"Five," Nicole said. "At once. In the bed, all five of them, at the same time. I could."
Sunday night, the kitchen table, most of a bottle of red gone between them. Ashley had left for her sister's that morning and the apartment already had the too-quiet of a week without her in it. Jessica had papers spread at her end of the table and had mostly been letting Nicole talk, which was how Nicole liked an audience anyway.
Jessica looked up. She didn't laugh. She said, "Five straight men will not get into a bed together, and you don't know five bi ones."
That was the whole of it. She said it the way she'd say a date in history, went back to her papers for exactly as long as it took Nicole to start arguing, and then put her pen down, got up, and came back with a fresh sheet.
"Fine," Jessica said. "On paper."
She wrote the top of it herself, saying it as she went, and slid the sheet across.
- If Nicole can't get five men into a bed with her at once, all at the same time, by Sunday: she has five over the night after.
Nicole read it, laughed, and held her hand out for the pen. "Give it here. If I'm losing this, which I'm not, let's make it worth watching."
She wrote the next four lines herself, saying each one to Jessica's face as she put it down. None of it was ever going to happen, so she made it big, and Jessica's face while it got bigger was the best part of the evening.
- They can do what they like with her.
- Face to the living room wall, hands flat above her head, feet apart, bent over, eight till midnight.
- Eyes shut, and she doesn't say anything.
- Fucked three times by midnight, or the same again tomorrow with five different guys, every night till it's three.
Jessica took the sheet back and read it through, top to bottom, twice, the way she did everything. Then she added two lines of her own at the bottom, in her small even hand, and turned it around.
- Nothing that leaves a mark she'd have to explain.
- She tells them that herself before she starts, and if anyone goes past the night ends there.
One name went on it. Jessica watched her write it, said nothing at all, and went back to her papers.
The week went like this.
Tuesday she asked the first three, separately, and got three yeses, and every yes had a question folded into it, and the question was never about her. Who else is coming. She learned to hear it before they had even asked. Wednesday she asked the fourth, a man from her Thursday seminar, and he said it sounded amazing and then went quiet the moment she said the number, and stayed quiet. Thursday she asked a fifth to replace him, and he asked who else was coming before he said anything else at all, and when she listed the names he laughed and said he'd think about it, which meant no.
Friday was going to be the night. By eight she had four confirmed. By nine she had three, because one of the four had talked to another of the four. By ten she had a text that said maybe if it was just a couple of us? and she sat on the end of her bed and understood, precisely, what Jessica had understood at the kitchen table in one sentence. Not one of them had said no to her. Every single one of them had said no to the other four. The bed was the problem. Five men in a bed are doing something together, and there was no version of her good enough to make that happen. She called the rest of it off that night — two texts, no explanations. It wasn't going to happen. The ones still in would have come anyway and had her in turns, and turns weren't the bet.
Sunday night Jessica came in from the library and Nicole was at the kitchen table with the wine already open.
"It's not happening," Nicole said. "You were right. You're insufferable and you were right."
Jessica got a glass. She didn't gloat, which was worse. Nicole poured for her and was a good sport about it, all the way to the bottom of the bottle.
Monday afternoon she asked her five.
It was the same ask she'd spent a week making, minus the bed. She typed the first message out plainly, because there was no other version of it. Her place, eight till midnight. Four other men would be there, but they could take turns. She'd be facing the wall the whole time, she wouldn't speak, she wouldn't look. They could do what they liked with her, short of one limit she'd tell them at the door.
The first yes came back in four minutes.
It took the afternoon, and by the end of it the afternoon had told her something she could have gone without knowing. The man from her seminar — the one who'd gone quiet at the number and stayed quiet — said yes in under a minute. So did the one who'd asked who else was coming. The same five-ish men, the same one of her, and the difference was the geometry: a bed is something you're in together, and a queue is something you're in alone. That fixed everything. She read it three times, sat with her thumb over the screen for a moment, and sent the last message anyway.
Five for five.
At eight o'clock there were five men in her living room, holding beers nobody had opened, spaced around the furniture the way men space themselves in an elevator.
She knew every one of them. That was the thing she kept walking into, moving through her own living room in her robe: the one by the bookshelf sat two rows behind her on Thursdays. The one on the arm of the couch went to her gym. These were not five strangers across town. These were five men who could say her name in daylight, and would have every chance to. Any other option was worse.
She stood in front of the wall and said her piece. The only rule she had to give them was the one Jessica had written, and she was glad of it, and kept that to herself. "It's eight till midnight. One rule. Nothing that leaves a mark I'd have to explain. Anyone goes past that, the night ends right there and everyone goes home." She looked at each of them once. "That's everything I'm going to say."
Jessica passed behind the five of them with her coat on and let herself out.
Nicole took the robe off and put it over the chair. Then she put her hands flat on the wall above her head, walked her feet apart and back, and bent forward from the hips, the way you stand to be searched. She was naked in her own living room, open, aimed away from every person in it.
She shut her eyes.
The position found her shoulders inside the first minute. Her own weight, hanging off her hands above her head, settling into the joints like sand into the bottom of a bag. She noted it and filed it. Four hours was an abstraction. Her shoulders would turn out to be where the four hours actually lived.
For a long time, nothing.
A beer opened. A low voice, another one answering, too quiet to carry words. Someone laughed once and cut it off. The couch took someone's weight. She stood there with her eyes shut in the middle of her own home, listening to five men she knew work out how to begin. She knew this room to the inch and couldn't have said where one of them was standing.
The first touch was one hand, flat on the small of her back, resting there like a question. She breathed. The hand slid down over her ass, unhurried, and a second hand joined it, and then the hands were sure.
The evening's first hour arrived in pieces after that. Fingers rolled her nipple where she hung, and then wood closed on it, a bright clean bite, and then the other one, and she made a sound through her nose and held her hands where they were. A palm cracked across her ass and set a rhythm, one cheek and the other, warmth building under it, and she caught herself listening for the man's breathing, trying to make it be someone. It could have been any of them. Any of the five spanked her in her own living room while the others watched, or didn't watch, or weren't there — the fridge had opened and shut twice, the hallway had had feet in it — and she had no way of holding any of it straight.
Then hands took her hips, and a cock pushed into her, all the way, in one motion.
She was wet. She'd been wet since the robe came off, and she'd known she would be. He fucked her steadily, fingers printing her hips, the clothespins swinging their small weight off her tits with every stroke, and she kept her palms flat and her feet planted and her eyes shut and did the one thing left to do, which was count.
One.
The spanking came back later, a different rhythm or a different man, and it climbed. Warm went to hot, hot went to something with an edge on it, and she knew the difference in her body before she could have explained it: this was the kind that stays. The kind that gets asked about.
"Uh-uh," she said — through her teeth, into the wall — and braced for the collar.
Nothing came. Not a word, then. Just a sound a body made, with no rank and no reach, and what answered it wasn't the collar and wasn't the man.
"That's going to leave a mark." A voice off the couch, level, done with the subject before it finished. The blow never landed. Footsteps crossed the room instead, and a palm settled on her stinging ass and rubbed it, slow, taking the heat out. And she knew the voice — placed it before she could decide whether she wanted to: the one from her gym, who re-racks other people's weights without making it a conversation. She stood there with her ass stinging in the shape of the limit. The line held; she just wasn't the one holding it. He was.
The second man to fuck her put his hands on her shoulders and kept them there.
Her shoulders had been the evening's quiet cost until then. They became its loud one: her own weight and half of his driving down through the joints while he fucked her quick and hard, her palms sliding a half-inch on the paint and pressing flat again. He finished, stepped back, and the room swallowed him the way it swallowed everything. Two, she counted. One more to go.
The clothespins came off without warning, one and then the other, and coming off was worse than going on — blood roaring back into her nipples like a struck match — and the sound she made at that was loud and shapeless and completely free.
Some time after, the vibrator.
No voice came with it. Nobody said a word, that whole stretch: just a hand steadying her hip and then the buzz arriving directly against her clit, firm, aimed by somebody who knew what he was aiming at. She had no say in it and no eyes on it and nowhere to go from it. It sat there and worked.
She tried to hold still. She knew, precisely, what was coming and what the terms said about it: coming was hers, and when she came she was going to move. She held her hands flat. She pressed them into the wall like the wall could be recruited. The crest came up through her in a long pull, and she came standing up in front of five men with her eyes shut, and her knees buckled and her thighs clamped and the shock arrived right inside the orgasm, sharp and total, indistinguishable for one white second from the thing it was punishing.
She got her legs open, got her weight back onto her hands, and the shock cut off.
The vibrator stayed on her a beat longer, and lifted away. He never spoke. One finger slid into her pussy instead and played there, a stroke, another, a man idly checking his work, and then that was gone too.
The third man to fuck her took his time about it.
He was slower than the first two, or was one of them, being slow. She had tried, all evening, to keep them separate — this one's hands were higher, that one breathed through his mouth — and the evening had shredded every thread of it. Men came and went. The door had gone once, out or in. She was fucked bent over against her own wall by somebody, and she counted, because she had to have three by midnight or none of this mattered.
Three. Line met. No matter what else happened tonight, she would be done.
Then he leaned down over her back, his chest against her, his mouth at her ear, and said, quietly, just for her:
"Should've asked me for this the first time."
And the voice landed with a name on it.
The man from her seminar. The one who'd gone quiet at the number and stayed quiet all week, who sat two rows back on Thursdays — that voice, that exact voice, saying something small across a desk, and it was him, unarguably and permanently him, inside her, his weight on her back, and he had done it on purpose. He wanted her to know. And it didn't land the way she would have called it. All five of them had already seen everything there was to see; any of them could have been every cock she'd counted. Knowing this one — his name arriving at her ear while he was inside her, because he'd put it there — was the hottest single thing that had happened to her all night, and her body said so where the room could hear it. On Thursday he would be two rows back, knowing she knew. Behind her shut eyes the evening settled into what it would stay: a list of five names, a list of everything done to her, and exactly two threads between them.
He finished, unhurried, and kissed the back of her neck like a full stop, and was gone from her skin.
After that there was nothing left to count. There was the position, and however much night was left in it.
Her shoulders had stopped being a location and become the medium the evening happened in. The burn ran from her wrists down through the joints and pooled between her shoulder blades, and she leaned into the wall as much as the position let her, and it let her almost nothing. She caught herself doing arithmetic with no numbers in it. The sounds behind her were men deciding: the low trade of voices, a bottle set down, the specific silence of somebody nodding at somebody.
Somewhere in there a man got down under her. A shoulder brushed the inside of her knee, and then a mouth was on her pussy from below, tongue flat, taking its time. He wasn't trying to make her come; she worked that out inside a minute. He licked her to the edge of meaning it and wandered off to her thighs, came back, settled, drifted, and the little noises she made were free, all of them, high and small into the wall — as much asking as she was allowed — and he didn't answer, and then he was gone the same way everything else that night was.
Late on, there were hands all over her at once — her tits, her hair, a thumb dragging down her spine — too many hands for one man, while a fourth cock fucked her, or the third again, or the first one back for more. Four, she counted, to nobody, for nothing. Four fucks, five names, and nothing to join them with.
Then, for a long while, less. The door, once, twice. Quiet that might have held four men or one.
The collar went off in her ear for the first time all night: "Midnight."
Her hands came off the wall and her arms did not so much lower as fall, and the pain of straightening up was its own event, worth a sound, and she made it to an empty room. Lamps on. Cushions wrong. Seven bottles on the coffee table, and seven told her nothing.
The lock turned. Jessica, coat still on, took one long look at her from the doorway: naked, wall-printed, upright at last, rolling one shoulder like something un-set.
"You're standing," Jessica said. "That's more than I'd put money on."
She got a shower first, hot as it would go, and came out in the old robe with her hair wet, and Jessica had made tea, which she did about four nights a year.
The marks were going already. She checked in the bathroom mirror: the pink lines the clothespins had left were fading to nothing, the handprints on her ass were losing their edges. By her Thursday seminar there would not be one thing on her body anybody would have to explain. The note had held all the way down.
She told it in pieces, out of order. The clothespins. The noise that turned out to be free and worthless in the same second, and the one from her gym stopping the spanking with one flat sentence she'd have known anywhere. Coming standing up with the shock inside it. Her voice was strange to her, four hours unused, coming out at the wrong sizes.
"Four," she said. "I got fucked four times, and I can put a name to one of them. One." She turned the mug around on the table without drinking from it. "The other three could be three different guys. It could be two. It could be him again. It could be one guy going all night while the rest of them just — watched, and drank my beer. I know their names, Jess. I know everything that happened to me. I can't make them touch."
"Tell me you watched," Nicole said. "Through the window. A camera. Anything."
"I wasn't in the room," Jessica said.
"One of them talked." Nicole looked up. "While he was fucking me. On purpose, so I'd know him." She laughed, short, at the ceiling. "The one who wouldn't even answer me last week. He's in my Thursday seminar. He sits behind me."
"It was mostly your idea," Jessica said.
"I wrote that laughing," Nicole said, flatly, and there was no sorry anywhere in it.
She looked at Jessica over the mug. "The marks line. That was you looking after me on a bet you'd already won. Thank you."
"Somebody had to," Jessica said. "You were too busy making it bigger."
Her shoulders had set up like poured concrete. She reached for the blanket on the back of the couch and her arm made it most of the way and stopped, and Jessica got up without being asked and put it over her.
"Five of them," Nicole said, into the tea. "One of me. Four hours where I was the only thing happening in that room." The five names were still going around behind her eyes like laundry, and they could keep going. "I lost the bet, I can't lift my arms, and I don't know who fucked me. And I have never once in my life felt that hot."
Jessica looked at her over the tea — the blanket, the wet hair, and the face above them, which had finally decided, and was not sorry at all.