Joan didn't answer.
"That's what I thought." Gabriela shut the case. "Sit down."
Joan sat down on the chair in the sun, naked, chain on, with her knees together and her hands on her thighs, and Gabriela stood over her and looked at her throat and then at the case, deciding which way she was going to come at this.
In the corner Diego's arms had started to ache in the shoulders. The cage hung heavy and still and full of nothing, and he watched, and the wet in the little window ran down the inside of the plate and dripped onto the floor between his spread feet.
Gabriela put one knee on the chair between Joan's thighs, and the wood creaked under the tandem of their weight.
She didn't rush it this time. She took Joan's jaw in one hand, flat against the bone, and tipped her face up, and held it there a second before her mouth came down. Diego watched his ex-girlfriend kiss his girlfriend and knew the difference instantly. The first one had been a move in a game. This one wasn't.
Joan made a small sound in her throat and Gabriela swallowed it. She came in at an angle, mouth open, took the lower lip between her teeth and let it go and came back for more, wet and slow. Her hand slid off the jaw and up into the damp hair and closed into a fist at the back of Joan's head.
Joan's hands stayed on her own thighs for a long count. Then one of them came up and gripped the back of Gabriela's sweater, low, at the hem, and pulled it taut across her shoulders.
Diego heard the wet click of it from across the room. The steel around his cock had gone warm with his body and he could feel the slit of the cage pressing into the ridge of the head, and every shift of his weight made the chain at his ankles tick against the eye bolt in the floor.
Gabriela broke off and stayed an inch away, breathing into Joan's open mouth.
"You taste like coffee," she said.
"So do you."
"No, I mean you've been sitting there drinking it while I decided whether to come here." She kissed the corner of Joan's mouth. "You weren't nervous at all."
"Should I have been?"
"Ask me again in ten minutes."
She came back down on her mouth and this one was longer. Joan's other hand found the front of the sweater this time and both of them were gripping it, and her knees had opened under it, a hand's width, without her saying anything about it. The chain on her throat caught the window light each time she tipped her head back.
Gabriela put her hand on Joan's bare thigh.
She didn't go straight up. She started at the knee, fingers spread, small pressure, and dragged upward an inch at a time. Diego watched the muscle move under the skin as the hand went. Joan stopped kissing for a second. She kept her mouth open and her eyes on Gabriela's collarbone and did nothing to help or hinder.
Gabriela stopped at the inside of the thigh and pressed there with the heel of her hand, warm, wide.
"Your skin's gone hot right here," she said. "Funny place for it."
Joan said nothing.
Gabriela's fingers slid the last bit and her knuckles brushed through the hair and then her whole hand was flat over the cunt, palm down, just resting its weight there. She held it still for five full seconds. Joan's breathing changed on the fourth.
Then she turned her wrist and dragged two fingers up the whole wet length of it, root to clit, slow, and came away with them shining in the sun off the fire escape.
She held them up between their faces and turned them once in the light.
"Look at that," she said. "You're soaked."
"I noticed."
"You noticed." Gabriela put the fingers back and did it again, same drag, palm grinding at the top of the stroke, and Joan's hips came up off the chair to meet it. "Say it out loud, then. What's that."
"That's you touching my cunt."
"That's not what I asked."
Joan's jaw worked. Gabriela did the slow drag a third time, and this time she finished with the pads of two fingers circling the clit, tight, patient.
"What's that," Gabriela said again.
"Me being wet for you." Joan got it out flat, without a shake in it, which was somehow worse for Diego than a moan would have been.
Gabriela smiled at that. She didn't gloat. She kept her fingers working in the same small circles, and with her other hand she pushed Joan's knees wider apart on the chair so she could stand between them. The chair tipped onto its back legs once and settled. Diego could see everything from where he hung, the whole pink open spread of her, and the two fingers sliding in the shine of it.
He pulled at the cuffs. The cuffs didn't give, and the wad of cotton in his mouth had gone from warm to something he could barely work around, and the head of his cock was jammed up against the inside of the plate so hard his eyes watered.
Gabriela leaned in and put her mouth on Joan's neck.
She did it under the jaw first, then down the line of the throat where the chain lay, and then she took the chain gently in her teeth and pulled it a half inch until the links went tight and let it drop back. Joan's head went all the way back. Her hand came up off the thigh and gripped Gabriela's forearm.
"Your pulse is going," Gabriela said into the skin. "Right here. Feel that?"
"I can't feel my own pulse."
"I can." She kissed down over the collarbone, wet and open mouthed, and stopped at the hollow above it and sucked hard enough to leave a mark. Joan's breath came out through her nose in a rush.
Then she went lower. She took the near nipple into her mouth and Joan arched off the chair back, honest to God arched, spine bowed, one heel skidding on the floorboards. Gabriela bit down on it, gentle, just teeth, and Joan made a sound that Diego had never heard her make in two years.
Her eyes were closed. That was the thing. Joan Mabry, who watched everything, had her eyes shut with another woman's mouth on her tits in her own kitchen.
Gabriela came off the nipple and licked it flat, then moved to the other side and did the same while her hand went back down between Joan's legs and kept the slow circles going. She went mouth first, then fingers, mouth, fingers, down the sternum and across the rib, and every time Joan's hips rolled she'd stop the fingers and wait and start again.
"Should I keep going?" Gabriela said against her skin.
Joan took a second to answer. That second was worth more than anything else in the room.
"Yes."
"Say please."
"No."
Gabriela stopped everything. Hand out, mouth off, standing up straight with her lips wet and her hair sticking to her cheek.
Joan sat there panting on the chair with her knees apart and the chain slid round to the side of her throat, glaring up at her.
"Please," Joan said.
Gabriela didn't smile. She let the word sit in the room and then she moved, and moving was the answer, because she pulled Joan up off the chair by both hands and turned her around and walked her two steps to the table.
"Hands on it."
Joan put her palms flat on the wood beside her cold cup and her hipbones against the edge. The sun came in on her back and down the line of her spine, and the chain slid sideways across her throat and hung there in the light.
Gabriela pulled the black case an inch closer and sat down on the chair she'd just vacated, facing Joan's ass.
"This is where I start," she said.
Joan's shoulders went tight. She didn't turn around. "Start what."
"Being honest about what I want." Gabriela put one hand flat on the small of Joan's back, above the hip, where the sun didn't reach. She held it there and watched the breath go in and out under it.
Diego couldn't see Joan's face from the frame and that was worse, because he could see everything else, the whole length of her bent over the table, the backs of her thighs, the shine between them going dark on the wood.
Gabriela's hand slid down and cupped one cheek. She squeezed it, slow, the way you'd weigh something at a market. Then she let go and did the other.
"You're tight here."
"So I'm told."
"That's not a compliment, that's an observation." She used both hands, one on each cheek, and pulled them apart and looked at what that showed her. Joan's breath went out hard through her nose. Diego saw her heels come up off the floor and settle back down.
"Where do you keep it?"
"Where do I keep what."
"The lube. You've got a case full of toys and a bottle half gone. Where's the half that's gone."
"Second drawer."
Gabriela got up and went to the drawer under the counter and came back with the bottle. She set it on the table beside Joan's elbow where Joan could see it, which was the point, and then she got behind her again.
"Anyone ever been in here?"
Joan was quiet for two seconds. Long seconds. Diego counted them.
"No."
"Say it properly."
"Nobody's ever put anything in my ass."
Diego's cock kicked against the inside of the cage and there was no room anywhere for it to go. The plate pressed the head flat and a fresh thread of wet squeezed out into the little window.
Gabriela uncapped the bottle. The click of the lid was loud in the kitchen.
"Here's what I'm going to do," she said. "I'm going to get one finger in you and I'm going to take my time with it, and every time you tell me a digit I'll do something nice for you. That's the trade."
"That's not the trade."
"It's my trade." Gabriela poured lube into her palm and it sat there shining, and she warmed it between two fingers. "You don't have to take it. Nothing's holding you on that table."
Joan stayed on the table.
Gabriela put the wet fingers on her and started at the top, working down, greasing the whole seam from the base of her spine to behind her balls. Not pushing. Just spreading. Joan's hips shifted back into it once before she caught herself.
The lube went on cold and warmed fast, and the sound of two fingers sliding in it was the only noise in the room for a while.
"Relax your jaw," Gabriela said. "You're biting your own teeth."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're standing there with your ass in the air telling me you're fine." She poured a little more and worked it in with two fingertips, small circles, pressing at the center of it without going in. "Breathe out when I push. That's all."
Joan breathed out. Gabriela pushed, and the tip of one finger went in to the first knuckle.
Diego watched it happen. He watched the muscle open around it and close back snug behind it, and he watched Joan's back arch and her fingers spread on the wood. She made no sound at all, which was the loudest thing she'd done all weekend.
"Talk," Gabriela said.
"Keep going."
"Not what I asked. How's it feel."
Joan turned her head and put her cheek down on the table and looked out the window, at the fire escape, at the gray morning, anywhere but back at her.
"Full."
"Good answer."
Gabriela worked it in and out, one finger, long slow strokes to the second knuckle and back, and each time she went in she turned her wrist a quarter. After a minute Joan's knees had started to shake. After two she'd stopped holding her own weight on the table and let her hips fall into the motion instead.
"You're leaking," Gabriela said. "Down your leg. That's not the lube."
"I know what it is."
Diego pulled at the cuffs again, out of rhythm now, jerking them. The bar didn't give and the chain at his ankles rattled against the eye bolt and both women heard it and neither of them looked.
Gabriela pulled her finger out and Joan's whole body chased it.
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"Don't stop."
"Give me a number."
Silence. The fridge hummed.
"Give me one digit," Gabriela said, "and I'll put two in you."
Joan lay on the table with her mouth open and her cunt dripping down the inside of her thigh, and she said nothing, and Gabriela bit the inside of her own cheek and went back in with two.
She went slow. Two knuckles, then the second finger folded in beside the first with a stretch that made Joan's fist open and close on the wood. The lube ran down between Gabriela's fingers and onto the floor in a thin line. Joan's breath came out in a long broken note that she tried to swallow at the end.
"Better," Gabriela said. "Now you're not lying about anything."
She set a rhythm. In to the knuckles, hold, out slow, and on every third stroke her other hand came down between Joan's legs from behind and dragged up through the wet there. Joan rocked back against it, then forward, then back, and the table legs moved on the boards with a scrape Diego could hear from the corner.
"You want to hear something," Gabriela said. "I've thought about you about six times a year since that work thing."
Joan laughed, wet and unsteady, cheek on the table. "You hate me."
"I do. Doesn't stop it." She curved the two fingers forward inside her and Joan's whole body locked. "There. That's the one."
"Gabi."
"Say that again."
Joan didn't. She pushed her forehead against the wood instead and took it, and Gabriela kept the two fingers working that spot in slow deep strokes while her other hand flattened over Joan's cunt and started moving.
Diego hung in his cuffs and watched his ex-fuck his girlfriend with two fingers in the sun, and he couldn't touch himself, couldn't close his legs, couldn't say a word around the wet rag in his mouth. His hands had gone numb at the wrists. There was a small wet spot on the floor under him now and it wasn't sweat.
Gabriela leaned down over Joan's back and put her mouth at her ear.
"One digit," she said. "One. And I'll finish you right here on your own table."
Joan turned her face on the wood and opened her eyes, and finally looked over at Diego where he hung, and held his gaze for one long steady second, and then looked back at nothing.
"No," she said.
Gabriela pulled her fingers out slow, and Joan's hips followed them an inch before she caught herself and put her forehead back down on the wood.
"Do you know what I'm going to do to you?"
"No."
"Neither do I." Gabriela wiped her hand down her own thigh and stood up. "Bedroom. Both of you."
Diego got as far as the chair before she reached him. She had his ankles unhooked from the floor ring in a few seconds, and then she reached up and lifted the bar off the hook and brought his arms down in front of him. His shoulders screamed at the change. She left the cuffs on and left the spreader bar cuffed between his ankles, so that when she steered him out of the kitchen he could only take steps about a foot long, and the bar rang against the floorboards on every one.
The hallway was four doors long and took him twenty steps.
The bedroom had gone gold at the edges. The blinds were half up and the sun lay across the bed in a wide band, and the sheets were still the ones Joan had changed in the middle of the night, still creased in the shape of two people.
Gabriela walked her to the bed by the back of the neck.
"Wrists."
Joan put her hands up over her head and let them be cuffed, one to the left slat of the headboard and one to the right, with her arms straight and her palms turned up. The cuffs were the ones from the nightstand, black leather and brass, and they went on tight. Then Gabriela took the ankle cuffs off the spreader bar and put one on each of Joan's ankles, and clipped each one to a corner of the footboard by a short strap.
The straps were long enough. Joan could bend her knees, close her thighs, open them, roll her hips. She could not leave the bed or sit up or reach anything.
"This is how you had him," Gabriela said.
"Nearly."
"Except his legs."
"Except that."
Gabriela crossed the room and set the black case on the end of the bed. She flipped it open and stood over it with her hands on her hips, and she took a long time choosing. Then she picked up the harness by one strap, looked at it, and dropped it back in.
"Not yet," she said, mostly to herself.
She lifted a small silver egg out of the bottom tray, egg shaped, no bigger than a thumb joint, with a wire running off the narrow end to a little plastic dial. It was cold in her palm. She held it up where Joan could see it and turned it once in the sun.
"You know what this is?"
"Yes."
"Say it."
"A vibrator."
"A small one." Gabriela climbed onto the foot of the bed between Joan's open legs. "I want to see how long the small one lasts."
She put her free hand flat on Joan's belly first and pressed down, so Joan would feel how exposed she was with the sun on her. Then she got two fingers slick from the bottle and worked them in, slow, no hurry, opening the way. Joan's knees came up off the mattress and stayed up.
Gabriela pushed the egg in with her thumb.
Joan's whole body went stiff around the little intrusion. She took it all, and the wire ran out of her onto the sheet in a damp spiral, and Gabriela sat back on her heels to look at it.
"Tell me when it's in far enough."
"It's in."
"Good." Gabriela laid the dial on the sheet beside Joan's hip, where Joan could see it and couldn't reach it.
She turned it on low.
The egg hummed. It was a small sound, thin and steady, and Joan's jaw went tight before anything else did. Her heels slid out across the sheets an inch and her fists closed over the cuffs above her head.
"How does that feel?"
"Small."
"That's not an answer."
"It's buzzing."
Gabriela turned it up a notch.
The whole shape of Joan changed. Her back came off the bed in a low arc, and she made a sound from the bottom of her throat, and her knees came together on either side of Gabriela's hips and squeezed. The chain she was still wearing slid sideways and caught on her collarbone.
Diego knelt by the chair with his wrists cuffed to the front leg and watched all of it from the side of the room. The sunlight had come around onto his back. The cage sat heavy on him and the pressure from watching had built into something close to nausea, and there was a wet line down the inside of the plate again, and no place for any of it to go.
Gabriela leaned down and put her mouth on Joan's breast.
She did it with the vibrator still running. She took the nipple in and sucked it flat and bit it once, and Joan swore out loud, a short raw word that bounced off the walls. Gabriela got the other one with her fingers, pinched, rolled it, and kept her mouth where it was.
"Open your legs."
Joan had closed them without noticing. She opened them again.
"Wider."
She went wider. The straps pulled at her ankles and held.
Gabriela picked the dial up off the sheet and turned it down to nothing, and the little hum died out of the room.
Joan's hips kept moving for a second after the sound stopped, chasing it, and then she went still with her knees up and her heels planted and her breath coming in through her teeth.
"You took it off me."
"I turned it down." Gabriela set the dial on the mattress by her own knee and leaned over it. "There's a difference."
"Not from here."
Gabriela put both hands flat on Joan's belly and pushed down, slow, until the muscle under her palms had to give. Then she slid them up over the ribs and closed them on the tits, one in each hand, and squeezed until the flesh came up between her fingers.
Joan's back arched off the sheet.
She worked them like that for a while. Palm, then fingers, then the heels of both hands kneading in slow circles while the nipples stiffened between her knuckles. Then she let go and took one nipple in her mouth and sucked until Joan's shoulders came off the bed, and pulled off with a wet pop.
"Anybody ever tell you these are the best thing about you?"
"You did. Twice."
"I did not."
"Two years ago. Parking lot." Joan's voice came out unsteady and she flattened it anyway. "You were drunk."
Gabriela pinched both nipples at once and rolled them hard between her thumbs, and Joan stopped talking and started breathing through it instead. The chain slid round to the side of her throat and clicked on the bone when she swallowed.
Then Gabriela moved down.
She got both hands under Joan's thighs and pushed her knees up and apart until the straps at her ankles went tight and held them there, wide, with her heels off the sheet and her cunt tilted up into the light. Joan's whole body locked at the angle.
"Hold that."
"I can't hold that."
"You can. The straps are holding it." Gabriela reached back and picked the bottle off the end of the bed. "I just want my hands free."
She poured lube into her palm and let it warm a second, and then she started at the inside of the knee, working down the thigh with both hands, spreading it wide and slow, and then over the cunt, and then past it.
Joan went rigid when the hands went past.
"Easy."
"What are you doing."
"Same thing I was doing downstairs. You just can't see it now." Gabriela's palm slid under her, cupping one cheek and lifting it, and the other hand poured more lube straight down the crack of her ass where the sun didn't reach. It ran cold and Joan flinched hard enough to shake the headboard. "There. That woke you up."
The lube dripped off the sheet edge and hit the floor. Gabriela rubbed it in with two flat fingers from the tailbone down, slow, greasing the whole seam half a dozen times without going near the hole. She did that until Joan's breathing flattened out and her hips had started rolling in a small tight rhythm against nothing.
Then she took one cheek in each hand and spread them and looked at what Joan had been keeping covered all morning.
"Look at that."
"Don't."
"I'm not doing anything." She held them apart like that and just breathed on it. "You're going pink down here. Just from me looking at you."
Joan turned her face away into her own arm.
Gabriela smacked her. Open palm, one cheek, hard enough that the sound bounced off the wall and the skin flushed up white then red in the shape of her fingers. Joan's whole body jolted and she made a noise she clearly hadn't planned on.
"Count that one."
"Fuck you."
"One, then." Another smack, same cheek, harder. Joan made a lower sound and her knees fought the straps. "Two."
Gabriela did it three more times, alternating cheeks, and by the fifth Joan wasn't trying to keep quiet. Her ass was hot and red under Gabriela's hands and she was pushing back into the palm instead of away from it.
Then Gabriela put her thumb on the hole.
Not in. Just on it, resting, greased, holding pressure. Joan stopped breathing entirely for a second and a half.
"Say it."
"Say what."
"You know what." Gabriela pressed a little harder without entering, and the muscle there fluttered under her thumb. "You've got your whole body open on this bed and one thumb on your ass and you're still going to make me ask twice."
Joan put her cheek on the sheet and looked at nothing.
"Do it."
"Do what?"
"Put it in."
Gabriela pushed the thumb in to the first joint. The muscle gave and closed around it, tight and hot, and Joan's whole back bowed off the mattress and her fists came down on the cuffs above her head hard enough to rattle the headboard.
"More."
"You don't get more yet." She worked the thumb in small circles, out, in, letting the ring of muscle learn it. "You get this and you say thank you for it."
Joan said nothing.
Gabriela reached over with her free hand and found the dial on the mattress and turned it on low and pushed the egg back in where it had slipped, and Joan's voice broke in the middle of a word that never finished.
"Now. What do you say?"
"Thank you."
"Louder."
"Thank you."
Gabriela worked both hands for a while. The thumb in her ass, slow and deep, and the other hand up between her legs with two fingers on the clit, matching that rhythm, and the egg humming where it sat. Joan's legs started to shake against the restraints in steady waves. Her mouth stayed open. Her cunt dripped onto the sheet under her and made a wet patch the size of a saucer.
"Gabi. I'm close."
"I know you are."
"Don't you dare."
"Beg me for it."
Joan got one breath in. Her hips had started to lift in small quick hitches and her voice had gone thin and high at the edges, and Gabriela could feel the muscle under her thumb starting to pulse in time with it.
"You want it?" Gabriela said.
"Yes."
"Then say my name properly."
"Gabriela. Please."
Gabriela turned the dial off.
She took her thumb out slow, and her fingers off Joan's clit, and she sat back on her heels between Joan's shaking legs with both hands in the air like she'd just let go of something hot. The egg sat inside her, dead, the wire still curled across the wet sheet.
Joan's hips kept going for four more strokes at nothing and then froze mid-air, and a sound came out of her that was more fury than anything else. Her heels hammered the mattress once, both at the same time.
"You fucking cunt."
"There she is."
"I was there. I was right there."
"Two seconds." Gabriela wiped her hands on the sheet and lay down on her side next to her, up on one elbow, close enough that her mouth was at Joan's ear. "That's how long I waited. Two seconds more and you would have come on my hand with my thumb in your ass."
Joan lay there with her arms up and her eyes shut and her chest going up and down.
Gabriela let her breathe for a while. From the chair by the wall, Diego watched, and neither of them had looked at him once.
Gabriela got off the bed and crossed the room with the sun on her back. She opened the black case again and stood over it, and this time her hand went to the bottom tray and came up with a small pair of clamps, black rubber jaws on a screw, joined by a short fine chain of their own.
"You know what these are."
"Clamps."
"I asked if you knew." She climbed back between Joan's legs and sat on her heels. "You just answered a different question."
Joan's arms were still up over her head, wrists in the cuffs, palms turned up and starting to pale at the fingers. She watched the clamps come closer and did not move her shoulders an inch to make it easier.
Gabriela took the nipple in her left hand and rolled it up hard between her thumb and forefinger until it stood. Then she opened the jaws and set them on it and turned the little screw.
Joan's breath went out through her teeth.
"Tight enough?"
"Yes."
"Say when." Gabriela gave the screw another half turn and Joan's whole rib cage jerked.
"When."
Gabriela stopped there and did the other one. She took her time with it, pinching the nipple up first, then the jaws, then the screw, and she stopped when Joan's heel came down on the sheet twice and stayed.
Then she sat back and looked at both of them hanging there with the little chain swooping between them. Every time Joan breathed, the chain moved.
"Look at you. Two little links and you've stopped using your lungs properly."
"I haven't."
"You have. Shallow. You're taking them from the top of your chest." Gabriela reached into the case and came up with the coiled silver chain, the one Joan had been wearing. She unhooked the clasp from Joan's nape and lifted it off her throat. "I'm taking this back."
"It was mine for an hour."
"It was mine the whole time." Gabriela slipped one end of the chain through the ring at the top of the left clamp and the other end through the right, and clipped them back together, so the fine silver now ran clamp to clamp in a shallow loop across Joan's sternum. Then she took the wire off the egg, the one lying wet across the sheet, and pulled a foot of it free, and knotted it twice around the middle of the silver chain.
Joan looked down her own body at it and understood what she was looking at.
"Don't."
"Don't what."
"You know what."
"I want to hear it." Gabriela took the wire in her fist and pulled it an inch. The knot slid and the silver chain came taut and both clamps tugged forward off Joan's chest. Her back came off the mattress and she made a sound with no word at the end of it. "Say it anyway."
"You wired my tits to my cunt."
"Say it properly. Which end does the pulling."
"The eggs." Joan's next breath was ragged. "Pull the eggs out and it pulls the clamps."
"There. That's the whole trick." Gabriela let the wire go slack and the clamps settled back. "Every time I move the egg, you feel it up here."
She picked up the bottle and poured more lube into her palm, and this time she poured a lot. She let it run off her fingers onto the sheet between Joan's legs, and then she got both slick hands under Joan's thighs and pushed her knees up until the straps at her ankles held and the whole seam of her ass was tilted into the sun.
"Hold that."
"I told you, I can't."
"The straps are holding it. Same as before." Gabriela slid one hand under her and cupped a cheek and pulled it up and out, and the other hand brought two fingers down, flat, greasing the ring under them without pressing.
The egg was still in her. Dead, but sitting there. Every time Joan's hips rocked, the wire dragged on the chain and the clamps pulled and she had to remember not to breathe hard.
"Nobody's touched your front now. That's what you're working with."
"I noticed."
"You noticed." Gabriela pushed one finger in, to the second knuckle, slow, and Joan's ass closed around it and her thighs shook. Then the middle finger folded in beside it, and the stretch made her fist open on the cuffs above her head. "There. Two in your ass and nothing on your cunt and a wire on your tits. Count the ways you're not coming."
"Gabi."
"Count them."
"Three."
"That'll do."
Chapter excerpt truncated at the edge.