He didn't ask. He just bent and slid one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and lifted her off the chair like she weighed nothing, like the whole of her — the yoga pants, the bare chest, the bound wrists still knotted behind her neck — was one easy armful. Rae's head fell back against his shoulder. The ceiling tilted past her fogged glasses, the desk lamp smearing into a long yellow streak, and she had the vague, swimming thought that she should say something, that there was a word for this, but the word had gone soft and useless somewhere between the chair and his chest.

"I can walk," she managed. It came out thin.

"You can't." He carried her the four steps to the bed, and the four steps felt like a hallway, like a whole building, and then her back met the cheap dorm mattress and the springs groaned under the two of them. He didn't put her down gently. He set her down like something he'd decided to keep.

The mattress smelled like her detergent and like the two of them, and the pillow was cool against her bare shoulder, and Rae lay there with her hands trapped behind her neck and her heart going so hard she could feel it in her teeth. Her nipples were still sore from his mouth, still standing up in the cold room, and the wet between her legs had gone from a discovery to a fact — she could feel it smeared against the inside of her thighs, tacky and warm, and every shift of her hips pressed the seam of her yoga pants into it.

She was so turned on she could barely string a thought together. That was the part that scared her. Not him — the not-thinking. The way her body had stopped waiting for her permission.

"Roll over," Jay said.

She didn't. She looked up at him, at the ponytail hanging dark against his jaw, at the black t-shirt and the way he hadn't bothered to put his cock away, still hanging heavy and half-full against his thigh, wet from her mouth. "Why."

He didn't answer. He just waited, and the waiting did the work, and after a second that stretched long enough for her to hear the mini-fridge kick on under the desk, Rae turned her face into the pillow and rolled onto her stomach.

The mattress dipped as he came down over her, one knee on either side of her hips, and his weight settled across the backs of her thighs. Her bound hands pressed up between her shoulder blades, useless, and she felt the whole length of him along her spine, the heat of him through his khakis, and she made a small sound into the pillow that she didn't mean to make.

His hands found the waistband of her yoga pants. He peeled them down slow, working them over the swell of her ass, and the fabric dragged against the wet mess between her legs and she gasped into the cotton, her hips jerking, and then the pants were gone, down her thighs, over her knees, off her ankles, and she was bare from the waist down on her own bed with a stranger kneeling over her.

The air hit her cunt and it was cold and she felt every bit of how wet she was, how open, how the lips of her had swollen and parted on their own. She pressed her thighs together. It didn't help. It just pressed the wet between them.

Then she heard it.

A pop. Sharp, plastic, small. The sound a cap makes when someone pulls it off with their teeth.

The smell reached her a half-second later — alcohol and something chemical and dark, the smell of a fresh permanent marker uncapped, and Rae's whole body went still against the mattress because she knew that smell, everyone knew that smell, and she did not understand what it was doing in her bed.

"What are you—"

The tip touched her. Just above the crack of her ass, right at the small of her back where the skin was pale and never saw sun, and she flinched like she'd been shocked. Cold. Wet. The nib dragged, and she could feel every millimeter of it, the pressure of it, the way it caught slightly on the fine hairs and the way he was slow about it, deliberate, like he was writing something that mattered.

"Don't," she said, into the pillow.

He kept writing.

The humiliation was the thing. That was what she hadn't expected — not the pain, there wasn't any pain, it was the fact of it, being held down on her own bed and written on like a piece of paper, like a thing that belonged to somebody. Her face went hot against the pillow and her eyes stung behind her glasses and her cunt clenched, hard, around nothing, and she hated that most of all. That her body had read the humiliation and answered it with want.

Three strokes above the crack. He moved down, to the left cheek, and the nib bit into the round pale swell of her and she felt the shape of the letters without being able to see them, two of them, W and H, and then he shifted to the right cheek and wrote two more.

Then a click. Not the pen.

A shutter. The digital, tinny little sound of a phone camera, and it was so small and so ordinary that it took her a full second to understand what it meant, and then Rae rolled — hard, fast, wrenching herself onto her side with her bound hands still trapped behind her neck, the whole bed lurching — and Jay sat back on his heels and let her, easy, one hand holding his phone up and out of her reach.

"Give me that." Her voice came out cracked. "Jay. Give it—"

He turned the screen toward her.

She stared at it. Her own body, from above, the pale curve of her ass filling the frame and the black letters stark against the untanned skin, and it took her a second to read them because they were upside down and because her glasses were a fogged mess and because her brain had gone somewhere slow and stupid. A-S-S, above the crack. W-H on the left. R-E on the right.

She didn't get it. And then she did.

ASS WHORE.

It hit her all at once, the way it would look if he spread her, the way the two halves would line up into the word, and her whole face went crimson, scalp to throat, and she made a sound that was half protest and half something she refused to name.

"That's not—" she started. "You can't just—that's on me. That's on my *skin*—"

"It'll come off." He said it the way he said everything, flat, certain, and he was already setting the phone face-down on the nightstand and reaching for her hip. "Eventually."

He rolled her back onto her side, one hand flat on her hip, and then his palm slid back and his fingers found the split of her and spread her. Both cheeks, pulled apart, and the cold air hit the tight ring of muscle between them and Rae's breath stopped in her chest.

She felt it before she understood it. Something blunt and smooth pressing against her there — not his fingers, not his cock, something plastic, a nozzle — and then a cold flood, sudden and enormous, a thick gel pushing into her body where nothing had ever been, and she jerked and gasped and it kept coming, more than she'd ever have thought, until she felt it pooling deep inside her and starting to leak back out around the nozzle.

"Oh my God," she whispered.

He'd brought it. He'd brought the pen and the lube and he'd had them in his pocket the whole time, the whole walk across campus, the whole way up the stairs, and she understood then, with a clarity that went through her like cold water, that this had been the plan. Not a maybe. A plan.

"I've never—" she said. "Jay, I've never. Not there. I haven't even—"

"I know." He was moving behind her, the mattress dipping, and then his chest was against her back and his arm came around her waist and he pulled her in against him, her bound hands trapped between their bodies, her bare ass pressed back against his hips. She could feel his cock against her, hot and full again, sliding up between her cheeks, slick with the gel that was already leaking out of her.

"It's too—" she tried. The words wouldn't come. She could feel the shape of the sentence in her mouth and then it was gone, the way words go when the body takes over, and all that came out was a small, high noise into the dark of the room.

The head of him found her. Not her cunt — higher, lower, the other place, the tight little hole that had never been asked to do anything, and he pressed the blunt tip of his cock against it and held there, just held, letting her feel the size of what was coming.

Rae's whole body went rigid. She tried to wiggle away — she did try, she'd swear to it later — she pushed her hips forward into the mattress, away from him, and it was the worst thing she could have done, because the gel had done its work and the movement just slid her back onto him, and she felt her own asshole give, open, take the first inch of him, and the sound she made was not a word at all.

"There it is," Jay said, low, right at her ear, and his arm tightened around her waist.

The stretch was everything. It was too much and it was slow and it kept going, and she felt herself opening around him inch by inch, the ring of muscle burning and giving, burning and giving, and her mouth was open against the pillow and she was breathing in fast shallow pulls and her cunt was so wet she could feel it running down the inside of her thigh. She had never felt so full. She had never felt anything like it, the pressure deep in her belly, the way her body had to make room for him, the way it was making room, the way it *wanted* to.

"I can't—" she gasped. "It's too big, it's—"

"You're doing it." His hips rolled, one slow stroke, seating himself deeper, and Rae's bound hands clenched into fists behind her neck and her back arched off the mattress on its own. "Look at you. Taking all of it."

She was. She was taking all of it, and she could feel him bottom out inside her, the whole impossible length of him buried where nothing had ever been, and the thought went through her like a hot wire — that her body would never be the same, that she'd been stretched open in a way that couldn't be undone, that she might already be the thing he'd written on her skin, ASS WHORE in black marker above her ass and her body answering yes, yes, yes.

And then he moved.

The first real stroke pulled almost all the way out and pushed back in, and the gel squelched wet and obscene between them and Rae cried out into the pillow, her glasses knocked crooked, her whole world narrowed to the place where he was splitting her open. He set a rhythm, slow at first, deep, his hand flat on her stomach holding her steady, and every stroke pressed the breath out of her and every retreat made her feel the empty ache of him gone.

"Say it," he said against her hair.

"Say—"

"You know what." Another stroke, harder. "Say what you are."

She shook her head, face buried, and he drove in deep and held, grinding, and the pressure inside her built into something that made her see white, and the word came out of her before she could stop it, small and wrecked and true. "Whore. I'm—I'm your whore."

"Good girl," Jay said, and something in her chest cracked open at that, at the praise, worse than the word had been, and she felt her cunt clench around nothing and her ass tighten around him and he groaned low in his throat and pulled her harder against his hips.

He was still moving. Deep, steady, filling her over and over, and Rae lay there on her side with her hands bound and her glasses crooked and her name written on her skin in ink she couldn't wash off, and she had not said stop. She had not said stop once.

The mini-fridge hummed under the desk. Down the hall, someone's door opened and closed again, ordinary and far away. And Jay's hips kept their rhythm, and her body kept answering him, and the wet sound of it filled the little dark room.