Kitty's Pussies
The bell above the bakery door chimes with a hollow brass note, and Katerina Illyonova Petrova—Kitty to those who have earned it—does not look up from her stock book.
Her pencil scratches across the column of numbers, the smell of caraway and rising dough thick in her nostrils, when the voices reach her from the front room.
Three voices, sharp as broken glass, yet joined in complaint.
"—the absolute nerve of him, Lu, you should have seen—"
"—saw him, Vee, that's precisely the problem, I saw him with my own two eyes—"
"—both of you saw him, which makes it rather crowded, doesn't it, considering he was meant to be—"
Kitty sets down her pencil.
The spit curl at her temple does not move. She rises from her stool with the deliberate grace that earned her alias, smoothing the flour-dusted apron over her cotton day dress, and pushes through the swinging door into the front room.
Three women stand in a constellation of silk and pearls and barely contained fury.
Tallulah Glessner examines her manicured nails with theatrical disinterest, her platinum bob catching the afternoon light through the bakery window.
True blonde, her pubes will confirm that.
Vivian Vance leans against the display case of black bread and honey cakes, her dark bob gleaming, one hand tapping her cigarette holder against her lower lip.
Her wet index finger taps her pink cupid's bead at the same speed under silk sheets.
Zelda Armitage stands apart, copper-red hair sharply cut, her silver cigarette holder already lit, smoke curling through her first exhale like a pronouncement.
Her fire-crotch is her true pronouncement; her pubes curl like shiny copper wire above the cutest, crucifix-shaped pussy lips.
Bruno Nowak hovers near the door to the flour-storage room, his flat cap pulled low, knuckles cracking one at a time.
His gaze finds Kitty's, waiting to let them enter or block their path.
"Miss Glessner," Kitty says, her voice carrying the faint trace of her mother's Russian lilt.
"Miss Vance. Miss Armitage."
She does not smile.
She rarely smiles before midnight.
"Bruno. The ladies are with me."
Bruno's heavy brow lifts a fraction. He steps aside, pulling open the swinging wooden rack of cooling trays that conceals the narrow staircase descending into darkness.
The scent of caraway and honey intensifies, then yields to something else—cigar smoke, perfume, the low thrum of jazz bleeding through floorboards.
Tallulah's hazel eyes finally lift from her nails.
"Kitty. Darling. We require—"
"Gin," Vivian interrupts, pushing off from the display case.
"Buckets of it. Oceans."
"And a hit squad," Zelda adds, her voice husky through the smoke.
"For Anthony Accardo."
Kitty studies them in the ochre light filtering through the bakery window.
Three heiresses, three fortunes, three women who have never once asked for permission to occupy space.
Their composure cracks in micro-moments she has learned to read: Tallulah's ankle crossed too tightly at the ankle, Vivian's thumb worrying her velvet choker, Zelda's hip cocked at an angle that dares the room to comment.
"Bruno," Kitty says, not turning.
"Fetch the rye from behind the molasses barrel. The 1919. Three glasses."
Bruno's jaw tightens. He hates being ordered, but he hates being idle more. He disappears into the storage room, his suspenders creaking.
Kitty moves to the counter, her movements feline and silent. She reaches beneath the register for her cigarette case—engraved with her initials, a prop she rarely fills with actual tobacco—and sets it on the glass with a deliberate click.
"Drink first. No guy is worth discussing before a girl has had three shots"
The descent into The Chervona feels like drowning in honey.
The staircase is narrow, the walls sweating condensation, the air growing thicker with each step.
Kitty leads, her T-strap heels finding the worn grooves in the wooden steps without looking. Behind her, the three women move as a unit, their silk chemise dresses rustling, their pearl necklaces clicking against each other like dice.
The main room opens like a throat—low-ceilinged, scarred mahogany surfaces gleaming under amber lamps, velvet booths swallowing shadows.
Roscoe "Strutt" Valentine sits at the piano, his long fingers hovering over the keys, his wire-frame glasses catching the light.
He wears emerald tonight, a three-piece suit cut sharp as his cheekbones, his pinky ring glinting gold.
He looks up.
Pats the boar-shaped jar that serves as a tip jar on the corner of his piano.
His gaze finds Kitty's, then travels to the three women behind her.
Something shifts in his posture—not recognition, exactly, but assessment. He knows these women.
Everyone in this room knows these women, or knows of them.
"Strutt," Kitty says. "Upbeat"
Roscoe's hands lift from the piano keys. He reaches for the saxophone resting on its stand beside him—a vintage Conn with mother-of-pearl inlays—and raises it to his lips without a word.
The first note is a low, liquid moan, a sound that seems to come from somewhere below the diaphragm, somewhere intimate and unguarded.
It fills the room like fingers sliding through pussy slick on a summer night under the stars.
The room stills. Conversations hush. The saxophone weeps through the air, sultry and searching, and Kitty feels it in her sternum, in the pulse at her throat.
It swirls in her mouth like a warm, fulsome jizz dump.
She leads the three women to the bar.
Bruno has already materialised, setting down three crystal glasses and a bottle of her private stock—the caraway-and-honey rye distilled from bakery grains, amber as betrayal.
He pours without looking at them, his scarred knuckles precise, then retreats to his post by the entry.
Tallulah lifts her glass first.
"Men, they all need the knife between their…"
"Yeah, after, a knee to the…" Vivian adds.
"—first, hang them by their sack," Zelda drinks fast.
The rye burns like raw anal sex.
Kitty watches their throats work, the delicate muscles contracting, the pearls at their collarbones shifting with each swallow.
Three women like three stray felines; hissing over a single hot sausage thrown in an alleyway.
"Again," Tallulah says, setting down her glass with a sharp click.
Kitty pours.
The saxophone curls around them, Roscoe's improvisation finding the spaces between their silence, filling them with notes of provocation.
"The Crimson Room," Kitty says.
Kitty looks at each of them.
Tallulah's kohl-rimmed eyes, bright with something that might be gin or might be grief.
Vivian's beauty mark, pencilled sharp as accusation.
Zelda's oxblood mouth, set in a line that dares refusal.
She thinks of her mother, alone in the apartment above the bakery, listening to the phonograph play Russian folk songs. She thinks of Wozniak, dead in an alley three years past, his blood already cooling when she found him.
She thinks of the iron rule of this place: no violence, no coercion, only what is given freely.
"The Crimson Room," she says, "is yours. No charge."
The room opens like a secret.
Crimson velvet curtains, gilded mirrors catching candlelight and multiplying it into infinity, the canopy bed with its silk sheets already turned down by invisible hands.
A decanter of rare cognac waits on the mahogany nightstand, flanked by four glasses.
The walls are soundproofed, the back entrance discreet, everything arranged according to Mama Rosa's original vision of luxury and absolute secrecy.
Kitty closes the door behind them.
Motions towards the bed.
Tallulah has her Mary Janes kicked off, her silk stockings whispering against each other as she climbs onto the mattress.
She lies back against the pillows with the languid entitlement of someone who has never been told no, her chemise riding up to reveal the ribbon garters at her thighs.
Vivian stands at the mirror, removing her cloche hat, her dark bob falling sharp against her jaw. She meets her own reflection, then Kitty's behind her, and something passes between them—acknowledgment, permission, appetite.
Zelda lights another cigarette from the gold table lighter in her clutch.
She does not sit. She watches, her posture deliberately languid, one hip cocked, daring the room to comment.
"You heard them," Tallulah says to the ceiling, her voice carrying that particular upper-class drawl that sounds like boredom and conceals everything else.
"Tony Blue. Anthony Accardo. The man with the eyes like ice and the hands that promised—"
"—promised his prick, not his heart," Vivian finishes, turning from the mirror. Her kohl-rimmed eyes find Kitty's.
" All prick."
"And three heifers fell for the bull," Zelda adds, exhaling smoke through her oxblood mouth, "Separately. Consecutively. Concurrently."
Kitty moves to the decanter. Her hands are steady—she has poured a thousand drinks, negotiated a thousand silences—but something in her chest uncoils, a warmth that has nothing to do with the rye.
"The rule," she says, her back to them, "is that nothing leaves this room. What is spoken here. What is done here."
"And what," Tallulah asks, her voice dropping to a register that scrapes against Kitty's spine, "will be done here?"
Kitty turns. The candlelight catches the art-deco brooch at her shoulder, the opera-length pearls knotted at her hip.
She has not changed from her day clothes—the cotton dress with its modest neckline—but in this room, in this light, she feels transformed.
"Come here, all three of you," she says.
Three women, moving like water, surrounding her.
Tallulah's fingers find her thigh. Vivian's hands slide to her breast. Zelda's cigarette holder presses against her lower lip, then is set aside, and her mouth finds Kitty's throat, the pulse hammering there.
Kitty's hands move with purpose, finding the silk of their chemises, the heat of their skin beneath.
She has not touched another woman like this in months—has not allowed herself the luxury, the vulnerability—but now, surrounded by their irritation, she feels something unlock.
The bed bounces beneath four figures.
They arrange themselves like a constellation.
Tallulah and Vivian stretch out on the silk sheets, their legs tangling, their mouths finding each other in a kiss that tastes of rye and ire.
Zelda climbs above them, her copper-red bob swinging, and looks back at Kitty with a challenge in her dark-rimmed eyes.
Girls will comfort girls, with secrets beyond prick Tony's hottest dreams.
Kitty removes her dress. She stands in her silk slip, her T-strap heels, her pearls still knotted at her hip.
She feels the candlelight on her pale skin, the gaze of three women.
The silk slides beneath her knees, cool and yielding.
Zelda has already positioned herself above Tallulah's mouth, her chemise pushed up to her waist, her pale thighs parting.
Vivian watches, her dark eyes wide, her hand moving between her own legs with the same languid entitlement she applies to everything.
"Kitty," Tallulah murmurs, her voice muffled against Zelda's thigh. "Come here."
Kitty understands. She stretches out beside Tallulah, her head finding the pillow, her legs parting.
Tallulah's free hand finds her hip, pulling her closer, arranging her like a gift.
Zelda shifts, her weight settling, and suddenly Kitty is looking up at the canopy above, at the crimson velvet, at Zelda's pale thighs descending toward her face.
Her pussy is a puffy, pouty present.
Glossy, slick and a cute pink bud.
Zelda's folds settle against Kitty's mouth, hot and wet and demanding.
Kitty's tongue finds her without thought, without hesitation.
She tastes lavender and salt and something sweeter, drips of girly bubbly cream; the arousal of a woman who has been wronged and wants to be wronged again, differently, better.
Zelda's thighs clench around her face, her hips grinding down, and Kitty feels the vibration of her moan against her own lips.
She has the experienced woman's pace.
The leisurely, flat, broad sweeps wetting every fold.
The precise tongue tip prod inside her pink tightness.
The darting flicks to occasionally stir the clit.
Tallulah's mouth finds her fanny.
"Ahh—" breaks her laps from Zelda's perineum to her cowl.
The sound escapes Kitty before she can swallow it, a gasp that becomes a moan as Tallulah's tongue slicks through her folds, finding her cupids bead with the precision of a woman who knows exactly what she wants.
Firm, fierce and fast, the two lap, spit and plunge tongue in a frenzy of peaking escalation.
Fingers ferret, forge and fornicate.
Pussies are stretched and tight rilled balloon knots are rimmed.
She is dining out inside a girl who needs a gigantic release.
Bodies meld and mesh.
The geometry of it overwhelms her, the feedback loop of giving and receiving, the way every lick she delivers makes Zelda grind harder, which makes Tallulah lick faster, which makes Kitty moan into Zelda's flesh, which makes—
"Your pussy," Zelda gasps above her, her hips stuttering, "is so wet. You're drowning me, Kitty. You're drowning me in it."
"Good," Kitty manages, her tongue finding Zelda's clit, circling it with the same rhythm Tallulah is using on her own.
"Drown. Drown in me."
Vivian has moved closer, her dark eyes watching everything, her fingers working between her legs with increasing urgency.
"Let me," she breathes, and Zelda reaches for her, pulling her into the tangle of limbs, arranging her so that her slash hovers above Kitty's face beside Zelda's, two women, two pussies, two sets of thighs clenching around her.
Kitty's tongue moves between them, from Zelda's salt to Vivian's sweetness, back and forth, her hands gripping their hips to hold them steady.
Below, Tallulah has found a rhythm that matches her own, her tongue flicking against Kitty's clit with merciless precision, her fingers sliding inside, curling to find the spot that makes Kitty's vision only see crimson.
"Ah—ahh—" Zelda's moans are breaking apart, fragmenting into gasps and whines.
"Forget feckless men, cum girl, cum," Kitty intreats.
Zelda's thighs clamp around her head, her back arching, her copper-red bob swinging as she cries out.
The orgasm hits her like a tigress escaping a cage.
A burst of intoxication.
Leaps of flesh delight course through her clit.
Her thighs quiver, breaths come fast.
She races, races to her peak.
Kitty feels it—the clench and release, the flood of wetness against her tongue, the shudder that travels through Zelda's whole body and into her own.
Vivian too watches her come undone, her own breath hitching, her fingers moving faster.
"My turn," she whispers, and Kitty turns her full attention to her, her tongue finding Vivian's clit with the same relentless pressure, her fingers sliding into Zelda's fluttering love nest to keep the rhythm going.
"Your tongue," Vivian gasps, her hips bucking.
"I like the fierceness, —"
Tallulah has added a second finger, her thrusts matching the rhythm of Kitty's tongue, building a pressure that coils low in Kitty's belly and spreads outward, pulsing and inevitable.
She can feel it coming, the edge approaching, the point where control shatters.
Shatters like glass.
Sharp peaky shards of bliss scatter through her erect nub, her leaking pussy, her clenching thighs.
"Ah—ahh—"
Her own moans are lost in Vivian's flesh, but she feels them in her chest, in her throat, in the pulse that beats everywhere at once.
The relentless internal spikes of delight.
"Come for me," Tallulah murmurs against her, the vibration pushing her over. "Come on my tongue. Let me taste you."
The orgasm crashes through her like a door kicked open.
Sensations rush and careen in every direction of her being.
Kitty's back arches off the silk sheets, her thighs clamping around Tallulah's head, her fingers digging into Vivian and Zelda's hips.
She cries out against Vivian's mound, the sound muffled but desperate, a wail that breaks into fragments as the pleasure crests and crests and crests.
"Ah—ahhh—Oohh—"
Her voice fails her, her body taking over, hips bucking against Tallulah's mouth as upsurge after upsurge rolls through her.
She is coming, she is coming, she is lost in the wet heat of three women and her own sexual unravelling.
Vivian follows, triggered by the vibration of Kitty's moans against her clit.
Her thighs tremble, her dark eyes rolling back, her elegant composure shattering into gasps and whimpers.
"Orrghh! Fuck! Yes! Yes! Orrghh!"
She comes with a cry that sounds like surrender, her hips jerking, her fingers tangling in her own hair.
Zelda, still sensitive, shudders again at the sight, her cute quim clenching around Kitty's fingers.
Collapsing like a house of cards, a tangle of limbs and silk and sweat, the scent of sex heavy in the crimson room.
Kitty's chest heaves, her pale skin flushed pink, her dark hair unpinned and wild against the pillow.
Tallulah crawls up beside her, her kohl smudged, her cupid's-bow mouth swollen.
"More?" she whispers, but Kitty shakes her head, already reaching for the cigarette case on the nightstand.
"Smoke," she says, her voice rough. "Then talk. Then toys later."
The cigarettes are Turkish, imported, illegal in twelve states.
They light them from Zelda's gold table lighter, four women propped against the silk pillows, the canopy above them like a tent.
The saxophone faintly seeps through the walls, Roscoe's improvisation endless and searching.
"Tony Blue," Vivian says, exhaling smoke across her beauty mark.
"The cad came to my father's warehouse," Zelda begins, her voice husky, her cigarette holder tapping against her knuckle. "Three months ago. I fell for his tongue…."
"The rake came to my charity gala," Tallulah interrupts, her hazel eyes distant. "I got lost in his finger work…"
"The rogue took me in his limo," Vivian finishes, her dark eyes meeting Kitty's.
"Well, he's frickin well-hung…"
Kitty listens.
She has heard a thousand confessions in this room, a thousand betrayals whispered into the crimson velvet.
But this one—this one makes her hand tighten on her cigarette.
"The bastard seduced you," she says. "All three. Separately."
"Consecutively," Tallulah corrects.
"Concurrently," Zelda adds, "for all we know."
"Probably had his way with us all on the same night, somewhere, sneaky blackguard," Vivian puffs, fast and furious.
"And you found out," Kitty continues, "tonight?"
"Tonight," Vivian confirms, her voice carrying an edge that could cut glass.
"At the Palmer House. We were all there. He was there. With a fourth."
"Some little thing from the North Side," Tallulah spits, her composure cracking for the first time. "Some dancer."
"And we," Zelda says, her oxblood mouth curling, "decided to find somewhere to plan his comeuppance."
Kitty looks at each of them in turn.
Three heiresses, three fortunes, three women who have never once asked for permission.
And now, in the aftermath of sex and smoke, they want something else from her.
Not just the use of her room.
Not just the comfort of her rye.
They want her to listen.
To remember.
To hold their stories like secrets in the crimson dark.
And plot their fem-revenge.
"Tell me," Kitty says, and settles back against the pillows, her dark eyes shifting from warm to glacial and back again.
"Tell me everything."
Outside, the saxophone moans on.
Inside, the stories begin.