ace anon - hopefully this gets you through the outage! there’s two more chapters before the story is finished so if anyone else receives this document and is upset at the cliffhanger here: this is an incomplete manuscript, the final two chapters will be up on ao3 when they’re finished. 1 chapter one Max hovers his hips off the bottom of the tub so Kelly can run her washcloth under the back of his thigh, and adds, “I thought I’d take the rental car and Bryan can drop you off at the Tiffany thing, otherwise it will be this whole terrible, you know, Daniel will call the taxi service only he likes where they all wear cowboy hats.” Kelly’s washcloth does not run under the back of Max’s thigh. Kelly’s washcloth hangs like a death shroud in her suddenly-still hand. She says, “Daniel’s going to be there tonight?” “I thought I told—?” Fuck. Supine in a bathtub is not a great position for an argument. If they’re going to fight Kelly’s in the better power stance, lounging on a bench made by the side of the bathtub that isn’t pressed to the wall, all cozy in a nest of towels they’d cycled through the warmer. She’s only wearing a tank-top and the grey sweats she stole from Max’s side of the wardrobe and turned into pyjamas after they found a hole on the asscheek, but that’s certainly more commanding than being naked with your dick only hidden from view because there’s so much bubble bath in the tub that the water’s coated in foam. The bath itself’s working against Max too, coaxing him sleepy and languid: his preferred bathing temperature is skin-meltingly boiling and Kelly’s delivered on water so scalding there’s steam fogging up the mirror. Everything feels molten, the heat sunken all the way into Max’s bone marrow. Their only light sources are the nineteen-thousand Phantom of the Opera candles they’ve lit against fire code advice. They’re only bright enough to illuminate the bathtub, a deep jacuzzi style rectangle with a sloped side, and the nook of the bathroom immediately surrounding it. By Kelly’s feet is the towel warmer, and a tea tray with today’s queue of products and various implements. Along the wall are alcoves, and in their cradles they’ve set up Kelly’s travelling crystal collection, some of the candles, and a quietly puffing aromatherapy machine. Max dragged in all the potted plants from the rest of the suite and set 2 them up around the edges of light where awareness fades out, a comfy green haze of don’t worry about it. Everything else is out of sight and doesn’t matter. Max’s world has shrunk to the weightless float of the bath, and to the guardian of its border, his Kelly. Kelly is making no expression at all. This is the way she frowns. “No, you didn’t tell me.” “Oh, well yeah, he just, he got into Austin a day early so it would be not nice to go out with the whole Ford crew except him.” Max tugs the dangling end of Kelly’s washcloth, plaintive, wanting her back. “And he knows them better than I do honestly so if he’s there it’ll be easier.” Kelly produces a glacial smile. She stretches her neck out, left ear to left shoulder, then right, mulling this over. After consideration, her hands reach back to Max and float his legs up and down one after another, then again, while she brings an exfoliator and then a cloth of bodywash over his calves, then thighs, then hip divots, and when she’s finished her slow advance up his body, wraps the cloth around the shaft of Max’s cock. His blood’s been pooling there since half an hour ago, when Kelly clapped her hands together and said, Max, it’s bathtime! Max closes his eyes and sighs. He’s already boneless but he does his best to keep himself still, not to splash her—trying to avoid getting Kelly wet is a novel reversal of his usual goal. She rewards his effort by removing the cloth and putting her hand on him directly, a dab of liquid soap on her palm, stroking up and down to clean him, careful fingers, teasing. At the moment she has a French manicure, not that he can see it through the bubbles. He’s not able to look at what’s happening to him. “That’s a nice surprise then,” Kelly says. Max has been hardening slowly, lazy, not erect enough to stand straight out. She finds the fold of his cock and rubs it with two fingers the way you would a clit. “It’s been awhile since you’ve seen each other in person.” “Yes,” he agrees, cautiously. “A long time.” “How long?” “Oh you know.” She actually does know but this investigation’s that of a leery 3 person. Kelly’s looking through a fossil record, expecting to uncover live specimens. Obviously she won’t. Kelly reapplies soap and plays with each of his balls in turn, a swivelling grip as if cleaning fruit. She squeezes enough to make him ache, then releases, and pats him on the swollen and newly tender flesh there. “Looking forward to seeing him around a track again?” “It is a surprise because last time we talked about racing again together he said he would rather die. But I suppose he is only watching and not racing himself. Actually I’m not sure what he is doing in the video? Maybe commentating? I can ask at dinner.” “Mmhm.” Kelly hums, and puts her soap back on the tray. She trades the current washcloth for a softer one, and pours a dollop of iridescent liquid onto it. “What?” She folds the cloth in half with the dollop in the middle and scrubs it against itself to create a lather. “It’s a little greedy of him. Drinks with the crew but dinner after too? Baby, I don’t think it’s good for you to—” Max levers himself upright and looks her directly in the eye, crossing his legs together and his arms over his chest. This is bullshit archeology; he can head it off at the pass. “I will obviously cancel dinner and drinks as well if you don’t feel comfortable with me spending time alone with Daniel.” “Oh.” Kelly’s eyes flutter in startlement. Her back straightens. “Max I wasn’t —” She clears her throat into her palm, and in an exaggeratedly condescending tone repeats, “It’s not good for—” “—I think it would be not so great to talk about this using a sex game because you actually were so angry.” Although Max’s entire lower body is submerged in water so hot putting a fish into it would constitute animal cruelty, the room suddenly feels like base camp on Everest. Kelly says, “I’m over it.” “It was before we—” “I know that.” “So it is not fair to be mad at me but we can of course talk about it if you 4 explain what you’re feeling instead of being angry by yourself.” “I’m not mad at you.” Max rubs his pointer and middle fingers into his eye socket, sighing. “Then what are you? Because it is something that’s not good. I don’t like when you’re upset and don’t let me help.” Silence. When Max’s vision clears again, Kelly’s biting her lip and looking at him with an open, sorry, expression that cuts him right to the quick. He reaches for her at the same time she reaches for him, four hands knotting tightly, two hearts leaning in. Max’s hand goes to her nape and drips water down the back of her tank top; her grip migrates to his wet shoulder, digging gouges, while they kiss. A few minutes later Kelly near-whispers: “I am angry but I’m really not mad at you.” Her voice is so soft it’s nearly the same frequency as the aromatherapy machine. They’re holding hands again, foreheads tilted together. He’s rubbing circles into the pulse points of her wrists. “When I think about.” She falters. “Max. You liked him so much for a very long time. That’s not the problem, I already knew that but it made things—difficult for me. When you told me,” her voice toughening, “how he treated you.” Max’s mouth drops into a circle. He needs a second to understand, then another second to respond. “But Daniel and I had a lot of fun.” “I know you did.” “Everything was good to be honest and he wasn’t bad to me, I don’t know what you’re, what it is you’re thinking?” “I know you don’t know.” She really isn’t mad at him. The circle of Max’s mouth turns into an oval, a grin; he makes an upturning noise, mmhm, seeking eye contact She avoids it. H follows her gaze down to her chest: their arousals dipped in tandem. His dick softened, one of her nipples lost its peak. Affection rises through Max’s ribcage. He can feel his eyes crinkling. “Kels. Everything is okay. Thank you for telling me.” Kelly’s bottom lip wobbles, a reflexive smile back curtailed by embarrassment, and she nods. He kisses the tension off her face, strokes the soft 5 skin behind her ears, the swell of her breast over the tank top. When she’s smiling back at him, relaxed, Max gathers her hair into a pile over one shoulder and plays with it, waiting for her to guide the mood forward. “The thing is,” Kelly says, when she’s ready. “I take care of my things. When a little puppy follows me home, I think about what’s best for him.” Max inhales; abruptly she bends him back into the bathtub, pushing his chest down and simultaneously pulling a leg out to send him onto his back lengthwise in the tub. He goes completely pliant for it. The crash of hot water over skin that cooled to room temperature dazes him, all his skin sensitising and pricking: while he’s reeling Kelly follows him over the lip of the tub, bending into it as to pin him onto the sloped surface while kissing over his eyebrow, the side of his nose, half-on half-off his bottom lip, a flurry of affection. Max bursts into laugher that trails off into a groan when she grinds her palm down his cock. The whiplash fades as her ministrations get softer, kinder, sweeter when she realises he’s not fighting any of it. She pulls slowly back to her original kneeling position, composure settling, mouth easy instead of pinched, but doesn’t let go of him. Kelly recollects the washcloth from somewhere, props one of Max’s legs into a triangle so his knee sticks up out of the water like an island, and balances the cloth on his knee so she can reapply soap and lather it up all without letting up the pressure on his cock. “Oh—ahh, Kelly that’s—that is very—” Max breaks off with a sigh, turning his face into his shoulder and shuddering. Kelly’s framed his pec in the V of her thumb and index finger, and gripped there, gotten herself a handful of his chest. She brings the lathered cloth down over the skin she’s framed, then massages it, pressing from the top-down so the cloth rubs over his nipple, roughly, and Max sighs again, moving his own hands between his legs as sneakily as he can, squeezing at his dick now that she’s left it wanting, just a few seconds of pressure before his arms fall back to his sides. “That’s lovely,” murmurs Kelly, as if to herself. She pinches the nipple with the cloth and twists, catching it against the fibres and pinning the peak between them. Kelly gropes indulgently, roaming from one side of his pec to the other, pinching and stroking intermittently, teasing, scrubbing hard and then brushing 6 lightly. Her favourite thing is to bring four fingers across the swell of his pec while making circles with her thumb on a sensitive place opposite, which is the same way she most likes him to touch her breasts too. She alternates seemingly at random: hand, cloth, pinch, squeeze, then—kiss, dropping the washcloth back onto his knee, scooping Max by the nape of his neck and bringing their lips together again. Max laughs into her mouth and collects the sweep of her hair, holding it up out of the water as she bends further down to bite his chest, then to suck a hickey over the bite mark. “If you fall in we’ll have to redo your shower again and it’ll be so annoying.” She kisses his forehead, retrieves the cloth, then starts the process over on the other side of his chest: cup, pinch, clean, tease. Now she has to navigate in the scoop of Max’s arms, still lifted up, holding her hair dry. “Annoying, is it?” “Only that you do not like when,” he imitates a hair dryer noise, “twice close together because it makes your hair staticky. From my side I’m to be honest always happy to have you naked and to be in the shower together.” Kelly draws out of the bathtub and tidies her hair into a ponytail, then further twists it into a bun. He lets her go reluctantly so she can manoeuvre, but before he can get sulky she comes immediately back and starts work on a hickey for his other pec. Max makes a cave for his dick and then collapses the ceiling of it, pressing down on himself but without back-and-forth motion. He puffs air out his nose when this time Kelly catches the movement of his arm and bites him, hard, right on top of the newest hickey. “Is it your job to be touching that?” “I’m cleaning it.” Kelly straightens onto her knees and presses her hips right to the rim of the tub. In one hand is the shampoo bottle. “That’s not your job either, baby.” She waits until he crosses his arms over his chest where she can keep an eye on them, and scruffs his cheekbone in reward. “Alright. I’m doing your hair now.” “It’s getting so long, can we cut it?” 7 “We can cut it.” “Just with the heat and the helmet and you know because I’m always saying but the, I hate the, are they bangs when they’re on the side? On the side of my head where it’s not long enough to go behind my ears but I can still feel it touching.” Kelly nods sympathetically. She squeezes out a puddle of product and starts massaging it into Max’s scalp, starting at the very tip of his skull and then smoothing downwards in circles. A tingling energy zings across his head. His temples. Behind his ears. A break when she eases her palm over his forehead to cut off a run of shampoo from getting down into his eyes, diverting the flow to a safe drip behind the ear. Then her nails, on the side of his head, scratching, pressuring but gentle, one hand on each side of his temples, massaging in tandem. The zinging courses all the way to his toes, warm pulsing at every extremity that keeps his cock plump against his thigh. “Here I come,” Kelly warns. She guides his head up by the back of the neck so it’s no longer resting flat on the bathtub’s slope, and she can rub shampoo onto the back of his head too. Max doesn’t help, floats and feels and fails to control even one of the well-trained muscles in his neck. He traces the hickeys on his chest to stop from reaching to his dick. “That’s nice.” “For me too. Your hair gets so silky when it’s wet.” She transfers the weight of Max from one hand to the other. “Did you and Daniel ever wash up together?” Max laughs. “No. It’s not normal to, with, a teammate even if you are—were! —and anyways it was more fun being gross. Of course not as much fun as we are having but it was fun with Daniel as I said.” “Really never any shower sex? Baby, you love shower sex.” Max giggles, pinking. “That’s, that is, different from.” “I see.” “But I think twice only. And there was never, you know, anything where. Is that true? Yes, the cleaning was mostly getting come off.” Kelly says, “I’m going to wash your hair out. Keep your eyes closed, okay? It’ll sting if any gets inside.” She lowers his head flat and rinses her hands in a 8 clear patch of water. Her thumb and index fingers stroke the hair of his eyebrows, both at once, expanding outward along the grain and then folding in back the way she came, until his face drops entirely slack, and then she traces her fingers down onto his eyes, encouraging them shut. “I just remembered there was one time with me in the ice bath but it was not —” “—Mouth too, sweetie, soap doesn’t taste very good.” Kelly takes the shampoo out by drawing water from the bath into a special pitcher she got from an antique store and pouring it out over Max’s head, a controlled waterfall, over and over, warm water streaming down everywhere except onto his face, until the rivulets stop coming out sudsy, and then Kelly takes a washcloth and rubs behind Max’s ears with it, finally pronouncing herself all done!, tracing a finger over the tip of an ear like she’s checking her work Kelly can manipulate connections in Max’s body that do not make sense. Cleaning his ears makes his throat ache to swallow; stroking his face like that makes his eyes heat and itch. She touches the nape of his neck and his toes curl in. “To rinse faster I could put my head under the water and,” Max shakes his head side to side like an animal shaking out its pelt. “Like that.” “But that wouldn’t feel nice. I like making you feel nice.” He bites the corner of his lip and smiles up at her. She’s already watching him closely, her eyes deep dark and her mouth curved, a dimple in her cheek. “I of course like feeling nice.” “That’s good, because I’m going to make you feel even better than nice.” He laughs, his ears burning hotter than they already were. Their flush soaks through his skin and into his chest, and then surges back out through his pelvis, into the roil of his stomach, and lower, collecting there. He’s more than half-hard now, and throbbing. “Kelly, what.” Max’s tongue darts over his lip. “What happens to the dog.” She smiles, tilts her head quizzically. “A dog? What on Earth?” “After he follows you home.” Half a beat more, then Kelly’s gaze scans from the dot of Max’s tongue, up to his eyes. She enunciates each word deliberately. 9 “Not a dog, Max. A little puppy.” He sinks a little lower into the bath. “That’s the same.” “No it isn’t. A dog is big. My puppy is only small, and needs lots of taking care of. When we get home I have to clean him up and brush his fur, and I’m going to feed him healthy food so he’ll grow up big and strong. I gave him a nice collar so everybody can see who he belongs to. If he runs away the first person to find him will know to bring him straight back to me.” Max presses his thighs into each other. “He is not going to run away.” “I know he won’t, but it’s my job to think ahead, just in case. And it’s important to have the collar because what if something unexpected happens? Because now that I’m thinking about it, my little puppy didn’t actually follow me home. I stole him off a porch. He was being so patient and good but he was cold outside, and nobody was looking after him properly, so I snatched him right up and now he’s mine. He’s going to sleep in my lap and bark when I tell him to.” “What if, when. What when the puppy gets too big for that?” Kelly coos, “Well, I just don’t think that’s going to happen.” Max turns his head away to face the wall and Kelly returns him to her, one hand on each side of his face and rotating. She tsks-tsks as she turns him back around and then holds him still as she kisses him. Kelly has a way of kissing that’s so matter-of-fact and firm that it’s more like an inspection, as if there’s something in her world that’s been unsettled and the way to rectify it is by kissing Max. Anticipation and pleasure—hearing the creak of his study door, opening in the certain way it does when Kelly’s looking for something that she means to find. She’ll deem Max needs to be kissed the same way she’ll decide the storage locker in Cajamar needs to be cleaned out, and she’ll go about both projects with the same methodical diligence. One of Kelly’s hands cups the back of his head and the other slides to pin his crossed wrists down onto his sternum, as she licks behind his teeth and sucks at his tongue and chases him, slow, thorough, persistent as he tries to pull away to breathe, keeping their lips connected while she examines the texture of the roof of Max’s mouth, the quality of the air in his trachea, the skin on the inside of his right cheek, sucking sweetly until she decides the kiss is over and ends it. 10 “Ah,” Max says, inexplicably shy. “Kelly...” “Kelly’s here, baby.” A swell of helplessness. “I know you are.” “You’re making me feel very good too. And aren’t you being sweet? So cute and obedient in your little bath.” Burning all over Max starts to say something else, but as soon as his mouth opens Kelly recaptures it. This time the kiss is less exploratory, but just as proprietary: she makes a seal of their lips and licks into him, then stays there, relaxed and possessive and soft, ignoring it when Max starts running low on air again and starts to make panicky mm-mmhm noises, sounds swallowed by the kiss. He kicks a leg out involuntarily and the water sloshes; Kelly giggles, pulling back for a couple seconds just enough to let him pant into her chin, and then kisses him for another two minutes while he squirms, then goes limp. Only then does she let him go. Max doesn’t do anything with his new freedom of movement, too dizzy and scoured to be interested in choices. He wiggles his limbs a little and enjoys how held by the water they are, how the temperature feels like arousal and the arousal feels like it’s everywhere. Maybe he should say something to Kelly but he can’t at the moment; he blinks at her and tries to get his eyes to focus but can’t quite make it happen. She presses her thumb into the freckle on his lip and says, “Just how I like you, sweetie. You’re right where you should be.” Kelly extracts a bottle from the bath tray. “Is your dick very hard now?” He groans, nods. “Mmhm.” “Let me check.” She trails a hand down his stomach and wraps it around the base of his shaft, then strokes lazily back up, all the way to the tip, and pulls out of the water with the same smooth motion. His cock kicks; if he were dry he’d be wet, tip drooling with pre. Max keens at the loss of her hand. She ignores it. “Okay. Here comes the conditioner.” Kelly always uses Le Labo’s Santal 33 for Max. She’s inflexible about it, as she is on everything under her dominion—last year Capella Shanghai’s concierge had wrongly procured The Rich Conditioner by Augustinus Bader, and Kelly 11 had been furious. Partly because the names aren’t similar and the packaging doesn’t look anything alike so it was a stupid careless mistake, but mostly because The Rich Conditioner is a product for damaged hair. Kelly was so insulted at the idea she’d ever allow Max to have damaged hair that she’d threatened her way into compensatory box tickets to a sold-out performance at the Shanghai Ballet that they’d of course not gone to because they were busy fucking in a fitting room at Plaza 66’s Chanel while Max’s bodyguard fended off the tailor by pretending to have an asthma attack. While they’re waiting for the conditioner to set Kelly quadruple-checks Max’s facial hair, to make sure she hasn’t overlooked anything or nicked him anywhere, cleans his ears with a Q-tip, and then she brushes his teeth. As to not contaminate the bathwater, whenever little bits of foam spill out of his mouth Kelly has Max spit into a cup and wipes him off with a microfibre cloth. It takes forever because they’re stopping after nearly every tooth. Max falls asleep when Kelly’s rising out the conditioner and drifts alert again sometime later to find he’s missed the whole hand stage. His cuticles are gone, beds tidied, nails shortened and shaped. Fuck knows how she did that without waking him up: she’s done the same for the toes on both feet and now she’s just starting with the pumice stone. An emery board’s tucked behind one of her ears like a pencil. Some drivers like to keep hard callouses on the pads of their feet to give them a buffer between skin and brake, some toughness that softens feeling and therefore pain. Max has always preferred sensitivity and doesn’t mind the trade- off of ache. That means he can better sense vibration, get a more accurate gauge of the pressure he’s applying and that the car’s responding to, minuscule improvements he nonetheless finds valuable. It means this part of the ritual has to be extra-thorough. One time, back when that kind of thing was Max’s own responsibility and he hadn’t really known how to go about it, he’d asked Daniel to borrow a foot file. Daniel sourced something he promised would work, then had laughed himself sick when Max had sliced his foot open on what turned out to be a cheesegrader. When Daniel had played a prank like that, as he used to every so often, the differences between their careers had seemed to absolve all guilty feelings about 12 it, like, I can laugh at your scuffed car and burned food because most of the time the world bends over backward for you and part of the world is me. Even now, Daniel savours Max’s inconveniences as if they’re unexpected jokes. Seeing Max ill-served has always made Kelly legitimately angry. “I barely want to go out anymore,” Max yawns. “‘M fucking tired.” “You can always stay in with me. Cozy night, just us. Doesn’t that sound nice?” “Of course.” He wants another kiss; she sees it in his face and presses one half-on half-off of his cupid’s bow, the side of his nose, the hollow behind his ear, then makes her way back to his mouth. The scent profile of the bathroom’s changed. Santal 33’s notes—aloe, leather, sandalwood. More time passes. Kelly finishes one foot and swaps to the other, after one final check of his sole, teasing down his skin with a perfect nail just to check he feels it equally everywhere. Max says, “If we stayed in I could fuck you.” Kelly makes a hiccupy air-puff of a laugh and pinches Max’s big toe, shakes it back and forth mischievously. “How will you do that?” She means since you’re falling asleep but Max finds the energy to smirk up at her from half-slitted eyelids. “Any position, any time.” They fall into silence but for the pumice rasping and the aromatherapy machine’s white noise. Kelly holds Max’s foot steady with an ever-moving grip, rotating him at the ankle, firming him by the Achilles tendon, angling him by the toe. It’s like the deep tissue massages Rupert sends Max to sometimes, a ruthless application of pressure. After the tough scrapes come barely-there butterfly touches, seeing the results of her work, and then he’s dusted with a bristle brush to make sure the skin’s sensitive enough to tickle. Whenever he twitches away from her she strokes his arches as if soothing a horse. When Kelly’s nearly through with the pumice, Max remembers: “Said I’d go though.” “They’re professionals. They’ll understand.” “Daniel would not.” “Who?” 13 Max flicks the surface of the bathwater to send a splash at her, smiling. “Also you are forgetting you have the Tiffany thing. If I cancel it will be me alone in the hotel waiting for you to come back from your meeting.” Kelly seems vexed. “I did forget about that.” Max’s eyebrows raise. “You were excited about it before I told you about Daniel.” A noncommittal shrug. The curve of her movement is pleasing to watch, the lines of her torso, the rise of her breasts. Then she digs the pumice stone into his heel as if tunnelling through it, and drags all the way down newly-smoothed skin until she reaches the other side of his foot, and repeats the motion with her wispy bristle brush. Max whimpers all the way through both passes, toes curling, and his shoulders shake up to his ears. That drumbeat feeling, that everywhere flush, gains volume. Sensitised and sloshing blood makes circuits through him. A tidal swell crests and crests and crests along some heretofore undiscovered erotic highway between his kidneys and the hard line of his cock. Kelly soothes, “Only one thing left before you’re all sparkling and new.” Max blinks up at her, bleary: “You don’t have to think, baby, just come up onto your hands and knees for me.” Being on his hands and knees means there’s new things to look at. Instead of Kelly, or the ceiling, now Max is avoiding eye contact with his own reflection in the bathtub’s faucet. The water level’s all the way up to his chest until Kelly drains it a little, replacing the plug after she’s exposed—Max bites hard on his own lip—his ass, the sweep of his shoulders and the plank of his back shivering in the air, the lower half of his thighs and his elbows still boiling in the bath. She plays with his ass more than she cleans it. She coaxes him all the way to the edge of the tub, flat to the lip, and bites the swell of his ass as soon as it's within easy reach. Instead of using a cloth or a loofah to wash him Kelly applies the soap right into her hand, parts his ass and teases her fingers up and down the separation. One of her fingers finds his rim and rubs the centre of it, not pressing in, applying no pressure, until Max tries to rock back onto it and gets a spank for his trouble. 14 The spank startles him so much his arms go weak and they have to pause while Max hiccups out the bubble bath he accidentally swallowed. None of the mood is lost—Kelly explains about potential accidents like being why it’s important to supervise little babies while while they’re having bathtime. She parts his legs into a wider stance theoretically to help him balance, but actually so she has unobstructed access to his balls, which she tells him she’ll hit next time he needs correction. She never expected to be the kind of woman who spanks, because she doesn’t believe in that sort of method, but she can hardly put him in time out when he’s already not allowed to leave the bathtub. This part doesn’t normally take very long but today it lasts forever and a day. It’s aimless exploration. Kelly circles his hole with the pad of her thumb, over and over and over, until this part of him that hasn’t been engaged during sex for seven years now is twitching and clenching and waiting to be unfurled, wanting to be breached. When she pushes in, only barely, Max cries out. His head wants to drop to his chest but he doesn’t let it, remembering to avoid another nose of bubbles, and Kelly makes a sympathetic, sweet, awww , taking her finger back out and giggling when Max goes, “Kell—aaaah—Kel—”, voice hitching, crazy, wildly unprepared for her to give his hole a little kiss. “You’re winking at me. It’s very friendly back here, isn’t that cute? You should’ve told me sooner this is something you like. I can’t read minds. Sometimes you have to ask, I don’t always know.” His voice is a wreckage. “But you do always know.” Max is so ready to—for—something—that he wails when instead he hears the plug lifting out of the drain again, Kelly stepping away and fussing with the towel warmer. He chases with his eyes, twisting to stare, betrayed and bereft, needy. “It’s okay, you’re okay,” Kelly’s voice is wobbly too, her movement not as graceful as usual. She snatches a towel blind and nearly knocks the warmer over as she does so, not looking away from him for a second, rushing straight back. “Come here sweetheart—don’t slip—” She has him in the towel for the two seconds it takes to walk from the bathtub 15 to the adjacent shower, and they’re both so frantic for it that Kelly pushes into the shower with him, not pausing even taking off her own clothes. She twists on the shower without looking because they’re making out again, trying to swallow each other; a stream of frigid water crashes over both their heads and Max barely registers it. The towel falls off him and Max thinks, good idea , and guides Kelly backwards until she’s sitting on the shower bench and he can rip off her sweatpants. While he’s doing that she’s leaning impossibly forward, fixing the shower temperature with the barest amount of contact she can achieve, the very tips of her fingers on the controls. Max laughs when he sees her right hand: she bit the nail on her index short so she could put it inside him. Kelly stands back up into the spray when it’s not icy anymore. Max tries to duck up the inside of her tank top so he can get his mouth on her breasts but it’s too tightly fitted and he gets stuck. “Fucking—” Max spits, and she tells him it’s alright it’s alright, pulling it off, finally naked too, back up a little so I can rinse you ; he returns the favour of all those hickeys while she activates the shower’s hand-held attachment and runs it over every centimetre of him, sloughing off all the soap and bubbles and bath residue, leaving behind nothing but raw skin, and arousal right on the flashpoint. His experience of his body is only his cock—when it feels something all of him feels it. His brain’s in his cock and his heart’s in his cock and the drumbeat throb of desire in his cock is the only sensation his body’s capable of processing. “Come inside,” gasps Kelly, and then she’s on the shower bench with her legs open, Max standing over her, pressing into her cunt, its wetness so unlike any other, slick, impossibly both open and tight, the safest place in the world. “Yes—” “—We, I just got all your mess tidied up so if—everything stays all—” A breathless giggle knotting into a moan as Max curses, seats himself fully inside her and tries to drag her further onto his cock, anyway, one hand braced on the shower wall and one clinging to her waist for dear fucking life, “—inside of me —” When Max comes it feels like a pot boiling over on the stove. It bubbles up and spills over and burns all through him, not centred on his cock but swelling 16 outward from a place behind his stomach, a secondary nexus in his groin, waves down his legs and through his chest, cresting over his ears, his nipples. Maybe his vision cuts out for a second. All that build and he lasted roughly fourteen seconds, unfortunately actually pretty good for him. “Holy shit,” Max says, when he can think again, which takes awhile. As soon as he can differentiate up and down again, he drops to his knees. Max puts his mouth on Kelly’s perfect pussy until she comes, and then puts the shower head on it until she comes a second time, and then they sit on the bench together, kissing and holding each other, until they notice Kelly’s clothing and Max’s towel clogged the drain and the water’s backing up over the lip of the shower onto the floor. Max offers to deal with the mess but Kelly forbids him from getting dirty and wasting all her hard work. They kiss some more about that, then Max dries himself off while Kelly calls the concierge about dealing with the flooded bathroom after they’ve both left for their events. She towels herself, too, and re- dresses in a housecoat because her stylist isn’t arriving with her outfit for another hour. Normally Max doesn’t dry himself off. Kelly runs a questing hand all over him, to make sure he did a good job, and then he lays on the bed with his head in her lap while Kelly puts on her makeup for tonight. Then she straddles his hips so they can look at each other while she rubs cream all over him. There’s one cream for his face that feels nice and cold after he’s gotten woozy in the bath steam, and a different lotion for most of the rest of his body, and a third one she uses on his hands and feet. The feeling of her caressing him, working in the lotion, goes on forever and sings through his whole nervous system. Every part of him worked over, dusted off, spruced up, caressed. No part of him is disengaged or able to hide from it. And then Kelly rolls him onto his stomach. Max doesn’t tense up because that would be physically impossible at this point, but he makes a bleary huh? , and then a sharper sort of whaah? when cold cream makes contact with his ass. When they’re playing this game Kelly doesn’t have to explain what she’s 17 doing to Max’s body, and right now, she exercises that right. She strokes his hole with the back of a knuckle, rubs whatever it is that she has into the seam of him, and his cheeks, and the rim, the same motions as in the bathtub. Max’s sense memories are a step sideways from this, similar but not the same. With Daniel it had been about speed and depth, achieving the widest spread of elasticity in the shortest amount of time. Kelly’s focus is on what this place on his body does to the rest of it. How does pulling apart Max’s ass to expose the hole in the centre, and looking at in silence, impact Max’s heart rate and the location of his pulse? Will Max’s legs twitch if she hooks a finger into his rim and rubs it from the inside at the same time as her thumb pets it on the outside? He’s moaning continuously into the duvet; when he realises he crosses his arms and hides his face inside their nest, but it does next to nothing to suppress the sound and he’s the only thing in this room making noise anyway. He ratchets up in volume when she puts her index to his hole and teases, then this time goes inside properly, in-in-in, then rotation, a little twist that Kelly seems to enjoy a lot too because she says, Max, fuck , in a voice like ripping paper. Whenever Max thinks he’s getting a hold on words something else happens that tows them away again. Kelly bites short a second finger and pushes it inside him as well, takes both out, reapplies something slick, and docks herself again, easier and easier every time she does it, getting the lay of the land. A quick study, of course. She knows his body better than anyone. Better than himself. Three fingers. Kelly makes a decisive back-of-the-throat sound and withdraws, cleans her hands on a towel, and then starts rubbing body lotion down Max’s spine like nothing unusual even happened. Lotion on his shoulders, lower back, nape. His hole clenches and unclenches, confused, expectant. No answers, and then he’s being turned over again. Kelly leans down, and with one hand she points to her cheek. Max tilts his chin, as much as he can, to see her, and blinks, resting his eyes before opening them again. Her meaning travels to him through a dark tunnel that slows time. When it finally arrives he’s happy to listen, sitting up and taking her into his arms. Their lips brush, the angle readjusts, he smells the waxy cream of a new layer of lipstick. 18 When she’s done with his mouth she roams the rest of his face, letting him settle back onto the duvet and just lie there with his eyes shut, his limbs splayed out, hands stretching and fisting and stretching again. “Can you get yourself dressed today?” She’s stroking his lip, pressing in on the freckle, then his cheek, the freckle there too. “Yes,” Max croaks. His voice wasn’t expecting to be called on. “Although to be honest I’m, Kelly I think, going to have trouble walking straight.” It’s just drinks and dinner so he’s in khaki shorts and a white shirt. The lower half of him handles the underwear and then the shorts poorly—he’s half- chubbed, and the feeling of being open makes the feeling of fabric on his hole totally insane. By the time he’s clothed and lingering in the entryway, texting with his PA and learning Ford’s covering everything so he doesn’t need to bring his wallet, it’s starting to sink in that Kelly’s not about to say sike! and reveal she’s actually super into anal sex and it just hasn’t come up yet. There’s a mirror hung in the entryway. Max double-takes at himself—there’s small lip prints on his neck, the underside of his jaw, his cheek underneath the left earlobe. All over his face, smears of the Champion shade of Unicosmetics X Kelly Piquet’s GROUND POUT gloss. “Oh my god,” he laughs, grabbing the hem of his shirt and reaching it up to his face. “After all that time washing we have already—” Kelly steps right into Max’s personal space, pinches his earlobe between two sharp nails and pries the shirt out of his hand before Max can lift it more than five centimetres. “Max,” says Kelly. Her voice is like steel. “I know you weren’t just about to wipe off kisses from Mommy.” His response to that is probably what being electrocuted feels like. A shudder kicks all the way down Max’s body, adrenaline and shock zapping the hair up on the back of his neck, coiling electric in his dick although he came fourty-five seconds ago. “Sorry. Wasn’t.” “But you obviously were, baby.” “Sorry.” 19 “And then you lied to me about it?” Kelly digs her nails into his ear, making a sad pout incongruous with the level of pain she’s setting herself up to inflict. Hastily Max explains, “I didn’t—I wasn’t—thinking of them like kisses. I was going to, with the lipstick because I thought it was just lipstick.” For long moments they make eye contact while Max hardens in his underwear and Kelly examines Max’s face, brushing her fingers over the lipstick kisses. Max knows his eyes are dinner plates because he feels