The side door clicked shut behind him and the cold took the rest. Tyler stood on the cracked asphalt with his arms crossed over his bare chest, his skin going tight and pebbled before he'd taken three steps, and the lot was empty except for his Corolla under the one working sodium light and the ticket fluttering under the wiper like something trapped.

He fished the keys out of his pocket before he remembered there was nothing in his pocket. His hand closed on denim. He stood there a second, hand in the empty cloth, and then he walked to the car and tried the door anyway, knowing it was locked, and it was.

The window was down an inch. He'd left it that way Tuesday because the handle on the driver's side stuck in the cold and he'd learned to crack it before the latch froze. He hooked two fingers in the gap and pulled, and the glass gave with a groan, and he got his arm through and found the inside handle and popped the door.

The dome light came on and showed him the inside of his own car like a stranger's: the gas receipt from the drive up, the hoodie he'd meant to wear, a crushed cup in the console. He got in and shut the door and the light went off and the dark came back, and the vinyl under his back was so cold it made him sit forward off the seat.

He pulled the ticket from under the wiper through the open inch of window before he rolled it up. Thirty dollars. Same as Tuesday. He folded it once and put it in the console next to the other one, and his thumb tapped twice against the wheel before he noticed he was doing it.

The engine turned over on the second try. He let it idle and sat with his hands at ten and two, and the clinic's side door was still open in his rearview, a yellow rectangle cut into the dark, and Renata was standing in it with her arms crossed.

She wasn't waving. She wasn't smiling. She just stood there with the light behind her and the cold coming around her ankles, and she watched the car the way you watch a thing you've already counted.

He put it in gear and pulled out slow, and he watched her in the mirror the whole way down the lot, and she didn't move. At the mouth of the drive he had to look forward to make the turn, and when he looked back she was still there, smaller, and then the road bent and the clinic went behind the trees and she was gone.

The heater blew cold for the first mile. He drove with one hand and held the other in front of the vent, and the road was dark and straight and empty, and his jaw ached — a low steady throb where the molar used to hurt, different from the old pain, deeper, like the bone itself had an opinion now.

He told himself he wasn't coming back.

He said it out loud, actually, because the car was empty and there was no one to hear it and it felt like it needed saying. "Not coming back." The words sat in the cold air and didn't take. He tried it again a mile later and it came out flatter, and he turned the radio on to have something else in the car and got static, and turned it off.

Friday. Five forty-five. She'd said it like a fact and not a threat, and that was the thing — she hadn't threatened him. She'd just described him. Like she'd already read the three days ahead and knew how they went, and the worst part was he could feel her being right. He was already doing it. He was already counting.

He got to the light at the county road and sat there with the blinker on and no one coming, and his thumb tapped the wheel, and he did the math without meaning to. Tonight was Thursday. Friday was tomorrow. Not three days — one. She'd said three days like she thought he'd leave and come back, and he'd never left at all.

The blinker clicked. He turned left instead of right, and then he pulled into the gravel turnout a quarter mile down, where the road curved back and you could see the clinic's lights through the bare trees if you knew where to look, and he put it in park and killed the engine.

He didn't know why he stopped. He sat in the dark with his hands on the wheel and the cold coming back in through the seals, and the yellow light was out there through the branches, small and steady, and he watched it.

His jeans were still buttoned wrong. He noticed it sitting there — the button through the wrong hole, the fly riding crooked, the way you'd dress a kid in the dark. He'd done it himself in the back room with her watching, hurrying, and he hadn't gotten it right.

He fixed it. And then his hand stayed there, at his waistband, and he sat with that, and the hollow pull below his belt that had been there since he walked out the side door got a little less ignorable.

It wasn't the ache in his jaw. That was nothing. This was lower and worse and it had been building the whole drive, and he knew exactly what it was and he didn't want to know, and he sat in the cold car with his hand on his belt and the clinic's light in the trees and did nothing for a while.

Then he reached over and locked the doors. All four, one at a time, the way you do when it's dark and you're alone and you want the locks to mean something. The last one thunked and the car went quiet, and he sat in the quiet with his heart going and told himself he was just cold.

He wasn't cold.

He undid the button he'd just fixed. His hand was steadier than it had any right to be. He got his jeans open and pushed them down to his thighs and the vinyl was cold against the backs of his legs and he hissed through his teeth, and then his hand was on his cock and it was already hard, had been hard, probably had been since the side door, and he hadn't let himself know it until now.

He closed his eyes and Renata was there. Not the Renata at the door with her arms crossed — the other one, the one from the chair, bare under the black scrubs, her ponytail coming loose, her mouth at his ear saying good boy while she took him inside her like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

He stroked himself slow and the car seat creaked and he stopped and listened, and the lot was empty and the road was empty and there was nothing but the light through the trees, and he started again.

His hand knew what it was doing. He'd done this a thousand times in a thousand places and it had never been like this, never with his chest going tight and his breath coming short before he'd even gotten started, never with the picture so clear. He could feel her weight on his thighs. He could feel the heat of her where she'd been sitting, the slick of her, the way she'd rocked and made him keep his eyes on hers the whole time, and the memory alone put a sound in his throat that he swallowed.

"Fuck," he said, quiet, to the windshield.

He sped up. His palm was dry and he spit in it and got back on himself and the wet sound in the small car was loud and he didn't care, and his hips came up off the cold seat to meet his hand, and the wheel was right there and he grabbed it with his free hand and held on.

Dr. Mack's voice came without him asking for it. Low and clinical, the way she'd said you'll be back at five forty-five, the way she'd said ready like it was a word with a lock in it. He heard her say it again in his head and his cock jumped in his fist and he made a sound he was glad no one heard.

That was the thing that got him. Not Renata's body — that was good, that was easy. It was the flat calm of the other one. The way she'd written in the folder while he walked out. The way she already knew. He stroked himself to the sound of a pen moving on paper and hated himself for it and didn't stop.

He was close already. Too close. He slowed down and squeezed at the base and breathed through it, because some part of him didn't want it over yet, wanted to stay in the warm middle of it a little longer with the light out there in the trees, and he sat with his hand wrapped around himself and his forehead on the wheel and just breathed.

"Friday," he said, out loud, testing it. The word came out of him easy. That was the part that scared him. It wasn't a date he was dreading. It was a place he was going.

He started again. Slower this time, deliberate, the way she'd ridden him — that slow roll, that patience, taking her time with him like he was something to be finished properly and not rushed. He matched it with his hand and his breath went ragged and his thighs started to shake against the cold vinyl and he let it build the long way, the way it wanted to go.

His other hand found the seatbelt and gripped it. The strap was cold and stiff and he held it like a rail, and the picture behind his eyes flickered — Renata's mouth, Dr. Mack's eyes, the folder, the pen, the yellow light, the brackets — and it all ran together into one thing that pulled at him from below the belt and wouldn't let go.

"Come on," he breathed. Not to anyone. To himself. "Come on."

It hit him harder than it had any right to. His whole body locked — legs straight, back arched off the seat, hand flying on himself — and he came into his own fist with a sound that came out of his chest and not his throat, and it kept coming, more than he expected, hot over his knuckles and the inside of his wrist and one stripe across his bare stomach.

He held on to the seatbelt through all of it. When it was done he sat there with his hand still wrapped around himself and his breath sawing in and out, and the car was so quiet he could hear the engine ticking as it cooled, and out through the trees the clinic's light was still on.

He didn't wipe it off.

He should have. There was the hoodie on the passenger seat, there was the crushed cup, there was his own shirt somewhere back in a drawer in that building. He had nothing to wipe it on and no shirt to ruin and no money and no keys that were his, and so he just sat with his hand open on his thigh and let it cool on his skin, sticky and undeniable, going tacky in the cold air.

His thumb tapped once against the wheel. Then again.

He looked at the light through the trees for a long time. It didn't flicker. It didn't go out. It just sat there in the dark being the only warm thing in a mile of cold, and he sat in his locked car with his come drying on his hand and understood, the way you understand a thing in your body before your head agrees to it, that he was going to be back before it was even Friday.

Not because she'd make him. Because he wanted to go. That was the whole of it. That was the thing she'd written down in her folder before he'd even left the room.

He wiped his hand on the inside of his own jeans and pulled them up and buttoned them, the right hole this time, and started the car. The heater had finally caught and the vents blew warm and the windshield fogged at the bottom and he sat there another minute letting it clear.

Then he put it in gear and pulled out of the turnout and turned back toward the county road, and he did not turn around to look at the light again, because he didn't need to. He knew where it was. He'd be seeing it again.

The ticket was in the console next to the other one. Two of them now. He drove the hour home with his hand still tacky against the wheel and the count already running in his head, and somewhere behind him in the dark, in a room with a chair and four steel brackets, Dr. Mack's pen was still moving on the page.