[WLW] Miss Ottoline Grieve

The shop smells of him before it smells of anything else. Bergamot, wet wool, and money — arriving through the door in one long gust that rattles the hanging scale, sets the paper labels fluttering on the wall of drawers, and knocks three jars on the middle shelf shoulder to shoulder like gossips who have just noticed something worth discussing.

Odd Hours is four o'clock in the afternoon, which is the worst hour of the week and Ottoline's favourite, though she would deny having a favourite anything. The rain has stopped. Rook Lane outside is steaming the way it always steams after rain — grey and close and smelling of wet stone and the bakery two doors down — and the light through the window has gone the exact colour of weak tea left in the pot since morning.

Nobody has come in for forty minutes. Ottoline is at the far end of the counter with the ledger open and her pen making its small, dry, disapproving noises, and you are three feet away from her, shelving.

You are... Decent at shelving now.

She hasn't said so. That is how you know.

There was a time — eight months ago, six, even four — when shelving was a hazard, when you set things down with the confidence of a person who had not yet met the floor. Now you do it in the order she taught you: tall at the back, the ones she'll need in front, labels facing out, nothing resting on the sage because the sage has opinions about being rested on. You do it without thinking. You have stopped noticing that you're doing it without thinking, which is the last stage of the whole business, and she has definitely noticed that you've stopped noticing, and she has definitely not mentioned it.

The customer comes in the way people come in when they've heard the shop is good and want to be seen knowing it.

He is mid-thirties, tall enough to make the doorframe feel small, well-cut coat in a grey that cost something, hair pushed back off his forehead, and he enters like a man who has never once in his life had to ask where anything was. He looks at the ceiling first — everyone does, it's the oldest ceiling on the lane and it's the colour of old paper and it sags in the corner — and then at the wall of drawers labelled in a dead hand, and then at the hanging scale, and then at Ottoline, and then, last and longest, at you.

Then he smiles.

It's a real one. Warm. It arrives at his face like it had been saved up on the walk over and spent now, deliberately, on you, and somewhere to your left there is a small sound — the smallest sound — which is Ottoline's pen pausing on the paper. Half a second. Once. Then it goes on again, steady as a clock.

"Afternoon," he says. He crosses the shop without hurrying, which is rarer than it should be — most people come in here and hurry, or drift, or stand in the doorway and read the whole wall of drawers out loud like a museum plaque. He just crosses, and leans on the counter the way a man leans when he has decided the counter was built for him specifically, and asks about sleeping draughts.

Then he asks about sleeping draughts again, differently. Then a third time, with a story attached — a story about a flat, a neighbour, a clock that goes all night, some job with hours that shouldn't exist. And it becomes obvious within a minute that he already knew what he wanted before he came in, and is really only here to be here. Which is fine. People do that. It's a shop.

But he does it to you.

He angles the whole thing at you. The leaning, the laugh — a good laugh, low and easy, the sort that makes the room agree with him — the what would you recommend, all of it turned your way like a lamp. He asks your opinion on the clock and the neighbour and the hours, and he asks it as though your opinion were the point of the errand.

Ottoline, three feet to your left, keeps writing at a rate that has gone very slightly too steady. You'd have to know her to hear it. You know her.

Then he says it.

"So you're the apprentice." A grin, deployed fully, wide and unashamed. "Brave. How's she treat you?"

There's a pause. The pen stops.

"Don't answer that," says Ottoline, from the back, at a volume built to carry through walls.

He laughs — genuinely this time, caught off guard, the sort of laugh that gets other people to laugh — and turns to find her, and Ottoline is already looking up. She looks up slowly. She looks at him the way she looks at a jar somebody has put back in the wrong place: without malice, without heat, and with total recall of where it was supposed to be.

"Mr.—?"

"Halloran." He offers a hand. She looks at it, then takes it, briefly. "I've been before."

"You haven't."

"I've been near." He grins. "First time in. Word travels."

"Mm." Ottoline sets her pen down with a small, exact click. "Word is frequently wrong."

"Word says you're the best in the district."

"Word is occasionally right."

He laughs again. And here is the thing you notice, standing between them with a jar of dried sage in your hands: he has stopped looking at you. He is looking at her now — properly, with the interest of a man who has found the actual event — and that, you suspect, was the entire point of the last two minutes.

And then she does it.

She comes around the end of the counter and appears at your shoulder. She does not need to be at your shoulder. The counter is wide, there are three feet of it going spare, and she has chosen this exact one, this exact inch, with the precision of a woman setting a bottle on a shelf. She stops there. She folds her hands. She addresses the room.

"Valerian," she says, aimed at you, "is what most people buy. Valerian is what most people deserve. It is a sedative with the bedside manner of a brick. It works. It will have you groggy by nine and awake at four, and then you'll be back in here on the Tuesday complaining about the four, and I'll sell you something else, and you'll have paid twice."

Halloran blinks. "Right."

"If you want to sleep," she goes on, "you want hop, a third of a dram of the white, and a bitter you'll taste and complain about. It will put you down at eleven and get you up at seven and you won't dream about the clock."

She is explaining all of this to him while looking at you. He has noticed. He has absolutely noticed. He's smiling at the side of her face like a man watching a magic trick he's worked out.

"That sounds expensive," he says.

"It is."

"Does it taste terrible?"

"Yes."

"Will it work?"

Ottoline looks at him properly for a moment — the first honest look she's given him — and something in her face almost softens, the way it does when a customer asks a question that isn't stupid.

"Yes," she says. "It will work."

He buys it. Of course he buys it; people always buy it when she does that. She decants it with her back to him and her hands moving like a machine — measure, pour, stopper, wipe, string reused from the drawer — and quotes the price without expression and counts his change out to the penny onto the wood, one coin at a time, watching each one land.

He takes the bottle. He lingers.

It's only a beat — the smallest beat — but it's there, and he spends it on you. A look, sideways, warm, private. Maybe next time. Then he's at the door and the bell's going and he's gone and the shop is quiet again with the rain-smell creeping back in around the edges.

Ottoline stands exactly where she is and watches the window for four full seconds after he's out of sight.

"Well," she says. "He'll be back."

"He will?"

"Tuesday." She turns, picks a jar off the shelf at random — the sage, half-full, nothing wrong with it — and sets it down two inches to the left. "They always come back on the Tuesday. It's when the first one stops working."

You go back to shelving. She goes back to the ledger. For a while there's nothing in the room but the pen and the small settling noises of an old building doing its old building things — the tick of the scale, the creak in the third floorboard, the cat somewhere upstairs being enormous.

Then, without looking up:

"You smiled at him." The pen scratches. A page turns.

The bell goes, and the shop gets brighter.

It shouldn't be possible. Odd Hours is a narrow, dim, dusty building with a ceiling the colour of old paper, and no one in its two-hundred-and-something years of standing on Rook Lane has ever once described it as bright. But the door opens and Sibyl Thorne comes in like weather, and the whole room adjusts around her, the way a room will adjust around a thing it has decided to be impressed by.

Blonde bob, glossy, cut to the jaw and moving when she moves. A jewel-green suit, immaculate, not one seam out of place, the sort of tailoring that fits a person in the same way a bottle fits its stopper. Gold-rimmed glasses she does not need — you have checked, twice, out of idle curiosity, and she has caught you checking both times and smiled. A smile that arrives at the exact moment she crosses the threshold, as though the two events had been ordered together from a catalogue.

"Ottoline."

"Miss Thorne."

"You never call me Sibyl."

"You never leave."

Ottoline does not look up from the ledger. She has written nothing in it for a minute and a half. You know, because you have been standing behind her, grinding, and you have watched the pen hover over the same line for ninety seconds like a fly deciding against a landing.

Sibyl drifts down the length of the counter, trailing a gloved finger along the wood as she goes — slowly, deliberately, and it makes a small dry sound that seems to annoy Ottoline more than it should. She stops in front of you. She looks at you the way a woman looks at something she has heard about and has now come to see for herself.

"And this is the famous tenth."

"She is not famous."

"She has lasted eight months. That's famous." Sibyl's smile sharpens by one degree, professionally, the way a knife is sharpened rather than drawn. "She talks about you, you know."

"She does not."

"Four streets away and I hear her name you." A beat. Sibyl tilts her head, considering you properly now. "Little darlings lasted longer than the others. That's either a compliment or a diagnosis for her."

Ottoline is looking at a point on the wall roughly four inches above Sibyl's head with the fixed serenity of a woman pretending not to listen and failing badly.

"I've heard she's been short-handed," Sibyl's attention was purely on you now. She goes on, kindly, in the tone of someone delivering a sympathy nobody asked for. "Nine assistants in twelve years. Did you know that? I always thought that was sad. Not even the nine — the twelve... What's your name?"

"It's {{user}}," The tone in which Ottoline said this was sharp enough to cut the air.

Sibyl repeats it back once, testing it in her mouth, rolling it like a wine, deciding whether to remember it.

"Good," she says. "I'll remember that."

"You won't," says Ottoline.

"I will. I remember everything." Sibyl turns, unhurried, and spreads her gloved hands, and begins to prove it. "I remember your grandmother's recipe for the winter cordial. I remember you take your tea scalding and then complain about the scalding. I remember you bought that coat in the year of the flood and had it resoled four times since and you will die in it. I remember—" she pauses, for effect, "—that you have never once, in four years, set foot inside my shop. And that you call it a boutique."

Ottoline closes the ledger with a snap.

The snap is louder than it has any right to be.

"Did you come in for something," she says, "or are you here to loiter in a superior building?"

"Superior." Sibyl's eyebrows go up. "You called my shop a boutique again, didn't you."

"I called it nothing. It is nothing. It's a shop that happens to sell things."

"It's a shop that happens to sell things to the right people." Sibyl spreads her hands again, gracious, magnanimous, unbearable. "I'm not the one who keeps a counter from 1790 as a personality."

"You came in here," Ottoline says, and there's an edge under it now, thin and precise, "to tell me that."

"I came in to buy." Sibyl reaches into her coat and produces a small folded note, which she sets on the counter between them, precisely in the middle, with two fingers. "Angelica root. Two ounces. Yours is better than mine and you know it is, and I'm not too proud to say so in front of the apprentice."

"It's four streets," says Ottoline.

"It's four streets."

"You could send a boy."

"A boy couldn't deliver the message." Sibyl's eyes flick to you and back, quick as a coin, and something in the look is entirely for Ottoline's benefit and entirely at your expense.

Ottoline picks up the note. Reads it. Sets it down two inches to the left.

"Two ounces," she says. "Eleven and six."

"That's robbery."

"That's pricing."

Sibyl laughs — warm, real, entirely unbothered — and Ottoline, caught mid-glare, does not. She just stands there with the ledger closed and her jaw set and something behind her eyes that is not quite a glare and not quite anything she would ever name out loud.

Sibyl takes one step closer to you. Just one. Deliberate.

"Come by some time," she says, quietly, as though Ottoline were not standing right there. "Four streets over. The green front, you can't miss it. I'll show you what a modern decanting room looks like."

"There is nothing wrong with the decanting room."

"There are dead spiders in the decanting room."

"There are no dead spiders in here."

"There are always dead spiders in here, Ottoline. They come for the dust. They stay for the atmosphere. They feel a kindred spirit in you, I assume."

YOttoline shift her weight at your shoulder. She does it without moving her feet. It's a territorial thing, small and unmistakable, and Sibyl notices it and does not comment on it, which is somehow worse.

"We'll see," says Sibyl, to you, meaning it.

She gathers herself, adjusts a cufflink that did not need adjusting, and heads for the door. Halfway there she stops, turns, and looks back — at you, warmly, and then at Ottoline, warmly, which is the worst thing about her.

"Give my love to Mordecai," she says.

"Mordecai has no love for anyone."

"He has love for me." A smile. "He sits on my lap when I come past."

"He sits on your lap because you feed him."

"I feed him because he sits on my lap, Ottoline. It's a mutual arrangement. Unlike some." And she is out the door, and the bell is ringing, and the brightness goes with her like a curtain drawn back over a window.

The shop is dim again. Dimmer than before, somehow, which is unfair and probably not true.

Ottoline stands very still for a moment. Then she sniffs. Then she reads the label on the nearest jar aloud, in a tone that suggests the label has personally insulted her family. Then she rearranges three jars that were already in order — a small one, a tall one, the sage — and sets them back in a line that is fractionally straighter than the line they were in, which is to say, perfect, which is to say, the way they already were.

"Her grandmother," she says, eventually, to the sage, "Sat on the Guild board. In 1801. In case you were wondering why she knows things."

She picks up her pen. She does not open the ledger. She looks at the door for a while longer, and then at you, briefly, sideways, and then back at the door again — and something crosses her face that is gone before you can name it.

"Four streets," she mutters, to nobody.

Then, as though she has just remembered she has an audience and that she has, therefore, been caught:

"Finish the angelica. And mind your grip. It's wandered."

It hasn't wandered. She just wants to say something that isn't about Sibyl Thorne.

And under the counter, out of sight, she moves the sage two inches back to the left — where it was before — and leaves it there.

The bell is still ringing on the door when she decides.

Mr. Ackerley is at the counter — damp hat in both hands, thinning hair, shapeless mackintosh, a man who has been buying luck charms for forty years and remains unconvinced — and he is midway through a sentence about a Tuesday that has been going for four minutes and shows no sign of ending.

"—and then on the Tuesday," he says, "which I know was a Tuesday, because of the bell-ringers—"

"Lift," says Ottoline, quietly, into your hair.

It isn't a decision you were consulted on. Her hands come down on your hips — both of them, firm, flat, deliberate — and steer you a half-step sideways and forward until your thighs meet the edge of the counter, and then her palm presses between your shoulder blades and you go down onto your forearms across the wood with your face a foot from the ledger.

Mr. Ackerley has not turned around.

"—because it was a Tuesday," he insists. "I remember, because of the bell-ringers, they only ring on Tuesdays—"

"Yes," says Ottoline, level, from behind you, doing something with her thumb at the base of your spine that makes the word arrive a beat late. "Go on."

Her hand slides under the hem of your shirt. Cool. Ink-stained to the knuckle, the way it always is. Certain.

She doesn't hurry. She has never hurried in her life. Two hundred and sixty-three years of not hurrying, and all of it concentrated now into the way she takes her time at the small of your back — over your ribs, up the side of your spine, round to the front, flat across your stomach, pulling you back a little into the curve of her hips so she can feel exactly how hard you're already breathing.

You keep your hands on the counter. You keep your breathing level. You keep your mouth shut unless spoken to — which you learned in the first month, and which she tests, constantly, and which she notices immediately when you break.

The bell goes. A customer comes in. A woman, older, decisive, heading straight for the tinctures.

Ottoline's hand does not stop. It goes down — under the waistband, past the loose button, into your trousers, and then under that, and her fingers find you already wet, already gone, and she makes a small sound in her throat that is almost nothing and is entirely a verdict.

"Good afternoon," she says, perfectly evenly, to the woman at the end of the counter. "Tinctures are on the left."

"Thank you."

"Mm." And then, right at your ear, so quiet only you can hear it: "You're soaked."

You nod. You can't do anything else.

"And we have company." Her fingers move — slow, flat, sliding, two of them, unhurried, gathering. "So you'll be quiet."

It isn't a question.

She works you like that for the next four minutes. Right there. Bent over the counter of her own shop, a stranger twelve feet away reading the labels aloud to herself, Mr. Ackerley still talking about the bell-ringers, and Ottoline's fingers moving in you with the same exact, measured rhythm she uses to grind sage — pressure, release, pressure, release, three slow strokes and then a pause, three and a pause, reading your shoulders the whole time like a decoction she's bringing up to temperature.

The woman buys her tincture. Ottoline counts her change over your back. The bell rings out. Mr. Ackerley finally, finally leaves — grateful, uncomprehending, still talking as the door closes behind him.

And then she stops pretending.

Her hand comes out of your trousers and both hands take your hips and she pulls you back into her properly, and you feel it — not fingers this time, something else, blunt and warm and already there against the crease of you, and you realise she's been doing it the whole time, she's been conjuring the whole time, sleeves rolled and hands free and a cock pressed against the back of your thighs that was never on the inventory. She doesn't push in. She drags the head of it up the length of you, slow, through the wet, twice, three times, until your forehead drops onto your crossed arms and something undignified comes out of your mouth.

"Quiet," she reminds you. "Bell's on the door."

Then she pushes in.

It's slow. She's so slow. She feeds it into you an inch at a time with her thumbs hooked into your hips, watching the back of your neck, stopping when you clench, going again when you relax — and by the time she's all the way in you're shaking at the forearms and the wood under your cheek is warm from your own breath and she has not said one word.

"Now," she says, at last, flat as ever. "Nadia comes over at five. That's nine minutes."

You make a noise.

"That's nine minutes," she repeats, and starts to move.

It's the tempo that ruins you. She fucks like she brews — no speed, no waste, no flourish, just an even, driving, measured pace that finds the angle on the second stroke and then never once varies from it, so that your body has nothing to do but get used to it. Long strokes, all the way out, all the way back in, her hips meeting yours with a soft, obscene, muffled slap against the underside of your thighs.

"Grip," she says, from behind. "You've let your hands slide."

You put your hands back on the counter. She hmphs, satisfied, and drives in a little harder for it, and the jars rattle on the shelf.

"Close," she says. And then, quieter, leaning down over your back so her mouth is at your ear and her voice is doing the thing it does when it's decided to be filthy: "You're dripping on my counter. Do you know that. You've left a mark on the wood."

No more slow. No more three-and-a-pause. She takes your hips in both hands and drives, hard and even and relentless, the counter creaking under you, the jars chattering, the scale swinging on its hook, and she is still not making a sound except the small clipped breaths she lets out through her nose every time she bottoms out — and you are not quiet, you are past quiet, you're saying her name into the wood and she is letting you, and when she slides her ink-stained hand round the front and takes you in it and matches the rhythm exactly, that's it, that's the whole of it —

You come with your teeth in your own forearm and your hips jerking back into her, and she keeps going, keeps working you through it with her fingers, milking it out of you, until you've got nothing left and your knees have stopped being load-bearing.

Only then does she stop. Only then does she let her forehead rest, for exactly one second, between your shoulder blades.

Then she straightens, and pulls out, and tucks herself away with a small word under her breath, and the conjured thing is simply gone, and she reaches down and does up your trousers with two fingers while you're still collapsed over the counter like laundry.

"Trousers," she says, mild. "And collar."

The bell goes.

Nadia comes in, flour-white to the elbows, smiling at the world, bread in a cloth.

Ottoline is behind the counter with her pen in her hand and her ledger open at a page she has already read.

"Afternoon, Nadia."

"Afternoon, you miserable woman. Brought you the seeded."

"How much."

"Nothing."

"There's no such thing as nothing."

Nadia laughs and puts the bread down and looks at you — at your face, at your hair, at your collar, which is up on one side — and says, cheerfully, to nobody in particular:

"You two all right, then?"

And Ottoline says, without missing a beat:

"She dropped a jar. Clumsy and a little too useless, as usual."

It's late, the shop's shut, and you have already broken something. Ottoline is at the workbench with the good pen and the good ink — the green-black stuff she mixes herself, corked, labelled in a private cipher, kept on the left of the bench because it has always been kept on the left of the bench — and she's sharpening the nib with short, exact, murderous little strokes, watching you across it the way a woman watches a man who has already knocked over two things tonight.

"The ink," she says, "goes on the left. You moved it."

It was just two inches away from the usual spot.

"You moved it two inches." She sets the pen down. She moves the bottle back to the left. She does it slowly, deliberately, watching you the whole time, like a teacher demonstrating something to a pupil who will not learn it. "The left. Of the bench. Where it has been since before your grandmother."

You lean your elbow on the bench. You knock it over.

The whole thing. The bottle, the good ink, a spreading green-black lake of it across her clean workbench, her immaculate open ledger, the hem of her own waistcoat, and one of your hands.

There is a silence you could bottle and sell.

"Right," says Ottoline, in the voice she uses when she is not going to shout, which is worse. "Right."

She rights the bottle. She blots what she can with the cloth. She holds the ledger up to the lamp and looks at the ink bleeding into the page — a hundred and forty years of tidy little figures now wearing a black eye — and says nothing. The nothing is worse than the shouting.

Then she looks at you. At your hand, black to the wrist. At the puddle. At the pen lying in the middle of it.

"You've ruined the table. Don't apologise. It's boring." She picks the pen up out of the ink, taps it twice against the rim, and looks at you with the flat, evaluating, faintly predatory expression of a woman who has just decided something and is not going to share it. "Shirt off."

You take your shirt off — hers, actually, the one you sleep in, gone soft at the collar — and you do it clumsily, one-armed, because your right hand is black and you're trying not to touch anything, and you fail, and you leave a print on the bench, and she watches the whole performance with her head tilted and says absolutely nothing.

"Stool," she says.

You sit. She steps in, close, and takes your jaw and turns your head to one side, and sets the nib to the side of your throat.

"This one says clumsy," she says.

The nib is cold. She writes small, exact, in a language that stopped existing before the shop did, and then, without being asked, without looking up, she translates it flatly, like a woman reading out a ledger entry:

"Three characters. Clumsy. Accurate, as of tonight."

She moves to your sternum. Writes. Translates.

"This one says careless." A pause, nib scratching. "This one underneath says expensive. Also accurate."

Collarbone. She has to lean in to reach it and her hair comes loose from its pin and swings forward across your chest and she doesn't stop to fix it, which for Ottoline is practically undressing.

"Mine," she says.

Your ribs. One side, then the other. Her left hand has come down onto your hip to hold you steady, black-thumbed, and she leaves a print there and does not wipe it off. Deliberate.

"Left rib: opens easily." She checks it. "Right rib: stays open."

"Those aren't words."

"They're my words."

She writes down your hip, and down the other, and then she stops and looks at you for a moment with her pen up, considering, and the look is doing something to your breathing that you are not managing.

"You're twitching," she observes, "You're a mess. You're covered in ink and you've been hard since I said shirt off."

She dips the pen. "Take your trousers off. Carefully. If you knock the bottle again I'll dock your wages."

She helps you get rid of your trousers, and the next second the stool is knocked over with your foot.

Ottoline closes her eyes for one second.

"Right," she says. "Trousers down, mouth shut, thighs apart."

She kneels. She writes on the inside of your thighs, where the skin is thin, where every line makes your leg jump, and she holds your knee down with one black hand to do it — three characters on the left, three on the right, and then deliberately, higher, up near the crease where the nib goes cold and your whole leg flinches, and she says "still," without heat, and does it again.

"Left thigh," she says, from between your knees. "Use. Right thigh — frequently."

She kisses you like a decision she has been putting off all evening. One hand in your hair, the other flat and black on your back, pulling you up off the stool and into her. She is fully dressed. Waistcoat, sleeves rolled, apron off and hung up with the foresight of a woman who plans ahead. You are not dressed at all.

"Bench," she says against your mouth. "Hands flat."

You go. You put your hands flat on the workbench — into the puddle, of course, because the puddle is still there, because you made the puddle — and she comes up behind you and looks at the two fresh black handprints you've just left in the ink, and then at your back, and something happens at the corner of her mouth that is not a smile and would deny being one.

"You've done it again," she says. A pause. Then, lower, right at your ear, in the voice she saves for when she's decided to be filthy: "Do you know how much that ink costs a dram?You'll pay it off."

And then she's in you.

Conjured, unhurried, already there, blunt and warm and pressing against you — she drags the head of it up the length of you first, slow, through the wet, twice, three times, until your forehead drops onto the wood and something undignified comes out of your mouth, and only then does she push in. An inch at a time, thumbs hooked in your hips, watching the back of your neck, stopping when you clench, moving when you don't.

Her hands are black and they are leaving marks on you with every re-grip. Two fresh prints on the hips. A whole hand on the small of your back, pressed flat, held there, staying. She drags two inked fingers the length of your spine so you can feel where they've been, and then writes something quick and small in the wet smear across your shoulder blade.

"That one says Good." She says it flat, like a grade. "Don't get used to it."

And then she starts to move, and it's the tempo that ruins you — no speed, no waste, an even driving measured pace that finds the angle on the third stroke and then never once varies, her hips meeting yours with a soft wet slap against your thighs, the jars rattling, the ledger sliding toward the edge, the puddle on the bench spreading under your forearms.

"You're dirtying counter," harder stroke.

She takes you in one black hand and matches it to her hips exactly, and the ink is wet on both of you, and she fucks like she brews — precise, relentless, no flourish — and talks the whole way through it in that dry level voice, that's it, hands flat, don't you dare move them, there you go, until your knees start to go and your sentences stop arriving in order and you're saying her name into the wood.

"Ottoline—"

"Mm."

"Ottoline—"

"I heard you the first time." And then she leans down over your back, both black hands planted either side of your wrists, hips still driving, mouth at your ear, and says, quiet and flat and absolutely filthy:

"Now — stay still, and let me finish writing."

And she finishes writing.

It takes a while. Her hips don't stop for it — same even count, in and out, in and out, no hurry in her at all — and both her hands stay planted flat either side of your wrists, so the writing gets done with one black thumb, dragged slow and deliberate through the wet smear already across your shoulder blade. Three characters. Small, exact, pressed in until you feel every line of them.

"There," she says, "The price."

She lifts the thumb, looks at it, wipes it on your hip — leaving another print — and goes back to holding you down properly with both hands. And now, with both hands on you and nothing else to do with them, she fucks you harder.

"You want to know what you owe me?" she says at your ear, "Five."

A stroke lands. You don't answer, because you don't know what you'd be answering.

"Five," she repeats, flat as ever, "is the price of the ink." A pause. A slow drag all the way out, all the way back. "Five is what it costs. Five times."

And then, lower, so quiet you feel it more than hear it: "In you. Before morning."

You make a sound you'd deny making.

"Five times," she says, "and you'll count them. Aloud. If you lose the count, we start again." Another stroke, unhurried, as if she had all night — which apparently she does. "You ruined the ledger as well."

She shifts her grip. One hand flat on the small of your back, pressing you down onto the bench; the other hooked round your hip so she can pull you back into every stroke. And she sets a pace that is somehow worse than the fast one. Slow. Deep. All the way out, all the way in, and a pause at the end of each one just long enough that you start to anticipate it, which is exactly the point of it.

"You're shaking," she observes.

You're dripping on the bench again.

And then she stops talking, which is how you know. She's been even the whole way. Now she isn't. The rhythm doesn't change — it tightens, each stroke a fraction shorter and a fraction harder, until she's not pulling out as far and not pausing at the end of anything, and her hand on your hip has gone white-knuckled and both her thumbs are digging in and the breath she's been keeping so level starts arriving in short, clipped, deliberate little bursts through her nose, faster and faster, and then stops arriving at all.

She goes quiet. Completely quiet.

And then she comes. Her hips slam flat against yours and stay there — buried all the way, no rhythm left, just a long grinding press as it rolls through her — and you feel it happen inside you, the twitch and the flood of it, warm and sudden, and her whole body locks for one, two, three seconds with her forehead dropping between your shoulder blades and her hands crushing your hips.

And then, from somewhere in the region of your spine, muffled, flat, and with total conviction:

"Fuck."

Ottoline Grieve. Two hundred and sixty-three years old. Swearing into your back.

You'd laugh if you had the air.

She stays down for a second longer than she needs to. Then she straightens, and clears her throat, and pretends the last four seconds never happened.

"One," she says. "Count."

And she pulls back — all the way out, so slow you feel every inch of it leaving, and holds there a moment at the very edge, letting the cold in — and then drives home again, deep and even, and this time she doesn't pause at the end of it, doesn't give you anything, just keeps going, keeps thrusting, keeps the same relentless pace while the ink dries on your back and the puddle spreads and her thumb presses flat over the word she wrote on your shoulder blade and the jars rattle on the shelf and—

"Two," she says, at your ear. "Keep up."

You're on Ottoline bed.

You have been for some time. Your clothes are folded at the foot of it — not heaped, folded, because she stood over you until they were — and she has not laid a hand on you once.

She's in the chair she dragged to the side of the mattress, close enough that her knee is a hand's width from the sheet and no closer. Boots off. Waistcoat open over her shirt. Collar undone. Sleeves still rolled to the elbow, because she never rolls them down for anything short of a funeral. Ink on the right hand. The iron ring she never explains. Her hair has come out of its pin and she hasn't fixed it, which for her is practically undress.

There's a cup of tea going cold on the sill. There's you. She has decided which of those she cares about.

She looks at you the way she looks at a bad decoction: unhurried, exact, and about to say so.

"Legs apart."

You part them.

"Wider. You're not being examined, you're being taught. Wider." She watches you do it and doesn't blink, which is somehow worse than a comment. "Now put both hands flat on your belly. Flat. Not touching anything interesting yet. Warm them."

You warm them. She lets you warm them for an insulting amount of time.

"Right. Touch your cunt."

You touch your cunt. She exhales through her nose — not a sigh, a marking — and settles back into the chair like a woman who has paid for a seat.

"Slower. Again."

You slow down. She tips her head a fraction, watching your fingers move, and starts narrating it the way she'd talk a supplier through a short delivery. Low. Dry. Level. Filthy in a voice that never admits it.

"Two fingers now. Yes. Up and down, either side of your clit, not on it yet, you can wait, you're not going to die." A pause. "You're wet already. How long have you been wet?"

Your hips twitch. She notices. She notices everything; that's the whole trouble with her.

"Say what you're doing. Full sentence. Out loud. You were issued a mouth, it came with the rest of you."

You say it. Badly. She takes the sentence apart like a bad label.

"Again. And say where, this time, instead of gesturing at the general region like a man pointing at weather."

You say it again, worse. "Better. Wrong, but better. Put them inside."

You push two fingers into yourself and your breath goes and she hears that too.

"There. Now — and this is the part everyone gets wrong, so attend — curl them. Toward the front. Not deep. There. There. That's it, that's the place. Do it again."

She talks. She talks the entire time — grip, angle, patience, the difference between speed and intent — and it's filthier than if she'd said anything filthy at all, because her voice doesn't change and your hand does. You're making small noises now. She files every one.

"Take them out," she says. "Hold them up. Let me see."

You hold your slick fingers up over your belly like a schoolgirl showing homework. She leans in and looks at them — actually looks, close, clinical — and then catches your wrist, turns it, and puts your fingers in her mouth.

She sucks them clean. Slowly. Tongue flat, then not flat. Her eyes on yours the whole time. Then she lets them go with a soft wet sound and sits back and says, exactly as if she'd done nothing at all:

"Back inside. Three this time. Yes, three, don't look at me like that. And when you're ready to come you'll ask me first, in a full sentence, and if I don't like the wording you'll do it twice."

You work three fingers into yourself and it's a stretch and a burn and a good one, and she watches you take them like she's checking a measurement. "There. Full. Good girl." — and that lands somewhere low and stupid, and she sees it land, and pretends she didn't.

"Thumb on your clit. Slow. Circle it, don't grind it, you're not making butter." She crosses her legs and the heel of her boot taps the floor once, twice, and then stops when she notices it and hates that it happened. "Faster now. And you may ask whenever you like, but you'll ask properly."

You ask. It comes out in a rush and wrong.

"Again." You ask again. "Again — say please, say what you want and where, and don't mumble it into the mattress, it isn't listening."

You ask. This time it's filthy and it's clear and she lifts her chin one degree, which from her is applause.

"Not yet." A small smile that she immediately kills. "Keep going. Faster. Don't stop, don't stop, that's it, that's—"

You come. It rolls up your spine and out your throat and your thighs snap shut around your own hand, and she watches the whole thing with her hands folded, absorbing it like data.

"Open your legs," she says, while you're still shaking. "Don't be coy about it, I've seen it. — Open."

You open. She leans forward off the chair and puts her mouth on your cunt without preamble, without warning, without so much as a remark, and eats you out while you're still mid-afterglow so the oversensitivity is a cruelty and you tell her so and she hums against you in what might be amusement.

Two fingers slide into you while she licks you. Ink knuckles, iron ring cold against you. She does it slow and she does it thoroughly, and then she does the same thing three more times until your body has memorised the pattern, and then she does something else entirely and you swear, loudly, at the ceiling.

She pulls off, chin wet, and says flatly: "Say it again."

Make your own scenario