The remote clicked against the leather. A small, plastic sound, and then nothing but the lamp.

Vivienne stayed where she was. Knees on the cold, sticky couch cushion, palms flat against her thighs, wet hair dripping onto the black lace and down between her shoulder blades. The floor lamp buzzed — a thin, insect drone that had been there so long she'd stopped hearing it, and now heard again, because there was nothing else. The house was empty the way a house is empty when the last other person has driven away and not come back. Dust in the light. Whiskey somewhere in the grain of the leather, old and sour.

She could feel the bruise on her ass without touching it. The skin there was tight and hot, a purple ache that announced itself every time she shifted her weight. The lace rode up into the crease and she did not reach back to fix it.

He looked at her for a while. She had learned the shape of that look — flat, patient, the way a man looks at something he owns and hasn't decided what to do with yet.

"Stand," he said.

She did not move.

It was not defiance. It was that the word didn't make sense for a second — she had been on her knees for so long, first in the shower with the water running over her face, then crawling across the carpet with her palms going tacky on the fibers, that her body had reorganized itself around the floor. Standing was a thing other people did. The word hung in the room and she looked at him and he looked back, and the lamp buzzed, and she understood that he was not going to repeat it.

So she rose.

Her knees cracked. Both of them, small and sharp in the quiet, and a sound came out of her mouth before she could catch it — a thin exhale through her teeth as the blood rushed down and the bruise on her ass pulled. She got her feet under her and straightened, one hand braced on the arm of the couch, and she stood in front of him in the black lace with her hair dripping onto her collarbone and her thighs still trembling from the crawl.

It was a mercy. She knew it was a mercy. He had made her crawl from the bathroom to the kitchen and back and down the hall, and now he had let her stand, and standing felt worse than kneeling, because standing meant her body was hers again for a moment, and she had to remember what that felt like, and she knew he was going to take it away.

"You're dripping on the floor," he said.

She looked down. A small dark circle on the hardwood, spreading, where her hair had let go of the shower. "I know."

"I didn't say stop."

"I'm not stopping."

He spread his legs. The hoodie hung open on his chest, and his hands rested loose on his thighs, and he tipped his head back against the couch and watched her from under his lashes.

"Dance for me," he said.

She didn't answer.

"Like you did before. In the lingerie. Show me your ass, your tits, your cunt." His voice was quiet and unhurried, the same voice he used to ask her to pass the salt. "You remember how."

She remembered. That was the thing. She remembered the bedroom four days ago, the black lace and the heels he'd made her wear, the way she'd moved for him because he'd counted down from ten and she'd known what happened at zero. She remembered the slap when she'd stopped. She remembered the taste of her own blood in the corner of her mouth and the way he'd come across her stomach and told her to clean it up with her fingers.

"I remember," she said. Flat. Not a question, not an apology. Just the fact.

"Then do it."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you go back on the floor." He said it without heat. "And you stay there until I'm bored. And I've got all night, Vivienne. You know I do."

She moved.

The first sway of her hips was mechanical, the way a woman moves when she's counting the seconds. The lamp threw her shadow long and sharp across the wall, and the shadow moved with her, and she watched it instead of him — the shape of her own body in black lace, hips turning, arms lifting. Her hands came up and slid along her own sides, over the lace, down her thighs, and back up. The lace was damp where the shower water still clung to it, and the fabric dragged on her skin.

"Slower," he said.

She slowed.

"Look at me."

She looked at him. His eyes were on her hips, on the line of her waist, on the way the lace cupped her breasts. His hand had drifted to the front of his jeans and was resting there, not moving, just resting, and she felt her stomach turn over and she kept dancing anyway, because the alternative was the floor and the belt of his arm and the long, patient work of being broken again.

"You're good at this," he said.

"I've had practice."

"Not like this." His thumb moved once, lazy, along the seam of his jeans. "You never danced like this for him."

She didn't answer. Her hips kept turning. She wasn't going to give him the name.

"Say it," he said.

"There's nothing to say."

"Say you never danced like this for my father."

The lamp buzzed. Her hands slid down her own ribs and back up, and she kept her face still, and she thought about the belt, and she thought about the floor. "I never danced like this for your father," she said.

"Good." He settled back. "Turn."

She turned. Slow, hips first, and when her back was to him she heard him breathe out through his nose — a small sound, almost a laugh, almost approval. She bent forward. Not far. Just enough that the lace pulled tight across her ass and the bruise showed, purple and yellow at the edges, the skin still raised where his hand had landed over and over.

"There it is," he said. "That's mine."

"Yes, Master."

"Say whose."

"Yours."

"Say the rest."

She stayed bent, looking at the floor between her own feet, at the small wet circle her hair had made. "It's yours, Master. The bruise is yours. You put it there."

"I did."

"You did."

She straightened. She turned back to face him. Her hands came up to her breasts, and she cupped them through the lace, and she felt the weight of them in her own palms, the nipples hard against the fabric, and she hated that they were hard, hated that her body had decided on its own to answer the room instead of her.

"Good girl," he said.

The words landed somewhere behind her sternum. She felt them go in and settle, and she kept dancing, and she hated that too — that a word from him could find a soft place in her chest and curl up there like it belonged. She had spent twenty years being told she was excellent. Boardrooms, dinner parties, the way she could walk into a room and have it rearrange itself around her. None of it had ever landed like that. Two words from a nineteen-year-old on a couch, and her throat went tight.

"You like that," he said.

"No."

"Your nipples are hard."

"That's the cold."

"It's not cold in here." He watched her hands move over the lace. "Say it again. Say you don't like it."

She kept moving. Hips slow, hands on her breasts, eyes on his. The lamp buzzed. Her hair dripped. Somewhere outside, a car went past on the road, and the headlights swung across the wall and were gone, and the room went back to the one yellow light and the smell of dust and old whiskey.

"I don't like it," she said.

"Liar."

She said nothing. Her hands kept moving.

"Come here," he said.

She stopped dancing. She walked to him, and she did not kneel, because he had not told her to kneel, and she stood between his spread knees with her hands at her sides and waited.

He reached up and hooked one finger under the strap of the lace bra and pulled it down her shoulder. Then the other. The lace sagged, and her breasts came free, and the cool air of the room moved across her nipples and she felt them tighten further, and she did not cover herself.

"You're shaking," he said.

"Yes, Master."

"Why."

She looked at him. The question was real. He wanted to know. That was the thing she kept having to relearn about him — that he was not stupid, that he watched, that he asked questions and waited for the answers and filed them away somewhere she couldn't see.

"Because I don't know what you're going to do," she said.

"You know exactly what I'm going to do."

"No." She said it quietly. "I know what you've done. I don't know what's next. That's different."

He considered that. His thumb moved once across the inside of her thigh, high up, close to the lace of the panties, and she felt the skin there jump under his hand and she hated her skin for it.

"Tell me what you're afraid of," he said.

"I'm not afraid."

"You're shaking."

"I'm cold."

"You're lying." His thumb moved again, slow. "Tell me what you're afraid of, and I'll let you sit down."

She looked at the floor. At the small wet circle. At the grain of the leather and the dust in the lamplight. "That I'll stop wanting to leave," she said.

He didn't smile. He looked at her for a long moment, and something moved behind his face and was gone. "Sit on my lap," he said. "Facing me."

She hesitated. Half a second. He saw it — she watched him see it — and his hand closed around her wrist, not hard, and he pulled her down.

She came down across his thighs with her knees on either side of him, and the bruise on her ass met the rough denim of his jeans and she made a sound through her teeth and her hands went to his shoulders to catch herself. He let her settle. Then his hand went flat on the small of her back and pressed her closer, and she felt him through his jeans, hard against the inside of her thigh, and her whole body went still.

"There," he said. "That's better."

"Nate—"

"Master."

She closed her eyes. Opened them. "Master."

"Say it again."

"Master."

"Good." His hand slid up her back, over the lace that was still hooked around her ribs, and settled at the nape of her neck — the shaved strip there, the bare skin he'd had Dana take down to nothing. His thumb moved over it, back and forth, and she felt the small hairs that were left stand up under his touch. "You're going to sit right there and let me touch you. And you're not going to move unless I tell you to."

"Yes, Master."

"Say the whole thing."

"I'm going to sit here and let you touch me," she said. "And I won't move unless you tell me to."

"Good." His other hand went between them. Two fingers, flat, pressed against the lace of the panties, and she felt the fabric go warm under his palm and she knew he could feel the heat coming back through it. He didn't move his hand. Just held it there, flat, and looked at her face while he did it.

"You're wet," he said.

"Yes, Master."

"Say why."

She looked at him. Her jaw worked. "Because you touched me."

"That's not why."

"It is."

His fingers pressed harder. The lace went slick under the pressure and she felt it — the wet sound of it, small and unmistakable, and her face went hot.

"Say it right," he said.

"Because I'm yours." The words came out flat and fast, like she was spitting them, and she watched his mouth move — not quite a smile, but something. "Because I'm your slave and you own me and my body does what it does. That's all it is."

"That's all it is," he repeated. He hooked his fingers under the lace at her hip and pulled the panties to the side, and the cool air hit her cunt and she felt how wet she was, how the slick had gathered and was waiting, and she did not close her legs, because he had told her not to move.

He slid one finger into her.

She made a sound. Not a word. Her hands tightened on his shoulders and her hips tipped forward an inch before she caught them and pulled them back, and he felt the catch, and he said, "Good," and pushed the finger in to the knuckle.

"You're tight," he said. "You're always tight. Even when you're dripping, you're tight."

"Yes, Master."

"Tell me how it feels."

She breathed out through her nose. Her thighs were already trembling on either side of him. "It feels like you're inside me."

"That's not what I asked."

"It feels—" Her voice caught on the second word. "It feels like you own the inside of me too."

"I do."

"No."

He pulled the finger out slow and pushed it back in, and the wet sound of it filled the small space between them, and she heard it and hated it and her cunt clenched around him anyway. He added a second finger. She felt the stretch and her breath caught, and he worked them in and out, curling them on the way in, and she felt the pads of his fingers drag across something inside her that made her thighs shake.

"Look at me," he said.

She looked at him.

"You're going to come on my hand," he said. "And you're going to say my name when you do it. Not Master. My name."

"Nate—" Her voice cracked on it. "Nate, please. Please don't do that."

"That's right." His thumb found her clit and pressed, and his fingers kept working inside her, and she felt the pressure build low and hot and she bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep it from going anywhere, and he watched her do it and said, "Don't."

She let go of her cheek. The sound that came out was not a word — a thin, high whimper that broke in the middle, and another one behind it, and she shook her head against his shoulder and her hands slid from his shoulders to the back of his neck and she held on. His thumb circled her clit, slow and hard, and his fingers curled and curled, and she felt the whole thing climb up through her stomach and into her chest, and she did not want it, and her body kept climbing anyway.

"Please," she said. "Please stop. Please, I don't want—"

"Please what."

"Please don't make me." The words came out wet and broken, and she heard how small she sounded, and she hated it, and she said it again anyway. "Please don't."

"I'm not going to stop. Now, say my name."

"Nate," she said. "Nate."

"Again."

"Nate—"

She came. She didn't want to and she came anyway — her cunt clenched down on his fingers and her hips rolled forward and she couldn't stop them this time, and the sound she made was low and broken and came from somewhere under her ribs, and it was not a sound of pleasure. He kept his fingers moving through it, slow, until she flinched, and then he pulled them out and held them up between them, slick and shining in the lamplight.

"Open," he said.

She opened her mouth.

He put his fingers on her tongue and she tasted herself — salt and musk and the faint chemical edge of the lace — and she closed her lips around them and sucked them clean because he had not told her to stop, and his eyes stayed on her the whole time, flat and patient and pleased.

"You taste like mine," he said.

She nodded, mouth full.

He pulled his hand back. He put it on her hip and held her there on his lap, and she could still feel him hard under her through the denim, and she knew that was not finished, that it was only paused.

"Good girl," he said again.

She sat on his lap with her hands on the back of his neck and her breasts bare and her hair dripping and the taste of herself in her mouth, and she waited, because his other hand had moved to his own lap, to the button of his jeans, and she knew what that meant, and she did not know what he would say next.

His fingers found the button. The small metal circle slid through the denim and the zipper came down, tooth by tooth, and she heard it because there was nothing else in the room but the lamp and her own breathing and the wet sound of her own mouth still working on nothing.

He didn't pull himself out. He just sat there with his jeans open and his hand resting on his own stomach, watching her.

"Kiss me," he said.

She didn't move. Her hands were still on the back of his neck and her breasts were still bare and the taste of herself was still in her mouth and she did not move.

"I said kiss me."

"No."

He didn't answer. He waited. And that was worse than the slap she was braced for — the waiting, the flat gray eyes, the way he let the word sit in the room and go stale. She counted the lamp buzzes. She got to four.

Then she leaned in.

She pressed her mouth to his. Dry, closed, a peck the way you'd kiss a cheek at a funeral. She pulled back an inch and he was already looking at her with something like disappointment, and before she could decide what that meant his palm cracked across her face.

The slap turned her head. Her ear rang. She tasted copper at the corner of her lip and her hand came up on instinct and he caught her wrist and put it back on his shoulder.

"Again," he said. "And do it like you mean it, or I'll do it again."

She leaned in again.

This time he took it. His mouth opened under hers and his tongue pushed in past her teeth, and she made a small sound — a whimper, thin, involuntary, the kind of sound that came out of her when her body did something before her mind could stop it — and she held still and let him in. His tongue moved over hers, slow, exploring, the way a man explores a mouth he's decided belongs to him. He tasted like the whiskey he'd been drinking earlier and something underneath it, salt and sleep, and she kept her lips parted and her tongue still and let him do what he wanted.

She hated it.

That was the thing she hadn't expected. She had thought she was past the point where anything he did could reach a new place in her. She had swallowed his cum. She had crawled on her knees across his floor. She had let him put his fingers inside her and she had come on them and she had licked herself off his hand. But this — his mouth on hers, his tongue in her mouth, the slow, patient, almost tender way he was doing it — this was worse. This was worse than all of it. Because his fingers and his cock and his open palm were about what he wanted from her body. This was about what he wanted from her. And what he wanted from her was the one thing she had ever given freely, and she had only ever given it to two men, and one of them was at the bottom of the Pacific.

Harry kissed her like this.

Not the same — Harry had been softer, slower, had always pulled back to look at her face before he went deeper — but the shape of it was the same. The tongue, the angle of the head, the hand that came up to the jaw. She felt Nate's hand come up to her jaw and she felt her whole body go cold.

"Use your tongue," he said against her mouth. "Don't just sit there."

She tried.

She moved her tongue against his and it was wrong — the wrong pressure, the wrong rhythm, the wrong mouth — and her throat closed around a sound she swallowed before it could get out. She tried again. Her tongue slid along his and she felt him make a low noise in his chest, approval or hunger or both, and his hand tightened on her jaw and he kissed her deeper, and she kept trying, and every second of it was a lie she was telling with her mouth.

She was kissing her husband's son. She was kissing him the way she used to kiss her husband. And her body — her traitor body, the body that had gone wet under his fingers twenty minutes ago — her body didn't even have the decency to be disgusted. It just sat there and let it happen. It let him in. It let him take.

His other hand came off her hip and cracked down on her bare ass.

The slap landed on the bruise. She broke the kiss with a cry — a real one, high and sharp, and her hips bucked forward against him and her hands clawed at his shoulders, and the pain went up her spine like a struck match and her eyes watered and she didn't have to fake the sound at all.

"Use your tongue," he said again, flat. "I told you."

"I am—"

"You're not." His hand came down again. Same spot. The second slap landed on top of the first and the pain doubled and went white at the edges, and she made a sound that was half a sob and half a word, and he caught her face in his hand and turned it back to him. "Open your mouth."

She opened her mouth.

He kissed her again, and this time he pushed his tongue in deep, all the way, and she felt the back of her throat close around the intrusion and she made another small, wet, miserable sound, and she moved her tongue because he'd told her to and because the alternative was the flat of his hand on her bruise again and she couldn't take another one. She moved her tongue. She curled it up along the underside of his. She let him suck on it. She let him do all of it.

And she thought about Harry.

She didn't mean to. It wasn't a decision. It was that the mouth on hers was shaped a certain way — the same jaw, the same teeth, the same broad Ashford face, and she'd kissed that face for six years, and she'd kissed it on the mouth a thousand times, and the last time she'd kissed it had been at the front door with his suitcase by his feet and his hand on her waist, and she'd said come back to me and he'd said always, and he hadn't. He hadn't come back. He was down there in the dark water where the light didn't reach and there was no one left on earth who kissed her like that except the boy who was doing it now.

Her mouth opened under his and she stopped trying to move her tongue and she just let him have it, and something in her chest cracked open, and the name came out before she could stop it.

"Harry."

It was barely a word. It was a breath with a shape. She felt it leave her mouth into his and she felt him stop.

He went still.

Not the stillness of a man deciding what to do. The other stillness. The stillness of a man who has just been hit somewhere he didn't know was still soft. His tongue stopped moving. His hand on her jaw loosened and then didn't let go, just held, and she opened her eyes and looked at him and saw it — saw the flat gray go strange, saw something move behind his face that she had only seen once before, in the kitchen, on the eleventh morning, when he'd told her the search had been called off.

Grief.

It came up through him like water through a floor. She watched it happen. His eyes went wet and he blinked and the wet stayed, and his mouth — the mouth that had just been inside hers — pulled down at the corner, and his hand on her jaw started to shake, just slightly, just at the fingertips.

She was still sitting on his lap. Her breasts were still bare. Her cunt was still wet against the open V of his jeans. And she had just said his father's name into his mouth while he kissed her, and she had meant it, and he knew she had meant it, and neither of them could take it back.

"Get off," he said.

His voice was wrong. Thin. He didn't push her. He just said it, and she got off, and she stood beside the couch with her hands at her sides and her hair dripping onto her shoulder and she watched him.

He didn't look at her. He got up and pulled his jeans closed without buttoning them and walked out of the living room, past the kitchen doorway, into the hall, and she heard his feet on the stairs. Not her stairs. Not the master bedroom he'd claimed. His own room. The door opened and closed, and the latch caught, and then the house was quiet again.

The lamp buzzed.

She stood there for a while. She didn't know how long. Her ass throbbed where he'd slapped her and her mouth still tasted like him and the name was still in the room, hanging there, and she could not make herself move.

Harry.

She had said his name because she had wanted him. That was the truth of it, the ugly one, the one she was going to have to carry. Not because she was trying to hurt Nate. Not because she was being clever. Because she had been kissing a mouth that was almost his and she had wanted it to be his, and the wanting had come up out of her and out of her mouth before she could stop it, and the boy on the couch had heard it.

She put her hand up to her mouth. Her lips were swollen. She could feel the heat of them under her fingers, and she could feel the small cut at the corner where the slap had split the skin, and she pressed her thumb against it until it stung.

He was dead. Harry was dead. Somewhere four thousand meters down, in the cold and the dark, and she had just kissed his son and said his name and the son had gone away to cry about it in his room, and she was standing in the living room in black lace with her tits out and her hair dripping and her body still humming from what he'd done to her on the couch.

She should have felt something about that. She didn't know what. She felt the floor under her feet and the air on her skin and the wet circle her hair had made on the hardwood, and that was all.

She turned and walked to the stairs.

She didn't crawl. She didn't think about crawling. She put her foot on the first step and then the second and she climbed, and the rule was somewhere behind her in the room with the lamp and the leather and the taste of him, and she left it there. Her knees ached from the hours on the floor. Her thighs ached from the crawl. She went up the stairs one at a time with her hand on the rail and she didn't look at his door when she passed it. She heard nothing from behind it. No sound at all.

Her own door was open. She walked through it and closed it behind her and stood in the dark of her own bedroom, and the bed was there in front of her, the bed with the sheets still rumpled from the morning, the bed where she had knelt and taken him in her mouth and swallowed him, the bed where she had lain on her side with her nightgown twisted and her ass purple and her eyes open all night.

She didn't turn on the light. She pulled the black lace over her head and dropped it on the floor and she didn't bother with anything else. She got into the bed. The sheets were cold and they smelled like her, like the serum she used at night and the shampoo in her hair, and she pulled them up to her chin and lay on her side with her knees drawn up and her hands tucked between her thighs.

The house creaked. The lamp was still on downstairs — she could see the yellow edge of it under the door, a thin line across the floor. Somewhere in the wall a pipe ticked as it cooled.

She closed her eyes.

She did not think about the rule. She did not think about tomorrow. She thought about the front door and a suitcase and a hand on her waist and a word he had said to her that he hadn't kept, and she lay there with her lips still swollen and her ass still hot and her cunt still faintly wet from the fingers of his son, and the name went around and around in her head like a coin in a dryer, and somewhere in the middle of it she stopped hearing it, and somewhere after that she stopped hearing the lamp, and she slept.