He mounts you on the table...

He climbs onto the table from your head-end, boots and all, and the wood complains under two adults and what is left of supper. A dish goes off the edge and breaks. He does not look at it. He takes your knees and keeps them open toward the envoy so that when he turns and settles between your thighs his back and his ass are what the other man has to look at, not his face, and the point of that is not lost on anyone still holding a cup.

The blindfold makes him arrive as weight and heat and the smell of wine on his breath. He puts himself in you in one shove that is sloppy because the table is the wrong height and the sauce under your back makes you slide, and he has to catch your hip with a hard hand before he is all the way in. You gasp into Sera’s throat. He finds a rhythm that knocks your shoulders toward the envoy and your head toward the ruined bread, missionary only in the sense that he is on you and looking down at the face he hates.

"Hold the fruit," he says, and there is no fruit left that matters, only his instruction, so you pin your palms to the wood and try not to buck when he bottoms out.

It is not a kind fuck. He uses the full length of her body as if he is reminding it who paid, and every few thrusts he turns the ring so the clit bead kicks against his stomach while he is in you. The collar ring taps the board. Your breasts move under his chest and the nipple beads catch on his coat and drag, and you make a noise you were trying to keep for later. The envoy’s chair does not move. You hear him set a cup down very carefully.

"If you are proving possession," the envoy says, court voice frayed, "you have proved it. If you are proving she is the one who ran, you have only proved you can make a copy cry."

The king does not turn around. He slaps your cheek with the open hand that is not on the ring, not as hard as the shop, hard enough that the hall hears it, and he keeps thrusting through the flinch.

"She left," he says. "This one stayed. That is the difference I required."

You try to tell him you are Charlie and the table slides and the sentence breaks, and he takes that as more of her. He hooks your knees higher so the envoy has the whole view of where he is going into you, and the wet sound of it is frank and ugly over the remaining plates. The beads will not let you stay only used. They drag you toward another finish you do not have room for, and you clamp around him without meaning to, which is the thing that finally changes his breath.

He does not last long after that. Fail is the word for how he spends it: too much, too sudden, a gush that fills you and keeps coming until it leaks around him in a warm run that finds the small of your back and the wood and then the edge of the table above the envoy’s place. He keeps himself planted and grinds through the last of it like he is trying to leave a mark the cloth cannot steal, and when he finally pulls out it follows him in a thick line that lands on your thigh and on the board and, before a steward can move, on the envoy’s cuff.

You lie there full and leaking, blind, legs still open because nobody told them to close. The king wipes himself on the hem of his own coat and stays kneeling between your knees long enough to turn the ring down to the crawl again.

"That is the first hour," he says. "She will stay on the table. If anyone licks a plate, they lick it off her." He drops off the board to the floor with a sound of boots. "We will have the cup after they change your coat. Unless you would rather keep it as evidence."

The envoy’s answer does not come at once. When it does it is longer, and it is not a joke.

"Change the coat. Leave her. I came for a border, and you have made the border look like a bedroom. I will drink your cup. I will not pretend I am clean."

You can feel him cooling on the inside of your thighs. The beads keep their small pulse. The next hour is still his to give away or keep, and you still cannot see which man is looking.