Georgia didn't fill the silence. He was still crouched in the coffee, one knee down in the cold puddle of it, and the shards of the tray sat around him like something he'd dropped on purpose. The fluorescent tube above the corridor ticked, that dry insect sound it made when it was deciding whether to stay on. Ruby's foot found the edge of the fallen tray and pressed. Porcelain ground against linoleum and made a noise like a tooth being dragged across a plate.

"I won't tell Hazel nothing," Ruby said.

Her smile didn't move. Georgia had been watching it long enough now to understand it wasn't a smile at all — it was a door left open, and behind it a room with the light off. She let the tray slide down her hip, slow, the metal rim catching the hem of her dress, and then she just opened her hand and let it go. It hit the floor with a clatter that went down the corridor and into the dining room and probably all the way to the grill.

Nobody came. The lunch rush had thinned to a hum of silverware and the low radio by the register, and the swinging door behind Ruby stood half-shut, and the corridor was a dead end of old tile and bad light with a back exit at the far end that hadn't opened in a month. Georgia knew that because Hazel had taped a sign to it: OUT OF ORDER. The tape had gone yellow.

"But I want something in return," Ruby said.

Her hand came up and rested flat on the front of her dress, right at the top of that low neckline, and her fingers found the edge of the fabric and worried it. Back and forth. A thumbnail along the seam. She wasn't looking at Georgia when she did it. She was looking at Dolly, and the two of them were doing that thing again, that measuring thing, and Georgia was on the floor between them like something they'd both bid on.

"You two been friends a long time," Ruby said.

"Two years," Dolly said. Her voice came out flat as a coin on a counter. She had the rag still balled in her fist — the rag she'd been about to use on the tables before the tray fell — and she hadn't moved it since Ruby walked up. Georgia could see her knuckles around it, white at the peaks, and the rag was damp and she was squeezing water out of it onto the floor and didn't seem to know.

"Two years," Ruby repeated, like she was tasting it. "That's a long time. That's longer than I been anywhere." She took a step. Not toward the dining room. Not toward the door. Toward Georgia, and her heel came down on a shard of the tray and it cracked under her, and she didn't look at it, didn't even blink. "So I'm new. And the new girl, she gets the first taste. That's just manners."

Dolly's eyes went flat. Georgia had seen her mad before — he'd seen her throw a man's hat in the fryer once for grabbing her ass, seen her smile the whole time she did it — but this was different. This was the flat kind, the cold kind, where her face stopped doing anything at all. She didn't say no. She didn't say anything. She just turned her head, slow, and looked at Georgia, and waited.

The fluorescent tube ticked. The radio by the register played something with strings in it. Georgia's knees were wet with coffee and his apron was turned around to hide a stain he knew was still there, and he was half-hard under the skirt, had been since the closet, and Ruby Maynard was standing over him with her hand on her own neckline and her smile not reaching her eyes, and Dolly was waiting, and the whole corridor smelled like scorched coffee and perfume.

Georgia stood up. His stiletto caught the edge of the puddle and he caught himself on the wall with one hand, and the wall was cold, and he left a print there. He straightened his skirt without thinking about it. It didn't help. It never helped.

"You want a taste," he said.

"I want the first one."

"Right here."

"Right here." Ruby's hand dropped from her neckline and found the tray on the floor, and she toed it, turned it over, the flat underside up, and then she looked at Georgia the way a woman looks at a chair she's about to sit in. "Right now. Or I go find Hazel and ask her what she keeps in that closet."

Georgia laughed. It came out of him before he decided to let it, a short dry thing, and it surprised Ruby — he saw it surprise her, saw the smile flicker at one corner and come back. "You know what you look like?" he said. "You look like something that would make Nancy Green roll in her grave."

Ruby's head tilted. "Who the hell is Nancy Green?"

"The first one," Georgia said. "The one at the Chicago World's fair in 1893. Before you were born from your mother’s uterus in 1932."

For a second — one second — the door behind Ruby's smile opened all the way, and Georgia saw something in there that wasn't mean at all. Then it shut. "Well," Ruby said. "She can roll." And she stepped out of her heels, one, then the other, and left them where they fell, and her bare feet were on the cold tile and she didn't flinch at it.

Dolly made a sound. Not a word. Something low, in the back of her throat, like a door being pushed. Georgia looked at her and she was still standing there with the rag in her fist and her jaw set, and she looked back at him, and her eyes said what her mouth wasn't going to. Your call. It's your call, and I'm standing right here while you make it.

Georgia looked at Ruby. Ruby looked back, unblinking, and put her hand on his chest and pushed him — not hard, just enough — and his heel caught the tray and he went down onto it, sitting, the metal cold through the thin blue cotton of his skirt, and his hands went back to catch himself and found the floor and the wet.

"There," Ruby said. "That's better."

She hitched her dress up around her hips. The yellow fabric gathered in both her fists and she lifted it past her waist, past the tops of her thighs, and she wasn't wearing anything under it — Georgia saw the dark hair between her legs and the shine already there, and his mouth went dry, and his penis, which had been half-hard and pretending, stopped pretending. It pushed up under the hem of his skirt and showed itself, pale and slick at the tip, and Ruby looked down at it and her smile finally reached her eyes.

"Well," she said. "Ain't you cut."

"Yeah."

"I like that." She put one knee down on the tray beside his hip, and the metal groaned, and then the other, and she was straddling him, the gathered dress bunched between her belly and his, and her hands came down on his shoulders and her grip was tight, tighter than it needed to be, the kind of grip that left marks. Her vagina was right there, an inch above his penis, and he could feel the heat coming off it like a stove you haven't touched yet.

"Dolly," Ruby said, without looking away from Georgia. "You gonna watch, or you gonna pout?"

"I'm gonna watch," Dolly said. Her voice hadn't changed. Flat as a coin. But she moved — she stepped sideways and put her back against the corridor wall, and she folded her arms, and the rag dripped once onto the tile and she didn't look at it. She looked at Georgia. Only at Georgia.

Ruby reached down between them and took him in her hand. Her palm was warm and a little damp and she wrapped it around him and squeezed once, slow, from the base up, and Georgia's hips came off the tray before he could stop them. She laughed. "Easy," she said. "I ain't started."

She held him there, upright, the head of his penis against the wet heat of her, and she didn't push down. She just held it there, and moved it, dragging the head of him through her folds — up, down, up — and Georgia could feel how wet she already was, could feel it slicking the whole length of him, and she was watching his face the entire time like she was reading something written there.

"You want it?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Say it like you mean it."

"I want it."

"Want what."

Georgia's hands found her hips. The yellow dress was bunched under his fingers and her skin was hot through it and he pulled her down and she let him, and his penis slid into her all at once, passing her bulbs and thrusting in her vagina, to the root, and both of them made a sound — hers low and satisfied, his high and cut short — and the tray under them scraped an inch across the tile and stopped.

She was tight. Tighter than Dolly, tighter than he'd expected, and hot, and she sat there on him without moving for a long moment with her head tipped back and her eyes half-closed, and her vagina clenched around him, once, twice, working him like a fist. Georgia's hands were shaking on her hips. He could feel every inch of her around him, the grip of her, the wet, and he could hear the radio still playing by the register like nothing was happening at all.

"That's it," Ruby said. "That's the thing right there." And then she started to move.

She rode him slow. That was the thing about it — she didn't rush. She came up almost all the way off him, until just the head was still inside her, and then she sank back down, slow, all the way, grinding her hips forward at the bottom so that she pressed against him where it counted, and then up again. Over and over. The tray creaked. Her breath came out of her in little measured sounds, and Georgia's came out of him ragged, and the fluorescent tube ticked above them, and Dolly watched from the wall with her arms folded.

"Look at him," Ruby said, to Dolly. "He's gonna cum already."

"He won't," Dolly said.

"He will."

"He won't," Dolly said again, and something moved in her voice finally, something under the flat, and Ruby heard it and smiled wider and rode him harder, faster, her thighs working, the slap of her skin on his coming quicker now, and Georgia's hands slid up from her hips to her waist and she caught them and pinned them back against the tray, both of them, her fingers laced over his, and leaned her weight onto them so he couldn't move at all.

"There," she said, breathless now, the drawl gone ragged. "Now you just take it."

Georgia took it. She rode him down into the tray and he couldn't move and couldn't slow her and couldn't do anything but feel it — the wet drag of her vagina up and down his penis, the heat of her, the way she clenched every time she bottomed out, the low sound she made in her throat each time. His skirt was bunched up around his waist and his apron was somewhere under him and he was lying half on cold porcelain and cold coffee and he didn't care, he couldn't have said his own name.

Ruby's breathing changed. It went high and tight and then it broke, and her rhythm broke with it — she ground down on him and stopped, and her whole body went stiff, and Georgia felt it happen: her vagina clamping down on him hard, hard, harder, pulsing around his penis in waves, and then the wet — a rush of it, hot, running down over his balls and onto the tray and the floor, and she cried out once, sharp, and her nails dug into the backs of his hands.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's — " and she couldn't finish it, and her hips jerked twice more and then she went heavy on him, all her weight, her forehead dropping to his shoulder, her breath hot and fast against his neck.

The corridor was very quiet. The radio by the register had stopped. Ruby's moan had cut off in the middle of itself and left the whole hallway ringing with the shape of it, and the tray under Georgia was wet in a way it hadn't been before, and his penis was still inside her, still hard, slick and proud and aching, and she lay on him for a moment with her curls against his cheek and the flower crushed between them.

Then she pulled back just enough to look him in the eye. Her lips were parted. Her breath was ragged. There was a shine on her chin that hadn't been there before.

"First taste," she whispered.

She rose off him slowly, and the wet sound of it made Georgia's stomach clench, and when she stood up the dress fell back into place around her hips like it had never been anywhere else. She stepped over the tray. She stepped over him. Her bare feet left prints in the spilled coffee, and she bent and picked up her heels, one, then the other, and didn't put them on — just carried them, hooked on two fingers, hanging down by her thigh.

Georgia lay on the tray with his penis out and slick and shining in the bad light, and he didn't move. He couldn't. His legs had gone to water and the floor was cold and the coffee had soaked through the back of his skirt and he was still hard, still aching, nothing finished, and Ruby Maynard was walking away from him down the corridor toward the swinging door with her shoes in her hand.

She stopped at the door. She looked back over her shoulder, and the smile was back on, easy, like she'd put it on with the dress.

"Don't look so put out," she said. "I said first taste. I didn't say last."

The door swung shut behind her.

For a moment there was only the humming light and Georgia on the floor and Dolly against the wall with the rag still dripping in her fist. Then, from beyond the door, from the dining room, clear as anything — Hazel's voice, clipped, carrying.

"What was all that noise about?"

Dolly pushed off the wall. She crossed the corridor and stood over Georgia and looked down at him — the wet tray, the skirt up around his waist, his penis still out and slick with Ruby Maynard, the whole picture of him — and she stood there for a second and said one word.

"Georgia."

It wasn't a question.