Page 81 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

Janice settled against the headboard and opened her knees, and there she was, closer than I'd ever been to her, bare and smooth, the light catching the wet flushed dark of her against the brown of her thighs. The scent of her came up, a thing I'll know in a dark room for the rest of my life now. My mouth was already going to her. Her hand came into my hair, not pulling, only resting, a weight that meant good.

I put my mouth on her.

Soft, as nothing else is soft, warm and slick, and the taste of her broke open across my tongue: faint salt and under it sweetness, the most intimate thing I'd ever tasted. A sound left me into her.

Her hips came up to meet my mouth, and her breath tore once above me. The praise started then. "That's my girl, right where you belong." I chased this, reading her off the sounds and the lift and the press of her hand: slow when she wanted slow and quicker when her fingers tightened.

The room started going. The lights first, then the close walls, then the awareness of being watched, all of it thinning at the edges the way the far end of a hallway thins when you've had too much to drink. All that was left was the taste of her, the heat of her against my mouth and chin, and her voice telling me what I was: good, perfect, hers.

A hand came onto me from behind, settling over the rise of my ass where it lifted bare to the room. Not Janice's. Janice's hand was in my hair. This one moved over me slowly, learning the shape of me with no question in it at all, and above me Renée's voice came pleased, half to herself. "Look at her go." The hand traveled the back of my thigh and rose again, and I didn't stop, I pushed back into it.

That cold feeling came back, mixing with the heat, the warmth, there and gone before I could fully understand it.

The hand found the wet that had been running down the inside of my thighs all this time, and two fingers went into me from behind while my mouth was still on Janice, and the two pressures arrived at once, front and back, my own body opened both ways with nothing left over to object to either. My mouth servicing Janice, near-strangers probing my most private needs. I was only here for anyone's pleasure. It was so right it scared me. I made a long sound into Janice, moving into one sensation and back onto the other, losing track of which one I was chasing.

Janice's hand closed in my hair and her hips came off the bed and the sounds above me stopped being words and became the broken one I'd heard from her at the club, and she came against my mouth, in my mouth, moaning my name split in two. I swallowed her, twice. Her thighs shut against the sides of my head, surrounding me with a darkness nothing could penetrate, and I stayed inside it, the fingers still working me, and for one long count I was nothing but the thing giving her this, and there was no quieter or safer place I had ever been in my life.

She came down slow. Her thighs loosened. Her hand went from holding to stroking. The fingers behind me drew out and the hand lifted away, and the dark around my head opened back into the lit cabin, and I knelt there surfacing by inches, my mouth wet, my own need hanging unfinished, my heart going like I'd been running.

Renée sighed behind me. "Okay," she said. "Yeah. I want her next."

Janice drew my head up out of her lap by the hair, turning my face so the others could see what I looked like, and her own face above me was full of a pride that was indistinguishable from love.

"I think she's about down for anything at this point," she said. "Aren't you, baby?"

And whatever was in me that had been answering yes all night stopped.

It stopped because she'd just said it out loud. Down for anything. There it was. She had known this for longer than anyone, knew how it worked. She had been using it for days and calling it loving me. Her love was real, which was the worst part, because to her the loving and the using were not even two different things.

"No."

It came up out of me from the same urgent wet place every yes had come from, before my head had any part in it, and I knew it was true. I didn't want this.

For a moment nothing changed in her. Her hand came back into my hair, stroking, soothing. "Okay," she murmured. "Okay, baby. I've got you. Shh."

Across the room Sloane stood up. She reached for her wrap and began to leave.

Janice felt the change in the room before she understood it. Her hand stopped in my hair. "Lacey?"

I sat back off her, onto my heels, and got a breath down into me. "No," I said again. It came out flat and cold, and it seemed to surprise me as much as her.

Renée looked from me to Janice and pulled the towel up over herself. "Okay," she said, slow. "This isn't, um—" A glance at Janice. "Jan. This isn't what you said it'd be."

I got up off the floor. I found my bikini bra where Janice had laid it aside like a thing she'd bought, and I put it on.

"Yeah," I said to the two of them. "You should go."

Janice was up off the bed. The ease went out of her all at once. She had always known what to do next, but now she suddenly seemed clueless. "Lacey, wait. I'm sorry. I read it wrong, I thought you— I'm sorry, I'd never make you do anything, you know I'd never—" She'd have said it on the floor. It was the truest thing about her and it didn't move the cold thing in me a single inch.

"No," I said. Empty. "Later. We'll talk later."

She closed her mouth.

Renée gathered her things, whispered something to Janice on her way past. Sloane was already at the door. She stopped with her hand on it and looked back at me, and she didn't say good night. She gave me one small nod instead. Then they both left and it was just the two of us in the bright cabin with the smell of sex and the unmade bed.

Janice stood in the middle of the floor with her hands a little away from her sides, a woman who'd set a precious thing down and lost the place she'd put it.

"Are you angry?" she asked.