"That's it," I crooned, letting a sliver of praise slip into the command structure. It was a calculated risk. I wasn't just giving orders anymore; I was a producer at a mixing desk, turning up the gain, tuning the drum of her pulse. "Keep that rhythm. One, two. One, two. A heavy hand is a good hand."
"Kit," she choked out, my name a ragged thing.
"I'm here. I'm the wall. I'm the structure," I promised. "You're the motion. You just follow the beat." I took a single, deliberate step closer, invading her visual field but keeping my hands locked behind my back until my shoulders screamed in protest. "Find the slick with your index finger. Focus there. Bring it up and circle the nerve cluster. A small, circular motion right on the nub. Gentle at first. Just wake it up."
She shuddered violently, a full-body tremor. Her hips bucked up off the mattress. The scent in the room spiked, a violent,almost painful surge of frosted grapefruit zest peeling under high voltage, sharp and clean and achingly electric.
"Harder," she begged, the word a raw command of her own.
"Permission to modulate?" I asked, forcing the clinical term out.
"Yes. Fucking…Yes."
"Good girl," I growled.
The effect was instantaneous. It was like I’d reached out and severed the strings on a marionette. Her eyes, which had been locked on mine, rolled back into her head. Her spine arched so sharply it looked like it might snap.
"That's it," I urged, leaning into the space between us, pouring my voice over her like wet concrete. "Harder now. Thumb only. Wreck it for me. You take that friction. You earn it. You take exactly what I'm telling you to take."
"Kit,Kit," she sobbed, a mantra of my name breaking apart on her lips.
"You ride it," I commanded, my voice the only anchor in the storm. "Don't you dare stop. I’ve got you. I’m holding the structure. You just fall."
And she fell.
She came apart completely, a shattered cry ripping from her throat as her hand worked frantically against her own body, driven by my words. She curled in on herself, wrist bent, body shaking with frantic, sobbing breaths, drowning in the sound of my voice while I stood there, a whisper away, motionless as a statue carved from granite.
I watched her climax. I never broke eye contact with her body. I watched the flush climb her chest, a dark stain in the low light. I watched the way her toes curled inside her beat-up socks.
And I didn't touch her. I didn't move a single fucking muscle.
I held the line.
When the last of the tremors finally stilled, she slumped back against the bunk pillows, chest heaving, a fine sheen of sweat beading on her temples and upper lip.
The silence that fell in the bus was deafening, heavier and more absolute than any sound.
Then, from the corner, a heavy, muffledthud.
I risked a glance over my shoulder. Alfie had slid all the way down the wall and was now biting hard into the sleeve of his ridiculous pink faux-fur coat, his knuckles white where he gripped the fabric, clearly trying to keep from screaming. Euan had his head tipped back, staring at the ceiling as if the wiring diagrams were visible there, his hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. He looked like he was doing complex quantum calculus in his head to keep his heart from exploding out of his chest.
With her free, trembling hand, Zia reached out and tapped the screen of her phone.
Recording Stopped.
She looked up at me, through me. Her eyes were glassy, pupils blown so wide they’d all but consumed the irises.
"Good girl," she whispered, her voice rough, testing the shape of the words.
My knees nearly buckled. It was all I could do to keep from folding in on myself.
"Variable isolated," I managed to rasp, my own voice completely shot, scraped raw. "Trigger identified."
"Yeah," she breathed, a shaky, exhausted exhale. "Trigger… identified."
She reached for the marker pen on the bunk’s edge. Turning to the whiteboard mounted on the wall, her hand shook so badly the letters she wrote were jagged, fractured things.
Under the headingVOICE PROTOCOL, she scrawled:
