The elevator doors opened onto gold.

Not paint — actual gold leaf, or something that wanted him to believe it was, laid into the coffered ceiling above a lobby that smelled like money and cut flowers. Walt stepped out barefoot onto carpet so thick his toes sank. The IV pole rattled along beside him like a shopping cart with a bad wheel, and a man in a navy blazer behind a marble desk looked up, looked at the gown, looked at the pole, and decided in the space of a blink that none of it was his problem.

Walt kept walking. His hip had gone past pain into something whiter and more electrical, the pin pushing at skin with every step, but the carpet was the softest thing his feet had touched in years and he found he didn't much mind. Above the desk, a chandelier the size of a small car hung in tiers of glass, lit even though it was midday, and beneath it a piano was playing something he didn't know.

To the left, past a wall of orchids, the bar opened up — low leather chairs, a long black counter, a bartender in a waistcoat shaking something silver. And in the corner, the corner with the best view of the room and of anyone walking into it, a young man sat with three women.

He was maybe twenty-five. White linen shirt, open to the sternum, gold chain, gold watch, hair swept back with something that caught the light. He had the particular softness around the jaw that came from never having been hit and never having worked, and he was laughing with his head back, one hand on a glass of something amber and the other hand — the other hand — on the thigh of the woman to his right.

She was blonde and bored and wearing a dress that was mostly a suggestion. His fingers had worked their way under the hem and were moving in a slow circle that everyone at the table could see and no one was pretending not to. The woman had her head tilted back and her lips parted and one heel up on the rung of his chair like this was a Tuesday.

The other two watched. One of them was stroking her own collarbone with two fingers. The bartender had turned away to polish glasses that were already clean.

Walt stood there in his gown with his ass hanging out the back and his IV pole dripping and watched a rich kid finger a whore in a hotel lobby at two in the afternoon, and something in his chest that had been asleep for thirty years sat up and took notice.

The young man's eyes drifted over the room the way rich men's eyes do — checking the door, checking who'd come in, checking whether anyone worth impressing had arrived — and they landed on Walt. And stopped. And narrowed.

"What the fuck," he said, loud enough for the piano to have to compete, "is that."

The women turned to look. The blonde took his hand out from under her dress and set it on the table, like a fork she was done with.

"Hey." The young man stood up. He was taller than he'd looked sitting, and he came around the table with his chest out and his chin up, the walk of a man who'd never once been told no by anyone who mattered. "Hey. Grandpa. You're dripping on the carpet."

"It's a hospital gown," Walt said.

"I can see it's a hospital gown. I'm asking why it's in my father's hotel." He stopped a yard away, close enough that Walt could smell the cologne and the whiskey and, under it, the sweat of a man who'd been at this table since noon. "You lost? You want me to call somebody? Because you look like you wandered out of a state facility, and I don't do charity cases in the lobby."

One of the women giggled. The blonde didn't.

"I'm walking through," Walt said.

"You're walking *out*." The young man jabbed a finger at the revolving doors. "That way. Before I have you thrown out on your wrinkled old ass and your little pole with you. Go on." He flapped his hand. "Shoo."

Walt looked at the finger. He looked at the hand it was attached to — soft, manicured, no callus anywhere, a hand that had never held anything heavier than a glass. Then he looked up at the boy's face, which was smiling now, enjoying the audience, enjoying the way the women were watching him be a man.

Walt's right hand had swung a hammer for forty years. It moved before he did.

The slap caught the young man across the mouth and turned his whole head a quarter turn. The sound of it cracked off the marble and the chandelier and came back twice. The blonde's glass tipped over. The piano stopped.

"You—" the boy started, hand flying to his lip, eyes going wide and wet and shocked, and Walt stepped in and put his bare foot into the boy's knee and shoved.

The kid went down hard, chair and all, and Walt brought his heel down on the boy's thigh — not a stomp, a kick, the flat of the foot, the way you'd shove a dog off a porch — and then again, and the young man curled up on the carpet with his hands over his head and made a sound that wasn't words.

"Forty years," Walt said, standing over him, breathing hard, the IV line pulling at the back of his hand. "Forty years I dug holes and poured concrete and ate shit from men like you. You don't get to shoo me."

The women had scattered back against the bar. The bartender had his phone out. The man in the navy blazer was coming around the desk, saying something about security, and Walt was already sorry, already feeling the hot drop of what he'd done settling into his stomach — sixty-seven years old and he'd just kicked a stranger in a hotel lobby like a drunk.

And then the elevator behind him opened, and the whole room turned to look at the woman who stepped out of it.

She was, Walt guessed, around fifty. She wore it the way a woman wears a thing she's spent a great deal of money and attention keeping. Black silk blouse, tucked, buttoned — barely. She had not put anything on under it, and the silk showed him that from across the room: the heavy pale weight of her breasts shifting under the fabric, the dark press of her nipples through it, the way the blouse strained across the front and left a gap between buttons at the fullest point. Her skirt was black leather, short enough that when she walked, the tops of her thighs came into view and out again, and when she crossed the light from the windows Walt could see the shape of a black lace thong pressed against the leather, and nothing else under it.

Her hair was dark and pinned up. Her mouth was red. Her eyes found her son on the floor before she'd taken three steps, and her face didn't change at all.

"Marcus," she said. Low voice. No question in it.

The young man scrambled up off the carpet like a child called in from the yard. His lip was split and swelling, blood on his teeth, and he went to her with both hands out and his face already collapsing, the whole performance of him breaking apart into something smaller and younger with every step.

"Mom." His voice cracked. "Mom, he hit me. That — that *thing* hit me, he kicked me, look at me, look what he did—"

She looked at Walt over her son's shoulder. Walt looked back. He was aware, suddenly and completely, of his gown and his bare feet and his IV pole and the come dried on him from two floors up, and he did not look away.

"He was drinking with whores," Walt said. "Fingering one of them at your table. In front of the whole lobby."

"Don't you *talk* to her—" Marcus spun, and his hands were shaking, and he grabbed his mother by the front of her blouse.

He didn't mean to. Or he meant to grab her, to pull her, to do something with all that shaking — and his fist closed on silk and pulled, and the blouse came open down the front in one long rip of buttons, and her breasts came out into the light.

They were full and pale and heavy, the nipples wide and dark against all that white skin, the undersides just beginning to soften with age, and the whole lobby went very quiet. The bartender turned around. The blonde by the bar put her hand over her mouth. Marcus stared down at his mother's chest like he'd never seen it before, and then — because he was twenty-five and drunk and humiliated and had never in his life been told what to do with a feeling — he put both hands on her.

Walt watched his fingers sink into the flesh.

"Look," Marcus said, and his voice had gone strange, high and thin and bright, and he was holding her breasts up in both hands, squeezing them, kneading them, the pale skin swelling between his fingers, and he turned her bodily toward Walt so Walt could see. "Look at these. You see these? You know how many men want these? You know what these are *worth*?"

"Marcus—" his mother said.

"Only me." He said it to Walt like a confession. Like a threat. "You hear me, old man? Only me. I'm the only one who gets to hold them. I'm the only one who gets to *suck* them." And he bent his head and took his mother's nipple in his mouth.

He sucked. Loudly. The sound of it carried in the marble lobby, wet and obscene, and his mother stood there with her hands at her sides and her eyes closed and her jaw set, and she did not push him away, and she did not open her eyes, and Walt understood in that moment that this was not the first time.

Walt's cock was hard. He hated that it was hard. He looked at the woman's face — the red mouth, the closed eyes, the small muscle working in her cheek — and then down at the young man's mouth working at her breast, and the panel flared to life in front of him, gold letters on a black field, and he read it while a grown woman let her son suck her tit in the middle of her husband's hotel.

*NEW TARGET ACQUIRED.* *ELEANOR VANE. 51. HOTEL HEIRESS.* *BONDING PROGRESS: 1 OF 3.*

Marcus came off her with a wet pop and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "There," he said, to Walt, to the room, to no one. "That's what you'll never have. That's what a man like you doesn't even get to *look* at." He let go of her breasts and they settled back against her ribs, wet and shining where his mouth had been, and he stepped away from his mother like she was a coat he'd finished trying on.

Eleanor Vane opened her eyes. She looked at her son for a long moment — no anger in it, nothing Walt could name — and then she pulled the ruined blouse closed over her chest with one hand and turned to Walt, and her eyes went down him slowly, the gown, the pole, the bare feet, the blood on the carpet, the hard-on the gown couldn't hide.

"You're the man from the fourth floor," she said. "Aren't you."

"I don't know what that means," Walt said.

"It means I know what you did to Helen Adler's husband this morning." She said it quietly, just for him, while her son stood three feet away bleeding and forgotten. "And I know what Helen did to you after." She let the blouse fall open again, deliberately, and held his eyes. "Come upstairs, Mr. Kowalski. I have a room. I want to hear the rest of it."

Behind her, Marcus said, "Mom—"

She didn't turn around. She was already walking toward the elevator, one hand holding the blouse shut, the leather skirt moving against the backs of her thighs, and the panel over Walt's chest pulsed once and went dark.

Walt looked at the boy on the carpet with his split lip and his mother's milk still on his chin. Then he got his hand on the IV pole and followed her.

She didn't wait at the elevator. She walked straight in, one hand holding the blouse shut, and when Walt got the pole through the doors she was already pressing the button for the top floor with the flat of her thumb, and the doors closed on the lobby — on Marcus standing there with his split lip, on the blonde righting her tipped glass, on the navy blazer still talking into his collar about security that hadn't come.

The car rose. Eleanor Vane stood in the corner facing front, and in the brushed steel of the doors Walt could see her the way you see someone in a mirror when neither of you will turn your head — the red mouth, the pinned hair, the ruin of silk hanging off one shoulder where her son's fist had pulled it. She smelled of something cold and floral and expensive, and under it, faintly, of breast milk gone sour in the fabric.

"You're bleeding on the floor," she said.

Walt looked down. There was a line of it, thin and dark, running from the hem of his gown to his bare heel. The pin had finally come through. He could feel the wet of it against his hip now that he'd stopped moving.

"It's the hip," he said. "It'll hold."

"It had better." The doors opened. "This way."

The top floor was one corridor, and the corridor was one door, and the door had no number on it. She put a key card to the lock and the lock gave a green blink and she went in ahead of him, dropping the card on a console table, and Walt dragged the pole across the threshold into a room that was bigger than his whole apartment and smelled like her.

The far wall was glass, floor to ceiling, the city laid out under it in the flat white light of early afternoon. There was a long table down the middle of the room — dark wood, twelve chairs, a bowl of white orchids sitting in the center of it like something set down for a photograph — and a bar along the near wall with bottles arranged by height. A boardroom. This was a boardroom, and she'd brought him up to it instead of a bedroom, and Walt filed that away without knowing yet what to do with it.

She walked to the head of the table and turned, and leaned back against the edge of it, and let the ruined blouse hang open. Her breasts sat heavy and pale in the window light, the nipples still wet and dark from her son's mouth, and she did not fix the blouse and she did not cross her arms and she looked at Walt the way a woman looks at a bill she intends to pay.

"Helen Adler," she said. "You put your hand up her skirt in a bathroom on the fourth floor and she let you. I know because she called me afterward and she couldn't stop talking about your hands." She tilted her head. "You're sixty-seven years old and you've got a hard-on through a hospital gown that a man half your age couldn't manage. So tell me what you are. Before I decide what to do with you."

"I don't know what I am," Walt said.

"Try."

He stood there with his hand on the pole and the blood running down his leg, and he thought about the panel, and about the words it had put over his chest in the lobby — ELEANOR VANE, 51, HOTEL HEIRESS, BONDING PROGRESS 1 OF 3 — and he decided, standing in the middle of her boardroom with his ass out the back of a gown, that he was too old to lie about anything anymore.

"There's a thing over my chest," he said. "Nobody else can see it. It tells me things. It told me about Helen's husband and where he was and what he was doing, and it told me about you before you ever came out of that elevator." He shrugged. "It pays me in years. I don't know how it works. I woke up with it after a truck put me through a windshield."

Eleanor Vane looked at his chest. Looked at it a long time, at the empty space above the gown where the panel floated, and Walt understood that she was looking exactly where it was, as if she could feel the shape of it even if she couldn't see it.

"How many years," she said.

"Twelve, so far."

"And what does it want from you?"

Walt didn't answer that one.

She smiled, small and red, and pushed off the edge of the table. She came across the carpet toward him with the leather skirt swinging against her thighs and the blouse open and her tits moving with each step, and she stopped close enough that he could smell her breath — coffee and something sweet underneath — and she reached up and took the knot of his gown at the back of his neck in both hands.

"It wants this," she said. "Doesn't it."

She pulled. The ties gave and the gown slid off his shoulders and down, and Walt stood in her boardroom in nothing but a hospital bracelet and a line taped to the back of his hand, sixty-seven years old, gray hair on his chest and his belly soft over the bone and his cock standing up out of a thatch of gray like the last fence post in a flooded field.

She looked at him. All of him. Down and up and down again, unhurried, the way she'd looked at the lobby.

"There you are," she said.

Then Walt got both hands on her blouse.

He took the silk in his fists — the front where the buttons had already torn, the whole hanging ruin of it — and he pulled, and the seam at her shoulder gave with a sound like a page tearing out of a book. She made a noise, not a word, and he pulled again and the other shoulder went, and the blouse came away in his hands and he dropped it on the carpet and she was standing there in the window light with nothing on her top half but skin.

Her breasts were bigger than they'd looked in the lobby, freed of the silk. Full and pale and heavy, the nipples wide and dark and still tacky with her son's spit, the undersides soft and shadowed where they met her ribs, and they hung with the weight of fifty-one years and two children and every meal she'd ever eaten in a restaurant with a name. Walt put his palms under them and lifted them both.

They filled his hands. More than filled them — the flesh spilled over the sides of his fingers, warm and dense, and when he squeezed, the nipples pulled up and out and she let her breath go through her teeth.

"There," she said. "That's it. That's what he thinks he owns."

"He doesn't."

"No." She reached down and closed her hand around his cock, and her palm was cool and dry and her grip was sure. "Nobody does. That's the whole point of me." She stroked him once, root to tip, and Walt's knees went loose. "You've got a good one for an old man. Thick. Sit down before you fall down."

He didn't sit. He put his mouth on her.

He took the left nipple in and sucked it the way her son had — loud, wet, pulling the whole dark circle of it into his mouth — and Eleanor Vane's head went back and her hand tightened in his hair. She tasted of salt and soap and something faintly metallic underneath, and when he bit down, careful, she said oh in a low flat voice like she was reading it off a page. He moved to the other one and gave it the same, and she held him there, and her hips had started a slow press against his thigh without her seeming to know it.

"The skirt," she said, after a while. "Take it off me. If you can still bend."

He could bend enough. He got the zipper down the back and the leather peeled off her hips and dropped, and she stepped out of it in her heels, and there was nothing under it but the black lace thong and a strip of dark hair showing above the waistband, and below that her thighs, thick and pale and pressed together at the top.

Walt went down on one knee in front of her. The bad hip screamed and he ignored it. He hooked his fingers in the lace at both hips and drew the thong down her legs, over the knees, past the calves, and she lifted one foot and then the other and stepped out of it, and then she was bare in front of him, and Walt looked at her cunt.

Shaved. Not trimmed — shaved, clean as a plate, the lips full and dark pink and parted just enough to show the wet shine between them, and above it a small neat triangle of dark hair left on purpose, the only hair on her. She was wet. He could see it, the slick catching the window light, and he could smell it — that heavy sweet musk coming off her, close and warm, and his mouth filled with water.

He put his thumb on her. Just the thumb, flat, up the whole length of her, and she was so wet it slid like a wet stone on tile, and when he got to the top he found her clit already out from under its hood, and he pressed it.

Eleanor Vane grabbed the edge of the table.

"Up," she said. "Up, up — on the table, come on."

She turned and put both hands flat on the dark wood and bent over it, and the position did something to her — pulled her back into a long pale curve, spread her thighs, dropped her breasts against the tabletop so they flattened and spilled out on either side of her ribs. She looked back over her shoulder at him, red mouth, pinned hair coming loose at the temple, and she reached back with one hand and pulled her own cheek aside so he could see.

Walt got his hand on the pole for balance and stepped in behind her.

He put the head of his cock against her and slid it up and down her lips, through the wet, once, twice, and she pushed back at him and he didn't give it to her, and she said his name — Kowalski — low and flat, and he pushed in.

She took him all the way on the first stroke. Wet enough that there was no drag at all, just the heat closing around him, the ring of her gripping him halfway down and then letting him deeper, and Walt stood there with his hands on her hips and his eyes closed and didn't move for a second because if he moved he was going to finish like a boy in a hayloft.

"That's it," she said. Her voice had gone rough at the edges. "That's — god. That's a lot of cock for an old man."

"You talk too much."

"I own the building. I talk as much as I—"

He pulled back and drove in, and the rest of it came out of her as a sound with no words in it at all.

He fucked her over the end of her own boardroom table. Slow at first, long strokes, watching himself come out of her wet and go back in, watching the pale cheeks of her ass take the slap of his hips and go pink, watching her tits slide against the dark wood with every push. The table creaked. The orchids in the bowl in the middle of it trembled and then tipped, and the bowl rolled and hit the carpet and didn't break, and neither of them looked at it.

"Harder," she said.

He gave her harder. He got a fistful of her pinned hair in one hand and pulled her head up off the table, and her back bowed and her cunt clenched around him so hard he grunted, and he fucked her like that — head up, hips slapping, her heels skidding on the carpet, the wet sound of it filling the room and coming back off the glass.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. There. Don't stop, don't you dare stop—"

He didn't stop. His hip was on fire and his hand was cramping on the IV pole and he didn't stop. He reached around her with his free hand and got two fingers on her clit and rubbed it in fast tight circles while he fucked her, and Eleanor Vane went up on her toes and made a long low sound that went up at the end like a question.

"Come on," Walt said. "Come on, you rich bitch. Give it to me."

She came. Her whole body locked around him — cunt, thighs, the hand she threw back to grab his wrist — and she shook through it with her mouth open and her eyes shut and nothing coming out of her, silent, and Walt felt every pulse of it travel up his cock and into his gut and he held on for one more stroke, two, and then he was coming too, pulling out just far enough to spend the first hot rope of it across the small of her back and the rest of it against her ass, one, two, three, his hand white on her hip, his breath sawing.

He stood there afterward with his cock still half-hard in his fist and his come running down the inside of her thigh.

Eleanor Vane stayed bent over the table. Her hair was down on one side. Her back rose and fell. The city went on doing whatever it did behind the glass, and somewhere far below, a piano started up again.

"Well," she said, into the wood. "Helen undersold you."

The panel flared over his chest, gold on black, and Walt read it while he caught his breath.

BONDING COMPLETE — ELEANOR VANE. VITALITY GRANTED: +3 YEARS. BONDING PROGRESS: 2 OF 3.

He was still reading it when the door to the boardroom opened behind him.