Joe didn't move for a long moment. He stood there with his cock still out, slick and half-hard and cooling in the dining room air, and he looked down at Ava the way a man looks at a job he's finished well. Her cheek was flat against the mahogany, one eye open and unfocused, her breath coming in hitches that didn't quite resolve into crying anymore. Just air moving wrong. His cum had run down the inside of her thigh and pooled in the crotch of her panties where they were still hooked around one ankle, and the smell of it was under everything now — under the beeswax, under the whiskey, under the last ghost of Olivia's perfume. Salt and sex and lemon peel.

He reached down and ran two fingers through the mess on her thigh, slow, gathering it, and lifted it to his own mouth without ceremony. Tasted himself. Tasted her. Then he wiped the hand on the edge of the runner and straightened up.

The laugh came up out of him easy, the way it had a minute ago, low and genuinely amused and a little tired around the edges. He shook his head.

"Next week," he said. "Same time. I can't wait."

The room went very still.

Hank's voice came out of the sideboard before anyone else could move — cracked down the middle, the way a hinge sounds before it gives.

"This was a one-time thing." His knuckles were white around the whiskey glass; the amber inside it had started to tremble and he hadn't noticed. "You said—Joe, you said my freedom. That was the deal. That was the deal."

Joe turned. He didn't bother tucking himself in. Let Hank look at it. Let him look at what had just been inside his daughter and what was still shiny with her.

"The deal changed," he said.

"You can't—"

"You fucked my family, Hank." Joe said it mild, conversational, the way he'd say a line item on a balance sheet. "Six years ago. You and Marlene in the back of the shop in Passaic, and you looked at me across the parking lot the next morning and asked me how my mother was doing. So now I fuck yours." He tilted his head. "Over and over. Until both of them are pregnant."

The glass hit the sideboard with a click. Hank had set it down without meaning to. His hand stayed on it, splayed, like the wood was the only thing holding him upright.

Olivia's back had gone rigid at the far end of the table. She was still on all fours, still naked, her panties still ringed around her knees, and she turned her head toward her husband slow, the way a woman turns toward a sound in the night. Her voice came out flat.

"Hank."

He didn't look at her.

"Hank."

"Don't." His jaw was working. "Don't, Liv."

"You told me it was the company. You told me—" She stopped. Started again, quieter, and the quiet was worse. "You told me it was a business decision. You told me it was numbers."

"It was."

"It was Marlene."

"It was twenty years ago and it was nothing—"

"It was nothing." She repeated it back at him like she was turning the word over to see which side was dirty. Then she laughed, one short ugly note, and put her hand flat on the table and pushed herself up onto her knees. Her tits hung heavy and her hair had come loose from its clip and she didn't fix either. "It was nothing, and now I'm on my hands and knees on my own table, and my daughter is—" Her voice caught and she looked at Ava, and whatever was in her face closed.

Ava had started crying again. Not loud. Just leaking, her face turned into the runner, one hand curled against her own mouth like she was trying to hold something in.

Joe watched all of it. He crossed to the sideboard — past Hank, close enough that Hank flinched — and picked up the untouched scotch and drank from it. Set it back down. Then he leaned against the edge of the buffet and folded his arms and let them have their moment, because that was the thing about leverage: you didn't have to interrupt. You just had to be standing there when it was over.

"Here's the shape of it," he said finally. "Every week. Friday. You'll both be ready. I'll tell you where."

Olivia turned on him then, and her eyes were dry — dry and hot and full of something that had stopped being shame maybe ten minutes ago and started being something with a spine in it.

"And if I say no?"

"You won't."

"And if I say no."

Joe looked at her a long moment. Then he looked at Hank, and Hank looked at the floor, and that was the whole answer, and all three of them knew it. Olivia's mouth twisted. She turned her face away.

"Next time," Joe said, "it's not the dining room." He let that sit. "Next time it's Hank's office. Mid-day. You'll come in like you're dropping off papers. Both of you. Secretary outfits — the real thing, not a costume. Pencil skirts. Blouses buttoned to the throat. Satin panties under them, satin stockings. Heels you can't walk fast in." He smiled slightly. "And Hank's desk is glass, so he'll see everything from underneath."

Ava made a sound into the runner.

"I don't—" Hank's voice had gone to gravel. "Joe, the office, there's people, there's—"

"There's a door. There's a lock on it. You'll manage."

"Please."

"You don't get please anymore." Joe said it without heat. "You spent it."

He pushed off the buffet and walked back to the table. Olivia was still on her knees, watching him come, and he could see her deciding something behind her face — could see the moment she chose. Her chin came up half an inch.

"You want to finish with me," she said. "You've been circling it all night."

"I have."

"Then do it." Her voice was steady and her hands were not. "But you look at me while you do. Not at her. Not at him. Me."

Joe considered her. Then he set the belt down on the table — he'd been holding it this whole time and had almost forgotten — and reached for her hips instead.

He pulled her up and turned her and bent her over the corner of the mahogany in one motion, her tits flat to the wood, her ass up, her knees knocked wide against the table's edge. She caught herself on her forearms. Her panties were still stretched between her knees and he hooked them with one finger and dragged them down her shins and off, and dropped them on the floor where Ava could see them.

She was wet. She'd been wet for a while — he could see it, the shine between her thighs, the way her cunt had opened to the air. Whatever she'd told herself about fighting him with her body, her body had already filed its own paperwork.

He put the head of his cock against her and held it there, just the head, sliding it up and down through her slick without pushing in, and Olivia's spine arched and she made a sound through her teeth that she clearly hated herself for.

"Say it," he said.

"No."

He slid the head against her clit and back down. Did it again. Her fingers curled on the table and her breath went ragged and she said nothing, and he did it a third time and a fourth, patient, easy, until her hips had started to move with him without her permission.

"Say it."

"Fuck you."

"That's not it."

She dropped her forehead to the table. Her voice came up muffled and furious and small. "Put it in me."

"Good girl."

He pushed in slow. All the way slow, one long stroke from the head to the root, and Olivia's whole body opened around him inch by inch and she made a sound that was half relief and half grief and got swallowed by the mahogany. She was tight and hot and soaked, and Joe stood there a second with his hands on her hips and just felt it — felt her, felt the night, felt six years of waiting finally showing up as the wet clench of his boss's wife around his cock.

Then he started to move.

He set a rhythm that was not fast and not slow, the kind of rhythm that doesn't let anybody off, and the table creaked under them and the lemons rolled and one of them fell and neither of them cared. Olivia's hands slid forward on the wood and found nothing to hold and came back and gripped the far edge, and she was pushing back into him now, meeting him, her ass slapping against his hips each time and the sound of it flat and wet in the room.

"There it is," Joe said.

"Shut up."

He reached around and put two fingers on her clit and her whole body jolted like he'd hit a nerve. She bit the table. She bit down on the edge of the runner and her hips went faster than his and he let her, let her use him for a few strokes, because that was the thing she'd never admit and he'd never have to say — that some part of her had been running toward this since he walked in the door.

"Ava," Joe said, without slowing. "Look at your mother."

Ava's head came up off the runner. Her eyes were swollen and her face was streaked and she looked, and she couldn't not look, because her mother was bent over the table with her tits flat and her mouth open and her hips fucking back onto Joe Mercer's cock like she'd been doing it for years, and the sound she was making was not a sound Ava had ever heard her mother make.

"That's what it looks like," Joe said. "When someone stops pretending."

Olivia came first. He felt it before he heard it — the clench, the flutter, the whole slick channel of her grabbing at him in waves, and she made a low broken sound into the table and her legs shook and she kept pushing back through it, through the whole thing, her heels lifting off the floor. Joe didn't stop. He fucked her through it, hard now, the rhythm breaking into something rougher, his hips slapping her ass and the table knocking against the floor and Hank's glass rattling on the sideboard.

"Inside," Olivia gasped. "You're going to—you're going to do it inside, aren't you—"

"Yeah."

"Joe—"

"Say my name again."

"Joe."

He came with his fingers dug into her hips and his eyes open and his teeth bared, and it went on longer than he expected, long and hot and deep, and he felt every pulse of it leave him and land in her. When it was over he stayed in her a moment, both of them breathing, her cunt still twitching around him in little aftershocks, and then he pulled out slow and watched his cum come after him, thick and white, running down the inside of her thigh to join what was already on the table from Ava.

Olivia didn't move. She stayed bent over the table with her forehead down and her hands still gripping the far edge, and her shoulders started to shake.

Not the way Ava had shaken. Quieter. Deeper. The kind of crying that comes up from under a lifetime, and Joe stood there and watched it and let it happen, because he'd earned it and she'd earned it and there was no reason to pretend otherwise.

Hank had turned his head away again. He hadn't moved from the sideboard. His scotch sat where Joe had left it, half-drunk, and after a while Hank reached out and finished it in one swallow and set the glass down and looked at the wall.

Joe stepped back. He tucked himself in, finally, and did up his trousers and straightened his shirt, and he looked at the three of them — Olivia bent and sobbing on the table, Ava flat on the runner with her face turned away, Hank standing at the sideboard like a man waiting for a bus he knew wasn't coming.

"Clean her up," he said. "Get ready."

Nobody answered. Hank's glass clicked against the sideboard as he set it down a second time, for no reason. Olivia's hands closed on the edge of the table until her knuckles went pale. Ava's sobbing went quiet, folded down into a shudder, and stopped.

Olivia lifted her head off the mahogany. Her face was wrecked — mascara gone, hair stuck to her cheek, mouth swollen — and she looked at Joe across the length of the table, and there was nothing soft left in it. No tears. Just something hard coming up through the shame like a splinter working its way out of skin, and Joe saw it and smiled at her and filed it away for next Friday.