Tim came up out of sleep the way you come up out of deep water, slow and wrong, his mouth dry and his eyes gummed shut and his whole body stiff with the particular soreness of a thing that had been used hard and put away wet.

He lay still and took inventory . Ass: sore, the welts from Dana's belt gone tight and itchy. Cock: soft and sore. Jaw: aching deep in the hinge, the way it ached after a shift of shouting over an espresso machine, except worse. Hair: in his eyes, wrong color, blond with pink in it, and he could smell the bleach.

Denise filled the doorway, and her voice came low and amused. “Well, hello there, my pretty little girl. You ready for another long, hard day of fun and service?”

She was the only one was still in the aprartment as Rosa and Patty and Yuki had gone home. Denise was wearing just a dressing gown and she let that slip off and stood naked and moved to him.

"Morning," she said. Her voice was rusted with sleep. Her hair was flat on one side and sticking up on the other, and she hadn't showered — he could smell the night on her, the jasmine gone sour underneath, the sex dried into her skin. "You sleep?"

"Yeah," Tim said. His voice came out like gravel. Her breasts hung heavy, and there was a shine on them, a dried shine, and he understood before she said anything that she had not washed and was not going to wash yet, that this was the point. "I'm filthy," she said, matter-of-fact. "You're going to clean me up.”

"You're going to put your mouth on me and you're going to lick every bit of last night off my skin and then I'm going to sit on your face until I'm done." She said it the way you'd read a grocery list. "Nod if you understand."

Tim nodded.

"Good boy." She swung a leg over him and settled her weight on his chest, and her cunt came down over his sternum, hot and damp and smelling of everything She leaned forward and her breasts hung down over his face, close enough that he could see the salt crusted at the underside of each one, the little dried runnels where sweat had tracked down and stopped.

"Start under," she said. "Get the underneath. That's where the sweat is."

He lifted his head and put his tongue to the underside of her left breast, and the taste hit him all at once — salt and stale perfume and the faint copper tang of skin and under all of it the flat animal smell of her. He licked up along the crease, slow, and the dried salt came up on his tongue and he swallowed it.

"There," Denise said. "That's it."

He worked his way across, tongue flat and then tongue tip, cleaning the underside of her breast the way you'd clean a plate. She shifted her weight and the other breast came to his mouth and he did that one too, and when he got to the nipple he took it in and sucked it and she made a low sound and her hand came down on the back of his head, not pushing, just resting there, a weight.

"Both," she said. "Don't leave the other one out."

He switched. He sucked the right nipple and licked the salt out of the crease under it and she sat on his chest and breathed through her nose and let him work. His cock was getting hard against his belly, stupid and traitorous, and she felt it — she had to feel it, it was pressed up between her thighs — and she laughed, low, without moving.

"You're easy," she said. "You know that? I've got you doing the most degrading thing I can think of and your dick's up like a flag."

"Sorry," Tim said, into her breast.

"Don't be sorry. It's the whole reason you're here." She sat back and looked down at him, doing the thing they did when she was deciding something. "My chest is done. Now the rest of me."

She moved up his body, knees walking up past his shoulders, and her cunt came down over his mouth.

It was not a clean cunt. It was a night's worth of cunt — thick, salted, the hair at the edges stiff , the whole of her warm and heavy and tasting of sex and of the night, and he got his tongue into her and licked up along the seam and she ground down on his face and let out a long breath

He licked her slit from bottom to top and then went back for more, tongue flat, working the whole length of her, and she rode his face with her hands braced on the headboard and her tits swinging over him and her hips grinding slow and steady, and Tim held onto her thighs and did what he was told.

"Harder," she said. "You're being polite."

He pressed his tongue in and up and found her clit and worked it, and she made a sound that was almost a grunt, her whole weight settling onto him, and he couldn't breathe through his nose for a second and didn't care. She was grinding down and her thighs were shaking and he kept his tongue on her clit and his hands quiet at his side and she came with a long, low, ugly sound, hips jerking, cunt clenching against his mouth, and he kept licking until she pushed off him and sat back on his chest, breathing hard.

"Okay," she said. "Okay." She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, which was funny, because it hadn't been her mouth. Then she climbed off him and stood, and she was unsteady for a second, and she caught the bedpost. "Shower for me. You're making breakfast."

"Yes," Tim said.

"And Tim." She looked down at him from the side of the bed, naked and flushed "You'll eat what I don't want. That's the rule. You eat what's left."

"Yes," he said again, and she went into the bathroom and shut the door, and the shower came on, with his mouth tasting of her and his cock aching and his heart going too fast, and after a minute he got up and went to find the kitchen.

The apartment was bright now, the blinds up, the light coming in flat and bright. He found the kitchen — he'd been in it before and cleaned it with Yuki, he knew where things were and he made coffee and set out what he could find: cold cuts, a hard-boiled egg, some fruit, a heel of bread. He put it on a plate hoping this would make her happy.

She came out in a robe with her hair wrapped in a towel and sat down at the counter and ate. Tim stood.

"Sit," she said, without looking up. "You look like a waiter."

He sat on the stool beside her. She ate the egg and half the fruit and left the rest, and when she was done she pushed the plate across to him without ceremony, and Tim ate what was left standing over the sink, cold cuts and bread and the picked-over fruit, and it was the first thing he'd eaten all day and he was so hungry he didn't taste it.

"Good," Denise said, watching him. "See, you can be trained."

She went to get dressed. Tim washed the plate and put it away and stood in the kitchen with his hands on the counter and listened to her moving around in the bedroom, and when she came back out she had a laptop under her arm and a stack of envelopes and a look on her face he was starting to recognize, the look that meant she had decided something and he was going to find out what.

"I've got charity letters," she said. "The annual gala. I've been putting them off for two weeks and I'm going to get them done today." She set the laptop on the dining table and the envelopes beside it and pulled out a chair and you're going to type them for me," she said, "since that's what you did all day back when you had that job after graduation, wasn't it? Typing letters, one after another”

"Not like that." Denise smiled, and it was the smile from the first night, the one that had gotten him into the bar. "Not like that at all. Go put on what's on the bed."

On the bed was an outfit. He stood over it for a while before he touched it. A gray pencil skirt. A white blouse with a collar. A black bra with lace on it, and a pair of black stockings, and a pair of low black heels. Laid out neat, the way Clara laid out a waxing tray.

He put it on. The bra first — he'd learned the clasp by now, front-hook, which was its own small humiliation — and the blouse over it, and the skirt, which was tight across the hips and ended above the knee. The stockings were the kind with the seam up the back and he got them on straight the second try. The heels were lower than the red ones and he could walk in them, mostly.

When he came out Denise looked him over the way you look over a car you're thinking of buying. She got up and circled him once and adjusted the collar of the blouse and pulled the skirt straight at the back and pushed his hair back off his face, and then she stepped back and nodded.

"There's a mirror in the hall," she said. "Go look."

He went and looked. The person in the mirror was a young woman with blond hair with pink in it and pink nails and a gray skirt and a white blouse, and she had a boy's jaw and a boy's freckles and a boy's flat chest under the lace, and Tim stood there and looked at her and felt the thing he was not going to examine, the thing that had been happening every time, the low hot drop in his stomach that had nothing to do with his cock and everything to do with the word she.

"Come on," Denise called. "The letters aren't going to write themselves."

She sat him at the dining table with the laptop open and a stack of donor envelopes and a printed list of names and addresses. The gala was in three months The letters were the same letter with different names in it, and she'd done the hard part already — the body of the text was written, the salutation and the first line were the only things that changed. She talked him through it once, slowly, the way you'd talk a child through tying a shoe, and then she sat down across from him with her own laptop and her own work and left him to it.

He typed. His nails clicked on the keys — pink, filed round, Clara's work — and he had to slow down to keep from hitting two keys at once, and the first letter took him four minutes and the second took three and by the fifth he had a rhythm. The skirt rode up when he sat and he kept pulling it down. The bra strap slid off his shoulder and he kept pushing it back. The stockings whispered against each other when he crossed his legs, and he crossed his legs without thinking about it, and then thought about it.

Denise worked. She didn't look at him much. Once she got up and refilled her coffee and stood behind him for a minute reading over his shoulder, and her hand came down and rested on the back of his neck, warm, and stayed there while she read the screen, and then she took it away and went back to her chair and Tim typed the next name with his neck still feeling the shape of her hand.

"This one's a doctor," Denise said, at one point, not looking up. "Dr. Ellen Marsh. She gave a grand last year. Don't misspell her name."

"I won't."

"You will if you're not careful. It's M-A-R-S-H, not M-A-R-C-H."

He checked it twice. He typed it right. He kept going.

Tim typed and Denise worked and the only sounds were the keys and the fan and the occasional car going by outside, and it was — and this was the thing he could not make sense of — almost peaceful. He was wearing a skirt in a stranger's apartment with no phone and no wallet and no way out, and he was typing charity letters for a gala, and it was the most normal hour he'd had in three days.

Then she closed her laptop and stretched and looked at the clock "Good girl," she said, and Tim's stomach dropped, and she saw it, and she smiled.

“Good girl,” Denise said again, softer this time, and she watched the word land on him the way she watched everything — patient, cataloguing, filing it away. Tim sat very still on the dining chair with his hands flat on the table and his knees together under the gray skirt, and he could feel the blush coming up his neck and into his face and there was nothing he could do about it.

She stood. The chair legs scraped the floor and she didn’t bother to push it back in. She crossed to the kitchen counter and picked up the glass she’d been drinking from — water, mostly gone — and drank off the last of it and set it down again, and the whole time she looked at him over the rim. Then she came around the table.

“Up,” she said.

He got up. The heels made him taller than he was used to being and it changed the angle of everything, the counter, her face, and he stood there with his hands hanging and didn’t know where to put them.

She didn’t say anything for a second. She just stood close enough that he could smell her. Her robe was tied loose at the waist and she reached up and pushed his hair back off his forehead, the way she had before, and left her hand there, palm flat against his temple, holding his head still.

“You know what I want,” she said. “Down.”

Her hand moved from his temple to his shoulder and she pushed. Not hard. Just the weight of it, the flat of her palm on the bone, and Tim went down because his legs had already decided before his mouth could argue. His knees hit the floor — the hardwood, no rug, and it stung up through the bone — and the pencil skirt went tight across his thighs and the stockings slid against each other and he knelt there in the middle of her kitchen in a white blouse with his hands at his sides, looking up at her.

“Better,” she said.

She untied the robe. It came open and hung off her shoulders and she didn’t take it off, just let it hang, and her cunt was right there at the level of his face, and Tim could see it was already wet — not the dried stuff from the morning, fresh, the lips swollen and shining and the hair at the edges dark with it. She’d been wet since before she stood up from the table. Maybe since she’d said good girl. He didn’t know which was worse, that she’d planned it or that she hadn’t.

“You did a decent job this morning,” she said. “But you were polite. I told you.”

“I know.”

“So do it right this time.” She stepped in, one foot between his knees, and her hand came down on the back of his head and pulled him in. “Open your mouth.”

He opened it. She pressed herself against his face and the taste hit him all at once — thick, salted, the whole of her hot and slick and smeared across his lips and chin, and his tongue came out on instinct and dragged up the seam of her and she made a low sound above him and her fingers tightened in his hair.

“There,” she said. “That’s it. Right there.”

He worked his tongue up along her slit, flat and slow, and she was so wet it came up on his chin and ran down toward his collar and he felt it go. He got to the top and found her clit and she jerked — a small whole-body twitch, like a fish on a line — and her hips pushed forward into his mouth and she breathed out through her nose, long and controlled, the way she did everything.

“Again,” she said. “Don’t stop.”

He didn’t stop. He put his tongue to her clit and worked it in slow circles and she rode it, her hips moving in a shallow grind, her hand a fist in his hair now, not guiding — holding. He could feel the muscle of her thigh against his cheek, hard from all the years of whatever she did to keep it that way, and he could feel the little tremors running through it, and he put his hands up because they had to go somewhere and found the backs of her thighs and held on.

“Harder,” she said. “You’re licking like you’re apologizing.”

He pressed his tongue flat and hard against her clit and held it there and she made a sound — not a word, just a sound, low in her throat — and her hips bucked once, hard, and he had to brace to keep his face in place. The wet was everywhere now, his whole lower face slick with her, and he could taste it in the back of his throat, and his cock was hard and pushed up flat against the inside of the skirt and the lace of the bra was rubbing and he didn’t care, he didn’t care about any of it, he just kept his tongue moving because she’d told him to and because stopping was worse.

“That’s my girl,” she said, and the words went through him like a hand.

She pulled his head back by the hair to make him look up at her, and her face was flushed and her mouth was open and she was breathing through it now, and she looked down at him kneeling there with his mouth wet and his hair a mess and his eyes watering a little from the pull.

“Say it,” she said.

“I’m your girl.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m your girl, Denise.”

“Good.” She pushed his face back into her and ground down on him, and now she wasn’t being careful, she was using his mouth, both hands in his hair and her hips working against his face in a rhythm that had nothing to do with him, and Tim held onto her thighs and kept his tongue where she’d put it and took it. He could feel her getting close — the clench of her, the way her breathing went shallow and fast, the way she stopped talking. Her thighs came in on either side of his head and squeezed and he couldn’t hear anything but the wet sound of his own mouth and the blood in his ears. He pushed his tongue into her clit and held it and she came on his face with a long, ugly, open-mouthed sound, her whole body locking and then jerking, her cunt clenching against his mouth, her thighs clamping so hard around his head that his ears rang and the world went narrow and red at the edges. He kept licking her through it, tongue still moving, because she hadn’t told him to stop, and she rode it out on his mouth with her fingers knotted in his hair and her head thrown back and her robe hanging open off her shoulders.

Then she let go. Her thighs came apart and her hands came out of his hair and she stepped back and stood over him breathing hard, and Tim stayed on his knees with his mouth open and her taste all over his face, dripping off his chin onto the collar of the white blouse.

She looked at him for a long moment. “Stand up,” she said. “Turn around.”

He stood and turned. The heels made him slow and careful on the hardwood and he had to put a hand on the back of the chair to keep his balance, and when he was facing her

“Take it off,” she said. “The blouse. The skirt. All of it. I want to look at you.”

He unbuttoned the blouse. His fingers were clumsy and it took him longer than it should have, and she stood there with her arms crossed and watched him do it, and when it was open he pulled it off his shoulders and let it fall on the chair behind him. The bra was lace and he reached back and unhooked it and slid the straps down his arms and dropped it on top of the blouse. Then the skirt. The zipper was on the side and he found it and pulled it down and the skirt went loose and he worked it over his hips and down the stockings and stepped out of it and stood in front of her in nothing but the seamed stockings and the heels and his cock standing up against his stomach, hard, the head of it shining.

She looked at him for a long time. Her eyes went down his body and up again and she didn’t say anything and the silence got long enough that he started to feel it in his shoulders, the need to cover himself, the old reflex, and he kept his hands at his sides because he’d learned that much, at least, in the last two days.

“Good,” she said finally. “You’re getting the hang of it.”

Denise went to the closet and came back with something pink folded over her arm. She shook it out and held it up against him, and Tim looked at it and understood it was a nightie — baby-doll, they called it, he knew the word from somewhere, a slip of fabric with thin straps and a hem that would sit at the tops of his thighs.

"Arms up," she said.

He raised his arms. She dropped it over his head and it fell down his chest, cool and slippery, and the hem settled high on his thighs and the straps were so thin he could feel them like threads. The lace at the neckline sat just under his collarbones and the pink was the pink of the polish on his nails, the pink in his hair, and he stood there in the seamed stockings and the black heels and the pink nightie with his cock pushing the fabric out in front, obvious, impossible to hide.

Denise walked a circle around him. She straightened one strap. She pulled the hem down at the back, and then let it go, and it rode back up. She put her palm flat on his ass through the fabric and held it there and looked at him over her shoulder.

"There," she said. "Now you're dressed."

"Denise."

"What."

"Where are we going."

"Out." She went to the closet and pulled out a coat — long, camel-colored, a woman's coat with a belt — and held it open for him. "Arms."

He put his arms in the sleeves and she turned him around by the shoulder and belted it at his waist and stepped back. The coat came down to his knees. It covered the nightie and the stockings and the tops of the heels, and it covered his cock, and Tim stood in the middle of the bedroom and understood that from the outside he was a person in a nice coat, and underneath he was a girl in a pink slip with her cock out.

"Better," Denise said. She left him stading in silent hooor and quxkly returned dressed in jeans, a thin sweater, She picked up her bag from the dresser and dropped her keys into it and looked at him. She opened the door andf together they walked out down to her car.

They drove off and she smiled and said, “you’re a lucky boy, the bar—do you remember it, well how could you ever forget—it’s having a charity cocktail and lunch from midday to six, and you’re going to be raising some extra funds for us.”

They drove to the bar and she parked up in a small lot fifty metres off, and together they walked over, her holding his arm, and he felt dizzy as they stepped into the site of his original shame.

The bar was full of women, many of whom, to his horror, he recognised, all talking loudly and with cocktails and snacks. The noise hit him first, a wall of shrill laughter and clinking glass, and then the smell—perfume and warm alcohol and something sweet frying. He stood in the doorway, her hand still on his arm, and the room seemed to tilt, the faces blurring into a single, terrible kaleidoscope of recognition. And now they were all looking at him, smiling, their eyes sliding over him like he was a ghost they’d been expecting. She squeezed his arm, a small, sharp pressure, and he felt the the dizziness swelling in his skull, and he knew, with a sick, thrilling certainty, that there was no escape from this.

The room turned toward her the way a room turns toward the person holding the leash.

"Denise!" A woman near the door lifted her glass, and the name went around the bar in a wave — Denise, Denise, look who's here — and the laughter underneath it changed key, went low and knowing, the way it had on the first night. Tim stood with her hand still closed on his arm and felt the coat on him like a lie he was wearing.

"Ladies," Denise said. She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to. "You all remember Tim."

A sound went up — not quite a cheer, not quite a laugh, something in between that came from forty throats at once and made the floor feel thin under his heels. He saw faces he knew. Carol, red-bobbed, elbow on the bar, watching him with her chin in her hand like a woman at a matinee. Margaret, at a table with three others, her glass paused halfway to her mouth. And at the far end, near the windows, a woman in a denim jacket with her hair pulled back — Dana — who lifted two fingers off her glass in a small wave, slow, and smiled at him across the whole room.

"Oh, he's pretty," someone said, close by, and there was a scatter of agreement.

"He's prettier than last time," another said. "Denise, what did you do to his hair?"

"Clara did his hair," Denise said. "And everything else. You should see under the coat."

Tim's stomach went out from under him. He looked at the door. It was behind him and there were women between him and it and one of them was already moving to close it, unhurried, the way you'd close a window against a draft.

She didn't wait for the answer. She took his arm and walked him into the middle of the room, and the women made way for her, and the noise of the room closed behind them like water. There was a clearing at the center of the floor, between the bar and the low stage where a woman had been playing music off a phone, and Denise stopped him there, in the open, with women on every side and the light coming down on him from the high windows.

"Stand still," she said.

He stood still.

She stepped back from him and looked him over once, head to heel, the way she'd looked him over in the apartment. Then she reached for the belt of the coat

She pulled the belt loose and let the two ends hang, and she looked up at him with her eyebrows raised, patient, waiting, and the room had gone quiet enough that he could hear the ice settling in someone's glass. Then she pushed the coat off his shoulders.

It slid down his back and caught at his elbows and she pulled it free and dropped it over the back of a chair, and Tim stood in the middle of the bar in a pink baby-doll slip and seamed stockings and black heels with his cock pushing the thin fabric out in front of him, hard, obvious, and the room made a sound.

It wasn't a laugh at first. It was the intake — forty women drawing breath at once, a hiss of it, and then the laughter came up through the hiss, and it was worse than being hit. It went around the room in rings. The women at the front could see the hem of the slip riding high on his thighs and the black lace at the neckline and the pink of his nails where his hands hung; the women at the back stood on their toes and craned and laughed at what they could see, and the ones who couldn't see at all laughed at the ones who could.

"Oh my God," someone said, delighted. "Oh my God, Denise."

"Look at him," another said. "Look at the little thing."

"He's got his cock out."

"That's not out, that's — honey, that's a slip, that's a nightie so pretty and perfect for him”

"Clara," Denise said. "Clara and Tina did all of it. Hair, nails, the whole business." She was standing a little apart from him now, arms crossed, letting them look. "He's a project."

"He's a doll," a woman said, and reached out and touched the strap of the slip where it sat on his shoulder, and her finger was warm and her nail caught the lace, and Tim flinched, and the flinch made them laugh harder.

"He flinches," the woman said. "Denise, he flinches."

"He does that," Denise said.

And then the hands came.

The first one was on his shoulder — the same woman, running her palm down the strap and over the bare skin of his arm, and she was maybe fifty, silver at her temples, and she looked at him the whole time she did it, smiling, like she was petting a dog she'd been told not to feed. The second hand came from behind, flat on his back, and the third landed on his hip through the slip, and then there were more than he could count, and the room had stopped being a room and become a crowd around a thing.

"Look at his shoulders," someone said. "He's got a boy's shoulders."

"He's got a boy's everything, that's the point —"

"Pretty girl," a woman said, right at his ear, close enough that he felt her breath, and Tim's whole body went hot from the scalp down. "Pretty, pretty girl."

Hands on his waist. Hands on his ribs, thumbs finding the ridges of them through the fabric. A hand on the back of his thigh, low, fingers spread, and he jerked and the hand stayed where it was, unbothered. A woman crouched in front of him — he saw the top of her head, dark hair pinned up — and ran both hands up the outside of his legs from ankle to knee to the hem of the slip, and she looked up at him from down there and said, "Nice stockings. Seams straight.

The room liked that. The room liked it a lot. A woman on his left — Margaret, he saw her now, gray hair, glasses, a glass of white wine in one hand — reached out with her free hand and cupped his jaw and turned his face toward her, and looked at him for a long moment with her head tilted, the way you'd look at a piece of furniture you were thinking of buying.

"He's got a lovely mouth," Margaret said. "I remember the mouth."

"You'd remember it," Denise said.

Margaret's thumb pressed at the corner of his mouth, testing, and Tim stood and let her, because his hands were at his sides and there were women behind him and in front of him and the door was closed. Her thumb slid along his lower lip and pulled it down a little and let it go, and she smiled and took her hand back and drank her wine.

Then the hands went lower.

He'd been hard since the coat came off — since before the coat came off, since the car — and the slip was thin enough that there was no hiding it, the fabric tented out in front of him and the head of his cock pushing a wet spot into the pink, and the women had all seen it, and now they wanted to feel it. The first hand that closed on him through the fabric was a stranger's, small and dry and deliberate, and she cupped him and weighed him and said, "Oh, he's warm," and the women around her laughed and pressed in closer.

The hand on his cock moved — a slow stroke through the fabric, root to tip, and the lace at the hem dragged against the head of him and Tim's knees went soft and he caught himself, and the women saw it and loved it.

"He's going to fall over."

"Hold him up."

Hands caught him — one on each arm, from behind, a woman on either side of him with her fingers closed around his biceps, and they held him steady and open while the others worked. A hand slid under the hem of the slip and found the bare skin of his hip and stayed there, thumb moving in a slow circle. Another hand came up between his legs from behind and cupped his balls through the fabric, gentle, rolling them, and Tim made a sound he didn't mean to make and the room made its sound back.

"Oh, he likes that."

"He likes all of it. Look at him."

"He's not even pretending."

Denise stood off to the side with her arms crossed and watched, and she had the look she got when something was going the way she'd planned it, and Tim found her eyes across the room and she raised one eyebrow at him, just slightly, a question, and he didn't know what the question was and couldn't answer it anyway, and she smiled and looked away.

"Pretty girl," a woman said again — a different woman this time, close to his face, and she said it slow, tasting it. "Pretty, pretty girl. Say it back."

"I'm a pretty girl," Tim said.

The room came apart. They laughed and clapped and one of them — the woman with the silver temples — actually pressed her hand flat to her chest and said, "Oh, he's a natural," and the hand on his cock stroked him again, harder, and the hand on his balls squeezed, and Tim stood in the middle of it with his head back and his mouth open and his cock aching and the pink slip stuck to the wet spot and the women all around him, and he was so hard it hurt.

"Denise," someone called. "Denise, is he for sale?"

"He's for the charity," Denise said. "That's the point of him. You want a turn, you put your name on the sheet."

"What sheet?"

"The one on the bar. Rosa's got it."

There was a movement toward the bar, a drift of women, and Tim turned his head and saw Rosa behind the bar with a clipboard and a pen, her hair in its sleek ponytail, the crimson wrap dress, and she was writing names down and taking money — bills, folded, into a glass — and she looked up and caught his eye and winked at him, slow, and went back to the clipboard.

The hands came back and they were bolder now. Tim's cock was slick now, wet from the head down, and the woman holding it stroked it once, twice, slow, and then stopped and let go, and stepped back, and another woman took her place. And another. They didn't let him come. That was the rule, and they all knew it, and they passed him around the middle of the room and stroked him to the edge and stopped and laughed and did it again, and Tim stood with his arms held and his knees soft and his mouth open and let them, because there was nothing else to do

"Good girl," a woman said, and squeezed his cock once, hard, at the root, and let go, and stepped back into the crowd, and the next pair of hands came up to take her place.

Denise let it go on. She stood by the wall with her arms crossed and watched him get passed hand to hand for what felt like a long time, and the noise of the room rose and fell around him, and somewhere Rosa was still taking money and writing names,