Chapter 383: Lunch

The hostess stopped at the last door on the left, turned the lamp beside it to green, and bowed herself away.

Lor stepped inside along with Nellie and the door closed behind him.

The cabin was small and warm, with a low round table, a curved velvet bench deep enough to sink into, and a lattice window over a courtyard of glowing moss.

By the edge of the table sat a small brass lever with a tag on it, and the tag read: If a lamp must be red.

"This is ridiculous," Lor said, sinking deeper into the velvet. "In a good way."

Nellie sat on the bench across from him and kept her knees pressed together and her back very straight.

The white blouse still pulled across her chest when she breathed.

The plum skirt had settled high on her thighs once she sat. She smoothed the pleats once, then left them.

The waiter, a lean man in spotless white gloves, set down two glasses of citrus water and two menus of cream-colored stone.

When Lor touched the corner of his, the prices shifted into view, and his Earth-born mind did the sums and reeled. The cheapest dish cost more than the entire week's worth of meals at home.

"You can have anything you want Lor," Nellie reminded him, gently, over the rim of her glass.

"The Starlit Pheasant," he said, because he had read the name on the board a month ago and never forgotten it. "The herb-crusted lamb. The Moonbloom Bisque. And garlic bread."

The waiter wrote nothing down. "And the lady?"

"The bisque, please. And the fruit tarts, afterward." She hesitated. "And a pot of the jasmine tea."

"The pheasant requires a little time. Twenty minutes, perhaps twenty-five." He bowed. "If you require privacy in the meantime, the lever beside the table will see to the lamp."

He backed out of the cabin with his hands folded.

Lor leaned back into the velvet and closed his eyes. After the morning he had just had, the warmth and the smell of bread drifting up from below were almost too much.

His stomach had settled a little from the cookie, but the rest of him still felt loose and tired in a good way.

Across the table, the bench creaked as Nellie shifted. Then again. Then a third time, slow, as if she were trying to find a position she did not have.

When he opened his eyes she was looking straight at him.

She had taken off her glasses and set them on the table, and without them her gray-green eyes looked larger and brighter, a little unfocused, and the tip of her tongue was caught between her teeth.

One of her hands was pressed flat on the table. The other was down under it, out of sight, gripping the velvet.

"Nellie?" Lor said slowly. "You okay?"

"I'm fine." She said it too fast. Her thighs pressed together under the table, and he heard the velvet creak under her.

"I mean— I forgot to mention something. Earlier. I wanted to say it on the road, and then you were so hungry, and then there were people."

"What is it?"

Nellie did not answer.

She drew a long breath through her nose, and her blouse pulled tight across her chest against it.

Then the hand that had been hidden under the table came up and found the brass lever beside the cushion.

She pulled it down.

Somewhere far off, beyond the door, something clicked softly in the wall, and Lor knew without needing to look that the lamp outside had just turned red.

She stood very straight for a moment, one hand pressed flat against her stomach.

The paper lamp painted her gold along one cheek and the curve of her shoulder.

Then she stepped around the end of the low table and turned her back to him.

"This is what I forgot to mention," she said, to the lattice window. Her voice shook, but it did not stop.

"Please don't laugh."

She bent forward at the waist, braced both hands on the edge of the table, and lifted her skirt with one hand.

The plum pleats rose slowly over the black bands of her stockings.

Above them was pale soft skin, faintly freckled on the outer curve of each thigh, and above that the round, heavy swell of her ass.

The cheeks were thick enough that they pressed together even bent over like this. Her panties were pink.

They were small and thin, with a lace trim, and they had been pulled up so tight that the strip of fabric had wedged itself deep between her cheeks, cutting a narrow line through the middle of them, and the seat of it was already dark and clinging with wet.

Lor stopped breathing.

Every thought he had carried out of Lia's house went out of his head at once.

What replaced them was heat.

It rose from low in his stomach and settled in his groin, and his cock hardened against his pants so fast it almost hurt.

Her hips swayed once, very slightly, as she balanced herself, and the cheeks shifted, rippled, and settled.

She was trembling.

He could see it in the backs of her knees, in the small tremor running up the black bands of her stockings, in the way her fingers had gone white on the edge of the table.

The cabin was so quiet that he could hear her breathing, short and shallow and a little too fast.

A bead of slick had escaped the edge of the lace and was sliding down the inside of her thigh, over the freckles, toward the top of the stocking, and she did not wipe it away.

She was waiting for him to say something. He could not.

Nellie reached back with her free hand, hooked two fingers into the narrow pink strip, and drew it aside revealing her pussy, a string of wetness formed as she pulled the strip onto her left asscheek.