#oc talk

Cate lasted exactly two months before admitting to herself that the divorce had not, in fact, cured anything.

Two months of dinners with people who were beautiful in tidy, respectable ways. Two months of hands on her waist, mouths at her throat, voices trying to sound certain while she smiled like a woman gripping a champagne flute, waiting for the crack. They were all fine. Better than fine, objectively. Hot, even. Cate had let one of them pin her against a wall last Friday, let another slide a hand up her skirt in the backseat of an Uber two nights before that, let a third murmur that she was trouble with the kind of pleased little laugh that usually worked on people.

None of it touched the starving part.

By eleven-thirty, her apartment was full of amber lamplight and bad ideas. The city beyond her windows glittered stupidly through the dark, all those little lights pretending other people were having better nights. Her kitchen counter was still cluttered with the wreckage of a dinner she’d barely eaten, and Cate sat sideways on the couch with one heel abandoned on the rug and her second glass of wine quietly becoming a fourth. She stared into her glass and thought, with the bitter precision of the genuinely miserable, that being divorced from Sydney Stark was like having a limb removed and then being expected to clap.

Her phone lay faceup on the coffee table, dark and useless. No new texts. No missed calls. Sydney had always been infuriatingly disciplined once hurt enough. Cate could picture it too easily, the stubborn set of her mouth, the quiet she wrapped around herself when she decided she would not come when called. That almost made it worse. If Sydney had been cruel, if she’d been messy, if she’d been loudly spiraling, Cate could have hated her in peace. But Sydney—being Sydney—had simply gone distant with that devastating kind of self-control that made it feel less like a fight and more like exile.

Cate tipped her head back against the couch and laughed once, humorless. “You had to be noble now?”

Still nothing from the phone.

Which, naturally, was when she abandoned the couch and followed the worst impulse available.

The wine had left Cate warm in all the least useful ways.

Not soft. Not comforted. Just flushed and restless and mean enough at the edges to hate the silence in her apartment, hate the expensive throw blanket folded too neatly over the arm of the couch, hate the fact that the last person she’d let into this place had kissed like they were waiting for applause. Cate stood barefoot in her bedroom, the remaining heel abandoned somewhere between the couch and the hall, blouse half-unbuttoned, and stared into the drawer she should not have opened.

There it was—tucked beneath old silk and the kind of self-deception money buys very elegantly. No reason to keep it except the real one, which was simple and humiliating and impossible to explain in daylight.

Divorce paperwork had divided furniture, accounts, property. Somehow this had ended up with Cate.

Because she’d made sure it did.

Cate hadn’t thrown it away. She hadn’t even had the nerve to bury it deep enough to make finding it difficult. She had only told herself she’d kept it out of spite, which might have been believable if she weren’t standing here now with her pulse drumming hot and guilty against her throat, too many glasses of red wine in her system, and an ache between her legs no one else had managed to touch properly in months.

Cate peeled the lid back and stared down at the dildo like it might rise up and accuse her. It looked obscene in the quiet room. Not because it was vulgar, exactly, but because it was intimate. Familiar. Personal in a way that made her chest tighten. Not some anonymous toy, not some clean silicone stranger bought in a fit of loneliness. This was specific. Chosen. Kept.

“Pathetic,” she murmured, though she was already reaching for it.

The silicone was smooth and heavy in her hand, indecently familiar in shape. Not the real thing but close enough to make something low and ugly twist inside her. 

It had been a joke once. Or it had started that way. One of those late, overheated, laughing nights when Sydney had been sprawled naked across their sheets, all long limbs and smug mouth, while Cate had propped herself on one elbow and said—in the thoughtful tone she reserved for either gallery curation or disaster—that it was actually unfair for a body to be that specifically engineered to ruin her life. Sydney had snorted and said, “You’re being dramatic.” Cate had replied, “No, I’m being archival. Different thing.” Then she’d kissed her stupidly perfect shoulder and said she wanted a copy in case of emergency.

Sydney had looked at her with that dark, entertained softness she only ever got when Cate was being impossible in a way she secretly adored. “A copy.”

“A mold,” Cate had corrected.

“You’re insane.”

“You married me.”

That had been the end of the argument.

She closed the drawer with her hip and carried the thing to bed like a secret she was tired of pretending not to keep.

Her phone was already on the nightstand. That, too, felt accusatory. Cate sat on the edge of the mattress, breathing through the heat gathering in her body, and let her head tip back for a second. The room smelled faintly of her perfume, clean linen, and the last smear of lipstick she’d scrubbed off after dinner with someone whose name she could barely remember now. She’d gone out because she’d been determined to act like a woman with options. She’d come home feeling lonelier than when she’d left.

Every attempt to forget Sydney had been like that lately. Another dinner. Another body. Another mouth that wasn’t hers. Another hand that touched Cate like she was decipherable in all the wrong ways. Too tentative or too eager. Too impressed with themselves. Not enough gravity. Not enough edge. Not enough history. They only wanted to sleep with her. Sydney had always known how to make her feel claimed.

That was the problem.

That was always the fucking problem.

Cate looked at the toy in her hand, then at the phone. Her lower lip disappeared between her teeth. She could still choose dignity. She could put it away. Take a shower. Drink water. Sleep this off and wake with only the ordinary kind of regret.

Instead, with the decisiveness that only comes when a woman is already halfway to ruining her own night, she opened the camera app and propped the phone against the lamp on her bedside table.

The screen reflected her back at herself. Gold hair mussed from her own impatient hands. Eyes bright and glassy. Blouse hanging open enough to show the edge of her bra and the warm rise of her chest. Pretty in a way she knew too well, but not polished now. Unraveled. Intimate. Vulnerable in that terrible accidental way alcohol sometimes managed, as if it dissolved all her defenses and left everything raw beneath it.

Her laugh came out quiet and breathy and self-mocking. “Great,” she muttered to her reflection. “You look insane.”

She hit record anyway.

For a second she only watched the timer begin to climb. Red dot. Counting. Tiny, merciless witness. Cate drew in a breath and reached up to undo another button, then another. The blouse slipped open fully. She didn’t take it off. Somehow that felt even more intimate, sitting there half dressed, like she’d started being reasonable and then abandoned the effort midway through.

“Hi,” she said to the phone.

Her own voice, soft and a little slurred, filled the room in real time. She nearly stopped right there. Nearly lunged for the screen and killed the recording before it captured anything worse than this humiliating little tableau. But then she thought of Sydney wherever she was, in whatever apartment or hotel or borrowed bed or studio or goddamn planet she’d been haunting since the divorce, and something hot and reckless unfurled in Cate’s chest.

“No, that’s terrible.” She gave a tiny shake of her head, smiling with none of the ease she was trying to project. “You don’t get a normal hello, actually.”

She shifted back on the bed, gathering one leg up. Her skirt had ridden scandalously high already. She let it. Let the camera catch the smooth line of her thigh, the white lace at her hips. Let it catch the toy resting against her palm.

“This is your fault,” she said, and there it was, that old cadence, the one she reserved for Sydney alone. Accusation as flirtation. Injury dressed like elegance. “Just so we’re clear.”

A pause. Her eyes flicked to the screen, to herself, then away.

“I tried to be normal,” she went on. “I’ve been very brave, actually. Very resilient. I’ve gone on dates. I’ve let boring people buy me drinks. I even let one of them stay over last week, which I’m mentioning only so you understand how desperate things have become.”

Her mouth twisted. Underneath the brittle humor was something else, fraying.

“And none of them…” She exhaled, looked down at the toy again, and her voice dropped. “None of them feel right. Isn’t that embarrassing?”

The honesty of it startled even her. It hung there between her and the phone, naked as anything else in the room.

Cate swallowed. Then, with the precise care of someone setting a trap and stepping into it herself, she slid her free hand beneath her skirt. The first touch made her breath catch. She’d already been wet, her lower belly tight with that familiar unsatisfied throb that had followed her home from another failed attempt to outrun herself. Her fingertips found the damp heat between her legs and lingered there, eyes fluttering once before she forced them open again.

“I hate you a little,” she whispered.

It was plainly not true, which made it worse.

She leaned back against the headboard and drew her hand out only long enough to push her underwear aside. Then she lifted the toy, dragging the tip slowly through her slick, not yet inside, just enough to make her thighs tense. Even that tiny contact hit too hard. Her mouth parted. She stared at it like it had offended her.

“God.” A breathless laugh. “See? This is exactly why I shouldn’t drink alone.”

She kept talking because stopping would mean feeling too much, and Cate had never been built for silence when she was unraveling. Speech gave shape to the spiral. Made it survivable. Or at least prettier.

“Do you know,” she said, tracing the length of the dildo against herself again, slower now, “how annoying it is that you still ruin people for me? It’s genuinely rude. Like, divorce should come with some kind of warranty. A reset button. A fucking…palate cleanser.”

Her head tipped back when she finally pushed the tip in, only the first inch, enough to make her body go taut around the intrusion. The sound that left her then was small and involuntary and much too honest. She pressed her lips together afterward as if she could take it back.

But she didn’t stop.

“Still fits,” she groaned, eyes half-lidded now. “Isn’t that depressing?”

Another inch. Then another. Cate sucked in a sharp breath and spread her legs wider on instinct, one hand braced on the mattress while the other guided the toy fully home. The stretch was familiar in the most punishing way. Not identical, no. No mold could capture the heat of Sydney, the minute adjustments of her hands, the way she always knew whether Cate needed to be teased or filled or held down or talked through it. But it was close enough to yank the memory straight through Cate’s body like a wire.

She made a low sound, almost a whine, and closed her eyes.

There you are, her body seemed to say before her pride could interrupt.

When she opened her eyes again they were wetter than before, lashes clumped a little. The wine had blurred the edges of embarrassment, but not enough to erase it entirely. She knew how she looked. Knew exactly what she was giving the camera. Hair fallen over one shoulder, blouse open, bra still on, skirt shoved up around her hips, one hand between her thighs holding a copy of her ex-wife inside her while speaking to an empty room like it might answer back.

If she’d seen anyone else doing this, she’d have called it tragic.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she told the phone, voice unsteady. “This is not because I miss you.”

She rocked her hips once, testing. Her whole body answered. The toy dragged against her walls in that deep, maddeningly specific way that made her stomach tighten.

Then again.

Cate’s breath hitched. Her fingers tightened on the base. Her shoulders pressed harder against the headboard as she established a rhythm, slow at first because anything faster felt dangerous. Each thrust landed with the strange ache of recognition. Her thighs trembled. She could hear how wet she was already, slick sounds filling the room between each shallow push and pull.

“You know what it is?” she said after a moment, voice thinner now. “It’s muscle memory. That’s all. My body is stupid and sentimental. It doesn’t mean anything.”

The next thrust went deeper. She gasped and her head fell back.

“Fuck.”

There was a little silence while she rode it, lips parted, breath coming quicker. When she spoke again, she sounded more drunk, or perhaps just more honest.

“I hate that you know me this well.”

Another roll of her hips. Another measured slide. Cate’s free hand came up to her chest, fingers hooking into the cup of her bra and dragging it down enough to free one breast, then the other, suddenly impatient with fabric, with concealment, with anything between feeling and exposure. Cool air kissed her skin. Her nipples were already tight. She touched one with absent, trembling fingers and shivered.

“You always knew exactly how to…” She trailed off, laughed once under her breath, then looked directly into the camera for the first time in nearly a minute. The eye contact was devastating. “No. If I say that out loud you’ll become even more unbearable, and I really can’t have that.”

But she was already moving faster.

The toy slid in and out with soft, obscene ease. Cate’s face had lost its practiced composure entirely now. Every reaction crossed it cleanly. Frustration, pleasure, shame, want. Her stomach fluttered with each thrust. She dragged her fingertips down over her breast, then lower, over the taut line of her abdomen, then back between her thighs where slick had gathered around the base. She circled her clit once, twice, and jolted.

“Fuck.” She laughed again, but it cracked this time. “Look at me.”

It wasn’t clear whether she meant herself or Sydney.

The room had become very warm. Or maybe Cate had. Her skin glowed. Her hair had begun to stick at her temples. She kept glancing at the screen as if each glimpse of herself might sober her, might stop this, might remind her that sending a video like this was psychotic behavior even for her. Instead it only made the whole thing feel more intimate, more deliberate, more impossible to excuse later.

“I’m serious,” she said, breathing hard now. “Nobody else does this right.”

The words were blunt, stripped of wit.

“Nobody else knows how to make me…” Her throat worked. She pushed the toy deeper and a broken sound tore out of her. “Fuck.”

Her knees widened further, heels digging into the mattress. The toy moved in her hand, pace uneven now because she was too far gone, too busy feeling memory and silicone and self-humiliation blur into one hot ugly thing. Cate reached for the phone as if she might stop the recording after all, but instead only adjusted the angle down a fraction, enough to show more of where she was split around the toy, lace shoved aside, cunt shining.

The decision was so reckless it made her own pulse leap.

“There,” she whispered to the screen, as if confiding. “Since you always liked to watch.”

Her face went hot immediately after saying it, but arousal swallowed whatever shame tried to rise. She put two fingers to her clit and rubbed harder, thrusting the toy deeper in answer. Her body tightened fast around both sensations. Getting off was never the point, not really. The point was that she wanted Sydney to see. Wanted her to know exactly how much damage she still did from a distance. Wanted—cruelly and desperately—to climb inside her head for one night and leave the same ache there.

“You left,” Cate said, and the words landed differently. No flirtation. No polish. Just injury surfacing mid-thrust. “You left and I’m still…” Her breath stuttered. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to outpace what she’d just admitted. “Still fucking built around you, apparently.”

That was too honest. Way too honest. Tears pricked, to her horror. She laughed once, thin and disbelieving. “This is so ugly.”

But she kept going. Of course she did.

Her movements had lost grace now. She was chasing her climax openly, hips lifting off the bed, hand slick and urgent. The headboard thudded lightly against the wall in a rhythm she would be mortified by when sober. Cate didn’t care enough to stop. Every drag of the toy made her cunt clench hard, as though trying to decide whether it could pretend for one stupid merciful second that silicone was skin. Her fingers on her clit grew more frantic. Her breath came in little broken pieces.

“I shouldn’t send this,” she whispered, sounding like she already knew she would. “I really, really shouldn’t.”

A deeper thrust. Her mouth fell open.

“But I want you to…” She swallowed, eyes glassy, fixed on the screen like Sydney might already be on the other side of it. “I want you to feel bad.”

That made her laugh again, wet-eyed and lovely and a little wrecked.

“No, that’s not true either. I want…” Her voice shook. “I want you to miss me like this.”

The confession filled the room and stayed there.

Cate’s whole body seemed to fold around it. She pressed her fingers harder to her clit, shoved the toy in to the hilt, and cried out softly, a sound more wounded than she would ever have allowed in daylight. Her thighs shook violently now. She could feel the orgasm gathering, not cleanly but in hot rolling waves, sharpened by grief and want and alcohol and the humiliating familiarity of the shape inside her.

“Syd,” she said then, for the first time all night, stripped down to the nickname like a bruise. “Fuck, I hate you.”

A beat.

Then, quieter, ruined by truth, “No, I don’t.”

That did it.

Her orgasm hit hard and messy, snatching the breath clean out of her. Cate jerked against the mattress, fingers slipping, toy still buried deep while her cunt clenched around it in rapid helpless pulses. She cried out again, louder this time, and then again, broken into pieces by the force of it, face twisted open with pleasure and shame and the kind of longing that made her chest hurt. Her free hand flew to her mouth too late to muffle anything. Tears slipped, one then another, and she laughed against her own palm at the indignity of it, shuddering through the aftershocks.

For a few seconds there was only the sound of her breathing.

Then she pulled her hand away from her mouth and stared at the screen, dazed.

What the camera saw now was somehow worse than what it had seen before. Cate flushed and half naked, chest heaving, eyes bright with the remnants of tears, the toy still inside her because she was too spent to move yet. Undone in a way she’d usually rather die than let anyone else witness.

She should have stopped recording.

Instead she leaned forward, reached for the phone, and brought it closer, until her face filled the frame. Blonde hair wild now, mascara smudged faintly at one corner, mouth pink and damp and trembling at the edges.

“If you watch this and get smug,” she said softly, each word cushioned by exhaustion and wine, “I’ll kill you.”

The threat had no bones in it. They both would’ve known that.

Cate glanced down at herself, then back up. A tiny, miserable smile touched her mouth. “Actually, no. That’s unfair. You can be a little smug. As a treat.”

She let out a shaky breath.

Then the final blow, because apparently tonight she was committed to total self-annihilation. “I kept it,” she admitted. “In the divorce. Which you probably guessed, because you know me, which is disgusting. But I did.”

Her eyes lowered for a second. When they came back to the camera, they were painfully sober in spite of the wine. “And I’m still trying not to call you every night, so I’d say we’re both having a pretty strange year.”

There it was again, that impulse to save herself with a joke. This time it failed halfway out. Her expression crumpled, only slightly, but enough.

“I just wanted…” She stopped, breathed in, started over. “I wanted you to know it isn’t better with anyone else.”

A beat. No defense after it. No flourish.

Then she whispered, with the fragility of someone stepping barefoot across broken glass, “I wanted you to know you still have me…in all the ways that matter.”

The silence after that was catastrophic.

Cate blinked at the screen as if she could gather the words back by force of will. She couldn’t. Her breathing turned shallow. Mortification arrived in a bright cold wave, too late and all at once.

“Oh my God,” she said faintly.

Then, because she was who she was, she did not delete the video.

She ended it with a trembling thumb, stared at the saved thumbnail for all of three seconds, and pressed send before she could convince herself she was a better person.

The message whooshed away into the dark.

For one stunned instant the room went completely still.

Cate sat there with the toy still inside her, breasts half out of her bra, blouse hanging open, thighs wet, hair wrecked, and felt the full magnitude of what she’d just done crash over her in one catastrophic wave.

Her hand flew to her mouth. “No,” she whispered.

Then louder, hoarse with dawning horror, “No, no, no, no, no.”

While Cate was trying to claw the message back through sheer force of panic, Sydney had picked the wrong bar on purpose.

That was the first honest thing about the night, and she knew it before she even stepped through the door. The place lived three blocks from Cate’s apartment and one bad decision away from their old life. Same narrow frontage. Same black-painted windows that made the inside feel like a secret even when it was crowded. Same crooked brass rail along the bar, worn smooth where too many rings and tired hands had worried at it over the years. They used to come here on Thursdays when they still belonged to each other in public, when Cate liked to lean into her shoulder and steal the olives out of Sydney’s drink with all the ceremony of a jewel thief.

So naturally, on a night when she was trying not to think about her ex-wife, Sydney came here.

“Real genius move,” she muttered to herself as she shouldered up to the bar.

The room smelled like lime peel, stale beer, old wood, and somebody’s too-sweet perfume trying to win a fight with spilled whiskey. Low amber lights turned everyone into a version of themselves they might regret by midnight. Music thudded soft but insistent under the floorboards, some bass-heavy thing with enough pulse to make the glassware hum faintly whenever the bartender set one down too hard. Sydney took the stool at the far end because it gave her a clean view of the door and a patch of wall at her back. Habit. Even now. Even in a place that had once been easy.

She ordered bourbon neat and tried to pretend her chest didn’t tighten when the bartender—new guy, younger than the last one—slid it over and said, “You waiting on someone?”

Sydney gave him a look over the rim of the glass. “That what this face says to you?”

He laughed, held up both hands, and moved on. Sydney drank.

The first sip burned clean and useful. The second tasted like memory.

There had been a version of Cate in this room that lived permanently under Sydney’s skin. Not one version, really. A whole collection. Cate in a cream sweater with her knees folded sideways on the stool, talking with her hands while pretending not to fish for agreement. Cate in silk and eyeliner after some event downtown, gleaming and sharp and impossible not to stare at. Cate laughing so hard she nearly slipped off her seat because Sydney had deadpanned something stupid under her breath and then acted like she hadn’t meant to be funny. Cate in the bathroom mirror once, fixing lipstick with one hand while the other gripped the sink because Sydney had kissed her hard enough to make her forget why they’d gone in there in the first place.

Sydney took another sip.

Across from her, somebody slid into the empty stool with the smooth confidence of a person used to favorable outcomes. Woman, maybe early thirties, dark curls pinned carelessly up, silver hoop in one ear, a mouth that already knew how to smile before it had earned the right.

“You look like you’re deciding whether to stab somebody or write a song about them,” she said.

Sydney turned her head slowly. “Those the only two options?”

“For people sitting alone in bars on weeknights?” The woman lifted one shoulder. “Usually.”

Sydney let her eyes drag away again. The drink sat amber and accusing between her fingers. “Maybe I just like bad lighting.”

The woman smiled wider at that. “Dangerous.”

“Not really.”

“Mm.” She angled her body in, close enough for the suggestion of perfume. Cedar, smoke, something floral buried under it. Not offensive. Not Cate. “I’m Kelsey.”

Sydney gave her a short nod but not her name. Kelsey didn’t seem offended by that, which almost made her more competent than Sydney wanted.

“You come here a lot?” Kelsey asked.

The question was ordinary. Harmless. The kind of thing people asked when they wanted to pull a night toward themselves. Sydney could’ve lied easily. Could’ve said no, first time, passing through, whatever version of detached she wanted. Instead she looked down at the groove worn into the edge of the bar and said, “Used to.”

“Good or bad history?”

Sydney huffed one dry half-laugh through her nose. “Depends who you ask.”

Kelsey studied her a second longer than politeness required, then tipped her chin toward the bartender for a refill she hadn’t requested aloud. Bold. Sydney could respect bold when it wasn’t aimed directly at her on a night she had no skin left to spare.

“You’ve got that look,” Kelsey said.

Sydney glanced sideways. “What look?”

“The one where you’re not actually here.” Kelsey tapped two fingers lightly against her own glass once the fresh drink arrived. “I’m not above benefitting from emotional unavailability, but I like to know the terrain.”

“Terrain,” Sydney repeated, mouth crooking despite herself.

“Sure.” Kelsey leaned one elbow on the bar. “Am I competing with a person, a job, a crisis, or your own terrible taste in women?”

Sydney looked at her properly then. Sharp little thing. Funny, too. In another month, another mood, she might even have been dangerous in a pleasant enough way. Sydney could already imagine the shape of it. A few drinks. Shared cigarettes outside under the streetlamps. Somebody’s hand on her arm. Somebody not Cate laughing at the right cadence and mistaking access for closeness.

That was the problem. There was always a moment with other people where the illusion thinned. The edges gave. She could see exactly how the night was meant to go and exactly why it wouldn’t mean a goddamn thing.

“My taste is pretty awful,” Sydney said.

Kelsey grinned. “That sounds promising.”

Sydney’s phone lit up face down on the bar.

She almost ignored it. Almost let the vibration disappear into the music and the wood and the ongoing project of not blowing up her own evening. But something in her wanted to check anyway, some mean little pulse of instinct she hadn’t managed to kill with the divorce. Sydney frowned, dragged the phone across the bar with two fingers, and turned it over.

Cate.

Every muscle in her body went still.

Not because Cate texting was rare. It wasn’t, not in the broad cosmic sense. Logistics still happened. A forwarded document. A question about mail. A spiteful note when one of them found something in the storage unit that technically belonged to the other. But late at night, with no preamble, while Sydney sat in a bar built out of old ghosts, the sight of Cate’s name hit like a fist to the chest.

Kelsey was still saying something. Sydney didn’t hear a word of it.

Her hand closed over the phone.

A video attachment sat in the thread like a dare.

Sydney stared at it and frowned.

“What’s that face?” Kelsey asked, amused. “Bad news?”

Sydney was already sliding off the stool. “Could be.”

“Should I wait for you to come back and tell me?”

Sydney looked at her, then at the phone, then back. “Don’t.”

Kelsey lifted both brows, accepting the blow with more grace than most. “Damn. Whoever she is, I hate her a little.”

Sydney’s mouth tightened around something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Yeah,” she said, though the word came out softer than intended. “Join the club.”

She was moving before Kelsey could answer, cutting through the crowd toward the back hallway where the bathrooms lived. The corridor narrowed fast, noise from the bar collapsing into a duller thud behind her. Black tile. One flickering bulb near the service door. The whole place smelled faintly of bleach and damp plaster and the citrus hand soap the owner kept buying in bulk. Sydney knew the route too well. Knew the women’s room was less likely to be occupied because the line out front meant people tended to wait until they absolutely had to go. Knew the last stall had a latch that stuck unless you lifted it slightly with your thumb. Knew all of this because Cate once made a map of the place with her body, and Sydney had memorized it.

She pushed into the bathroom and found it empty.

Thank God.

Mirror over the sinks, a little cloudy at the edges. Graffiti in silver marker across one stall door. One bulb above the far mirror blown out, leaving that corner in a forgiving shadow. Sydney didn’t bother with a stall. She braced one hand on the sink instead and unlocked the phone with her thumb.

There was no follow-up. No explanation. Just the video attachment sitting in the thread by itself, blunt and unhelpful and deeply, immediately ominous.

Sydney stared at it.

Her thumb hovered over the keyboard.

She typed What is this.

Looked at it.

Then deleted it.

The typing bubble appeared so fast it nearly stopped Cate’s heart.

She was still half folded over the bed, breath uneven, the phone clutched in one slick hand, when those three little dots bloomed in the message thread like some demonic pulse. The room had not changed at all, and yet everything in it felt suddenly hostile. The lamp was too bright. The sheets were twisted around her thighs like evidence. Her blouse still hung open. The toy was still inside her.

“Fuck.”

Cate yanked it out with a sharp gasp, more from panic than sensitivity now, and dropped it onto the duvet as though it had personally betrayed her. She scrambled upright, nearly knocking the phone out of her own hand in the process, staring at the typing bubble with the kind of focus usually reserved for bomb squads and women reading pregnancy tests.

Three dots.

Gone.

Three dots again.

“Oh, you sadist,” Cate whispered.

The message thread remained blank.

That was somehow worse than an immediate reply. Worse than mockery. Worse than anger. Worse than a laughing emoji, which Sydney absolutely would have weaponized under different circumstances. This was silence with movement inside it. Considered silence. Sydney was there, holding the video in her hands, doing God knew what with it, and Cate’s entire body seemed to turn inside out at the thought.

Sydney’s pulse gave one ugly kick.

“Jesus,” she murmured.

She should have texted back first. Asked if Cate was okay. Asked if this was a mistake she needed help containing. Asked if someone else was with her. Asked any of the reasonable things that belonged to people with functional post-divorce boundaries.

Instead she hit play.

For one second there was only grainy lamplight and the edge of Cate’s bedspread and the sound of breathing, a little unsteady, and Sydney’s own face in the mirror above the sink went blank with dread.

Cate’s thumb moved before her pride could stop it.

don’t look at that

She hit send. Watched it deliver, and immediately hated the naked desperation of it.

Sydney stared at it for half a second, thumb twitching uselessly against the side of her phone, the video still playing underneath.

Cate came into frame.

Open blouse. Hair mussed. Eyes bright and wet in that way they only got when she’d had enough wine to loosen the polished seams without fully dulling the intelligence underneath. Barefoot on the bed, holding a toy in one hand like an accusation she planned to lose to.

Sydney forgot how to breathe.

The room in the video was unmistakably Cate’s. Same headboard. Same lamp. Same pale walls and expensive bedding and the soft curated order of a life Cate wore like a mask even when she was alone. Except Cate did not look curated now. She looked unraveled. Flushed. Intimate. Like someone who had peeled herself open a little too far and decided to keep going.

Another buzz.

actually ignore that

“Jesus Christ,” Sydney muttered, thumbing the notification away to focus on the video.

“Hi,” video-Cate said.

Sydney’s fingers tightened on the phone until her knuckles whitened.

There was something about hearing Cate’s voice directed only at the screen, only at her, that made the dingy bathroom drop away entirely. Sydney knew that cadence. That false-start refinement. The way Cate tried to laugh around embarrassment when it mattered too much. She knew it so well her chest hurt with it.

The phone buzzed again.

don’t open it

A short, disbelieving sound left Sydney, half laugh and half something rougher. “Little late for that.”

Then Cate lifted the toy fully into view.

Every thought in Sydney’s head detonated at once.

It was her. Or close enough to qualify as psychological warfare. The mold they’d made half as a joke, half because Cate had spent an entire weekend being impossible about the idea until Sydney finally pinned her to the bed, bit the soft inside of her thigh, and said fine, then, if you want a monument so badly we’ll make one. Cate had laughed so hard she nearly ruined the casting materials. Later she’d gone reverent with it, smoothing silicone with the tip of one finger and looking up through her lashes like she couldn’t decide whether to be scandalized or turned on by her own audacity.

Sydney had assumed Cate threw it out after the divorce.

That assumption lasted exactly until the line: This is your fault.

The next vibration came almost immediately after.

seriously syd

Cate winced at her own tone, too commanding, too transparent, too obviously panicked. She dragged a hand through her hair and stood from the bed so abruptly the mattress bounced behind her. She needed clothes. Water. A tranquilizer dart. She paced once toward the dresser and back again, phone in hand, heart beating fast enough to make her vision feel a little strange.

Sydney barked one startled laugh under her breath. “You have got to be kidding me.”

The bathroom door opened behind her. Sydney killed the video on instinct and shoved herself sideways into the shadow between the sinks and the paper towel dispenser. A woman stumbled in, checked her lipstick at the mirror, glanced once at Sydney’s face and then very pointedly did not glance again. Sensible.

Sydney looked down at her phone again. Cate’s messages were stacking up beneath the video. Her thumb moved to the keyboard before she could stop it, but whatever she almost said died there.

The typing bubble flashed up again.

Vanished.

Cate stared at the thread. “Oh, I’m going to die,” she said out loud to the empty room, and then, because the room was not helping, she started gathering clothes from the floor with one hand while furiously typing with the other.

that was meant for someone else

She stared at that lie.

Then, offended by herself, sent more before she could delete it.

no it wasn’t obviously it wasn’t i don’t know why i said that

Then the stall door slammed, snapping Sydney out of it. Water ran briefly. The woman left without a word. Sydney waited until the bathroom fell quiet again, then pushed back out into the hallway and into the tiny single-user staff restroom at the end of the hall, the one that was almost always unlocked if you knew to test the handle.

She locked herself in and hit play again from the beginning.

Because one watch was not enough. Because she needed to make sure she was not hallucinating Cate talking to her through a two-way mirror built out of shame and silicone and longing. Because the first few seconds had left her so physically stunned she was no longer certain she had absorbed language.

This time she watched every second.

Watched Cate try to keep it light and fail. Watched her say none of the other women felt right with that brittle little laugh that always meant she was standing one inch from a cliff. Watched her touch herself beneath the skirt, eyes shining, and felt something hot and immediate slam low through her own body so hard she had to shift her stance on instinct.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Sydney muttered to no one.

The restroom was barely bigger than a closet. Toilet. Tiny sink. Cracked dispenser. Someone had painted the walls dark green years ago and the humidity had made the color blister at the seams. The overhead vent rattled intermittently like an exhausted insect. None of it mattered. The phone screen had become her whole world.

Cate saying, I hate you a little, with no conviction in it at all.

Cate easing the toy inside herself and going breathless at the stretch.

Cate half laughing, half breaking when she said still fits, isn’t that depressing.

Sydney had to plant one hand on the wall to steady herself.

It was not just that Cate looked beautiful. Cate always looked beautiful. That was weather. That was a law of physics. This was worse. Cate looked honest. The kind of honest she spent daylight hours turning into style, wit, presentation, anything but the raw thing itself. Here it all was anyway. The wet shine between her thighs. The trembling of her hand. The way her voice kept trying to climb back into polish and slipping. The way she kept addressing Sydney with that intimate precision that had always made even the cruelest things sound like vows.

Sydney felt heat crawl up the back of her neck. Down her spine. Straight into her gut.

There had already been whiskey in her blood. Already a soft restless ache under her skin from weeks—months really—of not admitting how often she still reached for Cate in the shape of every empty room. The video lit all of that up like a match dropped into gasoline.

When Cate pushed her bra down and freed her breasts, Sydney’s jaw tightened so hard it hurt. Not from anger. Not even close. Just the sheer brutal force of want. Cate’s skin flushed under the lamp. Her nipples tightened instantly in the cool air. Sydney knew the taste of that skin, the texture of it under her mouth, the exact expression Cate made when stimulation tipped from teasing into real need. The screen rendered none of it as precisely as memory did. It didn’t have to.

And then there was the talking.

God, the talking.

Cate could weaponize language on a good day. Drunk and needy and using the thing shaped like Sydney to fuck herself open on camera, she became catastrophic. Every line landed somewhere different. None of them missed.

Sydney stared at the video as the words came out of Cate’s mouth and felt her own body harden into helpless response. Her cock thickened, trapped uncomfortably in dark jeans that had not asked to become part of this situation. She shifted again, a quiet curse leaving her lungs. The restroom was suddenly too hot, too small, too full of air she couldn’t breathe.

It wasn’t just arousal. That would have been simpler. Manageable. This had grief in it. Relief. Vindication she hadn’t earned. A sharp mean stripe of jealousy toward every faceless person Cate had tried after her. A worse, softer ache at the sight of Cate crying around the edges and still keeping the camera on. Still choosing to let Sydney see.

When Cate adjusted the phone lower to let her watch, Sydney actually closed her eyes for a second.

A picture flashed through her head so vivid it hurt. Cate on their old bed, knees spread, hair falling over one shoulder, looking up with that devastating mixture of arrogance and surrender that made Sydney feel both worshipful and dangerous. Cate saying tell me what to do. Cate saying no, wait, don’t tell me, show me. Cate arching under her hands with tears at the corners of her eyes and acting offended about it after. Memory rose up thick and merciless, layering itself over the video until Sydney couldn’t separate the present from the old language of their bodies.

Then the line that split her clean in half.

You left and I am still…still fucking built around you, apparently.

Sydney went motionless.

There it was. Not the sex. Not the heat. The wound inside it. The thing they had both been orbiting since the papers were signed, each pretending the distance had settled something. It hadn’t. It had only made the wanting meaner. More abstract. Harder to feed and impossible to kill.

Sydney had not wanted the divorce. That was the stupidest part. She had signed because by then every conversation with Cate had turned into bloodletting with nicer furniture. Too much old damage. Too many barbed little tests. Too many nights where loving each other felt indistinguishable from proving who could survive the other longest. Sydney had told herself space might save what they couldn’t stop ruining up close. Then the space arrived and all it did was clarify the outline of Cate’s absence with surgical precision.

She missed her in humiliating ways.

In grocery stores when she reached automatically for Cate’s coffee creamer and had to put it back. In the middle of songs when she wrote a line and knew exactly what criticism Cate would make before anyone else heard it. In bed, obviously—Jesus Christ. In every apartment she entered because no room without Cate in it ever felt fully occupied. Even the relief had gone rotten fast. Fewer fights, sure. Fewer slammed doors. Fewer nights sleeping back-to-back in the same bed like stubborn rivals. But the silence after? The silence had teeth.

The video rolled on.

Cate getting closer. Losing what little rhythm she’d been trying to maintain. Saying she wanted Sydney to feel bad and then, almost immediately, even worse, that she wanted her to miss her like this. Sydney swallowed hard enough to hurt. Her hand had drifted unconsciously to the fly of her jeans, not inside, not yet, just braced there with the sort of pressure that made honesty hard to avoid.

When Cate finally said Syd, the nickname breaking open in her mouth like something she hadn’t meant to let out, Sydney’s whole body answered.

And then the climax hit.

Messy. Real. Cate shuddering around the toy with her hand clapped over her mouth too late, sounds leaking through anyway. Tears on her cheeks. Pleasure and shame and relief making a ruin of her beautiful face. Sydney watched with her lips parted and all higher thought completely gone. The sight of Cate coming apart on something molded from her wrecked Sydney so thoroughly she had to lock both knees to stay upright.

By the time the video softened into aftermath, Cate close to the camera and exhausted and wrecked and still somehow making threats that sounded like invitations, Sydney was gone. Entirely. Not in the bar. Not in the restroom. Not in any version of her life that did not still lead straight back to this woman.

If you watch this and get smug, I’ll kill you.

Sydney let out a raw little breath that might have been a laugh. “Bit late for threats, baby.”

Then Cate admitted she’d kept the toy in the divorce.

Sydney’s head dropped back against the door with a quiet thud.

Of course she had. Sydney should have known Cate would never actually get rid of the most indecent object in the house after fighting for it. Of course she’d filed it away like contraband grief. The image of her keeping it tucked beneath silk and self-respect was so staggeringly, specifically Cate that Sydney almost smiled.

By the end of the video Sydney was breathing like she’d run up stairs. She stared at the frozen thumbnail for a full five seconds after it ended, Cate’s face framed close and vulnerable on the screen, before reality crashed back in around her. The rattling vent. The smell of industrial soap. The pressure in her jeans. The fact that out in the bar some woman named Kelsey was probably assuming she’d been ghosted in the bathroom after a bad date with destiny.

Her thumb drifted back to the keyboard. She stared at the text box, trying to think of a response, and came up with nothing she trusted.

Back in Cate’s bedroom, the toy lay glistening obscenely in the rumpled sheets, impossible to ignore. Cate snatched it up and shoved it into the nearest drawer with all the moral clarity of a woman hiding a body. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirror over the dresser and actually stopped moving.

Mascara smudged. Hair wrecked. Flushed chest. Blouse still open. Mouth swollen from nothing but her own teeth biting back sounds and the shape of Sydney in absentia. She looked exactly like a woman who had sent her ex-wife a video of herself falling apart around a dildo molded from said ex-wife’s cock.

There was no angle from which that could be spun.

Cate buttoned two buttons with trembling fingers and abandoned the rest. Then she looked back down at the thread still open on her phone.

Three dots had appeared.

Her stomach dropped.

Gone.

Three dots again.

Gone.

Cate sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

“Why are you like this,” she muttered, though whether she meant Sydney or herself remained entirely up for debate.

She typed again, faster now, each text less composed than the last.

please don’t watch it

if you haven’t already

which you probably have because you’re incapable of listening to me once in your life

Another pause. Endless. Cate could almost see Sydney on the other side, broad hand around her phone, face gone unreadable in that infuriating way it always did when she was actually affected. Maybe sitting somewhere dark. Maybe alone. Maybe already having watched the whole thing once. Twice. Cate’s skin turned molten at the thought. Every second without a response only made the possibilities worse.

She sent another.

i was drunk

Then, because even in humiliation she could not resist accuracy:

slightly drunk not incapacitated just unfortunately sincere

Cate’s messages started piling in underneath.

Sydney looked at them and felt something twist hard and protective in her chest.

Her thumb moved to the keyboard. You were crying, she wanted to text immediately.

She deleted it.

Are you alone?

Deleted that too.

Did you drink water? Did you mean it? Do you understand what you just did to me? Are you trying to kill me? Do you want me there? Are we really doing this like this?

Instead she stood there with the phone in her hand for what felt like a hundred mortal years, because she did not trust the first forty things clawing their way up her throat.

The dots appeared and stayed longer this time.

Cate held her breath.

They disappeared again.

Nothing.

“That is psychotic behavior,” she hissed at the screen.

She stood and crossed to the window, barefoot on cool hardwood, pressing the heel of her free hand to her sternum as though she could physically steady the throb under it. Below, traffic moved in bright ribbons through the city. Somewhere out there, entire strangers were having normal nights. Nobody was dying of embarrassment in stages because the woman they still loved hadn’t answered after receiving the single worst video message ever sent in the history of telecommunications.

Her phone remained stubbornly silent.

Cate unlocked it again just to stare at the thread, as if the act of looking could force an answer to appear. Her own messages stacked one under the other in increasingly unraveling little blue boxes. The video sat above them, blunt and unforgivable.

She imagined Sydney watching it. The first sharp intake of breath. The stillness. The way Sydney’s jaw would tighten when she was hit cleanly enough to stop performing. The possibility of one of those low, disbelieving laughs she only ever gave when something cut straight through her.

And in the bar bathroom, Sydney looked exactly as Cate imagined. Her reflection in the little mirror above the sink looked almost hostile. Dark hair mussed from her own hands. Green eyes blown wide. Mouth set in that flat hard line it took when feeling too much threatened to split her open. She ran cold water, splashed some on the back of her neck, then laughed once at herself because there was no version of cold water that could solve this particular problem.

The jeans situation was getting genuinely absurd.

“Great,” she muttered. “Perfect. Exactly what a grown adult wants.”

Back in her bedroom, Cate pressed her thighs together on reflex before she could stop herself.

“Unbelievable,” Cate told herself.

Then she typed:

say something, asshole

That at least felt familiar. Stable. Almost elegant compared to the prior collapse.

Sydney’s phone buzzed again with another one of Cate’s increasingly distressed texts and that, somehow, did more to settle her than the water had. Cate spiraling in real time was a familiar emergency. One Sydney knew how to approach. Not fix. Never quite fix. But approach. Stabilize. Get close without spooking. Keep the floor from dropping out entirely.

Instead of replying, she watched the video again.

Not the whole thing. Not at first. She told herself she was only checking a line. Making sure she hadn’t imagined the key parts. She started halfway through and ended up staying until the end, jaw clenched and one hand gripping the edge of the sink hard enough to whiten the scars across her knuckles. This watch was somehow worse. There was less shock to blunt it. More room for detail. More space to register exactly how honest Cate had been. Exactly how much hurt lived under the provocation.

On Cate’s end, the thread stayed blank.

No response.

A full minute passed. Then another.

Cate’s pulse lost its frantic edge and became something worse. Heavy. Hollow. She knew silence. Knew what it felt like when it curdled from charged into unkind. Knew too well the shape of reaching toward Sydney and hitting that closed door where all the softest things went to die. The wine was fading at the edges now, leaving behind enough clarity to make everything sting harder.

She typed more slowly this time.

okay

sorry

you can pretend i didn’t send it

That one made her chest hurt the instant it delivered.

She followed it too quickly with another.

i mean i know you can’t literally pretend because it is, unfortunately, very vivid

Then another, because if she didn’t keep texting she might start thinking.

but you know what i mean

i’m not trying to make this weird

Even she could hear how absurd that sounded.

She closed her eyes. Rested her forehead briefly against the cool glass of the window.

Of course she was trying to make it weird. She’d made it weird on purpose. Sent shame gift-wrapped in lace and longing and spite. The problem was that some secret part of her had not only wanted Sydney to see it. She’d wanted Sydney to answer it. To meet her there in the mess. To say something impossible and exact, something that would make this all feel less like humiliation and more like the beginning of a bridge neither of them wanted to admit they were rebuilding.

Maybe that had been the real bad decision, not the wine or the video. Hope. Hope in an old, familiar shape.

Then the phone buzzed.

Cate jerked away from the window so fast she nearly dropped it.

A single message from Sydney:

What the fuck is this

Cate stared at it, heart kicking painfully.

Not because it was cruel. It wasn’t. Not really. In another tone it might even have been funny. But written there in plain text, after all that silence, it landed like a hand around the back of her neck. Dry. Disbelieving. Very, very Sydney.

Cate’s face burned.

She typed immediately.

nothing

Then:

ignore it

Then, because panic had burned through all quality control:

delete it

A pause.

please

The bubble appeared almost at once this time. Cate watched it with every muscle in her body pulled tight.

SYDNEY: You want me to delete it?

Cate’s mouth fell open. The nerve. The absolute fucking nerve of the question.

CATE: yes obviously i cannot believe you watched it

SYDNEY: You sent it to me, Cate.

The use of her name made something electric crawl down her spine. Cate sat back on the edge of the bed again, gripping the phone hard enough to make her knuckles ache.

CATE: that does not mean you had to open it there are ethical responsibilities attached to receiving insane material from your ex-wife

Sydney took longer answering that one.

Long enough for Cate to imagine her smiling.

SYDNEY: You seem confused about what “send” means.

Despite everything, a noise escaped Cate that was half laugh, half groan of agony. She pressed the heel of her hand to one eye.

CATE: i was having a bad night and then i made it your problem which, in hindsight, feels very on brand

There was another pause. Not long. Just enough to suggest Sydney had stopped joking.

SYDNEY: You were crying.

Cate went very still.

The room seemed to contract around that sentence. All the posturing leaked out of her at once, leaving something smaller and more frightening underneath. Of all the things Sydney could have chosen from the video, all the hooks she might’ve used to tease, to needle, to defend herself with distance, that was the one she picked. Not the toy. Not the talking. Not the wet shameless little confession that Cate still had her, somehow, impossibly. The tears.

Cate looked down at her own bare knees, suddenly unable to bear the mirror, the window, the room, any surface that might reflect her back too clearly.

CATE: i was drunk

The reply came quicker than she expected.

SYDNEY: Drunk doesn’t invent things that aren’t there.

Cate’s breath snagged. She typed, erased, typed again.

CATE: okay well that’s a horrible thing to say to me right now

SYDNEY: Is it untrue?

Cate stared. Then laughed once under her breath, stunned by the quiet brutality of that question. Sydney at her softest could still cut with almost surgical precision. Maybe especially then.

CATE: you don’t get to do this disappear for half an hour after i destroy my own dignity and then suddenly start being perceptive

SYDNEY: Half an hour?

Cate checked the timestamps and nearly threw the phone across the room. Eleven minutes.

CATE: it was spiritually much longer

For the first time, Sydney left her hanging only a few seconds before responding.

SYDNEY: I had to watch it at least twice.

Cate made a choked sound so sharp it hurt.

“Nope,” she told the room. “No, no, absolutely not.”

Her fingers flew.

CATE: why would you admit that what is wrong with you

SYDNEY: Wanted to make sure I heard you right.

Cate could barely feel her own pulse anymore. It had become one continuous bright hum under her skin. She stood, then sat again, then stood. The energy had nowhere to go. Her whole body had tipped back into that dangerous state between mortification and arousal where every word from Sydney seemed to land directly under her clothes.

CATE: i hate you

Three dots.

SYDNEY: No, you don’t.

Cate stopped breathing for a second.

Because of course Sydney remembered. Of course she had watched closely enough to catch the exact place where Cate’s bravado gave out. Of course she was the sort of monster who would hand the line back now, polished between her teeth.

Cate sat down on the floor beside the bed as if her legs had simply refused further participation.

CATE: i cannot believe you just used my own drunk breakdown against me

SYDNEY: Seemed honest.

Cate let her head tip back against the side of the mattress. The ceiling above her blurred for a second.

CATE: you’re being very calm for someone who received…that

Sydney took her time. Long enough to be deliberate, not long enough to be withholding. Cate was beginning to remember the difference, and that was its own kind of danger.

SYDNEY: You want honesty or do you want me to act normal?

Cate’s throat tightened.

CATE: honesty obviously don’t punish me with normal

The response came immediately this time.

SYDNEY: It wrecked me.

Cate shut her eyes.

There it was. No flourish. No padding. No trying to make it prettier than it was. Sydney, when she stopped hiding, could say one plain thing and make it feel like the floor dropping away.

Cate looked down at the screen through her lashes, afraid to blink and lose the moment somehow.

SYDNEY: I didn’t know if I was pissed at you or worried about you or hard the second you started talking. Turns out the answer was yes.

A laugh burst out of Cate before she could stop it, wet at the edges, breathless with disbelief. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth and sat there on the floor smiling like someone who had recently been concussed.

CATE: that’s revolting i mean that very affectionately

SYDNEY: Knew you would.

There was a gentleness under it now, dry still, but gentleness all the same. Cate could feel it like a finger pressed against a bruise. The phone trembled a little in her hand. She was aware, suddenly, of how late it was. How quiet the apartment had become. How alone she’d felt before the thread lit up. How not-alone she felt now, which was arguably more dangerous.

CATE: so you watched my complete emotional collapse twice and your first instinct was “what the fuck is this”

SYDNEY: Actually my first instinct was to come over.

Cate’s body went taut.

She read the line once. Then again.

Then sat up straighter against the bed, as if posture mattered inside a text conversation. Her thumb hovered uselessly over the screen. Something deep in her had gone alert and tender at once, a sleeping animal lifting its head.

CATE: and your second instinct?

The pause that followed was not long, but it had weight in it. Cate could almost hear Sydney deciding whether to step fully into the room she’d opened.

SYDNEY: To ask whether you meant any of it.

Cate looked down at the phone until the words blurred.

This, then. The actual heart of it. Not the scandal. Not the embarrassment. Not even the sex. The old impossible question underneath all of it: when Cate reached, was she reaching for real? And when Sydney answered, would she stay once she did?

Cate drew one knee up and wrapped an arm around it, suddenly cold despite the heat still lingering in her skin.

CATE: some of it was the wine talking

She sent that and instantly hated it for sounding slippery. Too easy. Too protective.

Before Sydney could answer, she sent another.

CATE: but not the important parts

The reply took long enough to make her nervous.

Then:

SYDNEY: Which parts were important?

“Cruel,” Cate whispered, though her heart was already opening under the pressure of it.

She typed three different versions before sending any of them. Deleted all three. Started over. Forced herself not to perform.

CATE: that nobody else feels right

Another breath.

CATE: that it isn’t better with anyone else

Her thumb hovered. Trembled.

that i still

She stopped.

The dots appeared from Sydney’s side before Cate could finish, then vanished. As if Sydney had started to answer and thought better of it.

Cate stared at the unfinished line in her own text box. Her chest hurt. Fine. Fine. If she was already in hell, she might as well walk deeper.

CATE: that i still want you

She sent it before she could edit the honesty out.

For a few seconds there was nothing at all. Not even typing. Just the thread, the room, the blood rushing in her ears. Cate pressed her lips together so hard they hurt.

Then the bubble returned.

Stayed.

Disappeared.

Returned again.

And finally, Sydney answered.

SYDNEY: If you want the real thing, sweetheart, you can always just ask.

Cate went motionless.

Every inch of her seemed to light up at once. Not because of the flirtation, though that pet name landed low and hot and devastating. Not because of the invitation, though God knew that would’ve been enough. It was the shape of the sentence. So straightforward. No games in the center of it. No pretending she hadn’t understood what Cate was reaching for all along.

Cate read it six times.

Then once more, just to suffer.

Her face burned. Her thighs pressed together helplessly on the rug. She could feel the ghost of earlier pleasure stir back to life under the much sharper force of being wanted by Sydney specifically, in present tense, with no hedging around it.

CATE: that is an outrageous text to send to someone after they’ve humiliated themselves

SYDNEY: Didn’t seem like humiliation from where I was sitting.

CATE: syd

SYDNEY: Cate

The bare exchange made her shiver. It was absurd. It was unfair. It was so familiar it felt like getting a song stuck in her head she hadn’t heard in months.

CATE: are you over me at all?

She hadn’t meant to ask it that baldly. But there it was. Sent. Irretrievable. The question beneath every other question.

This time Sydney didn’t make her wait.

SYDNEY: Not even a little.

Cate closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the mattress. The relief of it was so sharp it almost hurt more than the silence had. Something in her chest unclenched with a slow, aching inevitability, like a fist that had forgotten it was allowed to open.

Her laugh came out small and disbelieving. “Of course,” she murmured to herself. “Of course this is what fixes us. Public policy couldn’t do it. Therapy couldn’t do it. Apparently I just needed to send pornography.”

The bubble appeared again before she’d even typed a reply.

SYDNEY: Though for the record next time you spiral maybe call me before you start filming confessionals with my dick

Cate actually covered her face with her hand and laughed, full and horrified and helpless. It spilled out of her until tears stung again, but softer this time. Not wrecked. Just overwhelmed. There she was. There Sydney was. There they both fucking were, somehow, picking through the bones of their marriage with one hand and reaching for each other with the other like nothing in them had learned a single lesson.

CATE: next time? wow very presumptuous

SYDNEY: You sent me a solo feature-length psychological thriller, Cate. I’m planning accordingly.

Cate smiled into her palm, bright and helpless and far too gone.

Then, slowly, with care this time, she typed:

CATE: if i asked would you come over?

No immediate answer. Just enough time for her stomach to flip once, hard.

Then:

SYDNEY: Drink some water. Breathe. I’ll be there in twenty.

Cate stared at the screen, pulse leaping all over again, the whole room suddenly altered by those ordinary promises. Water. Breathing. Twenty minutes. Sydney had always loved through logistics when she was scared of sounding too tender. And Cate, stupid creature that she was, felt more moved by those practical instructions than by half the pretty declarations in the world.

Hunger dressed like home.

She looked at the thread one more time, at the evidence of her humiliation and Sydney’s and theirs, all of it tangled together into something that no longer looked quite as awful as it had ten minutes ago.

Then she rose from the floor on shaky legs, already moving.

God help them both.

By the time Sydney stepped back into the hallway, she knew three things with humiliating certainty.

One, she was not going home with Kelsey or anyone else or even finishing the second bourbon.

Two, the divorce had fixed absolutely nothing except their honesty problem. Distance had burned away their favorite lies. All that remained now was the ugly naked center.

And three, if Cate wanted the real thing, Sydney would be in her bed before the hour turned over.

She moved back through the bar slower than she wanted to, enough to avoid looking like she was fleeing a crime scene. Kelsey caught her eye from the stool, one brow lifting in dry inquiry. Sydney stopped beside her just long enough to put cash on the bar for both drinks.

“Your mysterious texter win?” Kelsey asked.

Sydney looked at the amber left in her glass and thought of Cate on her bed, flushed and wet and confessing into the dark.

“Yeah,” she said, voice gone rough. “By a landslide.”

Kelsey read something in her face then, enough to soften. “That bad?”

Sydney almost smiled. “That good.”

Then she was out the door and into the night, already typing with one hand, already heading for Cate like the city had finally admitted what it had been doing to her all along.

Sydney spent the cab ride pretending she was only going over there for the toy.

It was a stupid lie, thin as tissue and about as useful, but she kept handling it anyway, turning it over in her head like it might become truer with repetition. She knew exactly what this was, and exactly why it was a terrible idea. Cate wrecked, Cate wanting, Cate asking plainly enough to strip all the usual defenses off the bone. Sydney going to her anyway. Worse, Cate’s honesty had pulled too much truth out of her in return. So she sent Cate two texts on the way that leaned into the same dry fiction as cover.

SYDNEY: For the record, I’m just coming to collect my property. Try not to fuck it again before I get there.

The last one had earned a reply so immediate it practically vibrated in her bones.

CATE: you’re revolting i won’t have to resort to that if you hurry

Sydney had looked at that for the rest of the ride like it was a loaded weapon.

As the cab pulled up outside Cate’s building, the city had gone soft and slick with late night gloss. Streetlights smeared gold over wet pavement. Somewhere down the block a siren wailed and flattened into distance. Sydney paid, got out, and stood for one second under the awning with her hands in her jacket pockets and her pulse knocking slow and heavy at the base of her throat.

She could still turn around.

That thought came and went so fast it barely qualified as one.

The elevator ride up felt longer than the actual drive. Too bright. Too warm. Sydney caught her reflection in the brushed steel doors and looked away again. Dark hair ruffled from the wind. Mouth set. Green eyes too sharp. She looked exactly like what she was: a woman on the verge of making the same catastrophic choice she’d spent months trying to outlive.

Then the elevator opened, and Cate’s door stood at the end of the hall.

Sydney walked down the carpeted corridor with the kind of focus she usually reserved for damage control. The door swung open before she could knock.

Cate stood there barefoot in a soft cream robe knotted carelessly at the waist, hair brushed now but still a little wild at the ends, mouth bare of lipstick and still somehow more dangerous for it. She had—Sydney noticed instantly—changed but not enough. The robe showed the long clean line of one thigh when she shifted. Her face was scrubbed fresh, but her eyes still held the aftermath of crying and wine and orgasm and whatever terrible courage had made her hit send.

For one second neither of them spoke.

The apartment behind Cate was dim and warm, lit mostly by lamps. It smelled faintly of sandalwood, clean linen, and the ghost of the perfume Cate always wore too late into the night, after it had softened into something closer to skin. Sydney felt the old familiarity of it hit low and hard.

Cate folded one arm over herself and lifted the other hand in a small irritated gesture. “Well,” she said. “That took forever.”

Sydney leaned one shoulder against the doorframe before stepping inside. “Traffic.”

“That’s not possible. It’s after midnight.”

“Then I told the cabbie to take the scenic route out of spite.”

Cate’s mouth twitched. “That sounds more like you.”

The door clicked shut behind Sydney. The sound landed between them with embarrassing weight.

Up close, Cate looked steadier than she had in the video, but not fully. The polish was back on in patches only. Her robe had clearly been tied with trembling hands. There was still a pinkness along her chest. Her lashes were slightly cleaner now. Sydney had the insane urge to reach out and thumb gently under one eye just to see if the skin there was still damp from earlier.

Instead she shoved both hands deeper into her jacket pockets and said, “I’m here for the toy.”

Cate stared at her.

Then, very slowly, one brow lifted. “Are you?”

Sydney held the look as long as she could.

Which turned out to be almost two seconds.

“Among other things,” she admitted.

Cate gave a tiny huff of laughter, but it broke at the edges. “Honesty. What a novelty.”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting anything.” Cate stepped back from the door, opening the apartment to her fully. “You’re the one who marched over here in the middle of the night because apparently silicone theft is your new moral crusade.”

Sydney moved past her into the apartment, every nerve suddenly aware of the narrow distance between their bodies. Cate had always made space feel crowded in the most dangerous way. Even now, even divorced, even after all the months of trying to sand down the places where wanting her still lived, the brush of air between them was enough to tighten every muscle Sydney had.

“Didn’t march,” Sydney muttered. “Arrived with purpose.”

Cate leaned back against the door with her arms folded. “Very brave.”

Sydney glanced at her once, then away, taking in the room instead because the room was safer. Same art books stacked on the coffee table. Same throw blanket draped over the couch in deliberate disarray. Same half-burned candle by the window. Cate had always curated domesticity with a kind of ruthless charm, like if she could make the space around her beautiful enough it might protect the softest parts of her from being mishandled.

It never had.

Sydney turned back to her. “You okay?”

The question came out rougher than she meant it to.

Cate’s posture changed almost invisibly. Her chin lowered. Her arms loosened. The brittle humor flickered.

“That depends,” she said. “Are we counting before or after I sent my ex-wife a homemade porno at the expense of my own dignity?”

Despite everything, Sydney snorted.

Cate’s mouth softened for real at the sound. “God. I forgot how annoying your laugh is.”

“You love my laugh.”

“Unfortunately.”

The word sat there between them, warmer than it had any right to be.

Sydney looked at her fully then. “You drink water?”

Cate rolled her eyes, but there was no real heat in it. “Yes.”

“Did you eat?”

“Yes, dad.”

“That a no?”

Cate sighed. “I had fries. At dinner.”

Sydney made a face. “That doesn’t count.”

“Your commitment to nutritional authority after watching me degrade myself is genuinely inspiring.” Cate hummed, amused.

Sydney barked another laugh before she could stop it, then rubbed a hand over her mouth as though that might take the softness back out of the room. It didn’t. Cate watched her do it with that terrible, attentive focus she’d always had where Sydney was concerned. Noticed everything. Stored it. Turned it over in her head later when she was alone.

A beat passed.

Then Cate pushed off the door and said, quieter, “I’ve got water on the nightstand.”

Something in Sydney’s chest gave a hard painful thud.

Because of course she had. Because Sydney had told her to, and Cate—for all her dramatics and spiral-shaped instincts—had still listened. The sheer domestic intimacy of that nearly undid her more effectively than the video had. Almost.

“Good,” Sydney said.

Cate glanced down, smoothing the tie of her robe once over her stomach. “I’m not entirely helpless.”

Silence gathered again. Not awkward exactly. Too charged for that. Their silences had never been empty. They were rooms all their own, furnished with old fights, old tenderness, old habits of reading each other too well.

Sydney cleared her throat. “So. The toy.”

Cate looked up. “You are really committing to this bit.”

“I want it back.”

“You didn’t even ask where it was.”

Sydney paused. “Bedroom?”

A smile touched Cate’s mouth, small and tired and wicked anyway. “Bedroom.”

Of course.

Sydney followed her down the short hallway with all the false calm of someone walking toward a trap she’d helped design. The apartment got quieter the farther they moved from the street. Cate’s bedroom door stood open. Soft lamplight pooled over the bed, the nightstand, the pale rug underfoot. And there arranged like evidence, because Cate had apparently decided mercy was beneath her tonight, the toy sat on top of the dresser in plain view.

Sydney stopped in the doorway.

“You put it on display.”

Cate moved to the dresser and touched the base of it lightly with two fingers, then looked over her shoulder with a face that was all innocence sharpened to a point. “You said you were coming to collect it. I simply wanted to be helpful.”

Sydney’s mouth went dry.

The robe had shifted open again at Cate’s thigh. Her hair spilled down her back in pale loose waves. The room still carried the warm salted smell of sex under the cleaner notes of soap and lotion. Sydney could feel it in her body with humiliating specificity, the fact that Cate had been here not long ago, open and writhing and talking to her like an ache given language.

She took one step into the room.

Then another.

“Helpful,” Sydney repeated.

Cate turned fully now, leaning back against the dresser with the toy beside her and her hands braced on either side of it. “That was the idea.”

Sydney stopped an arm’s length away. Close enough to see the pulse beating at the base of Cate’s throat. Close enough to notice how carelessly the robe had been tied across her waist. Close enough to smell her.

The hunger came back so fast it almost angered her.

Not because it was new.

Because it wasn’t.

Because it had apparently been waiting under her skin this whole time, patient and cruel, needing only one cracked open door to come flooding back through. She had tried after Cate. She had. Different mouths, different apartments, different nights constructed with every practical intention of moving on. Some of them had even been good on paper. Pretty, willing, kind. Sydney had gone through the motions with a sort of grim sincerity, hoping one day her body would stop comparing. It never had. Nobody laughed like Cate when pleasure surprised her. Nobody looked at Sydney like she was both a weapon and a home. Nobody knew how to be difficult in exactly the ways that turned Sydney inside out.

Nobody else made wanting feel inevitable.

Cate tipped her head slightly. “You’re staring.”

“You sent me a video of you fucking yourself with my dick.”

“A mold,” Cate corrected automatically.

Sydney laughed once under her breath, disbelieving. “Jesus Christ.”

That made Cate smile, properly this time. Then the smile faltered. “You really watched it twice?”

Sydney held her gaze. “Yeah.”

Cate’s face pinked.

“You could’ve lied.”

“I could’ve.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

Cate looked down for one second, just one, and when she looked back up all the edges in her expression had softened into something dangerous in a different way. “Why?”

Sydney could have answered ten different ways. None of them would’ve been enough. Because I couldn’t believe you’d sent it. Because I wanted to hear every word again. Because I missed you so badly I went to our bar to pretend I didn’t. Because watching you come apart and realizing your body still knew mine that intimately made something vicious and tender rip me open. Because you were crying. Because you were using me even in imitation and it still felt like being wanted in the exact dialect my body understands.

Instead she said, plain and raw, “Because it was you.”

That landed.

Cate’s lower lip pressed inward. Her breathing changed first, then her posture, shoulders loosening a fraction as if some invisible brace had been removed. “Sydney.”

It was just her name. No ornament. No test in it. That made it worse.

Sydney reached past her then, took the toy off the dresser, and lifted it once between them. “This,” she said, because suddenly she needed the shield again, “is fucking insane.”

Cate’s eyes flicked to it, then back to her face. “I know.”

“You actually kept it.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d have gotten rid of it by now.”

Cate tilted her head, one brow lifting as if the answer were obvious. “Why would I?”

Sydney’s laugh was softer this time, almost incredulous, catching on the way out.

Cate’s mouth curved, all careless elegance over something much more dangerous. “It brought the real thing back to me, didn’t it?”

The answer sat so obviously in the center of the room neither of them touched it for a second.

Then Cate stepped forward and took the toy gently from Sydney’s hand. Not yanking. Not teasing. Just a smooth little reclaiming. She set it aside on the nightstand with almost ceremonial care.

Sydney watched her do it and felt the air change.

When Cate turned back, she didn’t stop at arm’s length. She came closer. Close enough that the front of her robe brushed Sydney’s shirt. Close enough that Sydney could see the exact moment Cate decided not to pretend they were discussing silicone anymore.

“This is a terrible idea,” Cate said softly.

Sydney’s heart pounded once, hard. “Probably.”

“We shouldn’t do this.”

The words should have snapped them back to reality. Restored sanity. Returned them to the nice clean fiction where Sydney had come over on a retrieval mission and Cate had not looked at her like this and the bedroom did not still smell like her body.

Instead Sydney heard what laid under the sentence because she always had. Fear. Consequence. The old awful knowledge that whenever she and Cate gave in to themselves, the room around them changed shape and nothing came out untouched.

Cate swallowed. “I mean it.”

Sydney looked at her for one long beat. “Do you want me to go?”

That did it.

Cate’s eyes lifted to hers at once, too fast for anything but truth. Her lips parted. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

Sydney let the silence hold one heartbeat more. Two.

Then Cate said, very quietly, “No.”

Everything in Sydney surged toward that.

She moved before her mind could interfere, one hand closing around Cate’s waist, the other sliding up into her hair, and kissed her with all the force of the months between them. Cate made a startled sound that dissolved instantly into need. Her hands came up to Sydney’s shoulders, gripping first like she might hold her back and then, just as quickly, like she needed leverage to pull her closer.

It was not a cautious kiss. They had done caution. They had done distance. They had done papers and signatures and all the dignified forms of failure. This was recognition, immediate and devastating. Cate’s mouth opened under hers with a familiar greed that made Sydney’s body go molten. The first sweep of tongue hit like a memory armed with teeth. Cate tasted faintly of mint and water and the ghost of red wine and something underneath that belonged only to her, some warm impossible thing Sydney had spent far too long without.

“Fuck,” Cate whispered against her mouth.

Sydney answered by kissing her harder.

Cate backed up blind until the edge of the bed hit behind her knees. Sydney followed, guiding rather than pushing, hands already learning her again though they’d never really forgotten. Waist. Ribs. The tie of the robe. The hot line of thigh beneath the parted hem. Cate’s fingers were in her hair now, then at her jaw, then dragging down the front of her shirt as if touch itself had become urgent enough to bruise.

They broke apart only long enough to breathe.

Cate looked wrecked already. Blue eyes wide and glassy. Mouth swollen. Hair half ruined already. “This is insane,” she said, and then kissed Sydney before she could answer, as though the diagnosis itself turned her on.

Sydney let herself be dragged down with her. Cate sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled Sydney between her knees by the front of her jacket. The movement was so achingly familiar it nearly stopped Sydney cold. How many times had they done this exact dance, in this apartment, in the old house, in hotels, in borrowed rooms, everywhere? Cate seated and gleaming and impossible, looking up from under her lashes while Sydney stood over her trying and failing not to lose all coherent thought.

Cate tugged her closer again. “You took too long.”

“I was in a bar.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” Cate’s hands slid under Sydney’s jacket and up her back beneath her shirt, palms hot against skin. “You shouldn’t go to bars in my neighborhood and let strangers flirt with you.”

The possessiveness in it flashed hot through Sydney’s gut. “You don’t get to say that after what you sent me.”

Cate tilted her head. “No?”

“No.”

Cate’s mouth curved, mean and gorgeous. “Pity.”

Then she kissed Sydney again, slower this time, and the room seemed to soften at the edges. One of her hands left Sydney’s back just long enough to undo the buttons of her shirt with quick impatient fingers. She wasn’t even looking down. She knew the shape of Sydney’s clothes the way other people knew songs. Knew where to tug, how hard, what speed would make Sydney let out that low involuntary exhale she’d always pretended not to notice.

When the shirt fell open, Cate put both hands flat against Sydney’s chest and simply held there for a second.

The touch undid her more efficiently than anything else so far.

Cate’s face changed too. The slyness ebbed. Under it was something almost reverent, old habit turned into ache. Her thumbs brushed once over the edges of Sydney’s breasts through the thin cotton of her sports bra beneath the shirt, then higher, fingertips skimming collarbone.

“I missed this,” Cate said.

Sydney’s throat tightened. “Yeah?”

Cate nodded once, eyes still on her chest as if the sight of her was too much and not enough all at once. “I missed you being real under my hands.”

Something hard and helpless moved through Sydney then. Love, probably. Stupid, tenacious thing.

She caught Cate’s chin gently and made her look up. “You still with me?”

Cate’s gaze sharpened instantly, soft but clear. “Yes.”

“Sure?”

Cate answered by untying her robe and letting it fall open.

Sydney lost the next coherent thought.

Cate was naked underneath. Of course she was. The robe parted around her body like an invitation she’d been too impatient to complicate with lace. Pale skin lit warm like honey by the bedside lamp. Breasts full and flushed at the top. Thighs already pressing together around Sydney’s hips as if they couldn’t quite help themselves. No performance in it now. No coy little striptease. Just Cate, open and wanting and looking at her like the wanting itself hurt.

“You’re awful,” Sydney said hoarsely.

Cate’s mouth twitched. “And yet.”

Sydney kissed her again because there was nothing else to do with that much feeling. Cate fell backward onto the bed with a small laugh that snapped into a moan when Sydney followed, one knee settling between her thighs. The mattress dipped under their combined weight. Sydney braced herself over her with one forearm while the other hand slid down Cate’s side in a slow deliberate pass that made Cate arch at once.

“Was someone flirting with you at the bar?” Cate asked, voice breathless already.

Sydney stared down at her. “You’re asking me that now?”

Cate’s eyes flashed. “Answer the question.”

Sydney laughed into her mouth. “Yeah. There was.”

Cate bit her lower lip. “Did you want her to?”

“No.”

“Did you let her buy you a drink?”

“No.”

Cate relaxed visibly. It was ridiculous and deeply on brand. Sydney kissed the corner of her mouth. “You’re still insane.”

“Please. As if you don’t like it.”

“I like a lot of things I shouldn’t.”

Cate’s hands slid down, over Sydney’s stomach, lower. “Such as?”

Sydney caught her wrist before she could reach her jeans and pinned it lightly to the mattress beside her head. Cate’s pupils blew wider at once.

“Careful,” Sydney murmured.

Cate shivered. “You came over because I sent you a filthy little video and now you’re trying to act like you’re in control.”

“Trying?”

The challenge in that made Cate’s lips part.

Sydney kissed her throat, once, then again, then lower. Cate’s free hand went straight into her hair. The sound she made when Sydney’s mouth closed over one breast was low and helpless and immediately went straight between Sydney’s legs. She sucked gently first, then harder, listening to Cate’s breathing go ragged above her. One of Cate’s knees hitched up around Sydney’s hip. The hand Sydney had pinned flexed in her grip.

“Syd,” Cate whispered.

Sydney let the nipple slip from her mouth with a wet sound and looked up. “What.”

Cate’s lashes fluttered. “I hate when you know exactly what you’re doing.”

Sydney smiled, slow and crooked. “No, you don’t.”

That familiar line again. This time Cate laughed, short and breathless, because neither of them had the energy to pretend otherwise.

Sydney released her wrist only to drag both hands down Cate’s body, palms spanning her ribcage, waist, hips. Cate’s stomach tightened under the touch. Every inch of her seemed hyperaware. Waiting. Her thighs opened without being asked as Sydney settled lower between them.

Then Sydney stopped.

Cate made a small wounded noise. “What are you doing?”

Sydney looked up at her through the fall of her own hair. “Asking you again.”

Cate blinked, dazed enough not to understand at first. Then she did, and something delicate crossed her face. Relief. Maybe. Or just being cared for in the exact shape she needed.

“Yes,” Cate said softly. “Please.”

Sydney kissed the inside of one thigh. Then the other. Cate shivered violently. Her fingers tightened in the sheets.

“Please what,” Sydney asked, because Cate liked words even when she hated herself for it, because the months apart had not erased that, because there were parts of her that only unclenched when named.

Cate exhaled shakily. “Please touch me.”

Sydney smiled against her skin. “Already doing that.”

Cate made an impatient sound. “Sydney.”

“What.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.” Sydney kissed a little higher, close enough now that Cate’s breath caught. “Say it anyway.”

Cate looked down at her, flushed and beautiful and exasperated to the point of ruin. “Please make me feel good.”

That hit Sydney low and hot. “There she is.”

Then she put her mouth on her.

Cate cried out at once and clapped a hand over her own mouth as if the habit of restraint had survived even this. Sydney hooked an arm over her thigh and held her open while she licked slow and deep, reacquainting herself with a taste she’d spent months pretending she could live without. She couldn’t. God, she couldn’t. Cate was slick already, body giving the truth away before her pride had a chance to intervene. Sydney licked through her cunt greedily, letting her tongue flatten and then narrow, teasing once only to hear the frustrated little sound Cate made before she settled into the pressure Cate actually wanted.

“Fuck,” Cate breathed. “Fuck, yes.”

There. That. Sydney knew that rhythm. Knew the way Cate’s hips would start to chase when she got close enough, the way her hand would leave the sheets and drift to Sydney’s hair like she couldn’t help needing something to hold. Knew the exact moment her thighs would begin to tremble. Memory returned not as thought but as muscle, instinct, devotion. Sydney let herself sink into it with a kind of furious gratitude. This, at least, had never lied.

Cate was squirming now, one knee hiked higher over Sydney’s shoulder. “I can’t believe you still,” she started, then broke off on a moan when Sydney sucked her clit into her mouth and gave it the pressure she’d always liked best.

Still what, Sydney wanted to ask. Still know you? Still ruin you? Still belong here?

Instead she worked her fingers into the mattress and kept going until Cate’s voice turned ragged and her stomach started to flutter under Sydney’s palm.

“Syd, wait,” Cate gasped suddenly.

Sydney lifted her head at once. “What’s wrong?”

Cate was breathing hard, chest heaving, eyes blown wide with arousal and panic twisted together. “I just…” She swallowed. “If you do that right now I’m going to cum too fast and then I’ll hate you.”

Sydney blinked. Then laughed outright.

Cate scowled down at her, pink to the roots of her hair. “Don’t laugh.”

“You’re threatening me with a post-orgasm emotional review?”

“Yes.”

“That’s very married of us.”

Cate’s expression cracked. She laughed too, helplessly, and the sound of it did something almost more dangerous than the sex. It dragged the ghosts of all their softer nights right into the bed with them. Laughing into kisses. Laughing while cooking in their underwear. Laughing in the middle of fights right before one of them said something tender by accident and ruined the whole argument.

Sydney climbed back up her body and kissed her before either of them could think too hard about that. Cate met her halfway, hands framing Sydney’s face now, gentler than before. She kissed like she was relearning not just Sydney’s mouth but the way Sydney leaned into being held when she forgot to be defensive about it.

“I missed you,” Cate whispered against her lips.

The words slid straight under Sydney’s ribs like a knife.

“I know,” Sydney said, because honesty had finally become less terrifying than pretending.

Cate’s eyes searched hers. “No, I mean…”

“I know,” Sydney repeated, softer now. “I missed you too.”

Something in Cate’s face gave way completely then. No flourish. No smile to soften it. Just the naked hit of being understood. She tugged Sydney down over her, kissed her once, twice, then slid one hand between their bodies and found the fly of Sydney’s jeans with trembling purpose.

Sydney caught her wrist on instinct. “Hang on.”

Cate looked up at her sharply, already too far gone to hide the fear that flashed there. “You changed your mind.”

It wasn’t a question. That old wound. That old terrible speed with which she could leap to abandonment when it mattered most.

Sydney’s whole chest tightened. She kissed her hard enough to stop the thought in its tracks. “No.”

“Then why are you stopping me?”

“Because,” Sydney said against her mouth, “I’m not pretending we don’t need a condom if we’re doing this.”

Cate stared at her for one beat.

Then, absurdly, she looked even more turned on.

“Oh,” she breathed.

Sydney barked a laugh. “Yeah, oh.”

“The drawer,” Cate said, already reaching blindly toward the nightstand.

“I know where you keep them.”

That made her blink. “You do?”

Sydney gave her a look. “Cate.”

“Right.” A tiny embarrassed smile. “Right.”

It was ridiculous how intimate even that felt. Sydney reached to the drawer herself, found the box exactly where she remembered it being, and shook one out. Cate watched her tear it open with huge darkened eyes. The sight of her like that, sprawled naked and flushed on the bed they had once shared more nights in than Sydney could count, watching with a mix of hunger and awe and something softer beneath it, nearly made Sydney lose the thread completely.

Instead she pushed her jeans and briefs down just enough, took her cock in hand, and rolled the condom on with practiced efficiency.

Cate watched the whole thing.

Openly.

Her lips parted. Her gaze tracked every movement with the same reverent greed she’d always had for this particular part of Sydney. It made something deeply possessive unfurl in Sydney’s chest.

“You okay?” Sydney asked, voice rougher now.

Cate nodded once. Then, very softly, “Come here.”

Sydney went.

Cate drew her down by the shoulders and kissed her hard, one hand slipping down over Sydney’s side to her hip, then lower, fingertips brushing the base of her cock where the condom met skin. The touch made Sydney jerk and exhale sharply into her mouth.

“Jesus.”

Cate’s eyes flashed with vindication. “Still sensitive there.”

“Don’t get smug.”

“You came all this way to reclaim your property,” Cate murmured, dragging her fingers once more over the spot, just enough to make Sydney’s thighs tense. “I’m just taking inventory.”

Sydney caught her wrist and pinned it gently above her head again. “You’re impossible.”

“And yet,” Cate whispered, smiling.

Sydney lined herself up slowly, watching Cate’s face the whole time. The first press inside made them both go still.

Not because it was unfamiliar. Because it wasn’t.

Because the body remembers in terrible detail.

Cate’s mouth fell open. Her lashes fluttered. Her whole body softened under Sydney’s weight with a low involuntary sound that cut straight through any lingering pretense. Sydney pushed in by degrees, careful despite the ache making her own hands shake. Cate took her exactly the way she always had, with that initial tight heat and then the slow yielding after, body rearranging itself around something it knew by heart. By the time Sydney was fully seated inside her, both of them were breathing like they’d run somewhere far and dangerous.

Cate looked wrecked already. She gave a tiny disbelieving laugh that broke halfway through. “Oh.”

Sydney kissed the corner of her mouth. “That your professional review?”

Cate’s eyes watered instantly with the intensity of it. “Shut up.”

Sydney held still and let Cate adjust, palms sliding down to hold her at the waist. She could feel every tremor in Cate’s body. The small clutching pulses inside her. The way her thighs tightened around Sydney’s hips as if they’d finally stopped pretending there was any world in which they wanted distance.

“Tell me if you want me to move,” Sydney said.

Cate stared up at her, breathing hard. “You’re being terribly decent for someone who just bullied her way back into my bed.”

Sydney smiled faintly. “Answer.”

Cate lifted her head enough to kiss her once, hard and needy and not nearly enough. “Move.”

So Sydney did.

The first thrust punched a sound out of Cate that made Sydney’s vision blur at the edges. She set a slow pace at first, not because she wanted slow but because she wanted to feel every inch of the recognition. The feel of Cate’s body around her. The way Cate’s mouth opened on little helpless breaths between kisses. The way one hand slid down to clutch at Sydney’s bicep while the other fisted the sheets. She had missed this with a violence that embarrassed her. Not just the sex—though God yes the sex—but the impossible fit of them. The sense that with Cate she was not performing competence or desire but simply settling into the shape her body preferred.

Cate turned her face into Sydney’s throat. “It’s not fair.”

“What isn't?”

“That you still feel like this.”

Sydney thrust a little deeper and felt Cate shudder. “Like what?”

Cate made an incoherent noise against her skin, then pulled back enough to glare weakly. “You know exactly what.”

“I wanna hear it.”

Cate’s eyes narrowed. “You are enjoying this entirely too much.”

“Yeah.”

A tiny broken laugh escaped her. Then she said it, because she always gave in to honesty when it mattered enough. “You still feel right.”

Sydney nearly lost the slow careful pace right there.

Instead she caught Cate’s face and kissed her with the full force of what those words did to her. Cate kissed back like she meant to climb inside her mouth and live there. Beneath them the mattress creaked. The lamp cast everything in that soft amber light that made Cate look almost mythic, all soft skin and flushed edges and gold hair spilled wild over the pillow.

Nobody else even comes close to Cate.

The thought moved through Sydney with ugly certainty. She had known it at the bar. Known it in other beds where she kept trying to convince herself good enough could become enough eventually. It never had. Cate had ruined her for approximation. For half-chemistry. For touch without history. For sex that wasn’t also argument and devotion and memory and the world narrowing to one room because the right person was in it.

Cate lifted both legs and wrapped them around Sydney’s waist. “Harder.”

Sydney looked down at her. “You sure?”

Cate’s answer was to hook one ankle more firmly behind her and tilt her hips, demanding. “Sydney.”

That tone. Fuck.

Sydney gave it to her.

The next thrust knocked the breath from both of them. Cate’s head tipped back with a cry. Sydney followed the new angle again, and again—harder this time—until Cate’s hands stopped trying to anchor anywhere sensible and simply clutched at whatever part of Sydney they found first. Shoulders. Hair. The back of her neck. Nails dragging down Sydney’s back in one helpless scrape that made Sydney shudder. Sydney’s name kept leaving her in fragments, each one more wrecked than the last.

“Yes,” Cate gasped. “Yes, there, fuck, right there.”

Sydney’s control frayed visibly. “You gonna cum?”

Cate laughed breathlessly, insulted by the question. “If you keep doing that, obviously.”

Sydney kissed her once, bruising and sweet at the same time. “Good.”

She slid one hand between them and found Cate’s clit, slick and aching already. The first touch made Cate jerk under her with a cry so sharp Sydney felt it in her own spine. Sydney stroked in the rhythm she knew would undo her quickest, matching it to the harder thrusts now, watching Cate come apart beat by beat.

It happened fast after that. Cate had never needed much once she was this deep in it. Her body wrote the truth all over itself. Tightening. Trembling. Breath snagging. Tears gathering again at the corners of her eyes when the pleasure became too much to bear. Sydney chased it with a kind of ruthless tenderness, fucking her through every little gasp and broken plea until Cate went rigid under her and came hard, mouth open around a sound that had Sydney seeing white at the edges.

“Good girl,” Sydney breathed, almost to herself. “There you are.”

Cate clung to her through it, shaking. The aftershocks kept catching in her body, little helpless convulsions around Sydney’s cock that made holding back suddenly feel like a violent personal insult. Sydney buried her face in Cate’s throat and lasted maybe four more thrusts before her own orgasm hit. She came with Cate’s name bitten off against her skin, hips stuttering, one arm braced hard by Cate’s head while the other locked around her waist as if there were any world where letting go made sense.

For a while after, neither of them moved.

Just breathing. Heat. The old impossible gravity of skin against skin. Cate’s heart thudding under Sydney’s chest. Sydney still inside her, softening slowly, unwilling to leave the warmth yet.

Cate was the one who laughed first. Small, exhausted, damp at the edges. “Well,” she murmured to the ceiling. “That was probably a mistake.”

Sydney lifted her head enough to look at her. Hair stuck to Cate’s forehead. Mouth swollen. Eyes brilliant and dazed. The sight was so beloved it hurt.

“Probably,” Sydney said.

Cate turned her face toward her, still catching her breath. “You don’t sound very convinced.”

Sydney kissed her once, lazy now, almost soft enough to be domestic. “I came over to get my dick back. This feels like mission drift.”

Cate’s smile spread slowly, tired and beautiful and real. “Looks to me like it found its way home.”

Sydney looked at her then, really looked at her, and something in her eyes softened with the terrible ease of recognizing a truth she had no defense against. “Yeah.”

They lay there another moment. Then Cate’s expression shifted, just enough to let seriousness back in. “I did mean it, you know.”

Sydney knew better than to ask which part. Even so, she did.

“Mean what?”

Cate’s hand came up and touched Sydney’s face with a care so gentle it nearly undid her all over again. “That nobody else feels right.”

Sydney closed her eyes briefly against the touch.

When she opened them again, Cate was still watching her with that unbearable nakedness she only ever showed in pieces. Sydney kissed over her knuckles.

“Same,” she said.

The truth settled over both of them like something long overdue.

Outside, the city kept moving. Tires hissed on wet pavement. Somewhere a horn blew once and faded. In the room, under the sheets they’d twisted into chaos again, Sydney stayed over Cate as long as she could, neither of them pretending this fixed anything and neither of them pretending it didn’t matter.

Because it did.

It mattered in the old dangerous way. In the inevitable way. In the way that said this would not be the last exception because it had never really been an exception at all. Just the truth, resurfacing with its hands around both their throats, asking whether they were finally tired enough of lying to answer it.

Cate brushed her knuckles once down Sydney’s cheek. “You know,” she said quietly, “for someone who came here to reclaim her property, you seem to have lost focus.”

Sydney huffed a laugh into the hollow of her throat, already knowing it was an argument she wasn’t going to win. “Keep it.”

Cate’s arms tightened around her. “Gladly,” she whispered.

And something about that, stupid and filthy and far too intimate, made Sydney hold her closer.

For a little while longer, they let the lie of temporary hold.

The first truly deranged thing was that they did not wake up tangled together. The second was that neither of them mentioned it.

By the time morning light cut through Cate’s curtains, Sydney was gone. Not in the old way, not vanished without shape or warning, but gone with evidence left behind in a dialect Cate knew too well to mistake. The empty glass from the water she’d actually finished sat on the nightstand. The condom wrapper had been thrown away properly. Her robe, which had ended up half under the bed sometime around the moment Sydney remembered exactly how to make her come apart, had been folded over the arm of the chair instead of left in a heap on the floor. And on the kitchen counter, beside Cate’s coffee machine, Sydney had left a note torn from the back of some unopened mail.

Order groceries. Fries don’t count.Text me when you eat something real.

No signature.

As if there had ever been anyone else in the world who could make care sound that bossy.

Cate stood barefoot at the counter in one of Sydney’s old shirts, the one she’d somehow never returned and had been pretending for months she kept only because it was comfortable, and read the note three times before pressing it flat against the counter with the heel of her hand. Her hair was a mess. Her thighs still ached sweetly when she shifted. There was a bruised kiss at the hollow of her throat and a deeper, more humiliating tenderness between her legs that made every step a private memory.

She should have felt victorious, maybe. Or ashamed. Or at the very least decisively one thing.

Instead she felt rearranged.

Not fixed. Nothing so clean. Just altered in some subtle but irreversible way, like a room after one piece of furniture has been moved and suddenly every path through it changes.

Her phone buzzed as if on cue.

SYDNEY: Eat.

Cate stared at the screen. Then, because she refused on principle to let concern arrive without being annoyed by it first, she typed back:

CATE: good morning to you too, tyrant

The reply came almost instantly.

SYDNEY: Morning. Eat.

Cate looked around her empty kitchen, at the coffee beginning to drip, the note on the counter, the shirt hanging off one shoulder, and smiled despite herself.

CATE: i had toast

SYDNEY: That’s not food.

CATE: wow. incredibly rude to toast.

There was a pause long enough for Cate to pour her coffee, long enough for her to wonder whether Sydney was already at work or back in her apartment or sitting in some parked car staring at her phone like an idiot. Then:

SYDNEY: You still sore?

Cate nearly dropped the mug.

The question glowed up at her from the screen with no warning, no hedge, no respect whatsoever for the fact that it was 8:17 in the morning and she had not yet fully reentered civilization. Heat climbed her face in a slow hot wave. She glanced instinctively over her shoulder as though someone might have materialized in the kitchen to catch her blushing.

CATE: unbelievable thing to text somebody before 9am

SYDNEY: Well?

Cate set the mug down very carefully.

CATE: yes happy?

SYDNEY: A little.

That should not have made her chest go soft. It did anyway.

What followed, over the next few days, was less a collapse into each other than a quiet mutual fraud.

They did not call it anything. They did not discuss what had changed. They did not have the terrifying adult conversation that hovered at the edge of all of it like weather waiting to break. Instead they texted constantly in the precise rhythm of two people claiming nothing had completely rewritten them while behaving like the exact opposite was true.

SYDNEY: Did you eat lunch?

CATE: you’re obsessed with me

SYDNEY: Answer the question.

CATE: salad

SYDNEY: With actual food in it or just leaves and self-hatred

CATE: grilled chicken, asshole

SYDNEY: Good girl.

That one made Cate so unreasonably happy she had to set her phone face down on her desk and pretend to read the same email three times in a row. By the time Emma asked why she was smiling at quarterly projections like they were foreplay, Cate had almost recovered.

Or:

CATE: i walked by that wine bar on 9th and felt compelled to let you know the hostess is still weirdly afraid of me

SYDNEY: You did threaten to bankrupt them over the oysters.

CATE: they were sandy

SYDNEY: You were drunk

CATE: and? i was correct.

That exchange put Cate in a different place entirely, all warm amusement and the stupid private pleasure of being remembered so precisely. She smiled at her phone for so long that Marie finally leaned over the partition and asked, with visible suspicion, whether she was sexting in broad daylight again. Cate told her to mind her business. Marie—correctly—took that as a yes.

Or, late at night when the world softened and honesty got looser around the edges:

SYDNEY: Can’t sleep.

CATE: because you’re old

SYDNEY: Because you mumble in your sleep and it’s too quiet now.

CATE: … that’s a horrible thing to say to me at 12:14am

They did not see each other every night.

That, perhaps, was the only remotely sensible choice either of them made.

Sometimes three days would pass. Once, almost five. Cate would begin to feel strange in her own skin by then, restless and brittle, too aware of every room she entered. Sydney would become curt over text, her jokes flattening into something drier, more absent-minded. And then some pretense would arrive. A hoodie left behind. A file that needed signing. A question about whether Cate still had the spare key to the storage unit. They would both know it was utter nonsense. They would both honor it anyway. There was something almost tender in that, the way they still built each other little ceremonial doorways to walk through.

And every time, no matter how they began, the room would end up the same.

Not identical, never that. They’d always been too impulsive for repetition to survive them intact. But the emotional gravity was familiar. Mouths first, usually. Hands re-learning what they had never truly forgotten. Cate softening in pieces, then all at once. Sydney going quiet in that way she only did when feeling too much had made language briefly obsolete. Sometimes they talked afterward. Sometimes they didn’t. Once they ordered takeout and ended up laughing so hard over some terrible action movie that Cate nearly cried for an entirely different reason. Once Sydney left after midnight and Cate stood at the window in one of her shirts watching the taillights disappear and felt so newly, stupidly loved it made her furious.

They never said what they were doing.

Divorced women with boundaries, apparently.

The fraud held for almost three weeks before Cate started making the mistake of imagining the future.

It happened in absurd fragments at first. She’d be in a meeting and glance at a gold wedding band on someone else’s hand and feel her stomach do something peculiar. She’d pass a florist and think—very briefly and against her will—Sydney likes lilies but pretends not to care about flowers. She found herself looking at an apartment listing downtown and wondering whether the kitchen was too small for two people who fought over counter space. Once, worst of all, she caught herself smiling at a toddler in a grocery store and thinking Sydney would carry a sleepy baby on one hip like it was the most natural position for her body to be in.

Which was not a neutral thought to have about your ex-wife.

Cate knew this. That was what made it so offensive.

She was sprawled on her couch one Sunday afternoon with paperwork in her lap and a pencil tucked in her hair when the idea arrived fully formed and monstrous.

I could remarry her.

The thought came with such smooth certainty it took a full beat for horror to catch up.

Cate sat bolt upright.

“No,” she told the empty apartment.

The room, annoyingly, offered no rebuttal.

She set the paperwork aside and stared at nothing, pulse suddenly skittering in a way she deeply resented. Remarrying Sydney was not a plan. It was not even a thought she had authorized. It was the kind of deranged little spark her brain produced when she was underslept and overly romantic and had recently been fucked into the mattress by the exact woman she had once stood in court trying not to look at too directly.

Still.

The idea remained.

Not because the divorce had been wrong exactly. That was what made it complicated. The divorce had—at the time—felt like surgery without general anesthesia. Necessary. Brutal. Conducted while both patients remained awake enough to watch. They had been impossible then. Sharp in all the same places at once. Too proud. Too wounded. Too practiced at translating love into tests and resentment and exhausted little cruelties that made sense only from the inside.

Now, with the danger stripped down to something simpler and more honest, with Sydney texting her to eat lunch and turning up in the middle of the night whenever one of them cracked visibly enough, Cate could feel her own mind beginning to do what it did best. Build meaning. Build ritual. Build a cathedral around one spark and then act surprised when she was suddenly kneeling in it.

She stood and crossed to the kitchen for water, mostly to escape herself.

That was where the memory hit.

Not as a vague melancholy blur, but with vicious cinematic precision. The conference room. The fluorescent lights. Too cold—always too cold. The long glass table with the neat stacks of papers and the little silver pitcher of water no one touched. Her attorney speaking in that calm, careful voice people use when they are trying not to startle rich women into violence. Sydney across from her in a black button-down that made her look unfairly handsome for a woman actively destroying Cate’s life.

They had divided everything with the strangled politeness of people trying not to bleed in public.

The house. The accounts. The car. The stupid vintage record player Sydney swore she’d bought before the marriage and Cate swore had technically become communal property the first time they’d danced drunk in the kitchen to Fleetwood Mac. Books. Lamps. The ugly ceramic bowl from Italy Cate hated but had let stay on the hallway table for six years because Sydney liked throwing her keys into it.

All of it.

And then, in a silence so sharp it could have cut glass, Cate had cleared her throat and said, “There is one...additional item.”

Both attorneys had looked up.

Sydney had gone still in that terrible, alert way she had when she suspected Cate was about to become either devastating or impossible, probably both.

Cate, who had rehearsed being dignified and instead arrived determined to lose her mind with style, had folded her hands on the table and said, “I want the mold.”

Her own attorney had blinked. “The what?”

Cate had kept her face perfectly smooth. “The silicone piece from the bedroom drawer.”

Across from her, Sydney’s expression had changed in minute catastrophic stages. First confusion. Then recognition. Then a look so violently suppressive Cate realized, with a bright shard of satisfaction, that Sydney was trying not to laugh during divorce proceedings.

“It is not,” Cate had said with frosty precision, before anyone could pretend not to understand, “a shared decorative object.”

Her attorney—to his eternal credit—had not asked follow-up questions. He had only made a small note and nodded like women requested custody of custom dildos every business day before lunch.

Sydney had finally looked down, hand coming up to cover her mouth.

Cate remembered the exact angle of it. The way Sydney’s shoulders had twitched once with contained laughter. The furious heat that had burned through Cate’s humiliation because even then—even there—in that room full of ending, she had still wanted to provoke a reaction out of her. Still wanted to be singular. Still wanted Sydney to look at her and think only you. Only this. Only mine enough to be impossible about it.

“Well,” Sydney had said at last, voice rough around the corners of burgeoning laughter, “I’m not fighting you for it.”

“Good,” Cate had snapped.

And that had been that.

The memory was so absurd, so intensely, hopelessly them, that Cate found herself laughing aloud in her empty kitchen with one hand over her eyes. The sound echoed softly off the marble and the glass and all the pretty expensive surfaces that had witnessed her decline into a woman considering a second marriage because the first divorce featured a contested sex toy and somehow that felt less like a warning than a love language.

“This is pathetic,” she informed the fruit bowl.

The fruit, being wise, kept its opinions to itself.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

SYDNEY: What are you doing.

Cate stared at the message with fresh suspicion. The timing felt rude. Psychic, almost.

She typed back:

CATE: thinking about how i demanded custody of your dick in court

There was a long pause.

Then:

SYDNEY: Jesus Christ.

Cate smiled before she could stop herself.

CATE: i wanted to upset you

SYDNEY: You wanted to make me laugh in front of two lawyers.

Cate leaned against the counter.

CATE: same difference

The typing bubble appeared immediately. Vanished. Returned.

SYDNEY: Worked.

Cate’s smile softened into something a little more dangerous.

CATE: i know you tried so hard not to it was cute but your shoulders gave you away

A full minute passed. Cate could picture it too clearly. Sydney somewhere with the phone in one hand, jaw tight, eyes gone a little distant because she was there now too—back in the fluorescent graveyard of that room—remembering the exact same stupid impossible moment.

SYDNEY: You were wearing that white blouse. The silk one. It was distracting as hell.

Cate went very still.

Of course she remembered that. Not just the moment. The blouse. The details. The way Cate had looked while insisting, in front of legal counsel, that she retain post-marital rights to a silicone replica of her ex-wife’s cock.

CATE: this is a very bad sign for us

SYDNEY: Yeah.

Cate waited.

Then:

CATE: do you ever think about doing it again?

The message sat there for a second after she sent it, and she nearly threw her own phone into the sink. Too vague. Too dangerous. She should’ve clarified. She should’ve pretended she meant the fight, or the paperwork, or the sex, or the laughing. Too late.

The dots appeared from Sydney’s side and stayed so long Cate’s pulse started acting stupid.

Finally:

SYDNEY: Which part?

Cate closed her eyes.

CATE: the marriage part

Silence.

Not dead silence. Charged silence. The kind that made air feel electrically expensive. Cate stood at the counter in the middle of her beautiful apartment and listened to her own breathing like it might betray her.

At last:

SYDNEY: Sometimes.

That one word should not have felt like a physical touch. It did.

Cate’s fingers curled around the edge of the countertop.

SYDNEY: Mostly when I’m trying not to.

There it was. The honesty problem again. Distance had burned it clean out of them and left all the dangerous truths intact, stripped of ceremony.

Cate looked down at the floor, at her bare feet against the tile, and thought with a kind of exhausted wonder: this is how it starts. Not with declarations. Not with grand repair. With grocery reminders and midnight sex and remembering who laughed in court and realizing the second version of a vow might be even more deranged than the first.

She typed slowly this time.

CATE: that seems unwise

SYDNEY: Yeah.

CATE: but not impossible?

The reply came quicker than she expected.

SYDNEY: Nothing with you is impossible. That’s sort of the problem.

Cate laughed then, small and startled and helplessly fond. Her eyes burned a little at the edges, not from sadness exactly, but from the sheer impossible tenderness of being known in this ridiculous, specific, unsanitized way.

She rested her hip against the counter and let herself look at the note Sydney had left days ago, still stuck beneath a magnet on the fridge because she had not been able to throw it away.

Remarrying Sydney might be a terrible idea.

So had divorcing her—to be fair.

Cate typed one last time before she could decide against it.

CATE: for the record if ever there is a second divorce i’m still keeping the mold

Sydney took less than ten seconds.

SYDNEY: Baby, if there’s a second marriage, I’ll make you an upgraded version.

Cate stared at that until she had to sit down.

Because there it was again, that impossible effortless way Sydney had of turning filth into devotion and devotion into something so practical it could sneak under Cate’s skin before she had time to armor herself. Not a proposal. Not even close. Just a line. A joke. A door left cracked open in the shape of a future neither of them was ready to name and both of them had already started circling like fools.

Cate pressed the phone to her chest and laughed into the quiet apartment.

Then, because she was still herself and because she had never once in her life known how to leave dangerous things untouched, she typed back:

CATE: obviously i’m not accepting anything off the shelf i have standards