The van is three blocks gone when his phone buzzes in the cupholder. He doesn't look at it at the light on Belmont, or the next one on Division, or the long empty stretch where the streetlights get sparse and the laundromat windows go dark. He watches the road and the road watches back and the plug sits in him the whole way home like a secret he's carrying in his pocket.

At his own apartment — second floor, one window, a fire escape he's never used — he parks and sits in the dark cab for a minute with his hands still on the wheel. Then he gets his phone out.

The message is a photo. Close-up, badly lit, of a canvas tote on a kitchen counter — the book, the granola bars, the charger cord snaking out from under a mug. The caption underneath: found your receipt. ur number's on it. this is me being organized. dont get used to it.

He types: Got it. Tomorrow 9? and then deletes the question mark and sends Got it. Tomorrow 9.

Three dots. Then: bring ur own coffee im out. Then: also the closet door in my bedroom came off its track. can u look at that too. Then, before he can answer: its not a sex thing. its a door thing. mostly.

He laughs — actually laughs, a short one out loud in the dark cab — and types I'll bring coffee and puts the phone face-down on the passenger seat and goes inside and takes the plug out in the bathroom with his forehead against the cool tile and stands in the shower with the water not quite hot enough thinking about the way she'd said mostly.

He sleeps badly. He's up at six.

—

Cass's building in the morning light is a different animal. The stucco's the color of weak coffee, the palm out front needs trimming, and somebody's left a mattress leaning against the dumpster since last night. Omar parks the van in the same spot, kills the engine, and sits for a second with the two coffees in the cupholder going warm in their sleeves.

He'd thought about the thong. He'd thought about it a lot, actually — standing in his closet at six-fifteen with the black lace in one hand and the plain cotton in the other, and he'd put on the lace, and then stood there another thirty seconds and taken it off and put the plain ones on, and then stood there another thirty seconds and put the lace back on, because he was going to a woman's apartment to fix a closet door and he'd already shown her the app and she'd already shown him her phone and there was no version of this where the lace mattered, and also every version of this where the lace mattered, and he'd driven here with the lace on and a fresh plug in his pocket instead of in him, because you didn't wear a plug to a job unless the job was the plug, and this job was a closet door.

He takes both coffees. He locks the van. He goes up.

—

She opens the door in a sweatshirt that's seen things and nothing else. Bare legs, hairy and pale, one knee still pink from where she must have been kneeling on something. Her hair's up in a knot that's mostly falling down. There's a smear of something purple at the corner of her mouth that might be a smoothie and might be a popsicle and might be none of his business.

"You brought coffee," she says. "Oh my god. You brought coffee."

"You said you were out."

"I said that and then I found half a bag in the freezer but I didn't want to tell you because then you wouldn't bring coffee." She takes one of the cups out of his hand with both of hers, cradles it, sniffs it. "What is it."

"Vanilla oat latte. The girl said it's what people get."

"The girl." She looks at him over the rim. "You asked a girl what to get me."

"I asked a barista."

"Same thing." She turns and walks into the apartment, and the sweatshirt hem swings and the backs of her thighs are pale and dimpled and there's a small dark bruise on the left one, high up near where the sweatshirt ends, and she doesn't look back and he follows her in and closes the door behind him.

The apartment smells like coffee now, and under it, faint, something else — the sour-sweet of the puddle he'd mopped last night, still there in the grout. She's got a fan running in the kitchen. The dishes from yesterday are still in the sink. The toys are gone from the coffee table, which means she moved them, which means she thought about him coming.

"Bedroom's back here," she says, and he follows her down the hall.

—

The bedroom is the same as the rest of it and also worse. A mattress on a low frame with the sheets half off, one pillow on the floor. A dresser with a drawer hanging open, bras spilling out of it, and on top, a phone on a tripod clip and a ring light folded down and a small black remote with one button. A full-length mirror leaning against the wall next to a stack of books. Clothes on the floor in a drift that starts at the closet and fans out toward the bed like the closet threw up and the bed caught some of it.

The closet door is the kind that slides on a top track. It's come out of the track on one side and it's hanging, tilted, the bottom edge dug into the carpet at an angle that's clearly been there a while because the carpet's got a groove in it.

"It's been like that since —" She stops. Thinks. "March. Maybe February."

"It's not going anywhere."

"That's what I said." She sits down on the edge of the mattress, cross-legged, cup in both hands, and watches him. "Do you need me to hold it or something."

"I need you to not stand under it."

"So I should stay on the bed."

"You should stay on the bed."

"Okay." She stays on the bed. She doesn't stop watching him. He puts his coffee down on the dresser next to the remote and the ring light and kneels in front of the closet, and the carpet's gritty under his knees, and he reaches up and gets both hands on the door and lifts.

It comes up easy. It's light — hollow-core, the kind of door that's mostly air. He gets the top rollers back into the track on the near side and the door hangs straight, and then he tries to slide it and it doesn't move. The bottom's stuck. He kneels down and looks and the bottom rail is glued in place, and it's not glue, it's dried — a film of it, thick, yellowed at the edges, spanning the whole bottom rail and the carpet underneath it, and there's something caught in it, something long and dark and ribbed that's been lying there so long it's grown into the carpet fibers.

He knows what it is before he knows what it is. He's seen the shape before, on the internet, at two in the morning, in a tab he closed before he closed the laptop. It's a dragon. It's the dragon. Big — bigger than his forearm, the kind of thing that has a base the size of a coaster so it doesn't fall over, and it's lying there in the dried mess like a fossil in amber and the mess is dried cum, there's no other thing it could be, the color and the crust and the way it's pooled and run and set.

"Oh," she says from the bed. "Oh, yeah. That."

He doesn't say anything. He's got his hands on the door and his eyes on the dragon and his whole body has gone very still, and he can feel her watching the back of his neck.

"I forgot to clean it," she says. "After. I meant to. I put it down and then I — I don't know. I think I got a text."

"You forgot to clean it."

"It was a long session." She's laughing a little, not embarrassed, or embarrassed in a way that's also laughing. "The whole thing was — I mean it was a custom. Somebody paid for a DP and I'd already done the black one and then the dragon went in after and there was just — a lot. There was a lot."

He gets his fingers under the edge of the dried film and it comes up in a sheet, like peeling a scab off a counter, and underneath the carpet's dark and matted and the door rail is clean. He scrapes the rest with the flat of a putty knife he pulls from his back pocket and the dragon comes up with it and he sets the dragon on the carpet beside his knee, where it sits, absurd, gleaming dully, longer than his hand.

"You can just leave it there," she says. "I'll get it. Later."

"I'm not touching it."

"I didn't say you were." She's quiet for a second. "You can if you want."

He slides the door on the track. It moves. It's fixed. He stands up and wipes his hands on his pants and doesn't look at the dragon and doesn't look at her and he's about to say something about the track needing new rollers when she gets off the bed and comes over and kneels down next to him — right next to him, close enough that her shoulder's almost touching his — and reaches past him into the closet.

Her bare cunt brushes his forearm. Just the side of his forearm, just the hair of it, but she's kneeling with her knees apart and the sweatshirt riding up and there's nothing under it and the contact is skin on skin and it's warm and it's soft and it's there and then it's not, and she's pulling a box out from under a pile of shoes and she doesn't seem to have noticed, or she's noticed and it doesn't register, or she's noticed and it registers and she's decided not to say anything, and he's kneeling there with his arm where her cunt just was and his heart doing something stupid in his chest.

The box is plain cardboard, unmarked, and she sets it on the carpet between them and pulls the flap open, and inside there's molded foam and inside the foam there's a cylinder — clear, with a flange at one end and a hose coming off it, and a bulb, and a gauge. It's German. The instructions are in German. There's a little tube of lube in there too, hotel-sized, and a drawstring bag.

"My new pump," she says. She says it the way you'd say my new blender. "XXL. It's — okay, so it's a pussy pump, it goes over and it suctions and it makes everything swell up, and I've been wanting to try it for like a month, but the old one broke and this one just came and I haven't —" She looks at him. "You're looking at it like it's a bomb."

"I'm looking at it like it's a German medical device."

"It kind of is." She picks it up, turns it over, shows him the flange. "See, this goes here." She holds it against the front of her own body, over the sweatshirt, low, where it would go, and the sweatshirt's thin and the shape of her underneath it is enormous and he looks at the flange and not at the shape and the flange is about the size of a saucer.

"You put it on and you pump and it holds suction and everything swells. It's — okay, it's a lot. My last one, I could get to about the size of a — I don't know. A lemon. This one, I think I could get to a grapefruit. Maybe bigger." She sets it back in the foam. "I haven't tried it yet. I was waiting for a day I had the whole afternoon."

He looks at the mechanism on the closet. He looks at the door he just fixed. He looks at the box.

"The track rollers are shot," he says. "The door slides now but it'll come off again. Whole mechanism needs replacing."

She tilts her head. She's still kneeling, still close, and she tilts her head at him like a bird, and she says, "Can you do it now?"

"Now."

"While I film." She's already getting up, already moving toward the dresser, already reaching for the phone on the tripod clip. "I have a try-on haul today and my subscribers love behind-the-scenes stuff. It's — okay, they eat it up. A guy fixing my closet while I try on stuff. That's content. That's good content." She's got the phone in her hand and she's looking at him with her eyebrows up and the sweatshirt hem swinging and her hairy legs bare under it. "You don't have to be on camera. You can just be — you know. In frame. Background."

"Background."

"Background is fine." She's already angling the phone, testing the light, moving the ring light with her foot. "It's just a closet door. It's not like you're doing anything weird. You're a handyman. Handymen are content."

He looks at the pump in the box between them. He looks at the dragon on the carpet beside his knee. He looks at her, kneeling-adjacent, phone up, sweatshirt riding, already halfway into whatever this is going to be.

"I'll need to go get the rollers out of the van," he says.

"Do it." She's grinning. "I'll start without you."

He goes down the hall. He goes down the stairs. He goes out to the van and opens the back and stands there in the morning heat with his hand on the toolbox and his heart going and the plug in his pocket like a stone and the memory of the side of her cunt against the side of his forearm like a brand he didn't ask for and can't put down.

He takes the rollers. He takes a deep breath. He goes back up.

—

The bedroom's changed when he gets back. She's moved the mirror to the corner where the light hits it and she's got the phone clipped to the tripod and the tripod on the dresser and the ring light on and pointed at the mirror and the mattress is covered in clothes — actual clothes, not the floor drift, but a pile of things she's laid out, tiny things, neon, mesh, a scrap of something yellow that might be a dress and might be a scarf. She's got the sweatshirt off. She's in a bikini bottom that's mostly string and a top that isn't there yet and she's holding two hangers up to her chest and talking to the phone.

"— so this is the one I was telling you about, the neon one, and I honestly don't know if it's going to fit, because I ordered a small and I am not a small, I am a —" She glances over her shoulder at him. "Oh, he's back. Everyone say hi to Omar."

He puts the toolbox down by the closet and doesn't say hi.

"He's shy," she says to the phone. "He's fixing my closet door. It's been broken since March. Or February. One of the months." She turns back to the mirror and holds the yellow thing up. "Okay. So. This one."

He kneels at the closet and gets the door off the track and starts on the rollers. Behind him the phone is talking and she's talking back and the ring light's humming and the mirror's throwing her reflection around the room and he can see her in it without turning his head — the string bottom, the pale back, the little roll of her at the waist when she bends to pick up the next thing, the bush dark at the top of the string where it doesn't quite cover, the way she's talking to the phone like it's a friend in the room.

"— okay so this one's the neon and I think it's actually going to be — oh. Oh no."

He glances. The yellow thing is on and it's too small and it's riding up and she's laughing at herself in the mirror, tugging it down, and the phone is making a sound he recognizes as chat.

"Okay so that's a no," she says. "That's a hard no. That's a — you know what, I'm going to keep it, because it's funny, and somebody's going to want to see me try again with the —" She turns and looks at him. "Omar. Do you think this is too small."

He looks. He's got a screwdriver in his hand and a roller in the other and he looks, and the yellow thing is riding up over her hip and the string bottom's still on and her tits are out and the ring light is making everything too bright and she's waiting for an answer.

"Yes," he says.

"Yes what."

"Too small."

"Thank you." She peels it off over her head and tosses it on the bed and stands there in just the string bottom and the ring light and looks at herself in the mirror for a second, hands on her hips, and then looks at him in the mirror. "You're staring."

"I'm working."

"You're working and staring." She turns around. The phone is still running. The ring light is still on. She walks over to him — three steps, four, across the carpet with the clothes and the dragon and the box — and she kneels down in front of the closet next to him, close, closer than before, and reaches past him into the closet and pulls out the box with the pump in it and sets it between them on the carpet, and the phone sees all of it, and she knows the phone sees all of it, and she doesn't move the phone.

"So," she says. "The rollers."

"Yeah."

"Whole mechanism."

She opens the box. She takes the pump out of the foam. She holds it up between them, clear plastic, the flange and the hose and the bulb and the gauge, and she looks at him over the top of it and her face is doing something that isn't quite a smile.

"I've been dying to try it," she says. "I really have. I got it three weeks ago and I've been — you know. Waiting." She turns the flange toward herself, toward the front of the string bottom, where it would go. "It goes right here. Over the whole thing. And then you pump and it holds and everything swells up and it gets —" She looks at the gauge. "It gets a lot."

He doesn't say anything. The screwdriver's still in his hand. The roller's still in the other. The phone is still running on the dresser and the ring light is still humming and the mirror is throwing both of them back at each other, kneeling on the carpet with a pussy pump between them, and he can hear his own breathing and he's pretty sure she can too.

"You can say no," she says. "It's a closet door. I'll fix the closet door myself. I'll watch a video. I'll —" She shrugs. "I'll figure it out."

"I can do it now," he says.

"Now."

"Now." He sets the screwdriver down. He sets the roller down. He looks at her. "While you film."

She looks at him for a second. Then she hooks her thumb in the string of the bikini bottom and pulls it aside — just aside, just enough — and the whole of her is right there, an inch from his knee, pale and swollen and open from yesterday, the lips puffy and dark and still a little bit pouted from whatever she'd done to herself last night, and the bush wet at the edges, and she holds the string aside with her thumb and looks at him and says, "Okay. So. Right here."

The phone is still running. The ring light is still on. The gauge on the pump reads zero. He reaches for it.

And then he stops.

His hand is halfway to the flange and it just — stops. Hovers. Comes back down to his knee and sits there, fingers spread, like he's holding a shape that isn't in the room. His head drops. His shoulders drop. He's looking at the carpet between his knees and the carpet's got the groove in it from the door and a couple of her hairs on it, long and pink, and he's looking at those like they're something to read.

She's got the string held aside with her thumb and she's holding the pose, and she waits. Three seconds. Four. The ring light hums. The phone ticks through its thing on the dresser. He doesn't move.

"Omar."

"Yeah."

"You okay."

"Yeah." He says it to the carpet. "I'm good. I'm —" He picks up the screwdriver. Puts it down. Picks up the roller. Puts it down. "Yeah."

She lets the string go. It snaps back against her and she doesn't flinch. She sits back on her heels and looks at him — actually looks, the way you look at a dog that's stopped wagging — and the phone keeps running and she doesn't reach for it.

"You don't have to," she says.

"I know."

"I'm not — I wasn't trying to —" She waves a hand at the pump, at the box, at the phone, at all of it. "This is just what I do. This is my Tuesday. I forgot you're not — you're not used to the way I am."

He looks up. Just his eyes, his chin still down. "I'm used to it."

"You're not."

"I'm used to it in a different way."

She tilts her head. The knot of hair that's been falling down all morning finally gives up and comes down over her shoulder and she doesn't push it back. "What way."

He doesn't answer that. He looks at the closet door instead — the door he fixed, hanging straight now on its track, the rollers he hasn't replaced yet — and he puts his hand flat on the bottom rail where the dried mess was and he leaves it there.

He stays like that for a while. Hand flat on the rail, chin down, the roller in his other hand forgotten. The ring light hums. The phone ticks. She watches him from her heels and something in her face goes soft and then goes careful, the way you look at a dog that's stopped wagging.

"Hey," she says. Not the flirty voice. The other one. "You went somewhere."

"I'm here."

"You're here and you went somewhere." She gets up off her heels and crosses to the dresser and does something to the phone — a tap, a swipe — and the little red light above the lens goes out. She turns the ring light off too. The room drops back to window light and it's a different room, softer, the too-bright gone, just a bedroom with clothes on the mattress and a closet door hanging straight on its track.

She comes back and sits down on the carpet next to him. Not across from him. Next to him, shoulder almost touching, both of them facing the closet like it's a fireplace.

"I turned it off," she says.

"You didn't have to."

"I know I didn't have to." She pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them. The string bottom's still on. The sweatshirt's still on the floor somewhere. She doesn't reach for it. "I do this all day and I forget that most people don't. That's — that's a me problem. That's not a you problem."

He turns the roller over in his hand. It's a cheap one, nylon wheel, the kind that comes in a four-pack. He's installed a hundred of them. He could do it blind.

"It's not that," he says.

"Okay."

"It's not —" He stops. Starts again. "You asked me what way."

"I did ask you that."

"I'm used to it in a way where it's not in the room." He says it to the closet door. "It's on a screen. It's at two in the morning. It's a tab I close. It's not —" He gestures with the roller at the carpet, at the box, at the dragon, at her. "It's not sitting on the floor next to me."

She's quiet for a second. Then she says, "Oh."

"Yeah."

"Oh, honey." And she says it without any of the performance in it, just the word, and she puts her hand on his knee. Flat. Warm. Not moving. Just there. "You're doing the thing where you think I'm going to be weird about it."

"I'm not."

"You are. You're doing it right now. You've got your shoulders up by your ears."

He lets his shoulders down. He hadn't noticed they were up. She laughs — a small one, through her nose — and takes her hand back and puts it around her knees again.

"Everybody's got a thing," she says. "I've got like nine. I've got a whole drawer of things. You saw the dragon. That was a Tuesday. That wasn't even a weird Tuesday."

"That was a weird Tuesday."

"For you." She grins at the closet. "For me that was a light day."

He laughs. It comes out of him before he can stop it, one short breath, and she turns and looks at him like she just won something.

"There he is," she says.

He sets the roller down on the carpet between them. He looks at the closet door — the door he actually fixed, straight on its track, the bottom rail scraped clean — and he says, "The rollers are still shot."

"I know."

"I've got them in the van."

"I know you do." She stands up, and the movement puts her hip right at his eye level for a second, the string bottom cutting a line across her, the bush dark above it, and then she's up and reaching for the sweatshirt off the floor and pulling it over her head and it comes down over all of it and she's just a girl in a big sweatshirt again, bare legs, hair everywhere.

She pads out of the bedroom. He hears her in the kitchen — a cabinet, the tap, the fan she left running. He stays on the carpet for a second with his hand still flat on the rail. Then he gets up and goes and gets the rollers.

—

It takes him twenty minutes. Real work, this time — the old mechanism off, the bracket screws out, the track wiped down with a rag he keeps in the toolbox, the new rollers seated and greased, the door lifted back in and slid once, twice, testing. It moves like it's supposed to. He slides it all the way open and all the way shut and it doesn't jump the track and it doesn't drag and the groove in the carpet stays where it is, a scar in the pile that isn't going anywhere.

She's on the bed behind him, cross-legged, laptop open, doing something with her phone and the laptop at the same time, the way she does everything. She's got her coffee now, the one he brought, gone cold probably, and she's drinking it anyway.

"Okay," he says. "Try it."

She gets up and comes over and slides the door. Smooth. She slides it back. She slides it again, faster, then slower, then she just stands there with her hand on the edge of it and looks at the closet like it's a magic trick.

"It doesn't do the thing," she says.

"What thing."

"The thing where it goes clack and then you have to lift it and it falls over and you swear and you leave it." She slides it one more time, gentle. "It just — goes."

"That's the point."

"That's a good point." She turns around and leans back against the closet door, arms crossed, and looks at him standing there with his rag and his screwdriver and his toolbox open at his feet. "Okay," she says. "I'm going to ask you something and I want you to actually answer."

"Okay."

"What do I owe you."

He blinks. "The sink was yesterday."

"The sink was yesterday and you didn't charge me for yesterday."

"I —"

"You wrote a receipt and you left it on the counter and the receipt says forty for the trap and nothing for the hour and a half you were under there, and I know it was an hour and a half because I was sitting right there." She's not mad. She's got the tone of somebody who's been over this before, with other people, maybe a lot. "And then you brought me coffee this morning, which is not on the receipt, and then you fixed my closet door, which is also not on the receipt, and now you're standing there like you're about to leave without telling me a number."

He looks at his toolbox. "It's not a big job."

"It's not about the job." She pushes off the door and comes over and stands in front of him, close, sweatshirt hem swinging, and she's shorter than him by a little and she looks up at him with her chin lifted. "It's about the fact that you keep not letting me pay you and I keep letting you not let me and that's a thing that happens and I don't love it."

"It's not like that."

"Then tell me what it's like."

He's quiet. She waits. She's good at waiting when she wants to be — better than he'd have guessed, better than the scattered thing she does with the coffee and the texts and the nine drawers of things. She just stands there and looks up at him and lets the silence do its work.

"It's like," he says, "I don't know how to be here."

"Here."

"In your apartment. On a Tuesday. With you standing there in a sweatshirt." He looks at the toolbox, then at her, then back at the toolbox. "On a job, there's a number and there's a receipt and there's a door and I go through it. That's the whole thing. That's how it works. And you keep —" He stops.

"I keep what."

"You keep not being a job."

She looks at him for a long second. Then she nods, once, like he passed something, and she turns and walks over to the dresser and picks up her phone and comes back with it in both hands, screen up.

"Okay," she says. "Here's how this works. I'm going to pay you. And you're going to take it. And it's going to be more than forty dollars because you did more than forty dollars of work, and if you argue with me about it I'm going to be annoying about it, and I'm very good at being annoying about it."

"Cass —"

"Nope." She's already tapping at the phone with her thumbs, fast, the way she does everything, and then she flips the phone around and holds it out to him. "There. That's the bill."

He looks at the screen.

It's a payment app. The amount at the top is a hundred and twenty dollars. And under it, where the name goes, where the app pulls the account holder, it says: @casscumsfirst.

He reads it. He reads it again. He reads the little profile picture next to it — her, cropped, a shot of her face with her tongue out and her eyes crossed, taken in this room, probably on this bed — and then he reads the handle one more time and his brain does the thing where it takes a second to catch up to what his eyes already did.

She's watching his face. She's watching it the whole time, from the second he looked down, and she's got her lip between her teeth and she's not laughing, not yet, but she's on the edge of it.

"That's me," she says. "That's — you know. That's the account. That's where the money goes."

"Cass."

"It's my stream handle." She says it plainly, no flourish. "It's the same one on the site. It's the same one on the videos. It's the same one on everything. It's just my name. It's my — it's like my email. It's not a secret. It's just not the name I put on the door."

He's still looking at the screen. The amount. The handle. The little crossed eyes.

"You're sending me a hundred and twenty dollars," he says, "from the account that says casscumsfirst."

"I'm sending you a hundred and twenty dollars from the account that says casscumsfirst, yes."

"Why."

"Because it's my account." She shrugs. "I could send it from the other one, the boring one with my real name on it, but that one's got like twelve dollars in it and I'd have to transfer and that takes two days and I'd forget. This one's got money. This one's always got money." She tilts the phone at him. "Take it. It's yours. It's for the sink and the closet and the coffee and the whole —" She waves her free hand at the room, at the dragon on the carpet, at the pump in the box, at the door he fixed. "The whole thing."

He doesn't take the phone. He's looking at the handle and something's happening in his chest that he can't name and doesn't want to, a hot-cold thing, the feeling of being handed a key to a door you've been standing outside of your whole life.

"Say it," she says.

"Say what."

"Say the name. Out loud. I want to hear you say it."

He looks up at her. She's got her chin up and her eyes on him and she's not teasing now, not really, there's something underneath it, something that wants him to say it because she's never heard it in his voice and she wants to know what it sounds like.

"Casscumsfirst," he says.

It comes out flat. Just words. But his voice does something on the way through — a hitch, a half-step — and she hears it, and her eyes change, just for a second, then she's grinning again and takes his hand off the toolbox and puts the phone in it.

"Okay," she says. "Now you take it."

He looks at the phone in his hand. The app's still open. The amount's still there. His thumb hovers over the button and his thumb's not quite steady and he presses it, and the screen does the little animation, and the money's gone from her account and into his, and the confirmation pops up with a checkmark and the handle @casscumsfirst right there in the middle of it like it's the most normal thing in the world.

"There," she says. "That's done. Now we're even and I can stop feeling weird and you can stop doing the thing where you fix my life for free."

He hands the phone back. She takes it and drops it on the bed without looking and stands there in front of him with her hands loose at her sides, and the room's quiet except for the fan in the kitchen and the traffic outside and somewhere down the block a lawnmower starting up.

"So," she says. "You've got my username now."

"I've got your username."

"You could look me up."

"I could."

"You could look me up tonight." She says it light, the way she says everything, but she's watching his face while she says it. "You could go home and open the laptop and type it in and see what I actually do all day. The real stuff. Not the —" She gestures at the room again. "Not the Tuesday version. The stuff that pays for the sink."

He looks at her. He's got his rag in one hand and his screwdriver in the other, his toolbox open at his feet, a hundred and twenty dollars in his account with her handle on it. She's standing there in a sweatshirt with her hair down and her hairy legs bare and her cunt still wet from whatever she'd been about to do before he stopped, and she's offering him a door.

"What if I don't want to look it up," he says.

"Then don't." She shrugs. "It's not a test. It's just — it's there. It's always been there. Half the people who come fix stuff in this building have probably —" She stops. Laughs. "Okay, that's not true. But you could. That's all. You could."

He kneels down and starts putting his tools back in the box. Screwdriver, putty knife, the rag folded twice, the leftover rollers in their little plastic sleeve. She watches him do it. She doesn't help and she doesn't leave.

"The balcony door," she says. "And the bathroom light. And the cabinet."

"I know."

"You don't have to do them today."

"I know."

"You could do them Thursday."

He closes the toolbox and stands up. "Thursday's fine."

"Thursday's fine." She nods. "Okay. Thursday." She walks him out — down the hall, past the kitchen with the fan, past the sink he fixed yesterday, past the coffee table with the toys gone and the coffee cup he brought her sitting on it half-full and cold. At the door she stops and leans on the frame and looks at him with her head tilted.

"Hey," she says.

"Yeah."

"You did good in there. The door. It's nice." She says it simply. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"And Omar."

"Yeah."

"Whatever your thing is —" She waves a hand at him, at the hallway, at the whole morning. "It's fine. I don't care what it is. I really don't. I just wanted you to know that."

He looks at her for a second. There's a version of this where he says something. There's a version where he tells her about the lace he's wearing right now, the plain ones he'd put back on and then taken off and then put back on, the plug in his pocket that he carried all the way here and didn't use because you didn't bring a plug to a job unless the job was the plug. There's a version where he opens that door right here in the hallway with her leaning on the frame and the fan running in the kitchen and her username still glowing on his phone.

He doesn't. Not yet. But it's there now, in the room, the way the dragon was on the carpet — a thing that's been lying in the dried mess so long it's grown into the fibers, and all somebody has to do is look down and see the shape of it.

"Thursday," he says.

"Thursday." She smiles. "Bring coffee."

He goes down the stairs. He goes out to the van and puts the toolbox in the back and gets in the driver's seat and sits there with the engine off and the morning getting hot through the windshield. He takes his phone out. The payment app's still open. The confirmation's still there. @casscumsfirst, right there under the checkmark, and under that, in smaller text, a little link that says View profile.

He puts the phone face-down on the passenger seat. He starts the van. He drives.

At the first red light he picks the phone back up and types the handle into the search bar and doesn't hit enter. The light turns green. He puts the phone down and drives through it and at the next light he picks it up again and his thumb's over the button and the light's still red and the van's idling and the phone's warm in his hand and somewhere behind him, three blocks back, in a bedroom with a closet door that finally slides, she's probably already got her laptop open.

He hits enter at the light on Delmar.

The page takes a second to load and then it's just — her. A banner across the top: a hand, ring-lit, two fingers spread, wet. Not a logo, not a drawing, a photo, cropped tight, and under it in a rounded font, casscumsfirst. Below that, a grid. Six videos across, ten rows down. Every thumbnail a different version of the same apartment he was standing in an hour ago — the same window light, the same couch, the same coffee table with the same chipped corner where the veneer peeled up. The toys are in every frame. The dragon, the black one, the pump, things he doesn't have a name for.

He doesn't scroll. He sits at the red light with the phone tilted on the wheel and reads the titles. They're long. They're the kind of titles that tell you everything up front, no mystery, no tease — pumping my cunt until it gapes open, then stuffing it with the big one (FULL SOUND, NO CUTS). Twenty-two minutes. Two hundred thousand views. The little counter under it says 4.2K likes, 318 comments, and he can see the top comment without opening it: the way you say please at 11:40 🥵.

The light turns green. He puts the phone down and drives. Two blocks later he pulls into the 7-Eleven on the corner and parks in the shade of the building and leaves the engine running with the AC on and picks the phone back up.

He scrolls now. He scrolls slow. He's not looking for a specific one. He's cataloguing — the way you size up a job. Every video is a room he's been in. The bathroom light that flickers, he can see it flickering in the background of one from three weeks ago. The cabinet door that slams — there it is, in the corner of a thumbnail, open, the same crooked hinge. She's been filming in this apartment for months and he's the guy who's supposed to come fix the stuff that shows up in the background of her videos and he didn't even know it. He's been walking past her door for a year.

His thumb stops on one. It's from six days ago. The thumbnail is a close-up of her face, eyes closed, mouth open, and the title is custom for a friend — he asked for the hairy legs, the unshaved pussy, and the brown water. no shame. (yes i peed. full vid on my page).

He looks at it for a long time. He looks at the parking lot through the windshield. An old man comes out of the 7-Eleven with a lottery ticket and a banana and gets into a Camry and drives away. Omar opens the video.

The preview is thirty seconds. It's her, on the floor of the bedroom, on the same rug, and she's talking to the camera like it's a person. She's saying — okay so he wanted the hairy legs specifically, which is, like, so funny to me because half the comments on my other vids are dudes asking me to shave and I'm like, no, this is the whole thing, this is the whole point — and she lifts one leg and turns it so the camera can see the dark hair down her shin, and then she reaches down between her legs and spreads herself open with two fingers and the camera zooms and the preview cuts out right there.

Omar puts the phone face-down on the passenger seat and sits in the 7-Eleven parking lot with the AC blowing on his face and his heart going like he just carried something heavy up three flights.

He's hard. He's been hard since the hallway. The lace is still on under his work pants and the plug is still in his pocket, and he can feel the seam of the lace against his cock every time he shifts in the seat. He sits there and thinks about the fact that the woman whose sink he fixed yesterday has a whole page of herself on the internet and a hundred and twenty dollars of his money now and a username he can type into any search bar for the rest of his life.

He starts the van and drives home.

His apartment is one bedroom above a garage on the east side, and it's clean in the way that means somebody's always got a hand on it — dishes done, bed made, laundry folded in the hamper, not a single thing on the floor. He drops the toolbox by the door and takes his boots off and lines them up against the wall and goes into the bedroom and opens the bottom drawer of the dresser.

The drawer is the only mess in the apartment. Lace, folded tight. Six pairs of panties — two black, two pink, one white, one gray — and under them a small black case the size of a paperback with a zipper. He unzips it. Inside, on a foam cutout, three plugs. Small, medium, and the one he wears to work, which is the small one, which is the one he's carrying in his pocket right now. He takes it out of his pocket and puts it back in the case, zips the case, sets it on top of the panties, and closes the drawer.

Then he stands there in his work pants with the lace on under them and his phone in his hand and the drawer closed and the whole apartment quiet except for the fridge.

He opens the drawer again and takes out the pink pair and puts them on the bed. He takes off his work pants and folds them and puts them on the chair, and he takes off the plain black lace he's been wearing all day and adds it to the laundry, and he stands in the middle of his bedroom in a t-shirt and nothing else, looking down at the pink lace on the bed.

He doesn't put them on. Not yet. He goes and gets his laptop off the kitchen table and brings it back and sits on the edge of the bed with it warm on his thighs and he types it in.

casscumsfirst.

The page loads the same as on the phone but bigger. He scrolls. The grid is longer than he thought — there's a second page, a third. She's been at this for two years. Two years of videos in that apartment, two years of the sink dripping and the light flickering and the cabinet slamming and nobody fixing any of it, and he thinks about how many times he's driven past this building on his way to some other job and he wants to put his face in his hands.

He clicks one. It's not the custom. It's a free one, posted a month ago, the kind she puts up as bait. Eight minutes. He hits play.

The first thing is her voice. Not the voice she used with him — that was the Tuesday voice, the door voice, the hey voice. This is the other one. Lower. Slower. She's talking to the camera with her knees up and her back against the headboard and she's saying, okay so I woke up this morning and I was already wet, like, before I even opened my eyes, and I laid there for a minute and I thought about just — you know — not doing anything about it, just letting it sit, and then I was like, no, that's stupid, why would I do that — and she laughs at herself and reaches over and picks up the black toy off the nightstand and it's the one from the coffee table, the big one, and she holds it up to the camera and says, this one's a foot long, which is honestly too much, but I'm gonna try anyway.

Omar watches all eight minutes. He watches her work it in slow, talking the whole time, narrating it to the camera like she's telling a friend about her day. He watches her get frustrated and laugh and reposition and try again. He watches the moment her face changes — the exact second it goes from talking to not talking — and he watches her hand come up and cover her own mouth and her eyes go to the side of the frame like she forgot the camera was there. When it ends he's got the laptop open on his lap and his cock is out of the pink lace and in his fist and he hasn't even noticed himself doing it.

He closes the laptop. He sits there breathing. The fridge hums. Somebody's car door slams in the parking lot outside.

He picks the phone up off the bed and opens the messages app and types her number in — the one from the receipt, the one he watched her write in the book — and he sits with his thumb over the keyboard for a long time.

hey it's omar. the handyman.

He deletes it.

Hey it's Omar. Just confirming Thursday.

He deletes that too. He types hey and deletes it and types I looked you up and sits with that one for a full minute with his heart going, and then he deletes it and puts the phone down on the nightstand and lies back on the bed with the pink lace still tangled around one ankle.

He's asleep in ten minutes. He doesn't set an alarm. He doesn't need one — he wakes up at six like he always does, and the first thing he does before coffee, before the shower, before he even sits up, is reach for the phone and check if she texted him.

She hasn't. It's six-oh-four in the morning and there's nothing on the screen but the time and a notification from his bank that says the hundred and twenty dollars is available.

He goes to work. He's got two jobs before noon — a garbage disposal in Oak Park and a fence gate in Berwyn — and he does them both without thinking about anything except the work, the way he always does, hands busy, mind quiet. At lunch he sits in the van in a strip mall parking lot with a sandwich and opens the phone and scrolls back to her page and watches another one. This one's longer. This one's the pump. He watches her attach something to herself and squeeze a bulb and he watches her cunt swell up fat and pink and wet and he watches her keep going past the point where it looks like it should hurt, talking the whole time in that low voice, and when the video ends he's got his sandwich half-eaten in his hand and he's not hungry anymore.

At two-fifteen his phone buzzes.

He's got the phone out of the cupholder before the second buzz finishes. It's not a number he knows — a local area code, no name, no contact photo.

He reads it once. Then again, slower, the way you read a text you're not sure you understand.

Hey Omar, it's Cass. From 3B. The sink. Sorry this is so last minute but I totally forgot I have a thing tonight and I need the closet door fixed before my friend gets here. Are you free in like an hour?

He reads it a third time. His thumb hovers. The sandwich is still in his other hand, half-eaten, and he sets it down on the dash because he's not hungry anymore and he wasn't hungry before either.

The closet door. She didn't mention the closet door. Yesterday it was the balcony door, the bathroom light, the cabinet door. Three things. The closet door is new. He thinks about that for a second and then he thinks about how she probably had to look around her apartment for something else that was broken just to have a reason to text him, and his heart does a thing he doesn't have a name for.

He types: I can do that. Be there in about an hour.

He hits send before he can think about it. Then he sits there in the van with the engine running and the AC blowing and his phone in his hand and the text sitting there in the thread like a thing that's already happened, and he realizes he's still wearing the lace from this morning. He put it on out of habit, the black pair, before he even thought about it, and now he's sitting in a strip mall parking lot with a text from her on his phone and lace against his cock and he doesn't know what to do with any of it.

He could go home and change. He has time. He could go home and put on the plain ones, the boring ones, and go fix her closet door like a normal handyman and come home and never think about it again. That's what a normal person would do. He sits there with his hands on the wheel and he thinks about that — the normal version, the one where he's just a guy who fixes things — and then his phone buzzes again.

You're a lifesaver. I owe you. I'll have cash.

He doesn't go home. He puts the van in gear and pulls out of the lot and drives toward her building with the black lace under his work pants and the small plug in his pocket and his heart going like a thing he can't slow down.

He parks on the street this time, not the lot. The building looks different in the afternoon — the light's different, the shadows are shorter, there's a kid on a bike in the parking lot and a woman carrying groceries up the steps. He sits in the van for a minute with his hands on the wheel and watches the building like it's a place he's never been, and then he gets out and grabs his toolbox and walks up the steps and knocks on 3B.

She opens the door and he forgets how to breathe for a second.

It's the same sweater. The same loose, oversized thing that hangs off one shoulder and comes down to her thighs, and she's bare-legged again, the same hairy legs, the same pale skin, and her hair is up in a messy knot this time with pieces falling out of it and she's got a pencil stuck in it like she was doing something and forgot it was there. She's barefoot. Her toenails are painted a chipped pink.

"Oh my god, you're here already," she says, and she sounds genuinely surprised, like she texted him an hour ago and expected him to show up in three days. "I didn't think you'd be this fast. Come in, come in, sorry, it's a mess, I was —" she gestures vaguely behind her at the apartment, which looks exactly the same as yesterday except somehow messier, "— doing stuff."

He steps inside and sets the toolbox down and tries not to look at the coffee table. The toys are still there. The big black one, the one from the video, is lying on the table like it's been there for days, and next to it is a smaller purple one and a bottle of lube with the cap off. He looks at them for exactly one second and then he looks at the floor and then he looks at her and she's already walking away, talking over her shoulder.

"It's in the bedroom. The closet door. It's been doing this thing where it won't stay closed, like it just —" she pushes the bedroom door open and gestures, "— pops open in the middle of the night and it's so creepy, I keep waking up and it's just standing there open and I'm like, who opened that, and it's nobody, it's just the door being a bitch."

He follows her into the bedroom. The bed is unmade. The sheets are tangled and there's a pillow on the floor and he tries very hard not to look at the bed and then he looks at the bed and then he looks at the closet door, which is standing open exactly like she said, a dark rectangle in the wall.

"Yeah, that's a latch issue," he says. "Probably the strike plate. Or the hinge is loose and the door's dropping."

"You're the expert," she says, and she says it like she means it, like he's the smartest person she's ever met because he knows what a strike plate is. She's standing in the doorway of the bedroom with her arms crossed and the sweater hanging off her shoulder and he can see the edge of her collarbone and he looks away.

He kneels down in front of the closet and runs his hand along the edge of the door. The latch is loose. The strike plate is worn. He can fix this in five minutes. He opens his toolbox and gets out a screwdriver and starts on the hinge, and behind him he can hear her moving around the apartment, the soft pad of her bare feet on the floor, the sound of something being picked up and set down somewhere else.

"So what's the thing tonight?" he asks, because the silence is too loud.

"Oh, just a friend coming over," she says. "We're gonna watch a movie or something. I don't know. She's bringing wine." She pauses. "I should probably clean up a little. I always say I'm gonna clean up and then I just — don't."

He tightens the hinge screw and tests the door. It closes with a soft click. He opens it again and closes it again. Solid.

"That's the hinge," he says. "The latch is fine now."

She comes over and stands next to him and pushes the door herself, once, twice, and then she looks at him with this big genuine smile like he just fixed her whole life. "Oh my god, thank you. That's been driving me insane for like a month."

He's kneeling on the floor and she's standing over him and the sweater is at her thighs and he's very aware of the fact that she's not wearing anything under it. He can't see anything — the sweater is too long, too loose, it hangs away from her body — but he knows. He knows because he saw her yesterday, because he watched her bend over and he saw her stretched cunt and the glow of the plug and he's been thinking about it for twenty-four hours straight and it's all he can do not to look down.

He stands up. He's hard. He's been hard since he knocked on the door and he's standing there in his work pants with a bulge he can't hide and she's standing two feet away looking at him with those blue eyes and he doesn't know where to put his hands.

"Anything else?" he asks. His voice comes out normal. He doesn't know how.

"Um," she says, and she looks around the room like she's trying to remember something. "The light? In the bathroom? It's been flickering. I keep meaning to mention it but I keep forgetting."

"I can look at it."

He follows her to the bathroom. It's small and cluttered — bottles on the edge of the tub, a towel on the floor, a toothbrush in a cup by the sink. The light is on and it's flickering, a steady pulse like a heartbeat, and he reaches up and takes the fixture and wiggles it.

"Just a loose bulb," he says. "Or the socket's worn."

He gets a new bulb out of his toolbox and unscrews the old one. It's hot. He replaces it and the flickering stops. The light goes steady and bright and he flicks the switch off and on to test it and it holds.

"Done," he says.

"You're amazing," she says, and she's standing in the doorway of the bathroom with the light behind her and the sweater hanging off her shoulder and she looks like something out of a movie he's seen a hundred times. "Seriously. I've been meaning to call someone for like —" she waves her hand, "— months. And you just come in and fix everything."

He shrugs. "It's not hard."

"It's hard for me," she says. "I can't do anything. I tried to fix the cabinet door once and I almost took the whole thing off the wall." She laughs at herself, a bright scattered sound. "I'm not good at, like, physical stuff. I'm good at other stuff."

He doesn't ask what other stuff. He doesn't have to. He's seen the coffee table. He's seen the videos. He knows exactly what other stuff she's good at.

He goes back into the living room and she follows him and they stand there for a second in the middle of the mess — the toys on the coffee table, the dishes in the sink, the pile of laundry on the floor — and he can smell her again. That smell. The one he's been thinking about since yesterday. It's in the air of this apartment like it lives here, like it's part of the walls, and he's standing in it with a hard-on and a pocket full of plug and he doesn't know what to do with his hands.

"The cabinet," he says. "You said the cabinet door slams."

"Oh, yeah," she says. "The kitchen. It's been doing it forever."

She leads him into the kitchen and points at the cabinet under the sink. He opens it and looks at the hinge. It's bent. He takes it off, straightens it with a pair of pliers, puts it back. He tests the door. It closes soft, no slam.

"There," he says. "That's everything."

She looks at him. She's standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed and the sweater riding up on her thighs and she looks at him for a long second and then she says, "How much do I owe you?"

He tells her. She digs cash out of a purse on the counter — crumpled bills, a receipt, a granola bar wrapper — and hands it to him. Her fingers brush his. She doesn't pull away. Neither does he. They stand there for a second with their hands touching and the air thick and she looks up at him and he can't read her face.

"Thanks," she says softly. "Seriously. You're like —" she gestures with her free hand, "— a lifesaver. I don't know what I'd do."

"You'd figure it out," he says. "You seem like you figure things out."

She laughs. It's a real laugh, not the door voice, and it does something to his chest. "I don't know about that. I'm kind of a mess."

"A good mess," he says, and he doesn't know why he says it, and she looks at him with those blue eyes and something flickers across her face and then it's gone.

"Well," she says, and she pulls her hand back and tucks the cash into her pocket. "I should probably —" she gestures vaguely at the apartment, at the mess, at the whole situation, "— do stuff. Before my friend gets here."

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I should —" he gestures at the door, at the van, at the whole thing, and she laughs again.

He picks up his toolbox and heads for the door. She follows him. He's halfway out when she says, "Hey, Omar?"

He turns. She's standing in the doorway with the light behind her and the sweater hanging off her shoulder and she looks at him for a second before she says, "If you're ever around and something else breaks, you know. You can just text me. I'm always breaking stuff."

He looks at her. She's smiling. It's a small smile, a real one, and he can see the edge of her collarbone and the curve of her shoulder and he thinks about the pink lace in his drawer and the plug in his pocket and the videos on his phone and the way she says his name.

"I'll do that," he says.

He walks down the steps and gets in the van and sits there with his hands on the wheel for a long minute. The sun is going down. The light is orange and long and it's hitting the side of her building and he can see her window from where he's parked. He sits there and watches it for a minute, and then his phone buzzes.

It's her. She sent him a text. It's a string of emojis — a wrench, a heart, a smiley face — and then a message: seriously thank you. you're the best.

He reads it four times. Then he puts the phone down and starts the van and drives home with the black lace against his cock and the plug in his pocket and the smell of her apartment still in his nose and he doesn't know what he's going to do about any of it.

His apartment is the same as he left it. Clean. Quiet. The bottom drawer of the dresser closed. He sets the toolbox down and takes off his work pants and stands there in the black lace and looks at himself in the mirror on the closet door. He looks like a man. He looks like a regular man in a regular apartment with a regular job and the only thing different is the lace and the plug and the phone in his hand with her messages on it.

He takes off the lace. He puts it in the laundry. He opens the bottom drawer and takes out the gray pair and the pink pair and holds them up and looks at them and then he puts them back and closes the drawer.

He goes to bed at nine. He lies there in the dark with his hands behind his head and the ceiling above him and he thinks about her standing in the kitchen with the sweater at her thighs and the light behind her and the way she looked at him when she said his name. He thinks about the videos. He thinks about the custom — the one with the hairy legs and the brown water and the way she spread herself open at the end of the preview. He thinks about the fact that she's probably with her friend right now, drinking wine, watching a movie, sitting on that couch with the toys still on the coffee table, not even thinking about him.

He doesn't sleep for a long time.

When he finally does, he dreams about her. It's not a dirty dream, not exactly — she's just there, in his apartment, in the kitchen, standing at the counter in that sweater, and she's talking to him about something, and he can't hear what she's saying but he can smell her, that smell, and he wakes up at three in the morning hard as a rock with the sheets tangled around his legs and her name in his head.

He doesn't go back to sleep. He lies there in the dark and listens to the fridge hum and thinks about the way she said his name. Like it meant something.

At six he gets up and goes to work. He's got a toilet in Cicero and a ceiling fan in Logan Square and he does them both with his hands busy and his mind going in circles. At lunch he sits in the van with a sandwich he doesn't eat and he opens his phone and looks at her page again. He doesn't watch anything. He just looks at the grid of thumbnails, the same apartment, the same ring light, the same pink hair, the same everything — and he thinks about the fact that he's been inside that apartment twice now and he's fixed four things and she's texted him twice and he's got her number in his phone and she's got his.

His phone buzzes. It's her.

hey. random question. do you know anything about like. ceiling stains?

He stares at the screen. Ceiling stains. He types: What kind of stains?

She types back fast. like brown ones. in the corner. I just noticed it and I'm like. is my roof gonna fall on me??

He tells her it's probably a leak from the unit above, not the roof, and it's not going to fall on her, and he can come look at it if she wants. He hits send and sits there with his heart going and the phone in his hand and he watches the three dots appear and disappear and appear again and then:

would you?? that would be amazing. I'm home all day.

He looks at the time. He's got one more job at two. It's twelve-thirty now. He could do it after. He types: I can come by around four.

She sends back a string of emojis — a heart, a smiley, a little wrench — and then: you're literally the best person I've ever met.

He puts the phone down on the passenger seat and sits there in the van with the AC blowing and his heart going and he thinks about the fact that he's supposed to be fixing a ceiling stain and he's going to be standing in her apartment again in a few hours and he's already hard just thinking about it.

He finishes his job at three. He drives to her building and parks on the street and sits there for a minute with his hands on the wheel before he gets out. He's wearing the gray lace today. He doesn't know when he decided that. He just reached into the drawer this morning and his hand came out with the gray pair and he put them on and he's been thinking about them all day.

He knocks on 3B. She opens the door and she's wearing the same sweater — or maybe a different one, he can't tell, it's the same shape, the same loose oversized thing that hangs off her shoulder and comes down to her thighs — and her hair is down this time, messy and pink and falling around her face, and she's barefoot again and she looks at him and smiles.

"You came," she says, like she's surprised. Like he wouldn't.

"I said I would."

She steps back to let him in and he walks into the apartment and the smell hits him again — that smell, the one he's been thinking about — and he sets his toolbox down and follows her into the bedroom where she points at the corner of the ceiling. There's a brown stain there, spreading, the shape of a map of a country he doesn't know.

"See?" she says. "It's been there for like a week. I keep looking at it and I'm like, is that getting bigger? And then I forget about it and then I look again and it's —" she gestures, "— bigger."

He looks at it. It's a leak from the unit above, like he thought. Not dangerous. Not going to fall on her. He tells her that and she lets out a breath like she's been holding it for a week.

"Oh thank god," she says. "I was like, I'm gonna die in my sleep, my ceiling's gonna fall on me and nobody's gonna find me for like a week."

"It's not gonna fall on you," he says. "It's just a stain. You should tell your landlord, but it's not an emergency."

"Okay," she says. "Okay, good. I won't die in my sleep."

He looks at her. She's standing in the middle of the bedroom with the late afternoon light coming through the window behind her and the sweater at her thighs and her hair falling around her face and she's looking at him like he just saved her life again. He's hard. He's been hard since he knocked on the door. He's standing there in his work pants with a bulge he can't hide and she's looking at him with those blue eyes and he can't tell if she sees it.

"Anything else?" he asks. His voice comes out rough.

She tilts her head. "What?"

"Anything else you need fixed?"

"Oh," she says. "Um." She looks around the room like she's scanning for broken things, and her eyes land on the closet door, the one he fixed yesterday, and then on the light, and then on him. "I don't think so. I think you got everything."

He nods. He picks up his toolbox. He's halfway to the door when she says, "Hey, Omar?"

He turns. She's standing there with the light behind her and she looks at him for a second and then she says, "Do you want a beer? Or something? I feel like I keep owing you and I don't — I don't know how to, like, repay you except with cash and I don't have any more cash." She laughs at herself. "But I have beer."

He should say no. He should say he has to go, he has another job, he has somewhere to be. He stands there with his toolbox in his hand and the gray lace against his cock and the plug in his pocket and he looks at her standing in the doorway of her messy apartment with the light behind her and he says, "Yeah. Sure. A beer sounds good."

She leads him to the kitchen and he follows, watching the way her bare feet pad across the wood floor, the sweater swaying at her thighs. She opens the fridge and bends over to root around inside and the hem rides up just enough to show the bottom of her ass cheeks, pale and round and bare, no underwear beneath the sweater. He looks away. He looks at the ceiling. He looks at the stain on the wall that he's already fixed. Anywhere but at the way her thighs part when she reaches for the back of the shelf.

"I have —" she says, straightening up with two bottles in her hand, "— I have this IPA that this guy at the co-op recommended, and I also have this like. Sour. It's pink." She holds them up. "The sour's pink. I bought it because it was pink."

"The sour," he says.

She grins and sets the IPA back and twists the cap off the pink bottle and hands it to him. Her fingers brush his. She doesn't seem to notice. She grabs the IPA for herself and leads him to the living room and drops onto the couch and pats the cushion next to her.

He sits. The couch is soft and sagging and smells like her — that same smell, the one that's been living in his head since yesterday, warm and musky and sweet underneath. He takes a drink of the sour. It's tart and cold and he doesn't taste it at all.

"So," she says, tucking her feet under her, "what's it like? Being a handyman?"

"It's fine."

"Do you like it?"

"I like fixing things." He turns the bottle in his hands. "I like when something's broken and then it's not."

"That's so nice," she says. "I feel like I break everything I touch. I'm like a — a chaos gremlin." She gestures at the apartment. "Look at this place. It's a disaster. I tried to organize my bookshelf last week and I ended up just. Sitting on the floor. Reading the first chapters of like six books."

He looks at the bookshelf. It's a mess — books stacked sideways, a few on the floor, a candle melted down to a nub. He looks at the coffee table with the toys still out — the big black dildo, the dragon one, the bottle of lube, the ring light folded up against the wall. She follows his gaze and doesn't seem embarrassed at all.

"Sorry about the mess," she says, but she doesn't sound sorry. "I was filming earlier. It's a whole thing."

"Filming?"

"Yeah. Like. You know." She waves the bottle vaguely. "Content. For my page." She says it casually, like she's telling him she runs a book club. "I do like. Custom stuff. Requests and things."

He takes another drink. The sour is doing something to his mouth, making it water. "What kind of requests?"

She laughs. "Oh my god, you don't want to know."

"I asked."

She looks at him for a second, those blue eyes, and then she shrugs and says, "Like. People want to see me do stuff. With toys. Or. Sometimes they want me to talk while I do it. Sometimes they want me to wear something specific. Sometimes they want me to —" she gestures at herself, "— you know. Be me. But like. More."

He doesn't say anything. He's looking at the toys on the coffee table and thinking about the way she looked yesterday, bent over the sink, the glow of the plug between her cheeks.

She sets the beer down on the coffee table next to the lube bottle, and he watches her do it, watches the condensation bead on the glass and run down the side, watches her fingers leave it and go to the hem of the sweater.

"God, it's hot in here," she says, and she says it like it's nothing, like she's commenting on the weather, and then she grabs the hem of the oversized sweater and pulls it up and off over her head in one motion, the way you'd take off a shirt you're done with, and she tosses it onto the laundry pile by the door without looking. Underneath she's wearing a small thin sheer camisole, the kind that's more suggestion than coverage, the fabric so light it clings to the shape of her tits and shows the dark of her nipples through it, and she leaves it on like it's the most normal thing in the world, like she's just changed her shirt in front of a friend.

He stops breathing.

She's standing there in the middle of her messy living room in a tiny yellow thong and a sheer camisole that's doing nothing to hide anything, and the string is eaten by her ass — completely disappears between her cheeks, a single yellow line that vanishes and doesn't come back — and her tits are out, heavy and pale and bare, the nipples dark and slightly peaked from the air, visible through the thin fabric, and her bush is dark and untrimmed above the yellow string, and her legs are hairy and bare and she's standing there like it's the most normal thing in the world, like she's just changed her shirt in front of a friend.

She doesn't cover up. She doesn't pause. She doesn't even look at him.

"So, like I was saying," she says, and she reaches down and picks her beer back up off the coffee table and takes a sip, "the custom stuff is where the money is, you know? Like, the free videos get people in the door, but the customs are the actual —" she waves the bottle, "— the actual thing."

He's still holding his pink sour. He hasn't taken a drink since she stood up. He's sitting on the couch and she's standing three feet away in a yellow thong and a sheer camisole and he's looking at the string that disappears between her cheeks and the dark of her nipples through the fabric and he can't stop.

"People pay for the weirdest stuff," she says, and she's looking at the bookshelf now, not at him, talking like she's telling a story. "You would not believe the stuff people ask for. I mean, you saw the dragon. That was a custom. Some guy paid three hundred dollars for me to take the dragon after the black one, and I was like, okay, sure, that's a Tuesday."

She takes another sip of her beer. The yellow thong rides up a little when she moves. She doesn't fix it. The camisole shifts with her, the thin fabric sliding over her skin, and she doesn't adjust that either.

"And then there's the people who want the like — the talking stuff. They don't even want the toy, they just want me to talk to them while I —" she gestures with the bottle, "— you know. While I do it. They want me to say their name. They want me to tell them what I'm thinking about."

He finds his voice. It comes out rough, like he's been yelling. "What are you thinking about right now?"

She turns. She looks at him. The ring light is off, the phone is on the dresser in the bedroom, the toys are on the coffee table, and she's standing in the middle of her living room in a yellow thong with her beer in her hand and her hair falling around her face and she looks at him, actually looks at him, for a second that stretches.

"Right now?" she says.

"Right now."

She tilts her head. The pencil is still in her hair, the one from earlier, and it's coming loose, and she reaches up and pulls it out and her hair falls down around her shoulders and she drops the pencil on the coffee table.

"I'm thinking," she says, and she takes a sip of her beer and swallows and looks at him over the rim, "that you're looking at me like you've never seen a naked woman before." She glances down at the camisole, at the way it's clinging to her, and then back at him. "Or a mostly naked woman. The camisole's just for — you know. Decency. Sort of."

He doesn't look away. He doesn't know how. She's standing there in the yellow thong and the sheer camisole and the string is eaten by her ass and her tits are out, dark nipples showing through the thin fabric, and her bush is dark and untrimmed and he's been looking at her page all day, he's watched her spread herself open on camera, but it's different. It's different because she's real. It's different because she's standing in her own living room with a beer in her hand and her hair falling around her face and she's not performing, not for the camera, not for anyone.

"I've seen naked women," he says.

"Have you?" She smiles. It's not the door voice smile. It's something else. "Seen one in person? In your actual life? Not on a screen?"

He doesn't answer. The sour is warm in his hand. He can feel the lace against his cock, the gray pair, the one he put on this morning without thinking, and he can feel himself getting harder and there's nothing he can do about it.

"That's what I thought," she says, and she says it soft, not mean, and she takes another sip of her beer. "You're like — you're like a guy who's been reading about the ocean his whole life and then someone takes him to the beach."

"That's not —"

"It's okay," she says. "It's not a bad thing. It's actually kind of —" she looks at him, "— it's kind of sweet. Most guys who come fix my stuff are like. You know. They stare at my tits and they don't even try to hide it and they're thinking about what they'd do to me and they think I can't tell." She tugs at the hem of the camisole, a small gesture, almost unconscious. "This thing's not even doing anything. It's just — it's a formality. I put it on so I wouldn't feel like I was — you know. Coming on too strong."

He can feel his face going red. He can feel the heat in his cheeks and he doesn't know what to do with his hands, doesn't know where to look, doesn't know anything except that she's standing there in a yellow thong and she's not covering up and she's looking at him like she can see right through him.

"You're not like that," she says. "You're like — you're watching me like I'm something you're trying to figure out. Like I'm a — I don't know. Like I'm a leak you're trying to find."

He laughs. It comes out before he can stop it, a short breath, almost a bark. "I fix leaks."

"I know you do." She grins. "That's what I mean. You're always looking for what's broken. Even when it's not a pipe. Even when it's —" she gestures at herself, at the yellow thong, at the camisole, at everything, "— this."

She sets her beer down and walks over to the laundry pile and picks up the sweater and holds it in her hands, looking at it, and then she tosses it back down and turns around and faces him.

"I'm not broken, by the way," she says. "I know I'm a mess. I know I've got toys on my coffee table and a ceiling stain and a closet door that was broken since March. I know I'm —" she waves a hand, "— a lot. But I'm not broken. I just live different."

"I didn't say you were broken."

"You didn't have to." She walks back over and stands in front of him, close, the yellow thong at eye level, her bush dark above it, her thighs pale and hairy, the camisole hanging loose off one shoulder, and she looks down at him and says, "You look at me like I'm a problem you're trying to solve. And I'm not a problem, Omar. I'm just a girl who likes what she likes and does what she does and doesn't apologize for it."

He looks up at her. She's standing over him, the light from the window behind her, her hair falling around her face, the yellow thong a thin line across her hips, the camisole so sheer it might as well not be there, and she's looking at him with those blue eyes and there's no performance in it, none, just her, standing there in her own skin.

"I know," he says. His voice is rough. "I know you're not broken."

"Good." She smiles, a real one, and then she turns and walks back to the couch and drops down next to him, closer than before, her thigh almost touching his, and she picks up her beer and takes a sip and says, "So. You've been looking at my page."

It's not a question. She says it like she knows. She says it like she's known all along.

He doesn't deny it. He can't. He's sitting on her couch with her in a yellow thong and the gray lace against his cock and his phone in his pocket with her username in the search history and he's never been more seen in his life.

"Yeah," he says.

"What'd you watch?"

"The —" he clears his throat. "The pump one. And the one with the —" he stops.

"The custom?" she says. "The hairy legs one?"

He nods. He can feel his face going red again and he can't stop it.

She takes another sip of her beer, slow, watching him over the rim. "That's a popular one," she says. "People like the — the natural stuff. The real stuff. I mean, I could shave and probably double my subscribers, but I don't want to. I like the way I am. I like that I'm —" she gestures at her legs, at her bush, at the camisole, at everything, "— like this. Hairy and messy and real."

He looks at her legs. The dark hair on her shins, the pale skin above it, the way the yellow thong cuts across her hips. She's the most real thing he's ever seen.

"I like it," he says.

She looks at him. Those blue eyes. "You like it?"

"Yeah." He says it to his hands, to the bottle in his hands, to the floor. "I like that you're — I like that it's not —" he stops, starts again. "I watch a lot of stuff. At night. On my laptop. And it's all — it's all fake. It's all these women who look like they've never had a hair on their body and they're all moaning the same way and they all look the same and it's —" he looks up at her, "— it's not real. And you're real. You're the only real one."

She's quiet for a second. The fan hums in the kitchen. Somewhere outside a car door slams. She looks at him with those blue eyes and something in her face shifts, a softness, a crack in the performance she's been wearing all afternoon.

"That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me," she says. "About the work. About —" she gestures at herself, "— about me."

He doesn't say anything. He doesn't know what to say. He's sitting on her couch with his heart going and his cock hard against the gray lace and she's sitting next to him in a yellow thong and a sheer camisole and the air between them is thick with it, all of it, the thing that's been building since yesterday, since he saw her bent over the sink, since the glow of the plug between her cheeks.

"Omar," she says.

"Yeah."

"I want to show you something."

She stands up. She walks over to the coffee table and picks up her phone and comes back and sits down next to him, close, her thigh pressed against his now, warm and bare, and she opens the phone and scrolls and holds it out to him.

It's a video. A thumbnail. Her, on her bed, knees up, the ring light on, and the title is in that rounded font: pumping my cunt until it gapes, then stuffing it with the big one (FULL VIDEO, NO CUTS).

"This is the one," she says. "The one I was going to film yesterday. When you came. Before the sink." She looks at him. "I want you to watch it."

He looks at the phone in her hand. The thumbnail. Her face, eyes closed, mouth open. The title. He can feel the heat in his chest, the thing that's been building, the thing he's been trying to keep in a drawer with the lace and the plugs and the pink pair he's never worn.

"Here?" he says.

"Here." She puts the phone in his hand. Her fingers brush his. She doesn't pull away. "I want you to watch it with me. I want to see what you look like when you watch me."

He looks at the phone in his hand. The screen is warm. The video is loaded, paused, ready. He can feel her next to him, her thigh against his, her breath, her presence, the whole of her in a yellow thong and a sheer camisole with the string eaten by her ass and her tits out and her bush dark and untrimmed and she's watching him, waiting.

He hits play.

The video opens on her bedroom. The same bed, the same ring light, the same window light. She's on the bed, knees up, back against the headboard, and she's wearing a t-shirt, nothing else, and she's talking to the camera like it's a person, the way she does.

On the screen, she adjusts the ring light, tilts it down, and the shadows shift across her face. She's talking — the same stream-of-consciousness babble she uses on every video, the one that makes people feel like they're in the room with her — and she's saying something about how she woke up this morning and the first thing she thought about was how good it would feel to stretch herself open, to feel that full ache, that burn of being completely filled.

He feels her shift next to him. Just a little. Her thigh presses harder against his, and he can feel the warmth of her skin through his work pants, and he doesn't move, doesn't dare move, because if he moves he might do something stupid like turn and look at her and she'll see everything on his face.

On the screen, she's pulling the t-shirt up. Slow. Teasing the camera the way she teases everyone, the way she's been teasing him all afternoon without even knowing it. She lifts it over her head and drops it on the bed and she's naked, all of her, the pale skin and the pink hair and the dark bush and the way her tits move when she shifts her weight.

She's saying something about the pump. About the big one. About how she's been thinking about it all week, how she can feel it in her cunt already, that hollow ache that only the big ones can fill.

He swallows. The sound is loud in the room.

She doesn't say anything. She just watches the screen with him, her eyes on the phone, her thigh warm against his, and he can feel her breathing, can feel the rise and fall of her chest next to him even though he's not looking at her, even though he's staring at the screen like it's the only thing in the room.

On the video, she's reaching for the pump. The big clear one, the one with the hose and the gauge. She's talking about how she likes the stretch, how she likes watching herself open up, how she likes the way it feels when she's so full she can't think about anything else.

The pump in the video makes a soft hiss as she fits it over herself, and he watches her on the screen brace one hand against the headboard, the other holding the clear cylinder against her cunt. She's still talking, still narrating, telling the camera how she's been thinking about this all day, how she can already feel the pull, the stretch, the way it's going to open her up. On the screen, she pumps. Once. Twice. The cylinder fills with her, pink and swollen, and she gasps, a real sound, not performed, and he feels his own breath catch in his chest.

Next to him, she's watching herself. Her eyes are on the screen, her beer forgotten on the coffee table, and she's watching herself the way you'd watch an old home video, with a kind of fondness, a kind of distance. She's not looking at him. She's not looking at anything except the phone in his hand, and he can feel her thigh against his, warm and bare, and he can feel the heat coming off her skin, and he can feel the gray lace against his cock, damp now, pressed hard against the straining fabric of his work pants. The camisole has ridden up a little, showing the pale curve of her stomach, and she doesn't pull it down.

On the screen, she pumps again. The sound is wet, rhythmic, and she's moaning now, a low sound in her throat, and she's saying something about how good it feels, how she can feel herself getting loose, how she loves the way it looks when she's all stretched open and gaping. He watches her on the screen spread her knees wider, watches her tilt her hips up, watches the pump pull at her flesh, and he can't look away, can't breathe, can't do anything except sit there with her thigh against his and her breath in his ear and the video playing in his hand.

"That's the part," she says next to him, and her voice is different now, lower, almost dreamy. "That's the part where I start to lose it. You can see it in my eyes."

He looks at the screen. She's right. On the video, her eyes are changing, going soft and unfocused, and she's not talking to the camera anymore, she's just moaning, just pumping, just lost in the feeling of opening herself up. He watches her on the screen reach down and touch herself, two fingers sliding through the wetness, and she shudders, a full-body shudder that travels through her on the screen and through her next to him at the same time, and he feels it, feels the tremor run through her thigh where it presses against his.

"I was so close," she says. "I was right there. And then you knocked on the door."

He doesn't know what to say. He's holding her phone in his hand, watching her on the screen pump her cunt open, and she's sitting next to him in a yellow thong and he can smell her, the sweat from the video, the same sweat she's still wearing, the musk of her, the heat of her, and he can't form words.

"I almost didn't answer," she says. "I was right there. I was about to —" she gestures at the screen, "— you know. Finish. And then you knocked and I had to stop and pull myself together and put on a sweater and answer the door like a normal person."

She laughs, a short sound, not quite real. "I was so mad at first. I was standing there in the bathroom with my cunt all loose and my heart going and I was so mad. And then I opened the door and you were standing there with your little toolbox and your polite voice and your —" she looks at him, "— your eyes. And I forgot I was mad."

He looks at her. She's looking at him, really looking at him, and the phone is still in his hand and the video is still playing and on the screen she's still pumping, still moaning, and he can hear it, the wet sound of it, the rhythm of it, and she's not watching the screen anymore, she's watching him.

"You want to know something weird?" she says.

He nods. He can't speak.

"When I finally finished later that night," she says, "after you left. After I fixed myself something to eat and got back in bed. When I finally got myself off —" she holds his eyes, "— I was thinking about you."

The words land in the room like something physical. He can feel them. He can feel the weight of them in his chest, in his stomach, in the hard ache of his cock against the gray lace.

"I was thinking about you under my sink," she says. "I was thinking about the way you looked at me. I was thinking about —" she stops, starts again. "I was thinking about what it would feel like if you'd come back. After you left. If you'd knocked on the door again. If I'd let you —" she gestures, a small motion, "— if I'd let you see the rest."

The video plays on. On the screen, she's pulling the pump off, and her cunt is gaping, open, pink and wet, and she's showing the camera, spreading herself with two fingers, and she's saying something about how she likes to watch it, how she likes to see how loose she is, how she likes the way it feels when she's so open she can't close her legs all the way. He's not watching the screen anymore. He's watching her. He's watching the way her chest rises and falls under the sheer camisole, the way her lips part slightly, the way her eyes hold his.

"I thought about you all night," she says. "I thought about you this morning. I thought about you when I was getting dressed and I put on this thong and I thought — I thought, maybe he'll come back. Maybe he'll fix the other stuff. Maybe —" she stops.

The silence stretches. The fan hums. On the phone, the video plays on, her voice a low murmur, the wet sound of her fingers on herself, and neither of them is watching it.

"Why are you telling me this?" he asks. His voice is rough, not his own.

She shrugs, a small motion. "Because you asked what I was thinking about. And I told you. And now I'm telling you the rest." She looks at him. "I don't do the — the hiding thing. I don't do the pretending thing. I like things and I want things and I don't see the point in pretending I don't."

"What do you want?"

The question is out before he can stop it. It hangs in the air between them, heavy, loaded, and he watches her face, watches the way her eyes change, the way something flickers in them, something he can't name.

She doesn't answer right away. She reaches over and takes the phone out of his hand, pauses the video, sets it on the coffee table. The screen goes dark. The room is quiet. She turns back to him, and she's close, closer than before, her face a foot from his, and she looks at him with those blue eyes and says, "I want to show you something."

She stands up. She walks over to the laundry pile and picks up the sweater she tossed there and holds it in her hands for a second, and then she drops it and walks to the bedroom doorway and stops. She looks back at him over her shoulder, the yellow thong a thin line across her hips, the string eaten by her ass, her bush dark above it, the camisole still on, still sheer, still doing nothing, and she says, "You coming?"

He stands up. He doesn't think about it. His legs move, and he follows her, past the coffee table with the toys, past the laundry pile, through the bedroom doorway into her room. The bed is unmade, the sheets tangled, the ring light still set up on its tripod in the corner, and she walks to the bed and sits on the edge and looks up at him.

"I was going to film this yesterday," she says. "Before the sink. Before you. I was going to do the pump video and then I was going to do another one, a different one, one I haven't done before." She reaches over to the nightstand and picks up her phone, scrolls, holds it out to him. "I was going to do this one."

He takes the phone. The screen shows a video thumbnail. Her, on this bed, in this room, wearing a yellow thong, the same one she's wearing now, and the title reads: riding my fist until I squirt (POV, REAL, NO EDITS).

"I've never done that one before," she says. "I've thought about it. I've practiced. But I've never —" she looks at him, "— I've never done it with anyone watching. I've never done it with anyone in the room."

He looks at the thumbnail. Her, on this bed, in this thong, her hand between her legs, her head thrown back. He can feel his heart going, can feel the gray lace against his cock, can feel the heat of the room, the weight of the moment, the thing that's been building since yesterday, since he saw her bent over the sink, since the glow of the plug between her cheeks.

"I want you to watch me," she says. "I want you to sit there —" she points to the chair by the window, the one with her clothes draped over it, "— and I want you to watch me do it. And I don't want you to touch me. I don't want you to come over here. I just want you to watch."

He looks at her. She's sitting on the edge of the bed in the yellow thong and the sheer camisole, her hands in her lap, her hair falling around her face, and she's looking at him with those blue eyes, open, honest, waiting.

"Okay," he says.

She smiles. It's a real smile, a soft one, and she says, "Okay."