The zipper stuck halfway. Cassie worked it with two fingers, thumb and forefinger pinched white, the little metal tab catching on a thread she couldn't see. The locker room smelled like bleach and wet hair and the radiator's steady hiss, that old-building clank underneath it, the pipes knocking every few seconds like something alive in the wall.
She was the last one in. Everyone else had already showered and gone, their wet footprints drying in gray smears across the tile, a forgotten hair tie curled by the drain. She'd told herself she'd be quick. She'd told herself a lot of things today.
The jacket came loose. She peeled it off her shoulders, the mesh still damp at the small of her back, and stood in her sports bra and the shorts that never hid anything, the ones she'd bought because they were on sale and she'd regretted every time she wore them.
"Don't bother with that."
The voice came from behind her, low and flat, and it didn't startle her the way it should have. That was the strange part. Later she would think about that — how she didn't jump, how her body had known before her mind did, how the hair on her arms lifted and something low in her stomach turned over like a coin.
She turned.
Damon was already naked.
He stood by the second row of lockers, one hand on the bench, the other at his side, and he was looking at her the way he looked at an opponent across the strip — reading her, waiting for the tell. His chest was wet, still wet, water beading in the hollow of his throat and running down the flat plane of him, and his thighs were the thighs she'd watched all practice, corded and thick from a thousand lunges, and she was looking at all of that, at the shape of him, when her eyes finally dropped lower.
Her mouth went dry.
Two.
They rose from him one above the other, the upper one thick and veined and flushed dark at the head, the lower one longer, hanging heavier, both of them half-hard and moving slightly with his breath. She had never seen anything like it. She had seen Ethan, she had seen the one other boy before Ethan, she had seen enough internet to think she knew what a body could do — and none of it had prepared her for a man who split the expected shape, who carried twice what he should, who stood there letting her look because he knew exactly what she was seeing.
Her mouth opened. "I should—"
Her hands were already at the waistband of her shorts.
She didn't tell them to. That was what she'd remember, later, when she was lying in her dorm bed staring at the ceiling: not that he'd ordered her, but that her fingers had moved on their own, hooking into the elastic, sliding the shorts down over her hips before she'd finished the sentence she was going to say. The shorts pooled at her feet. She stepped out of them. She reached behind her back for the clasp of her bra and it came open like it had been waiting.
Damon didn't move. He watched her do it, his dark eyes not blinking, and there was something in his face that wasn't surprise, wasn't hunger exactly — something quieter. Certainty. Like he was watching a thing he'd already seen happen, in a room he'd already been in, and she was simply catching up.
"I knew you would," he said.
The bra slid down her arms. She let it fall. Her nipples pulled tight in the cool air and she crossed her arms over her chest without thinking — the old reflex, the flat-chest reflex, the one that had followed her since ninth grade — and he watched her do that too.
"Don't."
She lowered her arms.
He crossed the room. Three steps, bare feet quiet on the wet tile, and then he was close enough that she could smell him — sweat and metal and salt, the sharp tang of a body that had been working, and underneath it something else, something clean and expensive that didn't belong in a locker room. His hand came up and his fingers found her chin, tilting her face up. His thumb pressed just under her lip. She could feel the callus on it, the rope-burn roughness, and she thought absurdly of the fencing grip, of all the hours that hand had spent wrapped around a weapon.
"You know you want this."
She shook her head. Or tried to. His grip didn't let her move much.
"On your knees."
"I have a—"
"On your knees."
The tile was cold. That was the first thing, when she went down — the cold biting into her shins, into the tops of her feet, the shock of it running up through her knees and settling somewhere behind her ribs. She knelt between his feet and looked up at him and the two cocks hung right there in front of her face, close enough that she could see the fine veins branching under the skin, the way the upper one twitched when he breathed, a bead of something clear gathering at the slit.
She thought about Ethan. It came and went fast, a flash of his crooked smile, the sawdust smell of his hands, the way he said take your time, I'm not going anywhere the last time she'd seen him, at the bus station, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Technically they were on a break. Technically. He'd said it himself, hadn't he, that she should go find herself at college, that they'd pick it back up when she was ready. Technically this wasn't cheating.
She was still telling herself that when her hand came up and wrapped around the lower shaft.
It was hot. Hotter than she expected, and heavier, and it filled her palm in a way that made her fingers feel small. She stroked it once, testing, and felt it thicken, felt the skin slide over something hard underneath, and above it the upper cock jerked and the bead at the tip swelled and broke, running down the side.
"Use your mouth," Damon said.
She leaned in. She didn't decide to — she just leaned, her knees sliding a little on the wet tile, and her lips parted and she took the upper cock into her mouth.
The taste hit her first. Salt and skin and something faintly bitter at the tip, and the smell of him flooding her nose, sweat and metal, and her eyes closed without her meaning them to. He was thick. Thicker than Ethan, thicker than she could comfortably take, and she had to open wider, her jaw aching almost immediately, the head of him pressing against the roof of her mouth.
Her hand kept working the lower one. She didn't know why. It was just there, heavy and hot in her palm, and it felt wrong to leave it, felt like it was asking for something, and so she stroked it slow while her mouth slid down the other, taking him deeper, her lips stretching around the widest part.
Above her, Damon exhaled. Just a breath, just a small one, but she heard it, and something in her chest went tight and hot at the sound — she'd done that. She'd pulled that out of him.
She hollowed her cheeks and sucked.
Spit gathered at the corners of her mouth and ran down her chin. She could hear it, the wet sound of her mouth working him, obscene in the tiled room, echoing off the lockers, and the radiator kept hissing underneath it like it was keeping time. She pulled back to breathe and a string of saliva stretched between her lip and the head of him, catching the fluorescent light, and she looked up at Damon and he was looking down at her with those dark unblinking eyes and she felt her face go hot.
She went back down.
This time she took him deeper, past where it was comfortable, until he nudged the back of her throat and she had to fight the reflex, her eyes watering, her free hand braced against his thigh. His skin was hot under her palm and she could feel the muscle there, the corded strength of it, and she felt small kneeling at his feet with her mouth full of him and her hand sliding up and down the lower cock, slick now with her own spit where it had run down.
She worked them both. Her mouth on one, her hand on the other, and she found a rhythm without meaning to, a slow pull and release, and her jaw ached and her knees ached and the cold tile had gone warm under her shins from her own body heat, and none of it mattered because the hunger had opened up in her stomach like a mouth and it was eating everything else.
She thought about the bench. About what came next. She didn't know what came next, exactly — she couldn't picture it, couldn't make the shape of it fit in her head, two of them, both of them — and the not-knowing made her cunt clench around nothing, a slick pulse between her thighs that she felt all the way up into her belly.
Her hand moved faster on the lower shaft. Her mouth moved faster on the upper. She was drooling now, spit running down her chin and dripping onto her own chest, and she didn't care, and she sucked harder, hollowed her cheeks, took him as deep as she could stand, and felt him swell against her tongue, felt the lower one jump in her fist.
Damon's hand came down on the back of her head.
Not pushing. Just there — his palm flat against her hair, his fingers spread, the weight of it settling her, holding her in place while she worked. She could feel the heat of his hand through her hair and she made a sound around his cock, something small and needy that she didn't recognize as her own voice.
He let her go on. One minute. Two. Time had gone soft and strange, measured only in the wet sound of her mouth and the knock of the pipes and the ache building in her jaw, and she would have kept going, she thinks, she would have stayed down there until her knees gave out, if he hadn't pulled her off.
His hand tightened in her hair and drew her back. She came off him with a wet gasp, a line of spit still connecting them, her lips swollen and her chin slick, and she looked up at him breathing hard through her mouth.
Both cocks gleamed. Slick with her, shining under the fluorescent light, the upper one dark and wet and the lower one too, and she'd done that, her mouth and her hand had done that, and something in her chest swelled with a pride that made no sense at all.
Damon looked down at her. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth, wiping away a smear of spit, and his face was still and certain and there was the faintest curve at one corner of his mouth, not quite a smile.
"Good," he said.
His hand stayed in her hair. She stayed where she was, kneeling, waiting, her heart going hard against her ribs, her cunt wet and empty and aching, the cold tile biting into her shins again now that she'd stopped moving.
"Now stand up," he said, "and turn around."