The lamp was still on. That was the first thing. The tea-colored light behind his eyelids, warm and low, the same light that had been there when he closed his eyes — so either no time had passed at all, or so much time had passed that the lamp had become the only fixed point left in the world. Tyler tried to move his hand and it didn't move. That was the second thing.

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling was close and unpainted, a seam of bare bulb-wire stapled along one joist. He was in the wood-framed chair. He knew that before he looked, from the smell of the cracked leather under his back and the way the frame creaked when his weight shifted — but the chair was not the chair he'd sat down in. Something had been added to it while he was under. Wide leather cuffs, worn soft and dark at the edges, buckled his wrists to the arms. The same at his ankles, cinched snug enough that he could feel his own pulse against the strap. And there was something in his mouth.

He worked his tongue around it and found metal. A flat steel plate, hinged, seated between his molars and holding his jaw open about an inch — a bite block, the kind he'd seen once at a clinic in town when a kid came in with a cracked filling and couldn't stop clenching. Cold at first, then warming to him, tasting of steel and rubber and the faint chemical ghost of whatever they'd cleaned it with. He tried to close his mouth and the block stopped him, and the sound he made around it was not a word.

The cuffs creaked when he pulled. There was no give in them. He pulled again anyway, both wrists at once, and the chair rocked an inch on its legs and settled, and the leather only creaked back at him, patient, the way a door creaks in a house that has decided you live there now.

Then he heard the cot.

He hadn't seen it when he sat down — it hadn't been there, or it had been folded against the wall behind the steel cart, or he'd simply been looking at the door and the stain and the towel and nothing else. But it was there now, a narrow folding cot pushed against the far wall under the lamp, and its springs were complaining in a slow, regular rhythm, and there were two people on it.

Dr. Mack was on her back. Her white coat was gone. Her blonde hair was down out of the bun, fanned loose across the cot's gray blanket, and her body was bare from the collarbone down — pale and lean and older than he'd imagined, the skin of a woman who took care of herself without ever once being looked at. Renata was above her, straddling her hips, still wearing her scrub top but nothing under it that mattered, and her red hair had come loose from the ponytail and was swinging against Dr. Mack's throat with every slow roll of her hips.

They were making love. That was the only word Tyler could find for it, and he found it from very far away, from the bottom of whatever the pale fluid had left him in. It wasn't what he'd been braced for. He'd braced for something clinical, something done to him. This was the two of them, on the cot, unhurried, Renata's hips rolling slow and deep against Dr. Mack's thigh, Dr. Mack's hand spread flat on the small of Renata's back like she was holding a horse she trusted, and neither of them looking at the door.

Then Renata turned her head.

Her green eyes found him the moment he stirred — he was sure of it, sure she'd been waiting for exactly that, the first flicker of him coming up out of the dark — and she didn't stop moving. Her hips kept their rhythm. Her lips parted, and she smiled at him around Dr. Mack's shoulder, a slow, warm, terrible smile, and her hand slid down her own belly and between her own thighs and she rocked harder, and she never once looked away from his face.

Dr. Mack turned her head to see what Renata was looking at.

"There he is," she said.

Her voice was unhurried. It was the same voice she used on the phone, the same voice she'd used to tell him the root canal cost twenty-four hundred dollars, the same voice she'd used when she said long charts are the ones that stay. She said it the way you'd say there's the mail, or there's the cat, and her porcelain smile caught the lamplight and turned it back at him, sharp and white and perfectly even.

Tyler tried to say something. The bite block turned it into a sound, a low animal noise that came up out of his chest and died against the steel plate, and Dr. Mack watched his mouth work around it with what looked like genuine interest.

"Don't," she said. "You'll bite your tongue."

Renata laughed — a soft, breathy sound, not unkind — and bent her head back down to Dr. Mack's throat and put her mouth there, and Dr. Mack's eyes half-closed and her hand slid up Renata's back to the nape of her neck and held her there, and the cot springs kept their slow complaint, and Tyler lay in the chair with his wrists cuffed and his jaw propped open and watched them.

He should have been afraid. Some part of him was — a cold spot under his sternum that hadn't gone anywhere since the first night, since the receipt with the blue ink, since the drill starting in the back of an empty building. But the pale fluid was still in him, whatever it was, and it had done something to the fear. It hadn't taken it away. It had moved it. The fear was there but it was downstream now, and what was upstream, what was filling his chest and his throat and the pit of his stomach, was something else, something that had no business being there, and it was getting worse the longer he watched.

Renata's scrub top had ridden up her back. He could see the ladder of her spine, the small dimples above her hips, the freckles he'd noticed the first day and hadn't let himself think about since. Her thighs were pale and strong where they gripped Dr. Mack's hips. Her hand was still between her own legs, working in small circles, and her breath had gone shallow and uneven against Dr. Mack's throat.

"Look at him," Dr. Mack said, quietly, into Renata's hair. "He's watching you."

"I know," Renata said. Her voice was thick. "He's been watching since he woke up."

"Is he hard?"

Renata lifted her head and looked down the length of the room at Tyler, at his bare chest, at his jeans, at the shape of him straining against the denim — and Tyler felt himself twitch against the zipper, traitorous and obvious, and the cuffs creaked when his hands closed into fists.

"He's hard," Renata said.

"Good," Dr. Mack said. "Keep going."

And she did. Renata braced one hand on the cot beside Dr. Mack's ribs and rode her harder, her hips finding a deeper rhythm, her breath breaking into small sounds that weren't quite words. Dr. Mack's head tipped back on the gray blanket and her mouth opened and her free hand came up to cup her own breast, thumb dragging slow across the nipple, and the lamplight lay along the long pale line of her throat and her collarbone and the underside of her jaw, and Tyler could not look away from any of it. The bite block pressed cold against his tongue. His own pulse was loud in his ears. He could feel sweat starting at his hairline, at the small of his back, and he could feel the seam of his jeans pressing the length of his cock against his thigh, and he couldn't move his hands to do anything about it, and he was not sure he wanted to.

Renata's hand moved faster between her legs. Her back arched. Her red hair swung forward and hid her face, and Dr. Mack reached up and gathered it and pulled it back, gently, holding it off her neck, and watched her the way you watch something you've made.

"There," Dr. Mack said. "There you are. Don't stop."

"I'm not—" Renata's voice caught. "I'm not going to—"

"Yes you are. Look at him while you do it."

Renata's green eyes came up and found Tyler's, and held, and she came with a soft gasp against Dr. Mack's hip — her whole body going tight and then loose, her hand slowing between her legs, her mouth open and her eyes still locked on his face, and Tyler watched her do it and felt his own cock jump against the denim and his own throat close around the sound the bite block wouldn't let out. The cot springs went quiet. For a moment the only sound in the room was the three of them breathing.

Then Dr. Mack's hand came up and cupped Renata's jaw, and turned her face gently, and kissed her — slow, thorough, the way she did everything — and when she let her go she looked past her, down the length of the room, at Tyler in the chair.

"Clean yourself up," she said to Renata, "and then get the tray."

Renata climbed off the cot, and Tyler watched her cross the room on bare feet — her scrub top hanging loose, her thighs still trembling a little, her hair a red mess down her back — and pick up the folded towel from the seat of the chair beside him, the same clean white square from before, and use it on herself, unhurried, thorough, the way she did everything. She didn't look at him while she did it. She was humming, very softly, something with no tune.

Dr. Mack sat up on the cot and reached for her white coat where it hung over the back of the steel cart. She didn't put it on. She held it in her lap and watched Renata move, and then her eyes came back to Tyler, and stayed there.

"You're wondering what the block is for," she said.

Tyler couldn't answer. He didn't try.

"It's not a gag," she said. "You're not being punished. It's a bite block. We use them so patients don't crack their own teeth when the work is long." She stood up, and the coat stayed on the cart, and she crossed the room to him naked and unhurried, the lamplight moving over her ribs and her hipbones and the pale inside of her thighs. "You're going to want to bite down, sweetheart. Everyone does. This way you keep your teeth."

She stopped at the side of the chair. She reached down and took the little steel ring at the end of the bite block — the one he'd only half-felt, the one that hung off the plate on a short strap — and she drew it back behind his head and buckled it there, snug against the base of his skull, so the block couldn't be worked loose no matter how hard he tried. The strap pulled his jaw a fraction wider. Tyler made a sound. She looked down at him with the porcelain smile and no warmth anywhere behind it, and she laid two fingers flat on his sternum, over his heart, and held them there.

"There," she said. "Now you're ready."

Behind her, Renata lifted the steel tray off the cart. Tyler couldn't see what was on it. He could hear it — the small dry click of metal settling against metal — and he could see the way the lamplight came off the tray's edge and laid a thin bright line across the floor, and he could feel his own heart going hard and fast under Dr. Mack's fingers, and the cuffs creaking at his wrists, and the taste of steel and rubber filling his mouth, and the cold strap of the block buckled tight behind his head.

Dr. Mack's fingers pressed once, gently, into his chest, and then lifted away.

"Friday came early," she said.