He didn't pull out right away. He stayed buried, hips pressed flush to her marked skin, and Rae felt every inch of him twitch inside her like a held breath, and the radiator knocked twice in the wall and she counted them, because counting was something to do with her mind while her body was doing something else entirely.

"You're squeezing me," Jay said. Not a question. His voice had gone lower, rougher at the edges, and his thumb moved on her hip — slow, almost absent, like he was thinking about something else. "Feel that. You don't even know you're doing it."

She didn't. She did. Her ass was clenching around him in little pulses she couldn't stop, and each one dragged a sound out of her throat that she tried to swallow back down. The marker on her skin had gone tacky where his palm rested on it. ASS WHORE, smeared now at the W, and she could feel the shape of the letters against his hand like a brand she'd asked for.

His hand slid around her hip, down her belly, and stopped.

Rae went very still.

"You've been dripping down your thighs this whole time," he said, and his fingers found the wet seam of her, slick and swollen and untouched, and she made a noise that wasn't a word. "You feel how wet you are? That's from me. That's your body telling you what it wants."

"I—" She didn't know what she was going to say. Sorry, probably. Sorry was always the first thing her mouth reached for.

He didn't let her find it. His finger slid down through the slick and found her clit, and pressed, and Rae's whole body jerked like a fish on a line.

"There," Jay said, satisfied, like he'd found a light switch in a dark room. "There she is."

He worked her slow. Two fingers, then the pad of his thumb, circling the swollen little knot of her while he stayed deep in her ass, and the two sensations braided together into something Rae had no word for — full and empty at once, stretched and stroked, and the radiator clanked and the desk lamp threw both their shadows up the wall, huge and wavering, and she watched them move and couldn't believe the shadow was her.

"Say it," he said.

"Say—say what?"

"You know what." His thumb pressed harder, and her hips bucked back onto him, and she heard herself whine. "Say what you are. You said it before. Say it again."

Her face was in the bedspread. It smelled like her detergent and like him. "I'm your whore," she whispered, and the words came out easier the second time, which frightened her more than the first time had.

"Good girl."

And that — that did it. Something in her chest cracked open the way it had before, at the praise, and her cunt clenched hard around nothing, and Jay felt it, because he groaned and pulled her hips back against him and started moving again, deep and slow, and his thumb never stopped its circling, and Rae stopped counting the radiator and stopped thinking about the door and the hallway and the girls down the hall who would never know, and her whole world narrowed to the wet sound of him and the pressure building low in her belly like water behind a dam.

"I can feel you getting close," he said against her ear. He'd leaned down over her, his chest hot on her back, his ponytail falling forward over her shoulder, the dark hair of it brushing her cheek. "Don't hold it. Give it to me."

"I don't—I can't—"

"You can. You're going to."

And she did. It came up through her like a wave she'd been standing in up to her waist, and it knocked her over. Her thighs clamped together on his hand and her whole body shuddered and pulsed around him, her ass milking his cock in tight rhythmic pulls, and she heard herself sobbing into the bedspread, one hand scrabbling uselessly against her own bound wrists behind her neck, and Jay made a sound like he'd been holding his breath for a very long time and let it out.

He drove in hard and held, grinding, and came.

Rae felt it. Felt him pulse inside her, hot and thick, and felt the strange full pressure of it spreading, and there was so much of it that her belly seemed to tighten and swell with it, an ache that was almost a cramp, and she lay there shaking with her face in the mattress and her glasses fogged and her body doing things she'd never known it could do.

Then he pulled out.

The sound was not dignified. It was a wet, sputtering little noise, and then a rush — fluid following him out of her, running down between her cheeks, soaking the bedspread under her hip, and Rae felt it go and burned crimson from her collarbones to her ears. She pressed her face harder into the bed. She wanted to die. She wanted to apologize. She wanted him to do it again.

"Don't," Jay said, and she didn't know what he meant until his hand landed flat on her lower back, holding her there, keeping her still. "Don't hide. It's supposed to do that."

He left her. She heard him cross the little room, heard the bathroom door, heard water running in the sink. She lay on her side with her hands bound behind her neck and her yoga pants around her thighs and the wet cooling under her, and she stared at the mini-fridge and listened to him wash his hands like a man who'd just come in from yard work.

He didn't untie her.

That was the thing she noticed, lying there. He walked past her — she saw his black khakis at the edge of her vision, the shape of him moving — and he didn't reach down and pull the knot. He sat on the edge of the desk chair, the one she'd been in before, and she heard the springs creak, and she understood that the not-untying was a decision. He was thinking about what came next. He was deciding.

Her pussy was sopping. She could feel it — not just wet, but slick and open and empty, clenching on nothing, and the emptiness had a shape now, the shape of him, and it hurt in a way that wasn't pain.

"Jay?" she said, small.

"Mm."

"Are you—" She didn't know how to ask it. Are you going to untie me. Are you going to leave. Are you going to finish what you started. "What are you doing?"

"Looking at you," he said.

And that was all, for a while. She lay there being looked at, and the looking was its own kind of hand on her, and her nipples — she only now noticed — were still hard enough to ache, dragging against the bedspread with every breath.

Then he stood, and his hands were on her, rolling her. Onto her back, her bound arms grinding under her shoulder blades, her glasses shoved fully sideways now so the room was a blur of lamplight and shadow, and she blinked up at the ceiling and felt him pull her yoga pants the rest of the way off her ankles, over the heels, and she heard the fabric drag across the floor.

"Legs apart," he said.

She moved them apart before she'd decided to. It was the same as the mouth opening had been — the body answering a question the mind hadn't heard yet.

He used the yoga pants to tie her. One ankle to the leg of the bed, then the other, and the black fabric stretched and knotted and pulled her open in a wide V, and Rae lay there spread and bound and blind-ish with her glasses crooked and her blouse still hanging open off her shoulders and her bra somewhere on the floor, and the dry radiator heat poured over her bare skin and the lamp lit every part of her he'd just decided to look at.

"Stay," he said, which was funny, because she couldn't do anything else.

He went back to the bathroom. She heard him open the cabinet under the sink — she knew that cabinet, her shampoo and her conditioner and the little plastic caddy she carried her stuff in — and she heard him move things around, and she lay there with her heart going and her cunt wet and no idea what he was looking for, and the not-knowing was somehow worse than anything he'd done to her so far.

He came back with her razor and the can of shaving gel she used for her legs.

"What—" Rae's voice came out high. "What are you doing with that?"

"You know what I'm doing." He knelt on the bed between her spread legs, and the mattress dipped, and she felt his weight settle there, and he shook the can and pressed the nozzle and a cold stripe of gel landed on her, right on the dark curls he'd been inside minutes ago, and she flinched at the cold and at the meaning of it both.

"Jay, I—you don't have to—"

"I know I don't have to." He spread the gel with two fingers, working it into the hair, down over the lips, and the touch was clinical and intimate at once and Rae's hips twitched under it. "Hold still. I don't want to cut you."

So she held still. She lay bound and spread and let a man she'd met tonight shave her, and the razor made its small rasping sound, and he worked in careful strokes, rinsing the blade in the glass of water he'd brought from the bathroom, and the whole time his knuckles brushed her clit and her lips and the inside of her thighs, and the whole time her body got wetter, and she could feel herself getting wetter, and she hated it and wanted it and couldn't tell the two apart.

"There," he said at last, and wiped her with the corner of the towel, and Rae looked down her own body — she could just see past the crooked glasses — and saw herself bare for the first time in her life. Smooth. Naked in a way she'd never been naked. The pale skin of her there looked like someone else's.

"Now hold still again," Jay said, and picked up the marker.

She watched the black tip come down. He drew first one small heart, right at the top of her mound, and then a bigger one around it, and then a bigger one around that — concentric, nested, like a target, like something out of a cartoon she'd seen once and blushed at — and then, on either side, two small hearts, and then two curved lines sweeping out from the center like little handles, and Rae lay there and let him draw on her and felt each stroke of the marker tip like a fingertip.

She knew what it was. She'd seen the pictures, in the corners of the internet she'd never admit to visiting. The mark they drew on the girls in the cartoons. The womb tattoo. The thing that meant owned.

"There," he said again, and reached for his phone off the nightstand, and the shutter sound went off, once, twice, and then he turned the screen toward her face so she could see.

Rae looked at herself. Spread and bound and shaved and drawn on, her thighs tied wide, her glasses crooked, her mouth still swollen, and the mark on her mound sitting there like it had always been there. It was the kind of picture that would end her if anyone ever saw it. She looked at it for a long time.

"That's you," Jay said. "That's what you look like right now."

She didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that wouldn't be a lie.

He set the phone down and climbed onto the bed over her, and his knees pushed her bound thighs wider, and his cock — she felt it, hot and heavy against the inside of her thigh, still slick from before — dragged up the smooth new skin of her and settled where the mark was, and Rae went very still, because she understood, all at once, exactly what was about to happen.

This was the moment. This was the thing the whole night had been walking toward, the thing the dancing and the dorm room and the knot and the marker had all been leading to, and she lay there with her heart slamming and her mouth dry and did not know if she was about to give it up or have it taken. Maybe both. Maybe there was no difference and there never had been.

"You know what this is," Jay said. His hand came up and cupped her face, thumb on her cheekbone, and it was almost gentle, and the gentleness was the worst thing yet.

"Yes," Rae whispered.

"Say it."

"I—" Her voice cracked. "I've never. I've never done this. I've never done any of this."

"I know." His thumb moved on her cheek. "That's why I'm going slow."

He pressed in.

Just the head, at first, and Rae's whole body arched off the mattress and her bound hands pulled against the knot behind her neck and she made a sound she'd never made before, half gasp and half sob, because he was thick and she was tight and it stretched — God, it stretched — a burning, splitting fullness that her body fought and then, slowly, gave way to.

"Breathe," Jay said. "Breathe out."

She breathed out, and he slid deeper, and something inside her gave — a small sharp pop, a tearing little sting, and she felt it happen and knew what it was, and Jay felt it too because he paused, buried halfway, and looked down at her face.

"There it is," he said quietly. "You did that yourself. You pushed back and popped it."

She had. She hadn't meant to. Her hips had moved on their own, chasing the fullness, and she'd taken her own virginity on his cock, and the thought of it made her cunt clench around him and made her eyes sting at the same time.

"Jay," she said, and it came out like a prayer, which it was, or the closest thing to one she'd ever said.

He began to move.

Slow at first, long strokes, letting her feel every inch of him drag out and push back in, and the wet sound of it filled the little room and the radiator clanked and the lamp threw their shadows up the wall and Rae's bound body rocked with each thrust, her breasts moving, her nipples dragging on the air, her shaved mound pressed against his pelvis with the mark on it hidden between their bodies.

It didn't take long. She was already ruined from before, and the stretch and the fullness and the way he watched her face while he did it — she came again, hard, her cunt ripping tight around him in waves, and she heard herself crying out and didn't care who heard.

And in the middle of it, with her body still shuddering, a thought surfaced in the back of her mind like a bubble coming up through water, and her mouth opened and it came out.

"Wait—wait, Jay, I—it's been a couple weeks. Since my period. I—please don't—don't make me pregnant—"

He slowed. Not stopped. Slowed, and looked down at her, and his hand came off her hip and cupped her face again, holding it still, holding her eyes, and he was still moving inside her, deep and steady, and he smiled.

"No," he said.

"Jay—"

"I'm going to fill you up." His thumb stroked her cheek. His voice was low and calm and certain, like he was explaining something simple to a child. "Right here. Right where the mark is. I'm going to come so deep in you it takes, and you're going to lie there and feel it happen, and you're going to know whose it is."

Rae's eyes went wide behind the crooked glasses, and her mouth opened to say something — stop, or please, or yes, she never knew which — and nothing came out.

"You're not going to stop me," he said. "Are you."

"No," she whispered.

"Good girl."

He fucked her harder then, and Rae stopped thinking in words. There was only the fullness and the wet sound and the heat of him over her and the dry radiator heat in the room and the mark on her skin and the phone on the nightstand with her picture in it, and the pressure built in her again, third time, impossible, and she came around him with a sob and her cunt gripped him and pulled, and she felt him go rigid and heard him groan, low and long, and then he was coming inside her, deep, pressed all the way in, and she felt it — hot and thick and pulsing, filling her, and this time there was no pulling out, no spilling onto the bed, this time it stayed where he put it, and her belly ached with it, and she lay bound and spread and marked and filled and understood, with a clarity that felt like ice water, exactly what she was now.

His.

He stayed inside her a long time after, softening, breathing against her throat, and the radiator knocked its slow rhythm in the wall, and somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed, ordinary and far away, and Rae lay under him with her hands still bound behind her neck and the black hearts still wet on her skin and his come still warm in her, and did not say stop.