“Baby, please,” she sobbed. “I just don’t know…” she looked off toward the window, her profile twisted in anguish, “…how it all gets ahold of me.”

Kane regarded her in silence over the rim of his whiskey. She looked deflated but tense. A few hours ago she would’ve stopped traffic. Now she looked ready to lie down in it.

The only windows faced the alley, and a random spiral of smoke drifted through pale shafts of streetlight from the ash tray where her latest cigarette lay forgotten and smoldering. Her face was streaked with tears and mascara, and her crossed leg was doing a nervous shake as she gripped each arm of the chair.

“You’re gonna hate me, aren’t you?”

Kane wondered what her skin would taste like now. Her neck looked so pale it seemed to be glowing. She wore a blousy, cowl neck sweater that plunged to her navel, exposing more than it covered. It was as black as her miniskirt and torn up pantyhose, and the way it hung off her shoulders made it appear in constant danger of falling off. Her breasts were eminently noticeable, but she seemed unaware of them as they swayed to her nervous gestures.

“You’re not going to talk to me? Is this your way of writing me off?”

Kane sighed and took a pull off his drink. His eyes kept moving back and forth between the careless wobble of her weighty breasts, her white knuckled fingers and her darting eyes. Half in shadow, he knew she couldn’t follow his gaze. He looked at the shadow in the valley between her breasts and felt a sudden urge to fast-pitch his bourbon at the window. It would make more noise and shards that way.

But he sat still. Took another hit. Said nothing again.

She took a deep breath and rang the buzzer. Then she stood through those awkward seconds, being expected yet suffering the small indignity of waiting to be let in. The height of her pumps made her legs feel strong – supple and lithe as saplings. In those moments, she could feel the heat of her pulse in the surface of her skin – cells pumping with excitement and a strain of fear.

It was always like this waiting to enter another strange room and stand at the center of a circle tinged with the faint stink of adrenalin and lust.

Tino looked high when he finally opened the door. She could smell the lingering vapors inside: herb laced with something pharmaceutical. He grinned, looking down at her from his imposing height, eyes quickly moving from her face to the conspicuous display of her breasts spilling from the deep plunge of her sweater.

She walked in, breezing past any chance of a hug or kiss. She’d never kissed Tino once. At least never on the mouth.

The mouth was personal.

“Okay, I fucked up. Is that what you want to hear?” she meandered on. “I keep fucking up. It’s what I do. Maybe you never should’ve told me you love me, ‘cuz obviously I’m just fucking that up, too.”

The still calm of his position in the worn chair didn’t begin to convey the flash in his mind of bolting to his feet and whipping his drink, seeing her jump in fear as a glittering shower of broken glass shattered whatever thread remained between them. The stronger part of him wanted to touch her, hold her like the pieces of something rare and priceless and broken and whisper his love would be strong enough to put it all back together. But he didn’t do that, either.

“Maybe I just deserve what I get,” she told herself as much as him in a tone of defeat. “All I’m ever left with in the end is me.”

He set his glass on the table by the chair. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to read his face in the shadows. Her hands slowly moved off the chair arms to the low slung edges of the cowl, pulling them together to cover herself, as if she were suddenly aware of turning into something indecent. It came off as a gesture of sadness and shame. Her sadness, but his shame. The way she pulled the fabric around her body reminded Kane of the way she was wrapping herself around a bad time. Something vital within her began to recede, and he knew he could never live with himself if he sat quietly by and watched it go.

But he sat quietly by, watching.

Two more were waiting inside on the couch. They didn’t say their names. She’d told Tino on the phone that afternoon she didn’t want to know them. Names were personal, too, and she wasn’t there to make friends. It was all about skin.

The shorter one had dark, curly hair and a bewildered expression that looked permanent. He had a slight paunch, and actually stood up to extend his hand.

Taye smiled sweetly and took his hand without shaking it. One look and she knew he’d spent his life following men like Tino who surrounded themselves with weaklings in order to look strong. Tino was alpha mongrel all the way.

The other one was taller and younger. He had long, powerful looking legs. Taye barely looked at his face. It was handsome enough, but not especially memorable. She studied his hips and thighs and immediately found herself wondering if they’d live up to their implicit promise.

Taye smiled at everyone. She felt like a flight attendant just before take-off to Babylon.

No bitch, no honey, no baby, no cunt.

Those were the rules. Denigrating language was off limits, but Taye’s nipples were already tingling with heat over the notion they were already thinking it.

He was suddenly desperate to see that force of selfless nastiness in her come back, the feral libertine residing inside a tortured angel. It was the part of her that filled him with anger and plunged him into a pit of hopeless anguish. The part of her he disdained for her narcissistic arrogance. The part the tortured angel could never accept being connected to. The part he ached for with a hardness that would never leave him in peace.

Her hair was a mess, like she’d been dancing or someone had been pulling it. It was dirty blonde and fine, falling just shy of her shoulders.

Kane knew it would only be a matter of time before Taye would see the unstoppable signs of his arousal lifting against the fabric of his trousers. It wouldn’t have been the first time to happen this way, even though earlier, before it had begun to rain, she had scorched new boundaries to the ever expanding region of her own obsessions. Pure contradiction flowed through his veins as he watched her clutch her sweater around her body. She lowered her head and gave herself over to dry-eyed sobbing.

“Taye,” he said, firm but soft. She went silent and looked back up. “We’re all only left with ourselves in the end. It’s not the worst person to end up with.”

She fumbled for a new cigarette, lighting it while the other was still burning down. The sweater fell apart as she moved. Kane watched the inner curve of her breast playing against the edge.

“Easy for you to say.”

She was right about that much. It had been easy to say. It was one of those platitudes he half believed that didn’t feel like the natural truth when he turned it back on himself. The natural truth was he envied her. She was the pure incarnation of herself, an animal of voracious hungers and fragile delicacies. She fit down inside her own spirit and appetites in a way Kane would never survive.

She took the wine Tino poured her from a bottle of cheap white sitting on a coffee table pocked with scuffs and char marks. It tasted like it might have been chilled an hour ago. Tino dragged in a chair from the kitchen and set it on the other side of the table, facing the sofa. Taye sat on his right thigh, her short skirt bunching around her hips.

The small talk shrank down to nothing when Tino put his hand on her thigh, running it up her hose encased flesh and under her skirt. He cupped her pussy through the fabric, the pleated fringe of her skirt barely covering the motion of his hand. The boys on the couch smiled and pulled at their beer cans.

The taller, muscular one let his empty hand drift over the crotch of his tightly packed jeans.

Good, Taye thought. Good boy.

Kane set his glass aside and rubbed his face with both hands. Then he leaned forward, arms folded across his knees. She was waiting, he knew, but he wasn’t able to look up at her at the moment. She was a raw thing, pure motion. He was the fading afterimage of something invented by strangers. She tripped in and out of the gutter as a tourist. His gutter was deep inside where she would never see.

Long, slow breath going in. Longer and slower going back out in a thin stream.

“They always put exotic birds in cages,” he told the floor. “But the only bird worth having in a cage is one who knows the door’s open, but she stays because it’s her choice.”

He looked up and found her still holding her sweater closed. Her grip had relaxed slightly. She was looking into the alley through the window, as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Stand up,” he said, leaning back in the chair again.

She turned her head but still didn’t look at his face. She made standing look painful; not in her body but her face.

“Please don’t look at me like that now…not now,” she said, looking as if she wanted to disappear behind the wide flaps of her sweater.

“Let go of the sweater,” he said. “Why cover yourself now?”

Taye finally looked at his face, pleading with her eyes.

“You showed them, didn’t you? You put it all to work like a machine on fire, but here, with someone you mean to love you’re suddenly full of shame? Just take it off. It makes you look like a cartoon.”

She pulled the sweater over her head and half threw it onto the chair behind her. She crossed her arms under her moonish breasts as if she were cold. She looked back at the windows again while Kane quietly studied her. Her spikes were lying on the floor by the chair. They looked sturdier than she did. Her areolas goose pimpled despite the close heat of the apartment.

Kane lost the urge to whip the glass at the windows. His last comment deflated his anger. He started to feel as broken as she looked, and the simple gesture of pulling off her sweater brought home how magnificent she was at full stride. He knew wherever she’d been that night she’d been shining like a gutter sapphire.

Tino’s fingers dug through her pantyhose into her mound. He didn’t know how to touch her very well, but he liked touching her in front of other people, and it made her feel like her heartbeat was coming straight from the core of her pussy. She ground against his thigh while his hand cupped and pressed. The heat between her thighs swelled and she started to flush.

“Looks like you know Tino pretty good,” the curly one said, beginning to show the trouble he was having to breathe.

Taye sipped her wine as she pulled the side of her sweater away from her breast, rolling her finger around the nipple, teasing it to grow.

“Not really,” she said. “We just get together to fuck now and then. Tino’s a pig, but his cock makes my pussy feel good.”

She snickered out loud at the looks on their faces. The taller one laughed and squeezed his cock through his pants. Taye let him see how she was watching his hand while she ground down harder on Tino’s solid thigh. His fingers dug harder to get at her. She closed her eyes and moaned for everyone.

Pain and heat began to pour through Kane’s blood. Images of disembodied hands pawing over Taye’s naked breasts shot through his mind. Lurid curiosities challenged the remnants of civility in his soul to a duel. He was overwhelmed by the irrational urge to lay her naked body on the floor and lick her skin as he lashed her ass with his thick leather belt.

The way she took delirious flight in being bent over and spanked or whipped with a belt was beyond his understanding. But whenever it happened, that sapphire glow wrapped itself around her like a rarified aura he could never step out of. What they both turned into in those moments scared him more than he could tell her. She had assured him many times it was not an act of violence but the only way he could touch certain places within her.

Sometimes he wondered if she did what she did just to move him to lay into her that much harder. But for Kane, there was only one real rule, and to strike the creature she was in anger would be to cease being a man. There were no exceptions. He closed his eyes and thought of the last time he’d been to the sea alone.

“Now the rest,” he said calmly, opening his eyes again after the moment passed. When it came down to the marrow, she was a far better thing to envision than the cold, unforgiving sea.

Something in her face started to look too tired to be ashamed anymore. She pulled down the short zipper on her skirt and pushed it over her hips. She wasn’t wearing panties under her hose, and there was another large rip in the nylon just where it should have been clothing her pussy.

Kane wondered if she’d been wearing panties when she first pulled on the hose. The image of her carefully stretching the flexible material up her thighs made his blood simmer. Now Taye nervously peeled the ruined pantyhose down her legs. They rolled along her skin into a frayed bunch, torn apart by strange hands that would not be denied the intoxicating feel of her ripe body. Leaning down, it looked as if she were dipping the tips of her breasts into something pale crimson.

She rolled the hose off her feet and left them in a ball on the floor. Then she came back upright and faced him one more time.

“That’s gonna make me wet if you don’t stop, T,” she smiled, looking at the others on the couch as they watched Tino’s fingers play.

“You don’t want me to stop,” he said. “Not now when everyone’s just about to see how pretty that pussy is.”

He reached over with his other hand, using both to pull at the seam of her pantyhose until the crotch ripped open wide. “Good girl,” he said, putting his hand back on her naked pussy. “No panties.”

Taye caught herself thinking how tedious it might get doing this for a living, not as she did now and then like a tourist visiting exotic slums where she could crawl out of her own skin and become a profane object of desire. It was a plastic exercise in Olympian depravity and she was Aphrodite for an hour or two.

“There you are,” said Kane. “Every shimmering inch of you.”

With her head cast down, her hair hung over her face. She didn’t bother pushing it away. She looked pale and bluish in the light bleeding in from the alley. Even her shape seemed different somehow. Supple, rounded and firm, as always, but as if the harder edges were gone. She was one woman with two bodies. Somehow her breasts seemed to quiver without moving. Images of strange hands cupping and squeezing them came to Kane’s mind and despite the static electrical pulse in his cock, he looked away and tried to will the intrusion from his mind.

He thought if he kissed her now her skin would only bear the traces of other men’s sweat and cum. He didn’t try imagining whatever she’d been walking through the center of. It was a cannon he’d been shot through before.

Her pussy mound was freshly shaved, and a few hours ago everything she had would have smelled of shampoo and perfume. Flashes of hard, blind cocks sluicing fast in and out of her pussy shoved through his mind. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the chair and breathed long and deep as he slowly exhaled the visions.

When he opened his eyes her arms were crossed over her breasts. Shame and protection, but protection from whom? Her thighs still had the slender look of strength she could never repress, but there was a weariness in the way one knee turned slightly toward the other. Kane looked at her thighs and felt the sense memory of their touch. Whenever she opened them for him, splaying open that tributary of soft skin with that wet, crimson slash at the apex, it was like traveling the only road there was to a better part of himself.

“Put your arms down,” he told her. “Never be ashamed in front of me.”

Her arms moved and her beasts found their natural shape again. She heaved one, quick, sudden sob with her body. Her eyes were dry except for the lacquered sparkle in them. Her nipples gradually tightened into pebbled knots and Kane couldn’t suppress the motion of his hand as it drifted over the shape of his cock in his pants.

Another image flashed through his mind of a time a couple of weeks before. She’d been bent over the formica topped table in the apartment kitchenette, naked as he drove his cock into her body from behind, barely in control as he repeatedly smacked the cheek of her ass. Own it! she’d screamed until someone started banging on the wall. Own that fucking pussy! Prove it’s all yours…prove you deserve it!

Belonging only lights on our shoulders for fleeting moments, he thought, his eyes trailing over the intricate shapes of her existence.

Tino’s fingers peeled her flushing slit apart as she lifted the hem of her skirt to give the others the wide open view. She felt like a piece of split fruit on display in a market window. Strange eyes looked on with mounting hunger. No pretense of love, affection or respect. No dinner, no movie, no sweet talk. It was a roomful of pigs slopping at a trough of ambrosia. The sinews in her body began to sing with electricity.

“That’s…fuckin’ beautiful,” the tall one said.

Tino pushed his middle finger up inside Taye’s slit. She let her thighs drift wider and sighed for them. Something about the eyes of the others seeing it all made his finger feel thicker, deeper…more…resonant.

Taye handed her glass backward to Tino. He set it on the floor, keeping the other hand on her pussy. Curly and the tall one were watching his finger sluice in and out of her. All the cells in her skin prickled with heat as she pulled open the plunging sides of her sweater, displaying her shapely breasts. She cupped them in her hands and squeezed her flesh, letting out an audible mewl.

“I guess you boys like my pussy,” she grinned, taking Tino’s wrist, pulling his hand from her pussy and lifting it to her face. She watched the men on the couch as she sucked her own froth off his finger, sucking the digit like a miniature cock, finally releasing it from her lips with an exaggerated smack.

“Mmmm, sweet and juicy, if I say so myself,” she purred. Then she rose to her feet and pulled the sweater over her head. She squeezed her naked breasts again, feeling the throb deepen in her nipples as the men on the couch watched her every move. She sashayed around the coffee table and stood hands on hips between the two men on the couch. She brought both hands up to play with her nipples as she looked at the curly one with a gaze that made him blink.

Please, sir, could you unzip my skirt? It’s beginning to feel too tight.”

The curly one grinned and shot a gleefully bewildered look at both Tino and the tall one before reaching up to lower the zipper on Taye’s skirt. As the fabric loosened around her hips, she uttered a long, exaggerated sigh of relief. Then the tall one reached over and pulled it down her legs.

“Thank you,” she chirped like a canary about to devour three stray cats.

"You’re like a bird that keeps flying in and out of that cage,” he said. “Just to see how long the door stays open. To see if you’re inside or out when it finally shuts.”

Her body heaved another disconnected sob, making her breasts quiver while more mascara blackened tears washed over the first streaks.

“Please,” she said, verging on sputtering, “don’t shut me out now. Fuck, not now. I’m gonna get better. You know there’s a good girl inside me. You said so. You’re the one who introduced me. Please…”

He finally stood up and went to her. He lifted the burning cigarette from the ash tray and dragged hard on it once before stubbing it out. The hard shank bulging the front of his pants loomed conspicuously between them, but she looked at his face as if she hadn’t noticed. He touched her cheek and smeared his thumb across the mascara trail.

“Sometimes maybe the bird wants to hear that cage door slam. Just so she knows someone needs her,” Taye said.

“Then you never really know if she’s there by choice. Life is just fucked up that way.”

“Yeah, and birds don’t fly cuz they have a choice.”

Her lips were slack and slightly parted. He wanted to kiss them with his whole body. He wanted to give her half the years he’d lived in that one, single, life-affirming kiss. But he wasn’t going to introduce her to the creature the taste of other men would turn him into. They were nothing but scars on the walls of his heart’s cathedral, and the burning rush of blood in his cock was making him dizzy. He slid his hand from her face to the back of her neck as he led her toward the cramped bathroom.

She stood in the open doorway, hugging herself around the middle while he knelt on the floor by the tub and ran water, holding his hand under the tap until the temperature felt right.

“My friend, Alicia, says if you’ve seen one cock you’ve seen ‘em all,” she said a coy smirk. “But if she ever saw yours she’d have to change her mind.”

She angled the plastic bottle above the tall one’s commanding erection firmly gripped in her left hand, letting a long strand of clear oil drip over the straining flesh. Standing stout and tall, it looked so hard it nearly pulsed visibly, with a thick ridge curling around the tapered flair of its crown.

The viscous oil cascaded over the shaft, causing the ripe flesh to glisten in the septic glare of fluorescent light.

Tino had dragged the coffee table off to the side of the room. Taye was still wearing her torn pantyhose, but all three men were naked. The tall one was lying on the floor where the coffee table had been. Tino and the curly one were both stroking their sap oozing poles as they watched Taye methodically lacquer and fondle the tall one’s cock.

She felt relieved for the huge rip in the crotch of her hose. Her pussy was broiling with heat. Her slit needed touching, even if only by air.

“Alicia would sing a whole different tune if she could get her nasty little mitts on this,” Taye said, looking up at her prone companion. His long, muscular legs were open far enough for Taye to kneel and play between them.

She let her hand glide up and down his blunt shaft just enough to spread the oil evenly, from balls to tip, rolling her thumb playfully over his richly inflated knob. The tall man uttered a muted groan. Then Taye rose up straight on her knees, bringing her hairless pussy mound level with his cock, and pressed the fertile stalk against her body.

“That’s how far up in me you’d go if you fucked me. Did you know that? Oh yeah, that’s how deep you’d go. You’d make Alicia cream like such a little whore,” she giggled. “But she’ll never know ‘cuz tonight your cock is all mine.”

Taye let go of his cock and took a few moments to drip oil over her lush, round breasts. She felt slender and sleek, with flawlessly smooth skin that was tingling with energy. She twisted her prominent nipples and cooed to her companions before settling back on her haunches. She cupped the tall one’s spunk laden balls in one hand and resumed stroking his slippery shaft with the other.

“My pussy’s so wet right now I could just fuck your brains out,” she said, almost calmly, “but today I can only make you cum with my hands and watch you squirt like a big, fat, fucking fountain. Oh yeah…I love watching you cum, knowing I made you shoot all that spunk just for me.”

Taye looked up at him with a lusty, coquettish grin that could melt a glacier. Still, there was something seriously formidable in her eyes, as if to say ‘proceed with caution’.

“Mouthwash,” Kane said, nodding at the bottle on the sink.

Her face screwed into a distortion of protest and self-reproach.

“Just fucking do it,” he said. His voice went metallic over the words.

Taye snapped up the bottle and uncapped it, pouring it into her mouth like she was taking a drink. When she spat, she spat with her whole body.

Water running, tub slowly filling, Kane stood back up and took her by the hand, leading her to the tub. He never let go while she stepped in and sank down.

“Put your head under the tap,” he told her. While she did, he squeezed shampoo into the palm of his left hand. She pulled her head back out and up and he calmly lathered her fine hair from his kneeling position, massaging her scalp with sure fingers. Own it, her words echoed again through his mind. Own me. Prove it!

She sobbed a little more and he shushed her, finally guiding her head back under the water to rinse. When she came back upright she fingered her wet hair back as her head reclined into the cradle of his palm.

“If only I could really fuck that cock,” she mused. “I know you’d love it as much as me, but I can’t. I have to be good. You see, I’m working real hard to be faithful to my man, so he’s the only one gets my pussy and ass.”

Taye grinned as she noticed the tall one’s jaw tighten in an effort to hold back an untimely flood of spunk. His abs were tight and firm, and every bit as hairless as the base of his cock. She started working his shaft with both hands, stroking up and down his thick length and twisting at the same time.

“I’m gonna make you cum like the fourth of July,” she purred, studying his cock like some exotic bird.

Her breasts quivered enticingly with the motion of her arms. Gradually, she started stroking him faster. Tino reached to fondle and squeeze the left side, keeping his hand in motion on his cock while the curly one fondled her on the the right. Their hands were rough and graceless. She uttered a soft growl of approval as a different man caressed each of her sumptuous breasts.

Her eyes remained closed while Kane squeezed a wet cloth in his other hand. He washed her face carefully, dipping and wringing the cloth one-handed as he gradually wiped away the wild smears of her ruined makeup. Every time he rubbed the cloth over her face she let out unconscious whimpers, as if there were something luxurious and tragic in the transaction between the cloth and her skin.

When she was clean again, Kane leaned forward and kissed each of her wet eyelids lightly. He touched his lips to hers, not kissing, but lightly, like an unwhispered promise. Then he turned away and shut off the water.

He slid his left arm further under her, until he was touching her ribs and her head was nestled in the crook of his elbow. Her eyes opened and stayed on his face as he laid the cloth across her breasts, then picked up a plastic bottle and squirted liquid bodywash onto the fabric.

“You’re gonna get your clothes wet,” she said weakly as he began to run the cloth over her body.

“Don’t worry about that.” Her body felt half alive under the scrub cloth. It was as if the traces of other men on her skin held her in some kind of surreal stasis, and as the shreds of their presence washed away, there was that much more of her there, present inside herself.

“God, that’s a fat cock,” she said huskily, stroking faster and faster until she was practically pounding his stalk with all her might. She brought her left hand back to massage his full balls again while the right continued flying up and down the shaft. “I want that nasty fucking spunk,” she growled.

“You know you wanna fuck it, Taye,” Tino taunted. “It ain’t like you not to get yours. I know how bad you need yours, too. Or did you forget how well I know you?”

“No, T,” Taye said, her eyes glazed with doubt. “I’m bein’ real good these days. Ain’t gonna fuck this one up. Not this time.”

Tino snickered and nodded to the curly one. The curly one got to his feet and stood over the tall one, feet planted at the sides of his hips where he dangled his jutting cock just before Taye’s face.

“Suck it, Taye. You know you want to,” Tino leered.

“Fuck you, Tino,” she said, then turned to face the curly one’s cockhead and opened her lips to suck it in.

He wondered whose hands she was feeling in her mind as he washed her breasts. Where was she? Who was she with now? He pushed the cloth over her shoulders, down her arms, along her torso and hips. All he could do was wash and caress her - to bring a sense of freshness to her delicate surfaces - but he couldn’t make her skin new again. He felt like a hopeless failure.

“Someone once told you the girl you were tonight and the one you are right now are two different people, but they’re not.” He pushed the cloth down along her thighs and tucked her in closer with the other arm. “They told you this one’s an angel and the other’s a whore.”

“Then why doesn’t it ever feel like the same one?”

He didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed. Her face was tucked against his chest while the scrape of the cloth along the insides of her thighs brought a rush of ghosts through the room. He slid the cloth to her pussy and lightly scrubbed her tender lips. She sighed and arched slightly.

“You’re beautiful the way music is beautiful. Beautiful in the tension between things that aren’t supposed to fit together,” he said, his lips moving against her wet hair. It hurt to say it, but it would have hurt even more not to. He held the cloth in place against the lips of her pussy and pressed. “Maybe they’re not the same one,” he went on. “But that doesn’t make one the devil and the other an angel.”

He pulled the cloth away and slid his palm over her skin. The water had a film of shampoo and soap in it now, and his hand slipped over her skin in a slick glide. He tightened the grip of his left arm and slid his hand over her breasts, pushing her flesh in star patterns as he began to wish anything or anyone but her could feel like her.

“You’re not a bird,” he said, sliding his hand back down to trace the shape of her inner thighs. “You’re just a girl. Every bit as alone in the world as the rest of us. As alone as me, thinking if someone could love us then maybe we could learn to love ourselves.”

He gripped her even harder and pressed his face against her dangling, wet hair while his hand came back to cup her pussy. His fingers moved against the supple warmth of her sexlips.

“Don’t you know how much I love you, Taye?” She nodded and whimpered while his fingers traveled the slick terrain of her tender slash. Someone had been there before him tonight. “But it’s all spinning around because they’re always saying how we’re supposed to love ourselves first. All the pretty Nazis with their mindless little spiritual placebos.”

“I love you, Kane,” she said. It sounded like she had more to say than that, but it wandered off and got lost in the ether of her fears.

Tino laughed and took the hand from his cock and reached for Taye’s pussy from behind. He ripped the hole wider in her pantyhose and brashly gnashed the pad of his thumb against her rim and pushed his fingers down through the slippery furrow of her slit. She moaned into the curly one’s cock, her hands steadily working the tall one at the same time as she rolled her hips against Tino’s insinuating fingers.

“Don’t know when I ever seen you this wet, Taye-Taye,” Tino chuckled. “Now ain’t you thinkin’ about what you said before about how deep that fuckin’ prick would go up inside you?”

It was too late to care if he used her name in front of the others.

“Do it!” the curly one grunted, pulsing hard inside her mouth. “You can fuck us all…you can do it!” He was breathing hard, shoving into Taye’s exquisite mouth with short jabs. She whimpered and moaned around the sluicing shaft. She knew her protest sounded as empty as her raging pussy felt. Every nerve in the surface of her gleaming skin was singing, crying for more. She felt aware of everything, as if all her senses were perfectly in tune. Every grunt and breath stood out with crystal clarity. Everything was in synch, and she felt as if the cock in her mouth and the one in her hands were almost becoming part of her. It was as if she could feel and taste every pore in their tautly stretched skin.

She was acutely aware of every gesture Tino made as he oiled his cock from the same tube of oil she was using for the tall one’s hand job. Then he was behind her. His breathing was hot and labored. He was beyond taunting her as he rubbed the dripping wet dome of his cock against her rim.

She let the curly one’s cock slip out of her mouth and braced herself on the palms of her hands just over the tall one’s shoulders. She crawled astride his hips and looked down at him with a feral growl. “Shove that fucking cock in me now!”

Her body shuddered a moment under Kane’s arm while the fingers of his other hand ground against her pussy, splaying her open at the same time. He stroked her lips as they slowly thickened. He could feel her teeth on his collarbone while his fingers smeared figure eights across her clit.

“Do you know what really matters?” he asked, letting his fingers brush past her lips into her sheath. He swept his fingers through her core with sweeping arcs as she reached for the sides of the tub to balance herself as her hips arched back at his hand.

She couldn’t answer past a whimper and moan.

“It’s this moment right now,” he said, grinding his thumb across her clit while his fingers thrust and curled. “It’s the woman you are right now before you breathe again and change into something just a little different. It’s what we are right now while we’re touching, while my fingers reach inside you and you curl just like this inside my arm.”

Her left leg shot forward against the end of the tub while her right squeezed harder against the side. Kane’s hand settled into a steadily rocking see-saw motion as his fingers slid through her sheath and his thumb ground and mashed over her clit. Her teeth sank deeper in his bone.

“This is our time, Taye. Our moment. You have never been this beautiful before, and there has never been anything so beautiful in my hands. Nothing ever changes that. Everything inside you that makes you precious is always there, no matter what’s going on on the outside.”

Her breath started to come in sharp little grunts while her ass lifted off the bottom of the tub and she fucked back at his hand until water began to splash out on the floor.

“You want to know that craven slut inside you is always there, too. Always hiding in the shadows ready to spring up and prove to everybody just how fucking bad you are.”

The tall one reached between them and fumbled with his cock, slipping the tip into the open maw of her dripping pussy while Tino slowly pressed his flesh into her ass. Taye uttered a sound more feline than human as she felt both cocks grinding into her body at the same time.

She could be good tomorrow, she thought as the curly one pushed his needy cock back against her lips. She opened her mouth and let his meat dance inside.

She could be good tomorrow. Just this once more. The feelings coursing through her flesh at the speed of sound had nothing to do with the love she felt for Kane. This was this and that was that. She was animal and machine combined. Everything disappeared but the mounting swift thrusts of four grinding bodies all hurtling toward the same precipice.

Her ass arched upward sharply and Kane thrust his two fingers deep and held them there. His thumb gnashed down harder against her clit. Wild, spastic circles as her right hand balled into a fist and banged weakly on the side of the tub.

“But you’re not bad and neither is she,” he muttered on. She was trying to shove her pussy against his grinding thumb. “You’re a tourist in the gutter. A little girl playing in the mud when your mother warned you not to get your dress dirty.”

His fingers began moving again, sweeping thrusts as she bit him even harder, huffing against his shirt while her hips rocked and jerked at his hand.

“You’re the beautiful fairy princess they locked in the dungeon for being precocious, but then forgot you were there. Years went by and you cried out for help, but by the time they remembered to come unlock your cell, you couldn’t walk through the door because you’d been there too long.”

He pushed his face against her cheek and whispered hoarsely. “But you were always the beautiful fairy princess, the precious brat everyone loved because there’s nothing like you anywhere. But it’s hard being loved so much, and sometimes you just need to fuck like some raw, senseless organism.”

Tino suddenly began smacking her ass with an open palm, her eyes glazing as she felt the see-saw motion of the tall one’s cock thrusting in while Tino’s drew back for the next thrust. Her head was bobbing onto the curly one’s shaft, but he was doing more of the work as he short-pumped his shaft into her mouth. It was a rhythmic counterpoint, the tempo hammered out in searing flesh.

The curly one gasped, and seconds later, a rush of cum washed across Taye’s tongue as his cock twitched and flowed. Tino’s hand was connecting harder and harder with every smack. She wondered how the slick scrape of those thrusting cocks inside her must have felt to each other through the thin membrane separating them.

Somewhere far down a desolate track, an old steam powered train began to spit scalding puffs while the old, iron wheels slowly cranked into motion.

A deep wave of rippling shudders began to peel through Taye’s body. She bit down on Kane’s collarbone hard enough to break skin and spot his shirt with blood. It felt as if she were even rippling on the inside around the driving thrusts of his thick fingers. She kicked against the sides of the tub and thrashed against the mauling pump of his fingers and thumb until her head leaned back and she uttered a strangled howl.

Her body stiffened a few moments more, and Kane held his fingers inside her as her muscles slowly relaxed. She slowly sank back down, until her ass was settled back on the bottom of the tub.

Kane slipped his fingers out of her pussy and kissed her. He held her face and kissed her long and deeply, their tongues writhing like miniature bodies. When they broke apart, he couldn’t look away from her glittering eyes.

The curly one arched his back and spent himself for good, finally backing away and retreating to the couch. Taye leaned down close to the tall one’s face. He was beginning to break a sweat as he pumped his hips off the floor. The skin of her ass was beginning to sting and turn a color she could only imagine as Tino smacked her and grunted and smacked her and grunted.

The hot chug of the distant train rumbled and quickened its pace deep inside Taye’s core. Tino’s spanking hand became so spastic he could barely seem to connect with her tender cheek anymore. His cock was grinding into her until she could feel every pulse.

Iron horse on a beeline through the middle of her body, too heavy, picking up too much speed for anything to stop it.

The tall one clutched her shuddering breasts and grunted hard into every, lunging pump. Tino reared his head back and howled “Fuck!” the moment his steaming cum poured jets into Taye’s clasping channel. He ground and pumped into the slick clasp of his own spunk as he wrenched himself into oblivion in Taye’s ass. The moment he fell backward and slipped out of her body, the freight train pounding through her center derailed in a screaming collision of sparks and steam.

Somewhere far below, in another dimension, the tall one was pounding his fists on the floor as his powerfully thrusting cock broke into spasms of heat and froth.

Taye leaned over him a moment longer. A bead of sweat dropped from her face onto his. They were looking at each other, but she wasn’t sure if they saw each other. She dismounted and sat upright on the floor. She looked around the room, trying to remember how she’d gotten there.

“You know I love you, right?” she questioned.

“I know.” He nodded with his eyelids.

“Then you know it’s not because I’m afraid you’re not enough for me. I’m afraid I’m not enough for you. Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m enough for myself.”

He smiled and kissed her gently. Her lips were pure softness and hope. Her kiss was the promise of so many things neither of them had ever known.

“Let’s get you to bed,” he finally told her.

She almost smiled as he guided her to her feet and out of the tub. He sat on the closed toilet lid and spent a long time drying her body, patting her and carefully rubbing her curves. He drew the towel between her ass cheeks, drying her cleft. He told her to lift her arms and dried everywhere underneath them. Then he wrapped the towel around her and she tucked it in place just above her breasts.

“Hey, maybe we could go to that farmers’ market today. We could get a bunch of stuff and both of us cook later on,” she suggested. She smiled like a pageant contestant who’d been sent home before the final round.

“That’s a great idea,” said Kane, standing up and putting his arms around her. “We’ll light candles. It’ll be beautiful.”

“God, I love you, Kane,” she said against his chest. Then she looked up at his face, serious fire burning in her eyes. “It’s gonna be enough for us both,” she went on. “This. Plenty for you. Plenty for me. No more spinning away.”

“I know, baby. That’s the way it’s gonna be.”

Kane walked her back out into the apartment and helped her unfold the studio bed. Together, they tore off the old sheets and put on fresh ones. It wasn’t cold enough for a blanket. Kane went to open the window, letting in fresh air while Taye crawled under the sheet and curled into a ball on her side. He sat down next to her and softly stroked her hair as he watched her eyelids grow heavier and heavier.

“What do you want to cook tonight?” she asked, then yawned.

“What’s your favorite?”

She seemed to think about it a moment or two as her eyes closed. “Oh…anything,” she purred dreamily.

Kane sat and watched her sleep. He fingered strands of hair away from her cheek and leaned down to kiss the side of her mouth. Everything about her was fresh and full of renewal.

“I love you, Taye,” he whispered, barely enough to be heard in her dreams. “I don’t think I’ve ever loved another human being as much as I love you.”

He kissed her once more softly and whispered goodbye. Then he left his key on the kitchenette counter and quietly locked himself out.

He got half way down the stairs when he suddenly deflated and slumped against the wall. He slid down and sat on the stair. It was odd, the things you’d notice at a time like that, like the way you can keep breathing while all the cells in your body feel like they’re breaking down. Everything suddenly came pouring out of him, wet into the palms of his hands.

The nature of all moments is that they have to be let go, so he finally stood up and dried his face the best he could with the back of his hand.

He took the rest of the stairs down. Stepped out on the street. The sun was coming up, and the world looked just like it always did – people coming and going, corners being turned, ants, birds and rooftops - but this morning, something beautiful and raw had been scraped out of the inside.

He put his head down and walked away through a gauntlet of disapproving angels.