Touch Me Like You Mean It
Nothing to Hide · Book One · Vera Calder
Opening chapter · 11,326 words · Explicit erotic romance for adults 18+.
Chapter 1: The Show and the Morning After
The party had been running long enough that nobody was pretending the music wasn't loud. The windows were open, the night air off Westwood moving through, and the ground floor common area smelled the way it always did at the end of a semester: warm bodies, cheap beer, and the optimism of people who had just handed in their last assignment and had nowhere they needed to be tomorrow. Marissa was familiar with this smell. It was her natural habitat.
She was standing near the kitchen with a drink she didn't particularly want, watching a sophomore named Garrett attempt to explain to two girls why he found himself more interesting than they did. The girls were nodding with a patience that had about forty seconds left. She'd read this, adjusted her estimate slightly for the quality of Garrett's material, and returned her attention to the room.
The dress was doing what she'd intended it to do. She knew this not because she was tracking people noticing — she'd stopped doing that sophomore year — but because she could feel it in the quality of space around her, the way people held a radius and then stepped into it anyway. The cowl at the back was open to the small of her spine. From the front the dress looked almost tasteful: a deep V, grey-blue fabric falling away from her in a soft A-line. From behind there was nothing — her back bare from the nape of her neck to the waistband, and below the waistband the hem ended close to where the question began: it cleared what needed clearing on a stationary body, and not by a margin anyone would call generous. The sandals changed the geometry. Three-inch stilettos — black satin at the base, rhinestone-studded straps winding from the toe up to mid-calf in a tight spiral that caught the light every time she moved — brought her to six-three. There were Division I athletes in this building, volleyball players who cleared six feet and one basketball center who had a few inches on most men, and she was still the tallest woman in the room. Her legs ran from the hemline all the way down to the floor and they took a noticeable amount of time to get there. She was aware of exactly where the hemline sat. She had chosen it anyway.
The dare game had been building since midway through the spring semester. The vote had run for weeks — participants, acts, order of operations, all of it decided by popular ballot, organized by Nadia and her committee with an attention to process that Marissa genuinely admired. She'd won. So had DeShawn Briggs. The MC had told her the day before. She'd nearly missed the whole thing — almost double-booked the night against Edward's standing schedule before she caught the conflict and sorted it.
She had done things like this before. Not this exactly. She had had sex with other people present, a few at a time, at parties smaller than this one, without staging or a master of ceremonies or an audience that had specifically elected her for the purpose. That was different. This was a roomful of deliberate voyeurs, and the difference was the thing she'd been sitting with all evening.
She had always assumed sex was private by default for her — not shameful, not hidden, just hers. The commune had given her no body shame and no instinctive modesty, but it hadn't given her exhibitionism either. Nudity there had been unremarkable. The sex had been matter-of-fact. Nothing performed for an audience of strangers. She'd brought that baseline into her adult life without ever examining it.
And now there was this. The specific hum of anticipation that had been building since she'd gotten dressed, since she'd walked in, since she'd watched Nadia set up the arena on the second floor. It wasn't stage fright. It was closer to the feeling before a meet — the held-breath quality of a body that knew something was coming and was ready for it. She was not nervous about DeShawn or the acts. The crowd was the part that mattered — specifically, what it was bringing out in her. That was the part she hadn't predicted.
She noted it as new information about herself and kept moving. There would be time to examine it later, or not. She was twenty years old and excellent at parties and the dare game was about to begin.
Garrett's two girls made their exit, on schedule.
Isaac came through the door.
He wasn't dressed for the party and hadn't tried to be — standard-issue UCLA hoodie, royal blue with gold lettering, carrying a book. She recognized the spine before she saw the title. Wittgenstein's Poker. She had left it in his room two weeks ago.
She caught her foot on nothing. The floor was flat and she had been standing on it for forty minutes, but she caught her foot on it anyway and had to recorrect with a hand on the counter. A glass moved. She saved it without looking at it. One of Garrett's friends noticed. She kept her face in the position of someone who was perfectly fine.
Isaac scanned the room and found her in approximately the time it took him to look. This was not a surprise; she was always the first thing people found in a room, and he was not a person who needed multiple passes. He moved through the party toward her with the manner of someone who was genuinely uninterested in the party itself and was not pretending otherwise.
"Your Wittgenstein," he said, and held the book up rather than out — showing it to her, not handing it over. "Seemed like the kind of thing you'd want back before summer."
"I was using that as a prop. It was making me look intellectual."
"It was." He considered. "I thought you should know it stopped working in week three."
She looked up at him — he had the look that meant he was about to say something she'd be thinking about later.
"Are you staying?" she asked. She meant for the dare game. He knew what she meant.
He glanced toward the far end of the room where the stairs were, then back at her. "No." His gaze settled. "Watching you exhibit yourself to a room of semi-drunk partygoers is not how I want to spend time with you."
"That's a very narrow position on what qualifies as quality time."
He accepted this without expression. "I'll leave this in your room on my way out," he said, and went. He still had the book.
She watched him reach the door.
Watching you exhibit yourself. Not I don't want to watch. Not I'm not interested. He had said: this is not how I want to spend time with you. The preposition was doing something she couldn't name.
She finished her drink. There was a dare game to get ready for. She was twenty years old and she was excellent at parties and everything was proceeding normally.
Maybe he's right, she thought, and didn't finish the thought.
The signal moved through the party the way these things moved — not announced, just absorbed. A shift in the room's attention, people orienting toward the stairs. The volume didn't drop; it changed in quality. Something was about to happen on the second floor and the ground floor was no longer where it was.
Nadia appeared at her elbow. She was in black, as always, and she had the particular expression she wore when logistics were in motion — focused, unhurried, handling it.
"Ready?" she said.
"Yes," Marissa said.
They went upstairs.
The corridor outside the arena room was already thick with bodies. Nadia moved through with the quality of someone who had decided exactly where she was going and did not require anyone's permission, and Marissa followed in her wake. They turned into the first staging room: a normal two-person room, someone's actual room for the year, loaned for the night. The beds were still made. The desks still had their occupants' things on them. Through the wall she could hear the muffled bass of the MC warming up the room next door.
Nadia closed the door behind them.
Marissa slipped off her sandals and handed them across. She reached back, found the dress's sash, untied it, let the cowl fall forward off her shoulders, and stepped out of the fabric. Her thong followed. She handed everything to Nadia and stood for a moment in the borrowed room — someone else's desk, someone else's made bed — naked in the way she had been naked her entire life: without particular commentary on the fact.
The nervousness was still there. She took a moment to find it — the way she found muscle soreness after a hard workout, locating the feeling and assessing it. Smaller than before. Still present. The arousal had not followed suit. If anything it had grown, in the same quiet way the party had been growing all evening, and she noted this as useful information rather than something to manage.
Nadia held out the robe.
Purple satin, boxer-cut, substantial in the hand. She put it on. Nadia stepped behind her to tie the belt, and in the moment before she finished Marissa caught a glimpse of the robe's back in the mirror above the dresser: APHRODITE in large gold embroidery, the letters emphatic and theatrical, the fabric catching the light. The Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and passion.
She considered herself in the glass for a moment.
She was playing a character tonight. The character was not very far from herself.
From the adjacent room came the low rumble of someone large and DeShawn's teammate's voice, the logistics of the other staging room in progress. His robe was red, she knew — red satin, THE ANACONDA in gold on the back, the counterpart to hers. She found this funny in the specific way of something that had been made carefully and with conviction.
Her mother came into her mind. Cindy — Lena Frost in the credits of two decades of work — had never once, in any conversation Marissa could remember, seemed diminished by what she did for a living. She had seemed professional, occasionally amused, entirely at home in her own skin. The thought was useful. Marissa settled the robe's lapels, straightened her back, and turned toward the door.
Nadia was already holding it open.
Through the wall, the MC took the room.
She couldn't make out the words yet — the staging room's door was solid and the wall was concrete block, the sound arriving as bass murmur and the rhythm of amplification without its content. But she knew what it meant when a room organized itself around a single voice, and this room was doing that now. The party noise resolved into attention. The MC was working.
She knew the broad shape of what he was saying. She had been told by the MC himself the day before — the acts in order, the list delivered with a matter-of-factness that had made her appreciate whoever had organized this. He had not been embarrassed by the list. She hadn't been either.
A roar came through the wall.
Her name, she assumed. Or DeShawn's. The crowd's response to the names was the same quality of sound as the first moment of a match when the starting lineups were called — expectant, partisan, the acknowledgment of something they had chosen. She stood in the staging room and heard it and felt something she hadn't fully anticipated: the warmth of having been elected by the people she lived with. They had voted for her specifically. Out of everyone on the floor.
The crowd continued to respond, distinct eruptions punctuating whatever the MC was working through — the acts, in sequence, each one landing differently. She knew the list but hearing the crowd's reaction to it was a different kind of knowing. The noise that greeted act four was notably louder than act three. She noted this.
Then a different quality entered the sound — still loud, the laugh register mixed into it now. Something had been said that was funny and also meant. A beat, then a more organized response, the crowd settling on something like agreement. The no-filming rule, she suspected. DeShawn's teammates somewhere in the room making eye contact. Whoever had been planning to push their luck reconsidering. She felt a particular satisfaction at this — the rule she held absolutely, now held by the structure of the whole event. The crowd had voted for a performance. A performance was not a documentation.
The MC's voice dropped to a single word she couldn't make out, and the room received it. Then the arena went into a different kind of noise: lower, more continuous, the roar of a crowd that had been informed of something and was now holding it with anticipation.
He was done.
Nadia set down the things she'd been holding and gave Marissa a brief look that needed no translation. She slipped out of the staging room. Her footsteps moved down the corridor toward the arena.
Marissa stood alone in the room in her Aphrodite robe.
She was about to walk through a hallway full of people. She was about to do something she had never done, in front of a crowd that had voted for her, in her own name. The nervousness she had been carrying all evening was barely present now. What had grown in its place was something she had not, in twenty years of assessing herself, had occasion to name before.
She decided she didn't need to name it now. She waited for Nadia's knock.
Nadia's knock came through the door, two quick raps.
Marissa crossed the staging room and opened it.
The corridor had changed. Two minutes ago it had been crowded; now it was full in a different sense — packed tight from the arena room door back down the hall, people two and three deep against the walls, some standing on whatever gave them a few extra inches. The smell of it hit her first: warm bodies at high concentration, the charged heat of a crowd that had been worked up and was holding something. Anticipation had a smell. She knew it from competition. This was the same smell and entirely different.
There were no phones. Hands at sides, hands in pockets, pressed against the walls behind them. Nobody filming. The football teammates had done their work.
She was barefoot — heels off in the staging room — and the corridor floor was cool under her feet. The Aphrodite robe shifted against her with every step, purple satin sliding over bare skin with nowhere else to go: across her breasts, loose and unobstructed, across her stomach, across the inside of her thighs as they moved. There was nothing underneath it. The crowd knew there was nothing underneath it. The robe ended at the top of her thighs — call it six inches of coverage above the question — and she was walking toward them at six feet in bare feet, and what she could feel was what it was doing to the room.
Nadia moved forward and Marissa followed her into the corridor.
The crowd saw her before she was close to most of them. She cleared most of the assembled heads — could see over them to the arena door at the far end, faces turning toward her in waves as she moved through. The noise they made was not quite a gasp but had the quality of air being held and then released in increments. She had an audience. They were looking at her the way crowds looked at something they had voted for and now had in front of them in person and were discovering that the real thing exceeded the expectation.
The crowd did not hold its noise. The corridor was not built for this level of sound and she felt it in her sternum and lower.
People pressed back to create the path. Hands reached as she passed — a palm on her arm, fingers grazing the robe's hem where it barely reached the top of her thighs, the warm pressure of hands that wanted contact and were taking what the moment permitted. She did not acknowledge any of this individually. The touch moved through the satin against her bare arm, against the outside of her thigh through thin satin. She kept moving.
Between her thighs, walking, the warmth was present and building. The body had received the message before she had consciously sent it. The satin slid against the inside of her thighs and she was aware of the wetness beginning — not much, not yet, but the direction was decided and her clitoris had the first warmth of arousal doing what arousal did when the stimulus was sufficient. She was not where she would be in an hour. But the machinery had started.
From the far end of the corridor came a different quality of noise — the crowd's second peak. DeShawn, somewhere in the corridor, converging on the arena door from the other side. She could not see him but she knew the sound.
The exhibitionism she had discovered that evening was at full current now. She had been right not to examine it too closely before this moment. It had not needed to be examined. It had needed to be walked into.
Nadia led Marissa through the doorway and into the cleared center of the room. DeShawn entered from the opposite side with his second. The MC was there. The crowd filled every margin of the arena.
The MC gestured toward DeShawn.
His second stepped behind him, untied the red robe's belt, took the fabric at the shoulders, and pulled it back.
The crowd inhaled.
Then it erupted.
DeShawn was 6'5" and had the body of a man built to move other bodies — the shoulders enormous, the arms dense with the mass of someone who had been lifting seriously since he was fifteen, the chest broad and the thighs thick with the musculature of an athlete who had been preparing his body for controlled violence since middle school. He stood in the cleared center of the room carrying what he'd been given at birth: the body, the ease, and several inches of thick dark cock hanging heavy between his legs even soft, the kind of size that made the word soft feel like a relative term. He let the noise land on him with the ease of someone for whom this was simply the situation he was in. Then he grasped himself at the base — that grip barely spanned a third of his length — and swung in a slow deliberate arc, a man demonstrating a fact that warranted demonstration. The crowd's second eruption was louder than the first.
Marissa watched and noted the dimensions. She had known the number. Knowing the number and seeing the fact were confirming the same information from two different directions, and the math of what was coming was considerably more interesting than she had anticipated.
The MC turned to her.
Nadia appeared at her left shoulder, untied the robe's belt, stepped behind her, took the fabric at the shoulders, and lifted it away in one clean motion. The satin went and the air arrived — the cool of a room full of bodies that was still cooler than the inside of the robe had been — and then there was nothing between her skin and more than a hundred eyes.
Marissa stood.
The crowd's response to her was different in character from its response to DeShawn. His had been a discrete eruption — gasp, then roar, the sharp sequential reaction to a discrete fact. Hers built. It was the sound of a room that had been expecting something and was now receiving it and discovering that expectation had been inadequate preparation. They were looking at the full length of her at six feet — the broad shoulders, the full breasts with their darker-rose areolas catching the light from above, the tight abdomen where training had pressed the definition close to the surface, the close-cropped dark-blonde patch of hair above the bare skin of her vulva, the long legs running all the way to the floor. The noise did not peak and drop. It continued and continued.
She felt her nipples respond to the air and the attention simultaneously — hardening, the sensation of exposure doing what exposure did to a body that was paying attention. The warmth between her thighs, which had been present since the corridor, was unmistakably more present now. She was aware of the specific wet heat of her arousal, the way it had arrived quietly during the walk down the corridor and was now, standing here fully bare under this many eyes, considerably less quiet. Being naked in this room was doing exactly what she had discovered all evening it was going to do.
She raised her arms, turned once slowly — the crowd got the full rotation: the frontal view first, then the quarter-turn with her in profile, then the back view as she came around, her shoulders and the line of her spine and the curve of her buttocks, then full face again at the end of the turn — and held a position with her weight on one hip, shoulders back, chin up, presenting herself to the room with the ease of someone who had spent her whole life knowing what her body could do and had simply added one more thing to the list. The smile she had was entirely her own.
The exhibitionism she had been discovering all evening was here now. Not building. Not approaching. Here. It felt, clearly, like a thing she had always known how to do.
"Aphrodite!" The MC swept his hand toward her and the room answered.
"The Anaconda!" He swept toward DeShawn and the room answered that too.
DeShawn turned to look at her fully for the first time — both of them naked in the center of the room, the mutual acknowledgment of what they were each bringing to the mat. He held out his hand.
She took it. They shook — formal, deliberate, brief. Not a kiss. The handshake said: this is what this is, these are the people doing it, here is the moment before it begins.
The MC said something to the crowd. She didn't catch the words. The room's response made the meaning clear.
DeShawn raised an eyebrow.
She nodded once.
They turned toward the mat.
They moved to the mat together.
DeShawn stood at the center. She kneeled in front of him.
From her knees he was very tall — her face came to approximately his waist, which put his cock directly in front of her at close range. She could see the full detail of him now, not the lasso-swing impression from across the room but the close-up fact. He was not yet fully erect; the weight of him hung forward, already thick in her hand when she took hold of him — heavy and warm, the dense weight of something with real mass in it. She wrapped her right hand around the base and her fingers did not meet. That was the girth. The length was what extended above the top of her fist plus more.
She took a moment, assessed, and began.
His smell up close was clean sweat and warm skin, the proximity-smell of a large man's body at heat. She took the head of his cock into her mouth — the width of him immediately spreading the corners of her mouth in a way she had not encountered before — and worked the first several inches with mouth and tongue while her right hand worked the base. The taste of him was specific: skin and the first trace of pre-cum, warm and faintly salt, the taste that confirmed he was responding.
The gag reflex arrived at approximately five inches. Not pain — her throat responding to an object that had reached the back of it before she expected, the involuntary contraction that was simply what throats did in that situation. Her eyes watered briefly. She pulled back, breathed, and tried again. Same depth, same result. A third attempt: identical. The parameter was set. Five inches was the working perimeter and she adjusted without ceremony and worked within it.
She reassigned. Left hand at the base, gripping the bottom third — even that grip left her thumb and fingers not quite meeting around his girth. Right hand above it on the middle length. Mouth taking the upper portion: the head, the first two inches below it, her tongue finding the spot under the crown that she had learned produced the most consistent response in a man, and applying pressure there in steady rhythm with the motion of both hands.
She could hear the wet sounds of her own mouth working him and noted them as part of what the crowd was hearing too.
Under her hands he grew harder by degrees. She had always found the process of bringing a man fully erect worth attending to — the progression of responsiveness — semi-hard to rigid — and the scale here made the progression unusually legible. She could feel each stage: the shaft thickening further under her grip, the skin pulling taut over the hardness building beneath it, the veins more prominent under her fingers with each pass of her hand, the weight of him shifting from the soft-heavy of initial handling to the erect-heavy of a cock fully engorged and demanding attention. Each hand-pass produced more warmth, more firmness, more of the rigid heat of full arousal.
Between her thighs, kneeling on the mat, something had started that she had not fully expected. The act itself — the focused physical attention of it, her mouth stretched around him, both hands working, the smell and taste and heat of it — was doing something to her. She was aware of the warmth gathering at her vulva, the slow heat of her own arousal — building since the corridor and the introduction, the crowd's reaction to her naked body, and now with her mouth on this cock and her hands full of him and fifty-odd people watching every movement, arriving at a new level. She was getting wet. That registered as information about the act and about herself, and she kept working.
Under her hands he reached full erection.
She sat back slightly and looked at what she held: ten inches of fully erect cock in both hands, the head of it flushed a shade darker than the shaft, the full length of him rigid and thick and glistening where her mouth had been, the girth of him filling both her hands and still leaving length beyond. The crowd got this image too. She had a clear operational picture of what the next act was going to require.
Not all of that is going inside me tonight, she thought. Probably.
She worked the final minute with more targeted attention — the rhythm she had found, the pressure at the right spot, his breathing shifting in quality above her — until the crowd's noise changed register and the MC's voice came through.
She came up off her knees, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and stood.
DeShawn looked down at her with what she read as uncomplicated professional respect.
She had done what the act required. He was hard and ready. That was the job.
She was still oriented toward the mat when DeShawn moved.
He gripped her at the hips, bent slightly, and lifted her off the mat with the casual ease of someone picking up a bag. She had known he was strong; she felt it now as an immediate physical fact — her weight was simply not a variable in his calculation. Her feet left the mat and the room rotated. The crowd, the mat, the ceiling: all of it swung as he turned her, and then she was inverted. Her legs went to either side of his face, his hands holding her firmly at the hips, her head hanging at the level of his still-wet cock. Below her — the room seen upside down, the crowd visible at the far end of what was now the ceiling — the audience registered what they were looking at.
They went appropriately insane.
Her blood began its shift toward her head. She could feel the pressure of it changing, the dizzy weight of inversion, even as she understood what the ballot's "exceptional positioning" had meant. The crowd had known what it was doing.
He pressed his face into her.
His mouth on her pussy was thorough from the first contact — his lips, his tongue, the focused attention of someone who knew what they were doing and was doing it with intent. She felt his tongue find her clitoris with direct accuracy — the flat of it pressing, then the tip circling, then the pressure again — and the sensation that moved through her was involuntary and sharp. She gasped. Her inner thighs tightened reflexively around his head and she forced them back open. She was upside down with his hands holding her hips and his face buried in her pussy and the crowd was below her inverted head and the gasp was the body's honest response, not anything she produced.
She was already wet from the corridor and the introduction and the fellatio, and what he encountered when he pressed his mouth into her was the warm abundance of an aroused woman who had been building toward this for the better part of an hour. He made a sound against her — brief, approving, the sound a man made when he got what he expected and it exceeded expectation — and then got to work.
Her clitoris was engorged and exposed and he attended to it with methodical, deliberate attention: pressure, then tongue, then suction, then tongue again. Each pass of his mouth produced more of the arousal that was already gathering in volume. She could hear the wet sounds of his mouth against her, audible even over the crowd, the sound of what her body was producing getting louder with each stroke of his tongue.
His cock was directly in front of her face at this angle — its full erect length visible from below, the underside of it, the weight of it. The geometry of the inversion changed everything: gravity had shifted, her approach was different, her throat oriented differently to the axis of his shaft. She took him in her mouth again, finding the angle. It was a different problem from kneeling — the head of his cock entered downward from her perspective, the pressure on her tongue reversed, the depth slightly different in this configuration. She worked with what the position offered.
So did he.
He was, she noted from somewhere in the part of her brain still noting things, very good at this. The spots he was working — the clitoris, yes, but also the pressure of his lips against her inner labia, the way he pulled those long lips gently into his mouth and released them before returning to her clit — these were not accidental. He had paid attention to something or to someone who had taught him. His tongue found the top of her vaginal entrance and pressed inward briefly and she made a sound she did not intend.
"Ahh" — involuntary, against the head of his cock.
The blood in her head was building in the way yoga inversions had prepared her for, and beneath that pressure her arousal was also building, and the two together made for an overwhelming sense of being very present in her own body in every direction simultaneously. She was wet enough now that she could feel it running toward her lower abdomen — gravity doing to her arousal what it did to everything else.
He came down eventually — a controlled descent, unhurried — and set her feet on the mat with the same ease as he'd lifted her. She stood while the blood redistributed and the room settled back to its usual orientation. He had his face wet with her: her arousal slick across his lips and chin and cheeks, the evidence of what his mouth had produced. He looked at her. His expression was the expression of a man who had done something correctly and knew it.
She was breathing faster and her clitoris was still sending the pulse of recent stimulation. The arousal that had been building since the procession was now at a level she was going to have to manage.
That was an interesting data point.
DeShawn lay down on the mat.
She positioned herself over him facing his feet, moved forward until she was squatting on his stomach, and looked down at what was in front of her. His cock stood fully erect from the base of his abdomen — ten inches of rigid, thick, engorged cock pointing directly upward between her thighs, the head of it level with her vulva, the size comparison made stark by her position directly above it. She was engorged herself: the cunnilingus had seen to that, and the corridor before it, and the hour of everything that had built to this moment. Her outer labia were spread open and her inner labia were visible and flushed, and the head of his cock was perhaps two inches from her entrance. The crowd could see all of this from the margins of the room.
They were chanting before she even reached for him.
Take. It. Take. It.
Nadia appeared at the margin of the mat with the lubricant. She held it out without ceremony. Marissa took it. She held the tube up to the crowd — they did not quiet, they got louder — and then applied it: working the lubricant over the head of his cock first, slicking the shaft, then reaching down and pressing the cool gel against her own vulva with two fingers, working it into the entrance to her vagina, her fingers sliding easily through the wetness that was already there. Her own fingers confirmed what she already knew — she was swollen with arousal under the touch. She gripped his cock at the base with her right hand — that grip not meeting around his girth — pointed the head at her entrance, and began to lower herself. She capped the tube and passed it back to Nadia, who stepped away from the mat.
The first contact was immediate: the blunt pressure of his cock head against her entrance, his size pressing where she was not yet open enough to take him. She pushed down. The pressure increased. She did not go. Her entrance resisted — not unwilling exactly, the arousal was real and the lube was there, but the size differential was also real and the body was making an honest assessment of what was being asked of it.
Take. It. Take. It.
She adjusted the angle, changed the tilt of her hips, found a position with slightly different approach geometry. She pushed again. The head of him pressed against the ring of her entrance and she could feel the specific resistance — the stretch that was not yet quite a stretch, the point just before yielding that her body was holding at. She breathed out and let her weight work with gravity. A centimeter. A millimeter past a centimeter. Her body yielding by increments that she could feel individually.
Her mother came into her mind. Cindy on a film set — that quality she'd always had, professional and present and something like genuine celebration underneath the professionalism, the pleasure of doing something well in front of people who appreciated it. Marissa made a noise for the crowd. She smiled. She whooped. The part that wasn't enthusiasm was nobody's business but hers.
The entry came in stages she could count. Each centimeter its own physical event: the stretch of her entrance accepting him and then the walls of her vagina accommodating the next increment and then the pause and the pressure and the breath and the next one. By two inches the stretch was specific enough that she was aware of every millimeter of him entering her. By four inches the fullness had become the primary physical fact of her existence in that moment, the sensation of being stretched and filled to a degree she had not been before. The crowd's chanting was loud but not as loud as the specific urgent presence of his cock working its way into her.
At six inches she hit her cervix.
She knew her anatomy. The cervix was positioned across his path and her body had not yet produced the tenting reflex — the arousal-triggered physiological response that lifted the cervix backward and upward and opened the full depth of the vaginal canal. She was aroused, clearly, the evidence was audible, but the threshold of arousal that produced tenting had not been crossed. The cervix sat in the way like a physical fact.
She needed more time. Not here, not in front of this crowd.
She gritted her teeth and pushed.
What pressing past a low cervix felt like from the inside was this: a pressure that was not quite pain and not quite comfort — something past the threshold of what her body expected to accommodate — and then the specific yielding of the anatomy as the cervix shifted slightly aside and the head of his cock settled into the posterior fornix, filling the space beside and behind the cervix. She felt him in her abdomen. She felt the pressure of him against her bladder through the vaginal wall. DeShawn made a sound — involuntary, a brief sharp exhalation, the sound of a man whose cock had just pressed into the posterior fornix and registered the added friction — and she felt him hold steady below her.
She raised both arms.
The crowd's response was everything a sold-out stadium sounded like. She had almost the full length of him inside her and the room understood what the last several minutes had cost and chose this moment to be loudest.
Ride. Him. Ride. Him.
She began to ride.
The first strokes were careful — she was still in the process of her body deciding how to feel about the depth she had worked to achieve. And then the decision arrived, not gradually but suddenly: the arousal her body had been building all evening reached the threshold that had been eluding her, and the cervical tenting happened, and the depth that had been uncomfortable became the depth that was extraordinary. The friction of him against the full circumference of her vaginal walls at this depth, the pressure of his cock against her G-spot with every upstroke, the full-and-emptying sensation of each stride — she felt all of it shift from managed discomfort into something entirely different.
The ride was audible now — the wet sounds of her body's arousal working in volume against his cock with each motion, loud enough that the crowd could hear it and was responding to it.
She rode him like she rode a horse: one arm in the air, her weight transferring with each drive of her hips, the rhythm finding itself and then building. DeShawn had his hands on her hips and was moving with her, timing his upward thrust to her downward stroke, and the combined motion at this depth produced a sound from her that she let out: "Oh" — not a word, just the involuntary output of a body that had been building toward something for an hour and had just gotten there.
The nervousness she had been carrying since the party was entirely gone. Not reduced. Gone.
She was, with genuine surprise, enjoying herself.
DeShawn's hands found her hips and stopped her.
"Whoa." He said it low, through whatever was happening in his chest. "Slow down, girl. You're gonna make me cum."
She had been riding for less than two minutes. She assessed this as information and decided to do something with it.
She turned to the crowd. Something had settled into place. The nervousness of the party was gone. The room was with her now — not something she was working for, simply something she had.
"Should I make him cum?"
The response was not unanimous but it was clear. NOOOO. Then, organizing itself: DOGGY. DOGGY. DOGGY.
She took this as her stage direction. The question had been asked; they had answered it; that was how this worked now.
She lifted.
The withdrawal was its own event. She had worked to get him in — the centimeter-by-centimeter entry, the cervix, the push-past — and his size in reverse produced a sensation that was the specific inverse of all of that: the walls of her vagina releasing him in stages, each inch of his withdrawal a distinct physical experience, the fullness receding and the specific empty-stretch that followed it, the feeling of her entrance opening and then closing behind the retreating head of his cock. She could feel the cool air between her thighs where his body heat had been. The sound of his withdrawal was audible and the crowd could hear it too — the audible evidence of how thoroughly her body had been occupied. She chose not to examine the crowd's response to that particular sound too carefully, because she had a position to get to.
She stood on the mat for a moment. Her body's state was precise and she took a brief inventory of it: vaginal walls still carrying the physical impression of his size, her arousal at a level that was producing continuous evidence of itself, her clitoris still sending the intermittent pulse of recent stimulation. She had been worked toward a threshold and then stopped at it. That was information about the next several minutes.
She got onto her hands and knees, legs spread, her back finding the yoga-spine arch that put her buttocks up and back and presented herself to him and the crowd simultaneously. Her body knew how to do this. She had been deploying her body her whole athletic life, just never from a context quite like this one.
DeShawn had other plans before the main event.
He dropped behind her and pressed his face into her.
Not his cock — his face. She felt the contact immediately: his mouth on her pussy, his lips against her outer labia, his tongue making first contact with her inner labia and then finding her clitoris with the direct accuracy she had already learned he possessed. The stubble of his jaw rasped against the soft skin of her inner thighs as he moved. He rubbed his face side to side against her — cheek and mouth and chin working through her vulva, getting himself thoroughly and deliberately wet with the arousal her body had been producing since the corridor. He was playing it up for the crowd and also, she noted, genuinely doing it.
She could hear the crowd before he sat up. The noise — approval, hunger, the sound of fifty-odd people watching something they had voted for and getting considerably more than they budgeted for — told her everything she needed to know about the visual he was presenting to them. She reconstructed it without needing to see: the face turned toward the audience, glistening with her, the tongue, the eyebrows.
Do. It. Do. It.
He stood back onto his feet. She felt him grip his cock at the base and position the head at her entrance. Her vulva was engorged and fully open — swollen labia, her inner lips long and flushed, the entrance to her vagina slick with her own arousal and the lube that still lingered from the reverse cowgirl. The positioning required no difficulty. Everything she had was presenting itself clearly.
"Slowly," she said. It came out as a whisper.
He didn't need the instruction. He took it from her anyway and eased in.
The entry was different from every other entry that had come before it: the angle, the position, her body's specific orientation, and the fact that her cervix had by now fully tented — the arousal had at last done the physiological work it had been working toward all evening, the cervix lifted back and up and out of the way, the full depth of her vaginal canal available. He went in. All the way. The full ten inches through a body that was finally ready to receive them, the head of his cock reaching the posterior wall with a firmness that was the sensation of complete depth, her vaginal walls gripping him along the entire length of him as he bottomed out.
They both made a sound. His was brief and involuntary — the exhalation of a man at maximum depth — and hers was a genuine "Oh" that she would not have produced on purpose.
He started slowly. Full length out — she could feel every inch withdrawing, the friction of him pulling back through walls that wanted to hold him — and then full length back in. The rhythm was patient and deliberate. The sound of it was immediate and specific: the wet sound of a well-lubricated body accommodating that much size at that depth, the sound of her arousal working against his cock with each stroke, audible to her and to the crowd. She could hear it. He could hear it. Everyone in the room could hear it. She felt her face flush.
"Mmh" — involuntary, against the mat. She let it happen.
He widened his stance to stay level with her raised hips and climbed high over her. The crowd had a better sightline now — the full view of his cock moving in and out of her from behind, her body taking the full length of him with each stroke, the wet sounds getting louder as her arousal increased. He picked up the pace.
The G-spot pressure from this angle was different from reverse cowgirl. His cock pressed against the front wall of her vagina with each inward stroke, the head of him moving across the territory she had always found most responsive. With each stroke the pressure was building toward something she could feel approaching — not imminent, but present, the horizon visible and getting closer.
The pressure against her bladder had also been building. She had set that aside; there was nothing to do about it mid-thrust. The two pressures — the approaching orgasm and the accumulated bladder pressure — were converging at a rate faster than she had anticipated.
The threshold crossed.
Her body convulsed without warning. The contraction was involuntary and total, a full-body spasm that expelled the accumulated fluid through her urethra in a stream that crossed approximately five feet of cleared floor. The sound of it was distinct and audible. DeShawn pulled back and out of the way as it happened, having been in this situation before — she was aware of his retreat with the corner of her mind that was still operational — and the crowd's response was the sound of a crowd watching something they had not specifically voted for and were discovering they very much approved of.
She caught her breath. She had some control back.
He waited while she caught her breath. She tipped her hips toward him again, and he took the invitation.
He brought his cock to her raised vulva and drew it upward — the fat rigid length of him dragging deliberately from her vaginal entrance up through her labia to her clitoris and then back down again, the pressure of that width and that rigidity against her most sensitive anatomy doing exactly what he intended it to do. Her body responded without consulting her: another full-body convulsion, another stream, the involuntary sound of a woman who has completely lost control of a particular physiological process. He did it again. Another stream. The Olé chanting from the crowd had found its rhythm now, synchronized with each convulsion, and she could hear the humor in it from somewhere behind the part of her nervous system that was too occupied to address humor.
"Enough." It came out as a whimper. "Stop — or I'm going to come."
DeShawn stood and turned to the crowd.
"Do I make her cum?"
The chant formed and coordinated itself within seconds: Anal. Anal.
The chant was unmistakable.
Her first response was reluctance. She liked anal, generally, but DeShawn's size made this a different proposition. For a few seconds she pictured the two of them struggling while the room watched. Then the chant found its rhythm. The sound went through her, and the thought of trying stopped looking like a problem to solve. She wanted to show them she could do it.
She looked back at DeShawn. "Let's do it. Go slow and use lots of lube."
Nadia handed him the tube. He used plenty of lubricant on her anus and his cock, then worked two fingers into her slowly. She breathed through the stretch, using the deliberate release yoga had taught her. He gave her time to adjust. When he judged her open enough, he withdrew his fingers and looked at her.
"Ready?"
"I'm ready."
He began slowly. The size of him still surprised her, but she could take it. She lifted her head toward the room. "I'm taking it," she told them. Then, looking back at him: "All of it."
DeShawn drove the rest of his cock in. She screamed — not from pain, but from the sudden, astonishing fullness of someone larger than anyone she had taken this way. The chant broke apart around her.
"I'm OK," she told the crowd, catching her breath. "I can do it. C'mon, DeShawn. Fuck me good."
She could feel him in her abdomen. The sensation of full anal depth was different from vaginal penetration — less friction against specific walls, more a sense of profound internal occupation — her body claimed to its complete interior extent. Not particularly aroused in this moment. Working. She was deploying the same quality of focused professional attention she brought to a difficult match point. Her mother came into her mind again — Cindy on set, that specific quality of presence she'd always had. Oh, she thought. So this is what that looks like from the inside.
The thought was useful. She settled into it.
He withdrew and plunged again. Her body was already adapting — the initial shock of the entry diminishing as her sphincter began to accommodate him, the channel of her rectum accepting the rhythm. Each successive thrust came easier than the last. Slowly, over the course of a dozen strokes, something began to build that was not quite arousal in the usual sense but was moving in that direction: the nerve-rich response of the anal canal to sustained stimulation, the gradual awakening of something she was not unacquainted with but had never experienced at this depth and width. The crowd's Olé chant had found his rhythm. She could hear it synchronizing with each of his inward thrusts.
"Mmh." Involuntary. Against the mat.
"Damn, girl." He said it close to her ear, still thrusting. "Tell me if you want me to stop."
She applied the yoga breathing with renewed focus. His thrusts came easier. The arousal was building — distant but present, genuine, coming from somewhere she was interested to understand later — and she could feel the edge of something approaching, not close but real.
DeShawn pulled out.
The withdrawal was sudden and produced an audible sound she was aware of without wanting to examine it. What she could feel in the immediate aftermath was the state of her anus post-ten-inches: the stretched-open ring of her sphincter, slow to close, the particular sensitivity of tissue that had been worked in ways she had not previously experienced. She could feel exactly what she imagined the crowd was seeing.
"Whew, girl." He addressed the room with the satisfied tone of someone reviewing completed work. "I can see all the way down to your belly button. That is wide open." He began working his cock for the audience — the vacuum-plunge effect, pushing in and pulling all the way out, each withdrawal producing a sucking sound from the vacuum his body created — then turned to face the crowd.
"Time to finish it. I ain't gonna last much longer." He grinned. "She's too hot."
Missionary. Missionary.
Her calculation had been wrong. The crowd had called for it, she had decided to try, and DeShawn had checked that she was ready before he moved. She held those facts alongside the physical sensation as her body settled.
Before they changed positions, she stopped him. "Clean up first." Nadia took him to the shared bathroom down the corridor. They came back after he had washed, and Marissa gave him room on the mat again.
She lay on her back and raised her legs, tilting her hips to give him the right entry angle. She had no need to check on her own readiness — the events of the last hour had taken care of that. The mat was wet beneath her and the smell of the last hour was in the air: sweat, arousal, the warm animal smell of two bodies that had been working hard at close range for the better part of an hour.
DeShawn knelt between her raised legs and looked at her from above.
"Man." He said it like someone taking inventory. "You are one sexy girl." He paused, and the pause had something like genuine awe in it. "I am going to come big time. I can already feel it — a massive load. How do you want it?" He looked at her face. "On your face?"
"Yes," she said. "Try to get some in my mouth. And then let me clean you up and get every last drop out of you."
He laughed — genuine and anticipatory — and guided himself to the entrance of her vagina.
One long push. She gasped and he gasped: the sensation of that length entering her from this angle, this deep, was still new enough in every iteration to produce an involuntary response, and the post-orgasm relaxation of her vaginal walls meant he went in with an ease that was its own specific sensation — the full ten inches sliding to depth without resistance, her canal wide open and slick around him, the fullness of him pressing against the posterior wall at depth. He settled his weight over her, held partly through his knees: 240 pounds of muscle, his jaw against her right shoulder, his arms reaching beneath her to grip her buttocks. She raised her legs wide and high, found the angle that gave him the best access, and he started to move.
She was not starting from zero. The first orgasm had released something that was also, apparently, a new threshold: her body was primed in a way it had not been before the orgasm arrived, the calibration of her arousal reset at a higher level by the event that had just passed. She could hear the sound of him inside her — the wet rhythm of her body around his cock at full depth, audible to the whole room — and feel the G-spot pressure from this angle with each inward stroke, and the two together were building toward something that was arriving faster than she had anticipated.
She bucked under him. Their bodies found a synchronization that needed no negotiation: her hips rising to meet his downward strokes, the rhythm amplifying the friction, the sound getting louder.
"You're going to make me come," she told him.
"That's it." He was breathing hard against her ear. "Come on this dick. Come to sweet DeShawn. Come to daddy."
The second part barely landed before the orgasm arrived.
It was not subtle. Her head went back and her shoulders came off the mat and the sound she made was involuntary and considerable and she was not in a position to manage it because she was not in a position to manage anything. The orgasm moved through her body from the inside out: the initial violent contraction of her vaginal walls around his cock — she felt that specifically, the involuntary gripping — and then the full-body shaking she could not control, her thighs clamping around him, her back arching, the overwhelming sensation of every nerve in the relevant territory firing simultaneously and taking her entirely out of any awareness that was not this. She squirted again, vaguely aware of the fluid expelling, completely unable to stop it. There was no arena. No crowd. No MC. There was this, only this, her body doing what it did when it was at the full capacity of what it knew how to do.
She was still shaking when she became aware of DeShawn pulling back from her to give her room. He was on one knee beside her when she surfaced enough to see him, looking from her to the crowd and back with the expression of a man who had just produced definitive evidence of something. He was not entirely wrong about what it meant.
The aftershocks came. She had known they would — she always did, her body's post-orgasmic protocol: peak, then a brief return to control, then the involuntary electric-jolt convulsion that snapped her body without asking, then recovery, then another one. DeShawn played these for the crowd with theatrical precision, approaching her as if to re-enter and then rocking back theatrically each time an aftershock fired through her and she convulsed again. The crowd was clapping in synchronized rhythm. She lay on the mat and let her body do what it was doing, which was all she was capable of.
He took the coordinated clapping as his signal.
He lay back between her legs. Her vagina was open and relaxed now — post-orgasm, post-squirt, everything softened and receiving — and when he pushed in the entry required no effort at all: ten inches of thick hard cock going in smooth and complete to full depth without obstacle. She felt the fullness settle back in. He wrapped his arms behind her and underneath, gripped her buttocks with both hands, settled his jaw beside her shoulder, and thrust with the specific focused intent of a man who was close and knew it.
She felt the quality of his motion changing: shorter strokes, the rhythm tightening, his breathing going from controlled to urgent. She put her hands on his back and pulled him in with each downward stroke.
"Yes." Her voice was rough from the orgasm. "Pull out. On my face, like I said."
He withdrew before he came. The first pulse missed her face and landed on the mat. The next went over her head entirely. He was trying to aim at her face; she had her mouth open; the following pulse hit her directly in the eye. She was immediately partially blinded. The next arrived in her left nostril with a force that sent it to the back of her throat.
Finally the aim found her mouth. She was not ready for the force of it. The pulse fired directly into her throat as she was inhaling and she went into a coughing fit.
She was coughing, one eye sealed shut, the other barely functional, with semen in her nose and at the back of her throat, when the remaining pulses landed on her face. She lost count. When he had finished and she had finished coughing, the accounting was: both eyes, both nostrils, cheeks, chin, throat. The one place she did not have what she had asked for was her mouth, owing to the coughing fit that had coincided with the only delivery that landed there.
She noted this.
DeShawn stood.
He reached down and took her outstretched hand. The haul upright was casual — the easy, unremarkable strength of someone for whom her body's weight was simply not a factor — and she was on her feet beside him with the same quality of ease with which he had lifted her and inverted her an hour ago.
She could barely see. Her left eye was completely sealed by a pulse that had landed with more enthusiasm than accuracy. Her right had some function. There was semen on her face in the comprehensive way of something that had missed its intended target and found all the other ones instead — across both eyes, in both nostrils, along her cheeks and chin and throat — and a dribble still tracking from her left nostril that she did not address.
Her body's inventory, standing: her vagina in the stretched-open state of something that had been used thoroughly and well; her anus in its own particular post-experience state; her clitoris still sending the occasional pulse of the events of the last hour; her thighs wet from everything her body had produced and from the mat beneath her that was considerably wetter than it had started the evening. She was naked and covered and standing at six feet in bare feet.
He raised their joined hands.
The crowd's response was the sound of a crowd that had received everything it voted for, and then some of what it hadn't known to ask for.
She held the position. Covered in evidence. Completely composed. Both of those things were true at once, and there was no contradiction between them, and she did not examine whether anyone else could have held both.
She walked out of the arena with the smile intact and the strut behind it.
The corridor was still full — fewer bodies than before, the crowd dispersing, but present. She moved through them the way she had moved through them going in: composed, unhurried, the crowd parting without requiring her to ask it to. The noise of the arena fell away behind her and the adrenaline went with it, and what arrived underneath was the quiet pull toward the staging room — not distress, not collapse, just the body's honest request for a small private space after something large and public. She gave nothing of this to the corridor and kept her face exactly where it had been.
Nadia was waiting in the staging room with a towel. She handed it over without ceremony and stood back while Marissa addressed the damage. The cleanup was approximate — she got what she could, which was not everything — and then the Aphrodite robe went back on. Nadia had the expression of someone who had seconded a principal and gotten exactly what she'd hoped for. She said something warm and direct. Marissa received it while still partly elsewhere, still sorting through the last two hours.
DeShawn came in wearing his red robe.
He hi-fived her. He told her she was amazing. Then he pulled her into a bear hug — the casual strength of a very large man for whom her mass was simply not a factor — and kissed her. Long, thorough, genuine. The first kiss of the evening; they had shaken hands at the start and arrived at a kiss at the close, which said something accurate about how the night had run.
He turned to leave. At the door he looked back and pointed a finger at her. "To be continued," he said, and winked, and went.
She stood there.
No line arrived. Her wit, which was normally loaded and ready and had never failed to produce something at the appropriate moment, produced nothing. She was too far inside the last two hours to generate the response. She noticed this absence briefly, the way she noticed anything that didn't behave as expected, and then the door closed and she was in the staging room with Nadia and the absent rejoinder was simply the situation.
She went upstairs barefoot in the Aphrodite robe, carrying her dress and thong and sandals in one hand. Semen had found its way into her hair — she had missed it in the staging room. On the stairs, she felt how tired her legs were; each step took more effort than she expected. She noted both as physical facts and did not change her pace.
The corridor still had people in it, the late-night remnants of the party. Most of them acknowledged her as she passed: thumbs up, a few words, the warmth of people who had voted for something and gotten it. She nodded and kept moving.
She opened her room door. The book was on her desk — Wittgenstein's Poker, where he had left it.
She picked it up and held it without reading. Isaac came into her mind.
She was glad he hadn't been in the audience.
That thought didn't get followed. She made herself move to something else and it closed before it had fully opened.
She wanted a shower. That was next. Then bed. She was twenty years old and the evening had been a success and she did not feel like staying up.
Five o'clock. Her eyes opened.
This was not remarkable. Her body woke at five every morning regardless of what had preceded the sleep — regardless of the schedule, the previous evening's activities, whatever state she had gone to bed in. The nervous system ran its own calendar. She lay in the dark for a moment and took stock.
Her vagina was sore. Her anus was sore. Both were sore in the way of tissue that had worked harder than usual at tasks it was equipped for — the soreness of effort, not injury. She noted this as data: the DeShawn size, documented. There was nothing catastrophic about it. It would be gone in a day or two.
She got up, moved to the far corner of her room, and unrolled the mat.
The practice began the way it always began — not dramatically, not as an act of will, just the body locating its breath and the mat beneath it and the beginning of the sequence she had been running every morning for years. The room was dark and the building was quiet. She was the only person awake in the immediate radius, which was how it always was at five, which was how she preferred it.
The dare game did not come to mind while she practiced. She did not think about Isaac. She did not examine what had arrived in the center of the arena when the crowd was chanting and the adrenaline was up — what she had discovered about herself that she had not known was there. All of those things existed. None of them were what the yoga mat was for.
The yoga mat was for this: the breath, the sequence, the quiet of early morning before the world required anything of her. The body that had been in the arena a few hours ago was the same body now in precise balance on the mat. That was not a contradiction. It had never been a contradiction.
Somewhere on her desk, in the dark, the spine of Wittgenstein's Poker was visible.
She held a pose. She breathed.
The summer was ahead of her. Jason and Edward were in Los Angeles, the arrangements on their established schedules. The dare game was behind her. Isaac was a few doors down the hall, for a few more weeks, until the semester ended and the dorm closed and things became a different kind of arrangement.
She moved to the next position.