The door swung in on its hinge and Georgia felt the noise before he understood it — a chair scraping tile, a man's laugh cut short by something wetter, a woman's gasp that had nothing to do with surprise. The smell hit next. Bleach, yes, and fried dough from the lunch prep, but under both of those, thick and unmistakable, the salt-and-copper smell of sex worked into the air of a room that had been doing this for a while.

Samantha's hand closed on Georgia's forearm, knuckles going white above the cuff of the blue cotton sleeve. Neither of them moved. The door swung shut behind them on its spring and the little bell above it rang once, thin and absurd, and nobody in the diner turned to look.

Natalya was on her knees behind the pie case. Her skirt was bunched at her waist, the blue fabric twisted into a rope around her hips, and her mouth was full. The man in front of her had one hand fisted in her black hair and the other braced against the pie case glass, and his hips were moving in a short, mean rhythm that made the case rock on its feet. Two more men were behind her, both stripped to undershirts, one with a hand flat on her lower back and the other crouched at her thigh, working her legs wider on the tile.

Sakura was backed against the register with her skirt up around her waist and a man's forearm disappearing between her legs. Her green eyes were half-closed and her heel scraped the linoleum once, twice, finding no purchase. She wasn't fighting him. She had one hand on the register drawer and the other on his shoulder and she was saying something Georgia couldn't hear over the wet sound coming from behind the pie case.

Izabella was bent over the third booth with her elbows on the table and two men in front of her — one in her mouth, one wedged between her tits with his hands cupping them from underneath, sliding his cock through the valley and watching himself do it. Her uniform was open to the waist. She had her eyes on the man in her mouth and her hips were moving in a slow circle against nothing at all.

And then Natalya's green eyes found Georgia across the room.

She pulled her mouth off the cock with a soft, wet pop, lips shining, chin slick, and she grinned at him — a slow, easy grin like she'd just spotted a regular at the counter.

"Welcome back, waitress."

Then she took it again, deep, all the way to the base, her throat working, and the man in front of her groaned and tightened his fist in her hair and pushed.

Georgia's fingers tightened on the cold metal of the doorframe. He hadn't let go of it. He didn't remember deciding not to. The pie case glass above Natalya was fogged in a wide oval and there was a palm print smeared across the fog, five fingers spread, and he found himself staring at the palm print instead of at the man's cock sliding in and out of her mouth, which was somehow worse, because the palm print meant someone had braced there and left, and the someone was gone, and the case was still rocking.

"Georgia." Samantha's voice was barely there. "Georgia, what—"

"Don't move."

He was counting them. That was the waitress in him, the part of him that had spent two years reading a room in the first three seconds of a shift. Four men at the pie case, two at the register with Sakura, two at the booth with Izabella. Nine. Nine men in undershirts and work pants, and every one of them had the same short haircut and the same red face and the same look on him, the look of a man who'd been told he was doing something righteous.

The one in Natalya's mouth was the one with the loudest voice — Georgia could tell by the way the others kept glancing at him, waiting for him to say something. He was the one who'd been at the front of the crowd on the sidewalk an hour ago. Georgia recognized the shape of his shoulders from the diner window, the way he'd stood with his legs apart and his chin up and his finger pointed at the door.

Natalya reached back without looking and found the man crouched at her thigh. She took his cock in her hand, guided it between her thighs from behind, and the man grunted and pushed in — not into her cunt, not yet, just between the thighs, the head of him sliding through the wet heat she'd already made there, and she closed her legs around him and began to rock, slow, so that he slid back and forth in the channel of her thighs while the leader fucked her face.

Samantha made a sound. It wasn't a word. His hand on Georgia's arm had gone from white-knuckled to shaking, and Georgia felt the tremor travel up his own arm and settle somewhere in his chest.

"We should go," Samantha whispered. "We should— Georgia, we should go."

"Back door's broken." Georgia's voice came out flatter than he meant it to. "Has been a month."

Izabella lifted her head off the cock in her mouth and looked over her shoulder at them, and her face was flushed and her mouth was wet and she was grinning like she'd just heard a joke.

"Georgia, honey, you gonna stand in the door all day or you gonna clock in?"

She took the cock back in her mouth before he could answer, and the man between her tits laughed and said something to the man she was sucking, and both of them laughed, and the sound of it was ordinary, the sound of two men at a lunch counter.

"Close the door," Sakura said from the register. Her voice was steady. "You're letting the cold in."

Georgia closed the door. He didn't know why he did it. His hand came off the frame and reached back and caught the edge of the door and pulled it shut, and the bell rang again, and the room was sealed, and the noise of it closed in around him — the wet sound, the slap, the low grunts, the case rocking on its feet.

Behind the pie case, the leader pulled out of Natalya's mouth and stepped back, and the man who'd been between her thighs moved up and took his place at her cunt, and Natalya went down onto her elbows on the tile with her ass up and her skirt still roped around her waist. The leader walked around behind her and knelt and put a hand on each of her hips and pushed his cock against her ass and held it there, not going in, just holding it there against her, and Natalya turned her head on the tile and looked back at him.

"Well?" she said. "You came here to make a point."

"You're a red menace," the leader said. His voice was thick and he was breathing hard. "You know what we do to red menaces?"

"You've been doing it for twenty minutes." Natalya pushed back against him, and the head of him went in, just the head, and she hissed through her teeth. "Stop talking about it and finish the job."

He pushed. She took him all the way in one slow stroke, her back arching, her hands flat on the tile, and the sound she made was low and satisfied, like a woman settling into a hot bath. The man at her cunt started moving at the same time, and the two of them found a rhythm almost immediately, one pulling out as the other pushed in, and Natalya's tits swung under her with every stroke and her mouth fell open and she started saying something in Russian, low and rhythmic, like a prayer or a curse.

Samantha's grip on Georgia's arm tightened again. Georgia looked down at him — at the blue dress, the short brown hair, the hazel eyes gone wide and fixed on Natalya on the tile — and saw that Samantha's mouth was open and his face was pale and his cock was pushing up under the front of his skirt, a tent in the blue cotton that he didn't seem to know about.

Georgia took him by the elbow and steered him sideways along the wall, away from the door, toward the end of the counter. It was the only clear path. The men at the register glanced at them and went back to Sakura. The men at the booth didn't look up at all.

Natalya watched them go. She was on her elbows and knees on the tile with two men inside her and she watched Georgia walk his new waitress down the length of the diner like she was watching the clock, and when they reached the end of the counter she lifted one hand off the tile and pointed at the pie case.

"There's a knife behind the case," she said. "If you're gonna stand there looking like that, at least cut the pie."

The leader's hand came down on the back of her neck and pushed her face toward the tile and she laughed, muffled, and stopped talking.

Georgia got Samantha to the end of the counter and put his back against the wall and let go of his elbow. His own hand was shaking. He looked at it for a second and then put it flat on the counter and pressed down until it stopped.

"That's Natalya," Samantha whispered. "From the corridor. She— she measured the—"

"I know who she is."

"Why are they—" Samantha stopped. His eyes went past Georgia to the pie case and then came back. "Why is she letting them?"

Georgia didn't answer. He was watching the leader's face — the red of it, the sweat on it, the way he kept his eyes on the other men instead of on Natalya, checking, making sure they were watching him do it. That was the thing Georgia couldn't look away from. The leader wasn't fucking her for her. He was fucking her for them.

The man at Natalya's cunt came first. He pulled out and finished across her lower back, and Natalya made a small sound and reached back with one hand and smeared it into her skin without looking, and then put her hand back on the tile. The leader pulled out of her ass and stood up and jerked himself twice and came across her tits and her chin, and she turned her face up and took it and licked her lip when he was done.

"That's what we do to communists," the leader said, breathing hard, tucking himself back into his pants.

Natalya got up off the tile. Her skirt fell back into place, wet and wrinkled, and she stood there in the middle of the diner floor with cum drying on her chin and her hair in her face and she looked at the leader like he'd just brought her the wrong order.

"You've got four more men," she said. "And I'm still standing."

Georgia's hand found the knife behind the pie case without him telling it to. It was the bread knife, the long serrated one, and his fingers closed on the wooden handle and lifted it off the shelf and the blade caught the light from the window and threw it across the fogged glass.

The knife hit the floor. He didn't drop it on purpose. His hand just opened and the knife went down and the clatter of it on the tile cut through the wet sounds for one full beat, and every man in the diner turned his head.

Natalya's eyes flicked to the blade on the floor and then up to Georgia's face, and a slow smile spread across her mouth — not the grin she'd given him at the door, something smaller and more private, something that was just for him. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand and turned back to the men.

"Well?" she said. "Who's next."

She went back down onto her knees on the tile and the leader's friends were already moving toward her, and Georgia stood at the end of the counter with his back against the wall and his empty hand still shaped around a knife that wasn't there, and Samantha's hand found his sleeve again, and neither of them said a word.