The elevator doors opened on the fourth floor and Warren stepped out into the smell of it — burnt coffee from the break room, the lemon polish the cleaning crew used on the baseboards, and under both of those, faint and unmistakable, the lavender of his own cologne, which he had put on at six-forty this morning in the dark of the Marlowe with the bathroom door closed like it was something to hide, which it was, which it always had been.

The plug moved with him. It had been moving with him since he put it back in last night in Matt's room, since he woke at five and showered and dressed and drove across the bridge with the plug seated deep and warm and his clitty already leaking a wet spot into the front of his panties before he had even reached the toll plaza. Nineteen hours had become twenty, then twenty-two. His body had stopped treating it as a foreign thing. His body had started treating it as the shape it was supposed to hold.

The gray suit was David's. The bone blouse was David's. The black patent heels — two inches, low enough to pass in an office, high enough that his hips had to work for it — were David's. The silver collar sat under the collar of the blouse, cold against his throat, and the pearl buttons were done all the way up to hide it, and the pearls were the thing he kept thinking about as he walked the long corridor past the copy room and the water cooler and the row of cubicles where the sales team sat with their heads down and their phones up.

The leather of the chair creaked when he set his bag down. The office air was thick and still. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair and sat, and the plug shifted, and he made a small sound in his throat that he turned into a cough.

"Morning."

Priya looked up from her desk two pods over. She had a turkey sandwich in a Ziploc bag on her blotter and a mug of tea going cold beside her keyboard, and she had been at work since seven, because Priya from accounting was always at work since seven, and she had a way of looking at a person that was not unkind but was not nothing either.

"Morning," Warren said, and heard it — the pitch, half a step higher than it had been a month ago, the vowel in the word a little rounder, a little softer, like his throat had been sanded down from the inside.

Priya tilted her head. She looked at the blouse. She looked at the way he had done his hair — no, he had not done his hair, he had done nothing to his hair, he had only combed it the way he always combed it, but it sat differently now, softer, longer at the nape, and he had not cut it in six weeks and David had told him not to.

"You look different," she said. "Lighter."

Warren's clitty pulsed under the slacks. It did not rise. It could not rise. It only pulsed, a small wet throb against the silk of his panties and the inside of his thigh, and leaked a fresh bead of precum that soaked into the gray wool, and he felt it happen and could not stop it and did not want to stop it, and the wanting-not-to was the worst part, the part that made his ears go hot.

"Thanks," he said. "New blouse."

"It's nice." Priya unwrapped the sandwich. "You been sleeping?"

"Some."

"You look like you been sleeping better." She bit into the sandwich and chewed and looked at him the way she looked at a spreadsheet that had finally balanced. "Good. You were gray for a while there. Grayer than the suit."

Warren opened his laptop. The screen lit and the spreadsheet from yesterday came up where he had left it, rows and rows of numbers that he had entered with his press-on nails clicking on the keys, and he had taken the nails off this morning before the office and the tips of his fingers felt naked without them, the way his mouth felt naked without the gloss.

He began to work. The plug sat in him and he sat on the plug and every time he shifted his weight to reach the mouse the leather creaked and the pressure moved inside him and his clitty leaked another bead into the silk. By nine-thirty the front of his panties was wet through. By ten the wet had begun to darken the inside of the gray wool at the crease of his thigh, a small shadow that no one could see unless they were looking, and he kept his legs crossed and his chair pushed in and his hands on the keys.

At ten-fifteen Gerald stopped by the pod.

Gerald from the adjacent pod was a heavyset man in his fifties with a wedding ring he twisted when he talked and a way of standing in a doorway that made the doorway feel smaller. He had a coffee in one hand and a folder in the other and he had not come to talk about the folder.

"Warren."

"Gerald."

"How's Claire?"

The question landed the way it always landed, flat and ordinary and loaded, and Warren felt his clitty pulse again, and his throat tighten around the collar, and his hand come up to the pearl buttons at his collar without his telling it to — one finger, the top button, a small tug, the way a woman checks a necklace that has slipped.

Gerald's eyes followed the hand. They went down to the pearls and stayed there a beat too long, and then they came back up, and there was something in them that Warren had seen before, in the lobby, in the subway, in the way men looked at him now even when he was trying to be Warren, and he did not have a name for it and did not want one.

"She's in Zurich," Warren said, and heard it — the voice softer than it should be, the consonants blurred, the sentence coming out of him like something he had practiced, because he had practiced it, in the mirror at the Marlowe, with the red wig on and the wig off, saying it both ways until it sounded like a lie he could live inside.

"Zurich," Gerald said. "Long trip."

"Four weeks."

"Four weeks." Gerald twisted the ring. "You got the place to yourself, then."

The folder was a prop. The coffee was a prop. Warren understood, in the small cold part of his mind that was still Warren, that Gerald had come over here to look at him, and had looked at him, and had gotten what he came for, and would go back to his pod and think about it.

"She's asked for a divorce," Warren said.

The words came out before he decided to say them. He heard them leave his mouth the way you hear a glass leave a counter, and he could not put them back, and once they were in the air between him and Gerald they sat there and did not move.

Gerald's face did something. It opened and closed, surprise and then something like sympathy and then something else underneath, something Warren could not read and did not want to.

"Ah," Gerald said. "Warren. I'm sorry."

"I've agreed."

"You've—"

"I've agreed to it." Warren's hand was still on the pearl button. He made himself take it down and put it on the desk, flat, beside the laptop, where it could be seen and where it could not do anything. "It's for the best. We both know."

Gerald looked at him for a long moment. The ring went around and around on his finger. Then he nodded, slowly, the way a man nods when he has decided not to say the thing he is thinking, and he said, "Well. You let me know if you need anything," and he went back to his pod, and Warren sat very still and listened to the sound of his own blood in his ears and the small wet throb of his clitty under the wet silk of his panties.

He worked. He did not know how long he worked. The numbers went by and his fingers moved and the plug sat in him and the collar pressed its letters into his throat every time he swallowed, which was often, because his mouth had gone dry.

At eleven-forty the phone lit.

He had it face-down on the desk, the way he kept it now, the way he kept it because the screen was a window and anyone walking past could look in. It buzzed once against the wood and he turned it over and the message was from David and it was three words long.

Did you send it.

Warren's thumb hovered. His clitty pulsed hard enough that he felt it in his stomach. He had not sent it. He had made the video in the men's room on Monday — forty-one seconds of himself on the tile floor with the blouse open and the pearls against his chest and his hand between his legs — and he had saved it and he had looked at it and he had not sent it, and David had asked once and Warren had not answered, and now David was asking again, and the question sat in the phone like a hand on the back of his neck.

He opened the video.

The screen filled with the men's room. The tile was the color of old teeth and the fluorescent light buzzed and the camera shook because he had been holding the phone in one hand and his clitty in the other and he had not been able to keep it steady. On the screen his own face looked back at him, eyes dark with the liner he had not quite gotten off from the night before, lips parted, the bone blouse open to the sternum, the silver collar catching the light in a thin bright line at his throat. He watched himself breathe. He watched himself say David's name, once, quietly, into the tile, and the sound of it on the recording was small and wet and pleading and it made his clitty leak into his panties now, in the office, in the chair, at his desk, with Priya two pods over and Gerald one pod away and Dana at the front desk and Ray in the lobby and the whole floor going about its morning around him.

He watched himself come. It was a small clench, a shudder, a thin spill down the inside of his thigh, and the sound he made was almost nothing, and the phone shook, and then the video ended and the screen went black and he was sitting in the office again with his hand on the desk and his heart going and the plug heavy in him.

He pressed send.

He typed with his thumbs, slowly, because his hands were not quite steady.

Yes. I sent it. I'm yours.

He put the phone face-down again. He sat with his hands on the desk and looked at the spreadsheet and did not see it. The wet spot on the gray wool had spread to the size of a coin and he could feel it against his thigh, cool now, and he could feel the plug and the collar and the small ache behind his clitty that never went away, and he could feel the office around him, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the far-off sound of the copier, the low murmur of Priya on a call, and none of it touched him, because he was somewhere else, because he was already in the men's room, because his body had decided before his mind had and his mind was only catching up.

At twelve-twenty he stood.

He did not tell anyone he was going. He walked past Priya's pod and past Gerald's pod and down the long corridor past the copy room and the water cooler, and the heels made a small sound on the tile that he had learned to soften by walking on the balls of his feet, and his hips moved under the gray slacks the way they moved now, and the plug moved with him, and by the time he reached the door marked MEN he was already leaking again, already wet through, already hard in the only way he could be hard, which was not hard at all.

The door swung shut behind him. The fluorescent light buzzed. The tile was cold and gray and the mirror over the sink held him for a second — the bone blouse, the pearls, the gray slacks, the face that was his face and was not, the soft brown eyes, the mouth that had gone pink without his doing anything to it — and then he went past the mirror to the last stall and shut the door and turned the latch.

He hung his bag on the hook. He undid his belt. He pushed the gray slacks down to his knees and the silk panties down after them and stepped out of one shoe and then the other so the slacks could come all the way off, and he stood in the stall in the bone blouse and the silver collar and nothing else, and the cold of the tile came up through the soles of his feet, and the plug sat in him, warm, patient, the shape his body had learned.

His clitty hung soft against his thigh. It was small and pale and wet at the tip and it would not rise and it had not risen in a month and it would not rise again, and he looked down at it the way he looked at it now, with a kind of tender contempt, the way you look at a pet that has been fixed.

He turned and faced the wall. He spread his feet on the cold tile, wider than a man stands, and he put one hand on the wall for balance and he reached back with the other and found the base of the plug.

He worked it. Slowly at first, the way David had taught him, the way he had learned to do it in the dark of the Marlowe with the phone propped against the lamp so David could watch, small circles, small pushes, the widest part of it stretching him and then settling, and his body opened for it the way it opened now, easily, wetly, because it had been opened every day for a month and had stopped closing all the way.

He thought about David watching. He thought about the camera in the corner of the hotel room, the red light, the way he had stopped looking away from it. He thought about David's face on the screen of his phone, the flat calm of it, the way David said good girl and the way the words went into Warren's chest and stayed there. He thought about David's cock in his mouth, heavy and hot and salt at the tip, and the way his jaw ached after, and the way he wanted the ache.

He pushed the plug in and out. His other hand came off the wall and found his clitty and he did not stroke it, because he could not stroke it, because there was nothing to stroke, and instead he held it between two fingers the way you hold a small soft thing, and he pressed his thumb against the tip of it and felt the wet there, the constant ooze, the way it leaked without being asked, and he let it leak into his palm.

"David," he said, quietly, into the tile.

"Good girl," he said, in David's voice, low and measured, the way David said it, and the words came back off the wall at him and went into his chest and stayed there. "You know what you are. Say it."

"I'm yours," Warren whispered. "I'm your girl."

"Again."

"I'm your girl. I'm made for this."

The word came back off the wall. The fluorescent buzzed. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed and a man's voice said something and laughed, and Warren did not stop, because the sound of the voice made it worse, made the wet come faster, made his clitty throb in his fingers like a pulse in a wound.

He pushed the plug deeper. He pulled it out until only the tip of it held him open and then he pushed it back in, and the stretch went up through his belly and into his chest and he made a sound that he bit off against his forearm. His fingers were slick now with his own precum and he brought them back and pressed them around the base of the plug, one finger, two, spreading himself around it, and the cold air of the stall touched the wet skin there and he shuddered.

He imagined David behind him. He imagined the broad chest against his back and the strong hands on his hips and the low measured voice in his ear saying what it always said, that Warren was his, that Warren was a good girl, that Warren was made for this and had always been made for this and had only taken a long time to find out. He imagined the weight of David's cock against the crease of his ass, thick and hot, and the moment before, the long moment before, when it was only the weight and the promise and the waiting.

"Ask for it," he said, in David's voice, and his own voice answered, small and wet, before he could stop it.

"Please. Please, David. Put it in me."

"Beg like the girl you are."

"I'm begging. I'm your girl and I'm begging. Please."

His hand moved faster on the plug. His other hand pressed his clitty flat against his belly and held it there and the wet ran down his wrist. His thighs were shaking. The collar pressed its letters into his throat and he swallowed against them and they pressed harder and he swallowed again.

"Please," he said, and did not know who he was saying it to, and did not care, and the word went into the tile with all the others.

"That's it," he said, in David's voice, and it was David's voice and it was his own and it was the only voice he had left. "Come for me, girl. Now."

The clench came up through him from somewhere below his stomach, a slow tightening, a gathering, and he rode it with his hand on the plug and his clitty flat under his palm, and it built the way it built now, not in his cock, not in the place a man comes from, but in his ass and his belly and his throat, a whole-body thing, a long slow roll of it that went on and on and would not let him go.

He came.

It was silent. It was always silent now. His mouth opened and nothing came out and his body clenched around the plug and around his own fingers and his clitty spilled a thin thread of wet down the inside of his thigh and onto the tile, and he held himself there, bent forward, one hand on the wall, one hand between his legs, the bone blouse hanging open around the collar, and he stayed in it, and it went on longer than it should have, longer than a man's, and when it was done he was still shaking.

He straightened slowly. He pulled the plug out and set it on the toilet paper dispenser and looked at it — black, wet, the shape of him now — and then he reached for the paper and cleaned himself and cleaned the plug and put the plug back in, because David had told him to keep it in and he kept it in, and the re-entry made him gasp once against the tile.

"Good girl," he said, one more time, quietly, into the wall, and then he stopped saying it because there was no one to hear it and it was only his own voice and his own voice was not enough.

He dressed. The panties were soaked at the front and he pulled them up anyway. The slacks went on over them and the wet spread into the gray wool and he buttoned the belt and stepped back into the heels. He flushed the toilet for the sound of it and he washed his hands at the sink and he looked at himself in the mirror — the bone blouse, the pearls, the soft brown eyes, the mouth, the collar hidden under the collar — and he did not look away.

The phone was in his bag. He took it out and there was a new message from David, one word, and he read it standing in the men's room with the water still running over his hands.

Good.

He turned off the tap. He dried his hands with two pulls of the paper towel. He put the phone back in the bag and the bag on his shoulder and he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor and the fluorescent light and the smell of stale coffee and his own cologne, and he walked back to his desk on the balls of his feet with his hips moving under the gray slacks and the plug seated deep and warm and the collar pressing its letters into his throat, and Priya looked up as he passed and smiled at him and he smiled back, and he sat down in the leather chair and it creaked under his weight, and he put his hands on the keys and went back to the numbers.

He did not get back to the numbers. He got back to the wet. The chair creaked under him every time he shifted and the plug answered it, a small deep pressure that moved up through him and settled behind his navel, and the wet spot on the gray wool had gone from a coin to a palm and the silk of the panties had gone slick against him in a way that made him sit very still and very straight so that the wool did not press.

The spreadsheet balanced. He balanced it twice, once with the column and once by hand, and the second time his thumb hit the wrong key and he had to back it out and start the row again, and the whole time his clitty leaked against the soaked silk and the collar pressed its letters into his throat and he could feel the shape of the plug inside him the way you feel a tooth with your tongue.

At one-forty Priya stood up and stretched and went to the break room and came back with a mug of tea and set it down on his blotter without being asked.

"You didn't eat," she said.

"I ate."

"You didn't." She stood over his desk with her arms crossed and looked at him the way she looked at a misposted journal entry. "You came in at eight-forty and you've been at that screen since. I watched you."

Warren's hand went up to the pearl buttons and stopped halfway and came back down. He had not eaten. He had not thought about eating. He had thought about David's cock in his mouth at two in the morning and the way the ache in his jaw was a kind of receipt, and he had thought about the men on Saturday and the mirrored ceiling, and he had thought about the plug and the collar and the wet, and none of it had left room for a sandwich.

"I'll eat later."

"You'll eat now." Priya put the mug down harder than she needed to. "There's a sandwich in the fridge with your name on it. I put it there Tuesday and you didn't take it and I put it back Wednesday and you didn't take it and I'm telling you now because I'm not going to keep doing it."

He looked up at her. She was standing there with her arms crossed and her reading glasses pushed up on her head and a small hard line between her brows, and he understood, in the small cold part of him that was still Warren, that she had been watching him for weeks, that she had been watching him the way everyone watched him now, and that she had decided something about him and had not said it and was not going to say it, and that the sandwich was the only part of it she was willing to put into words.

"Okay," he said. "Thank you."

"Okay." She went back to her pod and sat down and put her glasses back on and did not look at him again, and he sat with the tea going cold on his blotter and the plug in him and the wet against his thigh and the collar at his throat, and he thought about the sandwich in the fridge with his name on it, and about how Priya had written his name on it, and about how the name she had written was Warren.

He got up at two-ten and walked to the break room and found the sandwich in a Ziploc bag with SABLE in marker on the front and took it back to his desk and ate it standing up, in three bites, because sitting down pressed the plug and standing up made the wet run down the inside of his thigh and there was no position that did not do something, and he ate it over the wastebasket with his free hand cupped under his chin so nothing would fall on the bone blouse.

At two-forty the phone buzzed again.

He turned it over. It was David, and it was a photograph, and the photograph was of the men's room at the office — the same tile, the same fluorescent, the same angle from the corner above the last stall, the little black dome he had never seen and had never looked for, and in the photograph there was nothing but the empty floor and the drain and the long gray shadow of the stall door, and under it David had typed one line.

I watched.

Warren sat with the phone in his hand and the sandwich bag crumpled on the blotter and the plug heavy in him and his clitty leaking a fresh bead into the soaked silk, and he did not answer, because there was nothing to answer, because David had already said the only thing there was to say, and because the small cold part of him that was still Warren understood exactly what had just happened and understood that it had happened on purpose and understood that he was going to sit here in the leather chair and go back to the numbers and pretend that it had not.

He put the phone face-down. He put his hands on the keys. He worked.

At three-twenty Gerald came back.

He came back without the folder and without the coffee. He came back with his hands empty and his wedding ring on his finger and he stopped in the doorway of Warren's pod the way he had stopped that morning, but the doorway felt smaller this time, because this time he was not standing in it to say something and leave. This time he was standing in it to stay.

"Warren."

"Gerald."

Gerald put one hand on the pod wall and leaned. His shirt was untucked at the back and his belt had a worn spot at the buckle and he twisted the ring around his finger, once, twice, and watched Warren's hands on the keys and then watched Warren's throat and then watched the pearl buttons at Warren's collar, one after the other, in that order, the way a man reads a page.

"I've been thinking about what you said," Gerald said.

"About Claire."

"About Zurich."

The word sat in the pod. Warren's hands stayed on the keys. He did not move them and he did not look up and he did not let his finger go to the top button, and he could feel Gerald watching him not do it, and he could feel the collar pressing its letters into his throat with every swallow, and he was swallowing a lot.

"Four weeks is a long time," Gerald said. "For a wife to be gone."

"It's a work trip."

"It's a work trip." Gerald nodded slowly, the way he had nodded that morning, the way a man nods when he has decided not to say the thing he is thinking. Then he said it anyway. "I've got a cousin in Zurich. Works for one of the banks. I asked her — I asked her last week, when you first said it — I asked her if there was a conference there this month. Accounting conference. She said no."

Warren's clitty pulsed hard enough that he felt it in his stomach. The wet ran down the inside of his thigh and he felt it go and could not stop it and did not move.

"There's no conference in Zurich this month," Gerald said.

"I didn't say it was a conference."

"You said a work trip."

"I said a work trip." Warren's voice came out of him softer than he wanted it, half a step higher, the consonants blurred, and he heard it in his own ears and Gerald heard it too and Gerald's eyes went down to the pearls again and stayed there.

"Warren." Gerald twisted the ring. "I'm not asking to be nosy."

"You're asking."

"I'm asking." He leaned a little further into the pod and his shadow fell across the blotter and across Warren's hands. "You've been different for a month. Different clothes. Different walk. You look — I don't know how to say it without it coming out wrong."

"Then don't say it."

"I'm going to say it." Gerald's voice dropped, not unkind, the way a man's voice drops when he is about to say the thing he has been carrying. "You look like a woman, Warren. You've been looking like a woman for a month. Everybody's noticed. Priya's noticed. Dana's noticed. I've noticed. And now you're telling me your wife's in Zurich for four weeks and there's no conference in Zurich and you've got the place to yourself."

The fluorescent hummed. Somewhere down the corridor the copier ran and stopped and ran again. Warren sat very still with his hands on the keys and the plug in him and the collar at his throat and the wet cold against his thigh, and he did not answer, because there was no answer that did not open a door, and every door in him was already open, and the only thing he had left was to sit here and let Gerald look at him and wait for the question.

Gerald looked at him. He looked at the bone blouse and the pearl buttons and the soft brown eyes and the mouth that had gone pink without anyone doing anything to it, and he twisted the ring one more time and let his hand fall off the pod wall and stood up straight in the doorway, and his face was not cruel and was not kind and was only the face of a man who had decided to stop pretending he had not seen.

"So," Gerald said. "Where's Claire, Warren?"

Warren's finger found the top pearl button. He did not tug it. He held it. The collar pressed its letters into his throat and the plug sat in him and the wet ran down the inside of his thigh and the office went on around him, the hum and the copier and the low murmur of Priya on a call two pods over, and Gerald stood in the doorway with his hands empty and his ring going around and around on his finger, and waited.

Warren did not answer.

He held the button and he let the silence do the work it was going to do anyway, because there was no sentence in him that was both true and safe, and he had learned in the last month that the true sentences were the ones that got him caught and the safe ones were the ones that made men like Gerald lean further into the doorway. So he sat. The chair creaked. The plug sat heavy and low in him and the collar pressed its letters into the soft place under his jaw and the wet had gone from the inside of his thigh down to the top of his sock, a thin cold line he could feel against the bone of his ankle, and he kept his finger on the pearl and his eyes on the screen, and the screen showed him a column of numbers that meant nothing.

"Warren."

"I heard you."

"Then answer me."

Gerald's voice was not raised. That was the thing about it. It was the voice of a man who had already decided and was only waiting for the paperwork. He stood in the doorway with his hands empty and the ring going around and around and his weight on one hip, and he did not come in, and he did not leave, and Warren understood that the doorway itself was the question — Gerald was standing in it because he wanted Warren to know that he could stay there as long as it took.

"She's in Zurich," Warren said.

"You already said that."

"It's still true."

"It's still not an answer." Gerald reached up and scratched the back of his neck and let his hand come down and settle on the pod wall again, fingers spread, the wedding ring catching the fluorescent. "I'm not your wife, Warren. I'm not your priest. I'm the guy in the next pod who's watched you come in every morning for a month in a different blouse than the day before, and I'm the guy who asked you a question at ten-forty and got a lie, and I don't like getting lied to before lunch."

"It wasn't a lie."

"It was a work trip to Zurich that isn't happening."

"I said it was a work trip."

"And I said there's no conference." Gerald tilted his head. "So either she's in Zurich for something that isn't a conference, or she's not in Zurich, or she's not anywhere you're going to tell me about. Those are the three. I'm standing here because I want to know which one."

The copier ran down the corridor and stopped. Priya's call had ended and the floor had gone quiet in the way a floor goes quiet at three-twenty on a Thursday, the way that made every small sound the loud one — the hum of the vent over Warren's pod, the tick of the chair, the small wet shift of the plug inside him when he breathed too deep. He could hear his own swallow. He could hear Gerald's ring turn.

"She filed," Warren said.

It came out of him before he decided it would, and the moment it was in the air he felt the plug press and the collar tighten and his clitty give a long slow leak against the soaked silk, and he did not know whether the leak was the fear or the relief and he did not care, because the word was out and it had done what words do.

Gerald's hand came off the pod wall.

"She filed."

"For divorce." Warren's voice had gone softer and higher and he did not try to bring it back down. "Irretrievable breakdown. The papers came to the house. I signed them. She's not in Zurich."

Gerald was quiet for a moment. He looked at Warren's hands on the keys and then at the pearls and then at Warren's mouth, and he did not look away from the mouth this time, and Warren felt himself go warm from the collarbone up, the way he went warm when a man looked at him and did not pretend he was looking at something else.

"How long," Gerald said.

"How long what."

"How long has she been gone."

"A month."

"A month." Gerald nodded slowly. "And you've been coming in here every day in a silk blouse with your nails done and your mouth done and your walk different, and your wife's been gone a month, and you told me she was in Zurich."

"I told you what I tell everyone."

"You told me what you tell everyone." He said it back the way he said everything back, flat, a man turning a page to see what was on the other side. "So what do you tell everyone about the rest of it, Warren? About the blouses. About the — " he moved his hand, a small circle in the air, taking in the pod, the pearls, the soft brown eyes, " — about all of this."

Warren's finger came off the top button. He put both hands flat on the blotter and looked at them, at the press-on nails, the French tips glossy under the fluorescent, and he thought about David and the collar and the men on Saturday and the mirrored ceiling, and he thought about the small cold part of him that was still Warren and how quiet that part had gotten, and he understood that Gerald had asked him a question that had only one true answer and that the true answer was going to cost him something no matter which words he chose.

"I don't tell them," he said.

"No?"

"I don't tell them anything." He looked up. "They see it. They don't ask. You're the first one who asked."

Gerald looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached out and took the edge of the pod door — the thin metal frame that separated Warren's pod from the corridor — and he pulled it, and it swung on its hinge and closed with a click that Warren felt in his teeth, and the two of them were alone in the small gray box of the pod with the vent humming overhead and the screen glowing between them and the corridor cut off behind a pane of frosted glass.

Warren's clitty pulsed hard enough that the wet ran fresh down the inside of his thigh and he felt it go and did not move.

"Okay," Gerald said. He put his hand back on the pod wall, inside the closed door, and leaned in, and his voice was still low and still not unkind and now there was nowhere for it to go but into Warren. "Now nobody's listening. Now you can tell me where your wife is."

Warren sat with his hands flat on the blotter and the collar at his throat and the plug in him and the door closed, and he looked at Gerald's ring, going around and around, and he opened his mouth.

He opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.

Gerald waited. The ring went around his finger, once, twice, and the pod was so small now with the door shut that Warren could hear the little metal scrape of it, and the vent overhead, and his own swallow, and the wet shift of the plug when he breathed. He had a sentence ready. He had a dozen of them, all safe, all true enough to survive a Tuesday, and none of them would fit in the space Gerald had left him, which was the space between a man's question and the answer he had already decided not to believe.

"Warren."

"Give me a second."

"I've given you the morning."

Warren's hands were still flat on the blotter. The French tips of his press-on nails caught the screen light and threw it back, four small moons in a row, and he looked at them and understood that he had been sitting here for two hours with a wet palm-sized mark spreading under him in the gray wool and had not once thought about it, because it had stopped being a thing that happened to him and started being the shape of the day. Gerald had closed the door. Gerald was going to look at him no matter what he said. There was no version of the next minute in which Warren stayed a man at a desk with a folder and a coffee and a wife in Zurich.

So he stood up.

The chair rolled back an inch and stopped against the pod wall. The plug settled when he rose, a slow deep pressure that went up through his belly and made him put a hand on the desk edge for a beat, and he did not sit back down, and he did not turn toward Gerald, and he did not reach for the top pearl button the way his hand wanted to. He stood with his weight on both heels and his hands off the desk and his back to the pod wall, and he turned, slowly, the way you turn a thing over to show the other side of it, and he gave Gerald his back.

Gerald did not say anything.

The vent hummed. Down the corridor the copier ran and stopped. Warren stood with his shoulders square and his chin up and the collar pressing its letters into the soft place under his jaw, and he let the bone blouse and the gray slacks and the two-inch heels and the small soft body inside them be looked at, and he did not turn around, and he did not explain, and he did not offer the sentence that would have let Gerald off the hook.

He heard Gerald's breath change. One short pull of air through the nose, and then nothing, and then the ring stopped turning.

"Turn around," Gerald said.

"No."

"Warren."

"You wanted to know where Claire is." Warren's voice came out of him low and steady and half a step higher than the voice he used at the water cooler, and he let it be that voice, and he let the words stand on their own. "She's not in Zurich. She's not coming back. I signed the papers on Monday and I put them in the drawer with the chargers and the takeout menus and I haven't opened the drawer since."

"That's not what I'm looking at."

"I know what you're looking at."

The fluorescent over the pod gave a small tick, the way it did every few minutes, and Warren felt the wet wool against the back of his thigh, cool now at the edges and warm at the center, a palm-sized thing he could not see and did not need to see because he could feel exactly where it was and exactly how big it had gotten. He had felt it grow all morning. He had felt it at nine-thirty when the front of his panties went through, and at ten when the wool began to darken at the crease, and at eleven-forty when David's message lit the phone and his clitty leaked a fresh bead into soaked silk, and at two-forty when the photograph of the empty men's room came through with two words under it. He had sat on it and crossed his legs over it and pushed his chair in over it and worked the spreadsheet over it, and now he was standing in a closed pod with his back to a man who had asked him three times where his wife was, and the answer was written on the seat of his slacks in a language neither of them had to translate.

"You've got a wet spot on your pants," Gerald said.

"Yes."

"On the back of your pants."

"Yes."

Gerald was quiet. Warren heard him shift his weight, the small creak of the pod floor, and then heard him take one step closer, and the air behind Warren changed the way air changes when a body comes into it. He did not turn. He kept his eyes on the frosted glass of the pod door and the gray blur of the corridor beyond it, and he let Gerald stand behind him and look at the mark the way he had let Gerald look at the pearls, and the plug sat in him and the collar pressed and his clitty hung soft and wet against the inside of his thigh and gave one slow pulse that he felt all the way up into his throat.

"What is that," Gerald said.

"You know what it is."

"I don't."

"You do." Warren's hand came up and found the top pearl button after all, and this time he did not stop it. He held it between two fingers and he did not tug it and he did not let it go. "You've been standing in my doorway since ten-forty, Gerald. You asked me about the blouse and you asked me about the walk and you asked me about Claire and you asked me about Zurich and you asked me how long she's been gone, and you closed the door so nobody else could hear the answer, and now you're standing behind me looking at the back of my pants and telling me you don't know what it is."

"I'm telling you I want to hear you say it."

"Then say what you want me to say."

"I want you to say where the wet came from."

Warren's thumb moved on the pearl. He looked at the frosted glass and the gray corridor and the small dark shape of a person walking past with a mug, and he thought about the drawer in the kitchen with the chargers and the takeout menus and the divorce papers, and he thought about the Marlowe and the rack of clothes and the black dress in the garment bag, and he thought about the men on Saturday and the mirrored ceiling and the way Marguerite had said the last month was the fitting and this was the wearing, and he thought about the little black dome in the corner of the men's room and the photograph of the empty floor and the two words under it, and he understood that he had been standing in this pod for two hours with a wet mark on his slacks and a plug in his ass and a collar under his collar, and that there was nothing left in him that wanted to be a man at a desk.

"I have a plug in me," he said.

The words went into the small gray box of the pod and sat there. Gerald did not move. Warren heard the ring turn once, and stop, and turn again.

"Say that again."

"I have a plug in me." Warren's voice did not shake. That was the thing he noticed — his voice did not shake, and his hands did not shake, and the only part of him that moved was the small wet pulse behind the silk of his panties, which he could not have stopped if he had wanted to. "I've had it in since last night. I put it back in at three in the morning in a room off Christopher Street and I drove across the bridge with it in and I sat at that desk with it in and I stood in the men's room at noon with it in and I took it out and put it back in and I've been sitting on it ever since. That's where the wet came from. That's all it is. It's not coffee and it's not water and it's not anything you can wipe off with a napkin."

Gerald took a breath and let it out through his nose, slow, the way a man does when he is deciding something and wants to give himself the time. Warren could hear it land behind him. He could hear the ring stop. He could hear the copier start again down the corridor and run its long mechanical run and stop, and in the gap after it the floor was so quiet that he could hear the vent and the tick of the fluorescent and the small wet shift of the plug inside him when he shifted his weight from one heel to the other.

"Turn around," Gerald said again.

"I told you no."

"I'm not going to—"

"I know what you're not going to do." Warren's thumb came off the pearl and his hand came down and hung at his side. "You're not going to touch me and you're not going to tell anyone and you're not going to stand in my doorway tomorrow and pretend you didn't see it, because you already saw it and you already closed the door, and now you're behind me in a shut pod at three-thirty on a Thursday and you've asked me four times to turn around, and I'm telling you that the answer to your question is on the back of my pants and you can look at it as long as you want."

The fluorescent ticked. Warren stood very still with his back to Gerald and his hands at his sides and the wet mark spreading its palm-sized shadow into the gray wool, and he did not turn, and he did not sit, and he did not reach for the phone face-down on the desk where David's two words were waiting under the glass, and he let the silence do the work it was going to do anyway.

Gerald looked.

Warren could feel it — not the eyes exactly, but the weight of them, the way a room changes when someone stops pretending they aren't looking. It went down the back of his blouse to the waistband of the slacks and settled there, and then it went lower, to the dark crease at the seat, the soft wet shine of the wool where the silk underneath had gone through, the small round shadow that was not a spill and not a stain and was exactly the size of the thing that had made it. He heard Gerald swallow. He heard the ring turn one more time and stop and stay stopped, and he felt the pod get smaller around them, the way a pod does when two people are standing in it and one of them has just been told the truth.

"Jesus, Warren," Gerald said.

His voice was low and it was not unkind and it was not the voice of a man in the next pod anymore, and Warren stood with his back to him and his hand at his side and the collar pressing its letters into his throat and the plug sitting deep and warm in him and the wet cold against the back of his thigh, and he did not turn around, and he did not answer, and he did not let himself move, because the first sound out of Gerald's mouth was in the air now and there was no way to take it back, and the only thing left was to stand here and let it land.

He turned.

Slowly, the way you turn a thing over to show the other side of it, and he did not look at Gerald's face — he looked at the pod door and the frosted glass and then, as he came around, at the floor between them, and then at Gerald's hands. The right hand hung at Gerald's side with the wedding ring on it, and the left was still up on the pod wall where he had left it, fingers spread, the tips gone white where he was leaning his weight into them.

"There," Warren said, and turned his hip, and gave him the seat of the gray slacks the way you give a man a page to read.

The wet mark had stopped being a coin and stopped being a palm. It was a long dark shape low on the right cheek and a smaller one at the crease, and the wool had gone from gray to the color of wet slate, and the shine on it was the shine of something that had been coming out of him for hours and had nowhere to go but into the fabric. The fluorescent over the pod caught it. Warren watched Gerald find it. He watched Gerald's eyes go down the back of the blouse to the waistband and then lower, to the crease, and stop, and stay, and the ring on Gerald's right hand turned one full turn without Gerald knowing he had done it.

"That's not a spill," Gerald said.

"No."

"That's not coffee and that's not water."

"No."

Gerald's breath came in through his nose and went out through his mouth and did not sound like the breath of a man in the next pod. He was close enough now that Warren could smell him — the coffee on his breath, the cheap soap, the wool of his jacket — and the pod was so small with the door shut that the smell of him was in the air with the lavender and the wet, and Warren stood in it and did not step back.

"Show me your hand," Gerald said.

Warren brought his right hand up and turned it over, palm up, and held it between them. The French tips caught the screen light. The palm was dry. That was the thing — the palm was dry, because the wet was not in his hands, it was lower, and Gerald looked at the dry palm and then looked at the mark on the slacks and understood the distance between the two, and his jaw moved once, and settled.

"It's coming out of me," Warren said. "It's been coming out of me since eight-forty this morning. I've been sitting on it since eight-forty this morning and I have not once gotten up to do anything about it, and you're the only person in this building who has asked me a question I couldn't answer with the truth."

Gerald looked at him. The ring stopped turning.

"Feel it," Warren said.

Gerald's hand came off the pod wall. It hung in the air between them, the fingers still spread from where they had been pressed flat, and Warren watched it come down the distance between them the way you watch weather cross a field. The wedding ring caught the fluorescent and lost it. The fingers closed, opened, closed again.

"You want me to touch it."

"I want you to know what it is." Warren kept his hip turned, kept the wet slate of the wool toward him, and did not move his feet. "You've been standing in my doorway for two days looking at me like a man reading a menu. So read it."

Gerald's hand came the last six inches and stopped, palm hovering over the crease of the slacks, close enough that Warren could feel the heat coming off it through the wool. He could smell the coffee and the soap and something under both of them, the clean sweat of a man who had walked up two flights because the elevator was slow. The palm hung there. The fluorescent ticked. Warren heard his own breath go out of him slower than he meant it to.

"If I do this," Gerald said, "we don't talk about it."

"We're already not talking about it."

The palm landed.

It came down flat on the wet crease of the gray wool, and Warren felt it through the fabric the way you feel a hand through a shirt in a dream — the pressure first, the warmth a half-second behind it, and then the thing he had not been ready for, which was the wet. Gerald's palm found the wet and stopped. Warren felt the fingers spread against the damp wool and felt the wool give under them and felt the small slick drag of the fabric against the silk underneath, and behind the silk the plug shifted, a quarter inch, deep, and Warren's knees did a thing he covered by putting his weight into his heels.

Gerald made a sound. It was not a word. It came up out of his chest and stopped in his throat and stayed there, and his hand did not come off the wool.

"It's warm," he said.

"It's been in me since last night."

"It's—" Gerald's fingers pressed, testing, the way a man presses a bruise to find the edge of it, and the wet came up around the pads of his fingers and darkened the wool a shade further, and Warren felt the plug press back against the wall of him and had to set his teeth. "It's wet all the way through. The whole—"

"The whole seat." Warren's voice came out level. He was proud of that, distantly, the way you are proud of a thing you did with your hands while the rest of you was somewhere else. "It's been coming through since lunch. I sat through the two o'clock and the three o'clock and the whole time it was soaking into the wool and I did nothing about it because there is nothing to do about it."

Gerald's hand moved. Not off — along. The palm slid up the crease to the waistband and back down, slow, the way you read a page with your hand, and the fabric dragged against the silk and the silk dragged against the plug and Warren's clitty, small and soft and useless in the cage of the black panties, leaked a fresh bead against the inside of his own thigh. He felt it go. He felt the tick of it down the skin, warm, and then cooling, and he did not shift his feet and he did not take his hip away.

"You're not going to stop," Gerald said. It was not a question.

"No."

"Why."

Warren looked at the frosted glass and the gray corridor beyond it and the small dark shape of the copier sitting under its own light at the end of the hall. Somewhere past the glass a phone rang twice and stopped. "Because you already know," he said. "Because you've known since Tuesday and you stood in my doorway on Wednesday and pretended you hadn't, and because right now your hand is on the back of my pants in a shut pod at three-thirty on a Thursday and you haven't taken it off. You want to know what I am. So know it."

Gerald's breath came out through his nose, hard. The hand on the wool did not move. Then the fingers curled, slow, and the tips of them found the seam at the crease and pressed along it, and Warren felt the pressure go through the wool and the silk and land on the base of the plug, and his clitty leaked again, and this time he felt it wet the silk and start to work its way into the wool from the inside, a second wetness meeting the first, and he understood that if Gerald kept his hand there much longer the man would feel that too.

"There's something in you," Gerald said.

"Yes."

"That's not—" His fingers pressed again, harder, and the plug shifted inside Warren and Warren's hips moved a half-inch forward before he caught them, and Gerald felt the shift through his palm, because his whole hand went still. "That's not just wet. There's something in you."

"It's a plug."

Gerald's hand came off the wool.

It hung between them, palm up, the fingers wet and shining in the fluorescent, the wet catching the light the way a hand catches light after it has been in water. He looked at his own palm. He looked at it for a long time, the way a man looks at a thing he has just picked up off the ground and cannot name, and Warren watched him look and felt the cold come into the back of the slacks where the hand had been, the wet wool going cool in the air of the pod, and stood in it and waited.

"You have a plug in you," Gerald said.

"I told you that."

"You told me. I didn't—" He closed his hand into a fist and opened it again. The wet had gone into the creases of his palm and stayed there, a shine in the lines. "I didn't think you meant—"

"You thought I meant a figure of speech." Warren turned his hip back square and faced him and let the wet seat of the slacks go behind him, out of the light, and looked at Gerald's face for the first time since he had turned around. Gerald's face was doing something Warren had not seen it do. The jaw was set and the eyes were wide and the skin over the cheekbones had gone a shade darker, and there was a shine on his upper lip that was not from the coffee, and Warren understood, with a clarity that went down through him like cold water, that Gerald was hard. He could not see it through the wool of the trousers. He did not need to. He could read it in the set of the shoulders and the way the man's weight had come forward onto the balls of his feet, the way a man stands when he is holding himself still.

"Show me," Gerald said.

"Show you what."

"The—" He stopped. He looked at the pod door and the frosted glass and the corridor beyond it, and then he looked back at Warren, and his voice came down low, lower than Warren had ever heard it in two years of adjacent pods and shared copiers and the small talk of men who work near each other. "Show me the plug."

Warren stood in the small gray box of the pod with the collar pressing its letters into his throat and the wet cooling against his skin and the fluorescent ticking over his head, and he thought about the drawer in the kitchen and the black dress in the garment bag and the men on Saturday and the mirrored ceiling, and he thought about the two words under the glass of the phone on the desk behind him, and he understood that he was standing at the edge of a thing he had not planned and could not stop, and that the only way through it was forward.

"You have to turn around," he said.

"What?"

"You have to turn around and face the door and put your hand back on the wall." Warren reached for the waistband of the slacks. "Because I'm going to take them down, and I'm not going to do it with you watching my face while I do it."

Gerald did not move for three seconds. Warren counted them, the way you count the seconds between lightning and thunder. Then Gerald turned, slow, and put both hands flat on the pod wall on either side of the door, and the wool of his jacket pulled across his shoulders, and Warren looked at the back of him — the back of a man he had known for two years and had never once seen from behind — and reached for his own belt.

The buckle came open. The zipper went down. The gray slacks slid off his hips and pooled at his ankles and the cool air of the pod came against the back of his thighs and the black silk of the panties and the wet wool was suddenly not against his skin anymore and the relief of it made his eyes sting. He stepped out of the slacks one foot at a time, holding the waistband so the panties stayed up, and stood in the pod in the lavender blouse and the black panties and the heels, with the wet shine of the silk across the seat and the base of the plug pressing a small dark shape into the fabric, and the backs of his thighs bare and cool and the wet of his own leaking clitty cold on the inside of his right thigh.

"Turn around," Warren said.

Gerald turned.

His eyes went down and stopped at the panties and stayed there, and Warren watched him find the shape of the plug through the wet black silk, the small round base of it, the way the silk had gone dark and clinging around it, and Warren saw Gerald's throat move as he swallowed, and saw his hands come off the wall and hang at his sides with the fingers curled, and saw the front of his trousers, which had gone from a question to an answer.

"That's it," Warren said. "That's what's been in me all day. That's what's been coming out of me since eight-forty this morning. That's what you put your hand on."

Gerald took one step forward. The pod was small and one step was most of it, and then he was close enough that Warren could smell the coffee on his breath again and see the shine on his lip and the small broken veins in the whites of his eyes, and Warren stood in the heels and the panties and the blouse and did not step back.

"Let me feel it," Gerald said.

His hand came up and his fingers found the wet silk at the seat of the panties and pressed, and Warren felt the plug press back against the wall of him and his clitty leak fresh against his thigh and his hips move a half-inch forward into nothing, and he set his teeth and did not make a sound.

"It's hard," Gerald said. His voice had gone rough. "The thing inside you. It's hard."

"Yes."

Gerald's fingers pressed again, and then his hand slid down and around, the palm coming flat against the wet silk of the seat, and his middle finger found the crease through the fabric and traced it, slow, from the base of the plug up to the waistband and back down, and Warren stood in the small gray box of the pod with a man's hand on him and the fluorescent ticking and the copier humming somewhere down the corridor and understood that he was going to let this happen.

"Take it out," Gerald said.

"No."

"Warren—"

"You don't get to take it out." Warren turned his head and looked at the frosted glass and the gray corridor and the small dark shape of the copier under its light, and then he looked back at Gerald, and his voice came out low and level and did not shake. "You get to feel it. That's what you asked for and that's what you get. Put your finger in me and feel it. That's the whole thing. That's all there is."

Gerald's hand went still against the silk.

"I can't—"

"You can." Warren reached back and hooked his own thumb into the waistband of the panties and drew the silk down over the curve of his ass, slow, one inch at a time, and the cool air of the pod came against the bare skin and the wet shine of the plug base and the small dark ring of the silk where it had been clinging, and he stood in the heels with the panties at the top of his thighs and the plug in him and the blouse hanging to his waist and looked at Gerald's face. "There. Now put your finger in me and feel what you've been looking at for two days."

Gerald looked at him. The ring on his right hand caught the light. His breath came in through his nose and out through his mouth and did not sound like the breath of a man in the next pod. Then his hand came down and his middle finger found the base of the plug and pressed, and Warren felt the plug go deeper, a quarter inch, and his clitty leaked a fresh bead against the inside of his thigh and his knees did the thing again and this time he did not cover it.

"There," Warren said. His voice had gone soft and he did not care. "That's it. That's what it is."

Gerald's finger slid down past the base of the plug to the place where the plug met the wall of him, and pressed, and the tip of his finger went in alongside the plug, one knuckle deep, into the wet heat of him, and Warren felt the stretch of it and the slick of it and the small impossible pressure of a second thing inside him, and his clitty leaked again, and again, and the wet ran down the inside of his right thigh and did not stop.

"Jesus," Gerald said.

"Don't stop."

Gerald's finger stayed in him. One knuckle, then two, the middle finger sliding in alongside the plug until the base of it pressed against the ring on his hand and the ring went cold against Warren's skin, and Warren felt the metal and the wet and the stretch of being opened by a second thing, and his clitty gave another bead against the inside of his thigh, and he heard himself make a sound that was not a word.

"You're so wet," Gerald said. His voice had gone to gravel. "You're wet like—" He stopped. His finger curled inside Warren, slow, the way you curl a finger to say come here, and found the front wall of him, and pressed there, and Warren's whole body went up onto the balls of his feet in the heels and his hand came out and caught Gerald's shoulder and held it.

"There," Warren said. "That. Right there."

Gerald pressed again, and again, three slow strokes against the place inside him, and the plug rocked with each one, and Warren's clitty leaked so steadily now that he could feel the wet running down both thighs, the left one now too, and the blouse had ridden up and the hem of it was against his bare hip and he did not care, and his hand on Gerald's shoulder had gone from holding to gripping, the French tips digging in through the wool of the jacket.

"How long," Gerald said.

"Since last night."

"How long have you—" His finger pulled back to the first knuckle and pushed in again, deeper this time, and Warren's breath came out of him in a long shaking line. "How long have you been like this."

"Since I was fifteen." Warren turned his head and looked at the frosted glass and the gray shape of the corridor and the small dark copier under its light, and the words came out of him flat and level and he did not know where they came from. "Since I was fifteen and found my mother's stockings in the laundry basket and put them on and stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom with the door locked. That long."

Gerald's finger went still inside him.

"You're married," he said.

"She filed."

"Warren—"

"Don't." Warren's hand tightened on his shoulder. "Don't say my name like that. Not here. Not with your finger in me." He moved his hips, a small roll, taking the finger deeper, and Gerald's breath caught in his throat and stayed there. "You asked how long. I told you. Now keep going."

Gerald's finger moved again. He pulled it out to the tip and pushed back in, and the wet made a sound in the small gray box of the pod, a small slick click that Warren heard and Gerald heard, and neither of them said anything about it. He did it again. And again. The rhythm of it settled into something steady, three strokes and a pause, three strokes and a pause, and Warren stood in the heels with his panties at the top of his thighs and the blouse bunched at his waist and his hand on the shoulder of a man he had known for two years, and let himself be fingered in a pod at three-thirty on a Thursday afternoon with the fluorescent ticking over his head.

"Is that enough," Gerald said. "Is that what you wanted."

"No."

"What do you—"

"You know what I want." Warren looked at him. Gerald's face had gone dark across the cheekbones and his mouth was open and his eyes were not on Warren's face, they were down, on the place where his hand had gone, on the wet silk at the top of Warren's thighs and the shine of the plug base and the small dark shape of Warren's clitty soft in the cage of the panties, useless, leaking, and Warren watched him look at it and understood what the man was seeing and felt the shame go through him like heat and did not stop. "You've known since Tuesday. You've been standing in my doorway for two days with your coffee and your ring and your questions, and you know exactly what I want. So ask me for it."

Gerald's finger slid out of him, all the way out, and the cool air of the pod came against the wet ring of him and Warren felt the emptiness like a loss, and then Gerald's hand came around and his palm went flat against the wet seat of the panties again, pressing the silk against him, and his fingers spread and found the base of the plug and pressed it back in, slow, until it seated, and Warren's clitty gave one long pulse against the silk and the wet of it soaked through and met Gerald's palm.

"There," Gerald said. His voice had gone quiet. "There. That's what you want."

"Yes."

"You want me to fuck you."

The words landed in the small gray box of the pod and stayed there. Warren heard them and felt them go down through him and settle low, and his clitty leaked against the silk and Gerald's palm, and he stood in the heels with his hand on Gerald's shoulder and did not say yes and did not say no.

"Not here," he said. "Not now. There's a door and a corridor and a copier and a man in the next pod who can hear the printer. Not here."

"When."

"Not now." Warren reached down and caught Gerald's wrist and lifted his hand off the silk, and the wet came away with it, a shine across the palm and the fingers and the ring, and Warren held the wrist and looked at the wet hand and then at Gerald's face, and his voice came out low and even. "You asked me to show you. I showed you. You wanted to feel it. You felt it. That's the whole thing. That's all there is."

Gerald looked at his own hand in Warren's grip. The wet caught the fluorescent and the ring sat in the middle of it, and he turned the hand over and looked at the palm and the creases full of shine, and then he looked at Warren, and his mouth opened and closed and opened again.

"I have to go back to my desk," he said.

"Yes."

"I have a two-thirty."

"It's three-thirty."

Gerald blinked. He looked at the pod wall as if the clock were on it and it was not, and Warren watched him come back into his own body the way a man comes back from a long way off, the shoulders settling, the weight coming off the balls of the feet, the eyes going from the wet hand to the pod door and the frosted glass and the corridor beyond it, and Warren let go of his wrist and stepped back into the corner of the pod and bent to pick up the gray slacks.

The wool was cold and wet at the seat and he pulled them up anyway, one leg and then the other, and the wet silk of the panties went back against the plug and the slacks went over the panties and the wet wool met the wet silk and Warren felt the cold of it go against his skin and did up the zipper and the buckle and stood in the pod in the lavender blouse and the gray slacks and the heels with the wet seat hidden behind him, and it was as if nothing had happened at all except that the wool was cold and the plug was heavy and his clitty was leaking into the silk and he could still feel the shape of Gerald's finger inside him.

Gerald had not moved. He stood with his wet hand held away from his side, the fingers spread, the way a man holds a hand he has burned.

"Wash it," Warren said. He nodded at the door. "The men's room is past the copier. Nobody will look at your hand."

Gerald looked at him. There was something in his face that Warren had not seen there before and could not name, and it was not desire and it was not disgust, and it sat in the set of his jaw and the shine on his lip and did not resolve. He opened his mouth.

"Warren," he said.

It was not a question.

Warren stood in the small gray box of the pod with the wet wool against his skin and the collar pressing its letters into his throat and the fluorescent ticking over his head, and he looked at Gerald's face and at the wet hand held away from his side and at the ring on it, and he waited.

"Warren," Gerald said again. It was still not a question.

Warren reached past him and put his hand on the pod door and did not open it. The frosted glass held the gray shape of the corridor and the small dark copier under its light, and beyond the glass a phone rang twice and stopped, and Warren stood with his palm flat on the cold metal frame and felt the wet wool against the backs of his thighs and the plug seated deep and the collar pressing its letters into the soft place under his jaw, and he did not turn around.

"You have a two-thirty," he said.

"It's three-thirty."

"Then you have a three-thirty." Warren's thumb found the edge of the door and held it. "Go wash your hand, Gerald. Go back to your pod and open your folder and put the coffee down and do the rest of your Thursday. That's what you do now."

"That's not—"

"That's what you do." Warren turned his head, not all the way, just enough that Gerald could see the line of his jaw and the shine on his mouth and the small gold hoop of the earring David had put in his ear three weeks ago that Gerald had never once mentioned. "You wanted to know where Claire is. She's in White Plains with a lawyer. You wanted to know what's in me. It's a plug. You wanted to feel it. You felt it. That's the whole thing, and now you go back to your desk and I go back to mine, and at five o'clock I leave this building and I go to a hotel on Ninth Avenue where I keep a room, and I put on a platinum wig and a black latex catsuit and a pair of six-inch heels, and I wait for a man to come up and use me. That's my Thursday. That's every Thursday now. You don't have to like it. You just have to know it."

Gerald's wet hand had stopped being held away from his side. It hung at his hip now, the fingers loose, the shine still in the creases of the palm and around the band of the wedding ring. He looked at Warren's earring for a long time. Then he looked at the pod door and the frosted glass and the corridor, and then he looked back, and his voice came out lower than it had all afternoon.

"How much."

Warren's clitty gave one long pulse against the soaked silk and he felt the wet run fresh down the inside of his right thigh and he did not move and did not let his hand come off the door.

Warren took his hand off the door and turned around. The pod was small enough that turning put him close to Gerald, close enough to see the wet still standing in the creases of the man's palm and the small dark line of the ring where the shine had pooled against it. He reached up and touched the earring, turned it once between his thumb and finger, and let his hand drop.

"Three hundred," he said. "For the room. The room and the hour in it."

Gerald's mouth moved. Nothing came out of it.

"Two hundred more if you want my mouth." Warren said it the way he said account numbers, flat and even, and he watched Gerald's face take it in and go through the change — the flush coming up the neck, the eyes going wide and then narrow and then away to the frosted glass and back. "The Marlowe. Ninth Avenue, between Forty-Seventh and Forty-Eighth. Room four-oh-six."

"You—" Gerald stopped. He looked at his own hand again, the wet one, and then at Warren's mouth, and the flush climbed higher. "You have a price."

"I have a room and a rate." Warren reached past him for the pod door and this time he opened it. The corridor came in with its noise, the copier ticking somewhere down the hall, a phone going off in the far pod and a woman's laugh cut off by a closing door. "Five o'clock. I'll be ready at five. Catsuit, platinum wig, the works. Nails, lashes, the whole face. You knock, you come in, you put the three hundred on the dresser before anything else. You want the mouth, that's two more, and you put it down with the rest."

"And if I don't."

"Then you don't, and you go home to your wife and your folder and your Thursday, and this"—Warren lifted his chin, just slightly, so the collar shifted under the silk and the earring caught the light—"stays in the pod. Nobody hears it from me. I don't need it heard."

Gerald stood in the doorway with his hand still wet and his face doing something Warren had never seen it do, and Warren watched him do the arithmetic behind his eyes — the two hours, the three hundred, the two hundred, the wife, the drive, the thing in the pod that had already happened and could not be undone. He watched him decide, and he watched him decide to pretend he hadn't.

"I have a thing at six," Gerald said.

"Then you'll be late to it."

Warren stepped past him into the corridor. The heels clicked twice on the tile and he felt the wet wool pull at the backs of his thighs with each step and the plug shift and settle, and he did not look back at the pod or at the man standing in it with his hand held out from his side like a man who had touched a stove. He walked the length of the corridor past the copier, past the water cooler, past the frosted door of the conference room where the reorg had been announced, and every step was a step he had taken a thousand times in the gray slacks and the lavender blouse and no one looked up, and that was the whole of it, that no one looked up.

At his desk the phone was face down where he had left it. He turned it over. David's message sat at the top of the thread, unanswered since last night, three words he had read so many times they had stopped meaning anything: Did you send it. He had sent it. He had sent the men's room video and then the other one, the one from the bed, and David had said Good girl and gone quiet, and the quiet had been going on for eighteen hours now, and Warren had learned in the last month that David's quiet was not absence. David's quiet was a hand held over a mouth.

He put the phone face down again.

The afternoon went. He opened the ledger and moved numbers from one column to another and answered two emails in the flat voice he used at the desk, and at four-fifteen Priya came by with a coffee she didn't drink and stood at the corner of the pod and talked about her sister's wedding for six minutes, and Warren nodded and said the right things and felt the wet silk against the plug and the wet wool against the silk and the collar pressing its letters into the soft place under his jaw, and Priya looked at him once, a long look, and said, "You look good today," and left, and Warren sat with that and let it go down through him and settle.

At four-forty he stood and took his bag and walked out past Dana at reception, who said night, Warren without looking up, and past Ray at the door, who looked up and looked away, and out into the street where the light had gone the color of old brass and the air smelled like rain coming. He walked two blocks to the subway and rode it downtown with his hand on the strap and his eyes on the black window and his own reflection in it — the lavender, the earring, the soft line of the jaw — and he thought about Gerald's hand and the wet in the creases of it and the ring sitting in the middle of the shine, and he thought about five o'clock, and his clitty leaked against the silk the whole way down.

The Marlowe had a lobby that smelled like carpet shampoo and old cigarettes and a desk clerk who had long ago stopped asking questions. Warren took the stairs to the fourth floor because the elevator was slow and the stairs gave him the two minutes he wanted. Room four-oh-six. He let himself in and locked the door behind him and stood in the dark of the room with his back against it and let out the breath he had been holding since the pod.

Then he turned on the lamp and went to work.

The rack was where he had left it, the black latex catsuit hanging at the end in its sheath of plastic, and the platinum wig on its stand on the dresser, and the case of makeup open beside it. He stripped out of the gray slacks and the wet panties and the lavender blouse and laid them over the back of the chair, and he stood in the middle of the room in the heels and the collar and nothing else with the plug seated in him and the wet cooling on the insides of his thighs, and he took the plug by the base and worked it out slow and set it on a towel and felt the empty ache of it, and then he went into the small bathroom and washed.

The water ran over his hands and his wrists and the insides of his thighs, and he stood under it and let it take the office off him — the copier smell, the pod, Gerald's hand, the whole gray Thursday — and when he came out he was somebody else's problem. He dried himself with the thin hotel towel and sat down at the dresser in the towel and began the face.

Primer first, worked in with two fingers, and then the foundation with the sponge, and then the powder, and the brows penciled in dark and arched, and the smoky shadow built up in the creases and smoked out at the corners, and the black liner drawn along the lash line and winged out at the ends, and the lashes — the inch-long false ones, thick and black — set along the lash line with the tweezers and pressed down and held until they took, and the lower lashes brushed with mascara, and the cheekbones blushed high and sharp, and the lips lined and filled with the wet gloss until they shone like something spilled. He worked without hurry. He had done it a hundred times now and his hands knew it, and the face that came up in the mirror was not Warren's face and had not been for a month. It was Willow's, and Willow looked back at him with the black lashes and the wet mouth and the penciled brows and did not blink.

Then the nails. The press-ons, the French tips, matched to the gloss, one at a time, pressed down and held, and the hands in the mirror turned into something else, something with tips that caught the lamplight when they moved. He flexed them once and watched the light run along the white ends and felt his clitty pulse against the towel.

The breast plate came out of the case, the C cup, the silicone warm from the room, and he fitted it against his chest and settled the straps and felt the weight of it pull at his shoulders and the pencil-eraser nipples stand up hard in the cool air of the room, and he looked at himself in the mirror and the shape of him changed and the ache in his chest changed with it, and he stood there a moment with his hands on the dresser and his head down and let it go through him.

The catsuit went on the way it always went on — one leg at a time, the latex cold and then warm, worked up over the hips and the smooth buns and the flat belly, the zipper pulled up the front to the throat, the collar of it sitting just under the collar of the collar, the whole of him sealed into the black shine of it. He smoothed it down over his thighs and his hips and his chest and turned in the mirror and watched the light run over him from the shoulders to the knees and the shape that came back was a woman's shape, hips and waist and the small hard points of the nipples under the latex and the platinum wig still on its stand waiting.

The wig went on last. He fitted the cap over his own hair and settled the platinum down over it and worked the sides and the fringe into place with the tips of the press-ons, and when he looked up the woman in the mirror had long pale hair falling past her shoulders and a face done in black and red and a body in black latex and six-inch heels, and she stood with her hands at her sides and her lips parted and the shine of the gloss catching the lamp, and Warren was gone, and Willow stood in room four-oh-six at the Marlowe and waited.

She checked the clock on the nightstand. Four-fifty-eight.

She went to the dresser and took the cash she had drawn that morning out of her bag — five hundred, in twenties, folded once — and laid it in the top drawer where it would be out of sight and where she could reach it. She put the plug back in, worked it in slow with the press-ons and felt it seat and settle, and the latex stretched tight over the base of it and held it, and she stood and turned in the mirror and the black shine turned with her and the platinum swung and settled, and she heard herself breathe once, long and even, the way she had learned to breathe before a man came up the stairs.

At five o'clock exactly there was a knock on the door. Two knocks, then a pause, then a third, the way a man knocks when he has been thinking about the knock the whole way up.

Willow crossed the room. The heels clicked on the thin hotel carpet and the latex creaked at the knees and the platinum swung against her shoulders, and she put her hand on the knob and did not open it yet. She looked at the door and at the small brass number on the outside of it and at the peephole, and she leaned in and put her eye to it, and there in the fish-eye of the glass stood Gerald from the adjacent pod in his gray coat with his wet hand in his pocket and his face turned up toward the number, and behind him the corridor ran away toward the stairs and the elevator and the street and the whole gray Thursday she had just taken off and left in a chair.

She turned the knob and opened the door.

Gerald stood in the doorway of room four-oh-six with his gray coat buttoned wrong — the second button through the third hole, the collar riding up — and his wet hand still in his pocket, and he did not look at her face. He looked at her knees. Then the latex at her hip. Then the platinum hair, and then away, down the corridor, as if someone had called his name from the stairs.

"Come in," Willow said.

He came in. She shut the door behind him and turned the deadbolt and the chain, and the click of the chain going home made his shoulders come up an inch. The room was small and warm and smelled of carpet shampoo and the powder she had put on an hour ago, and the lamp on the nightstand threw one long yellow stripe across the bed and left the corners dark. He stood in the middle of it with his arms at his sides like a man waiting to be told where to put his coat.

"You can take the coat off," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You've got it buttoned wrong."

He looked down at his own chest and saw it and his face went red from the collar up, and he undid the buttons and did them again, slowly, the wet hand coming out of the pocket for the first time since he had walked in — still damp, still shining faintly at the creases, and he held it away from the coat like it belonged to somebody else. The ring was still on it.

"Why did you come, Gerald."

"You know why."

"I want to hear you say it." Willow crossed to the dresser and leaned back against it with her palms flat on the wood and her ankles crossed, and the latex creaked at her knees and the platinum swung forward over her shoulder and settled. "You stood in my doorway this morning and asked me about Claire. You stood in it again at three-twenty and closed the door and put your hand on the back of my pants. You asked how much. I told you how much. So say it. Why did you come."

Gerald's jaw worked. He looked at the bed and then at the lamp and then at the door he had just come through, and his voice came out of him lower than it ever had in the office, a voice he used somewhere else, for someone else.

"Five hundred dollars," he said. "For a blow job and to fuck you."

"Five hundred." Willow nodded slowly. "Three for the room and the hour. Two for my mouth. That's what I said and that's what's in the drawer. You brought it?"

"It's in my wallet."

"Then put it on the dresser."

He got the wallet out of his back pocket and opened it and counted out the bills with the wet hand — twenties, folded once, the way she had folded hers that morning — and laid them on the dresser beside her hip, and the paper made a small dry sound against the wood and then lay there under the lamp, five hundred dollars in a stack an inch from her hand. He did not step back after he put it down. He stood close enough that she could smell him — the coffee and the cheap soap and the wool of the coat and under all of it the sweat of a man who had walked up four flights because the elevator was slow.

"Now," she said. "Tell me what you see."

"What?"

"You've been looking at me since you came in and you haven't once looked at my face. So look. And tell me what you see."

Gerald's eyes came up. They went to the platinum first, the long pale fall of it past her shoulders, and then down to the face under it — the penciled brows arched dark, the smoky shadow smoked out at the corners, the black liner winged at the lash line, the inch-long false lashes, the cheekbones blushed high and sharp, the lips lined and filled and glossed until they shone like something spilled. His mouth opened and closed and opened again.

"You're a woman," he said.

"I'm wearing a woman. There's a difference and you know the difference. Say what you see."

"Your hair."

"Platinum. It's a wig. There's a cap under it and my own hair is under the cap and it's brown and it's short. Keep going."

"Your face." He swallowed. "You've got — the eyes. The black. The lashes are — Jesus, they're long. They're not yours."

"They're mine. I bought them. I put them on with tweezers at four-forty this afternoon. Everything on this face is mine. Keep going."

His eyes went down. The latex caught the lamp and ran it from her shoulder to her knee in one long black line, and the breast plate stood under it, the C cups, the pencil-eraser nipples hard in the cool of the room, and the waist pulled in and the hips came out and the six-inch heels put her eye to eye with him and made her legs a shape he had never once seen on a person he worked with. He looked at all of it and his throat moved and he did not answer.

"Tell me what I look like, Gerald."

"You look—" He stopped. His hand came up and hung in the air between them, the wet one, the ring on it, and he did not touch her with it and did not put it down. "You look like a whore."

"Say it again."

"You look like a whore." His voice had gone rough. "You look like a woman who charges five hundred dollars and puts on a wig and a rubber suit and waits in a hotel room on Ninth Avenue for a man to come up the stairs. You look like — I don't know what you look like. You look like the thing I've been thinking about since Tuesday. Since you came in wearing the blouse with the little buttons and your hands on the keys."

Willow's clitty gave one long pulse against the plug and the latex and the wet ran fresh down the inside of her right thigh and she did not move and did not let it show on her face. "Tuesday," she said. "You've been thinking about it since Tuesday."

"Since Tuesday."

"Why me."

Gerald's hand came down and settled on his own thigh and gripped the wool of the trousers. He looked at the money on the dresser and then at her mouth and then at the money again, and something in his face came apart and went back together wrong, and when he spoke it came out of him all at once, the way a man says a thing he has been carrying up four flights.

"Because you're the only thing in that building that's alive," he said. "Because I sit in my pod and I open my folder and I move the same numbers and I go home to a wife who hasn't looked at me in a year and a house with a mortgage on it and a lawn I cut on Saturdays, and every day for a month you've walked past my door in a different blouse with your hips moving under the slacks and your mouth done and your walk like — like you're going somewhere, like there's a place you're going that I've never been. And you looked at me. Twice. In the break room. You looked at me and you knew what I was looking at and you didn't look away. Nobody's looked at me like that in a year. So I asked. And you told me. And now I'm here."

"And your wife."

"She thinks I'm at a thing."

"Then you're at a thing." Willow pushed off the dresser and came to him and put her hand flat on his chest over the wool of the coat and felt his heart going under it, fast and hard and stupid, the heart of a man who had decided something on the stairs and had not yet told his body. "Take the coat off, Gerald."

He took the coat off. He hung it on the back of the chair with the gray slacks she had laid there, and he stood in the small warm room in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled and a belt with a worn spot at the buckle and the front of his trousers gone from a question to an answer, and he did not hide it and did not look at it and did not look away from her.

"Sit on the bed," she said.

He sat. The mattress gave under him and the springs complained and he put his hands on his knees and looked up at her standing over him in the black latex and the platinum and the six-inch heels, and his mouth was open and his breath was coming through it.

Willow knelt.

The carpet was thin and the heels made it hard and she went down anyway, one knee and then the other, and the latex creaked and pulled at her knees and the platinum swung forward and she pushed it back over her shoulder with the back of her hand. She put her hands on his thighs and felt the muscle jump under the wool and the heat coming up through it, and she looked up at him along the length of his own body and let him see her face from below, the lashes, the gloss, the smoke at the corners of her eyes.

"Tell me what you want," she said.

"You know what I want."

"Say it."

"I want your mouth."

"On what."

Gerald's hands came off his knees and found the belt and the buckle came open and the zipper went down and he lifted his hips and worked the trousers and the boxers down to his knees in one shove, and his cock came out of them hard and dark and already wet at the tip, standing up off his belly with the vein along the underside of it and the small bead of it catching the lamp. He was thick and he was not as long as David and he was thicker than Matt and none of that was the thing she noticed — the thing she noticed was that it was a man's cock and it was in the room and it was for her, and her clitty gave one long clench against the plug and the latex and leaked into the black shine between her thighs.

"That," Gerald said. "That's what I want your mouth on."

Willow leaned in and took the base of it in her hand and felt it jump at the touch, and she looked up at him once — his face above her, the flush at the neck, the eyes wide and stupid and fixed on her mouth — and then she put her tongue flat against the underside of the head and licked up the length of it, slow, from the base to the tip, and tasted the salt and the skin and the small wet bead of him, and Gerald's whole body went rigid on the bed and his hands came up off his knees and stopped in the air.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, Jesus."

She did it again. Slower this time, the flat of her tongue dragging up the vein, and at the top she closed her glossed lips around the head and took it in to the first inch and sucked, and the gloss made it slick and the slick made a small wet sound in the room, and Gerald's hips came up off the mattress an inch and his hands came down and found the back of her head and did not press.

"You're — your mouth," he said. "Your mouth is—"

She took him deeper. Two inches, three, the head against the roof of her mouth and the gloss smearing along the shaft, and she breathed out through her nose and let her throat open and took him to the place where it stopped and held it there, and Gerald's fingers closed in the platinum and stopped and opened and closed again and did not pull.

"Look at me," she said, and came off him with a wet sound, and the gloss had run and the lashes were down and she looked up at him with her mouth open and the shine on her chin. "You wanted to know what I look like. This is what I look like. A man's cock in my mouth and my hair in your hand and your five hundred dollars on the dresser. Look at it."

Gerald looked. He looked at her mouth and at the wet on it and at the shine running down to her chin and at the black latex and the platinum and the heels and the whole shape of her kneeling on the thin carpet between his knees, and his face did something she had not seen a man's face do in a long time — it went soft and then hard and then soft again, and he said, "Warren," and stopped.

"Not here," she said. "Not in this room. In this room I'm Willow."

"Willow."

"Again."

"Willow."

"Good." She took him back in her mouth, all the way to the place where it stopped, and this time she moved on him — up and down, slow, her hand working the base in time with her mouth, and the wet sound of it filled the little room and the springs complained and Gerald's breath came out of him in long shaking lines. His hand in the platinum had gone from not-pressing to pressing, gentle, the way a man holds a thing he is afraid of breaking, and his other hand found her shoulder and gripped the latex there and left a print in it.

"I'm not going to last," he said. "If you keep — Willow, if you keep doing that I'm not going to—"

She came off him with a wet pull and held him in her hand and looked up. "You paid for the hour," she said. "Not the minute. Slow down."

"I can't—"

"You can." She licked the head once, flat, and tasted him and felt him jump and held him still. "Breathe, Gerald. Put your hand back in my hair and breathe."

He breathed. His hand came back into the platinum and settled and his chest came down and he looked at her from above with his mouth open and his shirt open at the collar and the sweat starting at his temples, and Willow went back down on him and took her time. She worked the head with her tongue and her lips and the gloss, and she took him deep and held him and swallowed around him, and she came off and blew on the wet shaft and watched the gooseflesh come up on his thighs, and she went back down, and the lamp threw the two of them onto the wall in one long moving shadow.

"Your mouth," he said again, and it was not a sentence anymore, it was a thing he kept saying because there was nothing else to say. "Your mouth, your mouth—"

She pulled off him and stood up. The heels made her taller than him sitting down and she looked down at him with the gloss gone and the lashes heavy and the latex creaking at her knees, and she reached back and found the zipper at the throat of the catsuit and drew it down, slow, all the way to the base of her spine, and stepped out of it and stood in the room in the heels and the breast plate and the black panties and the plug, and the lamp ran down the front of her and the pencil-eraser nipples stood up hard and the wet shine of the plug showed through the soaked silk at the seat.

"There," she said. "That's the rest of it."

Gerald looked at her and his hands came up and stopped and came down, and his cock stood up off his belly and leaked onto his own shirt, and he said, "Turn around."

She turned around. She put her hands on the dresser and her feet apart on the thin carpet and the heels made her hips come up and the plug pressed the silk into the base of her spine, and she looked at him over her shoulder with the platinum swinging forward and the wet shine of the plug showing through the panties and the five hundred dollars under her hand on the wood.

"You wanted to feel it this afternoon," she said. "Now you can have it. Take the panties down and put it in me."

Gerald stood up off the bed and his trousers were around his ankles and he kicked them off and came to her and put his hands on her hips and the heat of them went through her and his thumbs found the waistband of the panties and drew them down over the curve of her ass, slow, one inch at a time, and the cool air of the room came against the wet skin and the base of the plug and the small dark ring the silk had left, and he looked at it and made a sound in his throat.

"It's still in you," he said.

"Take it out."

He took it out. He worked it slow with his fingers and the wet of her came with it and ran down the inside of her thigh and he set the plug on the dresser beside the money and stood behind her with his cock in his hand and the head of it against the wet ring of her and did not push.

"Do it," she said.

He pushed. The head went in and the stretch of it went up through her belly and into her chest and she set her teeth and put her forehead down on the wood and her hands flat on the money and let him in, inch by inch, slow, the way a man goes into a place he has been thinking about for a week, and when he was all the way in he stopped and stood there with his hips against her ass and his breath coming out of him in a long shaking line.

"Jesus," he said. "Jesus, Willow."

"Move."

He moved. Slow at first, the way she had told him, and the wet made a sound between them and the dresser knocked against the wall and the lamp shook on the nightstand and the platinum swung forward over her face and she watched the two of them in the dark window — a man in a white shirt with his hands on a woman's hips, and the woman in the platinum wig and the heels with her hands flat on a stack of twenties and her mouth open and the shine on her chin.

"Harder," she said.

He went harder. His hands came off her hips and found her waist and pulled her back onto him and the slap of skin started in the little room and the dresser knocked the wall with each one and Gerald's breath came out of him in grunts that he tried to keep quiet and could not, and Willow put her cheek on the wood and let it happen and felt the plug gone and the stretch of him and the wet running down the inside of both thighs and her clitty soft and useless and leaking against the edge of the dresser with every thrust.

"Tell me what I look like," she said.

"What?"

"Tell me what I look like." She turned her head on the wood and looked at him over her shoulder with the lashes down and the gloss gone and the black liner smeared at the corner of one eye. "You're inside me and you've got my hair in your hand. Tell me what I look like."

Gerald's hand came up and found the platinum and gripped it and pulled her head back an inch and his voice came out of him broken and low. "You look like a woman," he said. "You look like a woman I picked up in a hotel and paid five hundred dollars to fuck. You look like the thing I've been thinking about since Tuesday. You look — you look like you were made for this."

"Say the last part again."

"You were made for this."

"Yes." The word came out of her on a thrust and she did not take it back. "Again."

"You were made for this." He said it into the back of her neck and his hips went faster and the slap of skin went faster and the dresser knocked the wall and the money slid under her hands and one of the twenties came off the stack and floated down to the carpet. "You were made for this, you were made for this—"

"Don't stop."

"I'm not—" His hand in the platinum tightened and his other hand came around her hip and found her clitty, small and soft and wet, and pressed it flat with two fingers and held it there, and Willow's whole body came up onto the balls of her feet in the heels and her mouth opened and nothing came out of it.

"There," she said, when she could. "There. Keep it there."

He kept it there. He fucked her with his fingers on her clitty and his hand in her hair and his breath hot on the back of her neck, and the room was small and warm and smelled of latex and carpet shampoo and the two of them, and the lamp threw their shadow on the wall and the shadow moved, and Willow watched it move and felt the clench start somewhere below her stomach — the slow whole-body thing, the long roll of it that went through her ass and her belly and her throat and not through her cock at all — and she rode it with her hands flat on the money and her cheek on the wood.

"I'm going to—" Gerald said.

"Not yet."

"I can't—"

"Not yet." She pushed back onto him and took him deeper and heard him groan and felt his rhythm break. "You paid for the hour. Wait for me."

He waited. He held himself still inside her with his teeth set and his hand shaking in her hair, and Willow worked herself on him — slow, small circles, the way she had learned, the way that found the place — and the clench built and built and her clitty leaked against his fingers and her thighs shook in the heels and the platinum swung and the sweat ran down between the breast plate and her chest, and then it crested and took her.

She came without a sound. Her mouth opened and her body clenched around him and her clitty spilled a thin thread of wet over his two fingers and down the edge of the dresser, and she held herself there with her forehead on the wood and her hands on the money and rode it out, long, longer than a man's, and when it let her go she was still shaking.

"Now," she said. "Now, Gerald. Come in me."

He came. Two thrusts and then a third and then he drove in to the base and stopped and his whole body locked against her back and his hand in the platinum went white and he made a sound into her shoulder that was not a word, and she felt him empty into her — hot, in pulses, one and then another and then another — and she held herself still and took it and put her cheek on the wood and watched the dark window and the two of them in it.

He stayed in her a long time. His breath came down onto her back and his hand came out of the platinum and lay flat on the dresser beside hers, and the wedding ring sat on the wood next to the money and the wet shine of the plug, and neither of them said anything. Then he pulled out, slow, and the wet came with him and ran down the inside of her thigh and onto the carpet, and he stepped back and stood in the middle of the room with his shirt untucked and his cock going soft and wet in his hand, and he looked at her like a man who had just woken up somewhere he did not remember driving to.

Willow straightened. She reached for the plug and worked it back in, slow, with the wet of him still in her, and it seated and held and she felt the fullness of it and the small ache of the stretch and let out a breath. Then she turned around and faced him and stood in the heels with the catsuit open down the front and the panties around one ankle and the platinum hanging into her face and the black liner smeared at the corner of one eye, and she looked at him and did not fix any of it.

"Five hundred dollars," she said. "On the dresser. One of them's on the floor."

Gerald looked at the money and then at the floor and then at her, and his mouth opened and closed and opened again, and he said, "Willow."

"That's the name."

"What happens now."

She bent and picked the twenty off the carpet and put it back on the stack and squared the stack with two fingers and pushed it an inch toward him across the wood.

"Now you take your coat," she said, "and you go down the stairs, and you go home to your wife, and tomorrow morning you come in at eight-forty and you open your folder and you put your coffee down and you do your Thursday. And when I walk past your pod you look at me the way you've always looked at me."

"And this."

"This stays in the room." She turned away and reached for the towel on the back of the chair and began to wipe the gloss off her chin. "You know where to find me if you want it again. The rate doesn't change."

Gerald stood in the middle of room four-oh-six with his shirt untucked and his trousers in a heap on the carpet and his coat on the back of the chair, and he did not move to pick up any of it. He looked at the money on the dresser and at the plug beside it and at the woman in the platinum wig wiping her face at the mirror, and he said, quietly, "I don't know how to go back to my pod."

Willow looked at him in the mirror. The black liner had smeared down one cheek and the lashes were heavy and the mouth was bare now, the gloss gone, the lips pale and a little swollen, and under the makeup the face in the glass was a face he had sat two pods away from for two years.

"You don't go back to your pod," she said. "You go back to your desk. There's a difference."

She set the towel down and turned and picked his trousers up off the carpet and held them out to him, and he took them and stood there holding them, and the phone on the nightstand lit up and buzzed once against the wood and lay there glowing with the screen face-up, and both of them looked at it at the same time.

One word on the screen. From David.

Who's in the room.

Gerald's eyes went from the phone to Willow's face and back again, and his mouth opened and closed around a question he did not want to ask. The screen glowed on the nightstand, one word, three syllables, and the room had gone very quiet around it — the lamp throwing its long yellow stripe across the bed and the money and the plug, the carpet holding the smell of the two of them, the wet still cooling on the inside of her thigh.

"Who's that," Gerald said.

"Nobody." Willow reached past him and turned the phone face-down on the wood. "Nobody for you to worry about."

"Willow."

"It's not your question, Gerald. You paid for the hour and the hour's done and the rest of it is not yours." She looked at him standing there with his shirt untucked and his cock gone soft and wet against his thigh and his trousers in a heap on the carpet, and she felt the plug seated in her and the wet of him still inside her around it and the small ache of the stretch, and she did not soften any of it for him. "You came up the stairs and you put your money on the dresser and you got your hour. That's what you bought. The phone is what you didn't buy."

Gerald looked at the phone and then at her and then at the phone again, and the ring on his hand caught the lamp and lost it, and he said, "Is he coming here."

"No."

"Is he—"

"Gerald." She said it the way she had learned to say a name when she wanted a man to stop, low and level and with the weight of the room behind it. "You're going to walk out of this room in a minute and you're going to go home to your wife and your Thursday is going to be the Thursday you had, and none of it is going to touch him. He doesn't know you. He doesn't care about you. You're not in his world and you don't want to be."

"But he's in yours."

Willow looked at him for a long moment. The platinum hung into her face and the black liner was smeared at the corner of one eye and the gloss was gone off her mouth and she stood in the heels with the catsuit open down the front and the breast plate rising and falling with her breath, and she let him see all of it and did not hide any of it.

"Yes," she said. "He's in mine."

Gerald's jaw worked. He bent and picked up his trousers and stepped into them and did them up, and then he picked up his coat off the back of the chair and put it on and buttoned it — correctly this time, the second button through the second hole — and he stood in the small warm room with his hand on the door and did not open it.

"If you want it again," he said. "The rate."

"You know where to find me."

"The Marlowe. Ninth Avenue." He nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he has decided something. "Four-oh-six."

"That's right."

Gerald's hand came off the door. He crossed the room in three steps and he put his hand on the back of her neck, under the platinum, and he pulled her to him and kissed her.

It was not a small kiss. It was not the kiss of a man who had paid for an hour and was leaving. It was the kiss of a man who had been thinking about something since Tuesday and had only now found the words for it, and he put his mouth on hers and his hand in the platinum and he kissed her the way you kiss a thing you are afraid you will not get again, deep and open and with the taste of himself still on her lips, and Willow felt her clitty give one long pulse against the plug and her hand come up and find his chest and hold it.

He broke it first. He pulled back an inch and looked at her with his mouth wet and his breath coming hard and the ring still on his hand, and he said, quietly, "I don't know your real name."

"You don't need it."

"I want it."

Willow looked at him. The lamp threw his shadow long across the wall and the money sat on the dresser and the plug sat beside it and the phone lay face-down and dark, and she stood in the heels with the taste of him in her mouth and the ache of him still in her and the collar pressing its letters into the soft place under her jaw.

"Willow's the name I use," she said. "It's the name you get. Take it or leave it."

Gerald looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and he turned and crossed the room and opened the door and stepped out into the corridor, and he looked back at her over his shoulder with his coat buttoned right and his face gone quiet and his hand on the frame, and he said, "I'll be back," and he closed the door behind him.

Willow stood in the middle of the room and listened to his footsteps go down the corridor toward the stairs, the heavy measured tread of a man carrying something he had not carried an hour ago. The door clicked and the lock caught and the room went still.

She crossed to the nightstand and picked up the phone.

The screen had gone dark. She turned it over and the light came up and the message sat there at the top of the thread, still unanswered, three words that had been waiting for her through the whole hour — through Gerald's hand on the back of her pants in the pod, through the wet wool and the plug and the five hundred dollars on the dresser, through the cock in her mouth and the stretch of him and the come still cooling inside her. Who's in the room.

Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. The words sat in her throat the way the plug sat in her, a fullness that wanted out, a pressure that had been building since Gerald's hand found the back of her pants in the pod. She typed it fast, before she could think about it, the way you pull a bandage.

I just let a guy fuck me from the office for 500 dollars.

She watched the words sit there in the blue field, three dots not yet appearing on the other side. The room was very quiet. The lamp threw its long yellow stripe and the money sat on the dresser and she could feel the come cooling inside her, Gerald's, a wet warmth that had gone from hot to lukewarm to something she could feel as a separate thing, a weight, a claim. She typed again.

The best fuck he ever had and I made more money in one hour than I make all day.

Her finger hung over send. The collar pressed its letters into the soft place under her jaw and she thought about David's face when he read it, the slow way his mouth curved when she gave him something he could use, and she sent it.

The three dots appeared almost instantly.

She stood in the heels with the catsuit open down the front and her hand around the phone and her breath held, and she did not sit down. She stood the way you stand when you have thrown a stone into deep water and you are waiting for the splash to tell you how deep it is.

The dots stopped. Then they came back. Then they stopped again.

Willow looked at the money on the dresser. Five hundred dollars in twenties and a fifty, the way Gerald had counted them out on the wood with his thick accountant's fingers, each bill smoothed flat before he laid it down. She had watched him do it and felt the plug shift in her and known that she was going to do whatever he asked for the rest of the hour, and she had been right.

The phone buzzed in her hand.

Tell me everything.

She read it twice. There was no anger in it, no curl of jealousy, nothing she could brace against. It was the voice of a man who had been waiting for this, who had known it was coming, who had perhaps arranged for it to come, and who wanted the details the way you want the details of a meal you have been craving all week.

Willow sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under her and the wet of Gerald shifted inside her and she felt her clitty give one long pulse against the plug, a pulse that was not her doing, a pulse that answered the thought of David reading about it.

She typed. He's from the office. Gerald. From the pod next to mine.

The one who noticed the buttons.

She stared at the screen. He knew. Of course he knew. He had known since Tuesday, since the pearl buttons, since before that, since the camera in the men's room had caught her playing the file on her phone. There was nothing she had done in the last month that he had not watched. She typed yes and sent it.

And you let him.

She felt the words land in her like a hand. Not a question — a statement, a door closing behind her. She had let him. She had let Gerald put his money on the dresser and his hand on the back of her pants and his cock in her mouth and his come inside her, and all of it had been hers to stop and she had not stopped any of it.

Yes.

Good girl.

The two words went through her like heat through glass. She felt them in her chest and in the small wet clench of her clitty against the plug and in the flush that came up her neck under the platinum, and she sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in her hand and the come of another man inside her and the collar of the man who owned her pressing its letters into her throat, and she was not confused about any of it.

Was he good.

She thought about Gerald's thick fingers and the way he had held her hips and the sound he had made when he came, a sound like a man giving something up. He thought he was. He kept saying my name.

And what did you think about.

The question sat there in the blue field and Willow looked at it and felt the truth of it rise in her like water finding its level. She had thought about David. She had thought about his hands and his voice and the way he had looked at her in the fetish shop while the stranger touched her, and she had thought about the mirrored ceiling he had booked for Saturday and the four men who had paid for a table where she would be passed like a decanter.

You. I thought about you the whole time.

The dots came back. She watched them pulse and stop and pulse again, and she felt the wet of Gerald cooling inside her and the plug holding it there and the ache of the stretch that was already going soft, and she waited.

That's my girl.

The words sat in the blue field and she read them again — That's my girl — and the room changed shape around her, the way a room does when you have been holding your breath and you finally let it go. The lamp still threw its stripe, the money still sat on the dresser, the plug still held Gerald's come inside her, but the weight of the hour had lifted off her shoulders and settled somewhere else, somewhere she could carry it.

She typed before she could think. I think I'm quitting my male job.

The dots appeared and stopped and appeared again. She watched them the way you watch a kettle, knowing it will boil, not knowing when. The wet of Gerald had gone from lukewarm to something closer to her own temperature, and she could feel it as a thing that belonged to her now, a secret she was keeping warm. The collar pressed its letters into her throat and she did not lift a hand to it. She let it press.

Is that right.

Yes. She sent it and then kept typing, the words coming the way they had come in the men's room, fast and true and with no one to stop them. I sat in that pod today and I watched his hands on the keyboard and I thought about what he would look like when he came inside me. And then I made him pay for it. And I thought — I don't ever want to sit in that pod again. I want to be on my knees for you. I want to be the thing you keep in the closet and take out when you want to feel something.

She read it back. The words were all true. That was the terrible and simple thing about them — she had not had to reach for a single one.

Come to me Friday.

She felt the words land in her chest like a hand closing. Friday. Not Saturday, not the private room with the mirrored ceiling and the four men — Friday. The night before. The night she would come to him and not go back.

Yes. I'll come Friday.

And you'll tell me everything. Every detail. His hands, his mouth, the sound he made. You'll tell me on your knees with my cock in your mouth and you'll thank me for letting you have him.

The heat of it went through her like a current. She felt the plug give a pulse inside her and the wet of Gerald shift and the small clench of her clitty that she could not have stopped if she had wanted to, and she did not want to.

Yes. I'll thank you. I'll thank you for all of it.

Good girl. Now clean yourself up. The car comes at six.

She read it and the room came back into focus — the lamp, the money, the open catsuit, the smear of Gerald's come cooling on her thigh. The car. Of course there was a car. There was always a car when David decided the night was done.

She stood up and the wet of Gerald ran down the inside of her thigh and she felt it and did not wipe it away. She crossed to the little bathroom and ran the water hot and stood under it with the plug still in her, letting the water take the surface of the hour away, keeping the rest of it deep where the water could not reach.

She dressed in the clothes from the Marlowe — the gray suit, the bone blouse, the black panties over the plug, the heels — and she checked the mirror and saw Warren looking back at her and felt the strangeness of it the way she felt it every time now, a costume she put on for the world, a name that was not her name.

The money went into her bag. She counted it once, twice, the twenties flat and smooth, and she thought about the feel of Gerald's hands counting it out and the sound he had made when he came and the way he had kissed her at the door, and she zipped the bag and did not think about it again.

She went down the stairs and out through the lobby and the night air hit her face, cold and clean, and she stood on the curb with the collar under her collar and the plug inside her and the money in her bag and she waited for the car.

It came at six, black and low, and the driver held the door and she got in and the city slid past the window and she sat in the back with her hands folded on the bag and felt the plug shift with every bump and the wet of Gerald still warm inside her around it, and she thought about Friday.

The car did not take her to the Marlowe. It took her across town and down a ramp into a garage and stopped beside an elevator, and the driver got out and opened her door and said, "He's waiting, ma'am."

She got out. The elevator took her up and the doors opened on a corridor she knew and a door she knew, and she raised her hand to knock and the door opened before she could, and David stood there in his shirtsleeves with his collar open and his dark eyes taking her in from the heels to the hair to the bag in her hand, and he said, "Come in, little one. Tell me everything."

The room was warm and low-lit and the bed was turned down and the lamp on the nightstand threw its stripe across the sheets, and she crossed the threshold and the door closed behind her and she was not Warren anymore.

"On your knees," David said.

She went down. The carpet was soft under her knees and the bag slid from her hand and she looked up at him standing over her with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes dark and patient, and she felt the plug seated in her and the wet of Gerald still inside her and the collar pressing its letters into her throat, and she was not confused about any of it.

"Tell me," he said.

And she did. She told him about the hand on the back of her pants in the pod and the wet wool and the five hundred dollars counted out on the wood, and she told him about the cock in her mouth and the stretch of him and the sound he had made when he came, and she told him about the kiss at the door and the way Gerald had looked back at her with his coat buttoned right and his face gone quiet, and she told him she had thought about David the whole time, and she had meant it.

David listened. He stood over her with his arms crossed and his head tilted the way he tilted it when he was reading a report, and when she finished he was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, "Good girl."

The two words went through her like heat through glass. She felt them in her chest and in the small wet clench of her clitty against the plug and in the flush that came up her neck under the platinum, and she knelt on the carpet with the money in her bag and the come of another man inside her and the collar of the man who owned her pressing its letters into her throat, and she was not confused about any of it.

"Now," David said, and his hand came down and closed in the platinum at the nape of her neck, "let's see how much of him you're still carrying."

And he pulled her to her feet and turned her and bent her over the edge of the bed, and she felt his hand come down on the back of her pants and the plug shift inside her and the wet of Gerald run down her thigh, and she heard his voice low and level behind her, saying, "I'm going to fuck him out of you, little one. And you're going to thank me for it."