It kept bugging Pete about that business card she’d gotten from the guy. If it hadn’t been blank she might have just tossed it, because who gave a shit, but as it was it seemed like he’d deliberately presented her a mystery. Why hand a girl a blank card? Who did that? Was it some kind of a weird negging thing? Maybe there was a message there in lemon juice. She felt like she was missing something about it and she couldn’t really formulate what.

And now she’d lost the thing. She stood at the bathroom mirror fighting the urge to berate herself. She hadn’t once taken the card out of her bag since she put it in there, she knew it for a fact, and all the same it was gone. Helplessly Pete pawed yet again through the pile of non-card-containing crap she’d dumped out next to the sink. She felt an unaccountable panic welling up and tried to remind herself to breathe.

If Cart had been just a fraction less of a needy bitch. Pete knew she’d been procrastinating the last couple days but absolutely she meant to say something before work this morning. Hell she’d gotten herself up ahead of time for it. And there was CeeCee lolling on the couch feeling dramatic, somehow even nakeder than usual, as soon as Pete came in the room she started whining about how nobody loved her, nobody ever paid attention to her. Apparently she had a free day and it was a crisis. “I haven’t seen DeeDee in like forever, now you’re leaving, maybe I should just go out in the street and start turning tricks” kind of thing. Hungry hungry pussy, Dash called her once. Pete had to fuck her just to shut her up, and then even if she hadn’t forgotten about the card again there wasn’t time to do anything but wipe down and scramble for the bus.

Pete hadn’t seen Dash either. Like, “didn’t come home the last couple nights” hadn’t seen. And not the first time. She sighed, and with her forearm tried to sweep the pile of stuff on the counter back into her bag. Half made it, generously. As she bent down to pick up the bits that didn’t she felt the whole miserable weight of things come down on her all at once, the bag thudded to the floor and Pete hung her head and started to cry.

They were losing DeeDee. She hadn’t admitted it to herself before but she’d known. It was obvious. And she didn’t know how to talk about it. That’s all the card was, it was a token, something she could put in front of Cart just so they’d have a topic. There was so much weirdness and silence between them all about their relationship,— and especially over the dude and how they’d all met and whatever his deal was; it had all got tangled up in her head, the card, what she was sensing now about Dash, the precarity of the whole delibery girls thing. The dude wasn’t relevant. His fucking mystery card wasn’t relevant. Yet misplacing it felt to Pete like she’d fucked up for good, like without even knowing it she’d blown their last chance.

It was no help at all that she still had half a shift left to go. Crouched beside the open bag, she tried to calm her breathing and get her customer face back on. She thought she’d picked up all the stuff but then after a moment noticed a pale something on the floor next to the trash can. She reached for it. It was a neatly torn rectangle of heavy paper stock, like from a business card. She wondered at it a moment, flipping it back and forth a few times, but there was nothing there, so she threw it away.

She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She hated just the sight of that stupid corporate nameplate, and felt a savage little triumph ripping her apron off and tossing it and the nameplate into the corner. The blouse was only OK, but at least it gave you an idea how her tits looked. She smoothed the fabric over them and thought about chucking her bra too, but break time was about up. She smiled. “Ready to serve,” she promised her reflection, and she was.

Her bag was in the way of the door, so Pete kicked it under the sink before turning the lock. She hung a right out of the bathroom, towards the front of the store. No one said a word. The sunlight made her blink, and it took a second for Pete to process that she was outside. She squared her shoulders and strode off down the street.

She was standing just inside the foyer of the penthouse. The party dude came in carrying a couple glasses, and Pete took one. She hadn’t undressed yet. He scanned her up and down, looking somewhat put out. “Gotta say, you’re kind of unexpected. On your way to work or coming from?”

She paused to consider. “From? I think?” she said. She drained the bourbon at one go. “I don’t know how I got here.” She handed back the glass and started to strip.

“You really shouldn’t wear a bra,” he said, setting the tumbler on a side table. “Right?” she answered, shimmying her tits at him. The thing had been chafing her something fierce, and she gave a little kick at it where it landed. Bending forward to pull her slacks down she caught a glimpse of flaccid penis through the folds of his big black robe. “And you should look into getting another gown.”

He snorted and gave her a disbelieving head shake. “Things you do remember though,” he muttered, laughing. He downed his own drink. “Alright, well, you’re here anyway,” he sighed. “Come on up.”

She walked behind him up the front stairs and into a large, chilly-looking bedroom dominated by an enormous round bed in the center, draped all in black, set on a low platform. A round mirror of the same diameter was mounted on the ceiling above it, and a circumference of pale LEDs marked the platform’s rim. For the sexy light shows that would go with your playlist of sexy beats, Pete naturally assumed. It was such a cock thrust of a bed she had to stifle a laugh.

Between the dimness of the barely-lit room and the LED shimmer below the bed Pete had some trouble adjusting her eyes. She paused not far from the door while the dude went on ahead. There were girls on the bed, kneeling there in a group, and she had just made out the cute pair of Asian chicks from before when he turned in his steps and asked her, “Hey, what happened to that bag of yours?”

There were three girls. They were facing each other, knee to knee to knee, looking up at a point about midway between the bed and the ceiling, as if they were watching something hung in the dimness there. Pete tried and failed to conjure a shape out of it.

“I don’t think I had it,” she said. Slowly the girls stuck their tongues out, all the way, their mouths wide and their faces blank, in perfect sync. They closed their mouths and then they did it again. It was mesmerizing.

Pete flashed on an image of her bag slumped sideways on the floor next to a bunch of other trash. “I think I threw it away,” she told the dude. She wasn’t sure why that would be interesting. He made a sort of grunt in reply and gave her a dissatisfied frown, then turned aside and pulled out his phone.

All three of them were wearing headphones with little cat ears on top. Pink, Pete saw as the room brightened. She came towards the bed. The girls blinked and stopped gazing up at the invisible point and reached in unison to pull their ears off, and it wasn’t till she saw the tall one of the three shake out her hair that Pete realized she was looking at Dash.

She drew in a sharp breath. “Oh,” he said, glancing up. “Right.” Absorbed in whatever he was doing with the phone, he’d wandered some way to the other side of the bed, and now he came back over. He punched at something on the screen and scowled “fucking lights” in the direction of the LEDs then dropped the phone in his robe pocket.

“I’m afraid your friend was a little naughty,” he said to Pete. The girls were facing them now, eyes hooded, hips squirming, intent on their own arousal. You could see how wet they all were. “Remember, naughty girl?” It seemed to take effort for Dash to realize he was speaking to her. “Tell her what you did.”

Dash smiled at Pete, a big, voracious smile that spread to the sisters, who were kneeling on either side of her. “Hey pal,” she said, her voice throaty, and the Asian girls echoed her, hey pal, a beat late, in the same fuck-me register. Pete felt suddenly queasy. “We were going through your purse,” the girl on the left said. “We do that sometimes,” added the one on the right.

“We told you you don’t keep good track of your tips,” Dash said. “You’re always letting them pile up in there.” Still smiling, the sisters nodded their agreement. Only Dash could have managed to scold her and confess to being a purse sneak in the same breath, except it didn’t feel to Pete like it was Dash. She wasn’t sure her deliberymate even recognized her. She stood quiet, searching for DeeDee in those dark, inward-turning eyes. The words scarcely registered.

“It’s a party trick,” he said confidingly in Pete’s ear. “I mean they aren’t really, you know—” He spread his hands out and then interlaced them back together. “Even if they think they are.” He folded his arms and took a step back. “I liked the visual of that little blonde in there. But hey, the fates have spoken, huh? You work with what comes.” From her spot off the platform it seemed to Pete that Dash towered over the other two. The dude shrugged. “It’s funny in a different way.”

The circle of LEDs flashed three times and went dark. “See if the reset took,” he murmured, fishing in his pocket for the phone. He stepped onto the platform and snapped his fingers. Dash and her new companions collapsed back onto the bed, a puddle of hands and thighs and mouth noises. “We’re gonna do a little something tonight,” he told Pete. “Got some friends coming by.” He made a wry face. “Friends. Associates, let’s say. Anyhow,” he held out a hand. “We should talk about it a bit.” Pete gave him hers, and let him pull her up.

Pete lay flat, her head and shoulders propped against the upholstered black arc that made the round bed’s headboard. The hot Asian triplets knelt in a tight, self-involved little group at the other end, having a kissing party. Watching them in the overhead mirror Pete felt suspended, like she had floated away from her own body. The girls kissed by pairs, primly and in rotation, endlessly passing the kiss between and between them till it seemed to Pete it was the kiss itself that was real, and the triplets just its mindless, compelled vehicle. All around the bed the air shimmered with rainbows. To Pete it was the hottest most magic thing she had ever seen.

The taller and whiter triplet was outfitted with a strapon. That was black too. Pete could make it out sometimes, when one of smaller girls would reach down to fondle it, bobbing lazily and intermittently in the center of the kiss like it too was something with a mind of its own. She didn’t see its size though, or the liquid gleam of its surface in the light, till the kiss broke and the triplets started crawling towards her, strapon slut in the lead. Watching the sway of the fake cock made Pete drool. She spread her legs as wide for it as she could, but the bitch only knelt there and went still, leaving just the last inch of the thing to rest maddeningly against Pete’s mons. She stared at it, whimpering and paralyzed and trying somehow to will it into her.

A sudden gravity at her side took Pete by surprise. It was the party dude, who in all the sexiness she’d kind of forgotten existed. He propped himself on his elbow next to her and stretched out. “See, this is why it’s bad for me to get bored,” he sighed. “I get fiddly.” He said the word like it had a bad taste. He was staring at the triplets with a sour look on his face, as if he saw something wrong with them.

He’s such a nice guy, Pete thought. Maybe she’d been a little guarded about him at first but he was really just a nice guy who wanted to give everybody a good time. It was a shame to see him stressed like this. “I’m breaking so many of my own rules,” he said. “Fucking trip.” He looked Pete full in the face. “I mean, you know me,— I am strictly catch-and-release, yeah?” He chopped his hand in the air to emphasize the strictness. “Strictly. Got my own business to worry about.” He scratched absently at the back of his head. “This thing though, I dunno …”

He trailed off, and Pete felt like he was waiting for her to say something. She reached for the only thing that came to mind. “The fates have spoken?”

He looked at her with something like admiration and burst out in laughter. “Thank you! The fates, exactly, yes,” he said. He gave her a wink. “Clever girl.”

The feeling she’d been of use to him made Pete warm all over, even if she didn’t know quite what it meant. She watched herself squirming her pussy beneath the not weighty enough fake cock, like she was trying to find it with her clit. The cock slut’s face was motionless and her eyes opaque. He seemed to notice what Pete was doing the same time she did. She wondered if she was being rude, teasing her pussy like this without even asking permission, but the strapon was just making her feel so fucking needy.

“Hang on,” he chuckled, reaching back behind himself. He put her phone in her hand and winked at her. “Gimme some advice. I think we’ll have better luck with you at this point than your friend up there.”

There was a text window up. Pete remembered she hadn’t brought her phone with her, and saw she was holding Dash’s. It was a draft message for CeeCee: no text but an address, one Pete couldn’t recognize. “What do you think, would she come?” he asked. “Address only, would that read like urgency, like get here, or…”

Pete saw that she'd opened the emoji keyboard. She didn’t know why she had till she looked at Dash’s favorites list. It was right there at the top. A strange, wistful feeling came over her, and her thumb hung in the air over the screen, unable to move.

He watched over her shoulder. “That’s, which one, the raspberry? Like for the Pi …” He shifted to sit himself up, then threw his head back and pointed his finger at her. “Oh, ber— I get it. Of course, yeah I get it. Cute. What’s that gonna do? Does it mean like pussy or something?”

She was sliding a little more brazenly now, more up-and-down along the dildo’s length. Some roughness on the surface caught her and she squeaked her frustration. “Just a way to say I miss my girls,” she said. She remembered when Cart made stickers out of it. She remembered the joke they had about a berry-shaped bat signal. Her thumb dropped, and the emoji dropped into the text. Her chest felt tight. “She’s been feeling neglected. She’ll come.”

He was staring hard at Pete, in a way that made her nervous. His expression was unreadable. He put his hand to her face, and wiped up from the bottom of her cheek. There was nothing sexual in the gesture. Till she felt the cool in its wake she hadn’t even known she was crying.

“Listen,” he said, his voice soft, “it’s better. Things don’t always undo so easy. We’ll chill here for a little while, have some fun with some people, it’s all gonna be good. All good. Trust me, day or two you guys won’t remember there ever was a Dash.”

Just then Pete’s clit found what it was looking for, and she groaned aloud. This time when she looked up at the strapon triplet their eyes met. It was almost like they knew one another. This chick is so going to fuck me now, she told herself. She grinned at her wickedly and the slut grinned back. “What’s a Dash?” Pete asked her, and she giggled, and they were both giggling, and as she opened to let the strapon push in at last she hefted the phone in her palm and hit send.