Tallulah and fingers
Tallulah draws the cigarette holder from her lips, the silver catching the amber lamplight as she holds it suspended, smoke curling in a thin blue ribbon toward the canopy above.
Her hazel eyes, still smudged with kohl, fix on some middle distance between the women gathered around her, and she laughs—a dry, practised sound that doesn't reach her mouth.
"The Children's Hospital benefit," she says, her voice carrying that particular Chicago drawl that turns vowels into something you could pour over ice.
"I was bored out of my mind, standing near the champagne fountain pretending to care about orphans while Mother tried to marry me off to the Van Der Zee boy."
She shifts on the silk pillows, her beaded chemise dress rustling as she crosses her ankles, the ribbon garters visible beneath the pushed-up hem. Her fingers trace the rim of the tumbler she still holds, rye catching light like liquid amber.
"Tony Blue walked up like he owned the room. Which, in retrospect, he probably did."
She glances at Zelda, something passing between them—recognition, shared wound.
"He talked about the new wing they were funding, how philanthropy was the only thing that separated men like us from the animals. I ate it up. I was starving for someone to see past the pearls and the pedigree."
Kitty's dark eyes never leave Tallulah's face, her cigarette case resting loose in her lap, forgotten. Vivian has stopped adjusting her choker, her brown eyes wide and fixed, her breathing shallow enough to notice.
"He suggested air," Tallulah continues, her voice dropping to something more intimate, rawer.
"The terrace. I followed him through the service corridors like a fool, my silk slippers silent on the linoleum."
The service elevator at The Drake groans as it ascends, a metal cage rattling through the building's bones. Tallulah stands with her back to the wall, Tony Blue occupying the space before her like a man who has never learned the word no.
His charcoal suit fits him like a second skin, the silver watch chain catching the dim bulb overhead as he moves.
"You're different from the other society dolls," he says, and his voice is cedar and smoke, expensive and dangerous. " You like a puppeteer pulling your strings. Or more like playing you strings."
Tallulah opens her mouth to retort, some sharp thing about his presumption, but his hand rises, and his thumb presses against her lower lip, dragging it down.
Then his index finger is there, thick and warm, pressing past her teeth, resting on her tongue.
Fuck! His fingers play in her mouth.
Catch her tongue, toy her palate. Circle inside her cheek.
He finds erogenous zones she never knew she had.
"Don't talk," he murmurs, his icy blue eyes holding hers as the elevator shudders to a stop.
"Just feel."
She tastes salt and something darker, tobacco and whiskey and the metal of his ring.
Her tongue curls involuntarily around the intrusion, and she hates herself for the moan that vibrates in her throat, for the way her eyes flutter shut, for the sudden wetness between her thighs that has nothing to do with the humid March evening.
The wetter her mouth, the more her pussy leaks.
"Good girl," he whispers, and withdraws his finger slowly, deliberately, dragging it across her lower lip until it glistens.
"That's divine contact, Tallulah. That's the beginning of everything."
The elevator doors clatter open onto the terrace, and Lake Michigan spreads before them like black silk stitched with city lights.
She follows him out, her legs unsteady, her mouth still tasting of him.
Her pussy slick already wishing his fingers inside herself.
The rooftop terrace of The Drake breathes with the city below, wind carrying the smell of water, street vendors and distant rain.
Tallulah stands at the balustrade, her knuckles curve on the stone, Tony Blue pressed against her back like the promise of a kitten curling in your lap.
His hands find the hem of her dress, pushing upward with succulent efficiency, and she gasps as the night air hits her bare thighs.
His fingers—those same fingers that were in her mouth—slide between her legs, finding her already soaked, her silk step-ins peeled aside with a rip she doesn't care about.
God, her lipettes are as wet as leaves rolling with drops of morning dew.
"You're dripping for me," he breathes against her ear, his moustache tickling her skin.
"Look at you, princess. Embrace what you need."
One thick finger pushes inside her quim without preamble, curling upward to find that spot that makes her thighs tremble, her forehead dropping to the cold stone.
He works her with a precise precision, a second finger joining the first, stretching her, filling her, while his thumb grinds against her clit in tight, crafted circles.
He understands friction.
He knows pressure.
A master of the ideal stretch.
The fuckin' fem-just right inside her tight.
"Please," she whispers.
Asking for the same or different.
"Please what?" His voice is amused.
"Say it, Tallulah. Tell me what you want."
"Your fingers—fuck—your fingers, don't stop—"
"Sweetheart, I've barely started."
His fingers move like a machine designed for her pleasure, pumping into her wetness, dragging across her clit until she's sobbing, until her hips buck against the balustrade, until she's begging in broken syllables that mean nothing and everything.
"Uh-Uhh! Mmm! Oohh! Aahh!"
Finger-banged.
He strums through her private instrument.
Presses her clitty like it's a doorbell.
Fan-fuckin-tastic internal gouging.
She comes with her teeth bared against the stone, her cry swallowed by the wind off the lake, her body shaking apart while his fingers keep working her through it, drawing out every spasm until she's limp and gasping.
"Orrghh!"
"Beautiful," he murmurs, withdrawing his hand and holding it to her lips.
"Taste."
She takes his fingers into her mouth without thought, tasting herself—salt and musk and the creamy tang of her own arousal—sucking his digits clean while he watches her with those predatory blue eyes.
He turns her around, pressing her back against the balustrade, and his hands are at his belt, his cock springing free—thick and dark and already weeping at the tip.
Tallulah's legs tremble as he spins her, bending her forward over the stone railing until she's staring down at the street below, at the tiny scurrying people and the lake beyond, exposed and vulnerable, and she feels more alive than she's ever been.
"Hold on," he commands, and she grips the stone as he kicks her feet wider, as his hands spread her ass cheeks apart, as the head of his cock presses against her dripping folds and he strikes for home base, with goddamn perfect pace.
A sweep of his knob around her wet opening. His head playing on her girly porch. A step down her slick hallway. A prod into her deeper room.
The big, thick cock thrusts.
She screams, the sound tearing from her throat.
"Oof! Oh my! Yes! Yes! Harder! Fuckk! Aahh! Aahh!"
He sets a pace that is not lovey-dovey but conquest—pounding into her, his hips slapping against her ass, his hands gripping her hips.
He fucks her as she secretly craves.
Deep, dirty and indecent.
Her hidden tart side, his bad boy knowledge.
The balustrade digs into her stomach, her tits bouncing with each impact, her French bob falling into her eyes.
Then his thumb—wet with her spit and her cum—presses against her asshole, circling the tight ring of muscle, and she gasps, her body tensing.
"Oohh! God!"
"Relax," he orders, his voice tight with his own pleasure. "Let me in."
She tries, she tries to breathe, to open, and then his thumb is pressing inside, past the resistance, filling her ass with a finger; while his cock fills her cunny, and she's so full she can't think, can't speak, can only make broken sounds that the wind carries away.
"Uhh! Hnnghh! Uhh!"
"Good?" he asks, though he knows he can feel her clenching around him, can hear the wet sounds of her body taking him.
"More," she manages, the word torn from somewhere desperate.
A filthy craving, her trailer-trash side.
He laughs, delighted, and withdraws his thumb only to return with two fingers, pressing together, stretching her asshole wider, working her open while his cock keeps pounding her pussy.
The sensation is overwhelming, too much, perfect—his fingers scissoring in her ass, his cock hitting that spot inside her canal, the cold stone against her cheek and the city spread out below like an offering.
Everything suddenly twinkles.
Stars, headlights, neon, streetlights.
She shatters, her orgasm ripping through her with such force that her knees buckle, that she would have fallen if not for his hands holding her up, his fingers buried in her ass, his cock buried to the hilt as he spills inside her with a groan that sounds like victory.
"Aahhh!"
Afterwards, they blend onto a stone bench in the terrace garden, hidden from the main rooftop by a hedge of yew.
Tallulah's dress is still pushed up around her waist, her step-ins ruined on the flagstones somewhere behind them.
Tony lights two cigarettes, passing her one, and she takes it with fingers that still shake.
The nicotine hits her lungs like mercy, and she leans her head back against the stone, staring up at the stars that manage to pierce the Chicago haze.
She feels her whole body, earlobes to her toes.
Awareness of herself.
Distant sounds catch.
Smells waft and mingle.
Footsteps crunch on gravel, and a man emerges from the shadows—a city hall official she recognises from her father's business dealings, Alderman McCreary, his jowled face flushed with drink.
"Accardo," he says, his eyes sliding over Tallulah's exposed thighs with undisguised male lust.
"I wondered where you'd gotten to."
Tony exhales smoke through his nose, utterly unconcerned by their state of undress, by the smell of sex that clings to them both.
The two men move away, but Tallulah hears their lowered voices.
"Your father mentioned you were making moves on the amusement business. Glessner's operation. Pushing into the best slots first, eh! "
Tony backslaps the Alderman.
"Taking Tallulah's family business," he says, his icy eyes looking over the lake, "will be easier than flicking loaded dice onto the felt at The Crimson. I only need to flick her bean and finger her tush."
Suddenly Tallulah sees his puppeteer mask. His calculating use of everyone, including herself.
The Alderman leaves. Tony finishes his fag alone.
Tony adjusts his shirt, buttoning his trousers with the same efficiency he'd used to unbutton them.
"Doll, you should fix your face," he says. "Your gala guests are probably looking for you."
He walks away without looking back, his shoes crunching loose pebbles, and Tallulah sits alone in the garden with her cigarette and her ruined dress and the sudden, crushing understanding that she has been used.
But hell, the sod! The sod knew how to use his fingers.
In the Crimson Room, the silence stretches like taffy; thick and sweet yet stuck to your fingers.
Kitty's face has gone pale beneath her dark berry lipstick, her cigarette case clutched now in both hands, knuckles white.
"Loaded dice," she repeats, her voice barely above a whisper.
"Inside The Crimson."
Tallulah nods, her cigarette finally finished, the holder cool in her fingers.
"Everyone is just a piece in his game."
Kitty rises, moving to the decanter with a grace that belies the tremor in her hands.
She pours rye with deliberate slowness, the amber liquid catching candlelight, and when she turns back, her dark eyes have shifted from warm to glacial—that heartbeat change that makes men wait for her words.
"Your story, Vivian," she says, her voice steady as bedrock.
"I need to hear it now. I need to know everything."
Vivian's brown eyes go wide, her breath catching audibly.
She adjusts her choker with shaking fingers, the velvet dark against her pale throat, and for a moment her eyes look like a doe's caught in headlights; her lips too, caught between flight and confession.
"The rogue—" she begins, and her voice breaks, and the room holds its breath, waiting for what comes next.