LOGINI did not.I told him I could smell his soap in the hall at home. That I used to think it was an accident. That I started taking the long way to my room.“Claire.”My name in his mouth. Not Elena. Not Helen’s daughter. Claire.I sat down because he told me to and because I like being told by him. That is the part I do not say at school. I am grown. I am fine. I am also the girl who gets wet when her mother’s husband says sit down in a room with a clock.He told me to drive back to campus. No more parking lot. No more Elena Voss. He would give me three names that were not him.I asked if he wanted me to drive back.“What I want is not the point.”It was the only point. I looked at his mouth when he said it. I thought about that mouth between my legs, his glasses still on, my heel in his shoulder, the pad still blank on the floor. I thought about coming on his tongue and staying quiet because the scheduler might come back from lunch.My underwear was a lost cause. I could feel it. I shi
CLAIREI booked fifty minutes with my mother’s husband so I could sit across from him and get wet on purpose.Elena Voss. Fake first name. Street I used to live on. The scheduler did not ask. I drove four hours down from school with the windows up and my underwear already useless and I sat in his parking lot like I had been doing since May.I am twenty-one. I have my own place. I pay my own bills. He still says my name like it is a fire exit.Grant.Dr. Ward on the door. Grant in our kitchen. Grant at the sink at one in the morning in a white shirt, throat wet from water, saying *hey Claire* like I was a roommate and not the girl who went back down the hall and put her hand between her legs with her door locked and her mother’s laugh still stuck in the walls.He opened the office door.I was already in the client chair. I had chosen the blouse in a dorm mirror. I had thought about wearing nothing under the skirt and then put the underwear on anyway so I could feel myself soak them whi
The water made it strange. Less friction. Deeper somehow. She gasped and her legs tightened. He held the edge on either side of her and fucked her in long slow strokes that sent little waves out across the empty lanes. Each time he bottomed out the water slapped the wall. The sound was filthy in a room built for children and lane ropes.She came quieter than she had in his kitchen. A shake. A bite on his shoulder that would look like the pool did it. He held still inside her and felt it go through her and into him.He pulled out before he followed. He was not done and he did not want the water to take the rest of it.“Deck,” she said.They climbed out. Cold air. Water sheeting off them onto the tile. She grabbed a stack of clean towels from the office door and threw two on the first row of bleachers. Plastic and metal. She lay back on them and opened her knees and the underwater lights put moving blue on the inside of her thighs.Jude knelt on the wet tile.This he knew. The taste was
Bonus Chapter**Three weeks later the building was just a building.Lena had her own shirts back. Jude’s ice bowl lived in his cabinet like a normal object. They had learned how to pass each other in the hall when someone else was waiting for the elevator. They had not learned how to stop.Friday she texted a pin, not a knock.*Off at nine. Door on the side. Don’t come to the front.*The pin was a low brick building twenty minutes away. MUNICIPAL POOL in faded paint. The parking lot was empty except for her car and a hatchback that belonged to the night janitor, already pulling out when Jude arrived.He found the side door. She opened it before he knocked. Hair up. Staff polo. The smell of chlorine coming off her skin like a second heat.“If anyone asks,” she said, “you’re not here.”“Okay.”She locked the door behind him.The hallway was wet concrete and vending machines with their lights off. Through the next set of doors the pool sat under a high dark ceiling, one row of underwater
I fucked her like that until my knees went stupid. She reached back and grabbed my thigh. I got a hand around and found her clit, swollen, slick, and rubbed in time. She came again on my cock with her forehead on her own arm. I pulled out and came on the small of her back because I wanted to see it in the light. I did. I watched it land. I spread it with my thumb and she shivered.We stayed there. Her over my counter. Me trying to remember how to breathe.“Okay,” she said after a minute. “Now I should go home.”This time we got dressed.I gave her a clean shirt. She found her tank from the first night in a damp pile and left it. She walked out my door into a hallway that had lights and a smell of other people’s coffee and a kid’s scooter against the wall.I followed her.I did not plan to. My body just did not stay in the apartment.She stopped at her door. Keys. The lock stuck the way cheap locks stick. She got it open and looked at me still standing in the hall like a problem.“Jude
JudeI woke up because the fridge would not shut up.That thing had been a dead box for two days. Now it was the loudest object I owned. Cold air. A click every thirty seconds. The ceiling light in the hall was on too. I had forgotten to kill that one.Lena was still on my floor.Sheet twisted around one thigh. My shirt nowhere. Morning coming through the window we never closed. I could see all of her. Not candle. Not storm. Day. The bite on her shoulder was already a color. Gravel marks on her knee from the roof. Dried rain in her hair.I lay there and looked at her like I had not had my mouth on every inch of that.She opened her eyes without moving.“The fridge,” she said.“Yeah.”“I hate it.”“Me too.”She sat up. No attempt to cover anything. Daylight on her tits, on the faint bruises my hands left on her hips, on the inside of her thighs. I got hard against the sheet and did not bother hiding it. She saw. She looked at it the way she looked at the ice the first night.“I should







