The metro station's cool ceramic tiles clashed with the humid air, thick with car exhaust and sweat, as bass-heavy music thumped from a nightclub's open door. Dipanwita Roy stood at the platform's edge in the grey saree, the one he'd asked for, her pallu pulled low over her shoulder, the silk clinging to the swell of her hip. The train hadn't come yet. She'd been standing here for eleven minutes, and she'd checked her phone four times, and none of the notifications were from him.

She didn't understand what was happening to her. She was Dipanwita Roy, HR head of a BPO with three hundred employees under her, a woman who had made men call her Maa and beg to be her good boy. And here she was, on a metro platform, in a saree she'd chosen because a twenty-two-year-old finance intern had told her to, waiting for a text that said nothing.

The train came. She got on. She stood by the door and watched her own reflection in the black glass — platinum streaks catching the tunnel lights, kohl slightly smudged at the corner of her left eye. She looked like a woman who had somewhere to be. She had nowhere to be. She had cancelled her nine o'clock for him, and now it was ten-forty, and he had not called, and she was riding the yellow line in a grey saree like a woman carrying an answer to a question nobody had asked.

She got off at Cyber Hub. She didn't know why. Maybe because he'd mentioned it once, in passing, that he liked the music there. Maybe because she wanted to be somewhere loud enough that she couldn't hear herself thinking about his cock.

That was the thing she could not say out loud, not to anyone, not even to the dark inside her own head. She had spent the whole day thinking about his cock. At her desk, between two meetings, she had opened a spreadsheet and stared at it for six minutes and seen nothing but the shape of it, the way it had filled her, the way it had felt when he pulled out and the wet sound came with it. She had crossed her legs under her desk and pressed her thighs together and told herself it was nothing. It was not nothing.

She had spent her whole life believing men were lucky to have her. That was the architecture of her — the deep V of her blouse, the perfume that cost more than a junior analyst's rent, the rehearsed script of every call. She was the prize. She was the one who decided who got to touch her and how much and for how long. And now she was walking into a nightclub in a grey saree because a boy had not texted her back, and her cunt was wet from the memory of him, and she hated herself for it in a way that felt almost like the beginning of prayer.

The bouncer at the door looked her up and down. She watched his eyes catch on her cleavage — the grey silk had slipped a little on the train, and she had not fixed it, because she wanted to be seen, because she wanted someone to look at her the way Nikhil had looked at her when he'd stood at her balcony door and told her what he wanted. The bouncer let her in without a word. She didn't thank him.

Inside, the bass was a physical thing. She ordered a whisky at the bar and stood with her back to the room, the glass cold in her hand, and she took out her phone and looked at his contact. Nikhil. Just Nikhil. No pet name, no code. She had saved him like a woman who thought she was in control of the arrangement.

She typed: Where are you. She deleted it.

She typed: I'm at Cyber Hub. She deleted that too.

She typed nothing. She put the phone face-down on the bar and drank her whisky and watched the ice melt, and she thought about the way he had said there is no answer that is not a yes — no, that was her. She had thought that. She had lain on her own dining table with his seed running down her thigh and thought that, and she had been right, and now the yes was eating her alive.

Her phone buzzed.

She turned it over so fast the whisky sloshed. Not him. A work email. She stared at the subject line — Q3 Attrition Report — and felt something in her chest go small and cold.

She finished the whisky. She ordered another. She was on her second when she felt a hand settle on the small of her back, low, just above the curve of her ass, and she knew the hand before she turned around.

"You came," Nikhil Verma said.

She turned. He was in a black shirt, sleeves rolled, the collar open. He looked like he had come from somewhere and was going somewhere else. He did not look at her body the way the bouncer had. He looked at her face, and then he looked past her at the bar, and then he looked at her face again, and she felt the ground shift under her.

"You didn't call," she said.

"I know."

"I waited on the platform for eleven minutes."

"I know." He took the whisky glass out of her hand and set it on the bar. "You wore the saree."

"You asked me to."

"I know." He was not smiling. He was watching her the way a man watches a fire he has built and is deciding whether to feed. "Do you know why I asked you to wear it?"

She shook her head. Her mouth had gone dry.

"Because every man in this room is going to look at you," he said. "And I want them to."

She felt it land somewhere low in her belly, a heat that had nothing to do with the whisky. She had spent twenty years making men look at her. She had never once had a man tell her he wanted them to, out loud, in a nightclub, with his hand still on her back.

"Why?" she said.

"Because you're mine now," he said. "And I want to see what men do when they look at what's mine."

He took her hand and led her off the bar stool. She followed. She did not think about following. She just followed, her pallu slipping further, her heels clicking on the floor, and she felt every eye in the room turn, and she felt her own cunt clench around nothing, and she understood that she had become a woman who would do anything for the boy holding her hand.

He walked her through the club. Not to a table — through. Past the bar, past the dance floor, past a roped-off section where three men in untucked shirts looked up from their drinks. Nikhil stopped there. He let go of her hand and stepped back, and she stood in the middle of the floor with the lights moving over her, and he said, to the men at the table:

"This is Dipa bhabhi."

Bhabhi. The word went through her like a hand. She was a forty-five-year-old HR head with a corner office and a list of men who called her Maa, and he had just called her bhabhi in front of strangers, and she felt her nipples harden under the grey silk, and she did not understand herself at all.

"Bhabhi," one of the men said. He was maybe twenty-five, with a beard and a wedding ring. He looked at her cleavage, and then at her face, and then at Nikhil. "She's with you?"

"She's with me," Nikhil said. "Sit down, bhabhi."

She sat. On the edge of the booth, between the man with the wedding ring and a younger one in a hoodie who had not stopped staring at her since she'd walked in. Nikhil did not sit. He stood at the end of the table with his hands in his pockets, and he watched her, and he said nothing, and the silence went on long enough that she felt herself start to perform — the old reflex, the rehearsed smile, the slow crossing of legs that made the saree ride up her thigh.

Nikhil shook his head.

She stopped. Her leg went still. She did not know what he wanted, and not knowing made her want to please him more, and the wanting was so loud in her chest that she could hear it over the bass.

"Bhabhi, can I get you a drink?" the bearded man said.

She looked at Nikhil. Nikhil looked back at her. He did not nod. He did not shake his head. He just watched, and she understood that the answer was hers to give, and that whatever she gave would be wrong or right and she would not know which until later.

"No," she said. "Thank you."

The bearded man's eyebrows went up. He was not used to being refused by a woman dressed like her. He looked at Nikhil, and Nikhil smiled at him — a small, private smile — and the man looked away.

They sat there for an hour. Nikhil bought a round of drinks and did not buy her one. He talked to the men about cricket and about a deal he was working on and about nothing at all, and every few minutes he would look at her — just look — and she would feel her whole body turn toward him like a plant toward a window. The hoodie boy tried to talk to her twice. She answered in monosyllables. She was not there for him. She was not there for any of them. She was there because Nikhil had not told her to leave.

At one point the bearded man leaned in and said, low, "Bhabhi, your pallu."

She looked down. The grey silk had slipped off her shoulder entirely, and the top of her blouse was showing — the lace edge, the swell of her breast, the strap. She had not noticed. She had been watching Nikhil's mouth around the rim of his glass.

She reached to fix it.

"Leave it," Nikhil said.

Her hand stopped. The bearded man made a sound low in his throat. The hoodie boy shifted in his seat. She sat there with her shoulder bare and her blouse showing and her nipple hard against the lace, and she felt more naked than she had felt on her own dining table, and she wanted to crawl across the booth and put her mouth on Nikhil's cock through his trousers.

"Come on," Nikhil said. He stood. He did not say goodbye to the men. He took her hand and pulled her up and walked her out of the club, and she went, her pallu still down, her body still humming, and she did not look back at the table where three men were watching her leave.

Outside, the humid air hit her like a wall. He walked her to a black car — not his, she didn't recognize it — and opened the back door and gestured her in. She got in. He got in beside her. The driver did not look up.

"Where are we going?" she said.

"Another place."

"What place?"

"A place where more men can look at you."

She felt the words land in her cunt. She crossed her legs and pressed her thighs together and looked out the window at the city going by, and she thought about how she had spent the whole day thinking about his cock, and how she was now in a car with him, going somewhere to be looked at, and how she would do it. She would do anything. She would stand in a window and let a hundred men jerk off to her if he asked. She would get on her knees in a parking lot. She would let him pass her around a room like a bottle of whisky.

"Nikhil," she said.

"Hm."

"Did you think about me today?"

He was quiet for a moment. The car turned onto a wider road, and the lights of a mall went by, and she watched his face in the window glass — the jaw, the mouth, the same mouth that had told her he wanted everything.

"No," he said.

She turned to look at him. "No?"

"I didn't have to." He was looking straight ahead. "I knew you'd be thinking about me."

The words went through her like a blade. She had spent her whole life being the one who knew. The one who scripted. The one who rehearsed the call and chose the blouse and decided who got to come. And here was a boy who had not texted her all day because he had known, with absolute certainty, that she would be sitting in her office with her thighs pressed together thinking about his cock. And he had been right.

"You're cruel," she said.

"I know."

"I don't like it."

"Yes you do."

She did. She hated that she did. She sat in the car with her shoulder bare and her blouse showing and her cunt wet through her saree, and she wanted to put her hand on his thigh and she did not, because he had not told her to, and the not-doing was its own kind of pleasure, a hot wire pulled tight through her belly.

The car stopped outside a building she did not recognize. A bar, maybe. A club. There was a line at the door and a man in a suit at the head of it, and Nikhil got out and came around and opened her door and offered her his hand.

"Fix your pallu," he said.

She fixed it. She pulled the grey silk up over her shoulder and tucked it in at the waist, and she smoothed her hair, and she looked at him — a question — and he looked back at her and said nothing.

"Why?" she said.

"Because I want them to have to work for it," he said. "Come on, bhabhi."

Bhabhi. Again. She followed him into the bar, and the man in the suit nodded them through, and inside the music was slower, older, and the lights were low, and there were men at tables and men at the bar and men standing in groups, and every one of them turned to look at her as she walked in. She felt it like weather. She felt it on her skin.

Nikhil found a table at the edge of the floor. He sat. He gestured her into the chair beside him, and she sat, and he ordered two whiskies, and he put his hand on her knee under the table.

She went still. His hand was warm and heavy and it did not move. It just sat there, on her knee, through the grey silk, and she felt every nerve in her leg wake up and point at it.

"Nikhil," she said.

"Drink your whisky."

She drank her whisky. His hand stayed on her knee. The music played. Men looked. She sat there with her back straight and her legs crossed and his hand on her knee, and she thought about how she had come to this city twenty years ago with a suitcase and a plan to be somebody, and how she had become somebody, and how none of it mattered now, because a twenty-two-year-old had his hand on her knee and she would have burned the whole thing down for him to move it higher.

"Nikhil," she said again.

"What."

"Please."

"Please what."

She did not have words. She had never not had words. She had a script for everything. She had a line for every man she had ever wanted. And now she sat in a bar with his hand on her knee and she could not say what she wanted, because what she wanted was his cock in her mouth, and she could not say that, not here, not with the music and the men and the whisky, and so she said nothing, and he watched her say nothing, and he smiled.

"Good," he said.

His hand moved. An inch. Up her thigh, through the silk, and then back down to her knee. She made a sound — small, involuntary — and he heard it, and his hand went still again.

"You're going to have to be patient," he said. "I told you. I want everything. And everything takes time."

"I've been patient all day," she said. Her voice came out thin. "I've been patient for eleven minutes on a platform and an hour in a club and a car ride. I've been patient."

"Not patient enough." He took his hand off her knee. He put it on the table, on his glass, and he drank, and she felt the absence of it like a wound. "I want you to think about something."

"What."

"I want you to think about how many men in this room are looking at you right now."

She looked. She could not help it. She turned her head and looked around the bar, and there were — she counted — seven, eight, more. A man at the bar with a wedding ring, staring at her cleavage. Two boys at a table by the window, one of them with his phone angled at her. A man in a grey shirt at the end of the bar who had not looked away since she'd walked in.

"They're looking," she said.

"How does it feel?"

She thought about it. She thought about the old feeling — the power, the prize, the room turning. And she thought about the new feeling underneath it, the one that had been growing in her all day, the one that said I am his, and he is showing me off, and I want them to want me because he wants them to.

"Good," she said. "It feels good."

"Say it again."

"It feels good."

"Say what feels good."

"Men looking at me feels good." She said it to the table. She said it to the whisky. "You showing me off feels good."

"And what do you want?"

She looked at him. She looked at his mouth, and his jaw, and the collar of his black shirt, and she thought about the balcony door and the dining table and the way he had said there is no answer that is not a yes, and she said, quietly, "I want your cock."

He did not react. He did not smile. He took a sip of his whisky and set it down and said, "Not yet."

"Nikhil—"

"Not yet." He stood. He put money on the table — more than the drinks cost — and he took her hand and pulled her up, and he walked her out of the bar, and she went, and she did not look back at the seven or eight men who were watching her leave, and she did not care that they were watching, and she did not care about anything but the hand holding hers and the word yet ringing in her head like a bell.

In the car, she sat close to him. Closer than she had before. Her thigh against his thigh, her shoulder against his arm, and she did not ask where they were going, because she had stopped asking, because asking was the old Dipanwita and she was not the old Dipanwita anymore.

"Nikhil," she said.

"Hm."

"Can I do something for you?"

He turned his head. He looked at her for a long moment, and she watched his eyes move over her face — the kohl, the gloss, the platinum streaks. She had put all of it on for him. She had spent an hour in front of the mirror choosing the saree and the blouse and the lipstick, and she had done it for a boy who had not texted her back, and she was not ashamed of it. She wanted him to see.

"What kind of something," he said.

"Anything." She put her hand on his thigh. He did not stop her. She felt the muscle under the cotton, and she felt her own pulse in her throat, and she said, "I want to please you. I want to be good for you. I want—"

"You want my cock."

"Yes."

"Then be good for me," he said. "And I'll decide when."

She took her hand off his thigh. She put it in her lap. She sat beside him with her body burning and her cunt wet and her mouth empty, and she thought about how she had spent twenty years learning how to make men beg, and how she had never once learned how to beg, and how she was learning now, in the back of a black car in Gurgaon, at forty-five years old, for a boy who had not texted her back.

The car stopped outside her building. He got out. He opened her door and offered her his hand and walked her to the lift, and she went, and in the lift she stood beside him with her hands at her sides and she did not touch him, because he had not told her to.

At her door, he took the key from her hand and opened it and let her in first. She stepped into her own flat and turned to look at him, and he was standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame, and he did not come in.

"Nikhil," she said.

"I'm going home."

She stood in the middle of her own living room, still in the grey saree with the pallu tucked in at the waist, and watched him not come in. The brass bowl was still under the chair where it had rolled the night before. The dining table was still pushed against the wall where he had taken her on it. Everything in the flat was where he had left it, and he was leaving it again.

"You can't just—" She stopped. She heard her own voice, and it was not the voice of the woman who had run the rigged app and rehearsed the calls and decided who got to touch her. It was a woman in a doorway, asking. "Why did you bring me home if you're going to leave?"

"Because I wanted to see what you'd do when I did." He reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and silver and set it on the shoe rack by the door — the spare key she had given him the second night, the one he had never used. "Keep this. I'll come when I want to. Not when you call."

"Nikhil."

"I said I want everything," he said. "That means I take my time. You spent all day thinking about my cock. Good. Keep thinking." He turned and walked to the lift, and he did not look back, and the doors closed on him, and she stood in her doorway with her hand on the frame where his shoulder had been, and the silver key sat on the shoe rack like a dare she had not been given permission to answer.

She closed the door. She locked it. She stood with her back against it and slid down until she was sitting on the floor in the grey saree, and she pressed her palm flat against her own cunt through the silk, just once, just to feel something, and it was not enough, and she took her hand away, because he had not told her to.

She sat on the floor of her own flat for a long time. The marble was cold through the silk, and the grey saree was twisted around her legs, and the silver key sat on the shoe rack six feet away like a small bright animal she was not allowed to touch. Her palm still remembered the shape of her own cunt through the fabric — one press, that was all she had allowed herself — and the memory of it sat in her hand like a coal.

She got up. She did not turn on the lights. She walked through her dark flat in the grey saree and she stopped at the dining table and put her hand flat on the wood where he had taken her. The polish was cool. There was a ring on the surface from his glass, and she put her finger in it, and she stood there for a while doing nothing at all.

Then she took out her phone.

Nikhil.

She typed: I want to please you.

She stared at it. She deleted it. She typed it again. She sent it.

Three minutes. No reply. She sat on the edge of the dining table, still in the saree, her feet bare on the marble, and she watched the screen go dark and light and dark again, and she did not move.

At eleven-forty he wrote back. Two words.

Prove it.

She read them four times. Her whole body turned toward the phone the way it had turned toward him in the booth — a plant toward a window — and she typed back before she had decided to.

How.

Tomorrow, he said. Office. Grey saree. Nothing under it.

She looked down at herself. The blouse, the petticoat, the bra with the lace edge, all of it still on. She typed: Nothing?

Nothing.

She sat with the phone against her thigh and felt the heat climb her neck. She had walked into a boardroom with a hundred eyes on her and delivered a restructuring plan without a tremor in her voice. She had made a man call her Maa on his knees. And now she was sitting on her own table with her thighs pressed together because a boy had told her to take her underwear off tomorrow morning.

Yes, she typed.

The reply came fast. Good girl. Sleep.

She did not sleep. She lay in her bed in the dark with the grey saree on the chair and the phone face-up on the pillow beside her, and every time it lit up she reached for it, and every time it was nothing, and she put it down again, and by four in the morning she had understood something she did not want to understand: that she had spent twenty years making men wait, and she had never once known what waiting did to a person from the inside.

She was at her desk by nine. No bra, no panties, the grey silk against her skin like a hand she could not shake off. She had put on the kohl and the gloss — she had told herself it was for the day, for the meetings, for the three-hundred-employee machine that ran on her being the woman in the room — but she knew, and the knowing sat low in her stomach all morning.

He did not come. He was an intern; he had no reason to be on her floor. She took two calls. She signed eleven files. She crossed and uncrossed her legs under the desk and felt the silk slide against the inside of her thigh and had to stop, twice, with her pen in the air and her jaw set, because the feeling was too much for a Tuesday.

At one-fifteen her phone buzzed.

Terrace. Now.

She stood up so fast her chair rolled back and hit the cabinet. She walked out of her cabin past her assistant with a word about a site visit, took the service lift to the eleventh floor, and stepped out onto the roof terrace where the AC units hummed and the Gurgaon skyline sat in a brown haze and the wind was hot and dry on her face.

He was leaning against the parapet with his hands in his pockets, black shirt, sleeves rolled, exactly as he had been last night. He did not straighten when she came out. He watched her walk the length of the terrace in the grey saree — the pallu over her shoulder, the silk moving — and he said nothing until she stopped in front of him.

"Well," he said.

"Nikhil."

"Turn around."

She turned. She turned slowly, all the way, and let him look at her back — the bare strip of it above the blouse, the swell of her hip under the silk, the fall of the pallu down to her calves. The wind pressed the saree flat against her and she felt her own nipples go hard against the blouse and there was nothing between them and the fabric, nothing at all, and she knew he could see it.

"Good," he said. "Come here."

She came. She stood close enough to smell him — soap and the faint smoke of the club from last night — and she looked at his mouth and waited.

"Ask me," he said.

"Ask you what."

"You know what."

She did. She stood on the roof of her own office building in the hot wind with the whole city laid out behind him, and she said it in a whisper, because it was the only voice she had left. "Please."

"Please what, bhabhi."

"Please—" Her throat closed. She had said the word a hundred times to a hundred men in a hundred scripts and it had never cost her anything. Now it cost her everything. "Please let me have your cock."

He smiled. That small, private smile he had given the bearded man in the club, and it went through her like a hand. "Later," he said.

"Nikhil—"

"Later." He reached out and took the pallu off her shoulder and let it fall, and the silk slid down her arm, and she stood there with her blouse showing and her shoulder bare and the wind moving over her skin, and he looked at her, and he did not touch her. "I told you. Everything takes time."

"I've been waiting since last night."

"I know." He put his hand on her waist — just the one hand, through the silk, at the curve above her hip — and she felt the heat of it go all the way down her leg. "And I'm going to tell you what's next, and you're going to listen, and then you're going to do it, and every time you do it right, I'll give you something."

"Something."

"Something." He moved his hand up her side, slow, over her ribs, and stopped just under the swell of her breast, and her whole body leaned into the touch half an inch before she caught herself. "Do you want to hear it?"

"Yes."

"There's a boy in your office," he said. "Finance. Twenty-two. His name is Vivaan."

She went still. She felt the name land somewhere cold and far off, like a bell rung in another building. She had a key card in her purse with a room number on it and a boy with a blue tie and a box of strawberry condoms waiting for eleven o'clock tonight, and she had not thought about him once since the platform.

"I know him," she said.

"I know you do." Nikhil's thumb moved — one stroke, back and forth, over the silk just under her breast — and she had to set her teeth. "He wrote you a memo. About how to seduce him. You told me."

"I told you that?"

"On the table. The second night. You told me a lot of things on the table." He was watching her mouth. "You're going to cancel him."

"Cancel—"

"Tonight. The lounge. Whatever you set up. You're going to text him and tell him it's off."

She thought about the key card. She thought about the strangers she had promised him, the strawberry condoms in his pocket, the way he had called her mummy with his voice cracking. A week ago she would have grieved it. A week ago that boy had been the whole shape of her week. And now she stood on a roof with Nikhil's thumb on her ribs and she understood that she would gut the arrangement without a moment's hesitation, and that the understanding was not even a decision — it was a fact, like weather.

"Why?" she said.

"Because I don't share what's mine with boys who write memos," he said. "And because I want to see if you'll do it."

"That's not—"

"It's a test, bhabhi. I told you. Everything's a test."

She looked at him. The hot wind pushed the loose hair off her face and the AC units hummed and somewhere below, eleven floors down, three hundred people were working under her name on the door. She thought about the old Dipanwita — the one who scripted the calls, the one who chose the blouse, the one who decided who got to come. She thought about how that woman would have laughed at a boy on a terrace telling her what to do. And she thought about how that woman had never once, in twenty years, been as wet as she was right now.

"All right," she said.

"Say it properly."

"I'll cancel him."

"And?"

"And I'll do what you tell me."

"Good girl." He took his hand off her ribs and she felt the loss of it like a slap. "Now come here."

She stepped in. He put his hand on the back of her neck — the same grip he had used on the table — and he drew her down, and she went down, and the terrace tiles were hot through the silk when her knees hit them. She knelt in front of him on the roof of her own office with the city behind her and the pallu trailing on the ground, and she looked up at him, and he undid his belt.

She had thought about this all day. She had thought about it in the car, in the lift, on the floor of her flat. She had thought about it with her thighs pressed together at her own desk. And now his cock came out of his trousers — thick, heavy, already hard, the head flushed and wet at the tip — and it was right there, an inch from her mouth, and her whole body lurched toward it like a dog on a leash.

"Open," he said.

She opened her mouth. He fed it in — not the whole length, just the head, just past her lips — and her eyes closed on their own. Salt and heat and the specific weight of him on her tongue. She heard herself make a sound around it, low in her throat, a sound she had never made for any man in her life. She started to take him deeper.

He pulled out.

Her eyes flew open. His cock hung there, wet with her spit, an inch from her face, and he was looking down at her with that smile, and she made a noise — a real one, a small furious sound — and leaned after it.

"Ah," he said. "Not yet."

"Nikhil."

"You said you'd do what I tell you."

"I will."

"Then wait."

She waited. She knelt on the hot tiles with her mouth open and her cunt clenching around nothing and her whole body shaking faintly in the wind, and she did not reach for him, because he had not told her to, and the not-reaching was the hardest thing she had ever done.

"Text him," Nikhil said. "Now. While you're on your knees."

She got her phone out of the folds of her saree with a hand that was not quite steady. She opened the thread with Topper. She typed: Vivaan, tonight is off. I won't be coming. She looked up at Nikhil. He nodded. She sent it.

"Good," he said. And then he took her by the hair and pushed back in.

She took him deeper this time — half, more than half — and her eyes watered and she gagged once and swallowed it and kept going, and she worked him with her tongue the way she had worked the whole city for twenty years, with total attention, with everything she had. She heard him breathe out through his nose. She felt his hand tighten in her hair. She felt him grow heavier on her tongue and she thought, yes, yes, now, come in my mouth, come down my throat, give me something —

He pulled out again.

She actually swayed. She sat back on her heels with her mouth wet and her chin shining and her breath coming hard, and she looked up at him and there was something in her face she had never shown a man — not want, not hunger, something smaller and more naked than either.

"Please," she said. "Nikhil, please—"

"Please what."

"Please let me finish."

"Finish what?"

"You." She was whispering. She could not get her voice up. "Let me make you come. Let me— I'll do anything. Tell me what to do and I'll do it. Just let me—"

"Anything?"

"Anything."

He looked down at her for a long moment. The wind moved his shirt and her pallu and neither of them spoke, and eleven floors below them the machine of her life went on running without her, and she knelt in the middle of it with her mouth open and a wet chin and the whole architecture of who she had been lying in pieces around her knees.

"Then here's what's next," he said. "Tonight, ten o'clock. You're going to go to the lounge you booked. Not for Vivaan. Alone."

"Alone."

"You're going to sit at the bar and order a whisky and wait. There'll be a man." He tucked himself back into his trousers and did up his belt, unhurried, while she watched. "Older. Fifties. Grey hair. He'll come to you. You'll do whatever he says."

"Who is he?"

"You'll find out." He crouched down to her level, and his face was very close to hers, and his voice was almost gentle. "And when it's done, you'll come home and you'll text me every detail. Every single one. And if you leave anything out, I'll know."

She looked at him. She thought about the lounge, the bar, the strangers, the whisky. She thought about a man in his fifties with grey hair and a room she had rented for a different boy with a blue tie. She thought about how she had spent her whole life being the one who chose, and how she was now on her knees on a hot roof being handed a stranger's name she did not even have.

"All right," she said.

"All right what."

"All right, I'll go."

"And?"

"And I'll do what he says." Her voice did not shake. That was the strange part. It did not shake at all. "And I'll tell you everything."

He stood up. He put his hand on the top of her head — just once, a brief press, almost tender — and then he took it away and walked past her toward the service door, and she stayed on her knees on the tiles with the pallu on the ground and her blouse open at the shoulder and her mouth still tasting of him.

"Nikhil," she said, to his back.

He stopped. He did not turn around.

"When?" she said. "When do I get you?"

He turned his head, just enough that she could see the line of his jaw in profile, and he said, "When you stop asking." And he went through the door and it clicked shut behind him, and she was alone on the roof with the AC units and the haze and the city, kneeling in the grey saree with his taste still on her tongue and a stranger waiting for her at ten o'clock.

She stayed on her knees until the tiles burned through the silk and her shins went numb. The service door did not open again. The AC units hummed their flat, indifferent hum, and the city below went on being a city — cars, horns, a plane dragging its sound across the haze — and none of it knew that Dipanwita Roy was kneeling on the roof of her own building with her pallu on the ground and a stranger's name waiting for her at ten.

She got up. Her knees cracked. She fixed the pallu, tucked it at her waist, smoothed the silk over her hips, and walked to the service door with her chin up, because that was the last thing she had left — the chin, the walk, the woman who owned the corridor. The lift mirror told her the truth: kohl smeared at the corner of her left eye, gloss gone, a red mark on her lower lip where her own teeth had caught it. She wiped the corner of her eye with her thumb and did not fix the rest. Let them look. Let the whole floor look.

Her assistant looked up from the desk as she passed. "Ma'am, the site visit—"

"Reschedule."

"The vendor's been waiting since—"

"Reschedule it." She did not stop walking. The cabin door clicked shut behind her and she stood in the middle of her own office with her back to the glass wall, and she took out her phone and read the thread with Nikhil four times. Prove it. Tomorrow. Office. Grey saree. Nothing under it. Good girl. Sleep. She had not slept. She read it again anyway, the way you press a bruise.

Then she sat down at her desk and opened her laptop and did the thing he had told her to do. The lounge booking, the key card, the room number — she cancelled it in eleven seconds and did not let herself think about Vivaan's face when the message landed. Tonight is off. Done. A week ago that boy had been the whole shape of her week; now he was a line in a thread she would not open again.

At four o'clock her phone lit up. Not Nikhil. She looked anyway, the way she had looked all day.

It was a number she had saved without a name, months ago, when she still kept a Rolodex of the men she had broken and the men she had not. Sasur ji. The message was one line: Beta, I am in Gurgaon for two days. Shall I come for tea?

She stared at it. Her thumb hovered. And then, because she had spent the whole afternoon doing arithmetic she did not want to name, she typed: Yes. Tonight. Ten o'clock. I'll send the address. She sent it before she could take it back, and then she sat very still and felt her own heart going like a bird in a box, because she had just done something she could not explain to herself, and the only person she wanted to explain it to was the boy who had walked out of the service door without turning around.

She texted Nikhil. I have someone.

The reply came in under a minute. Who.

She typed the word and deleted it twice. Then she sent it. My sasur. My husband's father.

Nothing for four minutes. She watched the screen go dark twice. Then: Call me.

She called. He picked up on the second ring and did not say hello.

"Say it again."

"My sasur," she said. Her voice came out low. She had locked the cabin door; she did not remember locking it. "My late husband's father. He's in the city. He asked to come for tea."

"And?"

"And I told him ten o'clock."

She heard him breathe. That was all — one breath down the line — and it went through her like a hand. "Why him?"

"You asked me about a man I hate." She was standing at the dark window now, her reflection floating over the city lights, and she watched her own mouth move as she said it. "There's no man on this earth I hate more. He made my life a small, mean thing for six years. He counted the money I spent on sanitary pads. He told my husband I was barren because I worked. When my husband died, he came to the funeral and asked me, in front of forty people, when I was going to return the jewellery." She stopped. Her jaw ached. "So. Yes. Him."

"Does he want you?"

"He's wanted me since the wedding. He looks at my blouse when he thinks no one's watching. He's been looking at my blouse for nineteen years."

"And you've never—"

"Never. He's my sasur. He's a fat old man with a paunch and dentures and he smells of tobacco. I have never let him touch my hand." She heard herself laugh, a short ugly sound. "Until tonight, apparently. Because you asked."

"Say that again."

"Because you asked." She closed her eyes. "I'm doing this because you asked me to. Tell me that's why."

"That's why." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "You're going to let your sasur fuck you tonight because I told you to. Say it in those words."

Her whole body flushed from the collarbone down. She had made men say worse things on their knees. She had never once been made to say a thing like this into a phone in her own office with the lights off. "I'm going to let my sasur fuck me tonight," she said, "because you told me to."

"Good girl." A pause. "What are you going to wear."

"I don't—" She stopped. She knew exactly what she was going to wear. She had known the second she sent the message, the way she used to know, in the old days, which blouse went with which prey. "The red one," she said. "The one with the back cut out. The one I wore the night you saw me on camera."

"And under it?"

"Nothing."

"Good." Another pause, longer. "Show me."

She did not ask what he meant. She switched to video and propped the phone against the pen-stand on her desk and stood back, and she undid the pallu of the grey saree and let it fall, and she pulled the blouse over her head and stood in the dark office in her petticoat with her breasts bare and the city at her back, and she watched the small screen for his face. The light from the window gave her skin a grey sheen. Her nipples had gone hard in the cold of the AC; she did not cover them.

"Turn," he said.

She turned. Slowly. All the way, the way she had turned for him on the terrace, and she let him look at her back and her ass through the thin petticoat and the pale strip of her waist above it, and she heard him exhale on the line and felt it land between her legs.

"You're wet," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Touch yourself."

She put her hand inside the petticoat and found herself slick and hot, and she pressed two fingers flat against her clit and did not move them, and she looked into the phone and said, "Like this?"

"Not yet." His voice had gone flat and hard. "Go home. Get ready. Red blouse, nothing under it. Perfume. The expensive one. Lipstick. And when he comes in, you're going to be on your knees at the door. Not standing. Knees. He's going to walk into your flat and find you kneeling in your own doorway like a servant, and you're going to keep your eyes down until he tells you to look up."

She pulled her hand out. Her fingers were shining. "Nikhil—"

"You wanted to overplease me. So overplease me. Do everything I say and then do one more thing I didn't think of. Surprise me." A beat. "And text me when he's inside."

He hung up.

She stood in the dark office with the phone in her hand and the grey saree pooled at her feet, and she felt something she had not felt since she was a girl in a small town with one good dress — a bright, terrible, forward-leaning joy. She had spent twenty years making men wait at the door. Tonight she was going to be the one on her knees when it opened, and the man on the other side was going to be the man she hated most in the world, and the boy who had told her to do it was going to be waiting for her text.

She dressed. She put the grey saree back on because she had to get out of the building in something, and she walked past her assistant with the pallu over her shoulder and her chin up, and she drove home with the windows down and the hot wind in her face and her thighs pressed together against the seat.

At her flat she showered and did not wash her hair. She stood in the bathroom and shaved everything — legs, underarms, and then the rest, the careful slow work with the razor, the way she had not done it since the temple night with Kabir. She dried herself and stood naked in front of the mirror and looked at the woman in it: forty-five, the silver streaks in her hair, the breasts going soft at the sides, the belly she had earned with every whisky, the cunt she had shaved clean like a girl of twenty. She put on the perfume — the expensive one, three sprays at the throat and one between her breasts and one at the wrist — and she put on the kohl and the deep red lipstick and nothing else. No bra. No panties. Then she went to the wardrobe and took down the red blouse.

She had not worn it since the video call with Nikhil. It was the one with the deep V and the back cut down to the waist, the one that had made three hundred employees look at her and none of them touch her, and she shrugged it on and did up the two buttons that held it together and looked at herself in the long mirror and understood that with nothing under it, the silk showed everything — the shape of her nipples, the sway of her breasts when she moved, the soft heavy weight of them against the fabric. She put on the petticoat and the red saree over it, and then, standing at the mirror with the safety pin between her lips, she thought: surprise him.

So she did one more thing.

She went to the kitchen and took the brass bowl from under the chair — the one that had rolled there the second night, the one she had not moved since — and she set it on the floor just inside the front door, on the marble, in the centre of the doorway. Then she took the silver spare key off the shoe rack and set it inside the bowl. Then she stood back and looked at it: a brass bowl in her doorway with a key in it, like an offering, like something left at a shrine.

She texted Nikhil: He's coming at ten. I'm ready.

Describe it.

She described it. The red blouse, nothing under it. The perfume. The lipstick. The bowl in the doorway with the key in it. She typed it all out standing in her living room with the lights low and the AC humming, and she sent it, and she watched the screen.

What's the bowl for.

He can put the key in his pocket, she wrote. So he knows he can come back whenever he wants. Whenever you send him.

The reply took a long time. When it came, it was one word, and it made her close her eyes and press her thighs together in the middle of her own living room: Mine.

At nine-fifty the bell rang.

She was already on her knees. She had been on her knees for six minutes, the marble cold through the silk, her hands on her thighs, her eyes down. The bell rang again and she did not get up. She heard him shift his weight outside the door, the small irritable sound of a man who has been kept waiting, and then his key in the lock — because of course he had a key, he had kept a key to his dead son's flat for eleven years, and she had never once had the spine to ask for it back.

The door swung open.

"Dipanwita?" His voice, that voice, the voice that had asked her at the funeral when she would return the jewellery. "The lights are so low — what is this, are you ill? Why are you on the—"

He stopped.

She could see his shoes in her downcast vision — the brown sandals, the dusty toes, the hem of his white kurta. She could smell him: tobacco and coconut oil and the faint sourness of a long train journey. Her sasur stood in her doorway, and she knelt in front of him in a red blouse with nothing under it, and she did not raise her eyes.

"Dipanwita," he said again. Quieter. "What is this."

She lifted her eyes to his knees. Not his face. His knees. "Namaste, sasur ji," she said. "Please come in."

He did not move. She heard him swallow. "I asked you a question."

"I know." She stayed on her knees. The brass bowl sat between them on the marble, the key glinting in it, and she watched his eyes go down to it and then come back up to her, and she watched the old man's face do something it had never done in nineteen years: it went uncertain. "There's tea on the stove. And the key is for you. To keep."

"The key—" He looked at the bowl. He looked at her. She knew exactly what he was seeing — the red silk, the deep V, the sway of her breasts in the low light, the kohl, the mouth painted dark. He had spent nineteen years stealing looks at her and she had spent nineteen years making sure he never got more than a look. "What are you doing."

"Whatever you want," she said. "That's what I'm doing."

The old man stood very still in the doorway of his dead son's flat, and Dipanwita knelt on the cold marble in front of him with her hands open on her thighs and her eyes on his knees, and somewhere in the pocket of her saree her phone sat warm and silent against her hip with a boy's word — mine — burning a hole in it. She did not reach for it. She did not need to. She knew exactly what she was going to do next, and she knew exactly who she was going to tell, and she knew that the man in the doorway had no idea — none at all — that he had walked into a room that belonged to someone else.

She heard the sandal scuff on the marble. One step. Then another. Then the door clicked shut behind him, and the bolt she had not asked him to draw slid home, and she felt the sound of it go through her like a finger.

"Dipanwita." His voice had gone strange — not the funeral voice, not the voice that counted her sanitary pads, something underneath it that had been waiting in the walls of her marriage for nineteen years. "Get up. This is not— get up off the floor, what will the neighbours—"

"The neighbours are asleep, sasur ji." She stayed on her knees. Her eyes were on the brown sandals, the dusty toes, the hem of the white kurta. "It's ten o'clock on a Tuesday. There's no one in the corridor but you."

He did not move. She could hear him breathing — the wet, thick breath of a man who had smoked on the train all the way from Kanpur. She could smell the tobacco in the cotton of his kurta. She had smelled it at her own wedding, at her husband's funeral, at every Diwali dinner where he had sat across from her and watched her blouse while his wife served the dal.

"The tea," he said. "You said there was tea."

"There's tea. And there's whisky, if you'd prefer." She raised her eyes as far as his belt. "I thought you might prefer the whisky."

A pause. Long enough that she felt the marble bite into her kneecaps and did not shift.

"Whisky," he said.

She got up. Slowly, the way Nikhil had taught her on the terrace — no hurry, let the silk do the work. She stood and the red saree settled over her hips and she felt his eyes come down her body like a hand, and she turned her back on him and walked to the sideboard, and she knew exactly what her back looked like in that blouse: the cut down to the waist, the pale skin, the two thin straps holding the whole thing to her shoulders.

She heard him exhale behind her.

She poured two fingers into a crystal glass — the good glass, the one from the wedding set — and carried it back and held it out to him. He took it, and his fingers brushed hers, and she did not pull away. That was the first thing she had ever let him have.

"Sit," she said, and gestured at the sofa.

He sat. He sat like a man in a doctor's waiting room, knees together, glass held in both hands, and he looked up at her standing there in the low light with the red silk and the dark mouth, and she watched him try to reassemble his face into the face he had used on her for nineteen years — the contempt, the ledger, the man who owned the family name she had married into.

It did not hold. His eyes kept dropping to her breasts.

"Why are you dressed like this," he said.

"Like what?"

"Like—" He drank. Too fast. He coughed. "At this hour. For me."

"For you," she said. And then, because the words were already in her mouth and there was no version of the night that did not end with them: "I thought you might like it."

The old man's face went through three things in a second and a half. Confusion. Disbelief. And then want, naked and ugly, the want of a man who has told himself for nineteen years that he never wanted anything.

"Dipanwita," he said, and it came out cracked.

She sat down beside him. Not across from him — beside him, close, her thigh an inch from his thigh, and she turned her body toward him so the deep V of the blouse opened and the silk slid and he could see the whole pale slope of her breast and the darker edge where the nipple would be if he looked hard enough, and he looked. He looked like a boy caught in a lie. He looked like a man who had forgotten the glass in his hands.

"You know," she said, "I used to wonder what you were looking at."

"I don't—"

"At the wedding. At the funerals. At every dinner where I served you rice." She took the glass out of his hands and set it on the floor and put her hand on his knee. The kurta cotton was thin and warm and she felt the old man's leg go rigid under her palm. "You looked at my blouse, sasur ji. You looked at my blouse for nineteen years and you thought I didn't know."

"I never—"

"You did." Her hand stayed on his knee. "It's all right. I'm telling you it's all right."

He was breathing through his mouth now. She could hear it, and she could smell the whisky on it, and she could feel the small tremor running through the knee under her hand, and she thought — with a clarity that felt almost cold — this is the man who asked me at my husband's funeral when I would return the jewellery. And I am about to let him put his tongue in my mouth because a boy told me to.

And her cunt clenched at the thought, and she did not know whether it clenched for the old man or for the boy, and she decided not to care.

"Why now," he said. "After all these years. Why now."

"Because I'm tired of being the widow in the corner," she said. And that was true, and it was not the truth, and she let it stand. "Because my husband is dead and I'm forty-five and I've spent eleven years being a name on a door. And because—" She stopped. She looked at his mouth, the cracked lips, the tobacco stain at the corner. "Because I want to know what you look like when you stop pretending."

He moved. Fast, for a fat old man — his hand came up and caught the back of her neck and pulled her in, and his mouth landed on hers wet and hard and tasting of whisky and betel and something sour underneath, and she let him. She let him push his tongue into her mouth and she made a small sound against it and she put her hand flat on his chest and felt his heart going like a bird in a box.

He broke off, gasping. "God," he said. "God, Dipanwita—"

"Sasur ji."

"Don't call me that. Not now."

"Why not?" She said it against his mouth, low. "That's what you are. That's what makes it—" She stopped. She had almost said good. She had almost said that's what makes it hot, in the voice she used for the calls, and she caught it at the last second and swallowed it and looked at him instead with her kohl-rimmed eyes and let him read whatever he wanted into the silence.

He read the wrong thing, and it worked.

"I've wanted you since the wedding," he said. The words came out of him like something torn loose. "Nineteen years. I watched you serve the rice and I thought — I thought, this one, this one is the one my son does not deserve. I thought it at the funeral. I thought it when my wife was dying. Every Diwali. Every time you bent down to touch my feet I looked down your blouse, and I—"

"I know," she said. "I let you."

He made a sound — half groan, half laugh, wrecked — and his hand came off her neck and went down to the front of her blouse, to the two buttons, and his fingers were shaking so badly he could not get them.

She reached up and undid them herself. Both of them. Slow. She watched his face while she did it, watched the way his eyes went wide and then fixed, and then the red silk fell open and her breasts came out into the lamplight — heavy, pale, the nipples dark and already hard — and the old man stopped breathing entirely.

"Oh," he said. Just that. A small, ruined sound.

"Touch them," she said. "You've earned it."

His hands came up. They were old hands, thick-knuckled, the nails yellowed, and they closed over her breasts and squeezed, hard, like a man checking fruit at a market, and she let her head fall back against the sofa and let him. His thumbs found her nipples and rubbed them and his breath was coming in short wet bursts against her throat and she felt him press his face into the side of her breast and mouth at the skin there, sloppy, hungry, and she closed her eyes and thought about the boy in the black shirt who had walked out of the service door without turning around.

"Dipanwita," the old man mumbled into her chest. "Dipanwita, you have no idea—"

"Show me," she said. "You've been looking for nineteen years. Show me what you wanted to do."

He pulled her down. He got his arm under her and dragged her sideways onto the sofa, and she went, the red silk tangling around her legs, and he came down over her with his kurta rucked up and his belly pressing into her stomach through the cotton and his mouth going everywhere at once — her throat, her collarbone, the underside of her breast, the wet drag of his tongue down her sternum, and she felt his teeth graze her nipple and she arched up off the cushions and made a sound that was half performance and half the real thing, because the old man was clumsy and desperate and it had been a long time since anyone had wanted her this badly with their whole ugly body.

His hand went down. It found the waist of her petticoat and pulled at the string and got it wrong, and pulled again, and she felt the knot give and the silk loosen and his hand slide in flat against her belly, palm down, hot, and then lower.

He stopped. His fingers had found the bare skin.

"You're—" He lifted his head. He looked down at her, and his face was flushed and his glasses had fogged and he looked like a man who had walked into the wrong room. "There's nothing. Under the saree, there's nothing—"

"I know," she said.

"Since when?"

"Since I got home." She reached up and took his fogged glasses off his face and set them on the floor, and she looked at him without them, the old man's eyes going soft and small, and she said it in the voice she had used on a hundred boys in a hundred rehearsed calls: "I did it before you came. I shaved for you. I put on perfume for you. I've been sitting here on my knees for six minutes waiting for your key in the lock."

He came apart. She felt it — the whole weight of him shuddering, and then his hand went down between her legs and his fingers found her, and she was wet, she was so wet she could feel it on his knuckles, and he groaned like a man in pain.

"God," he said. "God, you're—"

"Tell me," she said. "Say what you're going to do."

"I'm going to—" His fingers pushed into her and she took them, easy, wet, and he made a sound like a sob. "I'm going to fuck you. On my son's sofa. I'm going to fuck my son's widow on my son's sofa."

"Then do it."

He fumbled at his kurta. He got his pyjama string loose and pushed the cloth down and his cock came out — thick, uncircumcised, already leaking, older and heavier than the boys she was used to, the head a dark wet plum — and he got up on his knees over her and lined himself up and looked down at her face with something that was almost terror.

"Dipanwita—"

"Sasur ji," she said. "Come inside me."

He pushed in. All the way, in one slow shove, and she felt the stretch of him — thick, blunt, filling her in a way the boys never did — and she arched and gripped the sofa cushion and heard herself make a real sound, a long low note, and the old man above her went rigid and shook and had to stop and breathe.

"Don't stop," she said.

"I can't— I'll—"

"Then come. Come inside me."

"No—" He pulled back and pushed in again, deeper, and she felt the wet sound of it, her own slickness around him, and he found a rhythm, short and hard and graceless, his belly slapping her thighs, and she lifted her hips to meet him because it was better that way, and she looked up at his face — the sweat on his forehead, the mouth open, the eyes fixed on her breasts as they moved under him — and she thought about the phone in the pocket of the saree on the floor, and about the word mine, and about the boy who was waiting for a text.

"Harder," she said.

He made a sound and obeyed. He got his hands under her thighs and pushed them up and back and drove into her, and she was folded nearly in half under a fat old man on her own sofa with her husband's photograph on the wall above them, and she felt her own orgasm start to gather low in her belly, real, surprising, and she let it come.

"Sasur ji—"

"Say my name," he gasped. "Say my name, not that—"

She did not know his name. She had been married into that house for six years and she had never once called him anything but sasur ji, and she was not going to learn it now, and so she said nothing, and she put her hand down between their bodies and found her own clit with two fingers and rubbed it while he fucked her, and the old man watched her do it and lost his rhythm entirely.

"You're— you're touching yourself—"

"I'm going to come," she said. "Don't you dare stop."

He did not stop. He held on, shaking, and she worked her clit and looked up into his ruined face, and then it crested and broke over her — her cunt clenching tight around him, her thighs locking, a long shudder going up through her whole body — and she cried out, once, sharp, and the old man felt her grip him and lost it.

He came with a shout. He pushed in to the root and held there and she felt him spurt, once, twice, three times, hot and thick, his whole body jerking over her, and he collapsed onto her chest and lay there panting into her neck with his soft cock still inside her and his sweat soaking into the red silk.

She lay under him and stared at the ceiling. The AC hummed. Somewhere down the corridor a door closed. Her body was still buzzing faintly, that good low aftershock, and her hand was still between her legs, wet and sticky, and the old man on top of her was breathing like a dog in the heat.

"Dipanwita," he said into her shoulder. "Dipanwita, I—"

"Shh." She put her clean hand on the back of his head, in the thin grey hair, and held him there. "Don't say anything."

Because she was not listening to him. She was listening for the phone.

When he finally got up — stiff, embarrassed, tucking himself away, looking everywhere in the room except at her — she sat up on the sofa and pulled the red silk over her breasts and reached down to the floor for her saree. Her phone was in the folds. She turned her back on him to check it, and there it was, one message, sent eleven minutes ago:

Well?

She typed with her thumb, one-handed, while her sasur stood in her living room with his kurta untucked and his glasses back on and his face going slowly grey with the beginning of shame.

He came. He fucked me on my husband's sofa. He came inside me.

The reply came fast.

Good girl. Is he still there?

She looked up. The old man was standing by the shoe rack with his sandals in his hand, and he was looking at the brass bowl — at the silver key sitting in it, small and bright under the low light — and she watched him look at it and look at her and look at the door, and she knew exactly what he was deciding.

Yes, she typed. He's looking at the key.

Tell him it's his.

She set the phone face-down on the sofa cushion and stood up, and the red silk fell open and she did not close it, and she walked to the doorway where her husband's father stood with his sandals in his hand and his face full of the thing he had spent nineteen years not saying.

"Sasur ji," she said. "The key is for you."

He stared at the bowl. He stared at her. The tobacco smell was still on him, and so was she — she could smell herself on his fingers from three feet away, that salt musk, and she watched him realise he could smell it too.

"You want me to—" He swallowed. "You want me to come back."

"Whenever you want," she said. "Whenever you're in Gurgaon. The tea will be ready."

He picked up the key. His hand shook doing it, and he put it in the pocket of his kurta and looked at her one more time — the silk, the breasts, the dark mouth — and then he opened the door and went out into the corridor without a word, and the door clicked shut behind him and she heard his sandals going down the hall, quick, embarrassed, a man fleeing a house he had just robbed.

She went to the sofa and picked up the phone.

He took the key.

Of course he did. A pause. Then: Clean yourself up. You'll see me tomorrow.

She stood in the middle of her living room with the red blouse open and the old man's seed starting to slide down the inside of her thigh, and she looked at the wall above the sofa — the photograph of her and her husband on their wedding day, garlands, vermilion, her eyes down — and she reached up and turned the frame face-down on its nail.