“As you wish.” I take both holes faster, remaining as gentle about it as I can manage. Which isn’t much.
“Now!” she warns, and then I feel her spasming on my cock.
There’s that rush in my balls, demanding to join her. Sweat trickles down the back of my neck. I’m quickly losing the battle to stay in control. “I’m going to come in your sweet pussy, pet!”
“Fuck, yes!”
“You’re taking it so good that I might have to fuck your ass for real.”
She whimpers wordlessly as her body squeezes on me again, and then a bellow tears out of her as she slams her fist into the pillows. I explode in her depths, shooting deep inside her pulsing body.
Usually, some part of my brain stays back, running the still-open problems. Tonight, nothing’s running. Just this room, this woman, and the dark.
SEVEN
LENA
The first weeksettles into something I didn’t anticipate, which is a rhythm. Not comfortable—I’m still learning which cabinet has the mugs and which drawer has the sharp knives. It’s not a drawer. It’s the magnetic thingy on the wall, which is positioned too high for Opal to reach, thankfully.
There’s a whole corridor off the east wing I’ve walked past a dozen times and won’t try, because I’ve already understood that not trying that door is the right call. But day follows day in a pattern I can track, and after months of barely keeping my head above water, trackable is what I need most.
Call center by day. Penthouse by night. Opal improving by the hour.
That last part is the one I keep thinking about. Dario adjusts her medication twice in the first week—small calibrations based on what he’s observing, not standard protocol applied without thought. By day five, she eats a full dinner without stopping to press her hand to her throat. By day six, her color is better. On day seven, she asks, completely unprompted, whether she can goback to school. I have to excuse myself to the bathroom for two minutes, because I am not going to cry in this man’s kitchen.
I cry a little in the bathroom. Quietly. Then I wash my face and come back and say yes, absolutely, let’s get your backpack ready.
Dario’s nurse friend Alanda starts the morning after we move in. She arrives at eight every day with a canvas tote bag and an easy authority that fills a room without crowding it. Opal takes one look at her and decides she’s wonderful. By the third morning, Opal is treating breakfast as a performance, working every angle to earn Alanda’s laugh. Alanda has an enormous laugh, and Opal treats the earning of it as a daily personal achievement worth reporting in detail every night.
Alanda goes home when I get back from work. We’ve built a handoff routine—a quick rundown of Opal’s day, meds, food, mood—and lately it stretches into fifteen minutes of actual conversation while Opal shows Alanda whatever she drew that afternoon. I like Alanda in the uncomplicated, unguarded way I like people when I don’t have to think about them. That doesn’t happen often enough.
About five days in, at dinner, Dario looks up from his plate. “You should quit the call center.”
“What? No.”
He sets his fork down. “The commute alone?—”
“No,” I say again. “I need something that’s mine. It’s not up for discussion.”
He holds my gaze for a moment, then picks his fork back up and goes back to eating. He doesn’t push it. I wait for the push. It never comes.
What I don’t tell him is the real reason. The call center is where I exist without context—without the penthouse or the arrangement or Dario’s presence in my peripheral vision at all times. When I put the headset on, I’m Lena Swan, three years in, who knows the system better than most of her supervisors, working toward becoming one.
That version of me doesn’t need managing. She just works. I need her intact.
I overhear a phone call midweek. His office door doesn’t latch when he’s in a hurry, and his voice carries—clipped, precise. A name comes out clean. Giovanni.
I don’t know a Giovanni. I note it and keep walking, which has been my policy all week.
Visitors come some evenings. They arrive with the braced energy of men who’d rather be somewhere else, and they don’t stay. The first couple of times I come out of the kitchen with an offer of coffee—a reflex, can’t help it—and they look at me like I’ve materialized from an unexpected dimension. Dario guides them past with a look that says let it go, so I let it go.
I stop offering coffee to the visitors. It feels wrong, but also like what I’m supposed to do.
Alanda is part of the texture of this place too, and I like her too much to think too hard about which parts she belongs to. She’s a nurse—her hands, her economy of motion, the way she reads a room all say so. Most days, she’s here purely for Opal.
But some days Dario asks her to help with the complicated cases, and on those days she comes out of the back room with the flat, professional face of someone who has done something requiring detachment. She washes her hands twice at the kitchen sink, andwe make tea and talk about Opal’s drawings and don’t talk about anything else.
I don’t ask. She doesn’t offer. That’s its own kind of arrangement.
