"That one," Veronica confirmed.

She grabbed her own breast.

The full, generous weight of it — her own magnificent breast, the kind that had been weaponized over the course of a very deliberate adult life — and brought it up and over his cock, pressing the warm, soft flesh against the shaft, her other breast joining it, the both of them sandwiching him in the warm, deliberate channel of her cleavage.

She looked up at him.

"Her parents are forcing the wedding," she said, her voice pure silk, her eyes pure ambition. "You should go fuck her on her wedding bed. In front of her husband." Her tongue found the tip of his cock as it appeared above her pressed-together breasts. "Teach them all a lesson before you bring her here."

He looked at her.

The warm, unhurried look.

"You," he said, his hand tightening in her hair, "are really a bitch."

She grinned.

The full, unguarded grin of a woman being told something she knows is true and finds complimentary.

He grabbed her head.

Pushed.

His cock into her mouth — straight, full, the comprehensive entry of a man who had just decided that the conversation was over and what came next was not conversation — and Veronica’s crimson eyes rolled upward, her lips stretching around him, the gag arriving at the back of her throat and her throat deciding it was not going to be a problem. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

She took it.

All of it.

Her eyes on his face.

The true whore.

The specific, devastating truth of a woman who could have been many things and had chosen this — not been brought to it, not been made into it overnight — had chosen it with the full, informed, ambitious certainty of someone who knew exactly what they were selecting and had selected it completely.

He groaned.

Low. The honest, involuntary sound of a man who has returned to something he had missed.

He looked beside him.

Frau Muller.

Still there. Standing against him, her forehead pressed to his chest, her hands gripping the front of his shirt — which he wasn’t wearing, so her hands were gripping his chest — her eyes closed, her body doing the small, continuous trembling of something that was trying to stay composed and not entirely succeeding.

He looked at her.

At the top of her head.

The specific, warm attention of a man noticing something he finds valuable.

He moved his free hand.

Found the neckline of her top.

The skirt — his fingers finding the waistband, pulling down in one smooth motion, the fabric falling away from the full, warm curve of her hips — and she made a sound.

"Raven—"

He pulled the bra aside.

Her breast.

The full, heavy, milk-warm weight of it arriving in the open air of the London apartment — the dark, thick nipple already hard, already informed by the last fifteen minutes of being groped through fabric that something was expected of it — and he leaned down.

His mouth.

Finding it.

Sucking — the deep, genuine pull of a man who had missed this specific thing — and she cried.

"MMNH~!! AHH~—"

Below, Veronica’s muffled sound around his cock.

"Mmph~—mnh~—"

Both women.

The apartment’s morning light catching the three of them in the specific, domestic warmth of a scene that London grey had not been asked to illuminate and was doing so anyway.

His mouth still at Frau Muller’s breast.

Veronica’s crimson eyes still on his face.

He pulled his cock from Veronica’s mouth — the string of her, the wet sound of it — and her chin tilted up, her eyes following him, her chest heaving.

"Let’s take a trip," he said.

His eyes moving between both of them. The warmth in them.

"India."

He bit down on Frau Muller’s nipple.

"AAAHH~!!"

"While," he said, "you both tighten your holes when I come back."

He snapped his fingers.

The London apartment — the aerial silk still swaying, the hardwood floor still holding the impression of their morning, the grey city continuing its grey business nine floors below — received the specific, sudden quiet of a space from which all its occupants have simultaneously departed.

The skirt on the floor.

The aerial silk.

The faint, warm scent of three bodies that had been close together and were now somewhere else entirely.

----

Far Away, Overseas,

The marigolds had been strung by hand.

Thousands of them — the specific, warm, orange-gold density of Indian wedding decoration, layered on every surface that could hold them — and the mandap at the center of the Mehta family’s rented banquet hall had been dressed for three days by aunties whose lives were a sequence of other people’s ceremonies.

It was beautiful.

Preet hated it.

She sat in the bridal preparation room with her back to the mirror and her mother’s hands in her hair — the specific, competent, entirely non-consultative hands of a woman who had decided how her daughter’s hair would look and was implementing the decision — and stared at a fixed point on the wall.

"You sit like you’re attending a funeral," her mother said.

"I don’t want—"

"Don’t." The hands tightened in her hair, pulling the braid taut. "Don’t start. Not today. Do you know how many people are here? Do you know what they will say if—"

"I know what they’ll say."

"Then sit straight."

She sat straight.

She knew what they would say. She had been knowing what they would say her entire life — the specific, comprehensive social calculus of a family where ’what people say’ was a governing document — and it had managed her for twenty-five years with general success.

Until the island.

The island had been the compromise. The consolation. ’Fine, you can go on your trip with your friends, but when you return we are discussing the match.’ She had gone. She had been reckless with the specific, contained recklessness of someone who knows they are going back to a box and is making the most of the time outside it.

And then.

The man.

She hadn’t even known his name for the first three hours. He had come out of the water at the cove where she and her friends had been sitting — the specific, impossible, Greek-god emergence of a man from the sea that happened in films and not in real life — and he had looked at her with purple eyes and said something to her in a language she didn’t understand and laughed when she didn’t understand it, and the laugh had been the warm, unhurried laugh of someone who was not laughing ’at’ her.

She had spent two weeks on that island.

She had not gone back to a box at the end of them.

She had gone back to a different box — a box that knew something about her that the previous box had not known, a box that contained the specific, accumulated knowledge of what she was capable of feeling when someone decided to show her — and the arranged marriage had been announced three months later and she had opened her mouth and looked at her parents’ faces and closed it again.

"Preet."

Her mother’s voice.

Present. Returning her.

"Your eyes are red. Wash your face. Don’t embarrass us in front of the many guests who have arranged to attend the wedding."