next.

The lamp is a cheap thing from a supermarket aisle that did not know it would be asked to do this. It throws a circle on the table and leaves the corners of the room to themselves, the way a woman leaves a city to itself when she has decided the evening belongs indoors. Leather takes the light and keeps it. Somewhere a mug has gone cold. The window is a black rectangle. Rain, if there is rain, does not matter. The city can do what it wants.

She sits first. That is the first fact and it rearranges the furniture. Dressed. Zip to the throat. One boot hooked on the other ankle. She looks like a person who has somewhere else to be and has chosen not to go. The chair opposite is empty for three breaths, then it isn’t. A body sits because it was told to sit, and sitting becomes, very quickly, the whole personality available to it.

He expects a scene. He has brought the expectation in with him like a coat: that she will come close, that there will be a hand, that there will be an ending with a shape he can name. She lets him keep the coat on for a minute. It is ruder that way.

Then the metal. Not as a speech. As a click. Where a hobby used to live there is steel, and the hobby understands, with a stupid animal clarity, that it is unemployed. Palms on wood. The wood is warmer than it should be. He is hard in a way that has nowhere to go, which is a kind of heat that makes people bargain. She does not bargain. She reaches down without looking as if she were adjusting a lamp, and the second click is a hole being given work. Brutal is not a mood. Brutal is a motor doing a job she will not do with her hands.

He makes a sound. It dies in the lamp-circle like it was never invited. She is already on the screen. Type. A still of a woman in a doorway. A sentence that does not explain itself. It does not matter which. What matters is the refusal to look up. Every time he thinks now she will see me, the evening gets longer. He learns, line by line, that a clock is not required for time to become a punishment. That a cock can be locked and a hole can be used in the same breath and neither of those facts is love. That dignity is a thing he was going to offer her like a coupon, and she is not shopping.

If I am very still, he thinks. If I am very good. If I make a prettier sound. There is cheap plastic on the table that might be a kitchen timer and might be nothing. He decides it is a key-box because he needs the story to have a lock he can survive. She hears furniture. She scrolls. The sky goes. The lamp does not.

Closer, then: the wet. The stupid drip that does not get to become a finish. The way his thighs want to close and cannot quite, because she said open and the word is still in the room like smoke. She could stand up and unzip. She does not. The zipper that does not come down is louder than one that does. He could hate her for that. He does not. He hates the hope instead, which is worse, and which she likes.

When she finally stands it is not to save him. She looks down the way you look at a coat you are not taking into the street. He is still steel. He has not come. She has not explained. She puts two fingers under his jaw, not kind, not cruel, just placing a face that has been waiting to be placed, and she says nothing at all. The silence is the hand.

Then she lets go. She goes back to the screen. He waits for the twist to be mercy. It isn’t.

The plastic on the table was never a box. There was never a key. The click was real enough — he felt it in his cock like a door — but the evening did not need a timer to keep him. She sat down. He stayed. That was the lock. She has been writing this while he bargained with an object that was only a mug. You are still sitting. The lamp is still cheap. She still has not come over.