Under the Floor

1: The Ride Home

The truck smelled like leather and sawdust, the kind of clean that made you think of hardware stores and Saturday projects. Mark had always smelled like this. Even when I was little and he would carry me on his shoulders at the lake, it was sawdust and soap and something else underneath, something darker that I only learned to name later.

"Your dad's gonna be pissed you didn't say goodbye," he said, not looking at me. The streetlights strobed across his jaw, that calm jaw that never tightened, never betrayed anything.

"Step-dad. And I texted him." My voice came out smaller than I wanted. The cookout had been boring, all my parents' friends talking about equity and kitchen remodels while I counted down the minutes until I could leave for college next month. Mark had offered the ride without me asking. Said he was heading home anyway, right past my street.

I should have noticed the turn he missed. I should have noticed the way his hands sat at ten and two, too perfect, like he was performing calm instead of feeling it.

But I was nineteen and tired and the AC felt good against my sunburned shoulders, so I closed my eyes.

The floor was cold. That was the first thing. Cold and smelled like wet earth and new lumber.

I woke up with my cheek pressed against something hard, wood grain digging into my skin. My mouth tasted like cotton and something chemical, sweet and wrong. I tried to sit up and my arms wouldn't move. Not wouldn't. Couldn't.

I looked down and saw the wooden box built around my chest and head, tight as a coffin from my collarbone to my hips, the lid still off. My arms went out through holes in the side walls, cut off at the biceps, and past that there was only grey. Same at my thighs. The box stopped there on purpose. Everything below it, everything outside it, was already packed in wet cement, calves and forearms disappearing while the pipe kept dumping more. The wood was the only thing keeping the mix off my tits and out of my mouth.

"You're awake." His voice came from above me, from a place I couldn't see. "Good. I was worried I gave you too much."

I screamed. It came out hoarse, shredded, nothing like the movies. My throat felt stripped. He had drugged me. He had stripped me. I was naked in a box in his living room floor and my legs were disappearing into grey stone that would harden around my bones.

Mark walked towards me slowly, each step deliberate. He wore the same clothes from the party. Khakis. Blue button-down. The watch my step-dad had given him for his fortieth birthday.

"Riley." He said my name like he was correcting a child. "Riley, listen to me now because I'm only going to explain this once."

I pulled against the box, but it didn't give. The cement was warm still, setting, and I could feel it tightening like a fist closing around my shins. I was trapped in a coffin that wasn't a coffin, my body under the floor level.

"You're going to live here now," he said. He stood at the edge of the hole and looked down at me like I was a problem he was solving. "Under the floor. I've been planning this since you turned eighteen. Since before, if I'm honest, but I have rules."

I spat at him. It fell short, landed on my own chest. He didn't flinch.

"One noise," he said. "One sound I can hear through the boards. One time you fight what I'm going to put in you. And I finish the job." He nodded at the bag in the corner, the one with the grey powder spilling from the top. "I leave the tube for breathing. You stay down here forever. You understand me?"

My chest was heaving. I could feel my heartbeat in my nipples, in my throat, everywhere. The cement was cooling now, hardening, and I realized with a kind of animal clarity that I could feel my toes still, could wiggle them inside the stone, but soon I wouldn't. Soon that would be gone too.

"Answer me, Riley."

"Fuck you." It came out whispered, desperate. "My dad will kill you. My dad will tear this house apart."

Mark smiled. It was the first time I'd ever seen him smile like that, and it made my stomach drop out, made me feel nineteen in the worst way, made me feel like a child who had walked into traffic.

"Step-dad as you liked to remind me. And when I have him over," he said. "He's going to sit right above you. He's going to drink my scotch and complain about his ungrateful daughter who won't answer her phone, and you're going to be so quiet, Riley. You're going to be the best girl, or you're going to be part of the foundation."

He knelt then, his knees cracking, and put his hand on my forehead. His palm was warm. Dry. The hand of a man who had fixed my bike chain when I was twelve, who had helped my step-father carry my mother's casket.

"The boards go on in ten minutes," he said. "I'll see you tonight. When it's dark. When no one can hear."

He stood up. I heard him walking around the hole, heard tools being moved, heard the creak of wood as he lifted the first floorboard from the stack against the wall.

"Mark," I said. My voice broke. "Please. I won't tell anyone. I'll do anything. Please don't put me in the dark."

He paused. For a second I thought I saw something flicker, some crack in the calm.

"You already are," he said.

Then the first board came down across my chest, and the darkness started, and I understood that the house was being built around me, that I was becoming part of the architecture, that no one was coming because no one would ever think to look for me here, in the floor, in the dark, in the mouth of a man who had helped raise me.

The screws turned. Above me, the living room waited. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator through the wood, the distant sound of a neighbor's dog, the ordinary world continuing without me while the cement finished setting around my legs like a lover's final embrace.

I bit my lip until it bled to keep from screaming.

The last board went on.

The dark was total.

2: The Install

The boards came off and the light hit me like a slap. I had been in the dark for hours, or days, or minutes. Time had stopped meaning anything except the rhythm of my own breathing and the slow ache of the cement gripping my legs from knee to toe.

Mark stood above me holding a tray. The overhead bulb turned his edges into halos, made him look like something from a church painting, serene and terrible.

"First we need to make sure you stay put," he said. "Even if you get handsy."

I tried to speak and my throat clicked dryly. I hadn't had water since before the truck. My lips were cracked, my tongue swollen. When I tried to lift my head, the cement held my extremities in a grip that felt geological, like I had been pressed into the earth itself and the earth had decided to keep me.

Mark set the tray on a stool beside the hole. I saw gleaming metal, clamps, things that looked medical and wrong in his carpenter's hands. He picked up a marker first, uncapped it with his teeth, and leaned over my chest.

"Don't," I whispered. "Please don't."

He drew two dots, precise and small, one on each nipple. The marker smelled like chemicals. My breasts were bare to the living room air, goosefleshed, and I watched his face as he looked at them, saw the calm fracture into something hungrier, something that had been waiting under the surface for years like groundwater.

"These are just the anchors," he said, like he was talking about drywall. "The real work comes later."

The clamps were cold. He attached them slowly, tightening the screws until my nipples went white, then purple, then a color I couldn't name. The pain was distant at first, like it was happening to someone else, and then it wasn't. Then it was everything.

I screamed into the gag he had tied while I was unconscious. The sound came out muffled, pathetic. He didn't hurry. He took a needle from the tray, thick as a pencil lead, and held it up to the light.

"Stainless steel," he said. "You'll have these forever, Riley. Part of the house now. Part of the fixtures."

He pushed it through my left nipple. The pain was white and absolute, a lightning strike that started in my chest and forked down into my cement trapped legs. I bucked against my prison and the cement held me still, held me open, held me exactly where he wanted me. He threaded the bar through, screwed the balls on each end, and moved to the right side before I had stopped shaking from the left.

I was crying. I hated that I was crying, that my face was wet, that he could see it. The bars sat heavy in my flesh, new and alien, catching the light. He flicked one with his fingernail and I jerked, choked on my own spit, felt the cement grind against my shins as I tried to curl inward and failed.

"Good," he said. "Now the tongue."

I shook my head violently. The gag was a ball of cloth tied tight, stretching my jaw, making my mouth into a hole he could work with. He untied it slowly, methodically, and when I tried to bite him he was already holding my jaw in one hand, his fingers pressing into the hinges, forcing me open.

"Riley," he said, his voice dropping into something almost gentle, almost fatherly. "You can do this easy or you can do this hard. But you're doing it."

He clamped my tongue with something metal that tasted like pennies. I gagged immediately, reflexively, and he waited, holding the clamp while I retched around it, while tears streamed down my temples and into my ears. He didn't move until I went still, until the shaking became trembling became submission.

"See?" he said. "You just needed a moment."

The first needle went through the left side of my tongue, just behind the ridge. I heard it more than felt it at first, a wet pop as it broke through the muscle, and then the pain arrived, bright and shocking, connected to my throat, my gag reflex, the parts of me that controlled air and swallowing and survival. He pushed the bar through horizontally, screwed the ball tight against the side of my tongue, and I felt the weight of it sitting there like a stone.

"One more," he said. "Side by side. This is the important part."

I tried to beg. My tongue was swelling around the new metal, my words coming out thick and bloody. He clamped the right side of my tongue, parallel to the first, and I gagged so hard I thought I would vomit. He held me through it, patient, patient, always patient, and when I went limp from lack of air he drove the second needle through.

Two bars now. Side by side. They formed a ladder across the width of my tongue, swollen and heavy, and when he tested them with his fingers I felt the vibration in my teeth, in my jaw, in the cement that held my legs like they were already dead and buried.

"Perfect," he said. "Now the throat."

He lifted a board from the stack beside the hole. Fixed to the underside was a shaft of flesh colored silicone, curved slightly downward. It mounted to a metal bracket bolted directly into the wood, positioned so it would hang down into the pit, into my mouth, into my throat.

"Custom order," he said, holding the board up so I could see the veins, the ridge of the head, the way it glistened with lubricant that smelled like industrial silicone. "Took six weeks to get the curve right. See, it needs to sit in your throat without blocking air. Needs to let you breathe through your nose while it rests there. While it moves."

I understood then. I tried to scream and the sound came out as a wet gurgle because my tongue was too full of metal to shape words, because my throat was already preparing to receive what he was holding.

He positioned the head against my lips. It was warm, body temperature, and that was worse than if it had been cold. It felt alive. It felt like surrender.

"Open," he said.

I kept my teeth clenched. He reached down with his free hand and twisted the left nipple bar. The pain was bright and electric and my mouth opened in a gasp and he pushed forward, past my teeth, past the bars in my tongue, sliding along the metal until the head caught on the back piercing and he had to push harder, had to force my throat to open around him, had to make me take it.

I gagged. The reflex was unstoppable, my throat trying to reject the intrusion, and every time I swallowed it pulled him deeper. He kept pushing, feeding the shaft past my tongue bars, and I felt them click against the underside of the shaft, felt how they would hold it in place, how I couldn't push it out even if I had the strength, even if I wasn't drowning in my own spit.

The base seated against my lips. My mouth was full, stretched, the corners cracking. I couldn't close my jaw. The dildo held me open, held me ready, and I could feel how the board above would control it, how every shift of the wood would shift the shaft inside me.

The shaft slid deeper as gravity took it, seating fully in my throat, and then the board was covering my face, cutting off the light, turning my world into the smell of wood and silicone and my own fear.

"Test run," he said.

The rest of the boards went on covering my body. The weight pushed onto my chest, the nipple bars catching, pressing into my flesh.

I heard the first screw go in. The vibration traveled through the board, through the shaft, into my throat. Then the second screw. The boards were fixed now, part of the floor, and I was fixed beneath it with my mouth full and my arms and legs in stone.

Then I heard his footsteps above me.

He walked the length of the room, testing the floor, and when he stepped on the board that covered my face I felt the wood flex. Just a fraction of an inch. Just enough. The shaft moved with it, thrusting deeper into my throat as his weight pressed down, then sliding back when he lifted his foot. I choked around it, gagged, and the sound was muffled by the wood, by the shaft filling my mouth, by the fact that I was becoming part of the architecture.

He walked back and forth. Each step made the board dip and rise, dip and rise, and the shaft fucked my throat in that same rhythm, slow and mechanical, powered by his casual pacing. I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. I could hear the wet sounds of my own submission, the slap of silicone against my tongue bars, the way my throat tried to swallow around the intrusion every time he stepped down.

I tried to buck but the cement held me still, held me open, held me exactly where he wanted me. Above me, the house sounded normal. I could hear the refrigerator hum. I could hear a car pass on the street. I could hear Mark walk back and forth, back and forth, and every time he crossed the room the board flexed and the shaft punched my throat and I choked and swallowed and choked again.

His footsteps moved away. I lay in the dark, and I understood finally that the bag of cement in the corner wasn't a threat. It was a promise. It was the next step if I didn't play nice.

I spent hours trying not to drown in my own spit. Every swallow pulled the shaft deeper. The dark was teaching me that I was no longer Riley.

3: The First Time

I learned the sound of 2 a.m.

It was different from midnight, different from the phantom footsteps of neighbors coming home from bars, different from the house settling. It was the sound of Mark being deliberate.

The boards came up only slightly and the air hit my face, cold and sharp. I had been sucking on the shaft for hours, my tongue working around it instinctively, swallowing the spit that pooled because if I did not swallow I would drown. The side by side bars in my tongue clicked against the silicone every time I moved, a constant reminder that the dildo was locked in place, that I could not push it out, that my mouth belonged to him now.

"Quiet night?" he asked.

I could not answer. The shaft still partially filled my throat, my lips stretched around it. I looked up at him with eyes that felt swollen, crusted. He had not given me water since the install. My throat was raw from the gagging, from the swallowing, from the way the board above me flexed every time he walked across the living room to go to bed.

He reached down, lifted the board away and the shaft slid out of my throat with a wet sound that made me want to die. My jaw hung open, unhinged, saliva spilling down my chin onto my chest. I coughed, gasped, sucked in air that tasted like freedom and immediately missed the fullness.

"Tube first," he said.

He had a system. A plastic tube for water, thick and medical, that he threaded past my tongue bars until it hit the back of my throat. I swallowed reflexively, felt the cold water hit my empty stomach, and I realized I was starving. I had not eaten since the cookout. I could not remember the taste of food.

Then the food tube. Chalky and sweet, pumped slowly into me while he held my jaw open with one hand. I swallowed and swallowed and hated that I was grateful, hated that my body accepted his care, hated that I was alive because he allowed it.

He wiped my face with a warm cloth. Under the chin, around the mouth, gentle as a father with a sick child. He removed the other boards and then moved lower. He wiped there too, efficient and clinical, and I flinched because I was bare, because the air was cold, because his fingers were warm.

"One noise," he said, the words rhythmic as prayer. "One fight. I fill the rest."

He nodded at the bag in the corner. I could smell the cement dust even from here, could see the grey powder waiting to finish the job, to pour over my chest and shoulders and face, to leave only the tube for breathing and the shaft for use. The threat sat in my head like a stone, heavier than the bars in my tongue.

He set the cloth aside. He looked at my mouth, hanging open, jaw trembling from being stretched so long. He looked at the shaft he had mounted to the board, now wet and gleaming in the dim light.

"Open wider," he said.

I did not move. I could not. My jaw was locked, cramped, disobedient.

He reached down and touched my clit.

I jerked. The cement held my legs still but my hips bucked, my spine arched, my mouth opened wider in a gasp I could not control. He touched me again, feather light, circling, and I felt heat rush to the place he touched, felt my body betray me with wetness, with need, with the terrible instinct to arch into his hand.

"Good girl," he said.

He touched me until I was breathing hard, until my nipples ached where the bars had been pressed against the wood, until I was rocking my hips in tiny motions, the only motion the cement allowed. Then he stopped. I almost whimpered.

He positioned himself above my face. He was hard, real flesh, different from the silicone that had filled me for hours. He smelled like soap and sawdust and something darker, something male.

"I'm going to use your throat now," he said. "Not the toy. Me. If you bite, I pour the bag. If you gag too loud, I pour the bag. If you do not swallow every drop, I pour the bag."

I nodded. I hated that I nodded, that I was agreeing, that I was participating in my own use. But I nodded.

He pushed into my mouth slowly. He was thick, thicker than the dildo, and the angle was different, alive, demanding. He slid past my tongue bars and I felt them catch on his shaft, felt the metal drag against his skin, and he groaned, actually groaned, the first sound I had heard him make that was not calm.

"Those bars," he breathed. "Those perfect fucking bars."

He went deeper. My throat opened for him, trained by the hours of silicone, ready for him, wet for him. I gagged and swallowed around him and he pushed deeper still, until his hips pressed against my face, until I could not breathe, until my nose was buried in the hair at the base of his cock and he was all the way in, all the way down, using my throat the way he had promised.

He moved slowly at first. Drawing out, sliding past the bars, pushing back in. Then faster. My tongue bars slid against him with every thrust, a rhythm that matched the wet sounds of my throat. I could feel my own heartbeat in my clit, throbbing, desperate.

He reached down with one hand and touched me again while he fucked my mouth.

The fucked up part of me wanted it and I came.

It was not pleasure, not exactly. It was overload, panic, submission, the feeling of being completely owned and the shock of his fingers on my clit while he used my throat. I convulsed, my whole body shaking against the cement, my throat tightening around him as I came, and he groaned louder and pushed deeper and I felt him swell, felt the pulse as he emptied into my stomach, bypassing my mouth entirely, shooting straight down my throat while I was still spasming around him.

He stayed there until he was soft. Then he pulled out slowly, watching my face, watching the way I gasped, the way I licked my lips, the way I could not meet his eyes.

"Good girl," he said again.

He cleaned me again. Wiped between my legs where I was wet and swollen, wiped my mouth where his cum had spilled, wiped my chest where my own arousal had beaded on my skin. Then he lifted the board with the dildo attached and positioned it above my face.

"No," I whispered. My voice was ruined, raspy.

"Yes," he said.

He lowered it into my mouth. The shaft slid past my tongue bars, locked into place, filled my throat again. I gagged around it, adjusted, swallowed, and it was deeper than before, as if my throat had learned to accept it, had been trained to want the fullness.

He screwed the board down. The weight pressed on my nipple bars. The darkness returned.

I lay there tasting him and the silicone and my own orgasm, feeling the shaft in my throat, knowing that he would walk across the floor tomorrow and the board would flex and I would gag and swallow and maybe, maybe, I would come again with my father's friend walking above me, using me, owning me.

I kept thinking of the cement bag in the corner. I knew now that I would do anything to keep him from opening it. Anything at all.

4: The Slow Breaking

Time stopped being measured in hours. It became footsteps. It became the number of times the board flexed above my face before the sun came up. It became the rhythm of the dildo moving in my throat, the wet click of my tongue bars against silicone, the swallowing.

I spent those first days trying to push it out. My tongue would probe at the shaft, the two bars side by side straining to force the intrusion backward, to eject it from my throat. I would gag deliberately, violently, trying to trigger my reflex hard enough to dislodge it. Every time I pushed, the shaft would only go deeper, and I would choke on my own spit, and I would learn again that fighting made the drowning come faster.

I learned to stop fighting the physical sensation and started fighting the panic instead. I would lie in the dark and count my heartbeats, trying to slow them, trying to accept the fullness in my throat, the weight of the board on my chest, the cement holding my arms and legs in their permanent grip. I told myself I was still Riley. I told myself I was still human. I told myself my step-father was looking for me.

The footsteps above would flex the board and the shaft would move and I would gag and I would hate myself for gagging, for making noise, for being weak.

I stopped wasting energy on resistance. My body learned first, as bodies always do. I started listening for the particular creak of the door, the specific cadence of his footsteps in the hall. When I heard him coming at 2 a.m., I would start working my tongue around the shaft before he even lifted the boards. Not because I wanted it. Because it hurt less if I was already wet, if my throat was already relaxed.

He noticed. Of course he noticed.

"You are learning," he said one night when he removed the board and found me already swallowing around the shaft, my throat muscles milking it in the rhythm he had taught me through the floor above. "Good girls get rewards."

He touched my clit while he fed me through the tube that night. I came hard, humping against his fingers like an animal. I hated him. I hated myself more. But I came.

I started anticipating the flex of the board. When I heard footsteps approaching the spot above my face, I would hollow my throat, dropping my palate, creating space. The shaft would slide deeper with the weight of the step, but instead of triggering my gag reflex, I would swallow around it, using the side by side bars as guides, letting them drag along the underside of the silicone, creating friction that I could control. I could not push it out, but I could move with it. I could ride it.

The first time I came from the footsteps alone, I wept afterward. I lay in the dark with the shaft filling my throat and tears running into my ears and I hated him with a purity that felt like love. He had not touched me. He had simply walked across his living room to get a drink of water, and the floor had flexed, and the dildo had moved, and I had arched against my cement restraints and orgasmed like I was designed for it.

He started being cruel in new ways.

He would invite people over. Just one or two friends, men from work, guys from the hardware store. I would hear them talking about lumber prices, about the game, about their wives, and I would hear Mark walk them across the living room, positioning them, guiding them to stand right above me.

"Right here is where I am thinking of putting the new couch," he would say, and the man would shift his weight, and the board would dip, and the shaft would punch into my throat, and I would swallow around it, and I would come silently, my body convulsing under the floor while two men discussed fabric samples.

He started timing it on purpose. He would wait until he heard a car pass on the street, or a neighbor's door slam, or any sound that meant someone was awake in the world above. Then he would step on the board with one foot, forcing the dildo to move in my throat.

Other times he would leave my lower half uncovered while kneeling on the board over my throat in rhythm with his fingers on my clit, making me associate the footsteps with the orgasm, making me need the footsteps to come.

It worked because I stopped pretending I hated the orgasms. When he lifted the boards and I saw his hand moving toward my crotch, I would open my throat before he even touched me, would start swallowing around the shaft in anticipation, would feel myself getting wet before his fingers made contact. My body had learned the pattern. My head followed after.

5: The Party

Time was difficult to track under the floor. I think a few months had gone by.

I still hated him. I hated him when I heard his truck pull into the driveway at the end of the day. I hated him when I heard him talking on the phone to my step-dad, saying he was sure I would turn up, saying kids just needed space sometimes. I hated him when he lowered the fresh board over my face each morning and I felt grateful for the darkness because it meant I could stop performing, stop being good, stop trying to earn the next orgasm.

But I came. I came when he wanted me to come. I came when the footsteps hit the right spot.

I was no longer Riley. I was the wet sounds under the floor. I was the rhythm of the house. I was the thing that swallowed and came and waited for the next footstep, the next flex of the board, the next time he would touch me and make me real again for a few minutes before the darkness returned.

An unknown time after that, weeks, months, I couldn't tell anymore, I heard door open at the usual time, but he did not lift the boards immediately. He stood above me, his weight making the board dip slightly, making the shaft move in my throat in that way I had learned not to fight. I swallowed around it, waiting, my tongue working automatically to keep the wet sounds down.

"People are coming Saturday," he said. His voice came through the wood muffled but clear. "Your step-father will be here. You will be quiet. You already know what happens if you are not."

I felt my heart rate spike, felt my throat tighten around the shaft, felt the panic I had not felt in weeks. My step-father. The word did not mean what it used to. It meant footsteps. It meant weight. It meant the board flexing above my face while I choked on silicone and tried not to make noise.

The board lifted. Light blinded me. He looked down at me with the calm that never cracked, the patience that had become more terrifying than any shouting ever could.

"Prep starts tomorrow night," he said. "You need to be ready."

He came down after midnight on Friday. The house above was silent, dark. He lifted the boards away. The shaft slid out of my throat and I coughed, gasped, felt the emptiness like loss.

After all the boards were gone and I lay there exposed, my body pale and streaked with dust.

He cleaned me first. Warm water, soap, cloths moving over my cement trapped legs, my hips, my stomach. He was thorough, gentle, checking my skin for sores, for marks, for anything that might make noise tomorrow. He oiled my shoulders, my breasts, the insides of my thighs so I would not chafe.

Then he checked the piercings. My nipple craved the touch. He twisted them and I gasped. He checked my tongue, the two bars side by side. He tested them with his finger, felt how they caught, how they held.

He positioned a new board, one with a longer shaft, thicker, mounted the same way but designed to sit deeper, to move more with each step, to be felt more intensely.

"Open," he said.

I opened. I did not fight anymore. The new shaft slid past my tongue bars, locked behind them, sank into my throat until my lips sealed around the base. It was deeper than before. I could feel it deep in my chest, the place that made my eyes water automatically, that made swallowing a conscious act of submission.

He lowered the next board. The weight pressed on my nipple bars, fresh pain and pressure. He screwed it down.

More boards swallowed me in darkness. Then I felt it. Something hard pushing up between my legs from above, something attached to the board itself, positioned tight against my clit. It rested there, a threat and a promise, ready to grind against me with every step he took.

"For motivation," he said.

He walked the length of the room once. The board flexed with each step. The shaft moved in my throat, sliding with the wood, fucking me in rhythm with his casual pacing. I gagged once, then controlled it, then rode it, my tongue working, my throat open. The hard piece pressed against my clit with each flex, a tease, a promise, a threat.

He stepped off. The house went silent. I lay in the dark and listened to my own heartbeat and tasted silicone and knew that tomorrow my step-father would walk on me.

Saturday evening. The doorbell rang.

I heard them arrive, heard the shuffle of shoes, the clink of bottles, voices rising in greeting. I heard my father's laugh first, that bark I had grown up hearing, and my throat tightened around the shaft, my body going rigid with a terror that felt like arousal.

Mark had positioned a table with snacks next to my body. My face was directly in the traffic pattern, the place where people would stand to talk, to drink, to shift their weight from foot to foot.

The first wave of footsteps hit.

I had thirty seconds to decide. Fight or ride. I rode.

The first guest was heavy, a man with boots who stood right above my chest discussing the stock market. The board dipped. The shaft slid deeper. I hollowed my throat, swallowed around it, felt the side by side bars click against the silicone ridge. The board and its addition pressed against my clit with the weight of his stance. I was wet instantly, shamefully, my body ready for what my mind screamed against.

More footsteps. A cluster gathered above me, three or four people, shifting, talking about the weather, about a game, about someone named Janet who was getting divorced. Every shift of weight drove the dildo, made it move in tiny thrusts, incessant, mechanical, powered by their casual conversation. My nipples caught on the wood above them, the bars pressing into my flesh with each flex.

I worked my tongue around the shaft, keeping it wet, keeping it moving, trying to minimize the sounds that might carry through the floor. I could hear my own wetness, the obscene slick sounds of my throat accepting the intrusion, and I prayed the voices above were loud enough to cover it.

Someone dropped a bottle.

The vibration slammed through the boards, into the shaft, into my throat. Cold liquid fell through the cracks into my body. The shock triggered something, some wire between panic and pleasure that he had installed in me over weeks of conditioning. I came. I came silently, my body convulsing in the floor, my throat spasming around the silicone, the nub grinding against my clit as the board shook with the impact. I swallowed the scream, swallowed it like I swallowed everything now, and rode the wave while people laughed above me about butterfingers and cheap glassware.

The footsteps moved. I lay there shaking, my body humming, my mind counting.

Then I heard the couch springs. My step-father’s voice.

I could hear the scuff of his shoes, could smell the leather, could almost see the worn heels he had worn to my high school graduation. He was talking about me.

"Haven't heard from her in a bit," he said. His voice was clear as a bell through the wood. "You know how kids are. Off with friends. Probably met some boy."

Mark answered from above my chest, his weight making the shaft punch deep, making me gag silently, making the nub press hard against my clit. "She will turn up," he said. "They always do."

I could hear both of them. The shaft never stopped moving. My father shifted, crossing his legs, and the board flexed and I swallowed and I came again, silently, tears running into my ears, hating myself, hating him, hating that my body was rewarding me for this.

The party went on. Music got louder. People danced. The floor became a constant pump, a rhythm of thrusts as feet moved across the boards, as weight shifted, as the living room filled with life and noise and my father's voice saying my name, saying he was sure I was fine, saying kids needed space.

I lost count of the orgasms. I lost count of the footsteps. I entered that ugly void where my body just took it and my head counted how many people had walked on me tonight. Twenty. Thirty. The same spot, over and over, flexing the board, moving the shaft, grinding the little extension against me.

Midnight. Mark decided to play with me.

I heard him pause right above my hips where the boards covered me. He stepped on it. His full weight on the wood and I felt the hard nub mounted beneath press down against my clit, grinding it flat, pinning me under his sole.

Then he started to work his foot.

Back and forth. Small movements, shifts of his weight from heel to toe, making the board flex and rock against me. The nub dragged across my clit with each motion, grinding it, working it, the pressure relentless and mechanical. I could hear the floorboards creak with his balance, could hear the guests talking mere feet away, could hear my father's voice rise in a laugh while Mark used his foot to fuck me with the same patience he used for everything else.

I came in thirty seconds. My body convulsed in my little hiding spot, my hips bucking uselessly. He kept working his foot through the orgasm, dragging it out, making me ride the sensitivity until I was trembling, wrecked, silent tears running into my ears.

He shifted his weight off. The pressure lifted. I heard him adjust his pants as he went to get another beer.

I lay there shaking, my body wrecked, my mind blank, the shaft moving gently now with the remaining footsteps, the aftershocks making me twitch.

After everyone left, he waited an hour. I heard him cleaning upstairs, putting bottles in bins, moving furniture.

He lifted the boards. The shaft slid out and I gasped, my jaw hanging open, my throat raw. Light hit me, harsh and sudden.

I was covered in spit, tears, sweat, the evidence of my own betrayal. My hair was matted. I looked up at him with eyes that had forgotten how to be human.

He did not give me time to recover. He positioned himself above my face, his cock out, hard and real.

"You were perfect," he said. "No one had a clue. Your father stood right here and drank my scotch and talked about his little step-daughter while you came under his feet."

He pushed into my mouth. No warmup, no gentleness. He used my throat raw, using the wetness the party had created, the training I had accepted. I swallowed around him automatically, my body performing for him, my tongue working the underside like I had been taught.

"Next time," he said, his voice tight, his hips moving faster, "I might invite more people. Might have music and dancing. See how many times you can come before you pass out."

He came in my throat, pulsing, hot, different from the silicone, alive. I swallowed every drop. I did not think about refusing. I did not think about the bag of cement in the corner. I only thought about being good, about earning the next breath, about surviving.

He pulled out. He wiped my face with his thumb. He looked at me with something like pride.

"Good girl," he said.

He lowered the board with the shaft attached. It slid into my mouth, filled my throat again. He screwed it down. The darkness returned.

I lay there tasting him and the wood and the party and the fact that I had come with my step-father standing six inches from my face, talking about how worried he was, how much he missed me, how I would turn up eventually.

The house settled. The refrigerator hummed. I was part of the house now, and the house was full of ghosts, and I swallowed around the shaft and waited for the next footstep, the next party, the next time I would prove how good I could be.