The phone buzzed against the mahogany, face-up, and the screen lit the underside of her chin green.

She had left it face-up. That was the first mistake, if she wanted to call it one. The office was empty this late — the fourteenth floor had gone dark pod by pod, Dana's desk lamp off, the accounting suite behind its glass wall a black aquarium — and she had left the phone where she could see it, which meant she had left it where she could see it light.

She did not look. She kept her palms flat on the desk, the edge pressing its hard line into the heels of her hands, and she read the confirmation bar one more time. Your resignation has been submitted. The green was the only other light in the room besides the lamp.

The phone buzzed again.

She looked.

Not David. Not Matt. The icon was the site — the one with the black background and the red script, the one she had made her profile on a month ago and then almost forgotten, because a profile is a thing you make and then a thing that sits there working without you. She had not opened it in weeks. She had assumed it was dead, or that she was.

One new message. From a member whose handle was a single word, no numbers, no flourishes: Cole.

She unlocked it with her thumb. The preview had been cut off at the lock screen; the full message opened under her eyes in the site's plain font.

Is the blonde in the red wig available tonight. Room 406. I can be there in two hours.

She read it twice.

The first read was just the words. The second read was the words landing, one at a time, in the place under her sternum where things landed. The red wig. He knew the red wig. He had seen the photographs she had posted — the ones on the staircase at the Marlowe, the ones with the red hair down over one eye and the black latex and the six-inch heels, the ones she had chosen because the red made her look like someone who did not work at Sable & Co. and did not have a briefcase under a desk with signed divorce papers in it.

He had seen them and he had decided he wanted the woman in them, tonight, in two hours, in a room she had rented by the week and paid for with a card that still had her husband's name on it.

Her clit was wet against the plug.

She felt it the way she felt it now — not an event, a weather. The plug had been in her since the morning, seated deep and heavy, and the small soft thing between her legs had been leaking against it all day, and now the leak turned to a slick, hot smear at the base of it, and her thighs shifted once on the chair, and the leather of the seat creaked, and the sound was very loud in the quiet.

She put her thumb over the reply box.

The HVAC hummed its one note. Down the hall, past the glass wall, past the empty pods, the elevator opened on nobody and closed again, and the sound of it went down through the floor and away, the way it had gone when she submitted the resignation, the way it would go every night from now on, because she had two weeks left and then she would never hear it again.

Two weeks. She had asked David for a few weeks and he had given them to her, and she had told him, on her knees in his room, that she wanted to quit her male job, and he had said the most frightening thing he had ever said to her, which was that if she decided to stop, she stopped. He would not take the last of her from a woman who had not decided to give it. And she had sat with that for a day, and then she had walked into the office in the pearl blouse and the slick black pants and she had typed her name at the bottom of the form and clicked submit, and now there was a man named Cole asking for the blonde in the red wig, and the two things were the same thing, and she knew it, and she did not say it to herself in words.

Her thumb was still over the box.

She thought about the drive. The Marlowe was on Ninth, forty minutes from the office if the tunnel behaved, and she kept a rack of clothes in 406 and a makeup case and a platinum wig and a black latex catsuit, and she would need to shower and shave and start over from the skin, and two hours was enough if she left now, and it was not enough if she sat here.

She thought about the money. She had not thought about the money yet. Gerald had put five hundred in her hand and she had felt the bills and had not counted them until later, in the room, alone, and the counting had done something to her that the fucking had not quite done. Five hundred dollars for an hour of her ass. There were men who paid that. There were men who would pay more, if the woman was worth more, and she had spent a month being told, by a man who did not lie to her, exactly what she was worth.

She typed Yes and sent it.

The message went out and the screen did the small thing it did, the little grey bubble, and then the confirmation, and then nothing, and she sat with her palms flat on the cool wood and the night suddenly real and only hours away, a thing with a shape, a thing that would happen to her body.

The phone buzzed almost at once.

How much.

She looked at the two words for a while.

There was a number she could put that would make him go away. There was a number she could put that would make him come. She did not know which one she wanted, and she understood, sitting there with the lamp making sharp shadows out of the pen cup and the stapler and the little framed thing Priya had given her at Christmas, that not knowing was the same as knowing, and that her hand had already decided, because her hand was already moving.

She typed 2000.

She looked at it. Four digits. More than Gerald. More than the room cost for the week. A number that said: this is not a favor, this is a rate, and the woman in the red wig is not a woman you find, she is a woman you pay for.

She sent it.

Then she sat very still and listened to her own heart, which she was not supposed to route anything through, and which was going anyway, and she put her hand flat on the desk and pressed until the edge bit, and the bite was good, and she did not move.

The reply came in under a minute.

Done. Two hours. 406. I'll knock twice.

She did not reply. There was nothing to reply. She closed the app and set the phone down face-up, and the screen dimmed, and the green of the confirmation bar was still there underneath, and the room was the room again, the leather and the dry paper and the one hum.

She opened her messages. David's thread was at the top, where it always was, the last bubble his, from this afternoon: If you decide to stop, you stop. She had not answered it. She had not needed to. He had said it and she had carried it, the way she carried the collar under her collar and the plug in her ass, a thing worn and not spoken of.

She typed: I quit the job. I need a few weeks to figure it out. I'll come to you when I do.

She read it back once. It was true. Every word of it was true. It did not say anything about the app, or the ad, or the man named Cole, or the two thousand dollars, and a thing can be true and still be a door with a room behind it that you have not opened for the person standing in the hall.

She sent it.

His answer came fast, which was not like him, and she understood when she read it that he had been waiting, the way he waited, with the patience of a man who had already decided the ending and was only watching her walk toward it.

Good girl. Take your weeks. You know where I am.

That was all. No question. No what will you do with them. He had given her the weeks and he had not asked what she would fill them with, and she sat with the phone in her hand and felt, for the first time in a month, the shape of a thing that was hers and not his, and it was small and it was hers and it was already spent.

She stood. The plug shifted with the movement and she made a sound she did not plan to make, low, in the back of her throat, and she put her hand on the desk to steady herself and stood still until the sound had passed.

Then she gathered the briefcase — the divorce papers in it, signed, under the flap, where they had been for days — and she turned off the banker's lamp, and the room went dark except for the phone, and she picked up the phone, and she walked out past the empty pods and the black glass wall and the elevator that opened on nobody, and she went down.

The parking garage smelled of cold concrete and exhaust. Her heels — the slick black pants and the heels David had laid out, the ones that made her walk differently, hips first — clicked across the ramp and she heard the clicks and did not shorten her stride. The car was where she had left it. She got in and put the briefcase on the passenger seat and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel and the engine off and the garage light coming in grey through the windshield.

Two thousand dollars. She had never been paid two thousand dollars for anything except a quarter of accounting work she did not want to do anymore.

She started the car.

The drive took thirty-eight minutes. She knew because she watched the clock on the dash the whole way, the way she watched clocks now, the way she had learned to count the time between one thing and the next. The tunnel was clear. The city came up out of it grey and wet and lit, and she took Ninth and parked in the garage on the corner two blocks from the Marlowe, and she sat in the car in the dark with the engine off and her hands in her lap.

She had told David she needed weeks to figure it out.

She got out of the car.

The Marlowe's lobby was small and gold and mostly empty at this hour — a man behind the desk who did not look up, a couple waiting by the elevator with their coats over their arms. She crossed to the elevator and pressed four and stood with her back to the lobby and her briefcase in her hand, and the doors closed on the gold and the couple and the man who did not look up, and she was alone in the mirrored box, and she looked at herself in the mirror: the pearl blouse, the slick black pants, the heels, the face David had been making for a month. The lips were wet. The liner was still sharp. She looked like a woman who had just quit her job and was going to a hotel room, which was exactly what she was.

Room 406.

She let herself in and locked the door and stood in the dark and did not turn on the light for a moment. The room smelled of the last time — latex and the faint sweet of the wigs and something underneath it that was her. She set the briefcase on the chair and turned on the bathroom light and left the door open so the light fell across the bed, and she began.

Shower first. Hot, as hot as she could take it, and she stood under it and shaved everything again, the legs and the chest and the arms and the small soft thing between her legs that had been leaking all day and was leaking now under the water, and she did not touch it beyond the razor, and the not-touching was its own kind of touch. She dried herself with the rough hotel towel and stood in front of the mirror with the steam clearing and looked at the body she had been given and the body she had made, and she reached for the case.

The breast plate first. C cup, the silicone warm from the room, the nipples already standing, and she settled it against her chest and felt the weight of it and the way it changed her line in the mirror, and then the sheer thigh-highs, black, rolled up each leg and smoothed, and then the panties — a black tanga, thin at the back, and she worked it up over the plug and felt the strap settle against the base of it and had to stop and breathe. Then the wig. Not the platinum. The red, the one Cole had asked for, the one with the long fall over one eye, and she settled it on and pinned it and brushed it out, and then the makeup: the black liner, the smoky shadow, the penciled brows, the blushed cheekbones, the glossy wet lips, the false lashes, one inch, extra thick, the press-on French nails in the color of the gloss.

She looked at herself in the mirror when it was done. The blonde in the red wig. The woman in the photographs. She was not Warren. Warren was a briefcase on a chair and a resignation in a system and a name at the bottom of a form. This was the woman who charged two thousand dollars, and she was standing in a hotel bathroom with a plug in her ass and her clit wet against it, and she was going to be fucked in an hour, and there was no part of her that was going to stop it.

She pulled the black dress out of the rack — not the latex catsuit, not tonight, tonight she wanted the dress, the short one, the one that showed the thigh-highs to the top — and she stepped into it and zipped it and put on the heels, the six-inch mules, and she stood in the middle of the room and waited.

He knocked twice, at the time he had said.

She opened the door.

Cole was not what she had built in her head. He was younger than David — thirties, she thought, hard to say — and broader, and he wore a good coat and no tie and he looked at her the way men had been looking at her all month, which was the way a man looks at a thing he has paid for and has not yet touched. He looked at her face and then her chest and then her legs, and he did not say anything for a moment, and then he said, "You're better than the pictures."

"Come in," she said.

He came in and closed the door and stood in the middle of the room and looked around — the rack, the case, the briefcase on the chair, the bed — and he took an envelope out of his coat and set it on the nightstand without counting it, and she understood that he had counted it before he came, and that the counting was part of it for him, and that he was not going to make her ask.

"Two thousand," he said. "It's there. You can count it after."

"I will," she said. Her voice had gone where it went, low and breathy, the purr, the one that came out of her when a man was in the room and she had stopped being the one who decided things.

"Good girl," he said. "You'll count it after. On your knees, if you want."

He took off his coat and laid it over the back of the chair, over the briefcase, and the coat covered the papers, and she watched it cover them and felt nothing about it, and then he crossed the room and put his hand on the back of her neck.

His hand was big and warm and it closed on her neck the way David's did, and she went still under it, and he turned her head and looked at her face close, at the liner and the lashes and the wet lips, and he said, "Show me."

She did not ask what. She knew what. She reached behind her and pulled the zipper down and let the dress fall off her shoulders and step out of it, and she stood in the heels and the thigh-highs and the black tanga and the breast plate with the nipples standing, and she turned for him, slowly, the way she had been taught, and the plug moved in her and she let him see the small sound it made in her throat.

"Jesus," he said. He reached out and put his hand flat on her stomach and slid it down over the tanga and pressed, and his fingers found the base of the plug through the thin fabric and pushed it, and she made the sound again, and he felt the wet through the fabric and pushed harder and said, "You're already wet."

"Yes."

"Say it right."

"Yes, sir. I'm already wet."

"For what."

"For you."

"Turn around."

She turned and bent over the bed, the way she had bent for David and for Matt and for Gerald, and she put her hands on the coverlet and spread her legs and looked back at him over her shoulder, the red hair falling over one eye, and she watched him open his belt.

"Look at you," he said. "Two thousand dollars and you're standing there with your ass up before I've touched you."

"Yes, sir."

"You'd have done it for free."

"No, sir."

"You'd have done it for free," he said again, quieter, "and we both know it, and that's why you charged."

She did not answer that. She put her forehead down on the coverlet and kept her hips up, and she heard him step out of his shoes.

He pulled the tanga down her thighs and left it at her knees. He put two fingers on the base of the plug and worked it out of her, slow, and the size of it coming out made her grip the coverlet, and then he set it aside and put his fingers in her where the plug had been, two of them, and she was so wet they went in without resistance, and he moved them in her and curled them and found the place, and she pushed back onto his hand and heard herself make a sound that was not a word.

"How long has that been in you," he said.

"All day."

"All day." He said it flat, like a man reading a receipt. "At work?"

"At work."

"Doing what."

"Accounting."

He laughed, low, and curled his fingers again, and she bit the coverlet. "Accounting," he said. "You sat at a desk all day with this in you, doing accounting."

"Yes, sir."

"And what were you thinking about."

"This."

"Say it."

"Being fucked."

"By who."

"By whoever paid."

He pulled his fingers out and she heard him open his pants and then felt the head of his cock against her, blunt and hot, sliding up and down the wet of her, and she held the coverlet and waited and did not beg, not yet, and he made her wait, and the waiting was the thing she had been leaking for all day.

"You want it," he said. Not a question.

"Yes, sir."

"Ask."

"Please."

"Please what."

"Please fuck me."

"That's not asking. That's a girl who thinks she's getting it anyway." He slid the head of it along her again, slow, and her hips followed it back. "Try again."

"Please fuck me, sir." Her voice had gone thin and she let it. "I've had it in me all day and I've been wet all day and I need you to put it in me. Please."

Then he pushed into her.

She had been opened all day by the plug and it did not hurt, it filled, and she felt every inch of him go in and the stretch of it and the heat of it, and she put her forehead down on the bed and made a long sound into the coverlet, and he held her hips and did not move for a moment, letting her feel it, letting her feel how deep he was.

"There," he said. "There she is."

"Oh," she said. "Oh, God."

"There's no God in this room." He pulled back an inch and pushed in again, slow, seating himself. "There's just me and what you're worth."

Then he fucked her.

He was not slow. He had paid and he had waited in the lobby and he was not slow, and she took it with her hands fisted in the coverlet and her heels slipping on the carpet, and the room filled with the sound of it, the slap of his hips against her, the wet of her, and she heard herself moaning on every stroke, the same sound over and over, and she did not try to stop it. His hand came down flat on her ass, hard, once, and she cried out, and he did it again, and the sting of it went straight to her clit and she felt the small soft thing between her legs leaking against nothing, dripping onto the coverlet, and she ground back onto him to get more of it.

"You like that," he said.

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I like it."

"You like being spanked like a girl who's been bad."

"Yes, sir. I like it."

"You've been bad."

"Yes, sir."

"Tell me what you did."

"I—" He hit her again and the sentence came apart. "I lied to a man who loves me. I told him I needed weeks and I came here instead."

"And what are you doing here."

"I'm being fucked for money."

"Say the word."

"I'm whoring."

"Good girl," he said, and drove in harder, and she heard the word land in her chest and stay there.

He pulled out of her and turned her over, onto her back, and pushed back in, and now he could see her face, and she looked up at him with the red hair spread out on the coverlet and the wet lips open and the lashes down, and he looked at her face while he fucked her, which was worse, which was better, and she put her hands on his chest and felt the weight of him come down and she wrapped her legs around his back and the heels crossed behind him and she took him deeper.

"What's your name," he said.

"Willow."

"Willow." He said it like he was tasting it. "You're a fucking whore, Willow."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I'm a whore."

"You're a whore who charges two thousand dollars."

"Yes."

"And you're worth it," he said. "You know how I know? Because I'd have paid four."

He fucked her harder and she said it again, and again, because he wanted it and because saying it was true and because the true thing and the wet thing were the same thing, and she felt him get bigger inside her and she knew he was close, and she was close too, the way she got close now, from the inside, from being filled and being called it and being looked at, and she put her hand up and gripped the back of his neck and pulled his face down to hers.

"Come in me," she said.

"Ask me nice."

"Please come in me, sir. Please. I want to feel it."

"You want to feel what you're paid for."

"Yes, sir. Please."

He did.

He drove into her three more times and then he was coming, and she felt it, the pulse of it inside her, hot, and he groaned into her neck and held her hips down and emptied into her, and she held him there with her legs and her hand on her neck and she came too, the full-body thing, the clench of it rolling up through her from where he was buried, and she heard her own voice go high and break, and then she was shaking under him and he was still coming and neither of them moved.

Then he pulled out.

She felt the wet of him follow, leaking out of her onto the coverlet, and she lay with her legs open and did not close them, and he stood over her and looked at what he had done to her, and he was breathing hard, and he reached down and put two fingers in her and pushed his own come back up into her, deep, and she gasped and her hips lifted off the bed.

"Don't waste it," he said. "You earned it."

"Hold it," he said.

"I—"

"Hold it in you."

She held it. She lay there with her legs open and her body doing what he had told it to do, and he watched her do it, and then he went to the bathroom and she heard the water run, and he came back with a towel and wiped himself and dropped the towel on the chair, and he put on his coat over the briefcase and he took his phone out and looked at the time.

"Same time next week," he said.

She did not answer.

He looked at her, still open on the bed, and he smiled at her, a small, satisfied thing, and he said, "You'll answer when I message," and it was not a question, and then he let himself out, and the door clicked, and she was alone.

She lay there for a long time. The come was cooling in her and starting to leak, and the plug was on the nightstand where he had set it, and the envelope was on the nightstand too, and the briefcase was under his coat on the chair, and the red wig was coming loose from its pins, and she could feel the makeup gone soft at the edges of her mouth.

She got up.

She went to the nightstand and picked up the envelope and opened it and counted the bills — twenty hundreds, new, in order — and she counted them twice, and then she set them down and picked up the plug and went to the bathroom and washed it in the sink and came back and lay down on her side and worked it back into herself, slow, the size of it, the fullness of it, and then she lay still with it seated deep and his come around it and her hand flat on the coverlet.

On the phone, face-down on the nightstand, there was a message she had not read yet.

The message sat there, face-down, and she let it sit while she got up and went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. The wig had slipped back an inch. The gloss was gone from the center of her lower lip, eaten away, leaving the liner intact around a pale seam. One lash had come loose at the outer corner and hung there like a small dark insect, and she pressed it back down with the pad of her thumb and held it until it stuck.

She came back to the bed and turned the phone over.

Cole: Same time next week. Don't wash it out.

She read it twice and set the phone down again, screen-up, and lay back on the coverlet with the plug seated and his come still pooled in her, and she looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was the ceiling of a room she rented by the week. There was a water stain in the corner shaped like nothing.

She did not answer him. She was not sure why she did not answer him, except that answering would have made the message a conversation, and she did not want a conversation. She wanted the two thousand dollars on the nightstand and the wet between her legs and the dark, and she had all three.

Her hand went down to her stomach. It went there the way it went there now — without a decision, the way you reach for a light switch in your own house. Her fingers slid under the edge of the tanga at her hip and down, over the smooth place where the hair used to be, and found the small soft thing at the base of the plug.

It was slick. It was always slick. She touched it with two fingers, light, and the touch went up through her like a struck wire, and her hips came off the bed an inch and her breath went out of her in a short sound.

She had been told what it was. She had been told it a month ago in a hotel room with the cage thrown out the window, and she had believed it then and she believed it now, and believing it had not made it stop working. It was small and soft and it would never stand up again, and it was the most sensitive thing on her body, and it leaked, and it had been leaking all day, and now she had a man's come inside her and two thousand dollars on the nightstand and nobody in the room to tell her no.

She started slow.

Two fingers, the same two, circling the tip the way you would circle a nipple, and the wet made it easy, and the wet was not only hers — some of it was Cole's, leaking back down out of her, and she gathered it on her fingers and used it, and the smell of him came up off her hand and she turned her face into the pillow and breathed it in.

Her heels were still on. She noticed that after a while. She had not taken them off and now she was lying on the coverlet in six-inch mules and a red wig and a black tanga pulled to one side, and the heels had dug two points into the mattress and she liked the way it felt, the way they made her legs longer even lying down, so she left them on.

The first ten minutes were good.

She built it the way she built it now — from the inside, from being filled, from the plug moving when her hips moved, and she worked the tip of the clit with her fingers and pushed the plug with her other hand and felt the two of them meet somewhere deep in her, and she got close, she got so close, the clench started up in her and her toes curled in the mules and she heard herself start to say something into the pillow, and then it slid away.

It slid away the way it always slid away when she was alone.

She stopped and breathed and started again.

Minute twelve. She turned onto her side and put one leg over the other and squeezed her thighs together and worked the clit with three fingers now, faster, and she thought about Cole's hand on the back of her neck and the way he had said there she is, and she thought about David's voice saying good girl, and she thought about the four men on Sunday and the mirrored ceiling and being passed like a decanter, and the clench came up again and got higher this time and her mouth opened and nothing came out of it, and then it fell off the edge and was gone.

"Come on," she said, out loud, to the empty room. It was the first thing she had said since he left.

Minute fifteen. She sat up against the headboard and spread her legs and used her whole hand, the heel of her palm grinding on the clit and two fingers in her cunt alongside the plug, and the sound of it was wet and loud in the quiet room, and she watched herself in the dark window across the room — the reflection of a woman in a red wig with her legs open and her hand between them, working, and she looked at the reflection and the reflection looked like a woman in a film, and that got her close again, and she chased it, and it went.

She made a sound of frustration that was almost a laugh. Her wrist ached. The lashes were both loose now and the liner had smeared at the corners of her eyes and she did not care.

Minute twenty. She got up and went to the case and got the small vibrator — the pink one, the one she had bought at a drugstore in the Village before she had ever met a man as Willow, back when this was a thing she did to herself in the dark and told no one — and she lay back down and put it on the clit and turned it up, and the buzz filled the room, and she held it there and pushed the plug with her other hand and the clench came up fast this time, fast and hard, and she arched and held it and held it and held it —

And it broke apart in her hands.

She lay there with the vibrator buzzing against her thigh and her chest going and her clit throbbing, throbbing, the little soft thing pulsing against the air like a second heartbeat, and she was not coming and she was not going to come, and she knew it now the way you know weather.

She turned the vibrator off and dropped it on the nightstand next to the envelope.

Minute twenty-five. She tried once more, on her knees on the bed with her face down and two fingers in her cunt and her thumb on the clit and the plug worked in and out in short strokes, and she said David's name into the coverlet, and she said please, and there was no one to hear the please and no one to grant it, and the please did nothing, and she gave up at twenty-eight minutes with her whole body hot and her clit swollen and aching and her hand cramped and her thighs wet to the knee.

She lay on her back and stared at the water stain.

She was hotter than she had been when Cole left. That was the thing. Thirty minutes of her own hand had not emptied her; it had filled her. The ache was worse. The clit was worse. Every place on her body that could want something wanted it, and the plug was in her and the come was in her and the money was on the nightstand and none of it was the thing she needed, and the thing she needed was a man's cock in her mouth, and there was no man in the room.

She understood, lying there, that she had not come in a month without David's cock in her or David's voice in her ear, and that she had just spent half an hour proving it to herself in a hotel room with nobody watching.

She got up and went to the bathroom and pulled the plug out and sat on the toilet and let Cole's come run out of her, and it ran out of her in a slow string and she watched it hit the water and did not feel anything about it, and then she washed the plug and washed herself and dried off and came back and put the plug back in, because the plug was hers and it stayed in, and she took off the mules and the tanga and the wig and the breast plate, and she hung the wig on the stand and laid the breast plate on the case, and she got into the bed under the coverlet with the makeup still on her face because she was too tired to take it off.

She reached for the phone.

She did not text David. She did not text Matt. She looked at Cole's message — Same time next week. Don't wash it out. — and she set the phone face-down on the nightstand and put her hand flat on top of it, the way she put her hand flat on the desk, and she closed her eyes.

The room was quiet. Somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed. The city did its one long note through the window.

She slept.

She woke because her clit was wet.

That was the first thing — before her eyes were open, before she knew the room, the wet and the throb, and her hips moving once against the sheet without her asking them to. She was on her stomach with one knee drawn up and the plug heavy in her, and her body had been working on its own while she slept, and she came awake into the middle of a dream she could not catch, only the tail of it, a hand on the back of her neck and a voice saying something she could not hear.

The light through the gap in the curtain was grey and low. Morning, or close to it. She lay still and let the throb settle and looked at the nightstand.

The envelope was there. The vibrator was there. The phone was face-up, and the screen was lit, and there were five of them.

She reached for it.

Five new messages on the site. Five separate men, or five separate handles, and she read them with her cheek still creased from the pillow and her makeup gone to ruin.

The first: saw your pics. free tonight?

The second: the red wig. how much for an hour.

The third was longer. I'm in the city through Friday. I don't do this usually. Your profile is different. Are you real?

The fourth: 2000 if you'll do what the last one did. I saw you were busy last night. I can wait.

She stopped on that one. I saw you were busy last night. He had seen. Somewhere on the site there was a thing that showed when a woman was booked, or he had messaged while Cole was in her and seen the silence, or he had simply guessed — and it did not matter which, because the effect was the same: he had watched her working and he wanted in.

The fifth was one line. Name your price, blondie.

She lay on her back with the phone above her face and read all five again, and her clit throbbed against the plug, and her mouth was dry, and she could taste the old gloss at the corner of her lip.

Five men. In one night, while she slept in a hotel bed with another man's come dried on her thighs. Five men who had looked at her photographs and decided they wanted the woman in them, and who had written to her before she was even awake to say so.

She sat up against the headboard. The coverlet fell off her chest and the breast plate was on the case across the room and she was flat-chested and bare and still the woman in the photographs, and she put her thumb in the reply box and typed.

She answered the fourth first, because he had been polite and because he had seen.

Two thousand. Tonight. Room 406, the Marlowe. Tell me what time and I'll tell you if I'm free.

Then she copied it, and pasted it, and sent the same words to the third, and the fifth, and the first. She did not send it to the second, because the second had asked how much for an hour and had not said please and had not said her name, and she was not, this morning, in the mood to be haggled with.

Four messages out. She set the phone on the coverlet and got up and went to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror: the liner smeared to the temples, the lashes hanging, the lips bare and pale, the red wig on its stand behind her in the reflection like a woman waiting her turn. She looked like what she was. She looked like a woman who had been fucked for money and had spent the rest of the night trying and failing to do it to herself and had woken up to four more men asking for the same.

She turned on the water and washed her face and started over from the skin, because the day had a shape now and the shape had a face on it.

The phone buzzed on the coverlet while she was doing her liner.

Then again.

She did not look until the liner was sharp on both eyes and the gloss was fresh and the lashes were on and the brows were penciled, and then she went back into the room with the towel around her and picked up the phone and read.

The fourth: Done. Eight o'clock. I'll knock twice.

The third: You're real. Eight-thirty.

The fifth: 2000 it is. Nine.

The first: can't tonight. tomorrow?

She read them standing in the middle of the room with the towel around her and the plug in her and the wet starting up again between her legs, and she did the arithmetic the way she did arithmetic: two thousand, two thousand, two thousand, and a maybe for tomorrow, and the room cost her three hundred a week, and the rent on the house she no longer lived in came out of an account with her husband's name on it, and she stood there and did the math and it came out to a number that would have made Warren Sable, accountant, put down his pen.

She typed the same reply to all three.

Eight. Eight-thirty. Nine. Don't be early and don't be late.

Then she put the phone down and went to the rack and looked at what was hanging there, and she pulled the black dress off the hanger and laid it on the bed, and then she sat down on the edge of the bed beside it with the towel around her and her heels on the floor and her hands in her lap, and she looked at the phone on the nightstand and the envelope beside it and the black dress on the coverlet, and the room was quiet and the morning was grey and she was already wet and she had three men coming tonight and a fourth tomorrow and two thousand dollars in an envelope and no idea, none, what she was going to do about any of it.

She reached for the phone and opened David's thread and looked at his last message — Good girl. Take your weeks. You know where I am. — and she did not type anything, and she did not close it either. She just held it there, the thread open, the cursor blinking in the empty box, the morning light coming grey through the gap in the curtain and lying across the black dress on the bed.

The phone went dark in her hand and she let it. She laid it on the nightstand beside the envelope, screen-down this time, and she sat on the edge of the bed with the towel still around her and the morning coming grey through the gap in the curtain, and she looked at the black dress lying across the coverlet and did not put it on.

Not yet. Not for eight hours.

She stood and went to the bathroom and turned the shower on and stood under it with the water as hot as the pipes would give and let it run down the back of her neck and over the breast plate line, and she peeled the breast plate off first and set it on the sink ledge, and then she stood under the water and washed the night off her — the dried come on her thighs, the smeared liner, the old gloss — and she washed her face twice with the hotel soap and it stung at the corners of her eyes and she did not mind.

When she got out she did not reach for the case.

She dried off and stood in front of the mirror with the steam clearing and looked at what was there: the flat chest, the smooth arms, the small soft thing between her legs that had been leaking all night and was leaking now, the narrow shoulders, the long pale neck. Warren's neck. Warren's shoulders. Warren's body, which was Willow's body, which was the same body and always had been, and she had spent a month learning that the difference between them was not the body at all.

She went into the room and opened the closet door.

Behind the rack of dresses and the catsuit and the boots there was a duffel at the bottom, the one she had packed a lifetime ago, the one with the male clothes in it — the clothes she had worn to the office before David burned the suits, the clothes she had worn on the drive down, the clothes that still smelled faintly of the house. She pulled it out and set it on the bed and unzipped it.

Jeans. Not the trousers. The skinny stretch jeans, the ones she had bought on a Tuesday afternoon at a store on Broadway and told herself she was buying because they were on sale, the ones that hugged the ass and the thighs and made the legs look longer than they were, and she had never worn them to the office because they were too much, and she had worn them on a Saturday once with a t-shirt and no one had looked at her twice.

A white t-shirt. Cotton, thin, the kind that showed the shape of the chest if the chest had a shape to show. Hers did not, not now, not without the plate.

Sneakers. Low, white, scuffed at the toe from a walk she had taken in the fall.

She laid them out on the bed next to the black dress and stood looking at the two of them — the dress for tonight, the jeans for now — and the arithmetic of it was simple and she did it without words. The dress was Willow. The jeans were not Willow. The jeans were the thing between, the thing she had never had a name for, the thing that walked down Christopher Street on a Saturday with a t-shirt and sneakers and a face that was neither one nor the other and was, she was beginning to understand, the truest thing she had.

She put the breast plate back in the case. She put the wig on its stand. She took the plug out and washed it and set it on the nightstand and did not put it back in, because the jeans were tight and the jeans were for walking, and because she wanted to feel the empty for a while.

Then she dressed.

The panties first — plain black, the ones that would not show through the denim. Then the jeans, and they were as tight as she remembered and she had to work them up over her hips and the waistband sat low and the denim stretched across the ass and she turned in front of the mirror and looked at the shape of it and felt the small hot thing between her legs answer to the pressure of the seam. Then the t-shirt, white, and it hung loose at the waist and pulled across the shoulders and she tucked the front just slightly and left the back out. Then the sneakers, no socks, and she laced them and stood up and looked at herself.

She looked like a woman in men's clothes. She looked like a man in a woman's body. She looked like neither and both, and the face in the mirror was bare — no liner, no gloss, no lashes, no brows — just the pale face and the soft brown eyes and the mouth that was a little too full for a man and a little too thin for the woman in the photographs, and she stood there and looked at it for a long time and did not reach for the case.

She put the phone in her back pocket and the room key in the front and she took the envelope off the nightstand and folded it and put it in the inside pocket of the t-shirt's chest, flat against the sternum, and she looked at the room once — the dress on the bed, the case, the rack, the water stain in the corner — and she let herself out and locked the door behind her.

The elevator was empty and the lobby was different in the morning. The man behind the desk was a different man, younger, and he looked up and looked at her and looked at the jeans and the t-shirt and the bare face, and he did not know what he was looking at, and she watched him not know, and she crossed the gold floor and went out through the door and onto the street.

Ninth Avenue at eight in the morning was a river of people going the wrong way.

She turned uptown and walked. The air was cool and damp and smelled of the subway grates and the pretzel cart on the corner and the wet from the night before drying off the sidewalk in patches. A woman in a puffer coat went past her with a coffee and did not look. A man in a suit went past her with his phone up to his ear and did not look. A kid on a scooter went past her and looked, and looked again, and then was gone.

She walked and she felt the jeans on her thighs and the seam against the small soft thing and the t-shirt loose at her waist and the envelope flat against her chest, and she thought about the four messages she had sent and the three men who would come tonight and the one who would come tomorrow, and she thought about the black dress on the bed in 406 and the four men on Sunday and the mirrored ceiling, and she thought about the number in her bank account that was not her bank account, and she thought about the resignation in the system and the two weeks and the desk with her palms flat on it, and none of it felt like a plan.

It felt like weather.

She crossed at the light and turned west onto Christopher and the street narrowed and the buildings got lower and older and the trees came up out of the sidewalk in little iron cages, and there were men holding hands and women holding hands and a man walking a small dog and a couple on a stoop with coffee, and nobody looked at her twice, and the not-looking was a different thing than the not-looking on Ninth. On Ninth she had been invisible. Here she was unremarkable. Here the thing she was did not need a name because the street had seen every version of it and had stopped being surprised a long time ago.

She walked past the bar with the angled door.

She slowed without deciding to. The bar was closed and the door was shut and the window was dark and the neon was off, and she stood on the sidewalk across from it with her hands in the front pockets of the jeans and looked at the door, and the door was the door Matt had turned her toward with his hand on the small of her back, and she had gone through it in a black catsuit and a red wig and six-inch heels and she had come out of it the next morning in the same clothes with a plug in her ass and his come dried on her thighs, and now she was standing across the street in jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers with no makeup on and no wig and no plate, and the door was just a door.

She thought about Matt. She thought about the way he had looked at her at the soup place across the table with the four photographs in his hand and the way he had said Jesus, you're real, and the way he had said see you at the office tomorrow, darling, and the way he had not, in fact, seen her at the office tomorrow, because she had quit the job before he got the chance, and she stood on Christopher Street in the morning and understood that she had walked out on the one man in the whole month who had wanted her without owning her, and that she had done it not because she did not want him but because she could not hold two things at once, and that the not-holding was the thing she was best at.

She turned and walked on.

Past the corner where she had waited for him. Past the stoop where the couple had coffee. Past a storefront with a rainbow flag in the window and a sign in the door that said open and a woman inside setting out a tray of something. Past a man in a leather jacket walking a dog the size of a loaf of bread. Past a church with its doors open and a sign out front with the week's message in black letters, and she read the sign without stopping, the way you read signs, and it said something about being known, and she did not take it in, and she walked on.

She walked for an hour.

She walked without a destination, which was a thing she had not done in a year, and she walked past the coffee shops and the bookstores and the little restaurants with their chairs up on the tables, and she walked past the men and the women and the ones who were neither and the ones who were both, and she looked at them and they looked at her and nobody said anything, and the walking was the point. The walking was the only thing on the whole street that was hers.

She stopped at a diner on the corner and got a coffee and sat at the counter with the cup in both hands and looked out the window at the street and drank it black, and the man behind the counter was old and did not care about anything and she liked that about him. She sat there for twenty minutes and watched the street and thought about the number two thousand and the three men and the dress on the bed, and she thought about the thing she was and the thing she was becoming, and she could not find the line between them.

She paid for the coffee and left a dollar on the counter and went back out.

The sun was up now and the street was brighter and the wet had dried and the day had a shape. She walked back the way she had come, past the church and the bookstore and the bar with the angled door, and she did not slow this time, and she turned up Ninth and walked the two blocks to the Marlowe and went in through the gold lobby past the different man behind the desk and up the elevator and down the hall and let herself into 406.

The dress was on the bed where she had left it. The case was open. The envelope was still flat against her chest. She locked the door and stood in the middle of the room with her back to the bed and her face to the window and the morning light coming in grey and thin, and she stood there for a while with her hands at her sides and did not reach for anything.

Then she went to the rack and pulled the black dress off the coverlet and hung it back up, and she went to the case and took out the breast plate and laid it on the bed, and she went to the stand and took the red wig down and set it on the bed beside the plate, and she went to the nightstand and picked up the plug and set it on the bed too, and she looked at the four things laid out in a row — the plate, the wig, the plug, the dress — and they were the whole of what she was going to be tonight, and she stood over them and looked at them and understood, finally, in the flat morning light of a hotel room on Ninth Avenue, that she was not going to stop.

She was not going to stop, and she had known it when she typed two thousand into the box, and she had known it when she sent the four messages, and she had known it when she put on the jeans and walked out onto Christopher Street and stood across from the bar and looked at the door. The jeans had been a test and she had failed it and the failing had felt like nothing, which was the worst part, because a thing that feels like nothing is a thing you have already decided.

She sat down on the edge of the bed with the four things beside her and the phone in her hand.

She opened David's thread and looked at the cursor blinking in the empty box and she did not type anything, and she did not close it either, and she sat there with the thread open and the morning coming grey through the gap in the curtain and the four things laid out on the coverlet like a sentence she had not finished writing.

Then she set the phone face-down on the nightstand and picked up the plug.

She had eight hours. She was going to use them.