CHAPTER 25 #2
They came up after dark, all three of them. They stood at the corridor head and waited to be asked in. That would have made me laugh in September and it did something else to me now.
I let them in. Then I put my hand on the door with all three of them watching me do it.
“I am not staying because the door is locked. I am staying because it isn’t.”
The bolt went over under my thumb with a short scrape and then a knock of metal seating in the plate. My key. My side of it.
“Julian first,” Rook said. “He has had his hands behind his back since the hall, and I want my mouth on your clit before anybody else gets anything, and I will wait until last for the rest of it.”
“I will take the chair by the window and be no use at all standing,” Alistair said. “The two of you may enjoy that as much as you like.”
“Julian first, standing, here,” I said. “Alistair in the chair after him. Rook last, in the bed, and I will say so out loud if any of that changes. Bellwether has not moved and I do not want it tonight.”
“That is the most organized thing anybody has ever said to me with her coat still on,” Rook said, and he was laughing before he finished it, and my face went hot and I laughed too.
Julian took the coat off me and put it over the chair arm. “The sweater, and then everything under it. You want me to ask before every piece, and I am going to ask before every piece.”
“Ask, then.”
He asked for the sweater and I put my arms up. He asked for the shirt under it, and then for the clasp behind my back, and the clasp took him two tries because that hand is slow now. My nipples were tight in the cold of the room before he ever put a finger near them.
“You want my mouth first. Do you not?”
“You know the answer and you asked anyway,” I said, “and I want it on the record that you asked.”
“May I?”
“Yes, and you can stop using that voice, because it is working on me and you know that too.”
He put his mouth on one nipple and took his time about it. Then he moved and took longer over the other nipple, and my knees stopped being anything I could rely on. His right hand stayed open against my back. That hand will not make a fist any more, and he did not pretend otherwise.
“Look at me,” he said, and I did, and slate came up at me with nothing at all put away behind it. He set his thumb along the closed split on my cheekbone and did not put any weight on it.
Alistair had the chair by then. I went to him and stood in between his knees, and the bandaged hand went up on the chair back and stayed out of everything that came after.
“Correct me where I have it wrong,” he said. “Your thighs shut on my hand when he said your name. Tell me no and this hand goes back on the arm of the chair.”
“You have it right.”
Two fingers, and he watched my face the whole time he was putting them in my pussy, and he was in no hurry about either thing. “Look at you,” he said. “You are so wet I can hear it, and some part of you would like the room to know I noticed.”
I laughed at him, and then his thumb found my clit and the laugh came apart into something with no shape to it at all.
Rook was on the bed by then, lying down, because his shoulder will not hold him up on that side any more.
“Come here and put your knee over me. I am going to put my tongue on your clit, and I am going to keep it there until you tell me to stop. Say it.”
“Do it, and keep the good hand where I can reach it,” I said, and I got my knee across him, and he took hold of my hip.
“Good girl.”
His tongue found my clit and did not leave it. He worked slow and then he stopped working slow. I had a handful of his hair and my other hand hard on the headboard. I came with his mouth on my clit and my thighs shaking around his ears.
Somebody’s knee took the water glass off the nightstand and it went over on the rug. Alistair said the housekeeping in this building had survived worse. For a moment all four of us were laughing at nothing, and I was trying to remember where I had left my own hands.
“I want your cock in my mouth,” I said to Julian, “and I want the hand that closes in my hair while I do it.”
“Open your mouth,” he said. “That’s it, Avery.”
He held my hair in the good hand and let the ruined one rest open along my jaw. The sound he made when I took his cock all the way was nothing like his talking voice. I did it again to hear it again.
Then I wanted Alistair, and I said so in a sentence with no manners left in it. He came to the bed and lay back. The bandaged hand went up over his head and out of the argument entirely.
“You will have to do the work,” he said. “I cannot brace on this hand, and I refuse to be watched trying.”
I put him in me and rode him. Rook got in behind me and held my weight up with his good arm across my ribs.
His mouth was on my neck and his hand came around to my nipple and then down.
Alistair’s cock was deep and he kept his eyes open the whole time.
They were ice-blue and unblinking, and he said my name in a register he has never used in a corridor.
“His hand is on your clit,” Alistair said. “Tell me what you want moved.”
“Nothing gets moved,” I said. “Everybody in this room stays exactly where he is.”
I came like that, with one man’s cock in my pussy and another one carrying my whole weight on an arm that should have been in a sling.
Rook was last, and he put me on my back and named each thing before he did it. He has been naming things out loud since the first night, and he has yet to miss one.
“I am going to put this knee up here. I am going to put my cock in you now, and if you want me out of you, say so and I am out inside the sentence.”
“Talk the whole time,” I said, and he laughed with his forehead against mine.
He talked the whole time. He told me where his hand was going before it went. He told me what my pussy was doing around his cock. He told me his knuckles were on my clit. He asked whether I wanted them lower down. When he was close he stopped and put his head down beside mine.
“Do you want me to come in you?”
“Yes. Ask me again tomorrow and you will get the same answer twice.”
Afterward the bed was too small for four grown people and nobody moved to do anything about it.
Julian had my ankle in the hand that will not close.
Alistair had the gauze up on the pillow above my head.
Rook was asleep on his right side inside a minute, and he slept the way a man sleeps who has not been sleeping.
“In the morning I am taking the method apart,” I said into the dark, to all three of them. “Every stage, with its name and its date and the man who signed for it, in plain language, and then I am giving it to the people it was done to.”
“You will want the second floor for that,” Julian said. “Take the whole floor. Take the drawers too.”
The brass key was on the nightstand where I had dropped it.
The corridor door was locked from my side of it.
The road at the end of that scraped path had been open all day, and it would be open again at seven.
In the morning I would start reading this building back to itself, one file at a time, out of a room with a lock on my side of the door.