Samantha's hand landed. His fingers closed in Izabella's hair — not gentle, not rough, just there, holding, and he felt the shape of her skull under his palm like something he'd been given permission to touch. His hips moved without asking him first. One push, shallow, and then deeper, and then he was sliding along her tongue toward the back of her throat and she took him there without flinching, her throat opening around the head of his cock like a door swinging inward.

"Oh," Samantha said. That was all. The word came out of him small and broken and it hung in the doorway air.

Georgia did not move from the threshold. His hand stayed flat on his own sternum, fingers spread, and his heel had come up off the boards — just the heel, just a half-inch of lift, like a man about to step forward into a room he'd been told not to enter. His lips were parted. He was not blinking.

Izabella pulled back slow, her lips dragging up the length of him, and stopped with just the head still in her mouth. Her tongue found the underside of the crown — found the new seam, the pink one, the one that had been raw ten days ago — and traced it. Once. Twice. Samantha's whole body jerked like a fish on a line and his hand tightened in her hair hard enough to pull.

"That's it," Izabella said, pulling off just enough to speak, her breath warm and wet on him. "That's the spot, isn't it. Right on the seam."

"Yes," Samantha said. His voice was not his voice. "Yes — don't stop —"

"I didn't say I was going to stop." She took him back in, all the way, her nose pressed into the thatch of hair at his base, and swallowed. The sound of it — the wet, tight sound of her throat working around him — filled the small room and Samantha's knees began to shake.

From the doorway, Georgia said, very quietly, "Sam."

Samantha heard him the way you hear a radio in the next apartment — present, distant, not for him to answer. He looked down at Izabella's head between his thighs, at the way her dark hair spilled over the white of her own knuckles where they gripped his hips, and he thought, with a clarity that surprised him, that he had never in his life been inside another person's mouth. Not once. Not in twenty-three years. He had spent every one of those years hiding the part of himself he was now pushing down a woman's throat, and here she was, on her knees on a bare bunkroom floor, taking it like it was nothing at all.

"Georgia," Izabella said, pulling off him with a wet sound that made Samantha's stomach clench. She didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on Samantha's cock, glistening, jumping in the air between them. "Come in or close the door. You're letting the cold in on him."

"I'm not cold," Samantha said, and it came out almost like a laugh.

"You're shaking like a dog in a thunderstorm." Izabella wrapped her hand around the base of his cock and worked it slow, up and down, her thumb sliding over the ridge where the scar was, and Samantha's hips rocked into her grip before he could stop them. "That's the cut," she said, almost to herself. "You feel that? That little seam. They took the hood off you and left you all raw nerves. You feel everything now. Everything."

"I —" Samantha's hand was still in her hair. He didn't know how to take it out. "I don't know what I'm supposed to —"

"You're not supposed to anything." She leaned in and licked a long stripe up the side of his shaft, root to tip, and then blew on the wet skin, and Samantha made a sound he had never made before — a high, thin sound, something between a gasp and a whine. "You just stand there and let me have it. That's the whole job."

Georgia's heel came down. Samantha heard it — the small click of the stiletto finding the boards again — and then Georgia stepped into the room, one step, and the doorframe groaned as he leaned his shoulder against it. He was close enough now that Samantha could smell him: soap and sweat and something underneath, the same smell that had been in the doctor's office, the smell of a person who had stood exactly here before.

"She's not lying," Georgia said. "She's good at it. She's been doing it a while."

"You'd know," Izabella said, and Samantha heard the grin in her voice even though he couldn't see her face. She took him back in — deep, deeper, and this time she didn't stop. Her hand stayed at the base, stroking in time with her mouth, and her tongue worked the seam on every upstroke, and Samantha's whole world narrowed to the wet heat and the small wet sounds and the place where her hand met her lips.

"Izabella," he said. Then again, louder, because the first one hadn't been enough. "Izabella — I'm —"

She pulled off just long enough to say, "I know," and then she was on him again, and her hand sped up, and she looked up at him for the first time — those dark eyes, that smirk, her lips stretched around him — and she held his gaze while she did it, and that was what undid him.

His hips pushed forward one last time and his body locked — everything, from the arches of his feet to the roots of his hair, going rigid and still, like a man who'd grabbed a live wire and couldn't let go. His cock pulsed against her tongue. Once. Twice. And Izabella swallowed around him, her throat working, taking every wave of it, her hand still stroking the base of him through it, slow and steady, milking him the way you'd milk something you intended to keep.

Samantha's head tipped back. His eyes closed. His mouth was open and something was coming out of it that he didn't recognize — not a word, not a name, just sound, the noise a person makes when they've been holding something for a very long time and it finally lets go. His hand in Izabella's hair had gone slack. His other hand was still on the doorframe, gripping so hard the wood had gone white under his fingers.

When Izabella finally pulled back, slow, her lips shining, a thin thread of spit and seed still connecting her mouth to the head of his cock — she wiped it away with the back of her wrist and sat back on her heels, and Samantha's knees simply gave out.

He caught himself on the doorframe. Both hands now, arms braced, head hanging between them, breathing like a man who'd run up a flight of stairs. His blue dress was rucked up around his waist. His cock was still out, softening, wet, and he could not make himself care. He could not make himself move. He stood there in the doorway of Bunk 6 with his hands on the frame and his legs shaking and his own spend cooling on his belly, and he thought, very clearly, that he was not the same person who had walked into this room ten minutes ago.

"There he is," Izabella said, and she stood up, smoothing her uniform down over her hips. "There's the man."

Samantha couldn't answer. His throat was closed. He was looking at the floor — at the boards, at the small dark spot where a drop of him had landed, at his own bare feet — and he was trying to remember how to stand up straight.

"Hey." Georgia's voice, close. Georgia's hand — flat, warm — landing on his shoulder blade, right between them, where the dress was damp with sweat. "Hey. Look at me."

Samantha lifted his head. Georgia was standing right in front of him, close enough that Samantha could see the little flecks of something darker in his blue eyes, and his hand was still pressed flat to Samantha's back, and his face was doing something complicated — not quite a smile, not quite anything Samantha had a word for.

"There you go," Georgia said. "You're all right."

"I don't —" Samantha's voice cracked. He tried again. "I don't know what just happened."

"Yeah, you do." Georgia's hand moved, just a little, up toward the back of Samantha's neck, and stopped there, warm and still. "You just got your first blowjob since you got cut. That's what happened. Congratulations."

Izabella laughed — a real laugh, low and pleased, and she bent to pick up something from the floor. Samantha's own handkerchief, the one he'd dropped somewhere in the last ten minutes, and she pressed it into his hand without ceremony. "Clean yourself up before Hazel comes up. She'll have your hide if you get the bunkroom floor sticky."

"Thank you," Samantha said. It came out wrong. It came out like something else.

"Don't thank me." Izabella was already at the door, already halfway into the hall, her uniform straight, her hair neat, like nothing at all had happened. She paused in the doorway and looked back at him over her shoulder, and the smirk was back, the one that meant she knew exactly what she'd just done. "Thank him." She tipped her chin at Georgia. "He's the one who told you to go ahead."

And then she was gone — down the hall, down the stairs, her heels tapping away into the noise of the diner below, and Samantha was alone in the doorway with Georgia, his handkerchief in his hand, his dress still up around his waist, his legs still not entirely his own.

Georgia hadn't moved. His hand was still on the back of Samantha's neck. His eyes were still on Samantha's face, and now that Izabella was gone, the complicated thing in them had settled into something simpler. Something Samantha could almost read.

"Georgia," Samantha said. He didn't know what he was going to say next. He only knew he had to say the name, out loud, in this room, with Georgia's hand on his neck and the whole diner going on below them like nothing had changed.

"Yeah," Georgia said. His voice was low. His thumb moved, once, against the back of Samantha's neck — a small, deliberate stroke, gone almost before it happened. "I'm here."

Samantha stood in the doorway and let the sentence sit in the air between them. I'm here. He turned the words over like a coin he'd found on the sidewalk, checking both sides for the trick. Nobody had ever said that to him in a doorway. Not in this building, not in any building. The words didn't seem to want anything from him, and that was the part he didn't have a shelf for.

His knees were still loose. He could feel the boards through the soles of his feet, the small grit of them, the one nail head that sat proud of the wood near the threshold — he'd stepped on it twice now without thinking, and both times it had felt like a fact about the world rather than a pain. His dress hung open around his waist. The air of the bunkroom, cold at the top of the stairs, moved across the wet skin of his belly and made him shiver, and the shiver was not shame. He catalogued that too, carefully, the way you'd write down the reading on a gauge. Not shame. Cold. Only cold.

"You should pull your dress down," Georgia said, mild as a man remarking on the weather. "Before someone comes up."

"Let them." The words were out of Samantha before he'd decided to say them, and they startled him almost as much as they'd startled Georgia, whose eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. Samantha heard his own voice in the small room and barely recognized it. "Let them come up. I don't — I don't care anymore."

"You will in about two minutes," Georgia said. "That's how it works. You feel like a god for two minutes and then you feel like a man who's standing in a hallway with his cock out." He let go of Samantha's neck — the hand lifting away slowly, deliberately, so Samantha could watch it go and not flinch — and bent to retrieve the hem of the blue dress from where it had bunched at Samantha's hip. He pulled it down himself. One tug, neat, the way you'd fix a crooked picture frame. "There. Now you're just a man in a hallway."

Samantha looked down at himself. The dress fell to mid-thigh, the way it always did, the way it had been cut for a woman's frame and not his, and the wet spot on the front of it was visible now — a dark bloom the size of a playing card, low and off-center. He folded the handkerchief Izabella had given him and pressed it there, and the cotton came away tacky, and he folded it again, and again, until it was a small square he could hide in his fist.

"It's on my dress," he said.

"It'll dry." Georgia had stepped back into the threshold, his shoulder finding the frame again, and the frame took his weight the way it had taken Samantha's a minute ago — the same small groan, the same give. "Everything dries. You want to know the worst thing about my first time?"

"Do I?"

"I cried. Not a little. Not the way a man cries in a movie. I sat on the edge of Dolly's bed with my skirt around my ankles and I cried like a kid who'd lost a dog, and she had to sit there and hold my hand and tell me it was fine, over and over, until I believed her." Georgia shrugged one shoulder. The movement was small and it was not embarrassed. "So you standing up straight and pulling your dress down is already ahead of the curve. Take the win."

Samantha's mouth did something. He wasn't sure it was a smile until Georgia's face answered it with one of his own — crooked, quick, gone. Downstairs a plate clattered and someone laughed, a woman's laugh, high and unbothered, and the sound came up the stairwell and through the open door and landed in the room like a reminder that the world had a floor beneath this one and was still turning on it.

"Does she know?" Samantha asked. "Dolly. About — you know. What you do up here."

Georgia's face didn't change, but something behind it did — a door closing quietly, somewhere back in the house. "Dolly knows everything about me," he said. "That's the problem."

"What does that mean?"

"It means she saw something today she didn't like, and she's going to make me pay for it, and I haven't figured out the price yet." Georgia pushed off the frame and stood straight, and for a second he looked tired in a way his twenty-two years hadn't earned. Then he shook it off — visibly, like a dog coming out of water — and tipped his chin at the hall. "Come on. Hazel wants you on the floor before the dinner rush, and if you show up looking like you've been crying in a stairwell she'll find out why, and I'd rather not explain."

Samantha didn't move. The handkerchief was a knot in his fist. Behind Georgia the hallway ran dark toward the stairs, and beyond the stairs the diner was all noise and steam and men in hats, and he would have to walk down into it wearing a dress with a wet spot on it and a body he no longer recognized. The thought should have terrified him. He waited for the terror, the way you wait for a train you can hear coming, and it didn't arrive.

"Georgia," he said again. He was aware he kept saying the name. He couldn't stop. It was the only thing in the room he knew how to hold.

"Yeah."

"Thank you. For —" He gestured vaguely, at the room, at the doorway, at the last ten minutes of his life, and gave up on the sentence. "You know."

Georgia looked at him for a second. Then he reached out and straightened the collar of Samantha's dress — one finger hooking under the blue fabric, tugging it level against his collarbone — and let his hand fall. "Don't thank me," he said, and his voice was doing the thing again, the low thing, the thing Samantha could almost read. "I didn't do anything. I just stood in the door."

He turned and started down the hall. His stilettos found the boards in a slow, easy rhythm, click, click, click, and the sound went away from Samantha and toward the stairs, and the light from the stairwell took Georgia's shape and made it small and then smaller, and Samantha stood in the doorway of Bunk 6 with his fist closed around a wet handkerchief and watched him go. Then he pulled the door shut behind him, and followed.