I hear her on the stairs before I ses her, fast, light, two steps at a time. And when she reaches the landing, she is soaked in sweat, breathing hard, braid heavy, eyes fixed on me like the last forty-three minutes had only ever had one destination.

There is a package on my kitchen table.
There is a reason Juna came.
But first, there is the doorway.

And then the door closes.

This is the beginning of a longer Kaia Wouldn’t Dare story.

The first part is open for everyone.
After the paywall, the kitchen gets very quiet.
And the package has to wait.

At the end, tell me one thing:
Should I take them to the roof?

Forty-Three Minutes

The Kitchen

She doesn’t knock.

I hear her on the stairs before I see her, that rhythm, fast and light, two at a time and I’m already at the door when she hits the landing, chest still heaving, her black tights soaked dark from the waistband down, her braid drenched and heavy, sweat running in a clean line down her throat, her collarbone, disappearing into the neckline of her sports bra.

Three months.

Her skin is deep black in the morning light and she is breathing hard and she is looking at me the way she looks at a wall she has already decided to climb.

“Oh”, she says. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

She leans against the doorframe. Not casually, her legs need it. She ran here. Not past here. Here, specifically, which means somewhere around kilometer six she made a decision and kept running toward it for twenty minutes.

“The last twenty minutes”, she says, “my thighs were rubbing together with every step and I couldn’t stop thinking about your mouth on my pussy.”

The words land before I’ve processed them. Juna in my doorway, soaked and breathing and saying this like a fact.

“I thought about how wet you get”, she says. “How fast. How you feel when I push inside you and you try to be quiet and your whole body gives you away anyway.” She tilts her head. “Has it been three months for you too or just for me.”

It moves through me like something poured. From my throat downward. Fast and complete and not a decision.

“Three months”, I say.

“Did you open the package.”

“You said I couldn’t.”

Something shifts in her face. Not quite a smile. Something that knows it already won.

“Take your clothes off”, she says. Still in the doorway.

“Juna. What is happening right here.”

“Sssh.” She steps inside. The door closes behind her. “Ask me again in an hour.”

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But morning has its own bad manners.

A missing Do Not Disturb sign.
A trimmer humming in the bathroom.
A woman caught in the middle of keeping something that belongs only to herself.

And Sofia, standing in the doorway with fresh towels and a question she probably should not have asked.

This final part is softer than the night before.
Less reckless.
Less loud.

But maybe that makes it more dangerous.

Because sometimes the most intimate thing in a hotel room is not what happens in the dark.

Sometimes it is the morning after, when someone unexpected walks in, sees too much and decides not to leave.

Previous parts of the Last Call Trology

(1) Last Call: Night
(2) Last Call: Do Not Disturb

Last Call • Do Not Disturb

The thing about trimming is that it requires a certain philosophy.

Not a complicated one. Just: I am a woman, not a billboard. Which means I maintain but I don’t erase. Keep the evidence of the fact that something lives here, has lived here for twenty-odd years, has its own texture and warmth and smell. I tried the full thing once, around 2011, when everyone did. Felt like I’d removed something that belonged to me. Never again.

I am standing with one foot on the edge of the tub, Spotify on something bossa nova and vaguely melancholy, trimmer humming, concentrating, when the bathroom door opens.

We both make a sound.

Not a scream exactly. More like the noise a person makes when their nervous system fires before their brain has context.

She is young. Dark hair, pulled back. Uniform. A stack of fresh towels held against her chest like a shield, her eyes very wide, looking at me. At the trimmer. At the general situation.

Her name tag says Sofia.

I look at her. Neither of us moves.

“Do Not Disturb”, I say.

“I knocked”, she says. “Three times.”

“Headphones.”

Her eyes drop briefly, not to the trimmer this time and come back up. Something in her expression shifts. Not embarrassment exactly. Curiosity. She is looking at me the way a person looks at something unexpected that is not, on reflection, unwelcome.

“You don’t shave”, she says.

It is not an accusation. It is not even really a comment. It is the tone of someone noticing something and being surprised to find they’ve said it out loud.

“No”, I say.

“Why not?”

I set the trimmer on the sink. Consider her. She is maybe twenty-three and she is still holding the towels and she asked a genuine question and she deserves a genuine answer.

“Because I’m a woman”, I say. “Not a child.”

She looks at me for a long moment.

Then she sets the towels on the floor.

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asked what would happen if I stripped the scene almost bare: no names, almost no stage directions, only the back and forth. Dialogue carrying the tension. Silence doing the rest.

I liked that idea too much to leave it alone.

So this is not a replacement for the original Forty-three Minutes. It’s a second angle. Same spark, less explanation. Fewer prescribed images. More room for your mind to step in and make the scene its own.

Let’s see what happens when the door stays open, but the narration steps back.

And yes. This is still only the beginning.

Forty-Three Minutes

The Kitchen

“Oh. Hi.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“The last twenty minutes, every single step, my thighs rubbing together, soaked through and all I could think about was my mouth on your pussy. How you taste. How you grab my hair when I lick you exactly right and try not to make noise and completely fail.”

“Juna.”

“I thought about how fast you get wet. How the second I push inside you, you’re already pulling me deeper. How you feel when I curl my fingers and you forget what words are. (tilts her head) Three months for you too, or just for me.”

“Three months.”

“Did you open the package.”

“You said I couldn’t.”

“Take your clothes off.”

“Juna. What is wrong with you?”

“Sssh. Ask me in an hour.”

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But I need you for something else today.

I tried something new: the beginning of an extended Kaia Wouldn’t Dare story, not written as classic prose, but almost like a dialogue scene. More direct. More breath. More right there in the room.

So this time, I’m asking you before I continue:

Does this format work?
Would you want a full KWD story like this?

You are my feedback people today. Be honest. Be kind. Be dangerous.

And yes. This is only the beginning.

Forty-Three Minutes

The Kitchen

[Sound: footsteps on stairs, fast, two at a time. Door opens.]

JUNA: (breathing hard, sweat on her skin, not moving from the doorway) Oh. Hi.

KAIA: Oh. Hi.

JUNA: The last twenty minutes, every single step, my thighs rubbing together, soaked throug and all I could think about was my mouth on your pussy. How you taste. How you grab my hair when I lick you exactly right and try not to make noise and completely fail.

KAIA: (very quiet) Juna.

JUNA: I thought about how fast you get wet. How the second I push inside you, you’re already pulling me deeper. How you feel when I curl my fingers and you forget what words are. (tilts her head) Three months for you too, or just for me.

KAIA: (beat) Three months.

JUNA: Did you open the package.

KAIA: You said I couldn’t.

JUNA: (not quite a smile, something that already knows it won) Take your clothes off. (still in the doorway)

KAIA: Juna. What is wrong with you?

JUNA: Sssh. (steps inside, door closes behind her) Ask me in an hour.

[Pause. Walks toward Kaia.]

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The bar is gone.
The city is gone.
There is only the room, the dark, the heat of another body and the kind of want that does not ask politely anymore.

Last Call, Part Two is slower, dirtier and far more intimate than I expected.

Kaia wouldn’t dare.
But apparently, 3AM has different rules.

Previous part of the Last Call Trology

(1) Kaia Wouldn’t Dare • Last Call: Night

Kaia Wouldn’t Dare: Last Call • 3am

He kisses me first and I taste the whole night in it.

Bourbon. Sweat. The faint mineral tang of my own skin on his lips from before. He was on my nipples for a long time and the knowledge of that is in his mouth when he opens it against mine, that intimacy, that specific record of what he’s already done to me. I feel my own pulse in my lips. They’re swollen. Tender. And he is kissing that tenderness like he built it and knows exactly what it cost me and wants me to feel it again, now, here, just his mouth before anything else.

My belly is still warm from the orgasm.

Not a memory. Present tense. The warmth sitting low and deep in me, translated from my nipples to somewhere further down, something woken up that hasn’t gone back to sleep.

He pulls back. His hands are still at my face, his thumbs at my jaw and he looks at me in the way he’s been looking at me all night, that look that is a decision and I feel the look between my legs. Actually feel it. The clench of it, involuntary.

My hands find his hips.

I pull.

He moves up.

The mattress shifts under me as his weight redistributes and I feel it through my whole back, that shift, the specific physics of a body rearranging itself with intention. His knee comes down beside my shoulder. His shin grazes my collarbone. He is moving in the wrong direction and the wrongness of it, the unexpected direction of it, is already doing something to me, something anticipatory, something that knows before he arrives.

His thigh settles against my cheek.

Warm. Rough with hair. The realness of it makes me close my eyes for a second. Just the sheer there of another person’s body, the undeniable corporeality of a thigh against a cheek at four in the morning. I turn my face into it without asking myself why. I inhale.

He smells of us.

That’s the only way to say it. Sweat and heat and sex, not abstract, not a category, but specifically this night, specifically this room, the particular smell of what two bodies make when they have been at each other for hours. Under that, something cleaner. His skin. The base note of him that I would know in the dark, which I am, which I do.

I am wet.

I notice this not as information but as pressure. The pulse of it. My body already fully enrolled in whatever this is before he’s so much as touched me.

His cock is above me.

I don’t touch it yet. I want to. I want to with a specificity that has colonized most of my available processing, but I don’t. I breathe. I feel the heat radiating from him, the proximity of all that wanting, close enough to feel on my lips before contact. His breathing from up there is already different. Shorter. He’s been hard since before the orgasm. Probably longer. The whole careful patient night of him, accumulated.

“Okay?” he says.

That voice. Something in that voice, the bottom of it, the place where he’s losing his grip on composed, goes straight to the throb between my thighs and makes it worse.

“Be quiet”, I say.

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The shower was over, the bar was closed, the room was quiet in that strange hotel way, too warm, too still, too full of everything I was not ready to feel alone.

So I called downstairs.

For two cocktails.

And when he answered anyway, something in the night shifted.

Not much. Just enough.

A voice. A pause. Ten minutes.

And suddenly the question was no longer whether I should put something on.

But whether I wanted to.

Kaia Wouldn’t Dare: Last Call • Night

The shower is still running when I call down to the bar.

Not running, I turned it off three minutes ago, but I can still hear it. That’s what happens in hotel rooms at midnight. Sounds linger. The air is still wet and warm and the mirror is still fogged and I am standing in nothing but a towel with my hair dripping down my back and I am, if I’m honest with myself, not ready to be alone yet.

The bar is closed.

He answers anyway.

His voice is low and a little surprised and I ask for two cocktails. Whatever he thinks, I don’t care and there’s a pause and then: Give me ten minutes.

I sit on the edge of the bed. The towel is damp. The room smells of soap and the particular air-conditioned nowhere-ness of hotel rooms everywhere. I think about putting something on.

I don’t.

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What’s left is a narrow cabin, a stranger who didn’t bother to pretend he was asleep and the kind of darkness that lets you feel more than you see.
Light hits in flashes: a shoulder, the open line of a throat, bare skin that only exists for a second and then lives on in imagination.

I could have kept my shirt on.
I didn’t.

By the time the train has decided where to take us, his body has already answered for him.
Hard lines. Slow breath. The unmistakable evidence of what watching me undress in the dark has done to him.

This isn’t a story about a reserved seat.
It’s about what happens when you step into the only berth left and realize the night is not nearly as empty as it looked.

No Reservation

The conductor finds me in the corridor between carriages.

Standing there with my bag and my ticket and the particular expression of a person who has discovered their reserved seat is occupied by a family of five and a foldable pushchair. He checks his screen. Checks again. One berth available, cabin 7, lower bunk, but he needs to ask the other passenger first.

I wait in the corridor while the train moves through the dark.

I hear his knock. A pause. Then a voice from inside, low, unhurried, one word and something in that voice, just the texture of it, registers below my conscious attention like a note played in another room.

“Fine”, the conductor tells me. “He says it’s fine.”

I open the door.

Dark.

Not the dark of a room with curtains, the dark of a space that is moving, that exists between places. The window is a rectangle of deeper black and through it the night move and every few seconds a lamp post or a signal light pulls past and the cabin fills, briefly, completely, with amber or white and then goes black again.

I hear him.

Breathing. Slow. Even. I feel the presence of him before I see him, the way you feel a heat source before contact.

I set my bag on the floor.

The train moves. The floor moves. I feel it through my feet, through my ankles, through the whole column of my body.

I begin to undress.

My jacket first.

A lamp post pulls past, one second of yellow light, his face visible for exactly that duration, turned toward me, eyes open, not pretending to sleep, then dark. He is awake. He is watching. He made no pretence of not watching.

I finish the jacket.

My shirt next. The train sways and I brace one hand on the upper bunk and work the buttons and I am acutely aware of being watched in a darkness that gives him everything and me nothing. I can’t see him. He can see me, in fragments, in the intervals of light.

This should feel like disadvantage.

It doesn’t.

A station light pulls past, longer this time, a fluorescent streak and in it I am briefly, fully lit. Shirt open. The curve of my shoulder. The line of my throat. Then dark.

I hear his breathing shift.

I wear no bra. Almost never had. The shirt falls.

Another flash, amber, warm and my breasts are in it, bare, the light finding my nipples tightened from the cool cabin air and I let it happen, let the light take what it wants and then it’s gone and I’m standing in the dark with my heartbeat doing something inconvenient.

My trousers. My underwear.

I am completely bare in a moving train somewhere between two cities. The air touches every part of me simultaneously. The floor vibrates under my feet. And his eyes are on me in the dark. I feel them the way you feel a hand before it lands.

I turn around.

The next light comes from the left. A farmhouse, distant.

He is on the lower bunk with one arm behind his head and the sheet pulled to his hips, low on his hips, very low and his chest is bare and broad and I have approximately two seconds in which to process all of this.

He is watching me with an expression that is not complicated.

“You like what you’re seeing?” I ask.

The farmhouse light fades. Dark.

A lamp post. His face, clearly. Something in his expression shifts from interested to decided.

He reaches for the sheet.

Pulls it back.

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White cotton.
Deep neckline.
No bra. No underwear.
Just sun, skin and a body already far too awake for an innocent afternoon.

Then she pulls over.

The woman who steps out of the patrol car is all restraint.
The man behind her says nothing.
And somehow that silence is worse than questions.

What begins as a routine stop turns filthy by degrees
a look held too long,
an order that lands lower than it should,
the slow collapse of the distance between fear, obedience and wanting.

By the time Kaia is told to step out of the car,
she is no longer trying very hard to be innocent.

This is not the kind of control anyone reports honestly afterward.

The previous Kaia Wouldn’t Dare Stories
(1) Occupied
(2) Zero Gravity: Because Someone Had to Ask
(3) Zero Gravity: The Experiment Ended. Desire Didn’t.
(4) Zero Gravity: On the Last Night, Nothing Stays Professional

Kaia Wouldn’t Dare • Contrôle

The road has been mine for forty minutes.

Not metaphorically. Literally mine, empty in both directions, the kind of empty that only exists in the south of France on a Tuesday afternoon in July when everyone sensible is somewhere horizontal and shaded. I have the windows down and the radio up and the sun pressing through the windshield onto my bare thighs like it has decided to stay. My dress is white cotton, thin as a reason, two straps and a neckline that starts at my collarbones and doesn’t stop until it has said everything it wants to say. No bra. I never wear one. My breasts move with the road, with the small vibrations of the engine and the heat sits on my skin like a second layer I stopped noticing an hour ago.

I am warm everywhere and going nowhere in particular and I am completely happy about both.

Then the lights.

Blue and white in my mirror, lazy and certain and my stomach drops and then does something else entirely that I don’t immediately name.

I pull onto the gravel shoulder. Cut the engine. The silence arrives at once, cicadas, dry wind off the lavender, the tick of cooling metal. My pulse is already somewhere it shouldn’t be and they haven’t reached my window yet.

She gets out first.

I register her before I register anything else. Dark hair pulled tight under the cap. Uniform that fits like a decision she made once and never revisited. Aviator sunglasses she doesn’t remove when she arrives at my window, so for a moment I see myself reflected, small, flushed, the deep V of my neckline doing exactly what it was made to do.

Vos papiers, s’il vous plaît.

Her voice settles in my chest before I’ve processed the French.

I hand over my license. My registration. She takes them without looking at me and I use the moment to look at her. The clean line of her jaw, the stillness of someone paid to be unreadable. Her eyes drop to my neckline.

Stay.

Come back up.

He’s at their vehicle still. Arms crossed. Still in a way that isn’t passive. The kind of still that is watching everything and filing it away. He is brown-skinned and broad-shouldered and his sunglasses are on and he is looking at me with an expression that is professionally neutral in absolutely no dimension.

She asks where I’m going. I tell her. She asks where I’ve been. I tell her that too and the whole time I am aware of my nipples pressing against thin cotton in the heat and whether she can see it and I stop pretending I don’t already know the answer.

Sortez du véhicule, Madame.

Read more

But this is the last night in orbit.
And not everything that happens up here belongs to science, protocol or history.

Some moments stay off mission.
And some never make it into the report at all.

First two parts of the Zero Gravity Trilogy:
(1) Zero Gravity: Because Someone Had to Ask
(2) Zero Gravity: The Experiment Ended. Desire Didn’t.

Zero Gravity: Off Mission

Her tongue on my nipple.

Wet. Warm. Deliberate.

In weightlessness my nipples can flee, the whole breast drifts, shifts, offers itself at unexpected angles. But her tongue stays. Follows. Does not negotiate.

Fuck, I think.

An hour ago I was debriefing.

Now I am not doing anything except this.

It is the last evening.

Tomorrow the capsule. Tomorrow atmosphere, deceleration, the brutal return of gravity. Tomorrow Houston, institutional coffee, the particular fluorescence of government buildings. Tomorrow I am a woman who went to space and came back.

Tonight I am still here.

Sheila finds me in the corridor near the observation module. She is in her off-duty clothes. Soft grey, no insignia, her hair loose for the first time since I’ve been on board. She looks different without the engineering in her face. Younger. Less armored.

“Can I talk to you?” she says.

“Yes”, I say.

We float to the small galley. She makes tea, real tea, from a sealed pouch, one of her personal supplies. She hands me mine. We hold our pouches and don’t say anything for a moment.

Then she says: “I turned on the compressor last night.”

I look at her.

“The loud one”, she says. “In the service module.”

A beat.

“I heard”, she says. “Not details. Just, I heard that something was happening. And I thought…” She stops. “I wanted you to be able to.”

I hold my tea.

“Thank you”, I say and mean it more than those two words can carry.

She nods. Looks at her pouch. Then: “I’ve had a crush on him since month two.”

She doesn’t say the name. She doesn’t need to.

“I know”, I say, gently.

“It’s nothing. It’s professional. It will always be professional.” She says it clean, without self-pity, the way engineers state tolerances. “I just wanted to say it out loud once. To someone who…” She almost smiles. “To someone who knows.”

I know.

We float in the small silence of two women who understand the same thing from different angles.

Then she looks at me. Direct. Something has shifted in her face. The confession done, something else beneath it now.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“What is it like”, she says, “in the module? Not the…” she pauses. “Not the research part. The…”

“The weightlessness part”, I say.

“Yes.”

I think about how to answer. About my breasts on that first day. About the drops that drifted. About the way an orgasm spreads without edges when there is nothing to contain it.

“It’s like your body stops having opinions”, I say. “And just receives.”

She is quiet for a long moment.

“I’ve tried”, she says. “In my sleeping bag. At night. But I can never…” She stops.

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But questions have a way of changing once a body has already answered them.

This is part two of the Zero Gravity trilogy.

The experiment is over.
What follows is no longer theory, no longer protocol, no longer something that fits neatly into a report.

Some things begin exactly where they were supposed to end.

First Part of the Zero Gravity Trilogy:
(1) Zero Gravity: Because Someone Had to Ask

Zero Gravity: Debriefing

His tongue on my nipple.

Wet. Warm. Deliberate.

In weightlessness, my nipples can flee. The whole breast drifts, shifts, offers itself at unexpected angles. But his tongue stays. Follows. Does not negotiate.

Fuck, I think.

An hour ago I was running an experiment.

Now I am not running anything.

The debriefing module is smaller than the briefing room in Houston, which was already small. Commander Hayes, six months on station, jaw like a geological formation, the particular stillness of someone who has made peace with confined spaces, sits across from me with a tablet he isn’t looking at.

“So”, he says. “How did it go?”

I tell him. Dry. A little arch. The saliva ribbon. Newton’s third law. Daniel’s good intentions versus the physics of desire. The laughter. The condom from Appendix C.

Hayes listens. Something moves at the corner of his mouth.

“They sent a writer”, he says.

“Two writers”, I say.

“Right.” He sets the tablet down. “Neither of whom had spent more than seventy-two hours in microgravity.”

“That is correct.”

He looks at me for a moment.

“You know what the problem is”, he says, “when you don’t know the environment. You fight it. You keep looking for the floor.”

“We found workarounds.”

“I’m sure you did.”

A pause.

“I’ve been up here six months”, he says. “I don’t look for the floor anymore.”

The thing that happens in my lower belly is immediate, involuntary, and entirely unprofessional.

“Is that relevant to the research”, I say. It is not a question.

“It might be”, he says. “Methodologically speaking.”

I look at him. He looks at me. The station hums its single note.

“Methodologically”, I say.

“Strictly.”

A test pilot. A Commander. A man for whom weightlessness was not the experiment. It was home.

“When?” I say.

“Tonight”, he says. “If that works for you.”

It works for me.

Back to now. His tongue on my nipple. My hand in his hair, not directing. Just needing something to hold.

He moves to the other breast and I feel the first one cool in the recycled air and the contrast makes me make a sound I hadn’t planned.

He has been up here six months.

It shows.

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Not about propulsion.
Not about radiation.
But about us.

Paul Root Wolpe, a NASA Senior Bioethicist (2003-2017), once said:
“We need to know more about sexuality in space if we are serious about long-duration space flights.”

He’s right.

And yet, almost nothing exists that actually explores what that means. Not clinically. Not honestly. Not from inside the body.

So I wrote it.

Not as theory.
Not as fantasy.
But as an experiment in what it might feel like, when gravity disappears and everything else doesn’t.

Zero Gravity: The Experiment

I’m floating.

Naked. In orbit. In a module with no official name, windows covered in blackout film someone applied with the same energy as a Post-it note. Provisional. Pragmatic. Privacy. Right. Sure.

Daniel is floating across from me.

Also naked.

We look at each other with the mutual respect of two people who know exactly what’s supposed to happen and have absolutely no idea how.

For science, I think.

For humanity.

That is a very high bar.

But first: my breasts.

I need a moment for my breasts.

On Earth they are full and heavy and mine, subject to gravity like everything else. Here they float. Barely. Just enough, a slow soft drift, unmoored from everything they’ve ever been subject to. I look down and feel something close to reverence.

Girls, I think. This is insane.

Eight weeks ago. Houston, a building that doesn’t appear on any visitor map, coffee that tastes like the idea of coffee. I was early. There was too much of the coffee and nowhere to put my hands.

He came in.

Jacket over a shirt that wasn’t trying. Folder held like a prop. He looked at me, looked away. The exact speed of someone who’d just done the math.

Writer.

We shook hands. Kaia, Daniel. His grip was even. His eyes stayed one second too long.

Mine did too.

The liaison said: Eight weeks. Both of you. Already signed.

I watched Daniel’s jaw shift, a door closing quietly. I understood. I had the same door. I’d been closing it every morning for fifty-six days.

Back to now.

I cross the distance between us. Not toward his mouth.

Lower.

His cock is already hard, warm in my hand and I take my time feeling him. His hand comes to the back of my head. Not pushing. Just present.

Then I take him in my mouth.

The physics of this become immediately, absurdly apparent.

A thin ribbon of saliva drifts away, suspended, luminous in the module’s filtered light, a slow perfect arc toward the far wall.

I pull back. We both watch it travel.

“Someone’s going to have to clean that”, Daniel says.

“Not us”, I say.

We look at each other and start laughing. Real laughter, the helpless kind, his hand still in my hair, both of us suspended in the middle of something that was supposed to be clinical and for the advancement of human knowledge.

Then I take him back in my mouth and the laughter stops.

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Some fantasies don’t belong in real life.

They live here instead.
Unfiltered. Unapologetic. Unlived.

Occupied begins with a mistake.
A curtain opening at the wrong time.

And the exact moment Kaia decides
not to fix it.

Kaia Wouldn’t Dare • Occupied

The bikini bottom is still on its hanger when I hear the curtain rings.

I don’t process it immediately. I’m standing in front of the mirror in nothing, absolutely nothing, the red fabric dangling from one finger and my brain is three seconds behind my body when the curtain opens all the way and the outside world walks in wearing board shorts and dreadlocks and an expression that goes from distracted to oh fuck in the time it takes me to breathe in.

I spin.

My back to him now, the mirror in front of me and the mirror has no mercy. It shows me everything. My breasts, heavy and bare in the warm department store light, nipples already stiffening from the air conditioning I’ve been standing in for ten minutes. The small dark teardrop of trimmed hair between my thighs, pointing down toward my clit like it knows something I’m still pretending not to. And behind me, reflected, him, tall, brown skin, a dreadlock falling loose across his forehead, two pairs of shorts in one hand that he has completely forgotten about.

He starts backing out.

Something in me stops pretending.

I turn around. I look left. I look right. The corridor is empty. Somewhere outside a woman is asking a sales associate about sizing. The background music doesn’t care about any of this.

I grab his tank top with one fist. I pull him in and the curtain falls closed and now there is no space between us and nowhere to be except here.

I push up on my toes and put my mouth on his throat and he makes a sound he doesn’t get to finish.

His hands find my waist, both of them, warm and immediate and the two pairs of shorts hit the floor. I feel what’s happening to him through thin fabric and I press into it deliberately and feel him inhale. I drag my mouth up to his jaw, bite lightly, feel the muscle tighten under my teeth.

Then I sink to my knees.

Eye contact. I hold it while I pull his shorts down and take his cock in my hand, warm, thick, already hard and getting harder while I look at him and then I take him into my mouth and the sound he makes is not a quiet sound. He catches it barely. One hand hits the mirror. The other finds my hair, not pushing, just gripping, like I’m the thing keeping him upright.

I take him deep. Slow. Tongue flat and then curling and I feel him twitch against the back of my throat and he bites down on his own knuckle and I feel completely, disgracefully powerful. I work him until his hips start moving without his permission and his breathing falls apart and then I stand up because I want more than this and I want it now.

I turn back to the mirror.

He understands without being told.

His hands move over my breasts first, both of them, filling his palms, thumbs finding my nipples and rolling them and I grip the mirror rail because my body does not respond to that with any subtlety at all. The sensation goes straight down through my stomach and arrives between my legs as pure heat and I watch my own face in the glass watching my mouth fall open and I think: this is what I look like when something is happening to me and then his hand moves lower and I stop thinking entirely.

He finds me wet. Finds me so wet that his fingers slide through me immediately and effortlessly and he exhales against my shoulder like it surprises him and I feel a flush of something that is part arousal and part absolute shameless pride.

Two fingers inside me. Thumb on my clit. Slow circles.

I grab the rail with both hands and hold on.

He works me with the patience of a man who has decided to take his time and I watch myself in the mirror. Watch my hips moving against his hand, watch my nipples hard and dark, watch the flush spreading up my chest and throat and I am already so close it is almost a problem. I rock against him and his fingers curl deeper and I make a sound into my own forearm that is muffled but only just.

Not yet, I think. Not yet not yet not yet.

I reach back and guide him.

He pushes inside me from behind and I press my forehead to the cold glass and feel the contrast of it. The glass cold, him hot, me somewhere between burning and dissolving.

He stops. Holds.

I roll my hips back. Don’t stop.

He doesn’t stop.

Slow at first. Deep and complete, each stroke pulling all the way back and pressing all the way in and I feel every inch of him and in the mirror I watch my breasts swing with each thrust, heavy, full, swaying forward and back and I watch my own eyes watching them and I cannot tell anymore what is undoing me more, what I feel or what I see. Both. Simultaneously. I am audience and body at once and I am so completely inside this moment that the world outside these curtains might as well be another country.

He grips my hips and the rhythm builds.

The wetness between us gets louder. A soft slick sound with every stroke that we both hear immediately and that makes him slow down and the slowing down is so much worse, so much more, each stroke now long and grinding and deliberate and he pushes deep and stays there and rolls his hips and finds something that makes my left leg briefly lose its entire purpose.

I am so wet it runs down my inner thigh.

I watch it in the mirror. I watch my own face. I watch my breasts still moving with the rhythm of him and I cup them with both hands and hold them, feel their weight, feel the sensitivity of my nipples under my own palms and the sensation layers onto everything else that is already happening to me and I cannot keep my hips still.

The sound of us fills the small space. Wet and rhythmic and completely beyond managing. He slows to almost nothing, long deep rolls that make me clench around him involuntarily and make my own sounds come out broken and desperate and outside someone is still asking about denim and the world is still going and in here there is only the mirror and his hands and the unbearable fullness of him and the heat of my own body going completely out of my control.

He pulls out.

The absence is a physical thing. I feel it like a question that has only one answer.

He turns me around.

I lift my right leg before he can ask. Ten years of ballet. Never more relevant than right now.

My leg over his shoulder. My back against the mirror, the glass warm now from our heat. I am completely open, unguardedly, recklessly open and he looks down at me and his gaze moves slowly from my face to my breasts to the dark wet teardrop above my clit to my face again and it is the look of a man who has forgotten everything that existed before this moment and has no interest in remembering.

He pushes back inside me.

This angle.

This angle.

It punches the air from my lungs. I grab his arm with both hands and hold on and he holds my hip with one hand and braces against the wall with the other and starts to move and I hear myself. Quiet and cracked and completely beyond dignity and my breasts swing with every thrust and I watch them in the mirror and I cup them in my palms and hold them up and feel their weight shift and the tenderness of my nipples under my fingers and I watch his jaw go tight and his eyes go dark and I watch my own face do things it only ever does alone and the watching and the feeling are the same thing now, completely fused, I cannot separate them.

He goes harder.

I bite my lip.

The sound of us. God, the sound of us. The slick wet rhythm of him inside me, the small helpless sounds coming out of my throat, the creak of the mirror rail under my grip. A person ten feet away is living a completely ordinary life. We are not.

My thigh is shaking on his shoulder.

My whole body is shaking.

I feel it coming from somewhere deeper than usual, not from my clit outward but from somewhere structural, the base of something, a pressure that has been building since the moment the curtain opened and has nowhere left to go. He feels the change in me. He knows. He presses his thumb to my clit and holds it there with exactly the right pressure and that is the absolute last decision either of us gets to make about any of this.

I come.

Not tidily. Not quietly. He covers my mouth with his palm and I come into it, against it, the sound going nowhere, trapped inside me and making the whole thing bigger and longer and more and I am clenching around him in long waves and shaking from my ankles up and my hands are still on my own breasts and I am watching my face in the mirror watching itself fall completely apart in a changing room in a department store on an ordinary Saturday and it is the most alive I have felt in longer than I want to admit.

He works me through every single wave.

Doesn’t stop. Doesn’t rush me. Every pulse, every aftershock, every small broken sound into his palm, he holds it all.

My leg slides down slowly. He keeps one hand on my hip until he’s sure I’m standing.

I lean back against the mirror. The glass is warm now. Everything is warm.

I cup my breasts in both hands, lift them, hold them together, feel their weight one more time and I look at him and I keep looking. His chest heaving. His eyes still dark. His jaw still tight with everything he’s been holding back this entire time.

He takes himself in hand.

He watches my face. My hands. The flush still spreading across my chest. The wet on my inner thighs that I have stopped pretending is anything other than what it is. His breathing shortens and breaks and then he comes across my chest, warm and sudden, landing across both breasts and my hands and I feel it like punctuation. Like the period at the end of a sentence that started the moment that curtain opened.

Like something that needed to be said.

Tissues. He has tissues. Of course. We clean up in the silence of two people who have passed through something together and are not going to name it.

He picks up both pairs of shorts. Shakes them out. Looks at me one last time. A long look, the kind that keeps something and the corner of his mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Something more private than a smile.

The curtain opens.

The curtain closes.

I stand alone in the warm light and look at myself in the mirror. Hair destroyed. Lips swollen. Chest still flushed, the heat not gone yet, maybe not going anywhere for a while. The dark teardrop of hair pointing down toward the place that is still pulsing very quietly with its own deep satisfaction.

I pick up the red bikini from the floor.

Put it on.

Look at my reflection.

Yeah, I think. That’s exactly the one.

Kaia wouldn’t dare.
But the sign said Occupied
and she decided that meant her.

“This one is new territory.

Not lived. Not remembered. Imagined, but built from real sensation.

Somewhere between 666 Dark Desires
and something with no rules at all.

It feels… risky.
In the best possible way.

What do you think?

Should I go further with this?
And do you want to see just how far a “routine police check” can really go?”

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