The radiator ticked its slow Morse against the wall, and Willow lay still against David's chest, her breath evening out, the latex of the halter dress stuck to her ribs with cooling sweat. David's hand moved in her hair — slow, methodical, the way he did everything — and for a long while neither of them said anything at all. Outside, a car horn blatted and died. The neon from the street bled red across the ceiling in a slow pulse.

"You want to know what I heard today," David said at last. Not a question.

Willow lifted her head from his chest. Her red wig had slid sideways, and one of her press-on nails — the French tips, the ones she'd glued on that morning in front of the bathroom mirror at the house — had come loose and was stuck somewhere in the sheets. She didn't look for it.

"Tell me."

David reached for his phone on the nightstand. He didn't look at it. He looked at her — that appraising look, dark eyes moving over her face like he was reading a page he'd already memorized.

"I listened to the file at nine-fifteen," he said. "The one I sent you. The one you played in the men's room at the office, second stall, earbuds in, with your panties pulled up under your slacks like a good girl."

Willow's throat moved. She remembered the tile, the smell of the industrial soap, the way the door had swung open and someone had walked in and she'd had to sit perfectly still with his voice in her ears telling her what she was.

"You were in there eleven minutes," David said. "You came out with your face flushed. You walked back to your desk and you sat down and you opened your email and you answered four messages in nine minutes. Efficient. Clean. Nobody looking at you would have known."

"They didn't know."

"No." He smiled, slow. "They didn't know. But they noticed."

Willow sat up. The halter dress pulled tight across the silicone plate of her chest, the C cups straining the white latex, the pencil-eraser nipples pressing two distinct points through the fabric. She folded her legs under her and the heels of her thigh-high boots dragged across the sheet. She didn't reach for the wig. She wanted him to see her like this — smeared, spent, undone.

"What do you mean, they noticed."

"I mean Marcus from the corner desk watched you walk to the copier at ten past ten." David's voice was low and even, each word laid down like a card. "I mean he watched your hips. I mean you didn't walk to that copier, Willow. You swayed to it. Your shoulders back, your steps short, your weight on the balls of your feet like a woman in heels who forgot she wasn't wearing them."

"I don't—"

"You do. I have it on the file. You do it in the elevator. You do it at the coffee machine. You did it in the meeting with the Portland account and Diane spent the whole call watching your hands."

Willow's clit throbbed — that soft, useless, leaking throb, the one that never resolved into anything, the one that just kept going. She pressed her thighs together and felt the slick between them.

"What did I do with my hands," she whispered.

"You turned your pen between your fingers. You touched your collarbone when you were thinking. You crossed your ankles under the table — left over right, toes pointed — and when you laughed at something Diane said you covered your mouth with two fingers." He paused. "No man does that. Not one."

The room was very quiet. The radiator ticked. The curtain breathed where the street air pushed under it.

"I closed the Portland call at three-forty," David went on. "You handled the whole thing. You were sharper than anyone in that room, and you were wearing black lace under your gray suit, and every time you shifted in your chair you felt the gusset drag across your clit and you dripped into your panties and you kept your voice level anyway."

"Yes."

"Say it properly."

Willow's chin came up. Her eyes were wet at the corners — the eyeliner had smeared hours ago and she hadn't fixed it, and she knew what she looked like, and she liked it.

"I dripped into my panties in the meeting and I didn't stop," she said. "I couldn't stop. It just — leaks out of me now. All the time. It's on the inside of my thigh right now."

David's hand found her knee through the latex. He squeezed once, hard, and she made a small sound that she tried to swallow.

"Good girl," he said. "Now tell me what you did at four-fifteen."

"I left."

"You left early."

"I left early."

"Why."

Willow looked at the window. Her reflection hung in the glass — a ghost of blonde and red and white latex, smeared and beautiful and not quite real, the streetlight moving through her like she was made of smoke. She lifted two fingers and pressed them flat against the cold pane, and the glass fogged a small oval around her fingertips.

"Because I couldn't be Warren anymore today," she said. "Because my clit was aching and my ass was empty and I kept thinking about your cock in my mouth and I couldn't sit at that desk one more minute pretending I was a man."

"And what happened when you walked out the door."

She closed her eyes. The lobby. The revolving door. The sidewalk.

"I stepped onto the street in my gray suit," she said slowly, "and I felt it. I felt every pair of eyes. There was a man waiting for the light at the corner and he looked at me — at Warren, at the man in the suit — and he looked at me the way you look at a woman. He looked at my mouth. He looked down at my hips. He didn't know what he was looking at and he wanted it anyway."

"And how did that feel."

"Hot." The word came out before she could shape it. "It felt like being undressed on the sidewalk. Like everyone who passed me could see the panties under my slacks and the stockings under my socks and they were picturing my mouth around their cock and my ass up and—" She stopped. Her hand was still flat on the glass. She watched her own reflection's throat move.

"And their cocks between your lips," David said. "Say the rest."

"And their cocks between my lips." Her voice had gone breathy, the way it did when she stopped performing and started meaning it. "And inside my tight sissy ass. All of them. Every man who looked at me on that walk to the subway. I wanted to kneel on the sidewalk and open my mouth and let the first one use me while the rest watched."

David reached over and pulled the curtain back a hand's width. The street threw a long bar of light across the bed and across her chest, and the low V of the halter dress caught it, the white latex going almost silver, the two hard points of her nipples casting small shadows on the fabric.

"Look at you," he said. "Look at what walked down Christopher Street tonight. Every man you passed is going to go home and jerk off thinking about the blonde in the tight dress with the hips, and they'll never know they were thinking about a married accountant from Westchester."

Willow laughed — a real laugh, wet and broken. "That's the best part."

"That is the best part." He let the curtain fall and picked up his phone. "Come here. Sit against me."

She moved across the bed on her knees, the latex squeaking against the sheet, and settled between his legs with her back against his chest. He was still dressed in the black suit trousers and the white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she could feel the heat of him through the silk. His forearm came across her stomach and held her there.

"The television," he said, and reached for the remote.

The screen on the wall woke with a soft chime, a waiting blue. David thumbed open the Bluetooth panel and his phone found the room's system with a click, and the blue turned into a mirror of his home screen — the photos app, the video app, the camera roll she'd never been allowed to hold.

"I'm going to show you something," he said. "Some of the highlights. From today."

"From the office?"

"From the office. From the men's room. From the walk to the subway. From before you knew I was watching." His mouth came down against her ear. "You think I only have what you send me. I have everything, Willow. I always have everything."

Her clit was leaking again — she could feel the wet spreading under the latex, a warm slick line down the inside of her thigh. She pressed back into his chest and felt the hard line of his cock through his trousers against her spine, and her whole body went loose and small and ready.

"Show me," she said.

David's thumb hovered over the screen. The blue light of the television washed the room, and in the window glass Willow watched her own reflection sit up straight, watched the blonde-and-red ghost of herself lean forward toward the light, watched her own mouth open slightly as if she were already about to say something she couldn't take back.

"There's a lot more to claim," David said quietly. "You understand that. Today was a test. You passed. But the real work — the work of making you into what you're going to be — that hasn't even started yet."

Willow nodded against his shoulder. The radiator ticked. Somewhere outside, a car door slammed, and a woman laughed, and the laugh went up the street and away.

David pressed play.

The first image came up on the screen — a photograph, not a video, shot from across a lobby, of a slim figure in a gray suit stepping through a revolving door, caught mid-stride, the jacket swinging open enough to show the line of a hip and the unmistakable sway of a body that had forgotten it was supposed to be a man's. The face was turned three-quarters away. The blonde wig was not visible. And yet anyone looking at the photo would have known, with a small cold certainty, exactly what they were looking at.

Willow stared at herself on the wall, at the streetlight catching the white latex in the photo's foreground — no, that was a different frame, the picture was of something else, the screen was already moving to the next image — and her fingers curled into David's forearm.

"There she is," David said.

The room held still. The blue light flickered across the ceiling. Willow's reflection in the dark window watched the screen with her, and for one long moment nobody in the room — not David, not Willow, not the ghost in the glass — said a word.