Page 24 of Filled

She nods, all that blonde fly-away hair sticking to her temples, and we start the continuous pummel. Hand over, hand under. Hand over, hand under. Our forearms slide. Our chests stay locked. The rhythm is hypnotic.

She gets sloppy on the seventh cycle. Her hand goes too high, and I catch her elbow to correct it, and as I’m pulling her arm back down she steps in to recover her base, too far in, and her thigh slots back between mine.

She gasps.

It’s small. Soft. The tiniest sound. But it’s a gasp, and her hand fists in the back of my T-shirt, and her forehead drops against my chest for one suspended second.

“Sorry. Sorry, Daddy, I?—”

The word lands like a punch.

I go absolutely still.

She goes absolutely still.

Her fingers are still curled in my shirt. Her breath is hot against my sternum. The word is just hanging there in the air between us, and I can feel the exact second it registers for her, the way she locks up, the way her head jerks back from my chest like I’ve burned her.

“Coach.Coach.Sorry. I. Shit, I don’t know why I… That came out wrong, I…”

“Reset.”

My voice sounds foreign to my own ears.

She stares at me, lips parted, eyes wide. There’s panic behind them. What she just called me, she didn’t mean to, and now she’s looking at me like she’s waiting for me to tell her to get her stuff and get out.

I should. I should send her to a different coach. I should walk away from her right now and never put my hands on her again.

Instead I roll my shoulders, set my jaw, and say it again. Steady. Calm. Coach voice. The voice I’ve used for fifteen years.

“Reset, Fisher. Same drill. Let’s go.”

“I—”

“It’s a slip of the tongue. People get tired. Move on.”

She watches me for another long second. I keep my face carved out of granite. I keep my hands loose at my sides. I keep my breathing even, even though my chest is doing something complicated and my cock is throbbing against the seam of my shorts and that word,Daddy,is on a loop in the back of my skull, playing over and over in her breathy, broken voice.

She nods. Slow.

“Yes, Coach.”

The correction is deliberate. She wants me to hear it.

Christ.

We finish the drill. Then we move to the cage and I have her work the fence, and I keep three feet between us at all times, and I run her until she’s gasping. Not because she needs the conditioning. Because I need her to be too tired to talk about it.

She is. By the time I call it, she’s bent at the waist, hands on her knees, sweat pooling at the hollow of her throat. She straightens up, drags her forearm across her brow, and the the way her breasts are barely contained in her sports bra nearly kills me.

“Good work,” I say.

“Yeah?” she asks.

“You held up well. The pummel transitions need polish but the fundamentals are clean.”

She nods. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the cage floor.

“Coach—”