The drill came up off the tray with a sound Tyler knew in his teeth before it ever touched him — that low electrical whine that lived in the walls of this place, the one he'd heard at 6:48 in the morning with his hand on a door he should have walked through. Dr. Mack held it at chest height, thumb resting on the switch, letting the motor idle. The burr caught the lamp and threw a thin white point of light across her knuckles, across the steel tray, across the floor.

"You asked what the last one wasn't ready for," she said.

The bite block held his mouth open so wide his jaw ached at the hinges. He tried to say something around it and produced only a wet, throttled noise, spit pooling at the back of his tongue. The strap behind his head had been buckled tight enough that he could feel his own pulse in it.

"This," she said.

Renata's hand was still in his jeans. She hadn't stopped — she'd been working him slow and even the whole time Dr. Mack was strapping the block in, a lazy pull from root to tip and back, her thumb dragging a wet circle just under the head every third stroke. His cock had been leaking against her palm for minutes. He could hear it, faint and obscene under the drill's idle, that small tacky sound of skin moving on slick skin.

The drill rose toward his face and his cock jumped in her hand. He felt it happen — the twitch, the fresh bead of pre-come that welled up and smeared into her fingers — and he felt her notice, because she made a soft sound through her nose, almost a laugh, and tightened her grip by a degree.

"Easy," Renata said, close to his ear. Her ponytail brushed his shoulder. She smelled like mint and, under it, like herself — the warm animal smell of a woman who'd been on a cot twenty minutes ago with her scrubs half off. "You're doing good. Keep your eyes open."

Dr. Mack's free hand came up and took his jaw. Her fingers were cool and dry and very strong — the grip of someone who had held a lot of faces still — and she turned his head against the resistance of his own neck until his cheek settled into the vinyl headrest and his mouth pointed straight up at the lamp. The bite block ground against his tongue. He tasted rubber and the faint copper of his own gum where the edge had pressed too hard.

"You'll feel the pressure," she said. "Not the pain. The block keeps your tongue clear. Don't fight it, sweetheart — you'll only make me slow."

The lamp was a white circle in his vision, and around it the room was nothing but the tea-colored dark and the two of them. Renata's hand moved down his shaft and back up, slow, and he heard himself breathe out hard through his nose. The cuffs creaked at his wrists. His ankles were strapped to the chair legs, and when he flexed his feet the leather bit into the tops of them.

The burr touched his molar.

It was the smooth one — the tooth that wasn't his, the one that had come back from the first night without a crack in it and without a nerve, a stranger's tooth set into his jaw. He knew the shape of it now with his tongue. He'd spent a week knowing it. And when the drill landed, the whole of him went rigid at once, from the cuffs to the straps, every muscle locking as if he'd been dropped into ice.

The sound was inside his skull. Not through his ears — through the bone, a high grinding shriek that seemed to come from behind his eyes, and the vibration rode down from the tooth into the hinge of his jaw and then further, into his neck, into his chest, into the chair itself, until the whole chair was humming under him like a struck tuning fork.

It didn't hurt. That was the thing he couldn't get his mind around. The tooth was dead, the gum was numb, and all he had was pressure — a deep, wrong, grinding pressure, like someone turning a screw into a block of wood that had no give left in it. Dr. Mack leaned her weight into the handpiece and the pressure went deeper, and he heard the pitch of the motor change as the burr found the hard enamel and started to cut.

Renata's hand never stopped.

"There he is," she said softly. "Feel that? That's the vibration. Goes all the way down, doesn't it."

It did. It went down through his jaw and his throat and his spine and it found the base of his cock, and every time the drill bit deeper the vibration pulsed through him and Renata's fist answered it, squeezing on the pulse, stroking up on the release. His hips lifted off the vinyl. The cuffs caught him and held him and he strained against them without deciding to, a long shudder running the length of his body.

"Good," Dr. Mack said, without looking away from his mouth. "That's the right response. Hold his head."

Renata's free hand came up and pressed flat against his forehead, pinning him into the headrest. Now he couldn't move at all — not his head, not his hands, not his feet. He could only lie there and take it, mouth open, jaw cranked wide, the drill grinding a channel into the tooth that wasn't his while the woman above him worked his cock like she was keeping time with the motor.

The burr withdrew and the pressure eased and he sucked air in through his nose in a long ragged pull. His vision swam. The lamp was still there, white and indifferent.

"Halfway," Dr. Mack said. She tilted the handpiece and looked down into his mouth with the flat, absorbed expression of a woman reading a page. "You're doing better than most. The last one screamed through the whole thing and I had to stop twice."

"He's not going to scream," Renata said. She was stroking him faster now, her wrist working in short tight arcs, and her voice had gone low and warm and certain. "Are you, Tyler. You're going to come for us instead."

The drill came back down.

This time he was ready for the sound and it didn't save him. The burr bit and the vibration started again, deeper now, and Dr. Mack's hand on his jaw shifted its grip so she could lean her whole weight in, and the pressure went from wrong to unbearable to something past unbearable that had no name, a grinding fullness in the root of the tooth that radiated out into his cheekbone and up behind his eye. His toes curled inside his socks. He made a sound around the bite block — not a scream, something lower, a groan that came up from his chest and got trapped behind the rubber.

"That's it," Renata breathed. "There it is."

Her thumb found the spot under the head of his cock and pressed, and her other hand slid up into his hair and gripped, and the vibration from the drill was still rolling down his spine in steady waves, and he was suddenly, terribly close. His balls drew up tight against his body. His thighs shook against the straps. He tried to say something — he didn't know what — and it came out as a wet noise around the block.

"Don't stop," Dr. Mack said, to Renata, without lifting her eyes from his mouth. "He's almost there. Keep him on the edge until I finish the crown."

She pulled the burr back and the pressure eased and Tyler nearly sobbed. Renata's hand slowed to a crawl, just barely moving, just enough to keep him hard and leaking and desperate, and he hung there on the edge with his whole body shaking and the taste of rubber flooding his mouth.

"Please," he got out, around the block. It came out mangled. "Please —"

"Please what," Renata said. She was smiling; he could hear it. "You don't even know, do you. You just want."

Dr. Mack changed instruments — he heard the click of the handpiece going back onto the tray and another one coming off it, a thinner sound, a different pitch when she thumbed the switch. She leaned back over him and her face came into the lamp, and her eyes were pale and flat and entirely calm, the way they'd been the first night when she'd told him he could work it off.

"Open wider," she said. "This one's for the inside."

He couldn't open wider. The block had him already at the limit. But he tried, and the strap bit into the back of his skull, and she made a small approving sound and set the burr against the tooth again.

This time when it bit, the vibration was finer and faster and it went straight up into the root, and his back arched off the vinyl so hard the chair creaked. Renata's hand started moving again, matching the drill, fast and tight and merciless, and the two rhythms locked together in his body — the grind in his jaw and the pull on his cock, the pressure and the pleasure braided so tight he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

"Come for me," Renata said, right at his ear. "Come on, Tyler. Let her hear you."

The drill hit something and the vibration spiked and he came.

It tore out of him from the root — his whole body convulsing against the cuffs, his hips bucking up into Renata's fist, his head slamming back into the headrest under her hand. The first pulse hit the back of her knuckles and the second ran down over her fingers and the third he felt leave him with a wrench that left him gasping around the block. His vision went white at the edges. The chair rattled under him. He heard himself making a sound he'd never made before, low and broken and continuous, and he heard Renata laughing softly and saying there he is, there he is, and he felt her hand keep working him through it, milking him, until he was twitching and oversensitive and trying to pull away from her grip.

The drill pulled back and the motor wound down and the room went quiet except for his own ragged breathing and the wet sound of Renata's hand finally letting go of him.

Dr. Mack looked down at his mouth for a long moment, and then at Renata's hand, and something moved across her face that might have been satisfaction and might have been nothing at all.

"There," she said. She set the handpiece down on the tray and reached for something else — longer, thinner, catching the lamp as she lifted it. "Now you're ready."

Tyler lay in the chair with his chest heaving and his come cooling on Renata's fingers and his jaw still cranked open around the block, and he understood, dimly, that the tooth wasn't finished, that whatever she'd just opened she was about to go back into, and that Renata's hand was still wet on his skin and hadn't moved away.