Dolly didn't answer Hazel. Her hand closed around Georgia's wrist — hard, the grip of a woman who'd hauled drunks out of the Blue Moon Tavern by the collar and never once been thanked for it — and she pulled.

"Dolly—"

"Walk."

He walked. His stilettos clicked once, twice, three times on the corridor concrete, the sound flat and quick, and then the storage closet swallowed them both and the door swung shut behind him. The lock turned. The click was small and final, like a fingernail against a tooth.

The diner went away. That was the strange part — it didn't fade, it just stopped, the way a radio stops when you pull the cord. The clatter of silverware, the fry cook's radio, Hazel's voice mid-sentence out there in the dining room, all of it folded behind two inches of painted wood and a deadbolt. What was left was the hum of the icebox compressor and the smell of bleach and the sweet, dusty ghost of spilled sugar.

Dolly let go of his wrist. Georgia rubbed it, not because it hurt, but because he didn't know what else to do with his hands. His skirt was still hiked up on one side from the corridor, his apron turned backward, the wet spot hidden against his hip like a shame he'd been carrying all afternoon. His penis had flagged some in the walk over — the fear of Hazel's voice had done that — but it wasn't gone. It sat against his thigh, half-hard and slick, and the cold air of the closet found his bare skin and raised it.

Dolly stepped closer. Her brown pumps stopped an inch from his stilettos, heel to heel, and Georgia backed up because there was nowhere else to go. The shelf caught him across the shoulder blades. A box of napkins dug into his spine. He heard the sugar sack shift somewhere down the row, and then it went, all at once, tipping off the edge and hitting the concrete with a soft, heavy thump that spat a white cloud across the floor between their feet.

Neither of them looked down.

"So," Dolly said. Her green eyes moved over him the way a woman reads a menu she's already decided on. Down the blue dress, the white apron, the bare thighs, the shape he wasn't hiding and never really tried to. "She had her taste."

"Dolly."

"She had her taste," she said again, slower, "and now I'm having mine."

Georgia's mouth opened. He had a joke somewhere — he always had a joke, it was the only furniture in the room when things got too big — but it died on the way out, because Dolly was already going down. Not gracefully. She hit the concrete on both knees with a sound that made him wince for her, dropping hard enough that the sugar puffed up around her calves, and her hands came up under his skirt and pushed it the rest of the way to his waist.

The cold hit him everywhere at once. His thighs, his hips, the backs of his knees. He felt his own skin tighten and prickle and he sucked a breath through his teeth.

"You're gonna freeze your knees off," he said.

"Then warm them up." Dolly's hands closed on the backs of his thighs, thumbs pressing into the muscle just above the knee, and she pulled him forward off the shelf until he had to brace one hand on the box of napkins to keep from tipping over her. Her breath was already on him. Warm, then warmer. "Look at you. She left you wet."

"She—"

"I can smell her on you." Dolly turned her face against the inside of his thigh and breathed him in, slow, her nose dragging up the skin, and Georgia's hand curled into the napkin box hard enough to dent the cardboard. "That's all right. I'll fix it."

She took him in her mouth.

Not the way the other one had — Ruby had swallowed him down like a woman proving a point, fast and deep and gone. Dolly took him slow. She got her lips around the head of his cock and stopped there, tongue flat and hot against the underside, and just held him in her mouth while she looked up at him. Her green eyes, hard as bottle glass, and under them her mouth full of him. The freckles across her nose. The smirk she couldn't quite get rid of even now.

Georgia's head went back against the shelf. A can rattled somewhere above him.

"Dolly—"

She slid down him. All the way, her lips going tight and wet, her tongue working the vein on the underside in a slow line from root to tip, and when she got to the end she pulled off with a sound that was frankly obscene in the small room and did it again. And again. Every pass she took him a little deeper, and every pass her hand came up to cup his balls, warm and dry and sure of itself, rolling them the way she knew he liked because she'd learned it two years ago in a dorm room and had never once made him ask.

"She didn't do this," Dolly said, pulling off to breathe, her lips wet, a string of spit still connecting her to him. "Did she."

"No."

"Did she make you cum."

"No."

"No." Dolly smiled, and it was not a kind smile. "Because she don't know how." She took him back in her mouth and went to work in earnest, her head moving, her hand working the base in time with her lips, and the wet sound of it filled the closet — that soft, rhythmic, unmistakable noise that Georgia had spent two years learning to hear without blushing. He couldn't hear it without blushing. He never could.

His hips started moving on their own. Small rolls, nothing he'd decided on, and Dolly took them, let him fuck her mouth a little, her hands sliding up to grip his ass through the blue skirt and pull him in. Her nails went through the fabric. He felt each one.

"Dolly, I'm gonna—"

She pulled off. Completely, all at once, and the cold air hit his wet penis and he made a sound he would deny later.

"Not yet." She got up off her knees, and the sugar on the floor stuck to her stockings in white patches, and she didn't look down at it either. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist — the same wrist that had hauled him in here — and then she reached under her own skirt and worked her panties down her legs, stepping out of them one foot at a time while she kept her eyes on him the whole way. She kicked them into the corner. They landed on the spilled sugar.

"Turn around," she said.

"What?"

"You heard me."

He turned. The shelf was at his back now and the wall in front of him, and he heard her step in behind him, felt her hand land flat between his shoulder blades and push him forward until his palms hit the shelf edge and his skirt rode up over his ass. Her hand stayed there, pressing, and then slid down. Down his spine. Over the small of his back. Under the hem of the skirt and along the crease of him, and he jumped.

"Relax," Dolly said against his ear. "I'm not putting anything there. Not today." Her fingers slid lower, between his legs from behind, and found him hanging there and took hold of him and stroked once, root to tip, with a wet hand. "I want this."

"Then take it."

"Say please."

Georgia closed his eyes. "Please."

She turned him back around with a hand on his hip. There was no room to do it gracefully and it wasn't graceful — she bumped the shelf, a broom handle clattered down behind them, and Dolly laughed, that low rough laugh, and then she was up on him. She'd hiked her skirt to her waist and she straddled him standing, one hand on the shelf above his head, the other down between them to guide him, and Georgia felt the first touch of her — hot, slick, so much wetter than he'd expected, the whole afternoon apparently having done something for her too — and then she sank down on him.

The stretch took his breath. She was tight and hot and she took him in one long slow drop, her face close to his, her eyes open, watching him the entire way, and when he was all the way inside her she stopped and just breathed. Her forehead came down against his. Her hips settled.

"There," she said. Her voice had gone rough at the edges. "That's mine."

"Dolly—"

"Say it."

"It's yours."

She started to move.

Slow. Deliberately slow, the way she'd taken him in her mouth — no hurry in her at all, her hips rolling in a long deep circle that ground her clit against the base of him on every pass. Georgia's hands came up and found her waist under the apron and held on. Her dress was wet at the small of her back. Her hair had come loose from its pin and hung in her face and she didn't fix it. The icebox hummed. Somewhere out in the dining room a plate hit the floor and nobody in the closet cared.

"You liked it," Dolly said. Not a question. Her hips came down and stayed down, grinding, and Georgia's knees went soft. "When she had you on that tray. You liked it."

"I—"

"Don't lie to me. I've never once minded the truth from you." She rose up off him almost all the way, just the head still in her, and held there. "You liked it."

"Yes."

"Good." She dropped back down on him, hard enough that he felt it in his teeth, and Georgia's head knocked back against the shelf. "I don't care that you liked it. I care that you came back in here with me."

She rode him then for real. No more slow. Her hand braced on the shelf, her other hand fisted in the front of his apron, her hips working him in a rhythm that started fast and kept getting faster, and the sound of it — skin on skin, wet, the slap of her thighs against his — filled the closet and probably the corridor and possibly the dining room, and Georgia had stopped being able to care about that somewhere around the third time she took him to the root. He got his hands under her ass and lifted, took some of her weight, and she made a noise against his throat that he'd only heard her make a handful of times in two years.

"There," she gasped. "There, there, don't you dare stop—"

"I'm not stopping."

"I'm close. I'm—" Her voice broke off. Her whole body went stiff against him, and then she came with a shudder that started in her thighs and rolled up through her belly and her back, and Georgia felt her vagina clench around him in tight rolling waves, one after another, and she bit down on his shoulder through the dress to keep from being loud and did not entirely succeed.

He followed her over. He couldn't have stopped it if Hazel herself had walked in with the key — the clench took him, three hard pulses, and he pulled her down onto him as deep as she'd go and spilled inside her, hips jerking, hands full of her, his mouth open against her hair. She held him through it. Rode it out slow, small circles, until he was shaking and oversensitive and had to catch her wrist to make her stop.

They stayed like that a moment. Her forehead on his shoulder. His back against the shelf. Both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere.

"Well," Dolly said finally, into the fabric of his dress. "Now she's got competition."

Georgia laughed — a real one, startled out of him, the kind of laugh that came out of a man who'd just been thoroughly taken apart in a supply closet during the lunch shift. "You're insane."

"I'm thorough." She lifted her head and looked at him, and the smirk was back, but there was something softer under it, something she'd have denied if he'd named it. She touched his cheek with two fingers, quick, almost like she hadn't meant to. "Don't tell me you didn't need it."

He didn't tell her anything. He kissed her instead, and she let him, and when she finally pulled off him there was a wet sound and a warmth that ran down the inside of her thigh and she made a face at it, comical, and reached for the rag on the shelf.

"Give me that." She cleaned herself up with the efficiency of a woman who'd done it a hundred times in a hundred places, then tossed the rag onto the sugar spill and smoothed her skirt down over her hips, straightening the apron, tucking her hair back with both hands. Georgia did the same — pulled his skirt down, wiped himself with the corner of his own apron, tucked himself away — and by the time they were done they both looked, more or less, like two waitresses who'd stepped into the supply closet for napkins.

Almost. Dolly's stockings were ruined at the knees and there was a white dust of sugar all up her calves. Georgia's face was flushed to the roots of his hair.

"Hazel's gonna know," he said.

"Hazel already knows something." Dolly stepped to the door and put her hand on the deadbolt. She stopped there. Her fingers rested on the little brass turn, and Georgia watched them, and they were not quite steady — a fine tremor in the tips, there and then gone, like a plucked string settling. She didn't turn around yet. "Question is what she does about it."

"And what do we do about it."

Dolly turned. The smirk had gone somewhere and come back different. She looked at him — the blue dress, the white apron, the stilettos, the whole ridiculous beautiful picture of him — and she opened her mouth to say whatever it was she'd decided to say.

Three sharp taps hit the door.

They both went still. Dolly's hand froze on the deadbolt.

"I know you two are in there," Hazel said through the door, muffled but perfectly clear, the way a woman sounds when she's standing six inches from the wood and has decided not to shout. "Door's locked, but I've got a key."

A pause. The handle moved. Just a little. Just enough to rattle.

"So." Hazel's voice, flat as a ruled line. "You can open it, or I can."