Nobody lets him come down. Tim is still shaking when they peel him off the bar rail and lay him flat across the marble, face-up, and the cold of it shocks up his spine and into his teeth. His cheek hits the polished stone and he smells the ghost of a thousand gin-and-tonics, lemon rind and juniper, and under that the warm animal smell of his own sweat gone cool. Rosa pulls the pink toy out of him slow, and the sound he makes is not a word. His heels are gone — someone took them off him at some point and he doesn't know when — and his bare feet slide against the bar's brass footrail, looking for purchase that isn't there.

"Spread him," Denise says.

They do. Patty takes his left wrist and pins it above his head, and Carol — the red-bob woman, back again, hands like a nurse's — takes his right. Two more women he can't see take his ankles and open him wide, and his knees fall apart on the slick marble and stay there. His cock is still hard. That's the thing that keeps happening to him, the thing he can't explain to himself wrung out and sobbing, and it hasn't gone down, it just lies against his belly wet and red and stupid and wanting.

Denise plants one palm flat on his sternum and leans her weight into it. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough that he feels every breath as a negotiation with her hand.

"There he is," she says, low, amused. "Look at him. Still standing at attention." Her thumb drags across his nipple through the sequins and he jerks under her palm and she doesn't move an inch. "You're going to be good for us now, aren't you."

"Yes please be gentle."

"Good girl."

That word goes through him like the toy did — that slow, deliberate slide, that stretch — and he feels his face go hot and knows they can see it, all of them, the whole crescent of them watching his cheeks flush under the bar lights. He doesn't examine it. He told himself he wasn't going to examine it.

"Ladies," Denise says, raising her voice just enough to carry, "he's had a long night. He's tired. But he's still got a mouth on him, and I think it's time we put it to work."

A ripple goes through the room. Not laughter, exactly — something hungrier than that, a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled. Chairs scrape. A purse snaps shut somewhere behind him. Yuki appears at his shoulder with a bar rag and wipes his chin dry without being asked, quick and businesslike, like she's prepping a station, and he turns his face toward her hand and she's already gone.

"Here's how it works," Denise says. She's still got her palm on his chest, and she uses it to press him flat when he tries to lift his head.

“most of us are going to take a turn with your tongue on our tits. You're gonna open wide and you're gonna work them proper — each one, every inch, no cutting corners, no hurrying it. You don't quit until she says quit.”

The words hang there, thick as the smoke in the air. He feels the weight of them settle low in his gut, a slow coil tightening. Denise watches him, letting the silence stretch, letting him feel the shape of what she’s just said — the order, the count of it, the sheer number of them lined up like a promise and a threat rolled into one. His mouth goes dry. He doesn't answer, can't answer, just stares at the damp ring his glass left on the wood, and she lets him sit in it, lets the anticipation crawl up his spine one vertebra at a time.

Then she smiles, slow and knowing, and adds, "And you'll thank us for it.

He tips his head back, past her, to the bulbs strung low over the bar, and groans while the women laugh and clap and hash out the order. His jaw already throbs. His balls ache worse. He can feel his heartbeat in his cock, one heavy pulse at a time, and every one of them sees it, and that’s what’s getting him off, he realizes — not the hands, the watching. Twenty-odd women staring at him, knowing exactly how desperate he is for it.

"Good." Denise steps back and Patty's grip on his wrist tightens, taking up the slack. "Patty. You're first."

Patty doesn't answer. She just comes around the end of the bar, and Tim hears the snap of buttons before he sees anything, and then she's leaning over him with her leather jacket open and her white tank top shoved up under her arms and her breasts hanging heavy and pale in the low light. She's older than the others in a way that shows — the skin soft and creased, the nipples wide and dark — and she smells like whiskey and old leather and underneath that, faintly, like a woman who's been dancing in a hot room for three hours.

"Open up, kid," she says.

He opens his mouth. She takes her left breast in her hand and guides the nipple down onto his tongue, and the first thing he feels is how warm it is — warmer than her hands, warmer than the room — and how it firms up the second his mouth closes on it, and Patty lets out a breath through her nose and settles her weight onto her forearms on the bar so she's arched over him, holding still, letting him work.

He works. He licks wide and flat, then narrow, then flicks, because he doesn't know what she wants and the only way to find out is to try everything and watch her face. Her pale blue eyes stay on him the whole time. She doesn't close them, doesn't look away, doesn't give him anything — just watches him lick her like she's reading a report, and it's that flat steady attention that makes him go harder at it, makes him pull the nipple between his lips and suck until she finally, finally makes a low sound in her throat and the corner of her mouth moves.

"Other one," she says.

He turns his head and takes the other, and this time he uses his teeth, just the edge, and her hand comes up and grips the back of his skull and holds him there. "That's it," she says, clipped, almost bored, and the boredom is worse than praise, it makes him want to earn something better. He licks down the underside, into the crease, up over the top, and when he comes back to the nipple she's breathing harder and her jaw has gone tight.

Somewhere below, a hand closes around his cock.

He bucks — can't help it — and Patty's grip on his skull tightens and Denise's voice comes from somewhere near his hip, easy and unhurried: "Nobody said stop, sweetheart."

It's Carol's hand. He can tell thats the hand that's working him root to tip in a slow fist, no hurry in it at all. She squeezes at the top just short of pain and he whines into Patty's breast and Patty huffs something that might be a laugh and holds him down harder.

"Don't you dare," Carol says, pleasant as a receptionist. "I'll know."

He doesn't. He can't. The squeeze has him pinned at the edge like everything else in this room, and he licks and sucks and swallows around Patty's nipple with his eyes squeezed shut, riding the narrow line between the mouth on him and the hand on him, and when Patty finally pulls back he's gasping like he's been held underwater.

"Next," she says, and buttons her jacket with two quick moves and steps away without looking at him again.

The next one is Rosa. She doesn't bother with the buttons — she just pulls the wrap dress open at the waist and shrugs one shoulder out of it and leans down, and her breasts are fuller than Patty's and warmer, olive-dark against the sequins, and she takes his chin in her hand and lifts his face to meet hers before she lets him have them.

"Look at me when you do it," she says. "I want to see what you look like."

So he does it with his eyes open, which is harder, and Rosa watches him the whole time with that glittering dare in her face, her thumb stroking his jaw like she's proud of him, like he's a project she's been working on. Carol's hand keeps moving on him, slow, and Yuki's fingers have found his stomach — light, cool, tracing the line of muscle down toward his hip and then back up, over and over, keeping the skin there alive and shivering. He's so hard it hurts. and every pass makes him twitch like she's flicked him.

"He's good at this," Rosa says over her shoulder. "Somebody taught him."

"Nobody taught him," Denise says. "That's the fun part he is a natural toy boy."

Rosa laughs — that loud contagious laugh — and lets him have the other breast, and he's thorough, he's so thorough, because being thorough is the only thing in this room he's allowed to be good at. When she finally straightens up and ties her dress back into place she pats his cheek twice, light, and says, "Good boy," and moves off, and the words land somewhere low in him and stay there.

Third is a woman he doesn't know, tall and blonde and drunk enough to be careless, and she laughs the whole time he's working her, not mean, just delighted, one hand braced on the bar and the other petting his hair like he's a dog. Fourth is the woman who took him first, hours ago, and she smells like cigarettes and peppermint and tells him, "You remember me, don't you," and he does, he does remember her, and she makes him say it out loud with his mouth full.

Fifth and sixth and seventh he starts to lose track of, because they're coming faster now and Carol's hand has found a rhythm that matches them, squeezing on the inhale and sliding on the exhale, and Yuki has started using her nails, just barely, drawing thin lines down his ribs that make him arch off the marble and then press back down against Denise's palm. His jaw is aching in a way that's going to last for hours. There's spit on his chin and he can't wipe it. His wrists are numb where Patty and others have been holding them and he doesn't want them let go.

"Eight," Yuki says from somewhere above him, calm as a scorekeeper.

The ninth one is Yuki herself. She sets down her bar rag first, folds it, sets it aside — and then she pulls the black turtleneck up over her head and Tim's breath catches in his throat for reasons that have nothing to do with her breasts, which are small and neat and brown-tipped, and everything to do with the fact that she's the one who's been watching him all night, the one who kissed him, the one whose approval he apparently needs now. She doesn't lean over him. She sits up on the bar beside his head, swings one leg over so she's straddling his face, and lowers herself down with her hands braced on his chest, and her silver knife pendant swings forward and rests, cold, in the hollow of his throat.

"Both," she says. "And don't be sloppy."

He isn't sloppy. He's never been less sloppy in his life. She's light on him, her thighs soft against his chest, and she smells clean — soap and something green, like the kitchen at the end of a shift — and she makes no sound at all for a long time, just breathes, and it's the silence that undoes him, the sense that she's grading him. When he finally gets a rhythm she likes, she hums — one low note, barely there — and her hand comes down and rests flat on him and he feels it in his whole body like a bell.

"Next," she says when she lifts off him, and her voice is exactly as even as it was before. She pulls the turtleneck back down and picks up her rag and is gone.

Carol's hand stops.

Tim makes a sound he's not proud of. He's right at the edge — has been at the edge so long it's stopped being a place and started being a country — and the sudden absence of her grip leaves him throbbing in open air, and he lifts his hips off the marble trying to find it again, and Denise's palm slams him flat.

"What did I say," she says.

"Not yet."

"Not yet, Keep going, ladies."

Eleven has freckles on her chest and a soft belly and tells him he's pretty. Twelve is quick and businesslike and doesn't say anything at all, just uses his mouth and steps away. Thirteen is a different woman who smells like Rosa, and his jaw is aching and his eyes are wet and he's so hard the marble under his cock has gone warm from him. Fourteen pinches his nose shut halfway through so he has to work her with his mouth closed and no air, and he does it, he does it, and she lets go just before he panics and he gasps against her skin and she laughs. Fifteen holds his head in both hands and tells him he's a good girl and he comes *close* — so close his thighs start to shake — and Denise sees it and nods at Carol and Carol's hand closes hard at his root and holds, and the edge recedes like a tide going out, and Tim sobs once, dry, and nobody comments on it.

"Sixteen," Yuki says.

The room goes quiet. Not silent — there's still the hum of the cooler and somebody's ice settling in a glass — but the talking stops, and the shuffle of feet stops, and Tim feels the whole crescent of them turn at once to look at whoever's stepping up. He turns his head against the marble, cheek flat, eyes half-shut, and watches her come around the end of the bar.

She's not one he's seen up close tonight. Dark hair, dark dress, unremarkable from a distance — but when she reaches him and starts on the buttons, he sees it: a small dark rose tattooed on her ribs, low, just under the curve of her breast, and he hasn't seen that on any of the others, hasn't seen a mark on any of them all night, and something about it snags in him.

She doesn't say anything. She opens her blouse all the way down, shrugs it off her shoulders, and lets it hang at her elbows, and her breasts are pale and heavy and the rose moves when she breathes. She leans over him slow — slower than any of them — and her hair falls forward and curtains them both off from the room, and it's just her face above his, close enough that he can see the little creases at the corners of her eyes.

She takes her breast in her hand and lowers it to his mouth. The nipple touches his tongue.

Nobody moves. Nobody breathes. Somewhere above him, Denise's palm is a warm flat weight on his chest, and Carol's rings are cold against his root, and Yuki is watching, counting, and the sixteenth woman holds herself there, one heartbeat, two, waiting for his first lick — and Tim, jaw aching, cock throbbing, wrists pinned, laid out on the cold marble like something served, closes his eyes and opens his mouth wider.

he licks her breast and the women laugh, a sound like shattered glass skittering across the floor, and more hands spread over him, greedy, dragging heat across his ribs, his thighs, his aching belly. Then she pulls back, and two more middle-aged women step forward, their shirts already open, and they haul out their heavy, swaying breasts — full, warm, pendulous, the nipples dark and stiff — and they press them to his mouth, one then the other, and he is starving, desperate, his tongue a raw muscle of need as he licks, sucks, bites softly, tasting salt and skin and the faint musk of their heat. His jaw burns. His cock throbs so hard it hurts, pinned beneath the weight of palms, and he strains upward, blind, wanting more, wanting all of it, wanting to drown in the soft press of them, the low, cruel laughter, the endless hands that hold him down and feed him.