The plug came out first. David worked it free with two fingers and set it on the nightstand where it sat glistening in the lamplight, and then his palm pressed flat between her shoulder blades and pushed her down until her cheek met the duvet and her hips came up and the wet of Gerald ran cold down the inside of her thigh. She heard the zip of his trousers. She heard the small wet sound of him in his own hand behind her, unhurried, the way he did everything.

"Count them," he said.

"What?"

"The men who've been inside you since Tuesday. Count them."

She felt him at her entrance, the blunt heat of him, and she said, "Three," and he pushed in to the root in one slow stroke that took her breath and gave it back wrong. Her hands fisted in the duvet. The latex of the catsuit had been peeled down to her waist hours ago and her clit hung soft and slick against the sheets, oozing, useless, and she ground it into the duvet without meaning to and the fabric came away damp.

"Three," David said. "And who were they."

"You."

He drew back and pushed again, deeper, and she heard herself make a sound she hadn't authorized, a small high noise out of the back of her throat. "That's one."

"Matt." The name came out cracked. "Matt, and—" he fucked into her again and the word broke in half "—Gerald."

"Gerald," David repeated, and there was something in his voice she couldn't read, amusement or appetite or both. He set a rhythm then, not fast, the kind of rhythm that had a bottom to it, and every stroke dragged over the place inside her that made her clit leak a fresh bead onto the duvet. "The man who paid you five hundred dollars to put his cock in your ass in a rented room. Say it."

"He paid me five hundred dollars."

"And you took it."

"I took it."

"Because you're a whore."

"Because I'm a whore," she said, and the words went through her like the two words had gone through her earlier, heat through glass, and her ass clenched around him so hard that he grunted and slowed and laughed low in his chest.

"There she is," he said. He leaned over her then, his chest to her back, his mouth at her ear, and he fucked her the way he talked, level and deliberate and without any hurry at all, and she lay under him with her cheek on the duvet and her mouth open and no sound coming out because there was nothing left in her that was separate from the thing he was doing. When she came it was the small clench, the one he could see from the gap in the curtain, her whole body going tight and then loose and her clit spilling a thin thread of precum onto the sheet, and he watched it happen and then he finished inside her and stayed there, breathing, until he was done.

He pulled out and she felt the wet of him follow, and he went to the bathroom and ran water and came back with a warm cloth and cleaned her himself, unhurried, thorough, and then he put the plug back in.

"Sit up," he said. "Put your clothes on. You're going home."

She sat up. Her hands were shaking and she did not look at them. She pulled the catsuit up over her shoulders and zipped it and stepped back into the heels and stood there in front of him with her hair in her face and her lips swollen and the collar showing above the neck of the latex.

"Sunday," David said. "The room. Eight o'clock. Four men. You'll be dressed by Marguerite and you'll do what you're told and you'll thank each of them by name."

"Yes."

"And Warren."

She looked up. He almost never used the name. He used it the way you'd use a word in a language you'd stopped speaking.

"You told me you want to quit the office."

"I do."

"Then quit it." He said it the way he'd said count them. "But I want a few weeks first. Not for you. For me."

She didn't understand. She stood there with the wet of him inside her and the plug heavy and the question on her face, and he saw it and did not answer it, which was his way of telling her the answer was not hers yet.

"Go home," he said. "Sleep. Tomorrow you go to work and you do the thing you asked me for. I'll be in touch."

The car was waiting downstairs. She rode home in the dark with the city going by and her forehead against the cold glass and she did not sleep, and when she let herself into the house she went straight to the bedroom and lay down in the catsuit and the heels and the collar and did not take any of it off.

---

Friday the office was hot in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. The building's HVAC had been fighting itself all week and losing, and by four in the afternoon the air on the fourteenth floor smelled like hot carpet and printer toner and the leather of the chair she'd been sitting in since nine, and the trace of something else she could not place and then could: the cologne. It had been in her nose since Tuesday. It was in the collar of the blouse she'd worn Monday. It was in the car. It was in her.

She was dressed as Willow at the desk. The pearl silk blouse — no breast plate, just the blouse against his flat chest, the fabric cool and slick where it lay over his ribs and moved with him when he breathed — and the black pants that were not office pants, slick and tight and shining under the desk lamp every time he shifted, and the heels he'd worn in from the lobby that morning with his overcoat long enough to cover the ankle straps. His hair was clean and brushed and it had grown out enough over the month that it moved when he turned his head, and his lips were wet and full and thick with the gloss he'd put on in the men's room at lunch, and his brows were penciled, and his lashes were on, and the office had stopped pretending not to see him somewhere around Wednesday.

Dana had said nice again that morning, which was the third time, and it had stopped being a compliment and become a fact about the weather.

The document was open on the monitor. He had written it at eleven and revised it at two and it had been sitting there since, four lines long, the cursor blinking at the end of the last one.

Please accept this letter as formal notice of my resignation from Sable & Co., effective two weeks from today. I am grateful for the years I have spent here and for the trust the firm has placed in me. I wish the team every success.

It was a lie, all of it, and it was the only shape the truth could take in a document that would be filed and forwarded and read by a woman in HR named Carol who had once brought him a birthday cupcake. He read it again. His reflection hung in the dark part of the screen above the text — the hair, the lips, the shine on the pants where the lamp caught them — and he looked at the reflection the way you look at a photograph of a room you used to live in.

The floor was nearly empty. Priya had left at three with her bag over her shoulder and a look at him she hadn't tried to hide. Gerald's pod was dark; he had not come in, or had come in and left, and Warren had not asked. Ray was at the desk downstairs and would be until eight. The HVAC hummed. Somewhere down the hall an elevator opened and closed on nobody.

He put his palms on the edge of the desk and leaned over the keyboard. The mahogany was cool and smooth under his hands and the edge of it pressed a hard line into the heel of each palm, and he stayed like that for a while, feeling the line, the way the pressure changed when he leaned in and out. It was a good desk. He had been happy at it once, in the way a man is happy at a desk, which is not happiness but the absence of the question.

His phone was face up beside the keyboard. David had not written since Wednesday night. The last message in the thread was his own — Yes — and above it, the six messages, and above those, Good girl. He had read it so many times the words had gone smooth.

He picked up the phone and called him.

It rang twice. "Willow."

"I'm at the office."

"I know where you are."

She turned the chair a quarter turn so the screen wasn't in her eyeline, and the blouse slid over her ribs, and she said, "You said a few weeks. For you. I want to know what that means."

"It means what it says."

"It doesn't say anything."

A pause. She could hear him breathing, and behind him, faintly, the sound of a room that was not this room — a television turned low, ice in a glass. "You asked me for space," he said. "On your knees, in my room, with my come running down your leg. You asked me for a few weeks to think and contemplate your life. I said yes. I'm telling you what I told you then. I'm not going to say it twice."

"I'm not asking you to say it twice. I'm asking—" She stopped. The cursor blinked at the end of the last line. She looked at it and not at her reflection. "I'm asking what I'm supposed to do with the time."

"Whatever you want," David said. "That's the point of it. I've had you for a month. I've had you caged and collared and plugged and on your knees in front of strangers and you've done everything I've put in front of you, and you've done it beautifully, and I'm not going to pretend I don't know what I've got." The ice moved in the glass. "But I'm not going to take the last of it from a woman who hasn't decided to give it. So. A few weeks. You think. You contemplate. You live your life. And then you come to me on Sunday and you do what you're told, and after that we'll see what you've decided."

"And if I decide to stop."

"Then you stop."

She sat with that. It was the most frightening thing he had ever said to her, and she could not have explained to anyone why, and she did not try.

"Sunday's still Sunday," she said.

"Sunday's still Sunday."

"Okay."

"Okay," he said, and hung up without saying goodbye, which was also his way.

---

She sat with the phone in her hand for a while. The office hummed. The elevator opened and closed. The light coming through the west windows had gone the color of weak tea and the desk lamp had taken over the work of the room, throwing her shadow up the wall behind the monitor, and in the shadow the shape of her was a woman's shape — the hair, the shoulders, the small waist, the hips — and she watched it the way she'd watched the reflection, without any particular feeling, the way you watch a thing that is simply true.

The cursor was still blinking.

She thought about the desk. She thought about Carol in HR and the birthday cupcake and the way Carol had looked at her Monday, the flicker, the recovery, the careful kindness after. She thought about Priya's turkey sandwich. She thought about Gerald's five hundred dollars in her bag, which was in the drawer, which she had not spent, which she could not look at without her clit going wet against the plug. She thought about the divorce papers in the briefcase under the desk, signed, and the house on a street in a town where nobody knew anything, and the closet in that house with the black dress in the garment bag hanging in it, and the other side of the closet where the suits used to hang before David burned them, and the empty rod.

She thought about the room at the Marlowe, which she had paid for through Sunday and which she would have to decide about by Sunday, and the rack of clothes in it, and the platinum wig on its stand, and the makeup laid out on the dresser in the order she used it.

She thought about Sunday at eight, and the mirrored ceiling, and four men whose names she did not know yet, and Marguerite's hands on her, and the black dress in its bag.

Then she put her hands back on the desk, and the edge pressed its hard line into her palms, and she clicked submit.

The screen went white for a moment and then a green bar came up across the top and a small box in the middle said Your resignation has been submitted. A confirmation has been sent to your manager and to Human Resources. Below it, a button that said Return to Home. She did not press it. She sat looking at the green bar and the small box, and the cursor was gone from the end of the last line, and the document was gone, and in its place was a screen that had already begun the work of forgetting her.

The office was very quiet. The HVAC hummed its one note. Down the hall the elevator opened on nobody and closed again, and the sound of it went down through the floor and away, and she sat in the chair in the pearl blouse and the slick black pants with her palms flat on the cool mahogany and her reflection hanging in the dark glass in front of her, hair glowing under the lamp, lips wet, and she did not move.