Isla in the Service Lift

I was Jonah Hale, thirty-four, an out-of-town guest with two nights booked in Surfers Paradise and no patience for the lobby crowd that had spilled from the wrestling card. The last bell had gone an hour earlier and the summer heat was still sitting in the concrete of the hotel, thick as breath against the back of my throat. I took the service corridor to skip the bright front of the building and I pressed the button for the staff lift, the one with the rubber floor and the steel walls that did not pretend to be anything else.

When the doors opened the car was empty. I stepped in. Down the corridor a girl came at a clip that said she was ducking the same people, twenty-one and still wearing the night on her. Her name was Isla Brown, though she would not give it to me, and I knew her face from the ring. She had been the one with the microphone, calling the matches in a voice that could lift a room and then drop back into something ordinary. I put my hand out and held the door.

She looked at the held gap and then at me, and she stepped in as if this were a lift and not a decision. “Thanks,” she said, and the word came out unhurried, a little unfinished, as if the rest of the sentence might arrive later if it felt like arriving.

I let go. The doors closed on the corridor and on the easy story she could still tell about herself if nothing else happened. What was at stake if they opened too soon was her gig, the microphone, the hours she posted around the fights. What was at stake if they stayed shut was whether I was going to put my hands on her in a steel box that anyone on staff could call. I wanted both of those risks at once. I thought, looking at the way she stood with her weight on one hip, that she might want them too.

She had a dark skirt that ended high on her thighs and a top that still looked like work, and the Gold Coast summer had put a shine at her throat. She did not fill the silence. She let it sit, playful in the way she glanced at the panel and then at my mouth, laid-back as if we had all night and the car was not even moving.

The car was moving. I watched the numbers fail to matter. I could smell salt and arena and whatever cheap soap the hotel put in the rooms, and under that I could smell her.

The car stopped between floors with a jerk that went up my spine. The overhead light stayed on. Neither of us reached for the alarm or the buttons. In the quiet I could hear her breathe, and I could hear my own blood.

“You’re the girl with the mic,” I said.

She smiled as if I had given her a warm drink. “The girl with the mic,” she said, feeding it back to me a shade too kindly, and she did not tell me whether she was on, whether the night was still a performance. She looked past my shoulder as if the question belonged to a third person standing in the corner, and then her eyes came back to mine and stayed.

I took a step. She did not take one back. When I put my mouth on hers she made a sound that went straight into me, and then she kissed me like she had decided to, her hands fisting in my shirt, her body coming forward until her thighs touched mine. I got my hand under the hem of her skirt and found the heat of her through cotton, and she opened her stance a little to let me. She was already warm. I rubbed her through the fabric until the cotton went damp and her breath broke against my teeth.

“You can,” she said, and it was not a plea so much as a permission she was granting on her own time.

I hooked the cotton aside and put two fingers against her cunt, slick already, and I worked her slowly because I wanted to feel her get wetter in my hand. She was tight and she was filthy with it, rocking to take me, and when I pushed those fingers into her she clenched and made a noise that the steel walls threw back at us. I thought of the doors. I thought of them opening on my hand inside her. I wanted that almost as much as I wanted her to come on my fingers, and I could feel in the way she kept her eyes open that she was thinking of the same thing.

She was soaked by the time I had fucked her with my hand for a minute, my palm grinding on her clit, my fingers curled against that soft place inside her. Her mouth was on my jaw. She was not performing, or she was performing so well I did not care, and she would not be drawn on the difference.

I kept at her until her thighs shook. Isla reached down and opened my trousers with a steadiness that did not match how wet she was. Her fingers wrapped my cock and she looked at it as if she had all the time in the world, even stopped between floors in a hotel that employed cleaners who worked late. I was hard enough that it hurt. She stroked me once, twice, spreading the wet at the head, and then she glanced at the sealed doors and back at me, and that glance was the whole conversation.

“If they open,” I said, and I heard how rough my own voice had gone.

“Then they open,” she said, still unhurried, still a little unfinished, and she did not say whether she wanted them to stay shut enough to finish or open enough to prove the risk was real. She treated that like it belonged to somebody else too. Her hand tightened on me. “You’re the one who held the door.”

I laughed against her mouth, surprised by it, and she smiled like she had won a small private point. There was humour in her even then, and under it something more vulnerable than she would have admitted, the knowledge that a caught girl with a microphone became a different kind of story. I kissed her again because I wanted that vulnerability in my mouth. I fucked her with my fingers while she stroked my cock, wet sounds in the quiet car, her cunt gripping every time I thought I heard the cables shift.

She pulled my wrist. Not to stop me. To get my hand out of her so she could go to her knees on the rubber floor, and she did it as if the decision had been hers from the moment she stepped in.

The floor was ugly and I did not care. Isla got my cock out properly and looked at it the way she had looked at the held door, considering, and then she licked the head with a flat slow stroke that made my hips jerk. She took me into her mouth without ceremony, hot and wet, and she sucked me down until I felt her throat work. I put my hand in her hair, not to force her, only to feel her move. She set the pace. She was good at it, unhurried even here, taking me deep and then pulling back to breathe against the shaft, a thread of spit connecting her lower lip to me.

“Fuck,” I said, because there was nothing smarter in me.

She made a small pleased sound around my cock, as if she had been waiting for me to give her that word so she could give it back later. She sucked harder. I could see her cunt when she shifted her knees, still shining from my fingers, her underwear hooked aside and forgotten. Anyone opening those doors would have seen a twenty-one-year-old ring announcer on her knees in a service lift with a guest’s cock in her mouth. The thought made me thicker against her tongue. I knew she felt it. She looked up at me while she sucked, eyes dark, and I understood that she wanted the picture as much as I did.

I told her she was filthy. I told her I was going to fuck her against the wall before this car remembered how to move. She pulled off long enough to say, “The girl with the mic,” in that too-warm way, as if she were quoting me for an audience I could not see, and then she took me back down and let me feel her throat again. My legs were shaking. I pulled her up because if I came in her mouth I would miss the rest of what I had been wanting since she stepped through the door.

I got her back on her feet and I pushed her against the steel. The wall was cool through her top. I shoved her skirt up around her waist and I dragged the cotton out of my way and I notched my cock against her cunt, which was so wet that I slid, and she reached down and put me where I needed to be. She pushed her hips onto me. I sank into her in one long dirty thrust that punched the air out of both of us.

She was tight and she was burning and she took all of me. I fucked her standing, her back to the wall, her one knee hooked over my hip, and every stroke made a wet sound that seemed too loud for the size of the car. Her hands were in my hair and then on my shoulders. She was not quiet. I wanted her louder. I wanted the whole hotel to have an opinion.

“Look at the doors,” I said.

She did. She kept her eyes on the seam while I fucked her, and I felt her cunt flutter every time the cables ticked in the shaft. I put my mouth on her throat and tasted salt. I told her she felt like she had been waiting for this since the last bell. She would not say if she had. She fed me back a scrap of my own wording, warm and unfinished, and then she bit my shoulder when I hit her deep.

I got a hand between us and rubbed her clit while I drove into her. She shook. She was close and she was fighting it a little, or riding it, I could not tell, and the not knowing was part of why I could not slow down. The car was still stopped. The risk was still theoretical. I could feel her wanting it to become real without quite asking for the doors to open.

I pulled out and turned her. She went without being told, hands finding the rail that ran around the car, arse out, skirt rucked, and she looked over her shoulder at me with a flush that had nothing to do with summer. I pushed back into her from behind and the angle made her swear, a clean loud beat of a word, and then she was ordinary again, panting, pushing back onto my cock as if she had decided the pace from here too.

I held her hips and I fucked her. I watched myself disappear into her cunt, watched her take it, watched the way her thighs trembled each time I bottomed out. Her hands stayed on the rail. She wanted the picture of that, I thought, the girl with the mic bent in a service lift with a stranger buried in her. I wanted it enough to hurt.

The car jerked.

It was not a full start. It was a lurch, a promise, the kind of movement that meant the doors might remember themselves. I did not stop. She did not tell me to stop. She shoved back onto me harder, and I understood in my spine that she was going to come because they might open, not in spite of it. I reached around and found her clit again and I rubbed her in tight circles while I fucked her through that jerk, and she broke with a sound she tried to swallow and failed.

Her cunt clamped down on me in pulses that nearly took me with her. She shook on my cock and she kept her hands on the rail and she came with her eyes on the doors, messy and real, and I felt the after of it run through her in smaller grabs while I kept stroking into that wet heat. I lasted three more thrusts and then I pulled out because I wanted to see it. I came on her cunt and on the insides of her thighs, thick ropes that striped her, dripping down toward the ugly rubber floor. She stayed bent for a breath, showing me, and then she laughed once, quiet, like she could not believe we had done it in time or that time had done it to us.

I put a hand on her back, not to hold her down, only to feel her breathing. The wanting was still there. The power of the sealed doors was still there. We had finished and we had not been caught, and I could already feel her mind reaching for the problem of that, the thrill that might not count if no one had seen.

We dragged clothes into place with the clumsy speed of people who had remembered the building. She fixed her underwear. I tucked myself away and my hands were not quite steady. The car thought about it and then it moved, a smooth guilty rise, and the numbers started to mean something again.

The doors opened on a cleaner with a cart. She looked at us, rumpled, too close, the smell of sex still hanging in the steel, and then she looked away as if the corridor had become fascinating. Isla stepped out first. I followed. We did not speak. I walked off without giving her a name and without taking one, which felt at the time like the only clean thing either of us had done.

I did not look back long enough to see where she went. I knew there had been a red light in the upper corner of that car, small and stubborn, the kind that meant a camera might have had us the whole time my fingers were in her and my cock was in her mouth and I was coming on her thighs. I did not know if she had seen it. I knew she was the girl with the mic, and that a man who wanted to could find her through the work she did with that microphone, through the rooms she lifted and the hours she posted. If she had not clocked the light yet, she would. I walked into the late Gold Coast heat with her wetness still on my hand, already certain I had not had the last of her, and that she would not be able to drop either the red eye in that corner or the chance that I would come back for her through the mic.