Snow drove in on a hard slant across the windshield of Stone’s car, idling in the parking lot of the community center. The season was supposed to be safely past this, but it was coming down like it was personal. When he’d heard the first report, part of him hoped they’d cancel, but another part of him just needed to get away from the house.

The wipers were on intermittent, heat cranked high with the fan on low. Stained cement steps led up to the metal door of a red brick building that had been impressive eighty years ago. An empty quietude enveloped it now. Rena’s was the only other car in the lot, and he’d been sitting like this for twenty minutes, waiting for someone else to show.

Since first meeting her, he’d felt a pleasure he could never say out loud in her merely walking in the room. He knew she’d always sensed his attitude, and he was more anxious than ever to see her now, but he wanted to avoid facing her alone this soon. He would have to look her in the eye, and the last thing he wanted today was to risk her recognizing what he really was.

The only reason he’d even bothered coming was to avoid spending the night in the house alone with Nikki. With the snow, no one was going to show up, but it was where he’d promised to be.

He reached for the bag from the bath shop on the empty seat beside him. He pulled out the bodywash he’d bought for Nikki and popped open the cap. The entire car seemed to fill with the scent of powder and roses. It seemed cheap and even a little tawdry when he thought of the natural scent of her arousal. The comparison was too laughable to exist. He felt foolish and decided it would be better not to give it to her at all.

He’d felt like a confused fool standing in the shop while his brain tried to distinguish aromas out of the cloying stew of soaps, lotions and perfumes. The woman who tried to help him had reeked of a sweetness that made him dizzy and a little bit sick. It might have been nice if they’d been out somewhere else in the usual stench of the world.

He didn’t know how to explain what he was looking for, but the saleswoman had gotten a close enough idea. She’d asked how old the lady was he was buying a gift for, and Stone got wary. He’d started to say she was twenty-five, but changed his mind in the middle and said twenty-nine. He couldn’t bring himself to say nineteen out loud. The saleswoman looked like she wanted to laugh and Stone felt his face burn red.

He finally chose what he chose only because it was more expensive than the others. It felt wrong getting something too cheap, as if it were saying what had happened between them was cheap.

He inhaled deeply, drawing the rose scent into his head, but instantly tried to replace it with his sense memory of Nikki’s peaches. Now, it felt as if getting her something just because it was expensive cheapened her, as if he were rewarding her with a pretty trinket. Hey, baby girl, I shaved your pussy and licked you like Mama’s frosting bowl…here, have some nice soap.

He’d save them both a lot of awkwardness and embarrassment and dump it before he got home.

He’d held onto her too long and too hard in the tub after they’d cum. He should have spoken to her right there and then, and explained how it had all been a mistake. Simple lapses in judgment, as if cumming in her mouth under his desk had also been a small mistake, like taking a left when you know turning right was the direction you needed to go.

But in the end, he almost wanted to tell her she was right, that she was acting like a craven little whore, and he was nothing but a hapless victim to her sinful ways. She would have to learn how to reign in and control her ripe sensuality.

But he was full of shit. He thumb-snapped the cap closed on the bodywash, tossed the bag onto the back seat, then shut off the engine and went inside.

Rena barely cast a glance as he went behind the reception desk to sign in, but he detected the hint of a smile on her face. It was the first time he’d ever seen her wear a skirt. It was a pleated uniform skirt in navy blue, and the way it draped her bare thighs made it impossible to judge how long or short it would be if she were standing. Her crossed thighs had a firm, fleshy quality much more stark than in the dark leggings she normally wore.

She had thin, white knee highs pulled up tight, with black pumps conspicuously replacing her traditional sneakers. The crisp, white blouse was just tight enough around her breasts to suggest a hint of tension against the buttons, which were primly fastened to her neck.

Stone swallowed a mouthful of air as he took in Rena’s glaring changes. She made him think of melted butter and cinnamon. He felt a deep, sudden thirst come over him.

“Hi Professor,” she almost sang.

Her tone was as unfamiliar as everything else, and he almost wondered if she were the same person.

“Don’t call me that,” he frowned. “Technically, I’m not a professor at all.”

“Ok, sir,” she smiled, pretending to study the call-in log on the desk in front of her. “How…um…how has the rest of your day been?”

Stone suddenly tasted Nikki all over his mouth as vividly as if she were riding his tongue then and there.

“Pretty uneventful,” he lied. “After you left, I mean.”

The coy smile broke into a larger one, but she kept her gaze trained on the paper in front of her. She might have been blushing, but it was hard to tell with her complexion being almost a dark as Nikki’s.

“I really appreciate all the extra…help. It was a very stimulating meeting.”

Stone felt his neck burst into flame as he stared at Rena’s thighs. He wasn’t sure if he should stammer an apology for having been an aggressive pig, or simply yank her up out of her chair and rip her skirt up and her panties down.

“Maybe we can talk about that after class tonight,” he finally suggested.

“May-bee,” she replied.

It was getting dark, and the snow was coming down as steadily as it had been for the last hour. For a long moment, he could think of nothing but the way she’d leaned against him in his office that day, with all that broiling heat between her thighs. But the memory was indelibly etched with the sensation of how Nikki had been silently sucking his cock at the same time.

“Gonna be a dead night,” he finally said, his tone betraying the complete absence of his brain.

“A lot of people called in to say they’re not coming.”

“I wouldn’t blame anyone tonight,” he replied. He didn’t realize he was staring at her thighs until she swiveled her chair toward him, offering an improved view. “But I better get ready. Maybe we’ll see the die-hards anyway.”

Stone forced himself not to look at the bright, turquoise nails gently raking the top of Rena’s thigh as he left her behind the reception desk and crossed the hall into the classroom.

He set his folders down at the end of one of the brown, wood veneer conference tables set around the large room in an open horseshoe. He shrugged off his worn, leather jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. Thanks to the antiquated heating system, the room was too warm and he pulled off his sweater to go through his ritual in jeans and a deep blue T shirt.

He took the spray cleaner and paper towels off one of the bookshelves and started wiping down the tables. He went around the horseshoe and pushed them all back in alignment, then set all the chairs in neat rows. He wanted the room to feel unused. On a night like this, he knew there wouldn’t be more than two or three people, and they’d barely notice the difference, but it gave him the illusion of organizing his mind.

When he was finished, he sat at the end of the row and opened a folder of hand-scrawled papers. He indulged himself in the charade of looking at them, but Rena was at the center of every passing thought. The scrawl on the papers became a hazy blur as he ran a hundred possible things to tell her through his head. None of his ideas felt like anything that would connect with the reality of looking her in the eye.

He gazed out the large windows and let the snow swirling through the parking lot lights daze him. As he was beginning to feel as if he were floating inside one of those luminous spheres, he felt someone enter the room.

Rena perched herself on top of the table, actually sitting on half of Stone’s mess of papers with crossed thighs. She’d fanned her skirt around her hips and her ass was directly on top of them. He wondered if she were wearing panties, and almost wanted to reprimand her for getting them wet.

“Um, Rena,” he crooned, “people are going to start showing up in a little while.”

“So?”

“So if they come in and see you sprawled across the table like that you’re going to make them wonder what we’re doing here.”

“I’m kind of wondering that myself,” she said lightly. “And anyway, I’m hardly sprawled on the table. Yet.”

She crossed the leg closest to him over the other, exposing more flesh in the process. The papers she was sitting on wrinkled.

“Rena, if you keep this up I won’t be able to stand up in class for the whole first hour.”

She giggled. It was something he never heard her do before. It sounded foreign and beautiful at the same time. He made a vain attempt to ignore the supple thigh extending across his view.

“Like this afternoon?” she teased. “Is that why you didn’t get up from your desk? So the poor, innocent coed wouldn’t see the professor’s big, bad hard on?”

A brief tsunami of paranoia suddenly washed over Stone.

“Look…uhh…about this afternoon…”

“Shhh,” she hushed him, briefly looking away. “It happened because we let it. Right?”

Only now did she look back at his face.

“Yeah, of course.” He tried to shove his way around the paranoia, but the wall only seemed to get bigger. “Look…about this afternoon…I know we need to talk about it, but people are going to be showing up anytime now.”

He wondered briefly why none of the other instructors had shown up yet. He thought he should ask if any had called in, but he got lost in the sight of Rena’s skin as he studied her generous thigh. The corresponding pulse deep in his jeans said it was a bad idea, an even worse idea than letting his mind wander back to that afternoon.

Rena didn’t respond. Stone kept waiting, but instead of speaking she dropped a very scant pair of panties on top of the papers jutting out from under her ass on the table in front of him.

Breath caught in his throat and the faint throbbing in his cock quickly grew into an insistent pulse. The panties had clearly been recently worn, and Stone didn’t bother resisting the urge to pick them up and hold them to his face, inhaling her intoxicating scent. Pure Rena.

“Jesus,” Stone sighed.

“I don’t know if this would interest you at all,” Rena said, “but I spent a good part of the afternoon in the bathroom, shaving…verrry carefully.”

Stone almost said fuck out loud.

Rena then turned until she was sitting with her thighs open and astride the corners of the table, her feet dangling near his thighs. Her skirt hiked around her hips, exposing the full length of each thigh, along with the shapely pout of her carefully shaved mound. He could see she hadn’t exaggerated about being careful.

“Jesus, Rena…”

She leaned back and propped herself on her elbows to watch his reaction with an expectant grin. He was entranced as she drew a teasing finger along her crease.

“Rena…for crying out loud…”

When he raised his face to meet her eyes, her lids were heavily hooded, and her bottom lip was caught under a row of white teeth. Stone felt his cock begin to uncoil as he watched the light stroke of Rena’s finger draw a fresh flush and swell to her pussy.

“Professor,” she crooned almost nervously, “did I pass my pampering exam?”

“Jesus, Rena, of all the freakin’ times,” he croaked, yearning to slide his tongue along the scarlet slit where her finger moved slowly but steadily.

Her finger stroked and then dug between her lips, drawing moisture as they began to flush and swell.

“Maybe you’d be interested to know this afternoon in your office I would’ve been perfectly happy to have you yank down my leggings and shove your fingers right up inside me.”

“Fuck, Rena…fuck,” Stone muttered. His cock was rapidly draining the blood from his cerebral cortex.

“Oh, but professor…” she mewled.

“Don’t call me professor,” he said automatically, watching, inhaling. “Technically…I’m…um…”

“Well, technically that’s true, because the director called an hour ago to cancel everything tonight. It’s just us, and technically, we’ll be the only ones cumming.”

The radiators hissed and sputtered while Rena’s dew-flushed petals made Stone think of anything but the reality of the unseasonably harsh climate just beyond the large windows. Her open, almost coppery thighs and humid core only reminded him of the impending summer awaiting them just beyond winter’s final gasp. He filled his flaring nostrils with her fragrance and longed to taste her while his cock thickened and ached with ardent demand.

Rena’s finger tapped a tantalizing rhythm against her rising clit. Stone got up from his seat and took a moment to look at her. He bent forward and placed a moist, lingering kiss on her mound, trapping her finger beneath his lips. She uttered a soft gasp and arched against his mouth while her finger danced with his tongue against her blossoming slit.

He pushed her legs up high against her body and stroked his flat, wet tongue along her lips until her breath deepened and she was rolling her hips in an easy rhythm against his mouth. She didn’t have much freedom to move in her position, but the ardent little gnashing motions against his mouth were steady, almost perfectly synched with the huffing sighs pulsing from her throat.

Rena’s clit bloomed under the wet rasp of his tongue, and she whimpered in complaint when he suddenly stopped. He picked up the panties she’d dropped on his papers and walked toward the doorway to switch off the lights, bathing the room in the spill of light from the parking lot just outside. He held the panties to his face and inhaled her aroma while he crossed the room, as if he could fill himself with her penetrating scent.

Rena sat up and swung her feet to the nearest chair while Stone approached. The sleek sheen of pale light reflected along her smooth skin made his breath catch and the growing shaft in his pants twitch with ardent heat. Her left foot moved aside, allowing him to step into the open space between her thighs.

Stone placed his hand briefly against Rena’s cheek, letting his palm slide along the warmth of her neck as she smiled up at him.

“You know, Rena,” he said, as his hand moved to open the top button of her blouse, “we really shouldn’t be doing this here.”

“Absolutely not, professor,” she replied obligingly. Her smile widened while her hand found the front of his pants. “It’s very unprofessional.”

“Very,” he nearly groaned as she ran her palm along his lengthy bulge. Her agile touch brought on a surge of new growth, until his ungainly cock was uncomfortably trapped inside his clothes.

He leaned forward and kissed her, fumbling with the remaining buttons on her blouse while her lips fused with his and her tongue swirled into his mouth. Her hands worked swiftly at his belt, then opened his pants and pushed them down, along with his snug boxer-briefs, until his naked stalk was jutting freely between her thighs.

Stone felt muffled sounds shudder up through his chest as Rena wrapped both hands around his heated flesh and began stroking him. With the front of her blouse pulled open, he reached inside to unclasp the scant, lacy bra that matched the panties lying on the table. His hands slid back to caress her warm breasts. He ground his thumbs across her swollen nipples and swallowed the mewling sighs that rose from her throat.

When he pulled away, he couldn’t help admiring her in the semi-darkness. She angled his cock until his blunt crown nudged her humid pussy, massaging herself with the tip. He was trying to think of a way to tell her how beautiful she was that didn’t sound tired, but she was miles ahead of him.

Nectar flushed thicker and more heavily as she ground the end of his blunt cock against the pouting maw of her pussy. His skin was smeared with her simmering moisture, and it was a strain to resist the natural urge to simply plunge inside her.

Then she shoved him backward, taking him by surprise as he dropped onto the chair behind him.

He reached for her bare thighs as she slid off the table, running his hands up along her hips toward the impertinent spheres of her ass, but just as he tried to grasp her taut flesh, she sank down on her haunches.

She flashed him a grin that seemed to glow in the shady room. She wrapped one delicate fist around the thick root of his cock and cupped his nutsac with the other. She leaned forward and kissed his stalk’s sensitive underbelly. Her lips felt warm. Soft and moist. Her tongue slipped out from between them and ran slowly up his length toward the thickly defined ridge of his crown.

“Nice cock…professor,” she drawled before her tongue repeated its journey around his shaft and tip.

“Jesus, Rena.” Her tongue curled around his dome, swiping at the generous seepage of precum. “You have got to stop calling me professor…”

Silence descended on the room as Rena’s mouth enclosed his cockhead. There was the intermittent hiss of the radiator. The occasional sharp intake of Stone’s breath. Rena’s hand rose along his thick shank until it met her descending lips.

His cock was rich, imposing and hard as a tree. Rena was more confident now than Stone had ever seen, as if he were stepping into her realm for a change. She explored his aching expanse of throbbing flesh until he was slick with a thorough blend of saliva and precum.

Stone was gradually transported deep into Rena’s world, where all sense existed only by the whim of her touch and kiss. But as the ache of pleasure rose to greater and greater heights, he was suddenly thrust back into this world, where a sensuous young woman was making tender, wet love to his cock until his rigid flesh was raging with inescapable demands.

He placed his hands against Rena’s neck, thumbs extended along each side of her jaw, and drew her face upward. She followed his guiding hands until she was standing again.

The short, synthetic zipper on the side of her skirt came down with barely a whisper of sound and fell in a heap around her ankles. She sat back on the tabletop again and opened the last button on her blouse while Stone hurried to yank off his shoes and pants. He reared back up and kissed Rena hungrily, pushing the open blouse off her shoulders at the same time. Now there was only her lacy bra dangling loosely from her shoulders.

The old heating system was cranking so hard Stone was ready to break a sweat as he stepped to the edge of the table. Rena turned, opening her plush thighs and letting her feet dangle off the sides. Stone paused to simply look at her, bathed in the distant glow of the parking lights with swirls of snow falling around them. His hands explored her sleek form, sliding off her shoulders and crossing over her conical breasts. Slipping down her torso and hips to palm the length of her thighs.

She wrapped both hands around his granite pole and almost seemed to be studying it. He let his breath escape silently, as if he were deflating a little, and set his thoughts of her accidental beauty aside as he leaned toward her, setting his hands on the table’s edges. When she held the tip of his cock against her simmering pussy, he anxiously ground against her, nudging his dome just inside her sheath.

He kissed her hungrily and ground in deeper, feeling the hot, wet kiss of her body’s churning core. He grasped and kneaded her taut breasts, rolling her thick nipples hard between his fingers and thumbs. Rena whimpered into his mouth, but then leaned back, lowering down against the table.

“You’re gonna fuck your horny little protégé now, aren’t you, professor?” she said in a mewling giggle.

Stone pulled firmly on her nipples as he started to laugh and nudge his cock deeper into her slick heat. “Jesus, Rena, where do you get this stuff? Besides, you have to stop calling me professor. Technically…”

“Yes, professor,” she sighed, biting her bottom lip and throwing her head back with her eyes closed. Rolling her hips, she slathered the length of his cock with her slippery core. She almost seemed to forget he was even there as her entire being seemed to be centered on the juncture of her pussy along his cock.

Stone watched her face grow distant as his stalk gradually sank fully into her body. A low, throaty purr escaped her lips as she rolled to meet the deep insistence of his cock. He released her nipples and gripped her hips, kneading her flesh as he arched his hips in a circle, their bodies adjusting to each other, taking on each other’s form and shape.

She finally slid her bra off her arms and tossed it on the floor while Stone’s cock drew back, angling for a deeper, harder thrust. He repeated the motion several times, finally settling into a steady rocking thrust, easy but firm while Rena’s body rocked against him.

The contrary motion of their arching bodies soon took on a life of its own while each of them were lost to their own world of hot need. Stone’s left hand moved back to grip Rena’s nipple while his right hand slid across her hip until his thumb found her engorged clit. When his thumb began rolling back and forth across her slick node, the rhythmic grind and rock of her hips grew more erratic.

Stone was thrusting into her clasping core with long, gliding strokes while Rena’s body gripped him like a hot sleeve. The speed and pressure of his rolling thumb intensified against her clit, while he was buried under the avalanche of his body’s demand for release. He was soon fucking her hard and forcefully, gradually submerging himself in a deep pool of her essence.

He closed his eyes and let himself keep sinking. Sinking and fucking, letting himself drown only to emerge renewed. When he opened his eyes again, he thought he was hallucinating when he saw Nikki leaning in the doorway of the room.

In the moment or two before the sight of Nikki finally struck him as real, he kept plunging his steaming cock deeply into Rena. Their flesh was growing milky with her flowing froth, but then Stone’s thrusts began to falter, slowing down until he locked eyes with Nikki and froze.

His cock was fully embedded in Rena’s pussy while his thumb kept rolling over her clit, as if by reflex. Rena sighed and rolled her hips, not so patiently waiting for Stone to start thrusting again.

Nikki had a look in her eye that came off as driven and distant at the same time. There was a darkness cast over her expression that had nothing to do with the dimness of the room. Stone forgot to wonder how she’d even gotten there on her own. In the passing moments they studied each other’s face, he felt the strange sense they were talking to each other, yet they were setting aside the words to speak aloud for some other time.

Finally, Rena opened her eyes and looked up at Stone. “C’mon, professor,” she crooned plaintively. “Fuck me.” Then she realized Stone wasn’t even looking at her and twisted her head to follow his gaze. She spotted Nikki and uttered a gasp of surprise.

The silence that followed held an awkwardness so surreal it almost turned the corner back to normal. Stone felt his cock pulse with spasms. Rena seemed to ripple inside, as if her body was reminding his what it was supposed to be doing.

“Go ahead, professor,” Nikki said, almost sounding confident. “Fuck your little whore like she wants it.”

Another moment passed through which everyone was looking back and forth at everyone else. Stone pulled back his hips and ground his cockshaft back into Rena’s pussy. It felt like she was beginning to broil inside.

“I told you before,” he said, leveling a serious gaze at Nikki, “don’t call her that.”

“You can still fuck me like one,” Rena said. Her breath was growing deeper again while Stone’s cock swept into her body with gradually building force.

Nikki snickered devilishly and Stone thrust hard into Rena’s pussy with a heaving grunt. He thrust again, harder this time, and Rena sucked in a sharp lungful of air. He pumped her clasping tunnel with a hard volley of thrusts while Nikki cautiously approached. Stone almost lost himself in the slapping, wet friction between them, until Nikki was standing there, gazing at the insistent plow of his glistening cock.

Nikki very nearly looked crazed. The light in her eyes was sharp and deadly while her jaw went slack. The tip of her tongue slipped out to moisten her lips as she followed the steady strokes of Stone’s shaft.

“I never saw anybody fuck before,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, while her tone was practically academic, like a scientist observing some natural phenomenon she’d heard about but never seen. “Anybody else, I mean,” she added.

Stone slowed down, placing his hands on Rena’s upper thighs and pressing back at her flesh, prying her sexlips further open. His mind was spiraling off through space while the jolt of his own blood coursing through his body began to feel like hammering traffic. If anyone was going to learn anything in that classroom that night, Nikki was going to learn she hadn’t invented being nasty all on her own.

“You were the one under the desk today, weren’t you?” Rena asked.

The question didn’t rise much higher than a whimper as Stone began fucking her pussy harder again, prying hard and kneading into the flesh around her swollen petals.

“You knew?” Stone groaned, feeling a hard spasm rush through his cock.

“I knew you didn’t cum just from fingering me through my clothes,” Rena told him.

Nikki snickered without seeming surprised. “He gave me lots of extra cum because of you,” she said, gazing at the other coed with a delighted sneer. “It was so fucking creamy and delicious. I love it so much I eat his cum every day.”

Stone tried to throw her a dirty look in reply to her outrageous lie, but the sheer nastiness of it only made his pumping cock throb with deeper, harder pulsations of raw heat. Nikki was already way past the moment. Her whole existence seemed to be trained on his cock driving into Rena’s pussy. The next few moments were punctuated by the wet slap of their bodies, gasps, and a soft, groaning purr Nikki let slip without thinking.

Stone reached for Nikki’s wrist and jammed the heel of her hand against Rena’s clit. He never stopped thrusting, and when he let go of Nikki’s wrist, she turned her hand to slide her fingers over Rena’s nub while Stone’s lathered cock continued to plunge.

“Fuck,” Rena mewled.

Nikki snickered while Rena started squirming to the slick rub of her fingers. She reached down inside her leggings with the other hand and fingered herself at the same time.

“Still think she’s not a whore?” Nikki asked Stone as Rena’s head tilted back and her body wrenched at the powerful sensations firing through her.

Stone felt like he was being tossed up in the air somewhere between being fed up and wanting to explode all over the room.

“For chrissakes, Nikki…just shut up long enough…”

Nikki looked like she wanted to giggle again but thought better of it. Stone had never spoken to her that way, and as spiteful as his tone was he started to feel as if the entire moment was something he was in with her. Rena almost seemed incidental now, as if she were just something for Nikki and him to be involved in together.

Nikki purred and Stone could tell she was pushing her fingers deep inside herself while her other hand was steadily thrumming Rena’s clit. Rena was clutching the sides of the table, beginning to pull deep gasps of air into her body with visible spasms.

Nikki suddenly yanked her hand out of her leggings and pushed her hand between Stone’s ass cheeks, pressing a wet finger against his rim.

“Jesus…what the fuck are you…?”

Nikki snickered briefly - low, down inside her throat without letting it push out. Rena squirmed, her pretty face squinting into a tight grimace as she started to cum. That was when Stone felt Nikki’s finger push just inside his ass, nudging slightly inside.

He shot a nasty look at Nikki, who was looking back him almost dazed with excitement, as if it had all been happening to her. Her hand followed the constant lunging of his ass while her finger dug into him with a rhythm all on its own. Stone promised himself to remember asking her how she managed it, but then he tossed his head back and exploded deep inside a gasping Rena with a raging volley of spastic thrusts.

It was a long few moments before everything began to unravel and feel loose again.

“Holy fuck!” Nikki cried, stepping back. “You fucked her like such a whore.”

Stone slowly drew his lacquered cock out of Rena’s pussy. He leaned on the table, his palms planted down on either side of his dazed protégé.

“I told you about that, Nikki,” he warned, casting the young Asian coed a dead serious gaze. “Don’t call Rena names like that.”

“She’s not the one I meant,” Nikki said, falling into a peal of indulgent giggling.

~~~

They helped Rena get out of the parking lot first. Stone took the shovel from the trunk of his car and cleared a path to the street while Nikki and Rena brushed off the windows. He listened but they didn’t talk. The snow was beginning to lighten up, but it was still windy and cold. After Rena drove away, Stone and Nikki sat in his idling car waiting for the heat to blow warm.

Nikki sat quietly in the passenger’s seat, brooding. Stone felt potent concern rising off her. The air of accidental conspiracy that had come between them before seemed in danger of evaporating.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.” She kept her eyes on the wipers and snowflakes hitting the glass and melting.

Stone leaned over and put his hands around her face. He kissed her mouth for the first time. Her lips felt like pillows for something inside him to rest on. Her mouth opened readily, and he seemed to feel the grace of her entire body in the motion of her tongue.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said when they finally broke.

He leaned back into his seat and put the car in gear. Nikki put her hands on the dashboard and never took her eyes off the road.

“Are you gonna fuck me like you fucked her?”

“Like a whore, you mean?” he smirked.

“Sort of,” she said.

Stone laughed. “Yeah. Something like that, but different. It’ll just be you and me. It’ll be better that way.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The car fishtailed to a stop at the next light.

“Got something for you,” he said. He reached for the gift bag on the back seat and gave it to her.

The light turned green but there was no one else on the road so he sat idling and watched her look in the bag. She pulled out the bottle and popped the cap to sniff.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Different than what my mother had. You got this just for me?”

He nodded. The light changed again. Yellow. Then changed again as she set the bag on the seat between her legs.

“You gonna fuck her again?”

He shook his head. In the dim glow of the red light, the corners of her mouth crinkled into a smile he wasn’t meant to see.