CHAPTER 14 #2
“When he’s had both of those in his mouth,” Rook said, “I’m getting on the floor and putting my mouth on you. I’ll ask you again before I do it, and you can say something different from what you’d say now.”
Alistair’s mouth closed over one nipple and stayed until my hand came up into his hair.
Then he crossed to the other nipple and took his time about the crossing, and the nipple he had left went hard in the cold air behind him.
My back gave out at the base of it. He put an arm behind me and carried the weight without one remark about carrying it.
“Your left hand is in my hair and your right hand is open on nothing,” he said. “That hand squares paper for a living. Correct me.”
“Keep going and stop reporting.”
“Those are two instructions, and I am taking the first.”
Behind the plaster the pipes knocked twice, which they do at eleven and again at four, and none of us moved for it. Rook came off the frame. He got down on the floor in front of the bed, put his hands on my knees, and waited with his face level with mine.
“I’m putting my mouth on you. If you tease me with stop, I keep going; a hard no or Bellwether ends it. Is that what you want?”
“Yes. Keep going unless I say no or Bellwether.”
He worked broad and slow across my clit, and then stopped being slow. Two fingers went into my pussy and stayed there, curled, working small while he kept the rhythm above them. Alistair’s hand came under my jaw from behind and held my head where he wanted it.
Rook stopped and looked up from between my thighs.
“You’re soaked and you haven’t said a word for a minute, so give me a clear answer—keep going or stop, good girl?”
“Yes, and you’re going to hear about it if you stop like that again.”
He laughed against me, and the laugh did more than the tongue had.
“I want to cover your mouth so the corridor gets none of it,” he said. “Do you want that?”
“No. My mouth stays free. I want to hear what I sound like in my own room.”
“Then it stays free,” he said, and his hand went back down onto my thigh in the same breath. There was nothing in his face about having been told no, and nothing there for me to have to manage.
I came with Alistair’s hand under my jaw and Rook’s fingers in my pussy, and I heard what I sound like, and it was nothing I would have guessed at.
They asked again, both of them, before anything moved.
“You have wanted to be face-down since he put his hands on your hips,” Alistair said. “Correct me.”
“You’re wrong on that one. I want to see you.”
He got his back against the headboard without one syllable of argument, and Rook came up onto the bed behind me, and the rearrangement cost nobody anything.
“Open your mouth,” Rook said behind me. “And if you want my hands anywhere else, you put them there.”
Alistair’s cock was in my mouth and my left hand was around the base of it. Above me his breathing changed in a way his face declined to.
“You’re taking him perfectly, and you knew that before I said anything,” Rook said.
Rook’s palm settled on my hip. “I want to be inside you in about a minute,” he said. “Tell me when.”
I answered around Alistair’s cock, which was the least legible yes I have ever given anybody, and Rook waited for a better one.
“Yes. Now, before you ask me a third time.”
Rook opened the foil on the nightstand and put the condom on before he came back behind me.
He came into me from behind slow, and then at a pace he set, and then at one he let me set. Alistair’s hand rested on the back of my head and did no steering with it.
“Tell me I can move you,” Rook said.
“Yes, and put your hand back where it was.”
He moved me an inch and no further than the inch. “You’re beautiful from back here, and I’d say that with every light in this building on.”
Rook’s fingers came around my jaw. “Look at me.”
I came off Alistair’s cock and turned my head, and his eyes were moss-green and close and entirely serious. He came saying my name and nothing else, and his hand went soft on my jaw before the rest of him did.
After that the two of them moved around each other with no negotiating left to do. Rook went sideways off the bed and Alistair took the space he left and lay back into it, and neither of them said a word about the trade.
Alistair used the second condom without making a ceremony of it, then lay back and let me decide the pace.
I got over him and took his cock at my own pace, which was slower than either man would have chosen, and neither of them said so.
Rook came up behind me on his knees. His left hand went down over my clit and worked without hurry, and his other arm crossed my collarbone and held me upright. “You take my whole hand and you aren’t even trying yet,” he said, into the back of my shoulder.
“You have kept the same pace since you started, and your breathing is the only clock in this room,” Alistair said. “Your hand has been on my neck a while and you have asked for nothing, which I take to mean you want me to decide.”
“Then decide, and tell me what you decided while you’re doing it.”
“Your knees came apart before he asked, and you did that with your eyes open.” His hips came up to meet me on the down stroke and stayed with it. “Correct me on any of that.”
“That one is correct, and you knew it before you said it.”
Rook’s fingers stayed on my clit, and his thumb came up and brushed my nipple on the way, and that nipple went hard before the rest of me had agreed to anything at all.
“There it goes first again — good girl.”
I came the second time with Alistair’s hand at my throat and Rook’s arm holding my weight up, and the sound I made was the same one I had made on the floor.
Alistair got up first and went around the room putting it back.
He set the water glass on a coaster he found in a drawer.
He squared the chair to the desk and settled my coat over the back of it with the pocket lying flat, the notice inside, unread by anybody but me.
He put my shoes side by side underneath.
He closed the drawer he had opened, and he did every part of it without hurrying.
Rook watched from the bed with one arm behind his head. “He does that in every room he has ever been in,” he said. “Ask him why and he’ll tell you the chair was wrong.”
“The chair was wrong,” Alistair said.
They came back on either side of me and I ended up on my side facing the door, one of them at my back and one in front.
Alistair’s eyes were ice-blue in the lamplight and half shut, and he was working something out behind them and had no plans to hand it over.
Rook’s hand lay heavy across my hip and got heavier.
Nobody had asked me to pick between them. Nobody had passed me from one to the other. Every yes in that room had come out of my own mouth, and two men had spent an evening building the room around waiting for them.
I have spent every room in this building waiting to be told what I was for. In this one I handed out an evening a piece at a time, and two men took the pieces in the order I gave them.
Alistair reached for the lamp.
Then the phone woke on the nightstand and threw a white square onto the ceiling, and into that square of light came the name WREN.