Victoria took him up to her bedroom at eleven for a nap. Hers, not his.

 

The room was dim, the blackout curtains still drawn from the night, the king bed unmade for once, the decorative pillows shoved onto the floor in a heap. The ring light on the vanity was off. His jewelry tray sat on her nightstand, the silk scarf folded inside it, the pink label-maker sticker still on the side.

 

Next to it was the legal pad.

 

Max saw it before she did. It was face up, and it had been folded back to the second page, and someone had circled something in purple, twice, hard enough to dent the paper. It was the same thing Izzy had done weeks ago, with number twelve: I'll leave the list on your nightstand, though. Just in case.

 

15. masturbation (hers. WITH him. like as the toy)

 

And further down the page, not circled, just there:

 

19. insertion (like all the way)

 

Victoria stopped beside the bed with him in her palm. She looked at the pad for a long time. Her hand didn't shake. He waited for her to pick it up and throw it in the drawer, or call Izzy, or cry.

 

Instead she sat down on the edge of the bed, and set him on the cream duvet beside her hip, and picked up the legal pad, and read it again.

 

"Mama caught herself," she said quietly. She wasn't talking to the pad. "In the shower. Mama stopped."

 

"I know," Max said.

 

"Mama was thinking about somebody else. That's why Mama stopped." She put the pad down. "That's what Mama was sorry about. Not—" She made a small motion with her hand, at herself, at him, at all of it. "Not that. Mama was sorry it wasn't you she was thinking about."

 

He didn't know what to say to that. He didn't know what his face was doing.

 

Victoria turned and looked down at him on the duvet. She was calm. It wasn't the smooth calm from the shower, the one that came up over the top of something else. It went all the way down. Only her breathing gave her away, a little quick at the top.

 

"Mama's not going to do anything you don't want, mijo," she said. "Do you hear me? You say stop, Mama stops."

 

He nodded.

 

"Do you want Mama to stop?"

 

He opened his mouth to say yes. It was right there. It was the word he'd been saying for twenty-five days, in his head, in the briefs, in the shoe, in the steam.

 

It didn't come out.

 

"No," he said.

 

She closed her eyes for a second. Then she opened them, and stood up, and untied the robe.

 

She took her time.

 

She let the satin fall off her shoulders onto the floor, and she stood there in the dim room naked, in front of him, and let him look. Her tits hung heavy and brown over the curve of her belly. A crease from the sheets was still printed red across one of them. The neat dark triangle of curls sat between her thighs. Her thighs were thick and smooth and touching. She smelled of last night's wine on her breath and sleep and her own skin, cocoa butter and salt.

 

She lay back on the bed, on the cream duvet, among the wreck of the pillows, and drew her knees up and let them fall open. Then she picked him up and laid him on her belly, just below her navel, facing down.

 

He could see all of her from there. The long brown slope of her stomach running down to the curls. The thick dark lips of her pussy, parted already, glistening at the center. Her thighs spread wide on either side of him, the whole cream bed between them.

 

"Look at Mama," Victoria said. "Mijo. Look at Mama while Mama does this."

 

He turned his head and looked up the length of her body, past her tits, to her face on the pillow. She was looking right back at him.

 

Then she slid him down.

 

Through the curls first, coarse and damp, catching at his chest and arms. Then onto her lips. She laid him lengthwise along her slit, his whole body on it, and held him there flat with two fingers across his back, and moved him. Up. Down. Her lips were hot and thick and slippery and they parted under him and folded back over his sides, and at the top was her clit, hard under its hood, the size of his fist, and she brought his chest up over it and stopped.

 

"There," she breathed. "Right there, mijo. That's Mama's."

 

She rubbed him on it. Little circles, the way she had in the shower, but nothing about it was absent now. She was watching him the whole time. She said his name. She said mi amor, mi niño, ay, así, así. When he got his arms around her clit and held on and rubbed his face against it on purpose, she made a sound high in her throat and her hips came up off the bed.

 

"Oh, mijo."

 

He did it again. He licked it. It was salty and sharp and slick, and it throbbed against his tongue, and every time he licked it her thighs twitched in on both sides of the bed. He was hard. He was so hard it hurt, pinned between his own belly and her wet lips, getting rubbed against her with every circle, and he didn't hide from it this time and he didn't apologize for it in his head. He just pushed back into her.

 

The shame was still there. He could feel it. It just wasn't on top anymore.

 

Her breathing went ragged. Her other hand came down and spread herself open with two fingers, and the lips peeled back, wet and dark pink inside, and the center of her opened under him, a slick hot dark mouth.

 

She stopped.

 

She lifted him up off her clit and held him in the air above her, dripping, and looked at him, flushed to her collarbone, her hair everywhere on the pillow.

 

He looked down at her. At the open center of her, glistening, waiting. Then past her hip, at the legal pad on the nightstand, at the line further down the page.

 

Down the hall, the AC kicked on. Somewhere on Ventus's waitlist, somebody was getting his room. Eighteen days.

 

"Mama's not sorry," Victoria said. "For any of this. You hear me?"

 

"I hear you."

 

Her eyes followed his to the pad.

 

"Nineteen?" he said.

 

She smiled at him, flushed to the hairline, and brought him back down to her clit.

 

"Not yet," she said. "Mama does things in order."

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October 28
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