The door clicked shut and the diner went away. Not silent — the lunch rush clatter was still there, plates and voices and the fryer hissing, but it came through the wood like something happening in another town. What was left was the closet: a single bare bulb on a cord, swinging a little from the slam, throwing their shadows long and crooked across the shelves of canned peaches and Quaker Oats boxes stacked to the ceiling. The air sat thick with old grease and cardboard, and under it, faint, the vanilla of the air freshener from the dining room bleeding in beneath the door.

Dolly didn't say anything. She just went down.

One knee, then the other, onto the gritty linoleum, and her hands came up the backs of his thighs under the skirt, nails dragging light enough to raise the fine hair on his arms. Georgia's shoulder blades found the shelving and stopped there. A can rocked somewhere above his head and he didn't look up. He couldn't look anywhere but down.

The bulb swung. Her freckles caught the light and lost it and caught it again.

"You've been walking around all shift with this thing swinging under your hem," she said, thumb already hooked in the elastic of nothing, because there was nothing under the skirt but him. "Every man in here's been trying to read the specials board and you're the specials board."

"I didn't hear you complaining."

"I'm not complaining." Her smirk tilted up at him, green eyes narrow in the bad light. "I'm stating facts for the record."

She pushed the blue cotton up his hip and the whole skirt went with it, bunched at his waist, and the cool of the closet hit his penis a second before her breath did. He was already hard — had been since the middle of the shift, since the third time he'd bent for the coffee pot and felt the hem ride and known exactly who was watching from the corner booth. Dolly looked at it the way she looked at a tip left on a table. Appraising. Pleased. Already spending it.

"There he is," she said, and took him in her mouth to the root in one motion.

Georgia's hand went into her hair before he told it to. Dirty blond, warm from the diner, and he got a fistful and held on while she worked him with a flat tongue up the underside, slow, then fast, then slow again, her lips catching the ridge and letting it go with a wet sound that was obscene in a room this small. She knew how he liked it. She'd known for two years, since a dorm room and a bottle of gin and a conversation that had started as a joke and ended with her on top of him, both of them laughing, both of them meaning it. She'd never once needed to be taught.

His stilettos scraped the linoleum, one heel skidding an inch when her hand came up and pressed flat against his hip, holding him against the shelf. She pulled off him with a wet pop and looked up, chin slick.

"Don't you dare," she said. "Not yet."

"I wasn't—"

"You were about to." She licked her thumb, wiped the corner of her mouth, and stood, and her skirt was already hiked to her waist before she'd finished the motion. No underwear either. Of course not. She worked the same shift he did and had for as long as he'd known her, and neither of them had ever pretended the uniform was for the customers.

"Somebody comes in—" he started.

"Then they get a show and a free pancake." She stepped in close, both hands on his chest, and walked him back against the shelf until the cans rattled. "You've got about ninety seconds of my patience left, Georgia. I've been watching that new girl stare at your lap since eleven o'clock. She nearly dropped a whole pot of coffee on Mrs. Kessler's lap. You want to know what she said to me in the kitchen?"

"I don't—"

"She said, 'Does he know it shows?'" Dolly's hand closed around his penis and stroked once, root to tip, and his whole spine tried to leave his body. "And I said, 'Honey, he knows.'"

She turned, backed herself against him, and reached behind to guide him in — no ceremony, no preamble, just the blunt wet head of him finding her and then the long slow give of her vagina taking him to the hilt while she braced one hand on the shelf and bent forward. The skirt of her waitress dress fanned over his hip. He felt every inch of the way in, the tight clench of her adjusting around him, the heat of her, and then she rocked back and took him deeper and made a sound low in her throat that he'd heard a hundred times and would never get tired of.

"There," she said. "That's the thing. That's the thing right there."

He got both hands on her hips and found the rhythm she'd already set, and the closet filled up with the sound of it — the slap of skin, the wet drag of him pulling almost all the way out and driving back in, the little grunt she made at the end of every stroke. The bulb swung on its cord. Cardboard boxes shifted against the wall. Somewhere out in the dining room a woman laughed at something, and the sound came through the door thin and far away, like the world was a rumor.

"Harder," Dolly said. "Come on, you know I don't break."

He gave it to her harder. One hand left her hip and slid up under the back of her dress, palm flat on the damp small of her back, and she arched into it and pushed back to meet him so the slap went sharp and flat and echoed off the shelves. Her cunt gripped him on every stroke — a hot clench, a pull, like she was trying to keep him — and he lost the thread of where the diner was, what time it was, whose shift it was.

"That new girl," Dolly said, breathless, cheek almost against the shelf, "she's gonna want a turn."

"Dolly—"

"I'm not jealous. I'm informing you." She pushed back hard, took him to the root, and stayed there a second, grinding. "You're gonna have to learn to say no, or this whole diner's gonna be a line out the door."

"I don't want—" He pulled back and thrust, and the sentence broke in half. "I don't want anybody else."

"Liar." But she said it soft, and her hand came back and found his hand on her hip and squeezed it.

He was close. He'd been close since the coffee pot. The heat gathered low and tight and started to climb, and his strokes went shorter, faster, losing the rhythm she'd built, and she felt it and dropped her shoulders lower and gave him the angle he needed, and the wet sound of it got louder and sloppier and neither of them cared.

"Georgia," she said, and that was all, just his name, the one she used when it was real.

"I'm gonna—"

"Yeah. Do it. Do it on me."

He pulled out at the last second, one hand stripping himself fast, and ejaculates across the backs of her thighs and the bunched skirt and the pale curve of her ass — hot, thick cum, roping down over her skin while she stayed bent and braced and breathing hard against the shelf. The first pulse hit and then the second and then the long slow drain of the last, and his knees went loose and he caught himself on the shelf with his free hand and stood there shaking.

Dolly straightened slowly. She reached back and dragged two fingers through the mess on her thigh, looked at them, and put them in her mouth without any particular hurry.

"Well," she said. "That's the lunch rush sorted."

Georgia laughed — a ragged, wrecked sound — and got his skirt back down over himself with hands that weren't quite steady. "You're disgusting."

"You're welcome." She smoothed her dress, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and looked him over with the same appraising look she'd given his penis. "You've got a smear on your apron. Fix it before Hazel sees."

He looked down and there it was, a small wet spot on the white cotton, and he was reaching for it when the clipboard rapped the door.

Once. Sharp. Deliberate.

They both went still. Georgia's hand hovered over the apron. Dolly's smirk didn't leave her face but her eyes cut sideways to the door and stayed there. Outside, the diner kept clattering — a voice calling for a coffee refill, the fryer hissing, somebody laughing — and under it, close, the small scrape of a shoe on the other side of the wood.

Then the lock turned.

The click was quiet and final and it didn't tell them a thing. It could have been Hazel locking them in for a word. It could have been Hazel locking the door behind her, clipboard in hand, ready to read them the riot act about inventory. It could have been a customer who'd wandered back past the kitchen and found the wrong door and turned the knob out of nothing but curiosity, and would open it now and see the two of them — Dolly flushed and mussed against the shelf, Georgia with his skirt wrinkled and his apron spotted and his penis still half-hard and wet in his hand.

Neither of them moved. Georgia's breath came shallow and loud in the small room. The bulb swung once more and settled, and the shadows on the boxes stopped moving, and in the silence behind the door somebody on the other side put their hand on the knob and waited.

The knob didn't turn. It just sat there under the hand, and the hand didn't move, and the not-moving was worse than anything the door could have done. Georgia counted the seconds and got to four before he lost count and started over. Dolly's eyes were still cut sideways, and one of her hands had come up to the front of her dress, fingers spread flat against her sternum like she was holding something in.

Under the door, a thread of light from the corridor. Feet on the other side — one shoe, then the second coming down beside it, both of them planted square to the wood. Not a customer's shuffle. Not the drift of somebody who'd wandered back past the kitchen looking for the men's room. Somebody standing with their weight even and their hand on the knob and no hurry at all.

"Say something," Dolly breathed, barely moving her lips.

"What am I supposed to say?"

"Not you. Me. I'll say something." She swallowed, and her throat moved, and her smirk was gone now, tucked away somewhere, and what was left on her face was the face she used when a john got rough and she had to talk him down. "If it's Hazel—"

"What if it's not Hazel."

"Then it's a man who came back here on his own two feet and that's Hazel's problem, not ours." She said it flat. She didn't believe it. Georgia could hear that she didn't believe it, and he could hear that she was going to say it anyway, and he loved her a little for it, standing there with her skirt still bunched at her waist and his spend drying on the back of her thigh.

His apron. He looked down at it again — the wet spot, small, the size of a thumbnail, no bigger than a coffee ring. He licked his thumb and pressed it into the cotton and the spot went darker and spread instead of disappearing. He tried the hem of his skirt instead, dragged it across the apron, and that only smeared it wider. Above him a Quaker Oats box sat square on its shelf, the man on the front grinning out of his white hat, and Georgia stood under him with his penis going soft against his thigh and his apron ruined and a stranger's hand on the door.

The bulb ticked. It always ticked when it swung — the filament cooling, or the cord, or something in the fixture he'd never asked about — and in the quiet the tick sounded like a clock in a room that had no clock. Dolly heard it too. Her jaw moved once, side to side, the way she did when she was doing arithmetic.

"Georgia," she said, still quiet. "Your skirt."

He looked. It had ridden up again when he'd bent to the apron, the way it always did, and the hem sat high enough that the underside of him showed pale against the blue. He pulled it down. It stayed down for a second and then crept back up, the way it always crept, because the cotton was cheap and the cut was short and the whole point of it was that it didn't stay down.

"It's fine," he said.

"It is not fine."

"It's as fine as it's going to get."

Dolly made a sound low in her nose — not a laugh, close to one — and her hand came off her chest and went to her hair, and she tucked the loose strand behind her ear again, and then she did it again, the same strand, like her fingers had forgotten they'd already done it. Georgia watched her do it twice and understood that she was scared, and that she would rather have her tongue cut out than say so, and that he was supposed to pretend he hadn't noticed.

So he pretended. He reached past her and picked a can off the shelf — peaches, heavy syrup, dented on one side — and set it back down on a different shelf, and the small scrape of tin on tin was the loudest thing in the room. Dolly looked at him like he'd lost his mind. He looked back like, what, and she looked at the door, and he looked at the door, and the two of them stood in the canned peaches and the Quaker Oats and waited.

The hand came off the knob.

They heard it — the small dry sound of a palm lifting away from metal — and then the shoe on the other side moved, one step, and stopped, and moved again, and the thread of light under the door shifted as whoever it was went sideways along the corridor. A shadow crossed the gap and was gone. Another voice, farther off, called something about a check at table six, and a woman answered it, and the fryer hissed, and the diner went on being the diner on the other side of a door that had never opened.

Dolly let out a breath she'd been holding since the rap. It came out of her in a rush and took some of the stiffness out of her shoulders with it, and she put her hand on the shelf and leaned there a second, head down, the way she leaned on the counter at the end of a double.

"That was Hazel," she said. "That was her. She does that. She raps and then she stands there and lets you sweat, and then she walks off and you spend the rest of your shift wondering."

"You don't know that."

"No." Dolly straightened and pulled her skirt down over her hips, smoothing the front with both palms, businesslike, and reached back to check the back of it with her fingers and found the wet and made a face and licked her thumb and worked at it. "No, I don't know that. But the lock's still turned, and if she'd wanted in she'd be in." She looked at him. "You want to stand here all day, or you want to go back out there and find out?"

Georgia looked at the door. The light under it was steady now. No shadow, no shoe, nothing. Just the ordinary bright line of the corridor and the ordinary clatter of the lunch rush and the ordinary ticking of a bulb that had stopped swinging.

He put his hand on the knob.