The hotel suite smelled of stale champagne and expensive perfume. The air conditioning was a low hum against the thick, humid Miami dawn pressing against the glass. Robin stood in the doorway, his hand still on the keycard, and stared at the bed. Two women. Naked except for scraps of linen. Skin the color of caramel, curves that defied gravity, long dark hair fanned across his pillows. They smiled at him, a practiced, hungry look. His cock hardened instantly, a traitorous, aching pulse against his zipper.

“Surprise, superstar,” the one on the left purred, arching her back. “Carlos sent us.”

Carlos. The tour promoter. His longtime friend who’d slapped his back at the after-party, shoved a bottle into his hand, and laughed. “You are always a motherfucker, Robin. Always. Don’t pretend this time.”

Robin’s mouth was dry. He should turn around. He should walk out. He thought of April, two thousand miles away in his bed in Beverly Hills, probably asleep with a textbook open on her chest. The image was a clean, sharp pain. Then it blurred, smothered by the fog of bourbon and the hollow ringing in his ears from the encore. The silence in this room was worse. He stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him.

“Carlos said you like to… appreciate,” the other woman said, rolling onto her stomach. The movement was a performance. The round, perfect swell of her ass was presented to him, a silent invitation. The linen panties were a joke, a sheer white veil over the shadow between her cheeks.

He didn’t remember moving. One moment he was by the door, the next he was on his knees at the side of the bed. The bourbon made the world tilt. The perfume was overwhelming, floral and cheap, but beneath it was something else. Something human. Musk. Salt. Skin. His hands found her hips. They were warm. Solid.

“You smell her,” the first woman whispered, a laugh in her voice. “Go on. Taste.”

He leaned forward. His nose brushed the linen. He inhaled. The scent was dark, earthy, profoundly intimate. It was the smell of a woman, of sex, of anonymity. It was nothing like April’s vanilla and sunshine. This was a different kind of truth. A filthy, honest one. A groan tore from his chest. He buried his face between her cheeks, the linen rough against his lips, the heat beneath it devastating.

Her back arched further. A low, approving sound came from her throat. Her friend’s hand slid into his hair, gripped hard. “Yes. Like that. You are an animal, no?”

He was. The thought was a relief. An animal doesn’t think about divorce papers or custody threats or the terrified look in a nineteen-year-old’s eyes when her home is vandalized. An animal just takes. He hooked his fingers in the linen and pulled. The fabric snapped. He tossed it aside. He didn’t kiss. He devoured. His tongue found her, licked a slow, wet stripe over her hole, then pressed against it. She gasped, pushing back against his mouth.

Hands were on his belt, his zipper. The other woman was beside him now, her breath on his neck. He felt his cock spring free, already leaking. Her fingers wrapped around him, stroked him once, twice, her thumb smearing the wetness over his head. “So big,” she murmured, her accent thick. “For us.”

He pulled his mouth away, breathing ragged. He looked up. Two pairs of dark, knowing eyes watched him. They saw the famous musician on his knees. They saw the desperation. They didn’t care. It was part of the service. The woman beneath him rolled over, her breasts swaying. She reached for him, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him deeply. He could taste himself on her tongue. The other woman’s mouth replaced his between her friend’s legs, her moans vibrating through the mattress.

It was a blur of heat and motion. They guided him onto the bed. They moved around him like a well-rehearsed dance. One knelt over his face, lowering her cunt onto his mouth, rocking against his tongue until she was dripping. The other took his cock into her mouth, not all at once, but inch by agonizing inch, her lips a tight, wet seal, her tongue swirling under the head. He gripped her hair, his hips lifting off the bed. She took him deeper, her throat working around him.

They switched. The one from his mouth straddled his hips, guiding him inside her with a smooth, practiced roll. She was so wet. She clenched around him, a vice of heat, and began to ride him with a slow, grinding rhythm that made his vision spot. The other woman kissed him, her breasts pressed against his chest, then moved down, her mouth finding his balls, licking, sucking, her fingers pressing behind them. The dual sensation was unbearable. He was everywhere, in every part of them, surrounded.

“Fuck,” he gasped. “Fuck.”

They laughed, a sound of pure pleasure. “Yes,” the one riding him said, her pace increasing. “Fuck us. Give it to us.”

He lasted longer than he thought he would. They drew it out. When he was close, they’d stop, make him watch them kiss, make him lick one clean while the other stroked him. They put him on his knees and took him from behind, one in front of him, pushing her ass against his groin, the other behind him, her fingers tracing his spine before pressing inside him, making him cry out. They used their mouths on him together, one taking the length, the other focusing on the head, their tongues meeting in the middle. He watched, hypnotized, as his cock disappeared and reappeared between their painted lips.

When he finally came, it was with a shout that felt ripped from his soul. He was on his back, one woman riding his face, the other his cock, and the release was a wave of blinding, empty white. It went on and on, draining him of everything—guilt, memory, fear. He collapsed back into the sweat-soaked sheets, spent.

They curled against him, sticky and satisfied. One traced the tattoo on his chest. The other dozed, her breath evening out. The room was silent again, save for the hum of the AC. The dawn light was stronger now, a gray wash over the wreckage of the room: discarded clothes, empty bottles, the torn linen panties on the floor.

Robin stared at the ceiling. The hollow feeling returned, colder now, filling the space where the heat had been. He thought of April’s face when he’d asked her to move in. The quiet trust in her “okay.” He thought of the way she’d gasp his name, not “Robin Thicke,” but “Robin,” like it was a secret just for them. A sick, cold knot tightened in his gut. How would he ever look at her now? How could he touch her with these hands, kiss her with this mouth? The animal was gone. The man was back. And the man was a liar.

The woman tracing his tattoo felt him stir. Her fingers stilled, then slid lower, over the tense plane of his stomach. Her touch was proprietary. Claiming. She knew the language of afterglow, how to reignite the embers before the ash cooled completely.

“Already?” she murmured, her voice a husky scrape against his ear. Her hand closed around him. He was soft, spent, but her grip was firm. Insistent. “The great Robin Thicke is not finished with us.”

He should push her away. The cold knot of guilt was still there, a lead weight beneath his ribs. But her skin was warm. The other woman shifted in her sleep, her thigh thrown over his, a heavy, comforting weight. The room still smelled of sex and her—that dark, musky scent clung to his beard, his lips. To think was agony. To feel was escape.

He turned his head on the pillow. Looked at her. Her eyes were dark pools, knowing and empty of judgment. She didn’t care about his guilt. She was a transaction, a warm body paid to make him forget. In that moment, he hated her for it. And he needed it more than air.

He rolled onto his side, facing her. The movement was slow, deliberate. His hand came up, not to caress her face, but to grip the back of her neck. He pulled her to him and kissed her. It was nothing like the kiss from before. This was not devouring. This was consumption. A silent, furious command to obliterate the last clear thought in his head.

She understood. Her mouth opened under his, hungry and compliant. Her hand on him began to move, a slow, twisting pump that coaxed blood back into tired flesh. He felt himself responding, thickening in her grasp, a traitorous betrayal of his own resolve. His body wanted the numbness again. It craved the void.

He broke the kiss, breathing hard. “Turn over.”

His voice was gravel. A stranger’s.

She smiled, a flash of white in the dim room, and obeyed without a word. She presented herself to him again, that perfect, round curve. The dawn light caught the sheen of sweat and saliva he’d left there earlier. The sight was a punch to his gut. Base. Primal. His.

He moved behind her, his knees sinking into the mattress. He didn’t enter her. Not yet. He placed his hands on her hips, his thumbs digging into the soft flesh. He just looked. He studied the shadowed cleft, the pucker of her hole, the glistening evidence of his earlier worship. He leaned forward and inhaled, deeply. The scent was even stronger now, mixed with his own saliva, a perfume of pure debasement.

A low groan escaped him. He licked a slow, broad stripe from her perineum up to the small of her back. Salt. Musk. Her. She shuddered, pushing back against his face. “Yes,” she hissed into the pillow. “Again.”

He did it again. And again. His tongue mapped her, not with passion, but with a kind of grim, focused study. As if he could memorize this sensation, this taste, and use it later to overwrite everything else. The memory of April’s shy gasp the first time he’d done this to her, in the quiet of his Beverly Hills bedroom, flickered behind his eyes. He chased it away with a harder press of his tongue, a rougher grip on her hips.

The sleeping woman awoke. She blinked, saw them, and a lazy smile spread across her face. She crawled over, her breasts brushing against his arm. She kissed his shoulder, then his neck, her hand snaking between his legs to fondle his balls. “Let me help,” she whispered.

Her fingers trailed lower, past his balls, to the tight ring of muscle behind them. She circled it with a slick fingertip—she was wet from earlier, or she’d used spit, he didn’t know—and pressed—just a gentle, insistent pressure.

Robin froze. Every muscle in his body locked. A jolt, electric and shocking, shot up his spine. It wasn’t a pleasure. Not exactly. It was an invasion. A surrender. It was the final barrier.

“Relax,” the woman behind him crooned, her breath hot on his skin. Her finger pressed deeper, a slow, inexorable invasion. At the same time, the woman beneath him reached back, her hand finding his cock, guiding him to her entrance. She was soaked. He slid into her heat with one smooth, devastating stroke.

The dual penetration was absolute. He was inside her, and she was inside him. He was filled and filling. The sensation short-circuited his brain. There was no room for thought. No space for April, for Paula, for the wreckage of his life. There was only this: the tight, clutching heat of her cunt around his cock, and the sharp, strange fullness at his core. He cried out, a raw, broken sound.

“Fuck,” he gasped, his forehead dropping between her shoulder blades. He began to move. His thrusts were short, frantic, driven by a need to outrun the feeling of being so utterly claimed. The woman behind him matched his rhythm, her finger moving in and out of him in time with his hips. It created a feedback loop of sensation, every push forward amplified by the pressure within.

It was over quickly. A second climax tore through him, less a wave of pleasure than a seismic shock of release. It was brutal, emptying, and left him trembling. He collapsed onto her back, spent, his face buried in her hair. The woman behind him slowly withdrew her finger, giving his flank a gentle, patronizing pat.

For a long minute, the only sound was their ragged breathing. The gray dawn had bled into a pale, sickly yellow. Miami was waking up. Robin closed his eyes. The numbness was back, a thick, woolly blanket smothering the shame. But beneath it, cold and hard, the truth waited. He had not lost himself. He had shown himself. And the man who was left, lying sticky and hollow between two strangers, was someone he would have to face in every mirror, and worse, in April’s trusting eyes.