Joe didn't move for a long moment. He stood over them with his cock still slick and softening against his thigh, and he looked at the two of them the way a man looks at a bill he's paid and means to be itemized for. The chandelier hummed. Somewhere past the dining room door, a clock in the hall ticked through the silence like it was counting something.

"Up onto the table," he said. Low. Lazy. The voice of a man who had all night and knew it.

Olivia's hands went flat against the floor first. She pushed herself up without looking at him, and the movement was practiced in a way that made him pause on it — the arch of her back as she rose, the way her shoulders rolled loose before she got her knees under her. Forty-two years old and she moved like a woman who had been looked at her whole life and had learned to make it a weapon. Cum was drying in a streak down her jaw. She didn't wipe it.

Ava got up slower. Her hands were still shaking — he watched her press one palm to the mahogany to steady herself, and the runner under it slid five inches crooked from where Olivia had clawed at it earlier, leaving a dark smear of polish where the wood had been exposed to light for years and nothing else. Ava noticed it. Her eyes stuck on the smear for a second too long, like it was the only thing in the room that made sense.

"All fours, Olivia. Edge of the table. Facing the sideboard."

She climbed up. Her knees found the mahogany and her palms followed, and she settled into the position like she was being fitted for something — spine long, hips high, head down. The sundress was gone, somewhere on the floor near Hank's feet. Joe had taken it off her an hour ago and nobody had picked it up. Her panties were still on. He'd left her the panties on purpose.

"Ava. On your back. Head at the far end. Legs open."

"No."

The word came out of her before she could stop it. She was standing in the middle of the room in the white top and the jeans, and her face was still wet, and she said it again quieter, like the second one was meant for herself. "No."

Joe turned his head toward Hank, slow, unhurried, and Hank — at the sideboard, hands at his sides, scotch abandoned an hour ago — went the color of old paper. He didn't say anything. He looked at his daughter. He looked at the floor. He looked at the floor harder.

"Ava," Joe said, and the name landed soft. "Your father's sentencing guidelines are eleven to fourteen. You can look it up. I did."

She looked at her father. Hank didn't look back.

She got on the table.

She lay back the way he'd told her — head at the far end, hair spilling off the edge and hanging, the wave of it catching chandelier light — and she opened her legs, and her thighs were trembling so hard that the runner bunched under her heels. Her jeans were still on. He'd said legs open, not jeans off. He wanted to see her do it in the clothes she'd been wearing when he walked in. There was a reason and the reason was his, and he kept it to himself.

He walked around the corner of the table. Slow. His bare feet on the hardwood made almost no sound, and that was worse than if they had. He stopped between them — Olivia on all fours facing the sideboard, Ava on her back facing the ceiling — and he stood there with one hand on Ava's knee and the other on Olivia's hip and he just breathed for a second, taking the room in like a man standing at the top of a staircase he'd built himself.

"Olivia," he said. "Turn your head. Watch."

She turned her head. Her cheek came down against the mahogany and her eyes found her daughter across the length of the table, and neither of them said anything. Ava's eyes were open now. She was looking back.

Joe hooked his thumb into the waistband of Olivia's panties — black lace, expensive, the kind of thing a woman wore for a reason — and peeled them down over her hips, over the curve of her ass, down her thighs, and let them hang at her knees. She didn't move. Her breathing had steadied into a rhythm against the wood — in through the nose, out slow, a metronome she was using to keep herself somewhere behind her own face. He could see the effort of it in the tendons of her neck.

He left the panties at her knees. He wanted them there.

Then he moved to Ava.

He got a hand under each of her knees and pushed them wider, and she let him, and the runner slid another inch. The fly of her jeans was already open — she'd done that herself, on the floor, without being asked, and he'd noticed, and he'd filed it away. He got the denim down past her hips and she lifted for him without being told, which was a small thing and a large thing, and he pulled the jeans down her legs and off one ankle and left them hanging off the other. Her panties were white cotton. Wet through the crotch in a dark circle the size of a coin.

"Look at that," he said. Not to her. To the room.

"I hate you," she said. Under her breath. Almost inaudible. Her lip was bitten white on one side.

"I know," Joe said, and pulled her panties to the side and put the head of his cock against her.

She was soaked. He could feel it before he pushed — the slick heat of her, the way her cunt gave against the pressure like it had been waiting and hated itself for waiting. He held there for a second. Just the head. Letting her feel the size of what was coming. Letting her mother watch.

Then he pushed in.

One stroke. All the way. Her body arched off the table like a bow being strung and she screamed — a raw, torn sound that hit the chandelier and came back down on all of them — and her hands scrabbled at the runner and found nothing and kept scrabbling. She was tight. So tight he had to stop halfway and breathe through it, his jaw working, his hands white on her hips.

"Jesus," he said, and it wasn't reverent. It was a man reading a number he liked.

"Get off—" she gasped. "Get off me, get off—"

He pulled back and drove in again, and the second stroke went all the way to the root, and her protest broke in the middle of the word and came out as something else. Her cunt was clenching around him in tight, involuntary pulses, and her heels were digging into the mahogany, and her head had turned to the side so she was looking at her mother — and Olivia was watching. Olivia's cheek was still flat on the wood and her eyes were open and she was watching her daughter get fucked and she wasn't looking away.

Joe set a rhythm. Fast. Punishing. His hips slapping against the backs of Ava's thighs, the table creaking under her, the chandelier swinging just slightly with each thrust so the light moved across his chest in slow arcs. Sweat came up on him quick — it was a warm room and he was working — and it caught the light and ran down between his shoulder blades.

"You feel that," he said. Down at her. "That's what you've been walking around with all night. That's the thing you were going to keep from me."

"Fuck—" Ava's voice cracked. "Fuck you—"

He laughed. Short. Then he pulled out.

Ava made a sound — a wet, involuntary sound of loss that she would hate herself for later — and Joe was already moving, two steps around the corner of the table, and he put his hand flat on the small of Olivia's back and drove into her from behind in one motion.

She took it better than her daughter had. That was the thing that got him. She took it with a gasp that she swallowed almost immediately, and her spine dipped into a long curve, and her cunt was wet and open around him, and she held her position like a woman who had decided that if this was going to happen she was going to be good at it in a way that nobody could take from her. Her hands stayed flat on the mahogany. She didn't claw.

"There she is," Joe said, low. "There's the woman who was going to fight me."

"Don't flatter yourself," Olivia said. Her voice was steady. It cost her something to make it steady and he could hear the cost in it, and it made him harder.

He fucked her hard. Harder than he'd fucked Ava — she could take it and she knew she could take it and he knew it too, and there was something in the room now that hadn't been there before, which was that Olivia had made a decision and the decision was to be exactly as good at this as she was at everything else, and Joe was the instrument of it, and she hated him for it and used him for it in the same stroke. He reached forward and got a fistful of her pulled-back hair and pulled her head up off the table and she made a sound — low, in her chest — and her hips pushed back against him without her permission.

"Your husband's watching," Joe said into her ear. "Your daughter's watching. You want them to see you like this?"

"They've seen worse tonight," Olivia said.

He laughed again and let go of her hair and pulled out.

Back to Ava. He didn't say anything this time — just got his hands under her hips and dragged her down the table toward him, her head sliding off the edge of the runner, her hair sweeping the floor, and he put his cock back into her in one stroke and she screamed again, and this time it was shorter, and this time her hips came up to meet him without her meaning to.

He fucked her fast and shallow and watched her face. She had her eyes closed now and her mouth open and she was making small sounds on every thrust, and her hands had stopped scrabbling at the runner and were just gripping it, white-knuckled, holding on. Her cunt was wetter than it had been. She was getting wetter. He could feel it — the slick, easy slide of it, the way she'd gone from fighting him to taking him in the space of two minutes, and he wanted her to know he'd noticed, and he wanted her mother to know he'd noticed.

"Look at her, Olivia," he said. "Look at your daughter."

Olivia looked.

"She's not crying anymore."

Ava wasn't. Her face was wet but it was old wet — the tears had dried in tracks and no new ones were coming. Her breath was coming in short huffs through her open mouth and her thighs had stopped trembling and were just spread, wide, taking him. She was still biting her lip. But she was meeting him now, small hitches of her hips, and she didn't seem to know she was doing it, and that was the thing Joe would remember about this night.

He pulled out of her and went back to Olivia. Then back to Ava. Then Olivia again — her this time with a thumb pressed to her asshole, just the pressure, just to hear the sound she made — and then Ava, and each time he switched he was rougher, and each time the table creaked louder, and the runner had slid so far out of true that one end of it was hanging off the edge of the mahogany. Lemons had rolled onto the floor at some point. Nobody had heard them fall.

Hank stood at the sideboard the whole time. Hands at his sides. He had not moved. He had not spoken. He had not looked away, either, which was its own kind of thing, and Joe had clocked it, and Joe would use it later.

He came back to Ava last.

He got her by the hips and pulled her down the table one more time, so her ass was right at the edge and her legs were hooked up over his forearms, and he drove into her with a groan that came up out of his chest and he stayed there — hips flush against hers, cock buried to the root, no pulling back, no rhythm, just the pressure of him all the way inside her and his hands locked on her hips and his breathing loud in the room.

Ava's eyes flew open.

"Wait—" she said. "Wait, wait, are you—"

He came.

The first spurt went into her hot and thick and she felt it — he watched her feel it, watched the exact second it landed, watched her whole body understand what was happening before her face did — and her hands came off the runner and grabbed at his forearms and her mouth opened all the way and she screamed it at him, raw, at the ceiling, at her father, at the room.

"I'm not on the pill, you fucking asshole!"

He came harder than he had in years. He came in long, wringing pulses that made his knees lock and his jaw clench and his eyes close, and he held her pinned there through all of it, hips flush, cock twitching and emptying into her, and he could feel his own cum flooding back around him as she clenched and shook and tried to get out from under him and couldn't. It leaked out of her at the base of him and ran down over his balls and onto the table. She was still screaming. She was screaming something he couldn't hear over the blood in his ears.

When it was done he stayed inside her. He opened his eyes.

Olivia was watching from the other end of the table, still on all fours, panties at her knees, and her face was unreadable — dark and still, the mask back on, and behind it something he couldn't name and didn't need to. Hank had turned his head away finally. Too late to count for anything.

Joe pulled out of Ava slow. His cock came out slick and whitish and still half-hard, and a thick rope of his cum followed it out of her and ran down between her legs and onto the mahogany. She was crying again. Quietly this time. Her hands had let go of his forearms and were just lying on the table, palms up.

Joe looked down at the mess of her — flushed, open, dripping — and then at Olivia across the table, and then at Hank at the sideboard, and he laughed. Low and easy and genuinely amused, the way a man laughs when something has gone better than he planned.

"We're only just beginning," he said. "I'm going to fill you up so much your little pussy's going to be a baby factory."