The shadow took another step and became a woman. Dr. Mack came into the yellow light with her white coat hanging open over nothing at all — no blouse, no silk, just the flat pale line of her stomach and the dark triangle between her legs, and the lamp caught the sheen on her inner thighs like she'd walked here from somewhere already warm. Her hair was down. He had never seen it down. It fell past her shoulders, and it made her face a stranger's face, younger, and the smile was the same smile, the one that never reached her eyes, and Tyler's gaze snagged on it and stuck there, and he could not pull it away, and he understood, dimly, that this was the point.

Renata lifted off him. He felt the slow drag of it, the wet pull, and then the cool air on his cock, and then the drip — his own come running down his shaft, pooling in the crease of his thigh, cooling in the draft from somewhere behind the chair. She stepped back without a word and her hand went to the bracket at his left thigh, and he heard the click before he felt the steel close, cold and exact, just above the knee. The right one followed. Two more clicks. The lower brackets took his legs and pinned them flat to the vinyl, and now he couldn't close his knees, couldn't shift, couldn't do anything but lie there spread open under the lamp with his come drying on his stomach.

"There," Dr. Mack said. Soft. Routine. The tone she used for instruments. "Now he's ready."

She walked the length of the chair the way she walked her exam rooms, unhurried, trailing two fingers along the armrest, and Tyler watched her fingers and then her face and then, helplessly, the open coat, the sway of it, the fact that she had come down here dressed for this and nothing else. Renata stood at the counter with her arms folded, scrubs rucked up around her hips, and her breathing had gone shallow. He could hear it. That was the only other sound in the room besides the hum of the lamp.

"You've been busy," Dr. Mack said. She stopped at his hip. "Twice. In my chair."

"I—"

"Don't." Her hand closed around his cock.

He jerked against the brackets and got nowhere. Her palm was cool and dry and she had him in a loose fist, thumb riding the slick he'd left there, and she stroked him once, root to tip, slow, watching his face the whole time. He was still half-hard from Renata and the touch brought him the rest of the way up fast, traitorous, blood answering before his brain could weigh in, and he made a sound he hadn't authorized.

"Good," she said. "You respond. That's the part they usually get wrong."

She let go and wiped her hand on the inside of his thigh, unhurried, and the smell of him and her came up off his own skin. Then she turned and looked at Renata, and something passed between them that Tyler couldn't read, some old arrangement, some standing order, and Renata nodded once and went to the sink room and came back with a folded towel, which she laid across the arm of the chair. She didn't look at Tyler while she did it. She hadn't looked at him since Dr. Mack walked in.

"You asked what happened to the last one," Dr. Mack said. She climbed onto the chair.

One knee came down beside his hip, then the other, and her coat swung open and she was over him, thighs bracketing his, and he could smell her — clean and clinical and underneath it something warmer, musk and skin, and the lamp was behind her head so her face went dark at the edges and her eyes caught the light and held it. She reached down between them and took him again, guided him, and he felt the first blunt press of her against the head of his cock, wet and hot and waiting, and she didn't sink down. She held there. Let him feel exactly where he was about to go and made him wait in it.

"They asked it in this chair," she said. "Same brackets. Same lamp."

"Dr. Mack—"

"Stephanie."

"Stephanie." The name came out cracked. "Please—"

"Please what."

He didn't have an answer. His hips lifted on their own, an inch, and the brackets caught him and held him down, and she smiled at that, the porcelain smile, and then she sank onto him.

She took him all the way in one slow descent, no hesitation, no adjustment — she was wet and she was ready and she swallowed his whole length like she'd measured it beforehand, and Tyler's back came off the vinyl and his mouth opened and nothing came out. She was tight and hot and she fit him exactly, and he felt every ridge of her inside, felt her settle, felt the small flex when she reached the base and stopped and sat there full of him, breathing through her nose, watching him come apart under her.

"There," she said again, and it was almost kind. "That's where he was, too."

She started to move.

Slow. Deep. A long pull up until he thought he'd slip out of her and then a long push back down that bottomed out with a wet sound each time, and the lamp hummed, and Renata's breath came shallow from the counter, and the chair creaked under the two of them, and Tyler's hands were white on the armrests and his heels dug at the vinyl and there was nowhere in the world he could go. She rode him like she had all night. She rode him like the drill, the same patience, the same flat efficiency, and it was worse and better than the drill and he couldn't tell the difference anymore.

"You want to know what the drill was for," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Say it again."

"Yes."

"Yes what."

"Yes—" He gasped. She'd changed her angle, rolled her hips forward, and the head of him dragged somewhere new inside her and his whole body lit up. "Yes, Stephanie. Yes, I want to know."

"Good boy," she said, and Renata made a small sound at the counter, and Tyler heard it, and understood that Renata had been told to stand there and watch and that the watching was part of it, that there were no private rooms in this building, that everything that happened here happened in front of someone.

Dr. Mack leaned forward. The coat fell open wider and her breasts came down against his chest, warm, the nipples dragging through the sweat on his sternum, and her mouth found his ear and she spoke into it low while she kept moving on him, slow, relentless, her breath hot and even.

"The drill was for a cavity," she said. "That's all it ever is. A cavity in a patient who can't pay. We open them up and we take the bad part out and we keep it, and we close them back up, and they go home, and nobody ever knows the difference. That's the whole business, sweetheart. That's what the sign out front means."

"You—"

"You had a cavity too," she said. "You just paid a different way."

She sat back up and rode him harder. The slow patience dropped out of it and the chair started to complain, and Tyler felt the orgasm building low and hot and unstoppable, the second one, the one his body had no business producing after Renata, and he tried to hold it back and couldn't, and she felt him start to go and bore down on him and took his face in one hand, thumb and fingers on his jaw, and made him look at her.

"Eyes on me," she said. "You come looking at me."

He did. He couldn't not. Her face was the whole room, the lamp behind her head a halo he'd have laughed at if he'd had the breath, and her eyes were pale and flat and absolutely present, and she was watching him the way she watched a chart, and he came inside her with a sob that tore up out of his chest, his hips bucking against the brackets, his cock emptying into her in long pulses while she kept riding him through it, milking him, slow and deep, until the last of it was out of him and he was shaking head to foot.

She stayed on him a moment longer. Then she lifted off, and he felt the wet drag, and his own come following her out and running down his softening cock onto the towel Renata had laid across the arm of the chair. She swung her leg over and stood, and the coat fell closed, and just like that she was a dentist again, bare-legged under a lab coat, reaching for the counter, reaching for the folded cloth beside the sink.

"Clean him up," she said to Renata. "Then the chart."

Renata came over with the cloth. She was flushed to the collarbone and her hands weren't quite steady, and she wiped him down without meeting his eyes, the way she'd wiped him down that first night, and Tyler lay pinned and open and wrung out and stared at the ceiling and listened to Dr. Mack open a drawer and take out a folder and set it on the counter with a sound like a door closing somewhere far away.

"Friday," Dr. Mack said, to the folder, to the room, to no one in particular. "He's ready."

The folder opened. Paper slid against paper, and a pen clicked, and Dr. Mack wrote something down while Tyler lay under the lamp with his legs still pinned wide and the cloth going cold against his stomach. He turned his head on the vinyl to watch her. She had put her hair back up. He hadn't seen her do it — one moment it was down and the next it was the severe bun again, and the transformation was so complete it felt like a trick, like she'd reached behind her head and switched off the woman who had just ridden him and switched on the dentist, and the dentist was the one who got to hold the pen.

"Renata," she said without looking up. "The lower brackets."

Renata's hands came back to his thighs. He felt her thumbs find the release tabs, felt the steel open, and the relief in his knees was so sudden and total that his legs slid apart another inch before he could stop them. She didn't close them again. She just left him there, open and unbound below the waist, and went back to the counter, and the small freedom was worse than the brackets had been, because now he had to decide whether to move and he didn't know if moving was allowed.

"Sit up," Dr. Mack said.

He sat up. The chair whined under him and his head swam and he got his elbows under him and then his back against the headrest, and the towel slid off his lap and he didn't reach for it. The top two brackets were still closed across his chest, one at the collarbone and one lower, and they held him upright against the vinyl like a man strapped into a ride. His jeans were somewhere on the floor. His socks were still on. That was the detail that got him — the socks, gray at the heel, absurd, and he stared at his own feet in their socks and felt the whole night tilt sideways.

Dr. Mack turned from the counter with the folder open against her forearm. She read from it the way she'd read his chart that first morning, flat and unhurried, and Tyler watched her mouth move around the words and tried to find the woman who had just had her hand on his jaw. She wasn't there. The coat was buttoned now, two buttons, enough to make it a coat again.

"Tyler Brennan," she said. "Twenty-two. No insurance. No dental history on file. Emergency intake, first visit, cracked lower molar, irreversible pulpitis." She turned a page. "Root canal, completed. Crown, pending. Patient tolerated procedure well." A pause. "Patient returned voluntarily. Twice."

"Three times," Renata said from the counter.

"Three," Dr. Mack agreed, and wrote it down.

Tyler's mouth was dry. He worked his tongue against the tooth — the new one, the smooth one, the one that wasn't his — and it sat in his jaw like a stone in a shoe, present in a way his own teeth had never been. He had stopped noticing it for whole hours at a time and then it came back, usually when he was trying to sleep, and it was back now, and he pressed the tip of his tongue against it until it ached.

"What's the chart for," he said.

Dr. Mack looked up. The pen stopped. For a second the flatness in her eyes thinned and something moved underneath it, not warmth exactly, closer to interest — the way a person looks at a tool that has done something unexpected.

"The chart is the record," she said. "Every patient gets one. What we did, when we did it, what it cost, what they paid." She closed the folder and set it down on the counter beside the sink, squared to the edge, and Tyler noticed that the counter had a ring on it, an old brown ring where a cup or a jar had sat for years, and that everything else on the counter was arranged around that ring and never on it. "Yours is getting long. That's all. That's a good thing, sweetheart. Long charts are the ones that stay."

"Stay where."

She didn't answer that. She picked up the cloth Renata had used and dropped it in a bin under the counter, and the lid fell shut with a soft plastic knock, and she came back to the chair and stood over him with her arms crossed under the coat, and the lamp was still on, still humming, still burning a hard white circle onto the vinyl behind his shoulder.

"Friday," she said. "Six o'clock. You'll come in through the side door, the one you knocked on. Renata will leave it unlocked at five forty-five. You'll come in alone, and you'll come in clean, and you won't bring anything with you — no phone, no wallet, no keys. We keep the keys here anyway, so that part's already settled."

"My keys."

"In the drawer." She tipped her head toward the counter, and he looked, and there was a shallow drawer under the lip of it, and he had no idea what was in it and no way to find out from where he sat. "Your shirt too. You'll get them back when you've earned them back. That's not cruelty, Tyler. That's just how the arrangement works. You give me something, I hold it, and then you have a reason to come back."

"I came back anyway."

"You did," she said, and the corner of her mouth moved, not a smile, something smaller. "That's what I'm telling you. You're already better than the last one."

Renata made a sound at the counter, a short breath through the nose, and when Tyler looked at her she had her back to both of them and her shoulders were up around her ears. She was rinsing something in the sink. The water ran and ran and she didn't turn it off, and Tyler watched the line of her back and understood, in a way he couldn't have explained, that Renata did not like hearing about the last one either, and that she wasn't allowed to say so.

"Stand up," Dr. Mack said.

She reached past him and worked the two chest brackets open, one and then the other, and the steel swung away from his collarbone and he could breathe all the way down for the first time in an hour. He got his feet on the floor. The vinyl was warm where he'd been lying and cold everywhere else, and his knees were loose and his thighs ached from holding still, and he stood in the middle of the back room in his socks with his jeans bunched on the floor at the foot of the chair and his cock still tacky against his stomach and the lamp burning down on all of it.

"Get dressed," she said. "Renata will walk you out."

He bent for his jeans and his back spasmed and he caught the armrest to keep from going down, and Renata was there before he asked, one hand under his elbow, steadying him, and she still wouldn't look at his face but her grip was warm and certain and it was the first kind thing anyone had done to him in this building. He got the jeans up and buttoned them with fingers that didn't quite work. His shirt was gone — she was wearing it, he remembered, or she had been, and when he glanced at her she was in her scrubs now, black, and the band tee was nowhere in the room, and he didn't ask.

Dr. Mack walked him to the door of the back room and stopped him there with two fingers against his sternum, light, the same two fingers she'd trailed along the armrest.

"One more thing," she said. "When you leave tonight, you're going to feel like this was a dream. That's the drug, partly, and the hour, and the fact that you haven't slept in three days. You're going to get in your car and you're going to tell yourself you can just not come back. Everyone tells themselves that." She took her fingers away. "You'll be back at five forty-five on Friday. Not because I'll make you. Because you'll have spent three days trying to figure out what I meant by 'ready,' and you won't be able to, and the not-knowing will be worse than the coming back."

She stepped aside. The hall was dark past her and the front office was blue with the fish tank and somewhere out in the lot his car sat locked with a ticket on the windshield, and Renata was already at the end of the hall with the side door open, holding it, waiting, and the cold came in around her ankles and moved down the corridor toward him like water finding a seam.

Tyler walked toward the door. Halfway down the hall he put his hand in his pocket out of habit and found it empty, and kept walking, and didn't look back, and behind him he heard Dr. Mack open the folder again and the pen start moving.