Walt had been staring at the ceiling tile with the water stain for what felt like an hour, maybe two. The stain looked like a rabbit if he tilted his head. It looked like a fist if he didn't. The morphine had worn off sometime around the second time he'd counted the ceiling tiles — forty-three, same as the first count — and now there was just the ache in his hip where the truck had folded him, and the hum of the monitor, and the smell of iodine sitting in his nose like something that had crawled in and died there.

He was sixty-seven years old. He had a studio apartment with a broken radiator, a truck that had turned him into a hood ornament on Van Buren, and no one on this earth who would have noticed for three days if he'd stayed dead.

And then there was the panel.

It floated about a foot above his chest, translucent, the color of old dishwater, and it had been there since he'd opened his eyes. He'd tried swatting it twice. His hand went through it like smoke. The text on it hadn't changed.

REWARD ACTIVATED. TARGET: JENNA DELACROIX. STATUS: INBOUND.

"Bullshit," he'd muttered, and the word had come out dry as a dog's bowl.

He'd been in and out of it since the ambulance. The doctor — Thorne, the one with the silver watch and the face of a man who'd never once laughed at a joke he didn't write himself — had stood at the foot of the bed that morning and told him the scans were clean, which meant the hallucinations were his own problem. "We'll see," Thorne had said, three times, to three different questions, and then he'd walked out and the door had clicked behind him like a lock.

The panel was still there when Walt woke up. It was still there when the lunch tray came and went, untouched. It was still there now, in the dark, glowing faintly green against the pale of his own chest under the hospital gown, and Walt had stopped pretending it wasn't.

A second line of text had appeared under the first sometime in the afternoon. He hadn't seen it arrive. It was just there, the way the rabbit in the ceiling stain was just there if you tilted your head the right way.

REWARD: JENNA DELACROIX. VITALITY BONUS: +10 YEARS.

Ten years. He'd laughed at that one, a wet, ugly sound that turned into a cough. Ten years. He'd have taken ten minutes.

The lock on the door turned.

Walt's head came up off the pillow. The door swung inward, and the hallway light behind her cut a long bright wedge across the floor, and then the wedge narrowed and vanished as she stepped through and closed the door behind her and turned the deadbolt with a click that Walt felt in his back teeth.

She was tall. That was the first thing. Tall and blonde and wearing a black dress that had no business in a hospital, the fabric doing things to the light that the light didn't deserve. Her hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders, platinum, the kind of blonde that came out of a bottle and cost more than Walt's monthly rent. Green eyes. Not the soft green of a field. The green of a bottle held up to a window.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled, and Walt felt his stomach do something he hadn't felt it do in about fifteen years.

"Well," she said. Her voice was low, a little rough, like she'd been smoking or singing or both. "There you are."

"I'm —" Walt's voice cracked. He cleared his throat. "Visiting hours are over."

"I know." She walked to the foot of the bed. Her heels made almost no sound on the linoleum, which struck Walt as wrong, somehow, the way she moved, like she was gliding. She stopped at the rail and looked down at him, and then her eyes drifted — not to his face. To the space above his chest.

To the panel.

Walt's whole body went cold.

"You can see that," he said.

"I can see that." She tilted her head, reading it the way he'd read the ceiling stain. "'Reward activated,'" she said, slow, savoring each word like it was something on a plate. "'Target: Jenna Delacroix.'" She looked at him. "'Vitality bonus: ten years.'" Her tongue touched the corner of her mouth. "That's me. I'm the target."

"You're —" Walt's hand found the sheet and gripped it. The cotton went tight under his knuckles. "You're the siren."

"That's what they call me." She reached down and laid her hand on his leg, over the blanket, just above the knee. Her palm was warm through the cotton. "But you can call me Jenna."

"I don't —" He tried to sit up. The hip caught and he hissed through his teeth and lay back down. "I don't know what any of this is. I don't know what you are."

"I'm a woman who reads panel text." Her hand slid up his thigh. Slow. Deliberate. The blanket bunched under her fingers. "And I'm a woman who's been waiting for a man the system would send me. It doesn't send many. I've been on the list for a while."

"The list."

"Mm." Her hand kept moving. Up. Past his knee. Past the middle of his thigh. Walt's breath had gone shallow and stupid and he was suddenly, horribly aware of everything under the blanket, the way his own body had started to answer her before his brain had caught up. "The system picks its men. Most of them are younger. Stronger." Her fingers found the outline of him through the sheet and stopped there, resting, feeling. "You're not."

"Thanks."

She laughed. It was a real laugh, low and quick, and it surprised him. "I didn't say it was a problem." She pressed down, just slightly, and Walt's hips came off the mattress an inch before he could stop them. "There it is."

"Jesus—"

"Not quite."

She pulled the blanket back. Walt's hand shot out to stop her and she caught it, both her hands wrapping around his, and she turned it over and looked at his palm. The calluses. The dirt that had lived in the cracks for forty years. The scar across the base of his thumb from a table saw in '79 that had nearly taken the whole digit.

She ran her thumb along the scar.

"You worked," she said.

"Yeah."

"With these."

"Yeah."

She looked up at him. The green of her eyes had gone darker, or maybe that was the monitor light, the soft green pulse of it catching her face and the curve of her throat and the swell of her chest above the neckline of the dress. "Good," she said. "I like hands that have done something."

She let go of his hand and stood up straight and reached behind her back. Walt heard the zipper, a long slow sound, and his mouth went dry, and then she stepped out of the dress and it pooled around her feet on the linoleum and she was standing there in nothing but the black heels and the light from the monitor.

Walt had been married for nineteen years before his wife had left. He'd seen her naked more times than he could count. It had never once, in all those years, made him feel like this.

Jenna's body was long and lean and the monitor light made the pale of her skin look like something under water. Her breasts were small and high and the nipples were already hard, dark against the pale. Her stomach was flat, ridged faintly at the sides, and below it a narrow strip of blonde hair, groomed, deliberate, and below that the lips of her, pink and parted and visibly wet.

She was wet. Walt could see it from across the room.

"You're staring," she said.

"Yeah."

"Good." She walked back to the bed. "Keep doing it."

She reached down and hooked her fingers under the hem of his hospital gown and pulled it up. Walt's cock was already hard — had been since she'd touched his thigh, maybe before that, maybe since the door had opened — and it stood up out of the thin cotton, flushed dark, the head of it wet at the tip and catching the green light. Sixty-seven years old and it was doing what it was doing like it had never once been told to quit.

Jenna looked at it. Then she looked at him.

"Well," she said. "Hello."

"Don't —" Walt's voice came out rough. "Don't make fun."

"I'm not making fun." She put her knee on the mattress. The bed creaked. "I'm looking at what the system promised me."

"What did it promise you?"

"Something honest." She swung her other leg up and straddled his hips, and her cunt came down against the flat of his belly, hot and slick, and Walt's whole body jerked at the contact. She was wet enough that he felt it smear across his skin. "Something that's done time. Something that knows what it's for."

She reached behind her and found his cock with her hand. Her fingers wrapped around it, and she stroked him once, slow, from root to tip, and Walt's eyes rolled back in his head and he heard himself make a sound he hadn't made in years.

"Look at me," she said.

He looked at her.

She lifted up on her knees, positioned him, and sank down.

The first inch was the whole world. She was so wet that there was no resistance at all, just heat and slick and the slow tight give of her as he slid into her, and she took him all the way to the root in one long motion, her hips settling against his, her thighs closing in on either side of his hips, her breath catching high in her throat.

"Oh," she said. Just that. Just the one syllable, and it came out of her like something she hadn't planned to say.

Walt's hands came up off the sheet. He didn't plan it. His callused palms found the tops of her thighs, and her skin was smooth and hot under the roughness of his hands, and he gripped her there and held on like the bed was a boat and she was the only thing keeping him from going over the side.

The monitor beeped. Faster than before. Walt heard it, somewhere far off, the way you hear a clock in another room.

Jenna rolled her hips, slow, testing. The slide of him inside her was wet and audible, a soft sound, and she made a low noise in her throat and did it again, and again, settling into a rhythm that Walt's body understood before his brain did. His hips came up to meet her. She took it. She took it and pressed her palms flat against his chest, both hands, and the rough of his chest hair under her fingers, and she leaned down over him and her blonde hair fell around his face and he could smell her — clean and warm and something underneath, something like salt and skin.

"There," she said. "Right there."

"Yeah."

"Say my name."

"Jenna."

"Again."

"Jenna."

She rode him harder. The bed creaked under them, a steady rhythm now, and the monitor was beeping fast and stupid and Walt didn't care, he didn't care about anything except the wet clench of her around his cock and the weight of her on his hips and the way her tits moved with every stroke, small and high and the nipples dark and hard. He reached up and cupped one. She pushed into his hand.

"Harder," she said.

He squeezed. She gasped and her hips stuttered and she came down on him harder, deeper, and Walt felt the head of his cock hit something at the top of her and she made a sharp sound and did it again, and again, chasing it.

The panel flickered at the edge of his vision. He didn't look. He couldn't look. He couldn't look at anything but her.

"I'm —" he started.

"Not yet."

"I can't —"

"Yes you can." She slowed. She slowed way down, rolling her hips in a long lazy circle, and Walt nearly cried. She was looking down at him with those green eyes and her lipstick was smeared and her hair was sticking to her forehead and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his entire miserable life. "You waited sixty-seven years for this," she said. "You can wait one more minute."

He gripped her thighs and held on. She kept moving, slow, deliberate, and the wet sound of it filled the room and the monitor beeped and the rabbit in the ceiling stain watched them both. Walt's whole body was shaking. His hip hurt. His back hurt. None of it mattered.

"Now," she said.

She came down on him hard. Once. Twice. And Walt let go.

It came up out of him like something breaking, deep and hot and long, and he felt himself spill into her, pulse after pulse, and Jenna's cunt clenched around him tight enough that he saw white, and she threw her head back and let out a sharp satisfied gasp that turned into a low laugh, and her thighs clamped down on his hips and she rode him through it, all of it, until he was empty and shaking and his hands had gone loose on her thighs.

The panel chimed.

Walt turned his head. The text had changed.

MISSION COMPLETE. VITALITY +10 YEARS.

And below it, smaller, a second line that hadn't been there before, flickering like it was still deciding whether to exist:

PARTNER BONDING ENGAGED —

Jenna was still on top of him. Still clenching around him, slow and rhythmic, like she was milking the last of it. She looked down at him and her green eyes caught the green of the panel and she smiled, and it was a different smile than the one she'd walked in with. Smaller. More private. Like something she hadn't meant to let him see.

"There," she said. "That's the first one."

Walt's chest was heaving. His hand was still on her thigh. He hadn't let go.

"The first one," he repeated.

"Mm." She leaned down and kissed him, quick, hard, her mouth tasting like lipstick and salt, and then she pulled back just far enough to look at him. "You've got a lot of years to make up for, Walter Kowalski."

Behind her, the panel flickered once, twice, and the second line resolved itself into words.

The panel's second line finished resolving while Jenna was still sitting on him, still warm and slick around his softening cock, and Walt read it over her shoulder in the green glow.

PARTNER BONDING ENGAGED — JENNA DELACROIX. ABILITY GRANTED: SYSTEM SIGHT.

"What's system sight," he said. His voice came out like gravel in a can.

Jenna turned her head, looked at the panel, and something crossed her face — quick, gone before he could name it. "It means you can see what the system sees." She lifted off him, slow, and Walt felt the wet drag of it, the cold air where she'd been. She swung her leg over and sat on the edge of the mattress, and he watched a thin shine of his own come slide down the inside of her thigh and she didn't bother to wipe it. "It means when someone near you is doing something the system thinks you should know about, you'll see it."

"See it how."

"Like a window." She reached down and gathered her dress off the floor. "You'll find out."

She pulled the dress up over her hips and reached behind for the zipper and Walt lay there with his gown bunched around his chest and his cock going soft against his belly and the ache in his hip coming back now that the rest of him had quit shouting. He watched her zip it. He watched her run her fingers through her hair and shake it out, and just like that she was the woman who'd walked in, immaculate, except for the smeared lipstick and the flush still sitting high on her cheeks.

"You're leaving," he said.

"I'm leaving." She stepped into her heels. "For now."

"When's for now."

She looked at him over her shoulder, and the smile she gave him was the private one, the small one. "When you need me." She walked to the door, and she didn't look back, and the deadbolt turned under her hand and the door opened and closed and the hallway light cut across the floor and was gone.

Walt lay in the dark. The monitor beeped. Somewhere down the corridor a cart rattled past. He put his hand flat on the sheet where she'd been and the cotton was still warm.

He didn't sleep for a long time.

—

The doctor came at 7:40 the next morning, and Walt knew the time because the little clock on the wall said so and because he'd been awake for it, lying on his back with the pillow bunched wrong under his neck and his hip throbbing a slow steady complaint that the morphine wasn't touching.

The door swung open without a knock.

She was mid-fifties, maybe, with a helmet of dark hair going silver at the temples and a face that had been beautiful once and hadn't fully given up the fight. She was built heavy through the chest and hips, the kind of body that had settled into itself years ago and stopped apologizing, and she was wearing a white coat open over a blouse that had been buttoned by someone who didn't think much of buttons. The top two were undone. The third was doing its best. Walt could see the slope of one large pale breast and the shadow of the crease where it met the other, and when she leaned over the foot of the bed to pull his chart off the rail, the blouse gaped and he saw the whole heavy underside of her, pale and veined, and the flat brown disc of a nipple the size of a half-dollar.

She straightened up and read the chart and Walt looked at her skirt. It was gray, tailored, and it ended well above her knees — mid-thigh, maybe higher — and when she shifted her weight to one hip the hem rode up and he saw the lace edge of her underwear, black, cut high, and the pale stretch of thigh above it.

He was sixty-seven years old. He'd been dead two days ago. His cock was half-hard under the sheet and he hadn't done a thing to earn it.

"Walter Kowalski," she said. Her voice was low and flat, the voice of a woman who'd said a hundred thousand names in a hundred thousand rooms and remembered none of them. "Sixty-seven. MVA, Van Buren. Hip fracture, pinned. No surgical complications. Scans clean." She flipped the page. "Dr. Thorne noted possible hallucinations. You reported seeing things."

"I reported seeing something," Walt said.

"Mm." She didn't look up. "They all report seeing something."

"What's your name."

She looked up then. Her eyes were brown, tired, and she looked at him the way you look at a stain you've decided not to deal with today. "Dr. Adler."

"Dr. Adler." He let it sit. "You married?"

Her jaw moved. "That's not in the chart."

"No." He shifted up on the pillow, and the movement pulled at the hip and he let the wince show, let her see it, because men who hurt were men you felt sorry for and he'd learned a long time ago that sorry was a door. "I'm just lying here in the dark, Dr. Adler. You're the first woman I've seen all morning who wasn't holding a needle."

"Flattery." She put the chart back on the rail. "From a man in a gown."

"It's not flattery." He let his eyes go where they wanted — down the open collar, along the pale weight of her, down to the lace at her thigh and back up slow. He didn't hide it. He'd spent forty years hiding it, looking at the floor, looking at his hands, and he was done with that. "You've got a hell of a figure on you. You know that. A woman doesn't dress like that unless she knows."

She went still. Not flattered-still. The other kind.

"You've got about three seconds," she said.

Walt reached out and put his hand on her breast.

It was warm and heavy and it filled his palm the way a thing does when it's real, and his thumb found the nipple through the thin cotton and he felt it stiffen under his touch, and for one full second he thought — he actually thought — that the system had done it again, that she'd lean down over him, that the blouse would come open.

Her hand came down on his wrist like a trap.

The slap landed across his knuckles, hard, and his hand flew off her and his fingers stung and she was already stepping back, one hand up, her face gone white around the mouth and her eyes flat and cold as a February pond.

"Don't," she said. Quiet. That was the part that got him — how quiet she said it. "Don't you ever put your hands on me again."

"Dr. Adler —"

"I'm going to walk out of this room and I'm going to the desk and I'm going to call the police, and they're going to come up here and put cuffs on a sixty-seven-year-old man in a hospital gown who grabbed a doctor's tit." She said tit like it was a piece of meat she'd found in her shoe. "Is that what you want, Walter? You want to finish your life in a cell?"

Walt's mouth was dry. His hand still stung. He looked at her — at the coat, the collar, the hair going silver, the flat cold eyes — and he understood, all at once and too late, that he'd read her wrong. She wasn't a woman who dressed like that for anyone. She was a woman who'd stopped caring what anyone thought, and those were two different animals, and one of them bit.

"No," he said. "I don't want that."

"Then keep your hands to yourself."

She turned for the door.

And the panel lit up.

It came alive at the corner of his vision, brighter than it had been, and the green of it washed across the ceiling and the wall and the back of Dr. Adler's white coat, and Walt turned his head and read it, and the words sat there in the air like they'd been waiting all along.

SYSTEM SIGHT — NEARBY EVENT.

SUBJECT: DR. HELEN ADLER. STATUS: MARRIED.

SPOUSE: HOSPITAL DIRECTOR, R. ADLER.

And then a window opened.

It was small, maybe the size of a paperback, and it hung in the air between him and the door, and through it Walt could see a room he'd never been in — tiled, green-gray, brighter than his ward, a stall with a metal rail and a hook and a folded towel. A bathroom. The kind they kept on the executive floor. And in the window, a man in a suit jacket with the sleeves shoved up was braced against that rail with his trousers around his ankles, and a woman in a lab coat was kneeling in front of him with her mouth full of his cock.

The man had a wedding ring on. Walt could see it from here. He could see the director's face, too — a heavy-jowled man with a comb-over and the particular look of a man getting exactly what he wanted on a Tuesday morning.

The woman on her knees had red hair and a badge that said Dr. Okafor, Cardiology.

Dr. Adler had her hand on the door handle. She hadn't turned around.

Walt looked at the window. He looked at the back of her coat. He looked at the window again, and something in his chest — something that had been dead so long he'd forgotten the shape of it — rolled over and sat up.

"Dr. Adler," he said.

"I'm calling them."

"Your husband's name is Richard."

Her hand stopped on the handle.

"He's got a comb-over and a gray suit and a wedding band he doesn't take off." Walt's voice came out slow and even, and he didn't know where the evenness came from, only that it was there. "He's on the executive floor right now. Fourth, fifth — I don't know the building. Green tile. There's a rail in the stall."

She turned around. Slow. Her face had changed again — not cold now, not white. Something underneath the white, something that had been sitting there a long time and had just been poked.

"What did you say."

"There's a doctor with him." Walt kept his eyes on hers. "Red hair. Okafor. Cardiology. She's on her knees."

Dr. Adler didn't move. Her hand was still on the handle and her knuckles had gone the color of bone, and Walt watched her breathe — one breath, two — and watched the thing move behind her eyes, the slow arithmetic of a woman deciding whether to believe a man she'd just threatened to have arrested.

"How," she said. "How do you know that."

Walt held up his hand. The one she'd slapped. The knuckles were red and he turned it over so she could see the calluses, the dirt, the scar from the table saw.

"I don't know how," he said, and that was the truth. "I just know it. And I'm looking at a woman who's about to call the cops on a man who's trying to do her a favor."

"A favor." Her laugh was one syllable and had no humor in it anywhere.

"You want to find out I'm lying?" He pushed the sheet down off his legs. The hip screamed and he ignored it. "Or you want to find out I'm not?"

She stared at him. The clock on the wall ticked. Somewhere down the hall a pager went off and a door banged and the ward went on about its morning like nothing was happening in room 412.

Then she let go of the handle.

"If you're lying," she said, "I'm going to have you moved to the psych floor and I'm going to personally sign the paperwork."

"And if I'm not?"

She didn't answer that. She walked back to the bed and stood over him, close enough that he could smell her — soap and coffee and the faint chemical ghost of the hospital on her coat — and she looked down at him the way a woman looks at a card she's been dealt and doesn't like.

"Get up," she said.

Walt swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold and the hip took his weight badly and he grabbed the rail and stood there swaying in the gown with his bare ass hanging out the back, and Dr. Adler watched him do it without offering a hand.

"You'll need a chair," she said.

"I'll manage."

She walked to the door and opened it and looked back at him. Her skirt rode up as she turned and he saw the black lace again and the pale thigh above it and he made himself look at her face instead.

"Fourth floor," she said. "Executive wing. There's a bathroom off the east corridor, past the boardroom."

"How do you know which one."

"Because I've been married to him for twenty-two years," she said, "and I know every bathroom in this building he thinks he can hide in."

Walt took a step. Then another. His hip ground and his vision swam and he got a hand on the IV pole and used it like a cane, and Dr. Adler stood in the doorway with her arms crossed under her chest and watched him come, and when he reached her she didn't step aside.

"One more thing," she said.

"What."

"You touch me again and the deal's off. I don't care what you can see."

Walt looked at her. At the silver in her hair and the flat brown eyes and the mouth that had called him a name and meant it.

"Understood," he said.

She stepped aside.

He shuffled past her into the corridor, barefoot, in a gown, dragging a pole with a bag of saline on it, and the morning shift looked up from the desk and the carts and the coffee and watched a sixty-seven-year-old man walk out of his room like he had somewhere to be. Dr. Adler walked beside him and didn't touch him and didn't slow down for him and didn't say a word.

At the elevator she reached past him and pressed the button and the doors opened and she looked at him one more time.

"If it's not him," she said.

"It's him."

They stepped in. The doors closed. The panel hovered at the edge of his vision, green and patient, and the numbers over the door ticked up toward four.

The elevator was slow. Walt watched the numbers tick — two, three — and the panel hovered at the edge of his vision, green and patient, and Dr. Adler stood beside him with her arms folded and her eyes on the door like she was already deciding what she'd do when it opened.

She didn't look at him. He didn't look at her. The car smelled like antiseptic and the ghost of somebody's coffee, and Walt's bare feet were cold on the linoleum, and the IV pole rattled every time the car swayed.

"You're bleeding," she said.

Walt looked down. There was a spot of red on the gown, low, where the pin in his hip had pushed through the skin when he'd swung his legs off the bed. "It's nothing."

"It's something." She didn't move to help. "You're going to walk into my husband's office looking like a man who crawled out of a ditch."

"I crawled out of a truck."

The doors opened on four. The corridor was carpeted up here — actual carpet, the kind that cost money — and the lights were softer than the ward's, and the whole floor had the hush of a place where people made decisions that got written down.

Dr. Adler stepped out first. Walt followed, dragging the pole, and the carpet was warmer than the linoleum had been and he was grateful for it and hated being grateful.

"East corridor," she said, low. "Past the boardroom. There's a door at the end — unmarked. It's the one he uses."

"How do you know which one he uses."

She didn't answer. She walked ahead of him with her heels clicking soft on the carpet and her coat swinging, and Walt watched the back of her — the silver at her temples, the set of her shoulders, the way she held her chin like a woman walking toward something she'd been walking toward for a long time.

The boardroom door was glass, frosted, and there was a light on inside and the murmur of voices, and they passed it and the corridor bent left and there it was: a plain door, no sign, no number, just a handle and a lock.

Dr. Adler stopped in front of it. She put her hand on the handle and didn't turn it.

"If you're wrong," she said, not looking at him.

"I'm not."

She turned the handle. The door opened onto a short tiled vestibule and then the bathroom proper — green-gray tile, the same as the window had shown him, a long counter with two sinks, a mirror, and at the far end a stall with a metal rail and a hook and a folded towel on the rail. The door to the stall was open a hand's width.

Walt heard it before he saw anything. A wet sound. A rhythm. A man's breath coming short through his nose, and under it a soft, choked, working sound that belonged to a mouth.

Dr. Adler went still in front of him. Every part of her went still — her hand on the door, her shoulders, the back of her neck — and Walt watched her watch it, watched her see the sleeve of a gray suit jacket shoved up past the elbow and braced against the rail, the trousers around the ankles, the woman on her knees with the red hair and the badge that said Dr. Okafor, Cardiology, her head moving.

"Richard," Dr. Adler said.

The sound stopped. The suit jacket jerked. The woman on her knees pulled off with a wet pop and turned her head and her mouth was open and her lipstick was gone and her eyes went wide as saucers.

"Helen —" The man's voice came out strangled. He was trying to turn, one hand still on the rail, trousers around his ankles, his cock still out and wet and standing.

Dr. Adler didn't move. She stood in the doorway with her hand on the door and her face bloodless and her mouth slightly open, and Walt watched the whole thing land on her — the man she'd slept beside for twenty-two years, the comb-over, the face she'd seen across a pillow, the cock another woman had just had in her mouth.

She made a sound. It wasn't a word. It was small and it came out of her chest and it was the sound of something breaking quietly, in a room where nobody was supposed to hear.

Walt reached past her and pulled the door shut.

The latch clicked. The corridor was silent. Dr. Adler stood with her hand still up where the door had been, and her breath was coming fast and shallow and her eyes were fixed on nothing, and Walt looked at her and understood that he'd just handed her the thing she'd been afraid of for years and she hadn't been ready for it.

"Helen," he said.

Her head turned. Her eyes found him. They were wet and flat at the same time and she was shaking, just slightly, a tremor running through her shoulders that she couldn't stop.

"Twenty-two years," she said. "Twenty-two years and I knew. I knew. I just never —"

"I know."

"I never saw it." Her voice cracked. "I never had to see it."

Walt stood in front of her with the IV pole in one hand and his bare feet on the carpet and the gown hanging open down his back, and he looked at her — the silver hair, the tired brown eyes, the blouse with the top two buttons open and the third doing its best, the skirt that ended mid-thigh, the black lace he'd already seen once — and something in him that had been dead a long time rolled over and sat up again, and this time it didn't lie back down.

He reached out and put his hand on the front of her blouse.

She flinched. "Don't —"

"He's in there with his cock out," Walt said. Quiet. "Your husband. Right now. And you're out here shaking."

"I told you —"

"I know what you told me." His fingers found the third button. The one that had been doing its best. "But you're not going to call the cops on me, Helen. Not today. Not after what you just saw."

Her breath hitched. She didn't move away.

He pulled the button through the hole.

The blouse fell open. Her breasts came out of it heavy and pale and full, the weight of them pulling the fabric down off her shoulders, and Walt looked at them — the flat brown discs of her nipples, the fine veining under the skin, the way they hung, the way a real woman's breasts hung when they were her own and not a photograph's — and his mouth went dry and his cock, which had been half-hard since the elevator, went hard as a nail under the gown.

"Walter —"

He put his palm on her left breast and lifted it. It filled his hand to overflowing, warm and heavy, and his thumb found the nipple and rolled it and it stiffened under his touch, and Dr. Adler sucked in a breath through her teeth and her hand came up and grabbed his wrist — not to pull him off. Just to hold on.

"Look at you," he said.

"Don't."

"Look at you." He squeezed, slow, and the breast pushed up out of his fingers, and she made a sound low in her throat that she tried to swallow and couldn't. "Twenty-two years and he's in there getting his cock sucked by a cardiologist, and you're out here with a sixty-seven-year-old man in a hospital gown with his hand on your tit."

Her laugh was wet and broken. "You're disgusting."

"Yeah." He squeezed again and she gasped. "I am."

He let go of her breast and reached down and found the hem of her skirt. She caught his wrist again, harder this time.

"There's a door," she said. "People —"

"It's a bathroom." He pushed the skirt up her thigh. "Doors lock."

He reached past her and turned the deadbolt — the small one on the corridor door — and the click was loud in the quiet, and Dr. Adler stood against the wall with her blouse open and her breasts out and her skirt rucked up and she looked at him like a woman looking at the last thing she had left.

"If you tell anyone," she said.

"Who'd believe me."

She didn't answer that. He got his hand under her skirt and up the inside of her thigh and her skin was warm and soft and the black lace of her underwear was right there under his fingers — high-cut, wet through, the cotton soaked. She was wet. She'd been wet since the door opened. He could feel it through the fabric.

"You're soaked," he said.

"Shut up."

He hooked his fingers under the lace and pulled. The thong came down her thighs and she stepped out of one leg and then the other and kicked it away with her heel, and it landed on the tile somewhere behind him and neither of them looked at it.

She was bare under the skirt. He put two fingers between her legs and they slid in easy, all the way to the knuckle, and she grabbed his shoulder and her nails dug in through the gown and her head went back against the wall.

"Oh God," she said.

"That's it." He worked his fingers in her, slow, feeling the wet grip of her, the clench, the little swollen spot up front that made her hips jump when he pressed it. "That's what he's missing."

"Don't talk about him."

"He's ten feet away."

"Walter."

He pulled his fingers out and they came out slick and shining and he wiped them on the gown and reached down and took hold of his cock.

It was hard and heavy and the head of it was wet at the tip and it stood up out of the gown like it belonged to a younger man, and Dr. Adler looked down at it and her eyes went wide and her mouth opened and she said, "Oh," in a voice that was almost reverent.

"Turn around."

She turned. She put both hands on the wall and bent forward and her skirt rode up over her hips and there it was — the pale heavy ass, the tops of her thighs, the wet lips of her cunt between them, open and pink and ready, and Walt stepped up behind her and lined himself up and pushed in.

She was so wet that he went in all the way in one stroke. Her cunt took him to the root and clenched around him and Dr. Adler made a sound — a long, low, shaking moan — and her forehead went down against the wall and her hands scrabbled on the tile.

"Jesus," she said. "Jesus Christ."

"Twenty-two years," Walt said, and pulled back and drove in again. "And he's in there with his dick in a doctor's mouth."

She laughed and it turned into a moan halfway through. "Fuck you."

"You are." He set a rhythm. Slow at first, long strokes, feeling every inch of the drag, the wet suck of her as he pulled back, the soft smack of his hips against her ass. "You're fucking me in a hospital bathroom while your husband's ten feet away with his cock out."

"Stop talking."

"You don't want me to stop talking."

She didn't. He could feel it — the way her cunt clenched when he said it, the way her hips pushed back into him, the way her breath came faster. He got a hand on her hip and pulled her back to meet him and went harder, and the smack of it filled the little tiled room and echoed off the walls, and Dr. Adler bit down on her own wrist to keep quiet and her whole body shook.

"Harder," she said into her arm.

He gave it to her harder. He was sixty-seven years old and his hip was screaming and his back was screaming and none of it mattered, because his cock was buried in a married doctor's cunt and she was pushing back into him like she'd been waiting twenty-two years for it. He got his other hand up under her blouse and found her breast and squeezed it, the heavy weight of it filling his palm, the nipple hard against his fingers, and she moaned into her wrist and ground back on him.

"Say it," he said.

"No."

"Say it, Helen."

"He's —" She stopped. Her breath caught. "He's never —"

"Never what."

"Never this hard." The words came out broken, one at a time, like she was pulling them out of somewhere deep. "Never this deep. Never — oh God — never like this."

Walt's hand tightened on her breast. "That's what I thought."

He fucked her faster. The tile was cold under his bare feet and the IV pole rattled somewhere behind him and the light over the sinks was bright and unforgiving and he could see everything — the back of her neck going red, the silver in her hair, the way her ass bounced against his hips with every stroke, the wet shine of his cock sliding in and out of her. He could hear it. That wet, rhythmic, unmistakable sound, and the little grunts she was trying to swallow, and his own breath coming rough in his chest.

"Don't stop," she said. "Don't you dare stop."

"I'm not stopping."

"I'm close."

"I know." He could feel it — the flutter, the tightening, the way her cunt was starting to grip him in waves. He reached around her with his free hand and found her clit with two fingers and pressed, and Dr. Adler's whole body convulsed and she came with her face against the wall and her hand over her own mouth, a long shaking orgasm that rolled through her and clenched around his cock hard enough to make him see spots.

He kept fucking her through it. He rode her through the clench and the shudder and the little aftershocks, and when she went limp against the wall he pulled her back onto him and drove in deep and let go.

It came up out of him from somewhere low and old, and he felt himself spill into her — pulse after pulse, hot and thick, filling her cunt while she was still trembling around him — and he held her hips and ground into her and emptied himself all the way, and Dr. Adler made a small sound and pushed back against him like she wanted every drop.

When it was done he stayed inside her. Both of them breathing hard. The bathroom was silent except for the drip of the far sink and their breath and somewhere beyond the door, muffled, the sound of a man's voice saying something that didn't matter.

Walt pulled out slow. His cock came out wet and shining and a thin line of come followed it, sliding down the inside of her thigh, and Dr. Adler stayed bent over the wall with her skirt around her waist and her blouse open and her breasts hanging, and she didn't move to fix any of it.

"Don't," she said, when he started to say something.

He shut his mouth.

She straightened up. Slow. She pulled her skirt down over her hips and buttoned her blouse with fingers that weren't quite steady, and she turned around and looked at him — the gown, the IV pole, the bare feet, the wet spot on the front of the gown where he'd wiped his fingers — and her face was a mask again, almost, except for the flush still sitting high on her cheeks and the shine of sweat at her temples.

"The thong," she said.

Walt looked. It was on the floor by the far sink. He bent — the hip ground and he made a sound — and picked it up and handed it to her, and she took it and looked at it and then folded it once and put it in the pocket of her coat.

"I'm not putting it back on," she said. "Not with what's in me."

Walt almost laughed. He didn't.

She walked to the door and put her hand on the deadbolt and stopped. She didn't look at him. She looked at the door.

"He's still in there," she said.

"Yeah."

"He'll come out in a minute and go back to his office and I'll see him at dinner and he'll ask me how my day was."

Walt said nothing.

Dr. Adler turned the deadbolt. She opened the door a crack and looked out into the corridor — checking, the way a woman checks — and then she stepped through and pulled the door almost shut behind her and left him standing in the bathroom with the IV pole and the smell of her still in the air.

Through the gap in the door he watched her walk away down the carpeted corridor. Her heels clicked. Her coat swung. She didn't look back, and she didn't slow down, and she turned the corner past the boardroom and was gone.

Walt stood there. The panel hovered at the edge of his vision and he turned his head and read it.

SYSTEM SIGHT — EVENT LOGGED.

SUBJECT: DR. HELEN ADLER. STATUS: MARRIED. ENCOUNTER: COMPLETE.

VITALITY +2 YEARS.

And below it, in the smaller flickering green text:

BONDING PROGRESS: 1 OF 3.

Walt looked at that for a long moment. Then he reached down and gathered the gown around himself and got a hand on the IV pole and turned toward the door.

Behind the far wall, muffled, through the tile and the studs and the quiet of the executive floor, he heard the stall door open and a man's voice say, "Jesus, Okafor, lock the goddamn —" and then the rest of it was swallowed by the closing of the corridor door as Walt pulled it shut behind him and stood alone in the hallway with his bare feet on the carpet and his hip on fire and his cock still wet.

The elevator was at the end of the corridor. He started walking toward it.