Warren had learned to sit still in boardrooms the way other men learned to breathe in them—automatically, without thinking, the body doing what the body had to do while the mind went somewhere else. But sitting still had become something else this morning. Sitting still was now a discipline. Sitting still was now the whole trick.

The mahogany was cool under his palms. He had both hands flat on it, fingers spread, the way he'd done for fifteen years of quarterly reviews and merger talks and the hundred small performances of composure that made up a career. The wood had a faint sheen from the polish the cleaning crew applied at four in the morning, and it reflected the ceiling lights in soft elongated smears, and he watched those smears and counted them and did not move.

Inside him, the plug pulsed.

Slow. Deep. Timed to the breath he was trying very hard not to think about. Inhale—pulse. Exhale—pulse. The rhythm wasn't his. He'd spent the weekend learning that it wasn't David's either, not really, not anymore. It had started answering to something else. It had learned him. Every breath he took, the device took with him, and every exhale it gave back as a small warm swell low in his body, and there was nothing he could do about it in a room full of men in suits.

He had tried, on the elevator up, to find the interval. To hold his breath and see if it would skip. It hadn't. It had waited—patient, indifferent—and pulsed the moment his lungs opened again, as if the pulse and the breath were the same event, as if they had always been the same event.

"—so if we're looking at the trailing twelve on the combined entity, the multiple compresses to something in the neighborhood of eleven point four."

Roger Kessler, the managing director, was at the head of the table with a laser pointer and a chart on the screen behind him, and he had the particular enthusiasm of a man who had been waiting three weeks to say a number out loud. Eleven point four. He said it again. He said it a third time, in case anyone had missed it the first two.

The air conditioning hummed its dry hum. Thirty floors below, a siren cut through the canyon of buildings and faded west, and Warren tracked it without meaning to, the way he tracked every exit and every siren now, the way his body had decided on its own that the world was a place you had to keep an eye on.

He was in the navy Zegna. The one with the half-canvas shoulder that made him look broader than he was. The Hermès tie—the orange-and-brown one Claire had given him for their fifth anniversary—was knotted tight against his throat, and beneath the knot, beneath the collar of the dress shirt, the collar David had locked on him three weeks ago sat flush against his skin, hidden, patient, a small weight he could not stop feeling.

The plug pulsed.

He shifted his weight in the leather chair, just slightly, just enough to redistribute the pressure, and the motion sent a slow bloom of warmth up through his pelvis and into his lower back, and he set his jaw and looked at the chart on the screen and read the revenue line and the cost line and the synergy assumptions, and none of it meant anything, none of it stayed, because the plug pulsed again and the meaning went out of the room like air out of a tire.

"Warren."

He looked up. Roger had turned from the screen and was looking at him, the laser pointer resting against his palm, and around the table the other analysts had swiveled their heads in the slow coordinated way of men who were glad the question had gone to someone else.

"You ran the comps on the last one. What are we looking at on the leverage side?"

Warren opened his mouth.

The plug pulsed.

It wasn't a hard pulse—it never was, not when he was dressed, not when he was out in the world. It was the slow deep one, the one that felt almost like a hand cupped around something warm, the one that could pass for a muscle twitch or a bad chair if you didn't know. But he knew. He knew with his whole body. And the knowing arrived at the exact moment he needed his voice, the way it had arrived at the elevator, the way it had arrived in the taxi, the way it had arrived when he'd shaken hands with the associate who'd held the door for him, and he had to grip the edge of the table with his left hand and let the right one stay flat and say the words anyway.

"Four point eight turns on the pro forma. Five point one if you strip the capitalized software."

The words came out smooth. They always did. That was the thing nobody at this table would ever know—that the voice he used in this room, the measured banker's voice, the one that had closed the Meridian deal and the Ridgeway deal and a dozen others, was a costume. It sat on top of him like the tie and the suit and the Hermès loafers, and underneath it there was nothing but breath and pulse and the small blue light blinking in the dark between his legs, and the fact that he could say four point eight turns while all of that was happening was either a skill or a sickness and he had stopped trying to tell the difference.

Roger nodded. "Good. Keep it there." He turned back to the screen. "Now—the second piece of this. If we're going to take the leverage up, we need to think about the covenant package, because the last thing we want is—"

Warren let him go. He let the voice drone on about EBITDA multiples and covenant packages and the difference between a springing lien and a hard lien, and he let his eyes go to the middle distance above the screen, and he breathed, and the plug breathed with him, and he thought about the phone.

It was face-down on the wood, three inches from his right hand. It had been face-down since he'd come into the room, since he'd set it there deliberately, screen to the mahogany, the way he set it every morning now—because he had learned that the screen could do things to him, and he had learned that he could not be trusted with it in a room full of men. The dark glass reflected the ceiling lights in two small circles. He looked at those circles and did not touch the phone.

It buzzed.

Once. A single short vibration, muffled against the wood, and the circles of light on the glass trembled and settled. Around the table, nobody looked. Nobody ever looked. A man's phone buzzed in a boardroom and the world kept moving, and Warren kept his hand flat on the table and his eyes on the screen and his breath even and the plug pulsed and he did not turn the phone over.

He counted. One. Two. Three. The way he'd counted the ceiling lights in David's penthouse. The way he'd counted the seconds on the terrace. The way he counted everything now, because counting was the only thing that kept the body from doing what the body wanted to do.

"—and on the debt side, we're looking at a term loan B, seven-year, with a one percent amortization, which should give us plenty of room to—"

The phone buzzed again.

Two short vibrations this time, close together, and Warren's thumb moved before he told it to—a small involuntary drift toward the edge of the phone, the way a tongue moves toward a sore tooth. He stopped it. He put his hand back flat on the wood and looked at Roger and nodded at something Roger had said, and Roger kept talking, and the plug pulsed, and Warren counted.

Four. Five. Six.

He thought about the phone. He thought about it the way he'd thought about the closet in his apartment, the one David had opened, the one with the pink latex dress inside. He thought about it the way he'd thought about the wall of photographs, the ones from nights he didn't remember, the ones where he was already Willow and he was already kneeling and he was already someone's. He thought about it the way he thought about everything now—with a kind of hunger that had no bottom, that had stopped being a hunger and become a climate.

The plug pulsed.

And this time—this time it was different. This time, behind his eyes, there was a picture. Not a memory. Not a thought he'd formed. A picture that arrived whole, the way the pictures had arrived all weekend, the way the device had learned to send them. David's hands. David's cock, thick and flushed, the vein along the underside that Warren had traced with his tongue a hundred times. The picture sat behind his eyes for a full second, sharp and specific and warm, and Warren's mouth went wet at the thought of it, and he had to swallow and blink and look at the revenue line on the screen and remind himself where he was.

The boardroom. The mahogany. The men in suits. The tie against his throat.

He was Warren Hartley. He was thirty-four years old. He was an investment banker in Midtown Manhattan and he was sitting in a boardroom in a navy Zegna suit and he was about to answer a question about covenant packages, and none of that was true, none of it was the truth of him, the truth of him was the picture behind his eyes and the plug in his body and the collar under his shirt and the key on the ring that David had given him and the blonde wig in the bag in his closet and the six-inch heels he'd learned to walk in and the small blue light blinking in the dark between his legs.

"Warren?"

Roger again. Looking at him again. And this time there was something in Roger's face—not suspicion, exactly, but attention, the specific attention of a man who has asked a question and is waiting for an answer and has noticed that the answer is not coming as fast as it should.

Warren's hands were still flat on the table. His thumb had drifted toward the phone again, and he pulled it back. The plug pulsed. He could feel the cage pressing against the inside of his briefs, the flat inverted thing that had replaced the first cage, the one with the tube, the one that made him feel every second of every day like a thing that had been put away. He could feel the lock of the collar against his collarbone, a small hard weight under the dress shirt, hidden, patient, his.

The air conditioning hummed.

The siren had stopped.

And on the polished mahogany, three inches from his right hand, the phone sat face-down, dark, and the two small circles of ceiling light on its glass did not move, and Warren looked at Roger and breathed, and the plug breathed with him, and somewhere behind his eyes the picture of David's cock was still warm, still there, still waiting the way Willow was always waiting.

"Sorry," Warren said. "Say that again."

Roger said it again. Something about the covenant package. Something about the springing lien. And Warren listened—he actually listened, he made himself listen, he made himself be the man in the suit—and the plug pulsed slow and deep and timed to his breath, and the phone lay dark on the wood, and the second buzz had not been answered, and the photo waiting behind the screen had not yet been seen, and the managing director was looking at him, and the deal talk went on.