The club was a block and a half from the hotel and the walk took him past a bodega with its gate half down and a man hosing the sidewalk in front of a nail salon that had closed hours ago, and Warren kept his eyes on the wet concrete and the shine of his own heels in it, cobalt over the puddles, and the doorman at the club looked up from his phone when the light caught the latex.

"Back again," the doorman said. Not a question. He was a heavy man in his sixties with a gold hoop in one ear and a windbreaker that had seen better decades, and he stepped aside and held the door with two fingers like he was holding it for a regular. "Coat check's the same. You're on the list."

Warren had not given a name at the door the first time either. He did not ask which list. The music came out through the door in a low thud that he felt in the platform of his mules before he felt it anywhere else, and he walked in and the doorman let the door swing shut behind him and the bass closed over his head.

The bar was the same bar and the stool at the end was the same stool, three down from the service well where the bartender had his back to the room and his hands full of shaker, and Warren sat down on it the way he had sat down the first time, one thigh crossed over the other, both mules hooked on the rung, his clutch on the bar under his left hand. The stool was still warm from whoever had left it. He did not move to the next one.

The bartender turned around and looked at him a beat too long and set a napkin down in front of him without being asked.

"Vodka soda," Warren said. His voice came out low and soft and he heard it the way you hear your own voice on a recording, from the outside, a stranger's voice, and the bartender nodded and went to the well and Warren put his hand flat on the bar and looked at his own nails on the wood, pink gloss, French tips, one inch past the tip of each finger, and he thought about the fact that he had painted them in the hotel bathroom an hour ago and could not remember deciding to.

He had decided to come here. That he remembered. He had stood at the window of the hotel room with the towel around his chest and the wig still in its net on the dresser and he had told himself, out loud, in the low voice he used for the man in the navy suit, that he was going to stay in tonight. That he was going to take the face off and put the suit on and be at the desk by eight. That he was a man with the ability to say no.

Then he had put the wig on.

The drink came. He wrapped his fingers around the cold glass and lifted it and the ice knocked against his teeth and he set it back down and looked at the room in the mirror behind the bar, the long mirror with the neon in it, and the room looked back at him the way it had the first time: the same crowd, the same low light, the same men in groups of two and three along the wall and at the tables, and one of them was already looking at him. He did not turn around. He watched the man in the mirror the way he watched a position on a screen, patiently, from a distance, with his hands still.

He had been in this room before. He knew what the room did. The room had put a hand on his elbow within ten minutes the first time, a man in a good suit, older, gray at the temples, who had leaned in close enough that Warren could smell his cologne and said, nice suit, and Warren had said thank you and the man had said, you don't usually dress this way when you come here, do you, darling, and Warren had not answered, and the man had run his hand down Warren's hip slow enough to feel the boning of the corset under the latex, and Warren had stood there and let him.

A different one had touched his cheek. A young one, younger than Warren, with a fade and a gold chain, who had come up on his other side and put two fingers under Warren's chin and turned his face toward the light and said, you are cute, and Warren had felt his own mouth go soft and open a little under the fingers and the young one had laughed, not unkindly, and let go and walked off, and Warren had stood at the bar with his cheek still warm and his drink untouched and his clit wet against the seam of the latex with nothing at all having happened.

That was the room. The room touched you. The room knew.

He lifted the drink again. The man who had been watching him in the mirror got up from his table and crossed the floor and Warren watched him come the whole way, unhurried, a big man in a black tee with sleeves rolled to the shoulder and forearms that said he worked with his hands, and the man stopped at Warren's shoulder and did not touch him and said, "You're the one from the video."

Warren set the glass down. The ice settled. He did not look up.

"I don't know what video you mean," he said, and his voice did the thing it did now, soft and sultry and low, a voice with the air let out of it, and the man heard it and smiled.

"Sure you don't." He leaned a forearm on the bar beside Warren's clutch, close enough that Warren could see the hair on it and the pale line where a watch had been. "You want company or you want to sit here and pretend you're deciding?"

Warren looked at him then. Mid-forties, weathered, a nose that had been broken once and set by somebody who didn't care, a wedding ring gone but the tan line still there. Not David. Nothing like David. The man was looking at Warren the way you look at something you've already bought.

"I'm deciding," Warren said.

"Okay." The man straightened up and did not move away. "I'll be at the table."

He went back to the table. Warren watched him in the mirror sit down and pick up his beer and say something to the two men with him and one of them looked over at Warren and laughed, and Warren felt the laugh land somewhere low in his stomach and stay there, warm, and he drank the rest of his vodka soda and ordered another one and did not leave.

The second drink took longer to go down. The room filled up. The music changed over to something slower and heavier and the lights dropped in the corners and Warren sat on his stool with his ankles crossed and his clutch under his hand and watched the room in the mirror and let the room watch him, and twice more in the next hour somebody came to the bar and stood too close to order a drink, and once a hand brushed the small of his back, the bare latex where the catsuit rode an inch above his hips, and he did not turn around and the hand did not stay.

He was still a man. He told himself this on the stool with the second drink half gone and the bass in the floor of the platform under his heel. He had a desk on Fifty-Second and a mortgage and a wife who had taken the condo and a suit hanging in a hotel closet two blocks away, and a man could stand up off a stool and walk out the door and be in that suit by ten and at the desk by eight and no one in the room would ever know. He had the ability. He had the switch. He could turn it off.

He turned his head and looked at the table where the man in the black tee was sitting and the man was already looking at him and raised his eyebrows, one hand loose around his beer, and Warren turned back to the bar and his thighs were wet against the latex and he had not touched his drink in ten minutes.

"Another?" the bartender said.

"No," Warren said. He put cash on the bar, more than the drinks cost, and slid off the stool, and the platform heel came down on the floor and he stood there a second with his hand on the bar and his clutch against his hip and the room tilting a little, not from the vodka, from the wanting.

He walked to the table.

The man in the black tee looked up at him and did not stand and did not offer him a chair. The two with him looked up too, and one of them was the young one with the fade and the gold chain, and he grinned at Warren and said, "Told you," to nobody in particular.

"Sit down," the man in the black tee said, and Warren sat down in the empty chair across from him, and the chair was low and Warren's knees came up high in the catsuit and the man looked at his knees and then at his face and said, "What's your name."

Warren opened his mouth to say Willow and something in him, the man in the navy suit, the one with the mortgage, put a hand up and stopped it, and he said, "Warren."

The man's face did not change. "Warren," he said, trying it out, and the young one laughed again and the man said, "Shut up, Marcus," and the young one shut up, and Warren sat very still because the name had gone through him like a cold draft under a door.

"Marcus," Warren said.

"My nephew." The man tipped his beer at the young one. "He's the one who showed me your page. He's got the subscription and everything." He drank. "So. Warren. You come in here in that and you sit at my table and you tell me your real name. What do you want."

Warren looked at his own hands on the table. Pink nails on the scarred black wood of the table, one inch past each fingertip, and under the nails the little moons of his own skin, and above them the wrist and the bare arm in the sleeve of the catsuit and the strap of the catsuit over the shoulder, and past all of that the room, the tables, the door.

"I don't know," he said. It was the truest thing he had said all week.

The man in the black tee set his beer down and leaned back in his chair and looked at Warren for a while, the way a man looks at a car he is thinking about buying, and then he said, "You want to come back to my place and find out, or you want to sit here all night and be pretty."

Marcus leaned across the table. "He's got a whole room," he said. "You should see it."

"Marcus."

"Sorry."

Warren sat with it. The room was loud and the room was dark and the room was full of men who had watched him on a screen and the man across the table had a room and a nephew with a subscription and a wedding-ring tan line and no interest in being lied to, and Warren thought about the hotel closet with the navy suit in it, and the phone in his clutch, dead or alive, he had not looked, and the desk on Fifty-Second, and the wife who had taken the condo, and the loop that was always there under everything, patient, in his father's voice and not his father's voice, saying what it always said.

He reached into the clutch and took out his phone and set it face-down on the table between them, deliberately, the way you put your keys down when you've decided to stay.

"Your place," he said.

The man in the black tee finished his beer and stood up and put a hand flat on Warren's shoulder, not on the bare skin, on the strap of the catsuit, and his palm was hot through the latex and Warren felt his whole body turn toward it before he told it to.

"Marcus. Get the car."

The car was a black SUV with a driver who did not look at Warren at all, and Marcus rode up front and the man in the black tee rode in the back with Warren and did not touch him the whole way, just sat with his arm along the top of the seat behind Warren's shoulders and his thumb moving, once, slow, along the back of Warren's neck, and Warren sat with his knees together and his clutch in his lap and watched the city go by the window, Bank Street, Hudson, the river black between the piers, and did not say anything and did not look at his phone.

The building was a warehouse conversion in the West Twenties with a freight elevator and a keypad and no doorman, and they rode up in the freight elevator with the gate rattling and Marcus holding it and the man in the black tee standing behind Warren with one hand on the small of Warren's back, thumb on the bare strip of latex above the hips, and Warren stood facing the gate and felt the thumb move and did not move away.

The apartment was one big room, brick and steel and a wall of windows with the river out past it, and a bed along the far wall, low, unmade, and along the near wall a table with things on it, and Warren looked at the table and then looked away and then looked back.

"Bathroom's through there," the man said, pointing with his chin. "Go get ready."

Warren stood in the middle of the room in his cobalt catsuit and six-inch mules with the river running black outside the window and did not move.

"Ready," he said.

"You know what I mean."

"I know what you mean." Warren's voice was very soft. "I'm not going to."

The man in the black tee looked at him for a long moment. Then he walked over to the table along the near wall and picked up a bottle, clear, with a pump top, and brought it back and set it on the bed and said, "Lie down."

Warren lay down on the bed. The mattress was firm and the sheets were clean and smelled like nothing at all, and he lay on his back with his mules hanging off the foot of the bed and his arms at his sides and looked up at the man standing over him with the river behind his head.

The man unbuttoned his jeans and pushed them down and stepped out of them and his cock came out of his shorts already hard, thick, flushed dark at the head, and Warren looked at it and felt his mouth fill and his clit leak against the latex in one motion, and the man knelt on the bed between Warren's mules and put a hand on each of Warren's knees and pushed them apart.

"Say it," he said.

"I want it."

"Say what you are."

Warren looked up at him. The loop was there under everything, patient, saying what it said, and Warren did not say what the loop said. He said, "I'm a man who wants it."

The man laughed, low, without meanness, and reached down and pulled the two strips of cobalt latex apart at the crotch where they were already parted, the seam of the catsuit open the way it was made to open, and Warren's clit lay there in the light, small and soft and wet, and the smooth hairless sack below it drawn up tight, and the man looked at it for a while and did not touch it.

"That's a shame," he said. "All that packaging for that."

Warren's face went hot. The shame came up through him the way it always did, straight to the cheeks and the throat, and under the shame the wet spread between his thighs and he felt it and the man saw him feel it and the man smiled and reached for the bottle on the bed.

The lube was cold. Two fingers of it, and the man did not warm it, and he put the fingers between Warren's legs and found his hole and pressed, and Warren's whole body jerked on the sheet and his hands came up and grabbed the man's forearm and the man did not stop, worked the fingers in slow, one then two, spreading, and Warren lay on the bed with his mules still on and his mouth open and his hands on the man's arm and his hips moving without being told to, pressing down onto the fingers, and the fingers curled and found the place and Warren made a sound he had never made in the navy suit and never made in the office and never made in his life before this week.

"There it is," the man said. "Roll over."

Warren rolled over onto his front and the man pulled his hips up off the bed with both hands, up onto his knees, his face down on the sheet and his ass in the air with the catsuit stretched across it, and the mules came off the foot of the bed and one of them hit the floor and Warren did not care, and the man knelt behind him and put the head of his cock against Warren's hole and held it there.

"You want it or you want to go home."

"I want it."

"Say please."

"Please."

The man pushed in. Warren felt the stretch of it, the wide blunt burn of it going in slow, and he put his face down into the sheet and his hands out flat on either side of his head and his ass up and open and the man went in until his hips were against Warren's ass and stopped there and let Warren feel all of it, the length of it, the fullness, the pressure low in his belly, and Warren lay there with his cheek on the sheet and his mouth open and breathed and felt his clit hanging soft and useless between his legs and dripping onto the sheet.

Then the man started to fuck him.

Slow at first, long, all the way out to the head and all the way back in, and Warren's body took it and rocked with it and the latex creaked and the bed creaked and the man's balls slapped wet against Warren's skin and Warren heard himself making the sound, the small high sound, the one that did not sound like the man in the navy suit at all, and he could not stop making it and did not want to.

"Harder," he said.

The man gave it to him harder. Both hands on Warren's hips now, pulling him back onto it, and the slap of skin came faster and Warren's face rubbed on the sheet and he reached back with one hand and put it on the man's thigh and felt the muscle there working and left it there, holding on, pink nails on the man's pale thigh, and the man drove in and the head of his cock hit the place the fingers had found and Warren's whole body lit up and he cried out into the sheet.

"You're close," the man said.

"I can't."

"You can't what."

"I can't come." Warren's voice was wrecked. "I can't, I can't, not without—" and he stopped himself, and the man heard the stop and fucked him harder for it.

"Not without what."

"Nothing."

The man pulled out. Warren felt the emptiness come down on him like a hand and he made a sound and the man turned him over onto his back on the bed and pushed his knees up and apart and put his cock back in, all at once, and Warren's legs went up over the man's shoulders and the mules were gone and the catsuit was stretched and Warren looked up at the man's face over him and the river out the window behind his head and the man put one hand flat on Warren's chest, on the breast plate, on the hard silicone nipple under the latex, and fucked him.

"You're going to come for me," the man said. "I don't care how you're built."

"I can't—"

"You're going to." He twisted the nipple through the latex and Warren's back came off the bed. "Come on."

And Warren came. He came with the man's cock in his ass and his clit soft and untouched and dripping on his own belly and no hand on it at all, came in a long rolling wave that started somewhere under the base of his spine and went through him and out of him and left him shaking on the sheet with his mouth open and his eyes wet, and the man watched his face the whole time and then pulled out and knelt over him and finished himself with his hand and came across Warren's chest, the breast plate, the latex, the throat, hot and thick, and Warren lay under it and felt it run down onto his collarbone and did not wipe it off.

The man got off the bed and went to the bathroom and the water ran. Warren lay on the bed with his knees still up and the man's come cooling on his chest and looked at the ceiling and listened to the water and felt the size of his own breathing.

Marcus was standing in the doorway to the kitchen with a beer in his hand, watching. He had been there a while, by the look of the beer. He raised the bottle to Warren, one inch, and said, "Told you," and went back into the kitchen.

The man came back with a towel and tossed it on Warren's chest and pulled his jeans back on and sat down on the edge of the bed with his back to Warren and his elbows on his knees.

"What's the deal with the name," he said.

Warren wiped his chest with the towel and sat up and swung his legs off the bed and looked around for the mules and found one and stepped into it and did not find the other and stood there with one heel on and one bare foot on the floor.

"What name."

"Warren." The man did not turn around. "You gave me a real name in a place like that. Nobody does that." He picked up his beer from the floor and drank. "So either it's your real name or it's not, and either way there's a deal with it."

Warren stood in the middle of the room in the cobalt catsuit with one mule on and the man's come drying on his throat and looked at the table along the near wall, the things on it, and then at the window, the river, the far shore lit up, and he thought about the phone face-down on the table at the club, still there, he had left it there, and about the desk on Fifty-Second and the suit in the hotel closet and the loop under everything, patient, saying what it said.

"It's my real name," he said. "There's a deal with it."

The man nodded, slow, like a man settling an account in his head. "Okay," he said. "Get your shoe. Marcus'll drive you back for your phone."

Warren found the other mule under the bed and put it on and stood up straight and the man in the black tee looked at him then, all the way up and all the way down, and said, "Same time next week, Warren," and it was not a question, and Warren did not say no.

He did not reach for the door. He stood in the middle of the room in the cobalt catsuit with both mules on now and one hand still on the bedpost and looked at the man's back, at the shoulders under the black tee and the line of the spine he had put his palm against ten minutes ago, and he did not reach for the door.

"No," Warren said.

The man turned his head, not all the way around, just enough to see him over the shoulder.

"No what."

"No, I don't want to leave yet." Warren let go of the bedpost and sat back down on the edge of the mattress, not close to the man, a foot of clean sheet between them, and put his clutch in his lap and both hands on the clutch and looked at the river through the window, the far shore strung with lights, a barge moving slow against the current with a single white lamp on its stern. "I need to know what this is."

"This is a fuck."

"That's not what I asked."

The man was quiet for a second. Then he turned the rest of the way around and put his beer down on the floor and looked at Warren the way he had looked at him across the table at the club, patient, unhurried, a man reading a contract he had not been shown yet.

"All right," he said. "Ask it."

Warren looked at his own hands on the clutch. Pink nails, French tips, one of them chipped at the corner where he had caught it on the man's belt getting his jeans down. He turned the chipped nail toward the inside of his palm so he would not have to look at it.

"I came here as Warren," he said. "That was a choice. I made it at the table. I don't make it again by accident."

"Meaning what."

"Meaning I want to know what you want from me before I decide anything else. Not after." He heard his own voice come out low and even, the banker's cadence coming up through the softness like stone under moss, and he let it. "You know what I am. You've seen the page. You've got a nephew with a subscription and a room with a table in it and a driver who doesn't look at me. So you knew before I walked in. That's a lot of knowing and no asking."

The man reached for his beer and did not drink it. He held it on his knee and turned it a quarter turn with his thumb.

"You want terms," he said.

"I want terms."

"That's not how this usually goes."

"I know how it usually goes." Warren lifted his head and looked at him. "I've been the one it usually goes to. I've sat in a room and been told what I am and said thank you. That's not what I'm doing tonight."

The man looked at him for a long moment, and something in his face moved, moved off the place it had been resting, the way a man's face moves when the thing he bought turns out to have a serial number on it. He set the beer down on the floor again and stood up and walked to the table along the near wall and stood in front of it with his back to Warren, looking down at the things on it, and did not touch any of them.

"You know what I do," he said.

"I can guess."

"Don't guess. I'm telling you." He turned around and leaned back against the edge of the table with his arms crossed and his ankles crossed and looked at Warren across the whole room, the length of it, the brick and the steel and the river behind him. "I find men like you. I've been finding them for eleven years. Some of them are married. Some of them aren't. Some of them come to me once and I never see them again and some of them move in for a year." He tipped his head. "None of them ask me what I want before they get in the car. You're the first one who's asked me anything but how hard."

"That's not an answer."

"It's a fact. You asked for terms. I'm giving you the shape of the thing first." He uncrossed his arms and put both hands flat on the edge of the table behind him. "The shape is: I don't do this for money. I don't do it for the videos. I've got money. I've got a business that runs without me and a house in the Catskills I go to in August. I do this because I like the part where a man stops pretending. That's the whole of it. That's the thing I'm paying myself in."

Warren sat with that. The barge had moved past the window and the river was black and empty again and the room was very quiet, the low hum of the building's HVAC coming up through the brick, and Warren could hear his own breathing and the man's, and neither of them was loud.

"And what do you want from me," Warren said.

"Same thing. The part where you stop pretending."

"I've been doing that all week."

"You've been doing it in a hotel room by yourself and at a bar with strangers." The man's voice stayed low. "That's the easy part. Anybody can be a slut in a dark room. That's not stopping pretending. That's pretending somewhere nobody's watching." He looked at Warren flat. "The hard part is the part where you stop pretending in the daylight. Where there's a name on it. Where something costs you."

Warren put his hand on the sheet beside him and pressed it flat, felt the cotton under his palm, the cool of it, the firm mattress under that. He thought about the desk on Fifty-Second and the suit in the hotel closet and the phone face-down on a table at the club, and about the wife who had taken the condo, and about the loop that said what it said, and he did not say any of it out loud.

"What does that look like," he said. "Specifically."

The man almost smiled. Not quite. The corner of his mouth moved and came back.

"There it is," he said. "That's the banker."

"That's the man who's not signing anything he hasn't read."

"Good." The man pushed off the table and walked back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, closer this time, the foot of clean sheet between them gone, his knee a hand's width from Warren's knee, and he put his forearms on his thighs and leaned forward and looked at the floor and spoke to it. "Here's what I want. I want you here for a weekend. Friday night to Sunday night. Not a night. A weekend. You come in the door as whatever you came in as tonight and you don't leave until Sunday. No going home. No suit. No phone calls where you step into the other room and be somebody else for ten minutes. You eat here. You sleep here. You don't decide anything while you're here — what you wear, what you eat, whether you come, whether you don't. I decide those. You don't get to be a man for two days."

Warren's mouth had gone dry. He swallowed and it did not help.

"And then what," he said.

"And then you leave Sunday night and go be whoever you are and I don't call you and you don't call me. That's the whole deal. I'm not your boyfriend. I'm not your therapist. I'm the man who finds out what you are when you can't get out of the room for two days." He looked up at Warren then, and his face was not cruel and was not kind, it was the face of a man who had done this before and knew exactly what he was buying. "You want to know my terms. Those are my terms. One weekend. Then you go home and think about it and if you want another one you ask me for it. That's the deal. There's no paper. There's no money. There's no promise on either side except the weekend."

Warren sat on the edge of the bed with his clutch in his lap and his two mules on and the man's come dried on his throat and the river going black past the window, and he ran the whole thing through his head the way he ran a deal through his head, the structure, the risk, the exposure, the thing that could not be undone. No suit for two days. No name for two days. No phone. The door of a warehouse elevator with a keypad and no doorman and a man who had been doing this for eleven years and a nephew with a subscription and a table along the near wall with things on it he had looked at three times and not once been able to keep his eyes off.

"I have a job," he said.

"Everybody has a job."

"I have a wife."

The man looked at him a beat.

"You said that like it's still true," he said.

Warren did not answer that. He put his hand on the chipped nail and pressed it with his thumb, hard, until it hurt.

"There's a thing I need to say before I answer," he said.

"Say it."

"I can't do this with somebody who doesn't know what he's taking on." Warren looked up. "I'm not a man who dresses up sometimes. I passed that a while back. There's a person I am now and she's got a name and a page and a following and a man who owns her, and I don't get to be surprised about that anymore because it's already done. So if you want a weekend with a man in a dress who goes home to his wife after, that's a different thing than a weekend with what I am, and I need you to know which one you're buying."

The man sat with that the way Warren had sat with the terms. He turned it over. He looked at Warren's face the whole time and did not look away and did not flinch and did not get up.

"What's her name," he said.

"Willow."

"Willow." He said it once, flat, the way you read a name off a list, and then he said it again, slower, and this time it had weight in it. "Willow." He nodded, once. "All right. Then the weekend's with Willow. You come in the door Friday as Willow and you don't take her off until Sunday. That's the deal. Same terms. Different name."

Warren's chest did something. He felt it under the breast plate, under the strap of the catsuit, a loosening, the way a fist loosens when you have finally been told the number and it is a number you can carry. He had come into a room expecting to be told what he was, and he had been asked instead, and the asking had cost him more than the being told ever had.

"And the man who owns her," the man said. "Does he know you're here."

Warren looked at his own hands.

"No," he said.

"Is that a problem."

"It might be."

The man nodded slow and stood up off the bed and went to the kitchen and Warren heard the fridge open and close and a drawer and the man came back with a bottle of water and set it on the bed beside Warren's hip and stood over him with his arms crossed.

"Then here's the last term," he said. "You settle whatever that is before Friday. I'm not in the middle of it. If he comes looking for you, that's yours, not mine. I don't fight men over their property." He looked down at Warren. "You're not property in this room. That's the deal. But you walked in here carrying something and I'm not holding it for you."

Warren picked up the water and unscrewed the cap and drank half of it standing there on the edge of the bed with the man watching, and the water was cold and tasted like nothing and went down his throat past where the come had dried, and when he set it back down he felt steadier than he had in a week.

"Friday," he said.

"Friday."

"What time."

"Nine. Marcus'll pick you up wherever you say. Text him the address, not me." The man turned and picked up his jeans from the floor and stepped into them and pulled them up and fastened them and reached for his phone off the table and held it out. "Put your number in."

Warren took the phone. The screen was warm from the man's hand. He typed his number into the new-contact field and looked at the cursor blinking after it and then typed a second line under the number, one word, and handed the phone back without saying what he had typed.

The man looked at the screen. He read it. He put the phone in his pocket and did not say anything about it and Warren was glad.

"Marcus'll drive you back for your phone," he said. "You want to put something on over that."

Warren looked down at himself. Cobalt latex from throat to ankle, the seam open at the crotch where the man had pulled it apart, the breast plate underneath, the collar loose on his neck, one mule strapped and one barely buckled. He looked at the man's face and the man was looking at him the same way he had looked at him all night, patient, unhurried, a man reading a contract he had decided to sign.

"No," Warren said.

The man's mouth moved again, the almost-smile, and he walked to the door and held it open with two fingers the way the doorman had, and Warren walked past him into the hall with the water bottle in one hand and his clutch in the other and both mules clicking on the concrete, and behind him the man said, low, to his back, "Willow," like he was putting the name somewhere he would be able to find it again.

The freight elevator came up with the gate rattling and Marcus was in it with a jacket over his arm and his phone in his hand and he looked Warren up and down and said, "Told you," for the third time that night, and this time Warren looked at him.

"You did," he said.

Marcus's grin went away for half a second and came back different, and he held the gate and Warren stepped into the elevator and the gate came down and the building went past them floor by floor and neither of them said anything the whole way down.

The SUV was idling at the curb with its lights off and the driver in the front seat not looking at anything, and Warren got in the back alone this time and put the clutch in his lap and the water bottle in the cup holder and looked out the window at the brick warehouse going dark behind them and thought about the two words he had typed under his number, and about Friday at nine, and about the loop under everything, patient, saying what it said, and for the first time in a week he did not answer it.

The club was still open when they got back. The doorman was still on the door and he looked at Warren getting out of the back of the black SUV in a cobalt catsuit with the seam open and a water bottle in his hand and did not say anything at all, just held the door with two fingers and let him in, and Warren walked to the bar and the phone was still face-down on the table by the empty chair where he had left it, exactly where he had put it, and he picked it up and turned it over and the screen was black and dead and under the black glass he could see his own face in it, the wig and the lashes and the wet lips, and he put it in the clutch and walked back out past the doorman and got into the car and Marcus drove him to the hotel on Christopher Street and let him out and did not say anything else, and Warren went up in the elevator alone and let himself into the room and locked the door and stood in the dark by the window with the water bottle in his hand and the city going on below him and did not take the face off.

The room had a mirror on the closet door, full length, and Warren stood in front of it with the water bottle still in his hand and the door locked behind him and the city going on below the window, and he did not turn on the lights. The neon from the street did it for him. Red and blue, the sign across the way, coming and going over the cobalt of the catsuit in slow bands, and he stood in it and looked.

He started at the bottom because that was where you started. Two mules, six inches, the straps buckled at the ankle, the vinyl gone dull at the toe where he had walked three blocks of wet sidewalk in them. One buckle had come undone somewhere between the car and the elevator and he had not noticed. His ankles inside the straps, thin, the bone showing, the tendon standing up when he shifted his weight. The latex went down over the tops of his feet and stopped at the strap and the strap was the only thing on him that looked like it had been put on by accident.

He turned sideways. The catsuit from the side was a different garment. The corset under it did what the corset did — the waist pulled in to a hand-span and the hips flaring out under it, the cobalt stretched tight across the flare, and above the waist the breast plate riding up under the latex so that the two silicone breasts pushed at the fabric from inside and made the catsuit bulge where no man's chest had any business bulging. He put his free hand flat on his own waist and felt the steel under the latex, the corset's bones, and ran the hand down over the flare of his hip and the curve of his ass, and the fabric was slick and cool and moved under his palm like something poured.

He turned back. The front. The seam of the catsuit was open at the crotch where the man had pulled it apart and it had not closed again, and through the gap he could see the smooth hairless sack and the small soft thing hanging under it, useless, wet at the tip from the drive, and he looked at it the way you look at a receipt you did not want. Above it the corset laced shut with the black cord. Above that the breast plate and the breasts in it and the hard little silicone nipples poking at the latex, and above that the collar, loose, sitting on his collarbones where it always sat when he had not tightened it, and above that his own throat, and above that the face.

The face was the part that stopped him. The wig, platinum, the lace front laid down along the hairline so that the hair came out of his own scalp, the long fall of it over one shoulder and down over the breast. The lashes, one inch, the black liner drawn up out of the outer corner of each eye into a little hook, and under the liner the eyes, his eyes, blue, and the neon going over them red blue red. The brows penciled dark and arched. The cheekbones blushed high. The lips — the lips were the whole thing, glossy, thick, plumped by the plumper until they sat full and wet and parted a little, and when he licked them the gloss moved and caught the neon and he watched himself do it in the mirror and did not decide to.

He stood there and took inventory the way he took inventory of a position. Heels to wig. Every line of it deliberate, every line of it paid for, and not one line of it a man. The catsuit was slickering in the red light and going dark in the blue and the corset did not let him take a full breath and he did not want it to.

What he wanted was downstairs.

He knew it the way he knew a trade was going to fill. He put the water bottle on the dresser and picked the clutch up off the bed and checked the dead phone inside it out of habit and put the clutch under his arm and walked out of the room and down the elevator and out onto Christopher Street in the mules and the open seam, and the doorman held the door with two fingers and did not ask him anything, and the bass came out through the door and he went in.

The bar had emptied and refilled while he was gone. Different men at the same tables. The stool at the end three down from the service well was free and Warren took it and crossed one thigh over the other and hooked both mules on the rung and set the clutch on the bar under his hand, and the bartender came over with a napkin and set it down without being asked and Warren said vodka soda and the bartender said, "You're still going," and Warren said, "I'm still going," and the bartender made the drink and set it down and went back to the well.

The room knew. He had been in it long enough now to feel how it knew. The mirror behind the bar carried the whole floor and he sat inside the mirror and watched the room watch him, and he let it. He crossed his legs the other way and the latex creaked and one mule swung loose off the rung and he let it swing. He lifted the drink and drank and set it down and licked the gloss off his upper lip slow, and in the mirror a man at the corner table put his glass down and did not pick it up again for a while.

The first one came up on his left. Thirty-something, a good watch, a wedding band he had turned around so the stone faced his palm, and he leaned on the bar and said, "I've seen you in here before."

"Have you." Warren did not turn his head. He watched the man in the mirror and let his lashes come down and up, once, slow, and the man in the mirror swallowed.

"You're the one from the video."

"Everybody's seen the video." Warren turned then, just his face, the wig swinging, and he looked at the man under his lashes the way he had practiced in the hotel bathroom mirror for an hour one Tuesday. "What did you think of it."

The man's mouth opened and nothing came out of it. He looked at Warren's lips and then at the bar and then at his own turned-around wedding band, and he said, "I—" and Warren licked his lips and the man's sentence died where it stood.

"Buy me a drink or don't," Warren said, soft, and turned back to the mirror, and the man stood there another ten seconds and then went back to his table with his ears red, and Warren drank his vodka soda and felt the warm thing in his stomach turn over and settle.

The second one was older, gray at the temples, a cologne Warren could smell from a foot away, and he came up close and put his hand on the bar beside Warren's clutch and leaned in and said, "I'd take you home."

"Would you."

"I've got a place in Tribeca. You'd like it."

Warren looked at him the way he looked at a pitch he had heard before. "What's in it."

"A bed," the man said, and smiled, and Warren smiled back at him with the wet lips and the lashes and said, "I've got a bed," and the man's smile came off his face and he straightened up and went away, and the bartender, who had heard all of it, put a fresh napkin under Warren's glass and said nothing.

The third one did not talk at all. He came up and stood at Warren's shoulder and put his hand on the small of Warren's back, on the bare strip of latex above the hips, and left it there, and Warren sat very still and felt the heat of the palm come through the fabric and did not move away and did not lean into it either, and after a while the hand came off and the man walked off without a word and Warren sat with the place where the hand had been still warm and his clit wet against the seam and his drink untouched.

He was good at this. That was the thing he kept coming back to, sitting on the stool with the room in the mirror. He had been good at the other thing too — the desk, the suit, the number — but he had had to learn that one, and this one he had not had to learn. This one had been in him the whole time, waiting, and now that it was out he could feel how much better his hands were at a glass than at a keyboard.

He finished the drink and ordered another and the room turned over again and he did the same thing to two more men, and by the second drink he had stopped counting. The lashes came down and up. The gloss caught the neon. The mules swung off the rung and the latex creaked and the men came and went with their proposals and their lines and their turned-around wedding bands, and Warren sat in the middle of it with his clutch under his hand and his knees crossed and the seam open, and under everything the loop said what it said and Warren heard it and ordered another drink.

What he wanted was on his lips. He kept coming back to it. Not the bed, not the room, not the drive — the taste. He wanted the taste of it in his mouth, the salt and the heat of it, a man's come on his tongue and his lips, and he sat on the stool with the want sitting in his mouth like a held coin and licked his lips for the tenth time and the bartender watched him do it and looked away.

The tall one came in at the top of the hour.

Warren saw him in the mirror before he saw him anywhere else, and the mirror did what a mirror does — it flattened him and made him a shape, and the shape was tall. Taller than the doorframe liked. He came through the door with his coat over his arm and his shoulders filling the space on either side of it and he stopped just inside and looked around the room the way a man looks at a room he already owns, unhurried, and the room looked back at him and made room.

Rugged was the word. It was an ugly word and it was the right one. A face that had been out in the weather for forty-some years, a nose set straight, a jaw with a day of stubble on it and the gray starting in at the temples, and under the coat a shirt rolled up over forearms that were thick at the wrist and corded at the top, and the shirt pulled across a chest that had been built by work and not by a gym. He was not beautiful. He was the other thing, the thing that made the beautiful ones look like a poster.

He walked to the bar. Not to Warren's end — to the middle, two stools down, and he put his coat on the stool and his forearms on the bar and ordered a whiskey and did not look at Warren at all for the length of a whole drink.

Warren looked at him. He could not help it and did not try. He looked at the forearms and the way the shirt strained at the shoulder seam and the way the man stood with his weight on one hip and his elbow on the bar, easy, and something in Warren's chest turned over and lay down.

Then the man turned his head and looked at him, and Warren felt it land the way the hand had landed on his back — hot, flat, unhurried — and the man looked at him for a long moment and then said, "You're the best one in here."

Warren's lashes came down. "In here isn't a high bar."

"It's not." The man picked up his whiskey and drank and set it down and did not look away. "You're still the best one."

Warren turned on the stool, all the way, both knees toward him now, one mule hooked on the rung and one foot on the floor, and he put his elbow on the bar and his chin on his hand and looked at the man with the wet lips parted and said, "What's your name."

"Doesn't matter." The man finished the whiskey and set the glass down and the bartender came and took it and did not bring another. "What matters is I know what you are."

"Do you."

"You're the best sissy prostitute in here, sweetheart." He said it flat, no cruelty in it, the way you say the time of day, and Warren's whole body went hot from the throat down. "I like your type. I know the type. I know what you are and I know what you want and I know you've been sitting on that stool for two hours letting every man in the room come up and say his piece and not one of them has said the right one yet."

Warren did not answer. His mouth had gone dry and the gloss sat on it and he could not have answered if he had wanted to.

"I want your lips on my cock," the man said. "That's the whole of it. Not tonight. Tonight's the card." He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a business card and put it on the bar between them, face up, and Warren looked down at it. A name, a phone number, an address on Fifth in the thirties, and under the address one line: Thursdays, by appointment.

"One thousand dollars," the man said. "Once a week. In my office. Every Thursday. You come in, you go down on your knees, you take my cock in your mouth, and you leave. That's the whole arrangement." He put his hand flat on the bar. "You can keep the page. You can keep the wig. I don't care about any of that. I want the mouth."

Warren looked at the card and then at the man and then at the card, and the room had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet when the thing that was going to happen is happening, and the man reached into his pocket and took out a bill and laid it on the bar beside the card, on top of the card, a thousand, folded once, and put his hand flat over it.

"What's your name," the man said.

"Warren."

The man nodded, slow, like the name was a thing he had ordered and it had come correct. "Warren," he said, and it did not sound wrong in his mouth, it sounded like a name he had read on a form. He lifted his hand off the money and left it on the bar and stepped back from the stool and picked up his coat and put it over his arm.

"We start now," he said.

Warren looked at the thousand on the bar. He looked at the card under it, the phone number, the address, the word Thursdays. He looked at the man standing there with his coat over his arm and his weight on one hip and his eyes on Warren's mouth, patient, unhurried, a man who had already been told yes and was waiting for the yes to be spoken.

He picked up the card. He folded it once and put it in the clutch, and he picked up the thousand and folded it the same way and put it in the clutch beside the card, and he slid off the stool and the mules came down on the floor and he stood up straight in front of the man and came up to his collarbone and no higher, and the man looked down at him and Warren looked up and licked his lips and said, "Where."

"My car."

Warren put the clutch under his arm and walked out past the man with the mules clicking on the floor and the seam open and the collar loose on his collarbones, and he did not look back at the bar and he did not look at the doorman and the doorman did not say anything, and outside the street was wet and the black car was at the curb with the engine running and the man came up behind him and put one hand flat on the small of Warren's back and opened the door with the other.

"In," he said.

Warren got in.

The car was warm and dark and smelled of leather and the man's coat, which he had thrown over the back of the seat between them, and the engine was already running and the driver was already gone — the man had opened the passenger door himself and stood there until Warren got in and then walked around the hood and got in the other side and shut the door, and the locks went down with a soft electric click.

Warren sat with the clutch in his lap and his knees together and his mules flat on the mat. The window beside him was black glass and the city going by in it, the wet street, the neon, a man on the corner selling umbrellas out of a bucket, and then the corner was gone and they were moving uptown and the man had not said anything and had not started the car so much as let it carry them, one hand loose on the wheel, the other arm along the top of the bench seat behind Warren's shoulders without touching him.

Warren put his hand on the clutch. He could feel the card through the leather, the fold of it, the crisp edge, and he sat with his thumb on the clasp and did not open it.

"Read it," the man said.

"I read it at the bar."

"You looked at it at the bar." The man's eyes were on the road. "Read it out loud."

Warren opened the clutch. The card was on top of the folded thousand and he took it out and held it up between two fingers, and in the dark of the car the card was a white rectangle with a shadow across it and he had to tilt it toward the window to catch the light from a passing streetlamp, and the lamp came and went and he caught the print in the half-second of it and lost it again and had to wait for the next one.

"I can't see it."

"Then turn the light on." The man reached up and tapped the dome light over the mirror and the car filled with a low amber glow, and Warren looked down at the card in his hand and the card looked back at him, engraved, heavy stock, the kind of card a man had printed once and never had to reorder.

He read it.

"Charles Reilly," he said. His voice came out low and soft in the closed car, the way it always came out now, and he heard the name land in the space between them and sit there. "Reilly Holdings. Five-oh-six Fifth Avenue, suite twenty-two hundred." He turned the card over. The back was blank except for the one line in the same engraving, centered, small. "Thursdays, by appointment."

"Again," the man said.

Warren looked at him.

"Say it again," Reilly said. "The whole thing. Like you're reading it to somebody who's writing it down."

Warren looked back at the card. The amber light was on his hands and on the card and on the chipped nail he had turned inward, and he read it again, slower this time, the banker's cadence coming up under the softness the way it did when he was tired or when he was being careful, each word set down flat and even.

"Charles Reilly. Reilly Holdings. Five hundred six Fifth Avenue, suite twenty-two hundred, New York. Thursdays, by appointment."

"And the number."

Warren read the number. He read it the way he read numbers in a meeting, in groups, digits clean and separate, and when he was done he set the card down on his knee and looked out the window and the city was going by and the light over his head was still on and he had not turned it off.

"Say the name," Reilly said.

"Charles Reilly."

"Not mine." His voice did not change. "The other one."

Warren sat with it. The window was black and the streetlamps were going by in the glass and in the glass he could see the two of them, the man's shoulders filling the driver's side and his own small shape on the passenger side with the wig and the lashes and the wet lips lit amber, and he looked at the reflection of his own mouth and said, "Warren."

"And the other one."

"Willow."

Reilly drove a block without saying anything. Then he said, "Which one's on the card."

Warren looked down at the card again. It was blank of either name — a business card did not carry the name of the person who would be kneeling in the office on Thursdays, it carried the name of the man who owned the office, and Warren understood that the card had been printed years ago and the name of the person had never been on it and never would be. That was the arrangement. That was the whole of what had been laid on the bar between them with a thousand dollars folded under it.

"Neither," he said.

"Right." Reilly turned the wheel and the car leaned and the street changed and they were on a wider avenue now, the lights longer, the buildings taller. "The card's mine. What's yours is what you say when you walk in. And what you say when you walk in is the thing I'm asking you to decide before Thursday."

Warren put the card back in the clutch and folded the thousand over it and closed the clasp and set the clutch on his knees and put both hands flat on it. The seam of the catsuit was still open and the leather of the seat was cool through it against the backs of his thighs and he was aware of every inch of himself in the amber light, the corset not letting him take a full breath, the breast plate riding high, the collar loose on his collarbones.

"You want me to come in as Willow," he said.

"I want you to come in as whatever you are when you're not deciding." Reilly's eyes stayed on the road. "You can come in as Warren and put your lips on my cock as Warren. It's the same mouth. I don't care what's on the paperwork. I care that the man who walks in knows what he's there for before he gets on his knees."

Warren looked at the amber light on the ceiling of the car and then reached up and turned it off himself. The dark came back and the streetlamps took over and the car went on up the avenue and the two of them sat in it without talking and the city went by in bands of light and dark.

"Say it out loud," Reilly said.

"Say what."

"What you're there for."

Warren's mouth was dry. He swallowed and it did not help and he looked at the black glass and his own face in it, the wig and the lashes and the wet lips, and he made himself say it in the low voice, the one that was his and also not his, the one that had been getting softer for weeks.

"To put my lips on your cock."

"And."

"And to take it in my mouth."

"And."

"And to leave." Warren's voice caught on the last word and he heard it catch and did not take it back. "Once a week. Thursdays. In your office. And then leave."

Reilly nodded, slow, one hand on the wheel and the other still along the back of the seat. The car came off the avenue and onto a cross street and the buildings got shorter and older and the lights got fewer, and Warren watched the street numbers go by and knew without asking that this was not the way back to Christopher Street.

"Say the address again," Reilly said.

Warren opened the clutch and took the card out and held it, and this time he did not need the light, he had the address in his mouth the way he had the desk's address in his mouth, the way he had his own phone number in his mouth, the way a thing gets in your mouth when you have said it once in the dark and meant it.

"Five-oh-six Fifth Avenue. Suite twenty-two hundred."

"And the day."

"Thursday."

"And the time."

Warren stopped. He looked at the card and the card did not have a time on it, only the day and the word appointment, and he turned it over in the dark and turned it back and said, "There's no time on it."

"There isn't." Reilly turned the wheel and the car pulled to the curb and stopped and the engine stayed running and the man put the car in park and turned in his seat and looked at Warren for the first time since he had gotten in. His face in the streetlight was the same face from the bar, weathered, straight-nosed, a day of stubble, and his eyes were on Warren's mouth and nowhere else. "You'll text the number on the card the day before and I'll tell you the time. That's how it works. The time is mine to give."

Warren looked at the card in his hand and then at the man and then at the card, and he understood the shape of the thing the way he understood the shape of a trade — the other party held the timing, and the timing was the whole of the leverage, and he had handed it over at the bar when he had picked up the thousand and folded it and put it in the clutch.

"Say it," Reilly said.

"The time is yours to give."

"Good." Reilly reached over and put his hand over Warren's hand, the one holding the card, and his palm was hot and dry and covered Warren's knuckles and the card both, and Warren sat very still and felt the weight of it and did not pull away. Reilly's thumb moved once across the back of Warren's hand, slow, the way his thumb had moved on the back of Warren's neck in the other car, and then his fingers closed on the card and he took it out of Warren's hand.

He did not look at it. He opened the clutch on Warren's knees with his other hand, unhurried, and put the card back inside it, on top of the folded thousand, and closed the clasp and set the clutch back on Warren's knees and put both hands back on the wheel.

"You keep it," he said. "You don't need to read it again. You know it now."

Warren put both hands on the clutch. The clasp was warm from the man's fingers and the card was inside it and the thousand was inside it and the address was in his mouth and the day was in his mouth and the man's name was in his mouth, and he sat in the dark of the parked car on a cross street he did not know with the engine running and the wig on his head and the corset not letting him breathe and the seam of the catsuit still open, and he did not open the clutch again.

"Where are we," he said.

"Nowhere." Reilly put the car back in gear and pulled out from the curb and the street went by the window again and Warren watched it and did not ask again, and after a while the avenue came back and the buildings got tall again and the lights got bright again and Warren knew the neighborhood the way he knew his own hand, Christopher Street, the hotel, the club a block and a half from it, the bodega with its gate half down.

The car stopped at the hotel and the engine stayed running and Reilly did not get out and did not reach across Warren to open the door. He sat with both hands on the wheel and looked straight ahead through the windshield at the wet street and the sign across the way going red and blue and red.

"Thursday," he said.

"Thursday," Warren said.

"Text the number the day before."

"I will."

Reilly nodded, once, and Warren put his hand on the door and the door did not open because the locks were still down, and he sat with his hand on the handle and the clutch in his lap and looked at the man's profile in the red and blue light, and the man looked back at him and did not reach for the lock.

"One more thing," Reilly said.

Warren waited.

"You said there's a man who owns you." He said it without weight, the way he had said the address, a fact on a card. "I don't know his name and I don't want it. But when you walk into my office on Thursday, whatever he's told you to wear under your clothes, you'll be wearing it. Whatever he's told you to put in your body, it'll be in your body. You'll come to me the way he sends you and you won't change a thing about it for my sake." He turned his head and looked at Warren. "I want the man he made. Not the man you'd build for me."

Warren's hand was still on the handle. The lock was still down. The streetlight was red and blue and red on the wet asphalt and on the hood of the car and on the two of them through the glass, and he looked at the man and the man looked at him and neither of them moved, and Warren felt the loop under everything, patient, saying what it said, and for the second time that night he did not answer it.

"All right," he said.

Reilly reached across and pushed the lock up with one finger and the door came open under Warren's hand and the cold of the street came in and the man said, "Go on," and Warren got out with the clutch in his hand and his mules on the wet pavement and shut the door and stood on the sidewalk and the car pulled away from the curb without hurry and went up the street and turned and was gone.

Warren stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel with the clutch in his hand and the card inside it and the address in his mouth and the thousand folded under it, and the doorman at the hotel — a different doorman, a young one, who had not seen him come or go — looked at him in the cobalt catsuit with the open seam and the loose collar and did not say anything at all, just held the door with two fingers the way they all did, and Warren walked in past him and crossed the lobby with his mules clicking on the marble and got in the elevator and went up.

In the room he locked the door and put the clutch on the dresser and did not open it. He stood at the window with the city going on below him and the neon coming and going on the glass and he said the address out loud one more time, quietly, to the window, in the low voice, and then he said the name, and then he said the day, and then he stopped and stood there and let the room be quiet around him and did not take the face off.

The hotel had a business center on the second floor, off a corridor that smelled of carpet cleaner and old coffee, and Warren went down at nine in the morning in the navy suit with the wig in a garment bag over his arm and asked the woman at the desk for a printer and a private room and paid for three hours in cash. The room was a closet with a table and a chair and a phone and a window that looked at the brick wall of the next building over, and he sat down and opened the laptop he had bought the day before at a Staples on Sixth Avenue, still in its box until last night, and he set it up on the table and plugged it in and sat looking at the screen for a minute before he touched it.

He had not turned his own phone on in four days. It was in the bottom of the garment bag, dead, and he had not charged it and had not looked at it and did not intend to until he had something to say into it. The new laptop had no history and no name on it and no cloud attached and no saved passwords, and when he opened the browser it was the plainest thing he had seen in a week, a white page and a cursor, and he sat with his hands on the keyboard and thought about what he was about to type the way he thought about a trade before he placed it.

He typed the name first. Charles Reilly. The search came back thin and clean: a company website with a gray header and a photograph of a building on Fifth Avenue, a board of directors page with a headshot that was ten years out of date, a Bloomberg mention from 2019 about a refinancing, a profile on a business networking site that had not been updated since 2021. Reilly Holdings. Commercial real estate, mostly. Industrial parks in New Jersey, a couple of self-storage portfolios, one line of business that the website described as specialty assets and did not explain. Forty-one employees. Founded 1998. The address on the card matched the address on the website and the suite number matched the suite number on the website and the phone number on the website was the same phone number engraved on the card in the clutch, and Warren sat back in the chair and looked at the brick wall through the window and felt something in his chest settle a quarter inch.

He did the other search next. He typed his own name into the box and hit enter and read what came back.

There was his LinkedIn, still up, the headshot from four years ago in the gray suit with the blue tie, the title still reading Managing Director under a company that had not called him in eleven days. There was a press release from a deal he had closed in the spring. There was a wedding announcement from seven years ago in the Times, the two of them in the photograph, Claire in the white dress and himself beside her in the tuxedo, both of them younger and both of them looking at the camera the way people look at a camera when they have been told to look happy.

And then, on the second page of results, there was the profile.

He had known it was there. He had put it there himself, months ago, in a hotel room in Chicago on a night when Claire was at a conference and he had ordered room service and opened a bottle of wine and made a profile on a site he had never told anyone about. The profile was still up. The profile picture was not his face — it was a shot from the throat down, the black lace bodysuit and the collar and one hand on the hip — and the name on the profile was not Warren Ashford and the age on the profile was not thirty-eight and the city on the profile was not New York, and he sat and looked at it and felt nothing at all, which was the strange part, felt the way you feel looking at a photograph of a house you used to live in.

He closed the tab. He opened a new one and typed the other name, the one he had typed under his number in the man's phone, and the results came back the way he had known they would and he read them anyway, the same way you check a position you already know is underwater.

Willow. The site. The subscriber count had gone up. He did not open the videos. He looked at the thumbnails the way you look at a menu when you have already ordered, and then he closed the tab and shut the laptop and sat in the closet of a room with his hands flat on the table and the brick wall going past the window and listened to the building's air conditioner cycle on and off.

At eleven he left the business center and walked up to the room and ordered lunch from room service and ate it at the window in the corset and the catsuit with the wig off, his own short brown hair flat against his scalp, the face still on from the night before, and he looked at the city from the sixteenth floor and did not go out.

At one he took a shower. He stood under the water with the wig off and the lashes off and the face washed clean and looked down at his own body the way he had looked at it in the mirror the night before, and the water ran off the breast plate where he had not taken it off and off the corset where he had not taken it off and off the smooth hairless sack and the small soft thing under it, and he put his hand under the water and touched himself, once, the way you touch a scar, and felt nothing move and nothing rise and stood there and let the water run until it went cold.

He dried off and dressed as Willow and sat on the bed with the laptop open on his knees and did the rest of what he had come to the room to do.

The first was the suit. He wrote the email to the office at two o'clock, short, four lines, the way he wrote emails that he did not want read twice, and he sent it from a new address that he had made that morning and told them he was taking a leave of absence for personal reasons effective immediately and that his assistant should route anything urgent to the managing director on the floor and that he would be in touch about next steps. He did not say how long. He did not say why. He read it over twice and hit send and watched it go and then closed the laptop and sat on the bed and looked at the wall for a while.

The second was the apartment. He had not been back to it since the night Claire had walked in and the locks had been changed and the doorman had looked at him the way the doorman had looked at him, and there was a storage unit on Tenth Avenue that had been in his name for eight years and a set of keys in the clutch and a small amount of money in an account that Claire had not known about and had not taken. He wrote a note to the storage company on the new email address and asked them to change the contact on the unit to a name he had not used before and to send the new keys to a mailbox he had rented that morning at a shipping store on Seventh Avenue, and he sent it and closed the laptop again and did not open it for the rest of the afternoon.

At four he took the train uptown.

He rode the 1 to Times Square and changed to the shuttle and came out at Grand Central and walked the three blocks up Fifth Avenue in the navy suit with the wig in the garment bag and the clutch under his arm and the heels in a shopping bag at his side, because he could not walk Fifth Avenue in the mules at four in the afternoon, and the city did what the city did at four in the afternoon in the fall — the light coming down between the buildings at a long angle, the cabs going by, the men in suits and the women in coats and the tourists with their phones out and the doormen in their uniforms under the awnings, and Warren walked it the way he had walked it a thousand times, the banker's walk, the even pace, the eyes straight ahead, and felt the black lace bodysuit under the shirt and the corset under the lace and the plug inside him pressing where the plug pressed, and no one on the street looked at him at all.

Five-oh-six was a limestone building between two others, twelve stories, with a brass directory in the lobby and a security desk and a man behind it in a blazer reading a paperback. Warren gave his name. The man looked at the list and found it and said suite twenty-two hundred, twenty-second floor, take the elevator on the left, and Warren said thank you and walked to the elevator and got in and pressed the button and watched the doors close on the marble lobby and the paperback and the brass.

The elevator was the kind with a mirror on the back wall and a brass handrail and a floor indicator with a needle, and Warren stood in it with the garment bag over his arm and the shopping bag in his hand and watched the needle go up and watched himself in the mirror go up with it. The suit, the shirt, the tie, the polished shoes. The face he had put back on in the hotel room at three — the liner, the shadow, the penciled brows, the blushed cheekbones, the lashes, the gloss. The wig was in the bag. The suit was doing what the suit did, which was to make the face under it look like a man who had made a decision about his own appearance and had made it deliberately, and Warren looked at the man in the mirror and the man in the mirror looked back at him and neither of them said anything and the needle went past eighteen and nineteen and twenty.

The doors opened on a small lobby with a reception desk and a wall of frosted glass and a logo etched in the glass, REILLY HOLDINGS, in letters that were not quite serif and not quite not. The woman behind the desk was in her fifties with gray hair cut short and a pair of reading glasses on a chain and a sweater over a blouse, and she looked up from her screen when the elevator opened and looked at Warren the way you look at a delivery you were not expecting and said, "Mr. Ashford."

"Yes."

"Mr. Reilly's expecting you." She did not look surprised and did not look curious and did not look at the garment bag or the shopping bag at all. She picked up a phone and pressed one button and said two words into it and hung up and said, "Down the hall, last door on the right. He'll see you now."

Warren walked down the hall. It was a short hall with a carpet that had a pattern in it and two doors on the left that were closed and one door at the end on the right that was closed and had a brass plate on it with no name on the plate, and he stopped in front of the door and put his hand on the knob and stood there for a second with the garment bag over his arm and the shopping bag in his hand and the lace bodysuit under his shirt and the plug inside him and the card in the clutch, and then he turned the knob and went in.

The office was bigger than the hall had suggested and had a window that looked at the back of the building across the street and a desk that was too large for the room and a leather couch along one wall and a low table in front of the couch with nothing on it, and the man from the bar was standing at the window with his back to the door and his hands in his pockets and his coat off and his sleeves rolled, and he did not turn around when the door opened and he did not turn around when it closed.

"You're on time," Reilly said.

"I'm on time."

"Put your bags down."

Warren put the garment bag on the couch and the shopping bag on the floor beside it and stood in the middle of the room with the clutch in his hand and his shoes on the carpet and waited. Reilly turned around from the window and looked at him the way he had looked at him in the bar and in the car, unhurried, all the way down and all the way up, and then he walked to the desk and sat down behind it and leaned back in the chair and put his hands on the arms of the chair and looked at Warren across the desk.

"Sit," he said, and pointed with his chin at the chair on the other side of the desk, and Warren sat down in it and put the clutch on his knees and looked at the man across the desk and the man looked at him.

"You texted the number," Reilly said.

"Yesterday. At noon."

"I got it." He picked up a pen off the desk and turned it in his fingers and set it back down. "You didn't say anything in it but the time. That was right."

"You said the time was yours to give."

"It is." Reilly leaned forward and put his forearms on the desk and looked at Warren across the top of it. "You're here as Warren."

"I'm here as Warren."

"The suit's good." He said it the way he had said the card was his, flat, a fact. "The face is good. The bags are the bags of a man who brought a second thing with him and didn't know which one to walk in as." He picked the pen up again and did not turn it this time, just held it. "So which one walked in."

Warren sat with the question. The desk was between them and the window was behind Reilly and the light coming through it was the long afternoon light and it lay across the desk and across Reilly's hands and across the pen and did not reach Warren's side of the room at all, and Warren looked at the line of the light on the desk and then at the man's face and said, "The one who made the appointment."

Reilly looked at him for a long moment. Then he set the pen down and opened a drawer in the desk and took something out and set it on the desk between them, and Warren looked at it. It was a small black box, the kind a watch came in, and Reilly opened the lid with one finger and turned the box toward Warren and inside it, on a black velvet cushion, there was a plug. Glass, clear, with a flat base that had a small round stone set in the center of it, and it was smaller than the one Warren was wearing and heavier than the one Warren was wearing and the light from the window went through the glass and made a shape on the velvet under it.

"Take out the one you're wearing," Reilly said. "Put that one in."

Warren looked at the box and then at the man and then at the box. He did not ask why. He stood up and put the clutch on the chair and undid his belt and his trousers and pushed them down enough and reached behind himself and found the base of the plug that was already in him and pulled it out slow and felt the emptiness come in behind it and set it on the desk beside the box, wet, and then he picked the new one out of the velvet and it was cool and heavy in his hand and he reached behind himself and put it against his hole and pushed and it went in slow and filled him the way the other one had not, the glass holding the cold of the room and then losing it, and he stood there with his trousers down and the plug seated and the light from the window on the side of his thigh and did not sit back down until Reilly said sit.

"That one stays in until you leave this office," Reilly said. "It's yours. You'll take it home in the box and you'll wear it every Thursday and you'll bring it back and I'll put it in a drawer and you'll take it out again the next week. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"The plug is mine and it stays in until I leave and I bring it back next Thursday."

"Good." Reilly closed the empty box and put it back in the drawer and shut the drawer and looked at Warren across the desk with his hands flat on the top of it. "Now. You said in the car that you wanted to know what this was before you decided anything else. I gave you the shape of it and you signed it. So I'm going to tell you what the rest of the afternoon is and you're going to say yes or no to it and either answer is fine."

"All right."

"You're going to go into the bathroom through that door and take off the suit and put on whatever you brought in the bags. When you come out you're going to kneel on that carpet in front of this desk and you're going to stay there while I finish my afternoon. I've got calls until six and a deal closing at seven and I'm not going to stop for you. You'll be there the whole time. Nobody's going to see you, the door's shut, the woman at the desk goes home at five-thirty. When I'm done I'll take my cock out and you'll put your mouth on it and you'll take it the way you took it in the car — the way you said you would. And then you'll get dressed and you'll leave and you'll go home and you'll text the number the day before next Thursday and we'll do it again." He paused. "That's the afternoon. Yes or no."

Warren sat with the plug in him and the lace bodysuit under the shirt and the suit trousers down around his ankles in a chair in an office on Fifth Avenue at four in the afternoon, and he thought about the room in the West Twenties and the man in the black tee and the card on the bar and the address in his mouth and the loop under everything, patient, saying what it said, and he looked at the man across the desk and said, "Yes."

"Then go get ready."

Warren stood up and pulled his trousers back up and fastened them and picked up the garment bag and the shopping bag and the clutch and walked to the door at the side of the office that Reilly had pointed at with the pen, and behind him he heard the man pick up the phone on the desk and dial and say, "It's Reilly," into it, and then Warren shut the door and stood in the bathroom with the light on and the door locked and the two bags on the floor and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

He took the suit off and hung it on the back of the door. He took the shirt off and hung it with the suit. He took off the lace bodysuit and folded it and put it in the shopping bag and stood in the bathroom in his underwear with the corset still on and the breast plate still on and the face still on and the plug in him, and then he took the underwear off too and stood there and looked at himself in the mirror for a minute, the corset and the breast plate and the small soft thing under them and the smooth hairless sack and the plug's flat base just visible between the cheeks of his ass, and he did not say anything to the man in the mirror and the man in the mirror did not say anything to him.

He took the wig out of the garment bag and put it on and settled the lace front along his hairline and brushed the fall of it over one shoulder. He took the catsuit out of the bag and stepped into it and pulled it up over the corset and the breast plate and worked his arms into the sleeves and zipped it up the back with the little hook and eye at the top. He took the mules out of the shopping bag and put them on and buckled the straps. He took the collar out of the clutch and put it on and tightened it one notch, not two, and looked at himself in the mirror and the mirror gave him back the thing he had been looking at for a week, the cobalt, the platinum, the wet lips, the lashes, the seam at the crotch already open because that was how the suit was made.

He stood in the bathroom with his hand on the doorknob and the phone on the back of the toilet where he had set it and the call still going on the other side of the door, and he did not look at the phone and did not think about the loop and did not think about the man in the West Twenties who was waiting for a text he had not sent, and he turned the knob and opened the door and walked back into the office and across the carpet and knelt down in front of the desk with his knees together and his hands flat on his thighs and his eyes down, and Reilly, on the phone, looked at him over the top of the receiver and did not stop talking and did not stop looking and went on with his call.