The guest room was the smallest in the apartment, and Warren had made it smaller. The bed was a narrow single pushed into the corner, the sheets tucked so tight you could bounce a coin off them, the corners folded at forty-five degrees the way his mother had taught him and he had never unlearned. The door had a lock. He used it every night, and every morning he turned it before he was fully awake, the way you check a stove you already know is off.

He woke at five-forty without an alarm. The steel was warm where his body had been curled around it. That was the first thing every morning, the warmth, and then the remembering, and then the low ache that had nothing to do with the metal and everything to do with the six weeks of it still ahead of him. He lay still and let himself feel it. His cock had tried, in the night, the way it always tried — a swelling against the cage, a pressure with nowhere to go, and by the time he was awake it had given up and gone soft and small, and the device sat on him like a hand that would not move.

The shower took four minutes. He had timed it once, out of curiosity, and then kept the number. The water ran over the steel and the steel held the heat and he stood under it with his forehead against the tile and his eyes shut, and he did not touch himself, because there was no point and no access and because Dominic had not said he could and Warren had discovered, in the week since Miami, that he was the kind of man who did not do a thing unless he had been told.

"You'll wash," Dominic had said on the phone, the one time he had called, three days in, his voice flat as a coin on a table. "Every morning. And you'll think about why."

Warren had said yes. He had said it into the phone in his own kitchen with the refrigerator humming and Claire's magazine open on the counter, and he had said it in the voice of a man agreeing to a meeting time, and the whole time his hand had been flat against his sternum, pressing the corset bruise that had not yet faded.

He dried himself in front of the fogged mirror. The towel went over his shoulders first, then down, methodical, and when he wiped the glass with the heel of his hand he looked at what was there. Five foot six. A hundred and twenty-five pounds. Narrow shoulders, a flat stomach, the long pale legs of a man who had never played a contact sport in his life. The steel cage sat low and snug and silver, and above it his belly was smooth and the hair had been shaved since Miami and had grown back as a faint dark down that he looked at and did not shave, because Dominic had not said he could.

The bruise was yellowing. A band around his middle, thumb-width, where the corset had bitten for six hours. He pressed it with two fingers and the ache went through him like a note held on a piano.

Then the suit.

He dressed from the skin out and the order mattered. Cotton boxers — loose, gray, the kind a man wears when he has given up — and the cage sat under them and the fabric did not touch it. The undershirt. The socks, black, over-the-calf, pulled up straight. The trousers, charcoal, with the crease he had pressed himself the night before with the iron he kept in the hall closet. The shirt, white, French-cuffed, and the cufflinks were onyx and had been a gift from Claire on their first anniversary, and he put them through the holes and felt the small click of them, one, then the other.

The jacket came off the hanger and settled onto his shoulders with a weight he knew the way he knew his own name. Brioni. Navy, almost black, the lapels narrow, the lining silk and cool. He buttoned it and the shoulders squared and the narrowness of him disappeared into it. The tie was a deep burgundy, silk, and he tied it in the half-Windsor he had used for twenty years, and he tightened the knot and looked at himself.

A man in a mirror. A short, neat, well-dressed man with light brown hair combed back and brown eyes that were a little too soft around the edges, and a mouth that was a little too full, and nothing at all about him that anyone would look at twice.

Under the trousers, the steel.

He turned sideways and looked. You could not see it. The cut of the trousers was generous through the hip and the jacket hung to mid-thigh and there was no line, no bulge, nothing. A thousand men had walked through a thousand offices with worse secrets in their pockets. He straightened the jacket and the movement pulled the silk across his back and he felt it, the way he always felt silk, and his throat went tight.

The shoes were in the hall. He had polished them the night before, sitting on the floor of the guest room with the tin between his knees and the cloth going in small circles, and he had thought about the mules, the black patent mules with the six-inch heel, and he had polished the oxfords until he could see his own face in them and then he had put them on and gone to bed.

Claire was in the kitchen. She had her back to him, at the counter, in the blue robe, and the kettle was just coming up and she had her hand flat on the counter the way she did when she was waiting for something to boil and had nothing to say.

"Morning," Warren said.

"Morning." She did not turn. "Coffee's made."

He poured it. The mug was the one from the conference in Chicago, three years ago, chipped on the rim. He stood at the counter across from her and they drank, and the kitchen clock ticked, and outside a taxi went by with its horn held down for a block.

"You were up early," she said.

"Couldn't sleep."

"Mm." She turned a page of the magazine. "There's a thing Thursday. The Hendersons. I said we'd go."

"Thursday's fine."

"You'll be back from the office by seven?"

"I'll be back by six."

She nodded and did not look at him, and Warren looked at the back of her head, at the ash-blonde hair pinned up, at the small pearl in her earlobe, and he thought: she has not looked at me in eighteen months and I have not given her a reason to. And then, because the thought was too clean and too easy, he thought: and I have been standing in hotel bathrooms in a corset, and she has been standing in this kitchen alone, and neither of us has said a true thing to the other in years.

"I'll be late tonight," he said. "The quarterly."

"All right."

He put the mug in the sink and went out. The door clicked behind him and he stood in the hall for a moment with his hand on the lock and the steel warm against him and the silk tie flat and perfect against his throat, and then he went down to the street and into the morning.

The office was on the thirty-first floor and the elevator took ninety seconds and Warren counted them. The doors opened onto the trading floor and the sound hit him the way it did every morning — the low continuous hum of a hundred Bloomberg terminals, the phone conversations, a chair rolling, the smell of burnt coffee and printer toner and someone's microwaved egg. He walked through it with his head up and his shoes clicking on the tile and men nodded at him and he nodded back.

"Ashford. The Miami deck."

"On your desk by ten."

"Ashford. Lunch?"

"Can't today."

He sat down at his desk and put his bag under it and turned on the terminal and the screen lit his face blue. His hands went to the keyboard. He was good at this. He had been good at this for twenty years and the numbers did what numbers did and he could do it with his eyes closed, and the whole time, under the suit, under the shirt, under the cotton, the steel sat on him and the morning went by one hour at a time.

At nine-fifteen he caught himself looking at his own cuff. The white cotton, the onyx link, the fine dark hair on the back of his wrist. He looked at it and thought about the French nails, the press-on tips the color of his lip gloss, and his stomach went tight and he put his hand back on the mouse.

At ten-forty he was in the men's room with the door locked in a stall, not doing anything, just standing there with his forehead against the cold partition and his fist pressed to his mouth, breathing. The craving had come up on him the way it did, without warning, between one email and the next, and it was not a thought. It was a hunger in the hands. It was the memory of silk moving on his thighs and the weight of the breast plate and the way the corset had held him upright and made him feel, for the first time in his life, that his body was a thing that had been arranged.

He unlocked the stall and washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror. A man in a navy jacket. Brown eyes, a little red. He straightened his tie and went back out and did not look at anyone.

The week went like that. It went like that in hours. He woke at five-forty and showered and dressed and the steel was warm and then cold and then warm again. He worked. He ate a sandwich at his desk. He came home and said something to Claire and she said something back and he closed the guest room door and lay on the narrow bed and looked at the ceiling and waited for the phone to ring.

It did not ring.

On Tuesday he opened the thread. Dominic's number, the one that had called him in his kitchen, sitting in his phone under a name he had typed as 'D' and then deleted and then typed again. He looked at it for a long time. He typed: *Are you there.* He looked at it. He deleted it. He put the phone face-down on the nightstand and lay in the dark and the steel sat on him and the craving came up and he pressed his palm flat against his chest and let it move through him and did not do anything about it, because there was nothing he could do.

On Thursday they went to the Hendersons'. Warren shook hands and made conversation about the market and drank two glasses of red and Claire laughed at something at the other end of the table and he watched her laugh and felt the distance between them the way you feel a wall in the dark. On the way home in the car she said, "You were quiet," and he said, "Long week," and she said, "Mm," and that was the whole conversation.

On Friday the craving had teeth. He sat at his desk with the terminal blinking and the ache was in his throat and his hands and the small of his back and he thought about the suitcase in the back of the closet, the one with the lock, and he thought: Claire is out Saturday, she has the garden thing, I could have four hours, I could have the whole afternoon, and then he thought: Dominic said no, and the thought was a hand on the back of his neck.

He did not get the suitcase out.

Saturday afternoon Claire came back early from the garden thing with her gloves still on and her hair coming down and she stood in the doorway of the living room where Warren was reading a report he was not reading and she said, "The office called."

Warren looked up. His heart did something in his chest and the steel seemed to tighten and he kept his face still.

"They're sending me to Zurich," she said. She pulled one glove off, finger by finger, and looked at it. "The whole department. Six weeks. There's a merger and they want us on the ground."

"Zurich," Warren said.

"I leave tomorrow."

She said it the way she said everything, evenly, with her eyes on the glove, and the word sat in the room between them — *tomorrow* — and Warren did not say anything. The report was open in his lap and the clock in the hall ticked and the steel was warm against his belly and the guest room door was closed at the end of the corridor and the whole apartment was suddenly, quietly, six weeks wide.

Six came and the alarm had not been set and Warren was awake before it anyway, lying on his back in the narrow bed with his hands folded on his chest like a man laid out, listening to the apartment. The shower ran. The closet doors opened and closed. A zipper went up, and then another, and then the small hard click of a case latch, and he lay there and counted the sounds and did not get up until the clock on the nightstand turned over to six exactly.

He showered. Four minutes. The steel took the heat and held it and he stood with his forehead on the tile and did not touch himself, and the not-touching had become a kind of prayer he said every morning without knowing who he said it to.

Claire was at the door when he came out. She had her coat on already, the gray one with the belt, and her hair pinned up, and the big case stood by the door with its handle up and the little one beside it and her handbag on top, and she had the look she got at airports, which was the look of a woman who had already left.

“There's coffee,” she said. “Half a pot. Don't let it sit.”

“I won't.”

“The Hendersons are back from the Cape on the twelfth, she'll call you, don't tell her I'm gone or she'll want to have me to dinner when I get back and I'll be useless.”

“I won't tell her.”

“The man is coming for the gutters on Tuesday. He'll want cash.”

“I'll have it.”

She nodded and looked around the hall the way people do when they have already checked a thing three times and are checking it once more to have something to do with their hands. Then she stepped in and kissed his cheek — a dry press, quick, the way she kissed him at parties — and her mouth was warm and her perfume came up off her collar and it was the one she had worn for years and it smelled like the hall of their apartment and like every evening they had ever spent not touching.

“I'll let you know when I board,” she said. “And when I arrive in Zurich.”

“All right.”

“I'm going to miss you.”

She said it plainly, without weight, the way she said the thing about the gutters, and Warren stood there in his suit with his hands at his sides and the steel warm against him and he said, “I'll miss you too,” and heard, in his own voice, that it was true, and heard, under it, that it was not the whole truth, and the two things sat in him side by side like oil and water.

Then she took the big case and he took the little one and they went down in the elevator together without speaking, and out through the lobby, and the doorman took the bags to the curb and the car was already there with its engine running and its trunk open. The driver put the cases in and shut the lid. Claire turned and put her hand flat on Warren's chest, on the Brioni, just over the sternum, and held it there a second.

“Be good,” she said.

“You too.”

She got in. The door shut with the soft expensive thud of a good car and the window came down and she looked up at him through it and lifted two fingers, and the car pulled out and turned the corner and was gone, and the street was the street again, and the doorman was holding the door, and Warren stood on the sidewalk in his navy suit with his hands at his sides.

He went back up. The apartment had that smell a place gets when someone has just left it — coffee and cold air from the open door and, under both, her perfume going stale in the hall. He stood in the kitchen and drank the half pot standing up and did not wash the mug.

Then he went down the corridor and opened the guest room door and closed it behind him and turned the lock.

He did not take the suit off. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging and he let himself feel it — the whole six weeks of it, the apartment empty, the door locked, no one to hear a thing — and the feeling went down through him and settled low, and that was when he noticed.

The steel was wet.

Not wet from the shower. He had dried himself with the towel and the towel had gone over the cage and the cage had been dry and it was not dry now. There was a bead at the tip of him, at the little slot at the end of the tube, and it had already begun to run, a thin clear thread of it sliding down the inside of the steel and gathering at the bottom where the metal met his skin. His cock had swollen against the cage without his permission — it did that, it did it more now than it ever had — and the swelling pressed him into the steel and the pressure had nowhere to go and his body, having no other answer, had begun to leak.

He sat very still and looked down at it. Ten days. He counted them off like a man counting coins. Ten days since he had last had his hand on himself, since the night before Miami, and one week — seven of those days — since Dominic had closed the little brass padlock and put the key in his pocket and said, *there.* Ten days of a body with no outlet and one week of a body with no access, and the thing between his legs had stopped waiting to be told and had started, all on its own, to weep.

He put his thumb against the slot and caught the bead and it was slick and warm and it kept coming, a slow pulse of it, and his hips moved — one small involuntary tilt, up, into his own hand — and he pulled his hand away as if the steel had gone hot.

“No,” he said, out loud, to the empty room. His voice came out thin.

He got up and walked to the window and stood with his back to the bed. The street below was doing its morning, a woman with a stroller, a man hailing a cab, the light coming off the windows across the way. He put his hands flat on the sill and breathed until the pressure eased and the leaking slowed and stopped, and the front of his boxers had a damp spot the size of a quarter and he could feel it against his thigh.

The closet was at the end of the room. He looked at it the way you look at a person you are trying not to look at.

The suitcase was in the back, behind the winter coats, and it had a combination lock and the combination was a date that was not Claire's birthday and not their anniversary. He knew it without thinking. He could feel it in his fingers the way he could feel a keyboard under them, and he stood at the window with his palms on the sill and thought about the lid coming up and the smell that would come out of it — latex and powder and the sweet chemical ghost of the setting spray — and the black tissue paper, and the corset lying in its own long shape with the laces coiled, and the breast plate in its box with the two pink nipples standing up like they were waiting.

His mouth had gone dry. He swallowed and there was nothing to swallow.

He thought about the makeup bag. The lip plumper that made his lips sting and swell and go glossy and full, and the lashes, the inch-long ones, and the way the room changed when he put them on, the way everything got closer and softer and he got further away. He thought about the blonde wig on its stand and the little cap that went under it and the pins and the brush and the whole slow ritual of becoming, and the craving came up in him so hard his knees went weak and he had to put his forehead against the cool glass.

And then, because the door was locked and the apartment was empty and there was no one to hear, he let himself think about the rest of it.

The laptop. The site. The little green dots beside the names of men he had never met in his life and had shown everything to. *AshDoll.* *SweetWillowNYC.* The message threads he had not opened in a week, and they would have piled up, they always piled up, men from Ohio and men from Dubai and men who wrote *show me your tits baby* and men who wrote nothing at all and just sent the same photograph of themselves over and over. He thought about the camera on the desk and the ring light folded in the closet and the way his hands shook the first time he had pressed record, and how by the tenth time they had not shaken at all.

He thought about the man in the video. *Say it again.* And Willow saying it, breathless, obedient, *I'm a doll, I'm your doll,* and the man's voice going rough with it, and the way Warren had lain awake afterward in the guest room with his heart going and his whole body humming like a struck bell.

His hips moved again, against the sill, a slow press, and the steel bit and the wetness came fresh and he made a sound into the glass.

Dominic.

The thought of him arrived the way weather arrives. The dark eyes that missed nothing. The voice on the phone, flat as a coin on a table. *You'll wash. Every morning. And you'll think about why.* The hand on the back of his neck in the Miami hotel room, not hard, just there, just enough to say *stay,* and Warren had stayed, he had stood in six-inch heels with his heart going and his cock straining in the cage and he had not moved until he was told.

The key. Dominic had the key. It was in a pocket of a black tailored suit somewhere in this city, and Warren was standing in his own guest room in a suit of his own with the door locked, and the one thing that could open the steel on him was walking around New York in another man's trousers.

He pressed his palm flat against the front of his trousers, over the steel, and held it there, and the pressure was almost — almost — enough to be something, and it was nowhere near enough, and the leaking had started again, hot and slow, and he could feel it soaking into the cotton.

And then the last thing, the thing he had been keeping at the back, the way you keep a bill you cannot pay.

The lobby bar. The Langham. The men. He had walked through it on Dominic's arm in the black latex and the heels with his chin up and his heart going like a bird in a box, and every face had turned, and the turning had gone through him like a current, and he had been so ashamed he could have wept and so hard in the cage he could have wept for that instead. The bartender's eyes. The man at the end of the bar with the wedding ring and the glass of Scotch who had looked at Willow's legs and then at her mouth and then, slowly, back at her legs. The two in the corner who had said something to each other and laughed and kept looking. *Looked at.* That was all. They had looked at him and it had been the most naked he had ever been in his life.

*Tomorrow morning,* Dominic had said. *The breakfast crowd. You'll stand where I put you and you'll be looked at.*

Warren opened his eyes and looked at his own reflection in the window glass. A man in a navy Brioni, twenty-nine years old, fit, slender, brown hair combed back, hands flat on the sill, mouth a little open. Under the suit, a steel cage with a thread of clear fluid running down inside it and a damp quarter-sized spot spreading on his gray boxers. Under that, a woman named Willow who had a key in another man's pocket and a suitcase in the closet and six weeks of an empty apartment in front of her.

He straightened. He took his hands off the sill and stood up and pulled his cuffs down and looked at the clock.

It was six-fifty-five. The office opened at eight. He had a deck to finish and a quarterly to close and a man coming for the gutters on Tuesday who would want cash.

He unlocked the guest room door and went out into the hall, and the apartment was empty and quiet and smelled of stale coffee, and he walked through it to the kitchen and picked up the mug he had not washed and stood at the counter with it in his hands, and the steel sat on him, and the wet spot cooled against his thigh, and the whole six weeks lay out ahead of him like a road with no one on it.

The phone went at eight-thirty, face-up on the counter, and Claire's name came up on it with the little photograph she'd made him take of her at the Cape two summers ago, squinting into the sun.

"I'm boarding now," she said. Behind her voice the terminal made its sounds — a woman being paged, the flat electronic chime, a cart going by with a wheel that needed oil.

"All right."

"They'll have the wifi on the plane. I'll write when we're up."

"Don't pay for the wifi, it's robbery."

"It's the company's money." A pause, and then the small shift in her breathing that meant she had turned her head. "Warren. The gutters."

"Tuesday. Cash. I've got it."

"And eat something that isn't a sandwich at your desk."

"I will."

"You've gotten thin." She said it lightly, the way she said everything, but it landed and stayed. "You were always narrow. Now you're—" The PA came on over her, a woman's voice, warm and bored, announcing the final call. "That's me. Be good."

"You too."

The line went dead. He stood with the phone in his hand and the mug in the other and looked at the black screen, at his own reflection in it, and thought about the word she had not finished. Now you're — and the sentence had gone out of the world before it could be finished, and he was left to finish it himself, and the only ending he could find was the one he could not say to her.

He washed the mug. He put it in the rack. He took his coat off the hook and went out.

The elevator took ninety seconds and he counted them, and the counting did not work the way it usually worked, because at some point between the fourth floor and the ninth the number in his head turned over into something else and he was thinking about the suitcase.

The office was on the thirty-first floor and the doors opened and the sound came at him, the hundred terminals, the phones, the chair that rolled, and Warren walked out into it and his shoes clicked and a man said Ashford, the Miami deck and Warren said on your desk by ten and did not hear himself say it.

He sat down. He turned on the terminal and put in his password and the screen lit him blue.

The deck was eleven slides and he had built it a hundred times. He opened it and looked at the first slide and read the title and then his eyes went off it, sideways, to the black window, and he saw the suitcase behind the winter coats with the combination lock and the number that was not Claire's birthday.

He typed a word. He deleted it. He typed it again.

At nine he was aware, in a low and constant way, that his waistband had loosened. He had noticed it in the elevator and not let himself look, and now he put his thumb inside the charcoal wool and there was a gap there, a finger's width, where in February there had been none. He had bought these trousers in the fall. He remembered the fitting, the tailor with the pins in his mouth, the way he had stood on the little platform and the man had said a hair off the waist, sir, and Warren had said take it in. Now the waist sat loose on him like a thing borrowed.

He looked at his own forearm on the desk. The sleeve of the Brioni, the white cotton beyond it, and the wrist coming out of the cuff, and the wrist was narrower than the cuff, and the bone stood up, and the fine dark hair lay flat on skin that had gone paler than it used to be. It had always been smooth. It was smoother now, or he was seeing it more truly, and the muscle that had once sat along the top of his forearm, the small hard cord of it from twenty years of carrying a briefcase and a laptop and his own small weight, had thinned down to something like a boy's.

He put both hands flat on the desk. The tendons moved under the skin like string under silk.

At nine-forty he stood up and went to the men's room and shut himself in the stall and stood with one hand braced on the partition and looked down. The cage was silver and snug and the front of his boxers had a spot on it the size of a half-dollar now, and when he moved, the wetness moved with him, cool, and the pressure behind the steel was a steady low ache that had not gone away since the guest room and had no intention of going away.

It had not stopped. That was the thing. In the guest room it had been one bead, and he had washed and dressed and come to the office and it had kept on, patient and constant, a slow leak with nowhere to go, and by now the cotton was damp through in a small circle and he could feel the wet against the head of him and the head of him was pressed to the slot and the leaking did not stop.

He put his thumb against the tip of the cage, through the cotton, and pressed, and the pressure was the wrong kind of pressure, and his hips moved and he took his hand away.

He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror. Twenty-nine years old. The jacket squared the shoulders and the tie held the throat and the face was the face of a man who was fine, and under it all, under the wool and the cotton and the steel, a small wet thing was going on and on like a tap that would not close.

At ten he sent the deck. At ten-twenty a man came by his desk and talked about the quarterly for six minutes and Warren nodded in the right places and did not hear a word.

Because behind the man's voice there was the guest room, and the door was locked, and the closet was at the end of the room, and the suitcase was behind the winter coats, and he could see it the way you see a thing you have looked at a thousand times. The black tissue paper. The corset in its own long shape, the laces coiled like something asleep. The breast plate in its box with the two nipples standing up, and the silicone cool at first and then warm, and the weight of it settling on his chest. The latex. The black latex mini dress with the zip up the back and the little sleeves, and the tanga bodysuit, and the stockings with the seams and the garter clips, and the mules with the six-inch heel, patent, the ones he had polished the oxfords and thought about.

The wig on its stand. The blonde, the long one, and the little cap that went under it, and the pins.

The makeup bag. He could feel the zipper of it under his thumb. The lip plumper that stung and swelled and made his mouth go fat and glossy, and the gloss, and the liner, and the inch-long lashes, and the setting spray that smelled like a chemistry set and held everything in place for twelve hours.

He was hard in the cage and the cage held him and the leaking came fresh and he crossed his legs under the desk like a woman and did not notice he had done it until he felt the silk of the trousers slide.

He uncrossed them. He put his hand on the mouse. He read the same line of a spreadsheet three times and on the third time understood none of it, and the clock in the corner of the screen said ten-fifty-one.

At eleven he opened his phone.

The thread was where he had left it. D at the top of the screen, and under it nothing, because Dominic had called him and never texted, and Warren had typed Are you there and deleted it and typed it and deleted it and the thread was still empty.

He looked at the empty thread. Then he typed.

She's gone. Six weeks. Zurich.

He looked at it. The cursor blinked at the end of it like a pulse.

He sent it.

Then he put the phone face-down on the desk and sat with his hands in his lap and the steel on him and the clock going, and the damp spot against his thigh had gone cool and he could feel every hair on his legs standing up under the wool, and he did not touch the phone, and the phone did not make a sound.

Four minutes. Five.

He turned it over. Nothing. He set it down.

At eleven-twelve it buzzed once, and he had it in his hand before it had finished, and the message was four words and no punctuation and it went through him like a hand on the back of the neck.

Go home at noon.

He read it. He read it again. The man across the aisle was on a call about a bond, and the terminal hummed, and Warren's thumb hovered over the box and then he typed, I have the quarterly, and sent it, and hated himself for it before the little swoosh had finished.

The answer came back inside a minute.

You have a locked little clitty that's been dripping in your trousers all morning. You have a closet full of things you want to put on. You have six weeks and an empty apartment. Tell me again about the quarterly.

Warren's face went hot from the collar up. He put the phone against his thigh under the desk and looked at the screen through the gap in his jacket and his hand was shaking and the wet was running fresh and warm and the ache had climbed up into his throat.

He typed: I don't have the quarterly.

No. You don't. Noon. Eat something first. Not a sandwich.

He sat with the phone in his hand and the screen going dark and the whole floor going on around him, and he thought about Claire somewhere over the Atlantic with a plastic cup of wine on her tray and her shoes off, and he thought: she told me to eat something that isn't a sandwich, and he told me the same thing, and the two of them had said the same small thing to him in the same hour and neither of them knew about the other.

He put the phone in his pocket. He stood up. He took his coat off the back of the chair and put it on and felt the silk lining settle over the cage, and he walked out past the desks with his head up and his shoes clicking, and a man said, Ashford, you're leaving? and Warren said, "Doctor's appointment," and did not break stride, and the lie came out of him smooth and easy and it was the first time in twenty years of suits and quarterly decks that he had said a thing like that without a flicker.

He ate a bowl of soup at the counter of a place on Sixth because it was hot and it was not a sandwich, and he did not taste it, and he watched his own hand on the spoon and the wrist coming out of the cuff and the bone standing up, and he thought about the heel of the mule and how his foot would sit in it, and how the corset would come down over the loosened waist and take it in, and how the laces would pull and pull and the waist would go smaller than any tailor's pin had ever taken it, and his hand on the spoon shook and he set the spoon down.

He walked home. The city was doing its Tuesday, the trucks and the scaffolding and the woman with the flower cart on the corner, and he went up in the elevator and counted the ninety seconds and did not get to ninety.

He opened the door and shut it and locked it and stood in the hall with his back against it and his hand still on the bolt, and the apartment was empty and quiet and smelled of nothing now, the coffee gone, the perfume gone, and the six weeks stood around him in the rooms like furniture.

He took off the jacket and hung it. He untied the tie and it came away and he folded it and put it in the drawer. He unbuttoned the shirt and the undershirt and stood in the hall in his trousers and his socks with his chest bare and the steel silver against him and the damp half-dollar on his gray boxers, and he turned and walked down the corridor to the guest room, and his bare feet made no sound on the floor.

He opened the door and went in and turned the lock behind him.

The closet was at the end of the room.

He stood in front of it and put his hand on the knob and did not turn it, and the phone buzzed in his trousers, and he took it out and looked.

You're home.

Yes.

Take everything out. All of it. Lay it on the bed where I can see it. Then send me a picture.

Warren looked at the closet door. The winter coats, the suitcase behind them, the lock with the combination that was not Claire's birthday. The key to the cage was in a pocket in another man's suit somewhere in this city, and the man was asking him to lay out the things he had hidden for six years, and Warren was twenty-nine years old and small and getting smaller and his clitty was dripping onto his boxers and his hand was already turning the knob.

The knob turned. Cold brass, then the give of the latch, and the door swung out and the smell came at him — cedar and wool and, under it, the faint chemical sweetness he had been smelling in his head all morning and had not let himself believe was real.

The winter coats came out first. He lifted them off the rail in a double armful and laid them on the narrow bed, and they were heavy and dead and smelled of the closet, and he did not care about them. The rail behind them was bare for the length of his arm, and then the suitcase, black, scuffed at the corners, sitting on the floor of the closet where he had pushed it six years ago, and he crouched and took the handle and pulled, and it came out dragging on the boards.

The combination was 0-4-1-9. Not Claire's birthday, not their anniversary, not his mother's. The date the first thing had arrived in the mail in a plain brown box with no return address, and he had stood in this room with the box in his hands and his heart going like a bird in a box, and he had thought: if I open this I am someone else. And he had opened it. And the tumblers fell and the latch popped and the lid came up.

Latex. Powder. The sweet chemical ghost of setting spray.

He knelt on the floor in his bare chest and his gray boxers with the damp half-dollar on them and the steel silver against him, and he began to take it out.

The dresses came first because they were on top, in their black tissue, and he laid each one on the bed in the order he lifted it, smoothing the tissue flat with the flat of his hand. The black latex mini — the one he had worn in Miami, the one in the video, the zip up the back and the little cap sleeves and the hem that stopped high on the thigh. The red, the same cut, a shade of red that had made him put it back in the box twice before he kept it. The champagne, sleeveless, the latex so thin it was almost a second skin, the neckline a hard straight line across the chest. The black again, but long — a floor-length latex column with a slit up one thigh and a high collar, the one he had never worn anywhere and had put on in this room at two in the morning once and looked at himself in the long mirror and taken off inside a minute because it had been too much. The plum. The white, the white that was almost bridal, the one that made him feel like a thing being unwrapped.

Six. He laid them shoulder to shoulder across the bed and the black tissue whispered and the latex caught the gray afternoon light from the window and held it in long wet-looking streaks along the seams.

The skirts were under them. Three minis, and he laid them out below the dresses — black leather, a pleated plaid so short it was barely a skirt at all, and a black latex one with a zip up the front that he had bought on a business trip to Chicago and worn once in the hotel room and never since.

The blouses. Four of them, and they were the only things in the case that were not latex or leather, and that was why he had kept them: a white silk blouse with a pussy bow, cut to sit over the breast plate and show the shape of it; a black satin one with the buttons small and pearl; a sheer chiffon thing the color of weak tea; and a cropped pink sweater that was not a blouse at all but that he had put in the case anyway, because when he wore it with the plaid skirt he had felt, for one whole hour, like a girl in a photograph.

The lingerie went at the foot of the bed. Five sets, and he laid them out set by set, the panties with the bras, because that was how they were meant to be seen. Black lace, sheer, the bra with the little satin bow at the center. Red, the same. A white set with a garter belt and the clips already on it. A black satin set with a thong, the satin so dark it looked wet. And the last one — the pink, the pink mesh, the bra cut low and the panties a tiny triangle of mesh with a slit in the front of them, and he held that one a second longer than the others and put it down last, at the end, where it would be seen.

The shoes he set on the floor at the foot of the bed in a row, the way a shop does. The three pairs of heels: the black patent mules with the six-inch heel, the ones he had thought about while he polished the oxfords; a pair of black stilettos, closed toe, the heel a needle; and a pair of red heels so high the arch of them looked painful and had been, the one time he wore them, and he had worn them for two hours anyway. The boots beside them — the thigh-highs, black leather, the platform sole and the six-inch heel, the ones that came up over the knee and had to be laced; and the ankle boots, black patent, the heel thin and tall and the toe pointed.

Three wigs on their stands. The blonde, the long one, the one Dominic had seen. A second blonde, shorter, a bob with a fringe that made him look younger and sillier and that he loved. And the dark one — a long dark fall, almost black, that he had worn exactly once and had looked at himself in the mirror and not recognized the woman looking back and had felt something go through him that had frightened him a little and thrilled him more.

He set the three stands on the bed's narrow pillow, facing the room, and the three faces looked back at him with their empty eyes and their careful partings, and the room was filling up. The bed was nearly covered. The floor at the foot of it was a row of shoes. The air smelled of latex and leather and the powder from the wig caps and the sweet ghost of the spray, and Warren knelt in the middle of it in his gray boxers with his chest bare and his clitty dripping and the steel on him, and he was not done.

The makeup bag came out of the case and he unzipped it and laid the contents out on the one clear corner of the bed in a grid, because a grid was how he thought. The foundation, the concealer, the powder. The blush, the contour, the highlighter. The eyeshadow palettes — the smoky one, the neutral one, the one with the pinks. The black eyeliner, liquid and pencil both. The mascara. The brow pencil and the little brush. The lip liner in three shades, the lipsticks, and the glosses, and the plumper — the extra-strength one, the one that stung — and he set the plumper apart from the rest, at the top of the grid, where it would be reached for first.

The nails went beside the makeup. The press-on French tips, two boxes, the color matched to the gloss. The glue. The little file. The lashes in their trays — the inch-long ones, three pairs, and the glue for those, and the tiny tweezers.

The jewelry was in a velvet roll and he unrolled it along the edge of the bed and it lay there in its little loops. The clip-on earrings — the pearls, the gold hoops, the chandeliers that caught the light and swung. The bracelets, the matching ones, the gold cuff and the gold chain and the pearls. The necklaces, the choker and the long strand and the delicate one with the little pendant, and each of them had a bracelet and a pair of earrings that went with it, and he laid them out so the sets were together, so a man could see that they matched.

And then, at the bottom of the case, under the last fold of tissue, the rest of it.

The collar was black leather, an inch and a half wide, with a steel D-ring at the front and a small brass buckle at the back, and he laid it at the head of the bed, above the wigs, above everything, and it sat there and the room was different with it there.

The ball gag was red silicone, the ball the size of a plum, the strap black leather with a buckle, and he laid it beside the collar and his mouth went dry looking at it, because he had never worn it, not once, not for a camera, not for himself, and it sat on the bed now with the afternoon light on the wet-looking red of it.

The plug was the new one, the Hush 2, silicone, size large, two inches across at the widest and heavy in a way silicone should not be, and he laid it next to the gag and it rolled a quarter turn on the sheet and stopped.

The phone buzzed against the floorboards by his knee and Warren's whole body went still, one hand still flat on the sheet where the plug had rolled, and he looked at the screen the way a man looks at a door that has just opened by itself.

San Francisco. He read it twice. Then the rest of it — How are you Darling? — and the capital D on the end of it, the way a man writes a word he means.

He sat back on his heels. The room around him was a shop window and he was kneeling in the middle of it, half naked, gray boxers damp through at the front, the steel silver and snug, and every surface of the narrow bed covered in six years of what he had done in the dark. The wigs looked at him. The collar lay at the head of the bed with its steel ring catching the gray afternoon.

He typed with one thumb, awkward, and had to delete it twice.

Home. Everything's out. All of it.

He sent it and then looked at what he had written and his ears went hot. Everything. He had never said that word to another living person with the bed in front of him. He put the phone down on the floor and picked it straight back up.

Three dots. They came and went. Came again.

Show me. Stand back far enough that I can see the bed and not just your knees.

Warren got up. His knees cracked — he had been kneeling a long time — and he stood at the foot of the bed with the phone held out in both hands and looked at the screen and at the bed and back at the screen, and then he took the picture.

The flash was off, but the shutter sound filled the little room, and he looked at what he had taken. The dresses laid shoulder to shoulder, six of them, the latex catching the window light in those wet-looking streaks. The shoes in their row on the floor. The three wigs on the pillow with their empty faces. The collar above them, and the gag red beside it, and the plug, and the makeup in its grid, and the jewelry unrolled along the edge like something in a case.

He sent it before he could think about it.

The answer took a while. Long enough that he sat down on the floor with his back against the bed frame and his knees up and the phone in both hands, and the radiator in the corner ticked the way it did, and a siren went by three streets over and faded.

You laid it out like a shop girl. That's not a complaint. That's how I know you've done this in your head a thousand times and never once had a man to show it to.

Warren read it and something in his chest turned over.

Then: The collar at the top. Good girl. You know where it goes.

He looked at the collar. Black leather, an inch and a half, the D-ring at the front. It had come in a plain brown box and he had put it on once, alone, in this room, with the door locked, and looked at himself in the long mirror and taken it off inside a minute because there had been no one to see it.

I've never worn it for anyone, he typed.

I know. Put it on. Then the plug. Then text me and tell me how it feels. Don't come. Don't try to come. You can't and we both know it, but don't even try to get your hand near it.

Warren's thumb hovered. He thought about the quarterly deck, which was sent. He thought about the office, where a man had asked him about the quarterly and he had not heard a word. He thought about Claire somewhere over the Atlantic with her shoes off and a plastic cup of wine on the tray table, and the thought went through him and hurt and he set it down gently, the way you set down something that might break, and did not pick it up again.

Yes, he typed. But it came out wrong, too small, so he deleted it and wrote: Yes. Tell me how.

No. You'll figure it out. You've been figuring it out in the dark for six years. Do it in the light this time and tell me.

Warren put the phone on the floor and stood up.

He picked up the collar first. The leather was cool and stiff and had a smell to it, hide and the faint oil of the buckle, and he turned it over in his hands and found the buckle and the little keeper and the two holes that had been punched for him. He had never punched a third. He brought it up to his throat and the leather was cold against the skin under his jaw and he got the buckle behind and worked the tongue through the second hole and his fingers were not steady and it took him three tries.

It went snug. Not tight — a finger would still go under it — but there, and the weight of it was a different weight from the steel, higher up, and when he swallowed he felt it move against his Adam's apple and the D-ring settled cold against his collarbone.

He went to the long mirror on the back of the closet door and looked.

A man in gray boxers with a black band around his throat. Narrow shoulders, flat chest, the ribs showing a little now, the pale smooth skin, the steel at his groin. His hair was flat from the morning and his eyes were red around the rims and his mouth was a little open.

He looked at the collar for a long time and could not find the word for what it did. It was not that he looked like a woman. He did not. It was that he looked like something that had been claimed, and the claiming was visible, and anyone who saw him would know that someone had put it there.

He picked up the plug.

The silicone was cool and gave under his thumb and it was heavier than it had any right to be. He had bought it in a shop on the West Side where the man behind the counter had not looked at him twice, and he had brought it home in a paper bag and put it in the case and not taken it out since.

He got the little bottle of lube from the makeup corner of the bed — it was there, it had always been there, in the case with everything else — and he slicked the plug and set it down on the sheet and then he pushed the boxers down over his hips and stepped out of them and stood in the middle of the room in nothing but the collar and the steel.

The apartment was empty. Six weeks. He had to say it to himself like a fact he was learning.

He bent over the bed with his elbows on the mattress and his knees apart and reached back, and the first cold touch of his own slick fingers made him flinch, and then he pressed and his body did not want to and he breathed and pressed again and it gave, slowly, the way a thing gives when it has decided to. He worked one finger in and then two and the stretch was a strange hot ache and his cock strained in the cage and the leaking started again, fresh, running down inside the steel.

He took his fingers out and got the plug and put the tip of it there and pushed.

The widest part of it was two inches and it did not go easy. He had to stop and breathe and start again and his forehead came down on the mattress and his breath went out of him in a sound he did not recognize, and then it slid, all at once, seating itself deep, and he felt full in a way he had never been full, and his whole body went loose and hot and his knees nearly went out from under him.

He straightened up slowly. The plug moved inside him when he moved and he made a small sound and put his hand on the bed to steady himself.

He took the phone off the floor.

It's in, he typed. The collar too. I can feel it when I move. I feel — and then he stopped, because the word he wanted was not a word he had ever written down, and he looked at the collar in the mirror and the steel and the bare pale legs and the plug seated in him and he typed: I feel full. I feel like something you own. My clitty is dripping and I can't do anything about it and it keeps going and I don't want it to stop.

He sent it and his face was hot to the ears and he did not take it back.

The dots came fast this time.

Good. Now the wig. The blonde, the one I've seen. And the makeup. All of it. You know the order. When you're done, send me a picture of Willow and not of Warren in a wig.

Warren looked at the wigs on their stands. The blonde, the long one, the one Dominic had seen, the one in the video, the one in the photographs on a server somewhere in a building Warren had never seen.

He picked up the little cap first, the flesh-toned stocking cap, and pulled it on and tucked his own hair under it, and the pins went in and he found the rhythm of it the way his hands always found it, and then he lifted the blonde off its stand and settled it down over the cap and the weight of it came onto his head and the fringe came down over his brow and the long sides came down past his shoulders, and he looked in the mirror and Willow looked back.

His throat was tight. The collar sat under the fall of the wig and the blonde hair lay over it and hid it, and he pushed the hair aside with one finger so the D-ring showed, and then he sat down on the floor with his back against the bed and pulled the makeup bag over and unzipped it.

The foundation went on with the little sponge and he did it the way he had done it a thousand times, the forehead, the cheeks, the jaw, the throat, down over the collarbone, and the pale smooth face in the mirror went even and poreless. The concealer under the eyes. The powder. The blush high on the cheekbones, more than a man would wear, the way Willow wore it. The highlighter on the tops of the cheekbones and the bridge of the nose.

The eyes took the longest. The neutral palette first, the soft brown through the crease, and then the smoky one over it, the black at the outer corner and worked in, and the black liner along the lash line and a little wing at the end, and he did the left and then the right and his hands were steady now, steadier than they had been all day, because this was the part of it that was only his and no one else's.

The brows, penciled in, a little higher than his own. The mascara. And then the lashes — the inch-long ones — and he got the glue on the strip and waited for it to go tacky and set the first one down and pressed and the lash came up and the world got further away and softer at the edges, the way it always did.

The second one. He blinked and both of them moved and the room was a different room.

Then the plumper. He uncapped it and put it on and it stung, the way it always stung, and he pressed his lips together and felt them swell and go fat and he put on a second coat and the sting went hotter and his lips were full and glossy and wet-looking and he looked at them in the mirror and touched them with one finger and left a print.

The gloss over it. The liner. The French tips — he did them last, the press-ons with the glue, and his own nails were short and clean and the tips went on over them and made his hands into a woman's hands, and he held them out and looked at them and the nails were the color of his mouth.

He got up and stood in front of the long mirror and looked at what was there.

A blonde woman in a black leather collar and a steel cage and nothing else. The lashes made her eyes huge. The lips were wet and full and slightly open. The wig fell to her shoulders and the hair moved when she turned her head and the collar showed under it and the D-ring caught the light.

She was thin. Thinner than she had been. The ribs showed and the waist was small and the hips were narrow and the legs were long and pale and bare, and the cage sat low and silver and the plug was inside her and she could feel it.

Warren picked up the phone and held it out and took the picture.

He looked at it before he sent it. The blonde in the mirror's frame, the collar, the steel, the bare shoulders, the wet mouth. It was the most naked thing he had ever looked at and it was him and it was not him and he sent it.

The answer came inside a minute, and it was longer than the others, and Warren sat down on the floor with his back against the bed and read it with his heart going.

There she is. Now listen to me. I'm in San Francisco until Thursday. You have a locked clitty that drips and a plug in your ass and six weeks of an empty apartment, and I'm going to tell you what to do with every one of those days. Tonight you're going to put on the white dress and the white lingerie and the red heels and you're going to sit in the living room with your hands folded and you're going to think about the breakfast crowd at the Langham and how they looked at you. You're not going to touch yourself. You can't come and you're not going to try. And when you've sat there an hour you're going to text me and tell me what you thought about.

Warren read it twice. The white dress. The one that made him feel like a thing being unwrapped. The red heels that had hurt for two hours and that he had worn for two hours anyway.

Why, he typed. Why the white.

The answer was one line and it went through him and settled low and stayed there.

Because you're going to sit in it and wait for me and you're going to be a good girl about it. That's all. That's the whole reason.

Warren set the phone down on the floor beside his knee. The radiator ticked. The gray afternoon light came in at the window and lay across the bed and the six dresses and the row of shoes and the three wigs on their stands, and Willow sat on the floor in the collar and the cage with the plug seated deep and the lashes making the room soft at the edges, and she looked at the white dress lying there in its black tissue and reached for it.

The tissue unfolded and the white came out of it and the white was worse in the hand than it had been on the bed. It was not a bridal white. It was the white of a thing that had been made to be looked at — the latex poured thin and smooth and the neckline a hard straight line and the hem cut high, and when it lay across her palms it weighed almost nothing, and the nothing was the humiliation, that a thing so small had been built to hold so much.

She laid it over the foot of the bed and stood in the collar and the cage with the plug moving inside her when she bent, and she did not reach for the dress. She reached for the lingerie first, because Dominic had said the white lingerie, and the white set was the one with the garter belt and the clips already on it, and the clips were cold when she got them out of the tissue and they clicked against her nails.

The panties were white lace and the lace was not soft. It was stiff with whatever they used to hold its shape, and she stepped into it and drew it up over the cage and the white lace went over the silver and the silver showed through it, a hard gleam under the weave, and she stood with her hands at her hips and looked down at herself and could not look away for a moment.

The garter belt went around her waist and the waist had loosened and the belt had to be taken in a hole she had not used before, and she felt that — the leather tongue through the third hole and the strap drawn snug on a waist that had not been that small in the fall. The stockings were white sheer and she sat on the edge of the bed with her knees together and rolled them up one at a time, and the sheer went over her leg and the seam ran up the back and she clipped the four clips and the clips bit and held and the stockings pulled taut and the white went up her legs like something being wrapped.

The bra was the worst of it. The bra was white lace and it was empty, and she put it on and the cups hung flat against her chest and the straps went over her narrow shoulders and the whole thing sat there flat and empty and absurd, and she looked at herself in the long mirror with the blonde wig and the collar and the white lace hanging empty on a flat chest and she heard herself make a sound.

It was a small sound. It came out of her the way a laugh comes out of a person in a church, half of it, cut off, and she put her hand over her mouth and the press-on nails were cold on her lip.

Because it was funny. That was the thing she could not say to anyone and could not say to Dominic and could barely say to the long mirror. It was ridiculous. There was a twenty-nine-year-old man in a guest room in a black leather collar with a steel cage on his cock and a plug up his ass and a blonde wig and a white lace bra hanging empty on his chest, and the afternoon light was coming in gray and ordinary through the window and the radiator was ticking and somewhere down the street a dog was barking and the whole thing was silly. It was silly the way a child's game is silly, and she had spent six years and a suitcase and a combination lock and a plain brown box with no return address on it, and now here she was, a man kneeling on a floor, playing.

She sat down on the floor again with the bra on and the stockings on and her back against the bed frame and the phone in her lap and she looked at the white dress over the foot of the bed.

What was she doing.

The question came up slow and flat and it did not sound like the craving. It sounded like a man in a navy Brioni at a desk at ten-fifty in the morning, and it sounded like Claire saying you've gotten thin with her hand flat on his chest on the sidewalk, and it sounded like the Hendersons' dining room and two glasses of red and the wall in the dark. There was a man in a hotel room in San Francisco telling her to sit in a white dress for an hour and think about being looked at, and she did not know his last name, and he had a video of her on a phone, and the key to the steel on her body was in his pocket, and she had never in her life met him sober in the daylight in a room with a door she could open.

She thought about the quarterly. She thought about the eleven slides she had built a hundred times and the men on the floor who said Ashford and expected a man in a suit to say something back, and about the thirty-first floor and the ninety seconds of the elevator and twenty years of a life that had been arranged like a well-made bed.

She could stop. That was what she had not let herself think in the guest room all week and had not let herself think in the hotel in Miami and had not let herself think in the lobby bar with her chin up and her heart going like a bird in a box. She could stand up. She could take the collar off and the plug out and the wig off and wash her face and put the white dress and the white lace and the red heels back in the case and zip the case and put it behind the winter coats and turn the combination off the date and be Warren Ashford again, and she could text the man in San Francisco and tell him to keep the key, or throw the key away, or do whatever he liked with the key and the video and the photographs, and she could go to the office on Wednesday and close the quarterly and come home to an empty apartment for six weeks and be a man in a suit in a life with no one in it.

She sat with the phone in her lap and her thumb on the screen and the plug seated deep and the stockings white up her legs and she did not type anything.

The radiator ticked. A siren went by and faded. The gray light moved a little on the bed.

And under the flat question, under what are you doing, there was the other thing, the small hot thing she had been keeping at the back the way you keep a bill you cannot pay, and it said: you are doing the thing you have wanted to do for six years and you have never once had the nerve to do it where anyone could see.

She had put the collar on for a man. She had put the plug in for a man. She had laid out six dresses and three wigs and a grid of makeup on a bed for a man she had known for a week and who had not yet touched her the way she had spent her whole life dreaming of being touched, and he had not promised her a thing, and he had told her no and not yet and you haven't earned it, and she had said yes to every one of them like a woman saying her vows.

Her thumb moved on the screen. She typed: I don't know if I can do this.

She looked at it. The cursor blinked at the end of it like a pulse, and her face was hot and her ears were hot and the flat question was sitting in her chest like a stone, and she sent it.

The three dots came at once, as if he had been holding the phone.

Can't do what. Be specific.

She read it and her mouth went dry. She typed, slowly, one thumb, and deleted it twice.

The white dress. Sitting in the living room in it for an hour. I feel ridiculous. I feel like a man in a wig and an empty bra and it's silly and I don't know why I'm doing it and I think maybe I should stop. All of it. I think maybe I should stop and you should keep the key and I should go back to my life and we should leave it here.

She sent it and her hands were shaking and the plug moved inside her when she breathed and she hated that she could feel it and hated more that she did not want it out.

The answer took a while. Long enough that she set the phone down on the floor and picked it up and set it down again, and the gray light on the bed had gone a shade darker, and the radiator ticked, and she thought: this is the moment. This is the moment a man decides.

You're not ridiculous. You're a man in a collar and a cage and a plug who is about to put on a white dress because I told him to, and you're scared because for six years this was a thing you did in the dark where it couldn't cost you anything, and now it's in the light and it's got a price on it. That's not silly. That's the realest thing you've ever felt and you know it or you wouldn't be asking me to let you go.

She read it twice. Her eyes stung and the lashes made the sting worse, and she pressed the heel of her hand to one eye and felt the lash come loose at the corner and she did not fix it.

If you want to stop, stop. Take the collar off and put the case away and text me and I'll send the key back in an envelope and delete the video and the pictures and you'll never hear from me again. I mean it. I don't keep men who don't want to be kept. But you'll do it looking at yourself in that mirror, and you'll know exactly what you're putting away, and you'll know that I saw it and that it was real and that it was beautiful, and you'll have to live with that for the rest of your life. So. Do you want to stop.

Warren sat on the floor in the white stockings and the empty white bra and the collar and the cage, and the plug was seated deep in her and the wig was heavy on her head and the lash was loose at the corner of her eye, and she looked at the words do you want to stop on the screen and she thought about the suitcase behind the winter coats and the combination that was not Claire's birthday and the six weeks of the empty apartment standing around her in the rooms like furniture.

She typed: No.

Then she typed, before she could take it back: No. I don't want to stop. I'm scared and I feel silly and I want to stop and I don't want to stop and I don't know how to hold both of those at once.

You don't hold them. You put the dress on and you let them both be there. That's the whole thing. Now put it on.

She set the phone down. She got up off the floor and her knees cracked and the plug shifted and she put her hand on the bed to steady herself, and she stood over the white dress lying over the foot of the bed in its black tissue.

She picked it up.

The zip was at the back and the latex was cool and she stepped into it and drew it up over the stockings and the white lace and the steel, and the latex went over the cage and the silver showed through the thin white and she did not look at that. She got her arms into the little cap sleeves and the dress came up over her shoulders and the neckline sat a hard straight line across her chest and the empty white lace of the bra showed at the edge of it, and she reached back and found the zip and drew it up and the latex closed on her like a hand.

It was tight. It was tighter than it had been. The waist of it gathered her in and the loosened waistband of the fall was gone and the dress took her at the middle and held her, and the hem sat high on her thighs and the white stockings went down out of it and the seams ran straight down the backs of her legs.

She stood in front of the long mirror and looked.

A blonde woman in a white latex dress that was too tight and too short, with a black leather collar at her throat and a loose lash at the corner of one eye and a steel cage showing silver through the white lace at her hip. The dress was the white of a thing being unwrapped. The white of a gift. The white of a girl on a card in a shop window.

And it was silly. It was still silly. A twenty-nine-year-old man in a white latex dress in a guest room, with a plug up his ass and a key in another man's pocket, and the afternoon going gray at the window and the radiator ticking — and she stood there in it and let the silly be there and let the scared be there, and under both of them the hot small thing turned over and settled and said yes.

She went and got the red heels.

They were at the end of the row on the floor and they were the highest she owned and the arch of them looked painful and had been, and she sat on the edge of the bed and put one on and the strap went around her ankle and the heel came down and the sole met the floor and her foot slid forward in it and the arch of her foot lifted and the whole line of her leg changed. She put the other one on and stood up and the room came up two inches and she put her hand on the wall and found her balance and the red heels clicked on the boards when she moved.

She went to the mirror and turned. The dress moved with her and the hem rode up and the white stockings and the red shoes and the collar and the blonde hair falling to her shoulders, and she turned again and watched herself turn and the plug moved and the cage pulled and the leaking started fresh and warm and she felt it go down inside the steel and soak into the white lace.

She picked up the phone.

She held it out and took the picture — the whole of her in the mirror, the white dress and the red heels and the collar and the loose lash and the wet mouth, standing in a guest room with the bed behind her covered in six years of what she had done in the dark.

She looked at it before she sent it. Then she sent it.

The answer came inside a minute.

There she is. Now go sit in the living room and fold your hands and wait. An hour. Don't touch the cage. Don't touch the plug. When the hour's up you text me and you tell me what you thought about, and you tell me the truth, and if you lie to me I'll know.

Warren set the phone down on the bed and looked at the door of the guest room.

The lock was turned. The apartment beyond it was empty and quiet and six weeks wide, and the white dress was tight at her waist and the red heels were already beginning to hurt, and the flat question was still there in her chest, small now, and the hot thing was louder, and she turned the lock and opened the door and stepped out into the hall in the white latex and the red heels with the plug seated deep and the key in a pocket in another man's suit in San Francisco, and the boards were cold under the thin soles and the heels clicked, and she walked down the corridor toward the living room with her hands at her sides.

The hall mirror was old, and it was not a good mirror. It had come with the apartment, hung by the door on a wire nail Warren had never moved, and it was foxed at the corners and gave everything back a half-shade too dark. Claire had wanted to replace it for years. He had always said the light was fine.

Willow stopped in front of it because her heel caught on the board and she put her hand out to the wall, and when she straightened she was looking at herself, and the looking went through her like cold water.

The woman in the glass was not the woman from the guest room mirror. The guest room had been closed and small and hers, lit gray from one window, and a mirror in a locked room tells you what you want to hear. The hall mirror had the whole apartment behind it — the framed print of the Cape, the umbrella stand, Claire's raincoat still on the hook because she had forgotten it, the pale green of the wall she had chosen herself from a fan of paint chips on the kitchen table four years ago.

And in the middle of all of it, a blonde in a white latex dress.

The dress looked different out here. In the guest room it had been a costume on a bed. In the hall, under the ordinary bulb, it looked like exactly what it was: too short, too tight, too white, pulled over a body that had no business in it. The latex caught the light in a long gleam down her side and the gleam showed every place the dress did not fit — the flatness of the chest, the bones at the top of the shoulders, the hard straight neckline sitting on nothing. The loose lash hung at the corner of her eye like a moth. Her lipstick had gone off at the inner edge of her mouth. The red heels made her calves look long and thin and slightly wrong, like a colt's.

Claire's raincoat hung on the hook beside her, and the collar of it was turned up, and Willow stood there in the hall with the raincoat and the umbrella stand and the print of the Cape and felt the whole apartment look at her.

Her hand came up to the collar at her throat. It was there. It was real. The leather had gone warm from her skin and the D-ring was cold and she hooked one finger through it and did not pull.

Then she went back. She did not think about it; her body turned her around and the heels clicked and she went back down the corridor with her jaw set and the plug moving with each step, and she shut the guest room door and turned the lock and sat down on the floor with her back against the bed frame and her knees up and the white dress pulled tight across them, and she picked up the phone.

I looked in the hall mirror, she typed. I look ridiculous. I look like a man in a dress. I can't go out there like this.

She sent it and put the phone down and picked at the loose lash with her nail, and it came away and she held it between two fingers and did not know what to do with it, so she set it on the floor.

The three dots came almost at once, and then they stopped, and then they came again, and the phone was quiet for a long minute.

Then a call.

Her whole body went still. The screen said D and the phone buzzed against the floorboards, and she looked at it the way she had looked at the door that opened by itself. She had never heard his voice except the one time in her kitchen. She answered it and put it to her ear and did not say anything.

"You're in the guest room," Dominic said.

"Yes."

"Door locked?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now listen to me, and don't answer until I'm done." The line was quiet behind him — a hotel quiet, the hum of a big building at night. "You went out into that hall expecting to feel like a woman. That's not what a mirror's for. A mirror in a locked room is a woman. A mirror in a hallway is every other thing in the house looking at her. You took one step out of the only room where this was yours and it turned on you."

Willow's throat worked. She did not say anything.

"What did you see?"

"A man," she said, and her voice came out thin and wrong, the voice of Warren Ashford in a collar. "In a dress. A thin man in a white dress with his hair in a wig."

"No. What did you actually see. Not the word you'd use to be cruel to yourself. What was in the glass."

She sat with the phone at her ear and looked at the long mirror on the closet door, at the woman sitting on the floor in the white dress with one lash gone and her knees drawn up.

"A blonde," she said. "Sitting on the floor. In a white dress. With a collar on."

"And?"

"And the dress is too small and the chest is flat and the wig is a wig."

"That's the inventory," Dominic said. "I asked you what you saw. Say the rest of it."

She pressed her lips together and the plumper stung all over again and her eyes stung behind the one remaining lash, and she said, very quietly, "She's scared."

"There she is." His voice had not got louder. It had got lower, and slower, the way a man talks to a horse. "She's scared and she's sitting on a floor in a white dress she put on because I told her to, and she's got a plug in her ass and a collar on her neck and she's been dripping since noon, and she's scared because she's been alone in the dark with this for six years and now she's in a hallway where the raincoat hangs. Of course she's scared. Scared isn't the opposite of what you are. Scared is what it costs."

"It looked silly."

"It is silly. A grown man in a white latex dress is a silly thing. I'm not going to lie to you to get you out of that room." A pause. She heard him breathe. "But silly's not the same as wrong, and it's not the same as ugly, and it's sure as hell not the same as alone. You looked in that glass and you saw the one thing in a million you've been too frightened to want in the daylight, and you called it ridiculous because you've spent your whole life being punished for wanting it. I know that voice. I've heard it in my own head."

Willow's hand went to her mouth.

"Here's what I want you to hear," he said. "That woman in the glass is not a man in a wig. That woman is thin because she's been starving for something for six years and nobody ever fed her. That woman's chest is flat because the tits are on the bed behind her in a box and she hasn't earned them yet. That woman's on the floor because she looked at herself in the wrong mirror and forgot who told her to put the dress on. I told her. And I'm telling her again. She's mine. She's not ridiculous. She's mine."

She was crying. She had not decided to and it was happening, and the tears went down and the one lash came loose and hung, and she made a sound into her own hand.

"I'm here," Dominic said. "I'm not going anywhere. Breathe."

She breathed. It came out of her in a long wet shudder and she put her forehead against her knee and the phone against her ear and breathed.

"Now," he said when her breathing had quieted. "You're going to do something for me, and it's small, and it's going to be hard, and then we'll talk about the hour."

"What."

"You're going to stand up. You're going to walk back down that hall. You're going to stop in front of that mirror, and you're not going to look at the raincoat or the paint or the print. You're going to look at her. And you're going to say it out loud, so I can hear it."

"Say what."

"Whatever's true. You'll know it when it's in your mouth."

She got up. The plug shifted and she steadied herself on the bed and the white dress pulled and she went to the door and turned the lock and stepped out into the hall, and the boards were cold and the heels clicked and the raincoat was still on the hook, and she stopped in front of the old foxed glass.

The woman looked back at her. One lash. Lipstick gone at the inner edge. The collar under the fall of blonde hair and the D-ring showing where she had pushed the hair aside.

She stood there for a long time and the phone was warm in her hand and she could hear Dominic breathing on the other end of it, and she opened her mouth and nothing came, and then something did.

"I'm scared," she said, out loud, to the glass. "And I'm not going to stop."

The line was quiet.

"That's the one," Dominic said, and his voice had gone rough at the edges, and she heard him let out a breath he had been holding. "That's the one, darling. Say it again. Say it like you mean it."

She looked at the woman in the glass and the woman looked back and the collar showed and the D-ring caught the bulb and she said it again, steadier, "I'm scared and I'm not going to stop."

"Good girl." The words landed soft and low and they went through her and settled somewhere under her ribs. "Now. Go sit in the living room. Hands folded. An hour. And when you text me, you tell me the truth about what you thought — all of it, the scared parts too. I'll be right here. I'm not going to leave you sitting in there alone with it."

"All right."

"Willow."

"Yes."

"You're beautiful. I saw it in Miami and I see it now and I'm going to keep saying it until you can say it to that mirror without needing me. Now go."

The call ended. She stood in the hall with the phone in her hand and the raincoat on the hook and the print of the Cape, and she set the phone down on the little table by the door where the keys lived, and she walked into the living room and sat down on the edge of the sofa with her hands folded in her lap and the white dress tight and the red heels on the rug and the plug deep in her, and she looked at the clock on the mantel and the hour began.

The clock on the mantel was a brass carriage clock that had been a wedding present from Claire's aunt, and it ticked. Willow had never noticed the ticking before. It had always been a sound under the television, under the radio, under the kettle. Now it was the loudest thing in the apartment and it moved like a small animal pacing behind glass, and she watched the minute hand lean toward the quarter and could not make it go faster with her eyes.

Her hands were folded in her lap. She had folded them the way he said. The nails were press-on French with a gloss that caught the lamp, and she turned one thumb to look at the white tip against the white latex and the clean line of it, and it was a woman's hand. It was. The wrist was thin and the arm was smooth and the nails were long and white-tipped and it was a woman's hand folded over a woman's knee in a woman's dress, and the clock ticked, and she thought: it is not the hand that is the problem. It is the room. The room knows what I am.

The sofa had a small tear in the seam of the cushion where Warren had caught it on a belt buckle years ago and never fixed it. She put her thumb in the tear and rubbed the stuffing and thought about Claire, who would come home from the book club at half past nine, and the thought went down her spine like a cold finger and she took her thumb out of the tear.

The clock said six minutes.

She got up. She had not meant to. The heels clicked on the boards and she went back down the hall past the guest room door and stopped at the table by the door where the keys lived and picked up the phone and typed with a thumbnail, because the long tips made it slow.

Six minutes. I have thought about the raincoat and I have thought about Claire coming home and I have thought about the tear in the sofa. I have not thought about her. I keep going round her. Is that the truth you wanted.

The three dots came and stopped and came.

That's the truth I wanted. Now go look at her again and tell me what she's doing.

She turned. The hall mirror was three steps behind her and the foxed glass took the lamp and gave it back half a shade too dark, and the blonde came up in it out of the dim, and Willow stood still and let her come.

The woman in the glass had stopped crying. That was the first thing. The face was still streaked where the tears had gone and the one lash was a black smudge at the corner of her eye, and she had the look of a woman who has been crying and has finished, and the finishing had left something in the set of the mouth. Her chin was up. Not much. A little. The collar showed at her throat and the D-ring lay against the hollow of it and her shoulders were back in a way they had not been, and the white dress was too small and the chest was flat and the wig was a wig, and none of that had changed, and something had.

She's standing up straight, Willow typed. She's got her chin up. She looks like she's been crying and she's done with it.

Good, Dominic sent. That's not a man in a wig. A man in a wig would have taken it off by now and had a shower and put the box back in the case. She hasn't. She's standing in a hallway at night in a white dress with a plug in her and she's got her chin up. What's she waiting for?

Willow looked at the woman and the woman looked back and the clock ticked somewhere behind her in the living room and she typed: For you.

There it was. She read the two words on the screen after she had sent them and her face went hot and she did not take them back.

The reply took a moment. When it came it was longer than the others and she read it standing up in the hall with the phone tilted to the lamp.

Then hear me, because I'm going to say it once and you're going to keep it. You are a man who is a woman in a white dress in a hallway at night, and that is not a mistake you made, it's not a phase, it's not a thing to be cured of. It's what you are. There's no version of you that gets to be a man in a suit and be happy, because that man has been trying for six years and he's tired and he's lonely and his wife hasn't touched him and he can't get it up for her and he knows why. The suit is the costume. The dress is the truth. You can put the truth back in a box and lock it in a case and carry it to Miami and back and it will still be true when you open the case, and one day you'll be too old to open it and you'll have spent your whole life being a man in a suit who was scared. I'm not going to let that happen to you. Not because I'm kind. Because I want the woman in the glass and I don't want the man. So put her chin up and keep it up and go sit down and finish your hour.

Willow read it twice. The second time her eyes went slower and the words went in and sat down somewhere behind her breastbone and stayed there, warm and heavy, and her thumb moved on the screen and she did not type anything because there was nothing to type that would not be smaller than what he had sent.

She went back into the living room and sat down on the edge of the sofa and folded her hands. The clock said eleven minutes. She looked at the woman in the long mirror on the closet door across the room, small and white and far off, and the woman had her chin up, and the clock ticked, and Willow sat with her hands folded and let the minute hand lean and did not look away from her.

At twenty-three minutes the phone lit on the table by the door and she got up and crossed the rug with the heels clicking and read it standing.

You've stopped texting me the scared parts. That means either you're not scared or you're sitting on it. Which.

Both, she typed. I'm scared of Claire coming home and finding me like this and I'm scared of the morning and I'm scared of what I'll be when the hour's up. And I'm sitting on it because there's nothing to do about any of it tonight and you told me to fold my hands.

Then unfold them and do one thing for me. Go to the guest room and get the box with the tits in it and put them on. Not for the morning. For the last half hour of your hour. You said the chest was flat and it is, and I want to know what she looks like when it isn't.

Willow stood in the hall with the phone in her hand and her heart going and the raincoat on the hook beside her and the print of the Cape, and she thought about the box on the bed in the locked room, and she thought about the hour, and she typed one word and sent it.

Yes.

The guest room smelled of the latex and the powder and the warm bulb of the closet light, and Willow shut the door behind her and turned the lock out of habit, though there was no one in the apartment to lock out. The box was where she had left it on the bed, square and white with a plain gray lid, and she lifted the lid off with both hands and set it down and looked at what was inside.

The breast plate lay in tissue, and the silicone was cool and matte and the color of her own throat, and the two nipples stood up off it like something that had been startled. She had worn it a hundred times. She had never once put it on while a man was on the other end of a phone, breathing, waiting to hear what she looked like.

She lifted it out. It was heavier than it looked — that was the thing nobody understood about it, the weight, the way it pulled at the shoulders and made you stand differently, made you bring your arms in and your chin down and your chest forward, because the body under it had to answer for the weight. She turned it over and the back was tacky and cool and there were two little cups where her own flat chest would go, and she set it against herself with the cups over her own small hard nipples and the silicone went cold and then, in a moment, warm.

She reached back and found the straps and drew them over her shoulders and they crossed at the back and the clasp met between her shoulder blades and she got it closed on the second try. The plate settled. The weight came down and her shoulders went back to carry it and her spine straightened without her telling it to, and she stood in the middle of the room in the white dress with the plate against her chest and looked down at herself.

The white latex bodice was a hard straight line and the plate came up under it and filled it. The white lace of the bra showed at the neckline and the plate showed through the lace, the pale silicone and the two nipples standing up under the white like something under a sheet, and she put both hands on her chest and felt the weight of it and the warmth of it and the way her own hands did not know what to do with a chest that was not hers.

The dress had been too small before. It was not too small now. The plate pushed the bodice out and the latex took it and held it and the neckline sat where it was meant to sit, on something, and the white went flat and smooth across the two round weights and the seams of the dress drew tight over them and the whole shape of her changed.

She pulled the phone out of the waistband where she had tucked it and held it up and typed with the long white tips, slow.

It's on. The dress fits now. It didn't fit before.

The answer came quick. Send it.

She held the phone out at arm's length and turned a little toward the long mirror and took the picture, and the flash was off and the room was gray and the white dress glowed in the glass, and she looked at what she had taken before she sent it. A blonde in a white dress with a chest. The nipples standing up through the white lace and the white latex. The collar under the fall of hair. The one lash gone and the other still on, and the mouth wet and full and slightly open.

She sent it.

The dots came and went and came and then the answer.

There she is. Now stand in front of that mirror and look at her properly. Not the hall mirror. The one in the room. The one that's yours.

Willow turned the phone over in her hands and looked at the long mirror on the closet door. The closet light was on behind her and the room light was off and the glass gave her back in a soft gray wash, and she walked over and stood in front of it and put the phone down on the bed.

The woman in the glass had a chest.

That was all she could see at first. The white dress and the white lace and the two round weights pushing out the latex and the nipples standing up hard under the white, and the waist pulled in under them and the hips narrow and the legs long and white in the stockings and the red shoes bright at the bottom of the glass like two drops of something spilled. The blonde hair fell to the shoulders and the collar showed at the throat and the D-ring lay against the hollow of it, and the face above it was streaked where the tears had gone and had one lash and one bare eye, and the mouth was full and glossy and wet.

She put her hands on her hips. The heels made her tall and the plate made her a shape and the dress made her a line, and she turned a little, one hip out, and watched the white dress move on her and the nipples move under the lace and the hair swing.

She pouted. It came up out of her without deciding — the lower lip pushed out and the chin down and the eyes up through the lashes, the way Willow pouted at a camera, the way she had pouted at the little green light of the laptop a hundred nights in this room. The pout made her mouth look fuller and made the gloss catch the light and made her look, for a moment, like a girl who had been told no and was going to get her way anyway.

She turned the other way. The plug moved inside her when she turned and she felt it and her breath caught, and the catch went through the pout and made it something else, and she saw it in the glass — the mouth opening a little, the eyes going soft.

She posed. She did not think about it. Her body knew the poses the way her hands knew the makeup. One hand on the hip and the other up in the hair, lifting it off the collar so the black leather showed and the D-ring caught the bulb. Shoulders back. Chest out. Hips turned. The white dress pulled tight across the plate and the latex shone along the seam of her side and the red shoes pointed and the legs went long.

She looked at herself and the woman in the glass looked back and she felt the small hot thing turn over under her ribs and settle, and she did not look away.

Then she smiled.

It started small — the corner of her mouth, the way a smile starts when you are not sure you are allowed — and then it came up and took the whole face, and the woman in the glass smiled at her with the full wet mouth and the one lash and the bare eye and the tear-streaks gone dry on her cheeks, and the smile made her look young and silly and happy and a little bit wicked, and Willow stood in front of the long mirror in the white latex and the red heels with the plug in her and the collar on and the plate heavy on her chest, and she smiled at herself and could not stop.

She picked up the phone and held it out and took the picture of the smile — the whole of her, the pout gone, the chin up, the white dress and the red shoes and the collar and the grinning wet mouth — and sent it without looking at it first.

The answer took a moment.

There's my girl. That's the face I've been waiting for all night. You went out in that hall and cried and came back and put your tits on and now you're grinning at yourself in the glass like a woman who knows exactly what she's got. Tell me what changed.

Willow looked at the woman in the mirror and thought about it, and the thinking was slow and the smile was still there at the corners of her mouth.

She typed: The dress fit. When the dress fit, I stopped being a man in a dress. I don't know how to say it better than that. I put the plate on and the dress closed over it and it was a dress on a body it was made for, and I looked at her and she was pretty. She was actually pretty. I've looked in this mirror a hundred times and I've never once thought she was pretty.

She sent it and her face was hot and the smile had gone a little wobbly and she did not take it back.

The dots came slow this time. Then the answer, and it was short.

You've been pretty the whole time. You just couldn't see it because you were looking for the man. Now finish your hour. Hands folded. And when it's up, you text me the truth about what you thought about, and then I'm going to tell you what tomorrow looks like.

Willow read it and set the phone down on the bed and stood in front of the mirror a moment longer, and she turned once more, one hip out, and watched the white dress move and the red shoes click, and the woman in the glass turned with her and smiled and the smile said yes.

The hour was not up.

She knew it without checking — the phone had gone dark on the bed and the closet light still hummed behind her and the room was still gray, and the hour had started when he said start, and she had spent most of it in front of the mirror. She crossed the carpet and sat down on the edge of the bed with her knees together and her hands folded in her lap, and the plate pulled at her shoulders when she sat and the corset pressed up under her ribs and the dress made a small sound against the bedspread.

Hands folded. She folded them. The white tips lay over the white latex and the red nails sat on the white like something set down on a table, and she looked at them and let the quiet come in.

The plug was there. It had been there all night and she had stopped counting it and now, sitting still with nothing to do but wait, it came back to her — the full blunt weight of it, the way it sat and did not move unless she moved. She moved, a little, testing, and it moved with her and her breath went out through her nose and she folded her hands tighter and sat still again.

The clock on the nightstand was a hotel clock with red numbers and she watched it change. Nine fifty-one. She had never in her life sat in a locked room in a woman's body and watched a minute go by. The minute went by. The bulb in the closet was warm on the back of her neck through the blonde hair and the hair was heavy and the collar was warm too, warmed by her own throat, and the D-ring lay cool against the hollow of it because the metal did not take the heat the way the leather did.

Nine fifty-four. Her jaw had gone tight without her noticing and she let it go slack. The plate weighed on her chest and the two nipples of it stood up under the white lace and she could feel them there, not as a thing she was wearing but as a thing that was part of the shape she was in, and when she breathed the white went flat and then round again and the lace moved.

Somewhere down the corridor a door closed and a man laughed and the laugh went past the room and away. She sat with her hands folded and listened to it go.

Nine fifty-eight. Her phone lit up on the bedspread and she did not reach for it, because he had not said to, and the light lay there on the white cotton for a moment and then went out.

Ten o'clock. The numbers turned over and she sat for one more minute to be sure, and then she unfolded her hands and picked up the phone and the screen came up under her thumb and his message was waiting and she read it twice before she answered.

It said: Time. Tell me the truth. Not the pretty version. What did you think about, standing there?

She looked at the question and her thumbs hovered over the glass and the white tips clicked when she started to type and she stopped and started again.

She typed: I thought about the dress fitting. And then I thought about you looking at the picture of it. And then — she stopped and read it back and her face was hot and she made herself finish it — and then I thought about the door of this room being open and somebody walking past and seeing me in it. A man. Any man. Seeing me standing in front of the mirror with my tits on and my hands in my hair. And I got — she could not type the word and then she typed it — wet. I got wet thinking about it. I'm wet now. I've been wet since the bar.

She sent it before she could take it apart and then she sat with the phone in both hands and her heart going and the plug in her and the wetness between her thighs real and undeniable and hers.

The dots came at once. Then: Good girl. That's the truth I wanted. Now listen, because this is what tomorrow looks like and I'm only going to say it once.

She sat up straighter. The plate came up with her.

Breakfast is at seven. The dining room on the mezzanine, the one with the windows. You'll be there at six forty-five, dressed, and you'll be dressed the way I tell you and not the way you'd choose. You'll walk in on your own two heels and you'll ask the girl at the desk for a table for one, and you'll sit where she puts you, and you'll order coffee and you'll drink it and you'll eat something, because I'll be watching to see that you do.

She read it and her mouth had gone dry and she typed: You'll be there?

I'll be there. You won't know where I'm sitting and you won't look for me. That's the rule. If you look for me, I'll know, and I'll be disappointed, and you don't want that on the first morning.

She pressed the phone against her chest, against the plate, and the glass was warm from her hands and the white dress was warm under it, and she thought about the mezzanine dining room with the windows and the breakfast crowd and the girl at the desk and a table for one.

What do I wear, she typed. And then, because she could not help it: Please don't make me wear the white. It's beautiful and I love it and I can't walk into a room full of people in it. Not in the daylight. Please.

The answer took its time. She watched the dots and her thumb found the D-ring at her throat and turned it and turned it.

Not the white. The black. The high neck, long sleeves, the one that covers you from your chin to your wrists and stops at the tops of your thighs. The stockings with the seam up the back. The boots — the platform ones, the six inch — because you'll be standing at that desk and I want to see you hold still in them. No gloves. The collar stays on. And the face you've got on right now stays on right now — you'll do it fresh at six, and you'll do it exactly the way you did it tonight, because it worked.

She read it and the black dress came up behind her eyes, the high neck and the long sleeves and the hem that stopped where it stopped, and she knew exactly which one he meant because there was only one like it in the box.

Yes, she typed. Then: What do I say if someone talks to me?

You be polite. You be a lady. You keep your voice down and your chin up and you don't tell anyone anything, and if a man asks you a question you answer it sweetly and you don't look at me. And Willow — she read her own name and stopped — if a man asks you to come up to his room, you say no thank you, and you say it nicely, and then you sit back down and you finish your coffee. Because you're not his. You're mine, and I don't share on the first morning.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in her hands and the white dress on and the red shoes on the floor where she had stepped out of them, and the words sat in her chest and made a place for themselves.

I'm yours, she typed. I'll be at the desk at six forty-five. I'll order the coffee. I won't look for you.

Good. Now get out of the white and take the face off and put the plate in the box and get some sleep. You've got a long morning and you're going to want to be steady for it.

She set the phone down and did not move for a moment. Then she reached back and found the clasp between her shoulder blades and opened it, and the straps came off her shoulders and the plate came away from her chest and the weight went out of her all at once and her spine came down and her shoulders came in and the dress hung empty where the chest had been.

She laid the plate in the tissue in the box and looked at it lying there, the two nipples still standing up, and she put the lid on and pressed it down.