Each precise word, shaped soft and acute by Rose's lips, rakes across the last dregs of Pearl's dignity. Strips away another layer of the facade that she works so, so hard to cobble together, to make it through her daily life. Her stellar grades, her cogent mind, her graceful limbs long coached into practiced obedience: all of it gone to pieces as she thrusts her hips jerky and stuttering into the stream of water.

It's not even Rose's touch. Not even her own. No, all it's taking is the silky, indifferent patter of liquid pulsing against the tortured, sensitive throb of her clit.

And the sight of Rose, of course, in all her goddess magnificence, brimming with heated flesh and husky voice. Her body is as full and perfect unto itself as Pearl's is fragile and trembling, hunched in the corner. Rose wears her skin like the cloak of a ruler, boldly self-assured in her birthright of sexual pleasure: nothing like Pearl, who chokes hers down laced with shame and miserable joy.

But Pearl is wanted, somehow still wanted, and remembering that feels like a kind of mercy, a brutal tenderness burning under the hunger in Rose's eyes. Smouldering intent, single-mindedly bent on taking her apart.

Voiceless by command and by desire, Pearl shakes her head mutely: not sure if she's saying I don't know, or maybe turning her cheek into Rose's hand, or maybe forcing out some last faint denial, or maybe saying Please don't let me. Or maybe all of those, or maybe none. Grasping at the edges of thoughts as she tries to string together some last semblance of self-control. She's close and getting closer -- she'll have to pull back in a moment or she'll be dangerously on the edge of coming.

Begging with her eyes, she shifts her wrist, angling for just a second of relief.