The quilt hit his shoulder blades before the light did. Georgia's back found the mattress with a soft slap, the springs groaning under Dolly's weight as she came down on top of him, knees pinning his thighs, her hand already working the waistband of his skirt.
"Don't." Her voice was low and flat in the dark. "Don't turn it on."
His hand dropped away from the lamp cord. The room above the diner kept its shape in the streetlight coming through the window — the washstand, the chair with his second uniform draped over it, Dolly's shape above him, her dirty-blond hair loose and falling forward. The crinkle of something in her fist. A foil square, caught between her knuckles.
"I want to know something first," she said.
"Ask."
"No." Her free hand caught his wrist and dragged it up, flat against her belly, then lower. "You're going to show me."
Georgia's breath caught. Her skin was warm through the cotton of her uniform, and beneath the hem, nothing else. No slip. No cotton. She'd come up the stairs without anything under the blue dress.
"Dolly—"
"Put them in." She rocked her hips forward, pressing his hand into the heat between her legs. "Two. And then you look at me while you do it."
He obeyed. His middle and ring fingers slid into her, and she was already slick — not the slow-waking wet he knew from a shift's worth of teasing in the storage closet, but a ready, deliberate heat, as if she'd been thinking about this all the way up the stairs. Her cunt closed around his knuckles, snug and familiar, and something in his chest unclenched at the shape of it. He knew this. He'd known this for two years.
"There," she said. "That's what I thought."
"What's what you thought?"
"Check me." She ground down onto his palm, her thighs tightening around his wrist. "You know what I feel like."
He did. He knew the exact drag of her, the way she got wet in stages, the little catch at the top of her cunt where his fingertips could find the spot that made her bite her lip. He curled his fingers and pressed there, and her breath broke — a short, sharp sound — before she caught it and locked her eyes back onto his.
"Does it feel like someone else has been here?" she asked.
"No."
"Say it."
"No one's been here." His wrist was wet to the heel of his hand. "It's yours."
She smiled at that — the smirky smile, the one she used on drunks and line cooks and men who thought they could get a free slice of pie — and then she moved off his hand and sat back on his thighs, and the foil square came up between them with a sharp crinkle that cut the dark.
"You're going to put this on," she said, "and then you're going to tell me the truth with your cock instead of your mouth."
"Dolly—"
"Your mouth lies." She tore the foil with her teeth, one quick rip, and spat the corner onto the quilt. "Your mouth told me you liked her touch."
There it was. Georgia's fingers went still on the quilt. The streetlight laid a stripe across the ceiling, and somewhere below them, through the floorboards, the low murmur of the diner — a late customer, the jukebox, the clink of the pie server against the case. The whole ordinary world, going on under the bed where Dolly was finally saying the thing.
"That's not—"
"Don't." Her thumb pressed the air out of the tip of the condom — one slow, deliberate squeeze, the little bubble collapsing under her pad — and then she rolled it down his shaft, all the way to the root, her knuckles dragging the length of him. He was hard enough that it hurt, hard enough that the roll of the rubber felt like a second skin pulled too tight. "Don't finish the sentence. I watched you through the door crack. I heard you say it."
"You heard me say I liked it."
"I heard you say you liked her touch." She lifted up onto her knees, one hand braced on his chest, the other guiding him — the blunt head of his cock finding the warm opening, sliding along the seam of her, not yet in. "So now you're going to be inside me, and I'm going to feel whether that's true."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"It makes perfect sense." She sank down.
He went in slow — she took him in one long, steady drop, thighs trembling on either side of his hips, her cunt stretching around him until he was all the way to the hilt, and then she stopped, seated, breathing through her nose, her eyes never leaving his face. The wet grip of her was the same as it had always been. The same heat. The same little flutter deep inside that had made him come embarrassingly fast the first time, two years ago, in a dorm room that smelled like gin and someone else's laundry.
"There," she said, and her voice had gone rough at the edges. "Feel that?"
"Yes."
"Does it feel like a woman who's been sharing?"
"No."
"Then why did you say it." She rocked forward, just once, a slow grind that dragged him along the front wall of her, and Georgia's hands came up to catch her hips on instinct — the familiar curve of them, the freckles he could find blind. "Why did you tell me you liked the way she touched you."
"Because she did." The words came out before he could stop them. "She put her hand on me through the skirt and I liked it. That's the truth."
Dolly's jaw worked. She rode him slowly, no hurry in it, her hips finding a rhythm that was almost lazy — almost like the storage closet, almost like the two years of it, except her eyes stayed open and stayed on him, and her hand had come up to press flat against his sternum, feeling his heart go.
"And when she did it," she said, "did you get hard?"
"Yes."
"And did you want her to keep going?"
He didn't answer. Dolly's rhythm stuttered — just for a half-beat, a stumble in the slow grind — and then she found it again, deeper this time, taking him all the way with each roll of her hips, and her thighs were trembling now, the smooth muscle jumping under the skin where she gripped him.
"That's what I thought," she said.
"Dolly—"
"Answer me." She leaned down over him, and her hair fell loose around both their faces, curtained the streetlight out, so that all he could see was her — the green eyes, the freckles across the bridge of her nose, the smirk that had gone thin and serious. "When Ruby Maynard put her hand on your cock through your skirt in the corridor, did you want her to keep going?"
Georgia's hand found her hip and pulled her down deeper — not a word, just a hand, just the weight of her settling onto him to the root — and a gasped sigh broke out of her lips before she could catch it. Her cunt clenched around him, one hard pulse, and his eyes nearly rolled back.
"Yes," he said. "I wanted her to keep going."
The room went quiet except for their breathing. Dolly didn't move for a long moment — just sat on him, full, her hand flat on his chest, her eyes gone somewhere past his face. Below them, the jukebox changed records, and the first brassy notes of something slow came up through the floorboards, and Georgia lay there under her with his cock buried in the one woman who had ever been his, and did not say the thing he could feel building behind his teeth.
"Okay," Dolly said finally. Just that. Okay. And she started to move again, slower than before, and her hand slid from his chest to his jaw and turned his face up toward hers, and she looked at him the whole time she rode him — the same look she'd given him across the counter for two years, except there was something new in it now, something that had been filed away and taken out and looked at.
He did not answer her question. The condom was the only barrier between them, and it was thin, and he could feel every drag of her along the length of him, and the pressure was building low in his gut the way it always did with her, the way it never quite did with anyone else. She was still moving when the thought crossed his mind — he had not thought of Samantha since she'd pushed him down onto the quilt.
"Where'd you go," Dolly said.
"Nowhere."
"Liar." She rolled her hips and took him deeper, and her mouth came down to his ear, and her voice was barely a breath — "You went somewhere. I felt you go."
He turned his head and caught her mouth instead of answering, and she let him — she kissed him back hard, her hand fisting in his hair, her hips picking up speed — and for a while there was no question in the room at all, just the wet sound of her coming down on him and the creak of the springs and the slow brass of the record under the floor, and Georgia closed his eyes and let himself be inside her, and told himself it was enough.
It was not enough. It had never been enough, and Dolly knew it before he did — she always knew it first. She broke the kiss, dragged her mouth off his, and sat back up on him with her hands braced on his chest, and she watched him the way she watched the pie case when a customer's hand hovered too long over the last slice. Her hips kept moving. Slow. Deliberate. Every drop of her took him to the root and held there a beat too long, so he felt the whole wet length of her before she rose again.
"Open your eyes," she said.
He did. The streetlight came back, a pale stripe up the wall, and her face above it — flushed, hair stuck to her temple, that thin serious mouth. She had her lower lip caught between her teeth and she let it go slow.
"Say my name."
"Dolly."
"Again."
"Dolly." His voice came out lower than he meant it to, and something in her face loosened at the sound of it — just a fraction, just at the corners of her eyes — and then she shut it back down.
She pulled off him — all the way off, a wet drag that made him hiss through his teeth — and swung her leg over, and for one blind second Georgia thought she was leaving, that the question had finally landed and she was done with him. Instead she dropped onto her back beside him on the quilt, and the mattress rocked, and she reached up and caught his wrist and pulled.
"Get on top of me."
"Dolly—"
"I said get on top." She spread her knees and planted her feet flat on the quilt, and the blue uniform was rucked up around her waist, and there was nothing under it, nothing at all, just the dark triangle of her and the slick shine the streetlight caught on her inner thigh. "You want to prove something, prove it from up there. I want to see your face."
He moved between her legs. Her hand found his cock — the condom still on it, still slick from her — and she guided him in herself, one flat palm against his hip, and he sank into her slow, all the way, and she arched under him and let out a breath through her nose that was almost a laugh.
"There he is," she said. "That's the face I wanted."
"What face."
"The one you make when you're trying not to say something." She reached up and pressed her thumb into the corner of his mouth, hard enough to dent it. "Been making it since the corridor. Since before the corridor, maybe. Since you came down the stairs this morning with your hem showing and a hard-on you thought nobody clocked."
He started to move. Slow at first, because she liked it slow, and because he did too, and because when he went slow he could feel the little catch at the top of her that meant she was close to something. Her hands came up and gripped his shoulders, nails biting, and she lifted her hips to meet him, and the quilt bunched under his knees, and the springs complained in a rhythm the whole diner could probably hear if the jukebox ever stopped.
"That's it," she said, low. "Harder. Don't be polite about it."
He wasn't polite about it. He drove into her, and she took it with her head thrown back and her throat working, and the wet sound of it filled the little room, and Georgia watched her — the freckles, the smirk gone entirely now, the way her mouth fell open around a word she didn't say. He knew that word. He'd heard her say it in the storage closet, half a hundred times, and it was his name.
"Don't stop," she said. "If you stop I'll know why."
"Why would I stop?"
"Because you're thinking about it." Her hand came up off his shoulder and slapped flat against his chest, right over the heart, feeling it. "You're inside me and you're still thinking about whether you're going to answer me. That's a man who's got somebody else in the room with us."
He didn't answer. He put his weight down on one hand and got the other between them, thumb finding her clit, and worked it the way he knew she liked — small circles, no hurry, let her chase it — and her whole body bowed up under him and her nails raked down his chest.
"Oh, you bastard," she breathed. "You know exactly—"
"I know."
"You know exactly what you're doing." She was close. He could feel it, the flutter deep in her, the way she got tighter and wetter at once, and her heels dug into the mattress on either side of him. "So do it. Make me come while you lie to me."
"I'm not lying."
"You're not answering." She caught his jaw in her hand and dragged his face down to hers, and her eyes were wide and bright and furious in the dark. "There's a difference. There's a whole world of difference, and you're standing right in the middle of it, and I can feel you there."
Her body broke around him. She came with her teeth in his shoulder and her hand fisted in his hair, hips bucking up hard, cunt clamping down on him in slow waves that he felt all the way to the base of his spine. He held still through it, buried to the root, and watched her ride it out, and said nothing, and the not-saying sat in the room between them like a third person on the bed.
When she let go of his shoulder there were toothmarks in the skin.
"Finish," she said. Flat. Not a question.
"Dolly—"
"Finish inside me. You're already wearing the rubber, so finish, and then we're going to have the rest of this conversation."
He moved. He didn't have a choice about it — his body had been waiting, and the pressure was there, low and heavy, and her cunt was still milking him in little aftershocks, and it took four strokes, maybe five, before it broke loose. He came with his forehead down against hers and his hand fisted in the quilt beside her head, and it went on longer than it should have, longer than it ever did, because some part of him was trying to put the whole unanswered question into it instead of words.
Dolly watched him the whole time. She didn't close her eyes once.
When he finally went still on top of her, breathing hard into her neck, she lifted one hand and put it flat on the back of his head — not gentle, not rough, just there — and held him down against her for a count of five.
"Get off," she said then, and let go.
He pulled out and rolled onto his back beside her. The condom was heavy and warm and he dealt with it the way he always did, knotting it, dropping it off the edge of the bed onto the floorboards where it landed with a wet little slap. Neither of them looked at it. The jukebox below had moved on to something with horns in it, and somebody in the kitchen was laughing, and the ordinary world went on doing what it did.
Dolly sat up. She didn't pull her uniform down. She sat there with it bunched at her waist in the dark, and she reached over him to the washstand and got her cigarettes, and she lit one off the little kitchen match she kept in the pack, and the flare of it lit her face from below — the jaw, the freckles, the mouth that had gone back to being a smirk but a tired one.
"So," she said, around the smoke. "You've been inside me. It felt like me. You came like it was me."
"It was you."
"That's not what I asked." She turned her head and looked at him down the length of the cigarette. "I asked whether you've been inside anybody else. And you didn't answer. And you didn't answer because the answer is yes, or the answer is something you think I can't hear."
Georgia lay there and looked at the ceiling stripe and said nothing at all.
Dolly took a long drag. She held it. She let it out slow, toward the window, and the smoke crossed the streetlight stripe and turned it milky for a second before it thinned and died.
"Okay," she said again, the way she had before. Just that. And she stubbed the cigarette out on the windowsill and swung her legs off the bed and stood up, and the floorboards creaked under her, and she started pulling her uniform back down over her hips with both hands, smoothing the blue, tucking the hem, putting herself back the way she came in.
At the door she stopped with her hand on the knob and her back to him, and the corridor light cut in under the frame and laid a bright line across the floorboards right past the knotted condom.
"You've got the counter tomorrow," she said. "No apron."
"I know."
"Ruby's going to be on that floor." She didn't turn around. "And Hazel's going to be watching the two of you like it's a picture show. And I'm going to be watching the three of you. So whatever you've got in your head about tomorrow — get it out before you come down those stairs."
She opened the door and went out and pulled it shut behind her without looking back, and her footsteps went down the stairs, and the little room above the diner was just a room again — his uniform on the chair, his face in the dark, the washstand, the window, and the bright stripe of the corridor light under the door going out one second later when she hit the bottom of the stairs and the switch.