Chapter 4: The Door’s Second Opening
The door opened at a little past two in the morning.
Diego stepped in and shut it behind him without turning on a light. The kitchen glow fell across the living room in a long dim wedge and showed him the shape of her against the chair, black lace gone dark with sweat, the split front hanging open down her middle. The red ball lay in her lap where she'd gotten a hand free enough to pull the strap over her head.
She looked up at him. Her wrists were still behind the chair leg, cuffs on, chain slack. The little blue light on the toy's wire had gone out.
He stood in the doorway a second. His face gave nothing. He'd walked four hours through the city in the same clothes and his shirt had come untucked somewhere and his hair had dried funny on one side.
"Did you come back alone?" she said.
"Yeah."
"Where's Gabriela?"
"Home. She dropped me off at the corner." He crossed the room slow and stopped in front of the chair. "You're still cuffed."
"They took the key off the table. I couldn't reach it."
He dropped to one knee and looked under the chair. The key sat on the skirting board against the wall where it must have rolled. He reached past her hip and got it, and his shoulder brushed her knee and she flinched before she caught it.
He worked the cuffs off one at a time, silent, settled them on the floor. She brought her arms around in front of her and rubbed her wrists and winced at the new blood coming back into them.
"Did you check your phone?" she said.
"I saw your missed calls."
"There are seven."
"I know."
She pulled the lace down off her shoulders and let it fall into her lap, and she sat there naked from the waist up with red marks on her collarbone and the clamps' pinch still showing on her nipples. The chair had left a pattern across her back in sweat and dust.
"The bride came," she said. "She brought two of the girls from the party. The one with the short hair and the one who kept asking about the harness."
He looked at her without moving.
"They took turns. Forty minutes each. The short one used the paddle until I couldn't sit on it. The one who liked the harness put the black dildo in me and rode the chair like it was hers." She said it flat, fast, as if she had to get it out before it got stuck. "The bride saved the wand for last and made me come four times. By the end I was begging her to stop and she just kept going until the gag was too wet to keep the strap on."
"Then they left?"
"Then they left." She looked down at the red ball sitting in the black lace in her lap. "I sat here for an hour with the phone in arm's reach and it never buzzed. Zero missed calls from you."
He didn't say anything. He stood up and took her by the wrist and pulled her off the chair. Her legs gave out on the first step and he caught her under the arm before she hit the boards, held her up while she found her feet.
"Where are we going?" she said.
He walked her the three steps to the low table.
"Put your hands on it."
She looked at him a second. Then she planted both palms flat on the wood and the paddles and clamps still lined up at the edge of her hands, and she leaned forward and the sweat on her stomach made a wet sound against the table's edge.
He unbuckled his belt. The jangle of it was loud in the quiet room. He stepped out of his jeans and dropped them on the floor, and his cock came up already hard, flushed dark from a night of knowing exactly what he'd find when he got here.
"Did they fuck you?" he said.
"No. They didn't."
"Did they make you come?"
"Yes. Four times."
He stepped in behind her and put one hand flat on her lower back, pressing until her spine curved and her chest lay against the wood. The table was cool on her ribs. She had started to shake somewhere between the chair and here and hadn't stopped.
He pulled her hips back and slid the head of his cock against her cunt, wet and open from hours of it, and she made a low sound and pushed back an inch.
"No," he said.
She stopped.
He moved the head lower, against her ass, and she twisted her head to look back at him.
"Where are you going?"
"You had them all in your cunt tonight." He ran the head of it up and down the crack once, slicking it with everything that was already on him. "That's theirs. I'm taking the other one and you're going to take it and you're going to come on it like you came on every toy they gave you."
He kept his hand flat on her lower back and pushed. The head pressed against her, resisted, pressed again, and the ring of muscle gave and opened and he slid into her ass an inch at a time, tight and burning for the first few seconds before she breathed out and it gave way.
Joan's whole body locked. Her fingers clawed the table's edge and the wood creaked under her palms, and when he was halfway in she made a noise that came out as a sob and a word mixed together.
"Keep going," he said. "Take it all."
He pushed until his hips were against her and the full length of him sat inside her, and he held still there with both hands on her hips and let her breathe around it. Her back was a long curve of sweat in the kitchen light and her hands shook against the wood.
He pulled out slow, almost to the head, and pushed back in.
Her voice came up out of her throat, cracked and thin. "Diego."
He fucked her like that, slow and deep, pulling almost all the way out before he pushed back in, each stroke measured, watching the place where they joined, watching his own cock slide into her until his balls pressed her clit. Her hands clawed the wood and her legs spread on the floor and soon she was meeting his strokes with a rhythm of her own, jerking back against him so hard that the table jumped.
"You were thinking about this when they had you, weren't you."
"Yes. Yes."
"Who were you thinking about?"
"You. Diego. You."
The table scraped across the boards an inch at a time as he drove her into it. She'd gone up onto her toes and back down, and the wet sound of him moving inside her filled the room. He grabbed her hair and pulled her head up off the wood and she arched her back and took him deeper.
"I'm going to come," she said.
"Not yet."
"I can't."
He wrapped an arm round her waist and pulled her up off the table by the stomach, her back against his chest, still speared on him, and he hooked his hand down between her legs and pressed two fingers flat against her clit. She bucked in his arm.
"Now," he said. "Come on me. Come on my cock."
She came with her back arched and her head thrown back against his shoulder and her whole body locked around him, and the sound she made wasn't a sob and wasn't a word, it was a scream that rattled the windows in their frames. He held her up through it and kept fucking her through it, slow, and she shook around him and kept shaking until the last wave passed.
He came inside her two strokes later. She felt it, the hot spill of it deep in her ass, and she made a sound like she was being torn open and went limp in his arms.
He pulled out gently and lowered her to the floor. She sat with her back against the table leg, knees drawn up, breathing like she'd run a marathon. The come ran out of her and down the inside of her thigh and she didn't bother to wipe it.
He sat down on the boards across from her, naked, spent, chest heaving. The kitchen light fell across his face and the side of his mouth lifted almost imperceptibly.
"I wasn't here," he said.
"I know."
The toy's wire lay on the floor between them, dead and dark. She looked at it, then at him, and reached out and closed her hand over his wrist.
She held his wrist a long moment, thumb against the pulse, and neither of them said anything. The kitchen light had gone the color of old honey, low and grainy, and the city outside had gone to that dead hour where even the traffic stops.
He turned his hand over and closed his fingers around hers, and they sat like that on the boards with the dead toy wire between them.
"I need a shower," she said finally.
"Go."
She got up slow, wincing when she straightened, and limped to the bathroom with the come still drying on her thigh. He heard the water go on and stood, gathered his jeans off the floor, and followed her in without asking.
She stood under the spray with her forehead against the tile and let him wash her. His hands went over her shoulders, down her back, careful over the rising marks, and she made a sound that wasn't quite a word and leaned back into him.
"What do you want to eat?" he said.
"Nothing. I want to sleep for a day."
"Then sleep."
They dried off and he found her an old t-shirt in the drawer that still smelled like her, and she pulled it over her head and sat on the edge of the bed with her knees drawn up. He sat beside her. The sheet was still tangled from the morning, the cage gone, the cuffs on the floor by the chair.
"We have to pick the game," she said.
"I know."
"Next weekend. Saturday. Same rules."
"You don't want to skip one?"
She looked at him. "Do you?"
"No."
"Then we pick."
He thought about it with his hands on his knees. The city had gone quiet outside and the light through the curtain was the gray of before dawn.
"Chess again," he said.
"Same game? That's boring."
"Not the same. We play one game, best of three. Winner takes the weekend. Loser doesn't get to argue the scenario."
She turned that over in her head. "And the third game if we split?"
"Sudden death. Four minutes on the clock. You blunder, you serve."
She was quiet a second. Her toes curled against the sheet.
"I like it," she said. "But I'm not losing to you twice in a row."
"That's what you said last time."
She laughed, short and tired, and it turned into a yawn she couldn't stop. She lay back on the pillow and he stretched out beside her, and the mattress sighed under them both.
"Saturday," she said.
"Saturday."
"Ten in the morning. Kitchen table. Bring your A game."
He pulled the sheet up over her shoulder and she rolled into him, forehead against his chest, and her hand found his under the sheet and held it.
The last thing he heard before she went under was her breathing level out, slow and easy, like the whole day had never been. He stayed awake a little longer with his arm round her and the gray light growing at the window, and by the time it went pink he was gone too, with Saturday already sitting warm in his gut like a second heartbeat.