Originally based on an image from the February contest | 4500 words
___
The envelope has no return address. I find it on a Tuesday, stuffed in my gym bag between my water bottle and a rolled-up towel. Cream-colored cardstock, heavier than it should be. The flap is sealed with actual wax – deep plum, stamped with an ornate B.
Inside, a single card. Embossed gold lettering:
You’ve been watching from the edges long enough.
BaxiBoo – Friday, 10 PM
Wear something that makes you feel powerful.
This invitation will not come again.
Below that, an address in the arts district. Nothing else. The card smells faintly warm. Amber, maybe. Sandalwood?
My first instinct is to throw it away. My second instinct is to press it against my chest and hold it there. I go with neither. I set it on the kitchen counter and stare at it while my coffee brews.
___
It sits there all week. By Thursday night, I’ve already bought the dress.
Friday. 9:47 PM. I’m sitting in my car outside a converted textile warehouse, gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles hurt.
The dress is black, backless, shorter than anything I’ve worn since college. Heels I can barely walk in. A smoky eye I watched three tutorials to get right. I look like someone else. Someone who doesn’t spend Friday nights on the couch with a cat named Pencil and a glass of wine, pretending she’s fine with the quiet.
Because here’s the thing – I’m not lonely for company. I’ve had company. David, Marcus, Ryan. A neat line of kind, forgettable men who touched me gently and never once made me feel like I was on fire. What I’m lonely for is harder to say out loud. It’s the jolt I feel when a woman’s hand brushes my lower back in a crowded bar. It’s the dreams I wake from with my thighs pressed together and a woman’s voice still dissolving in my ear.
I’ve never acted on it. Not once. Not out of shame exactly – more like this bone-deep fear that if I opened that door, my whole careful life would rearrange itself around something I wasn’t ready for.
The card said this invitation wouldn’t come again.
I get out of the car.
The door opens before I knock. A woman in a black silk robe checks my card, smiles, and waves me down a corridor draped in dark fabric. The walls glow with layered light – violet, indigo, deep rose. The air is warm and thick with that same amber-sandalwood, mixed with something floral I can’t place. Music reaches me. Not electronic… something low and melodic. Strings over a slow liquid beat that I feel through the floor, through my heels, up into my legs.
The corridor opens into a room that makes me stop walking.
High ceilings. Draped fabric catching purple light. Low velvet furniture everywhere – couches, daybeds, cushioned alcoves – some occupied by people in masks. Everyone wears masks. The dress code ranges from couture to barely-there, and every body I can see is adorned somehow. Harnesses, chains, lace, leather, gold.
I feel immediately, completely out of place. My little black dress feels quaint. Like bringing a butter knife to a sword fight.
I make it twelve steps before I think about turning around.
“First time?”
I turn. And my brain just. Stops.
There are two of them, standing close in a way that tells you they’re together. Not just together – synced. They look at me with the same focused attention, like they’d already been watching before I noticed them.
The one who spoke is blonde. Long pale gold hair over bare shoulders. She wears a silver choker tight against her throat, matching cuffs on her wrists, and a chain harness draped across her chest in delicate geometric lines that barely cover her breasts. Her mask is purple with soft spiraling curls worked into the design. Behind it, the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. Her smile is wide and easy and completely in charge.
Beside her – dark brown hair swept back from her face. Green mask with small iridescent feathers. A golden rope harness crisscrossing her bare torso, accentuating her waist and the fullness of her breasts. Her nipples are pierced, small ornamental pendants dangling from each, catching the violet light. She doesn’t say anything. She just smirks. The kind of smirk that says she already knows what you’re thinking.
“Is it that obvious?” My voice comes out thinner than I want.
The blonde laughs – unhurried. Easy. “Honey, you’re holding your clutch like a shield.” She extends her hand, palm-down, fingers relaxed. “I’m Serena.”
I take it. Her fingers are cool and sure, and she doesn’t shake my hand – she holds it. A beat too long. Then she turns it over, runs her thumb once across my palm, and lets go. My skin buzzes.
“And this is Maren.”
The dark-haired woman tilts her head. “You came alone.”
“I did.”
“Brave.” Her voice is lower than Serena’s, rougher, with an accent softened by years somewhere else. “Or desperate. We like both.”
“What she means,” Serena says, stepping closer, her hand finding the small of my back, “is we can show you around. If you want.”
I can feel the fork in the road. I can say no thank you and spend the rest of my life wondering. Or I can go.
“I’d like that.”
Serena’s smile deepens. Maren’s smirk sharpens. Serena takes my hand, and this time I hold on.
They walk me through the room. Serena keeps her hand on my lower back, warm and possessive. Maren walks half a step behind, watching me with quiet focus. We pass an alcove where two women are kissing – deep and slow, one straddling the other’s lap – and my breath catches before I can help it.
“You like watching,” Maren says behind me.
“I – I’m just-“
“It’s not a criticism. Watching is how it starts. You watch until watching isn’t enough.”
Serena squeezes my hand. “Are you still just watching, Elise?”
I freeze. I never told them my name.
“We sent the invitation,” Serena says, reading my face. “We’ve seen you. At Luma – the wine bar on Seventh.”
I do go to Luma. Every other Friday. Alone. With a book I pretend to read while I watch the women around me.
“You sit at the corner table,” Maren says, close enough now that I can smell her – warm skin, something spiced, a trace of leather. “Same Malbec every time. And you look at every woman in the room like you’re starving but you don’t know what to do about it.”
Part of me knows this should be alarming. Two strangers who’ve been watching me, who know my habits, who slipped an anonymous card into my bag. If I told this story to a friend over brunch, she’d say run. But standing here, in this light, with Serena’s hands still warm on mine – it doesn’t feel like surveillance. It feels like being noticed. And I’ve been invisible long enough to know the difference.
What Maren said hits me harder than it should. My eyes sting.
“We talked about approaching you there,” Serena says gently, both hands on mine now. “But you needed somewhere the stakes felt different. Somewhere you could be someone without a name.”
“So you created stakes,” I whisper.
“We created a door. You walked through it yourself.”
I look between them – Serena’s warmth, Maren’s intensity – and something in my chest just opens. Like a fist you’ve been clenching so long you forgot it was closed.
“What happens now?”
They look at each other. It feels like a whole conversation in just a glance.
“Now,” Maren says, “we take you somewhere private. Only if you want.”
I think about my apartment. Pencil. My neat row of acceptable men.
“I want to.” And my voice doesn’t shake at all.
The private room is smaller, warmer, soaked in violet light. A wide low bed draped in dark silk. Real candles on low shelves. The fabric walls muffle the music to a soft pulse. Serena draws the curtain closed and the rest of the world just… goes away.
I stand in the center, suddenly aware of how loud my breathing sounds.
“Rules,” Maren says. “You say stop, we stop. Immediately.”
“And if something feels good, say so,” Serena adds, moving behind me. I can feel her warmth along my back, not quite touching. “We want to hear you.”
“Okay,” I breathe.
“One more thing.” Maren traces the line of my jaw with one finger. My eyes flutter shut. “Tonight you don’t lead. You don’t decide. You just feel. Can you do that?”
Everything in my carefully managed life is screaming at me to negotiate, to keep some control. I look into Maren’s eyes and let every bit of it go.
“Yes.”
Her smirk softens into something gentler. “Good girl,” she murmurs, and I feel those two words melt through me like warm water settling low in my belly.
Serena’s fingers find my zipper. She draws it down slowly – I feel every tooth release. The fabric loosens, slides off my shoulders when she nudges it, pools at my feet. I’m standing in nothing but lace underwear and heels between two women who are looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room worth seeing.
“God,” Serena breathes against the back of my neck. “Look at you.”
Maren circles me. Literally walks around me. Studying me with this frank, unhurried appreciation. When she stops in front of me again, she nods once, like she’s confirming something to herself.
“Beautiful. And trembling.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Yeah you are. A little. That’s fine – means you’re paying attention.” She leans close, lips at my ear. “Now stop thinking.”
She kisses me.
It wrecks something. Whatever wall was left, whatever last reservation. Gone.
Maren kisses the way she talks. Precise. Deliberate. Her lips are soft but insistent and when her tongue slides against mine I moan into her mouth, this sound I’ve apparently been holding onto for years. Behind me, Serena presses close – skin against my back, impossibly warm – and her lips trace a slow line from below my ear to my shoulder. Her hands settle on my hips, thumbs stroking the hollows above my pelvis.
I’m caught between them. Two mouths, two sets of hands, two heartbeats against my body. It’s too much in the best possible way. My knees go soft and Maren catches me, one arm wrapping around my waist.
“We’ve got you,” she says against my lips. “Let go.”
They guide me to the bed. Serena settles against the headboard and pulls me back against her chest so I’m reclining between her legs, my back to her front. Her arms wrap around me – one hand flat on my stomach, the other trailing up. She unclasps my bra with practiced fingers and eases it off; then cups my bare breast, rolling my nipple between her finger and thumb. The feeling fans out across my chest.
Maren kneels at the foot of the bed. She removes my heels one at a time, pressing a kiss to each instep that makes me shiver. Then her hands slide up. Calves, knees, the inside of my thighs. She pushes them apart – gently but somehow firmly – and I let her. My body responds to the authority in her touch before my brain can even process it.
She doesn’t go where I expect. She leans down and puts her mouth on the inside of my knee. Then higher. A trail of slow, open-mouthed kisses along the sensitive skin of my inner thigh. Each kiss slightly closer but never arriving. Her breath is hot against me, her lips unhurried. She’s not racing toward anything. She’s making the trip itself unbearable.
“Please,” I hear myself say.
“Please what?” Maren’s voice against my thigh, calm as anything.
“Touch me. Please.”
“Where?”
The word sticks. I’ve never said it out loud to anyone. Never asked for what I wanted this plainly. Serena’s hand tightens on my breast. Encouraging.
“My – between my legs. Please.”
“Say it,” Maren murmurs. I can feel her smiling against my skin.
“My pussy. Please touch my pussy.”
“Good girl,” Serena whispers in my ear, and the approval floods me with heat.
Maren hooks her fingers into my underwear. “Lift.” I lift my hips and she slides the lace down and off. I’m naked. Completely, utterly bare between two women still in their harnesses and chains. The imbalance makes me feel naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes.
Maren runs one fingertip along the length of me. Feather-light. Barely there. My hips jerk.
“Already so wet,” she says. Her tone is so calm it’s almost clinical. Except for the part where it makes my stomach flip. She traces the same line again, parting me just barely, gathering the slickness on her fingertip. “All this from kissing?”
“From… everything,” I manage. “From the card. From watching. From years of wanting this and pretending I didn’t-“
“Shh.” She presses her thumb against my clit – one firm, steady press – and I gasp so hard my vision whites out at the edges. “You don’t have to explain. We know.”
Then she lowers her mouth.
The first broad stroke of her tongue pulls a sound out of me I’ve never heard myself make. Serena holds me firm with arms tightening around my torso, her mouth working the side of my neck while her hands move between my breasts: kneading, rolling my nipples until they’re stiff and aching.
Maren works me with this devastating patience. Long slow strokes, flat and thorough, from my entrance to my clit and back. She’s mapping me. Learning me. Each pass teaches her something – she is registering every hitch in my breathing, every involuntary clench, and adjusting. When she finds the rhythm that makes my thighs tremble, she locks in and holds.
“Oh god – oh fuck -“
Every time I get close she backs off. Not cruel about it – precise. Keeping me right at the edge, my body strung tight, fingers twisted in the silk sheets. Serena pinches my nipple hard enough to make me cry out and the sharp bright pain braids itself into the slow pleasure between my legs until I can’t separate them.
“Please let me cum. Please, I need -“
“She’s ready,” Serena says above me. Still warm, but with a thread of command now.
I realize the dynamic between them is more layered than I assumed. Serena is the warmth. She’s the hand that holds yours. But she’s also the one who decides.
Maren obeys. She slides two fingers inside me, curling forward, pressing against that swollen spot while her tongue focuses tight and relentless on my clit. The fullness, the pressure, the wet heat of her mouth – it’s nothing like what I’ve had before. My previous partners approached my body like a problem to solve quickly. Maren approaches it like she already knows how it works.
The orgasm crashes through me. My back arches off Serena’s chest. My thighs clamp around Maren’s head. The sound I make is raw and wrenched and barely human, and Serena holds me through it, murmuring into my hair – there you go, good, so good, let it take you – while Maren works me through the aftershocks with gentler and gentler strokes.
When I finally go limp and panting, Maren presses a soft kiss to my inner thigh and looks up with a smirk.
“That was the warm-up.”
I laugh. It’s loose and unguarded, and a little wild. I haven’t laughed like that in months.
They don’t give me long to recover.
Serena slides out from behind me. They both remove their masks, and I see their actual faces for the first time.
Maren – sharp-featured, striking. Serena – softer, freckled, with laugh lines around those pale blue eyes. They’re beautiful without the masks, but more importantly they’re real. Not fantasies. Just women, with warmth and desire plain on their faces.
“Sit up,” Serena says gently.
I sit up. My body moves before my brain catches up, and something about that – the automatic obedience, the pleasure of being told – unlocks a part of me I didn’t know was there. I’ve spent my whole adult life being capable and self-sufficient and in control. Giving that up feels almost as good as coming.
Serena removes her chain harness. Her breasts are full, her dusky pink nipples already stiff. She settles against the headboard with her legs parted and threads her fingers into my hair, guiding me down with gentle pressure.
“Show me,” she says softly. “Show me what you’ve been wanting.”
I’ve never done this. That thought should terrify me but somehow terror has turned into desperate, aching want. I lower my head between Serena’s thighs. She’s bare and slick, and when I breathe her in the scent makes me dizzy – warm, musky, private. I press my lips to her tentatively. More firmly when she sighs, her fingers curling tighter against my scalp.
“Slow,” she murmurs. “You’ll find it.”
I explore her with my mouth. Tasting a woman for the first time – salt and heat and something sweet underneath – and the reality is so far beyond the fantasies that my eyes get wet. Not sadness. Just. Finally. Finally doing the thing I’ve wanted for so long the wanting became part of who I am. I find her clit with the tip of my tongue and circle it, and the low moan she gives me feels earned.
“Yes. Right there. Just like that.”
Behind me, Maren’s hands grip my hips. She repositions me on my hands and knees, tilts my hips up, and I hear her adjusting something. A buckle clicks. Straps tighten. Then something firm and smooth presses against me from behind. Something larger.
I gasp against Serena’s skin.
“Relax,” Maren says. Her voice low… almost soothing – a contrast to the steady pressure at my entrance. “Breathe for me.”
I breathe. I press my mouth back to Serena. And Maren pushes inside me.
The stretch is slow and exquisite. She feeds it to me inch by inch, one hand on my hip, the other flat against the small of my back. Not just pushing but feeling for my response. Almost reading my body through her palm. She shifts her angle, finds the depth that makes me moan instead of tense. When she’s fully inside – hips flush against me, rope harness rough on my skin – she pauses.
“How does that feel?” she asks.
“Full,” I whisper into Serena’s thigh. “So full.”
“Good full or too much?”
“Good. God, it’s good.”
She rolls her hips. One slow testing grind. The head of the toy drags against something deep inside me and the bolt of pleasure that shoots through my core nearly drops me. My arms shake. Serena’s fingers tighten in my hair.
“Deeper,” Serena says. Not to me – to Maren.
The next thrust goes all the way and I cry out against Serena’s thigh.
Then Maren starts to move.
Deep, measured thrusts that push me forward into Serena with each stroke. It creates this feedback loop – every thrust drives my mouth harder against Serena; Serena’s moans fuel my own arousal; Maren’s grip tightens as she watches me fall apart between them. I’m being used and worshipped and I honestly can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.
At some point Maren’s hand ends up on the back of my neck. She’s not pressing hard – just holding me there, face down between Serena’s thighs, like this is where I stay. I don’t argue.
I work Serena with everything I have – licking, sucking, figuring out what makes her breath catch and what makes her hips buck – while Maren fucks me from behind with an authority that leaves zero room for thought. She reads my body through the toy. Adjusts her angle, her pace, her depth. When I push back against her she rewards me with a harder thrust. When I falter, overwhelmed, she slows and lets me breathe before building again. Her own breathing has gone ragged – that measured control finally cracking. Knowing I’m doing that to her, that this isn’t just performance but real want – that does something to me I wasn’t expecting. Even from underneath, even with my face buried in Serena, I feel like I’m winning something.
Serena’s thighs start to shake against my ears. I suck her clit between my lips, work it with my tongue, and her composure just breaks.
“Right there – fuck – don’t let her stop, Maren, don’t you dare change anything -“
I don’t stop. Sloppy and desperate and giving it everything. Serena cums with a high shattered cry, hips bucking, hands fisting in my hair, holding my face against her as she rides it out. I taste the rush of her – warm, flooding – and take it all while my own body clenches around the toy still driving into me.
Maren pulls out slowly. I whimper. She turns me onto my back. I’m dazed, flushed, lips swollen and wet with Serena’s taste. Maren looks down at me and there’s hunger on her face, yeah, but something else too. Something careful.
“One more,” she says. “I want to see your face.”
She pushes my knees up and apart, settles between my thighs, and slides back inside me in one long stroke. The angle is deeper and more direct, and when she rolls her hips, the base of the toy grinds against my clit while the shaft hits that devastating spot inside. My mouth falls open. Nothing comes out.
And then my hands come up. Not to touch her – to cover my face. It’s instinct. Some reflex left over from the woman I was two hours ago, the one who hid behind books and wine glasses and a neat line of men who never really saw her.
Maren catches my wrists. Pins them gently beside my head. Leans down close enough that I can see the gold flecks in her eyes.
“No,” she says quietly. “I want all of it.”
I stop fighting.
Serena stretches out beside me. She brushes my hair back from my face, tucks it behind my ear, and the tenderness of it almost undoes me more than anything else tonight. Then she bends and takes my nipple into her mouth, sucking gently at first, then harder when I arch up into her. Her free hand finds my jaw, turns my face toward hers.
“Look at me,” she says. And when I do – when I’m looking into those pale blue eyes while Maren fucks me – Serena smiles. “There she is,” she whispers. “There’s our girl.”
My whole body clenches. Maren groans behind the thrust.
Serena kisses me. Slow and deep, swallowing the sounds I’m making, her tongue moving in counterpoint to Maren’s rhythm. One hand still on my breast, rolling and pinching, the other cupping my face like I’m something worth holding. When she pulls back there’s a string of spit between our lips and she looks wrecked and fond and I realize she’s getting off on watching me get taken apart.
Maren builds her pace – slow at first, then faster, watching my face the whole time with those dark gold-flecked eyes.
“Eyes open,” she says when mine start to close. “Stay with me.”
I force my eyes open. It’s the hardest thing I’ve done all night.
“Tell me how it feels,” Maren says.
“Like I’m – I can’t – it’s too -“
“You can. Tell me.”
“I-” My brain tries. It really does. But Maren rolls her hips and whatever I was going to say turns into a moan that doesn’t have any words in it.
“That’s enough,” Maren says, and there’s a rough edge to her voice now, like my inability to speak is doing something to her. “Let it go.”
She drives into me harder. One hand braced beside my head, the other sliding down to press her thumb against my clit. She works me in tight fast circles while Serena’s mouth is on my breast and the feeling shoots straight down between my legs. The three of us moving together like we’ve been practicing.
The orgasm just hits. My back arches off the bed. My hands fly up – one gripping Maren’s shoulder, the other fisted in Serena’s blonde hair – and I scream. Actually scream, this sound from somewhere I didn’t know existed. Maren doesn’t stop. She holds the rhythm, thumb relentless, pulling wave after wave out of me until I’m sobbing. Until I’m shaking all over. Until I’m making sounds that aren’t words anymore – just noise and need and whatever comes out of a person when they finally quit holding it together.
It takes a long time to come back.
I surface slow. Like rising up from deep water. Maren has withdrawn, taken off the harness, and stretched out on one side of me. Skin on skin, her leg draped over mine, her fingers tracing lazy shapes on my hip. Serena’s on my other side, holding me against her chest, her heartbeat steady under my ear.
I’m crying. Not sobbing – just silent and slow tears running down my temples into my hair.
“You’re okay,” Serena says softly.
“I know.” I touch my face, surprised by the wetness. “I’m not sad. I’m – I’ve just been so -“
“We know,” Maren says. She presses her lips to my shoulder. “That’s why we found you.”
Maren wipes a tear off my temple with her thumb.
The room is quiet. Just the distant thump of music through the walls and three women breathing together. I think about the invitation. The wax seal. The words that reached into my careful, buttoned-up life and cracked it wide open.
You’ve been watching from the edges long enough.
I think about my apartment. Pencil. My neat row of acceptable men. Every Friday at Luma, every glass of Malbec, every woman I watched and wanted and never once reached for. All those years of circling. Too scared to land.
“Will I see you again?” My voice comes out small.
Serena tips my chin up and kisses me. Soft. Deep. Tasting like herself. And… maybe a promise?
“Honey,” she says, “you haven’t even seen the other rooms yet.”
Maren laughs. And I realize I’m not thinking about the door anymore – whether to go through it. Whether it was a mistake. Whether my careful life is waiting on the other side.
I’m thinking about what to wear next Friday.
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