Do More Fucking

The fluorescent lights had no right.

No right to be this bright, this consistent, this aggressively indifferent to the fact that Erica Hayes had gotten three hours of sleep and was running on spite and concealer and a lukewarm coffee that had stopped being worth drinking two blocks ago.

She walked into the office at 8:57 with three minutes to spare and the particular expression of a woman held together entirely by will. Her hair was done because her hair was always done — the one thing she’d managed on autopilot while her brain was somewhere between the shower and a full system shutdown.

She found her desk. Flopped her bag onto it with more force than the bag deserved.

From the adjacent cubicle, Priya’s head appeared over the partition like a very concerned prairie dog.

“Damn, Erica. Who pissed in your cereal?”

“I’d tell you if I had time to eat anything this morning.” Erica dropped into her chair and stared at her monitor without turning it on. “I barely managed to get dressed and get here on time.”

“Missed your alarm?”

“I was up before the alarm.”

Priya frowned. “Bad dream? Insomnia?”

Erica picked up her coffee. Looked into it. “Hard penis.”

A pause.

“Oh.” Priya nodded with the solemnity of a woman who understood completely. “That’ll do it.”

Erica took her first sip. It was lukewarm. Of course it was.

She’d bought it at the cart outside twenty minutes ago with every intention of drinking it while it was hot and then Jacob had texted and she’d made the mistake of looking at her phone and the text was sweet — hope you got there safe, I love you, I know last night was late — and the sweetness of it had made her feel guilty for being tired, which made her stand on the sidewalk doing an internal moral inventory while the coffee cooled in her hand.

I love you was the problem. Not the words — she believed them. Jacob loved her with a consistency that she’d found remarkable when they first got together. Flowers for no reason. Texts that arrived like he’d been thinking of her mid-thought. The way he looked at her like she was something he couldn’t believe he got to keep.

All of that was real. She’d never doubted it.

It was just that love, in Jacob’s frequency, ran on a schedule she hadn’t agreed to in the original terms.

Last night had been the second time this week. Which didn’t sound like a lot until you factored in the time — 2:07AM, she’d checked, because the phone screen had blinded her when it lit up from his movement — and the duration, and the fact that she had a 5AM alarm for the gym that she’d been skipping more and more lately because she was tired in a way that the gym could not fix.

She’d said yes last night because a week had passed and she could feel him getting quiet in that specific way. Not cold. Just — contained. Careful. Jacob without his full wattage was somehow more exhausting than Jacob at full volume because then she’d spend her mental energy wondering if he was okay, if she’d done something, if the distance meant something was wrong.

So she’d said yes.

And he’d been grateful and attentive and it had taken forty five minutes the first time and she’d been almost asleep when the second round materialized and she’d thought I don’t have it and then thought but he did wait a week and then thought that should not be a factor and then somewhere in that internal litigation she’d just — let it happen.

He’d finished. She had not, the second time.

He’d kissed her temple and said I love you so much and been asleep in four minutes.

She’d lain there in the dark looking at the ceiling fan.

The ceiling fan.

She’d stared at it until her alarm went off at five and then hit snooze twice and missed the gym and gotten here on three hours of sleep and a coffee that was now entirely cold.

“How long has it been like this?” Priya asked. She’d migrated fully around the partition now, perched on the edge of Erica’s desk with the look of a woman prepared to offer genuine counsel.

Erica thought about it. “Long enough that I’ve started tracking his sleep schedule.”

“To avoid—?”

“To anticipate.”

Priya winced. “Erica.”

“I know.”

“That’s not — that’s not a sustainable system.”

“I know, Priya.”

“Have you talked to him?”

Erica looked at her monitor. Still hadn’t turned it on. “How do you tell someone who looks at you like you’re the greatest thing that ever happened to him that he’s running you into the ground?”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. That’s the thing. He thinks he’s loving me.”

“He is loving you. Just—”

“At 2AM. On a Tuesday.”

“Consecutively.”

“With a five AM alarm in the room.”

Priya was quiet for a moment. “Did you at least—”

“The first time.”

“Not the second?”

“I was mostly asleep by the second.”

A longer pause.

“Erica.”

“I know, Priya.”

“He doesn’t know?”

She finally turned her monitor on. The brightness made her wince. “He knows what he needs to know.”

Which was that she’d said yes. Which was that she was there. Which was that she loved him, genuinely, in the daylight hours when she had the resources to show it properly.

What Jacob did not know was that she’d started sleeping with a pillow between them some nights, a gradual border, constructed innocently enough — I sleep better with something to hold — that had slowly become a buffer she was embarrassed to acknowledge even to herself.

What Jacob did not know was that she’d started checking the clock when he reached for her.

Calculating.

How long.

How much sleep she’d lose.

Whether she could survive tomorrow on what would be left.

What Jacob did not know was that she loved him and was exhausted by him in equal measure and had no idea how to hold both things at once without dropping one.

She opened her email.

Forty three unread.

“I need a nap,” she said to no one.

“You need a conversation,” Priya said, migrating back to her own desk.

Erica stared at her inbox.

Her phone buzzed. Jacob again.

Dinner tonight? I’ll cook. You just show up.

She looked at it for a long time.

He would cook. He’d have the table set and music playing and he’d refill her glass before it was empty and he’d ask about her day and actually listen and at some point in the evening he’d look at her the way he always looked at her and she’d think I love this man and mean it completely.

And then later, in the dark—

She typed back: Dinner sounds good.

Put her phone face down.

Opened her first email.

He’d lit candles.

Of course he had.

Erica saw the flicker through the bedroom door the moment she stepped inside the apartment and felt something in her chest tighten that had no business tightening when a man lit candles for you. She set her bag down quietly. The apartment smelled like garlic and the specific candle he only burned when he was in a particular mood — amber and sandalwood, warm and intentional.

The table was set. Actual plates, not the everyday ones. Her glass already poured.

Jacob came out of the kitchen with the kind of smile that had made her say yes the first time he asked her out — open, uncomplicated, aimed entirely at her.

“Right on time,” he said. He kissed her temple. His hand found the small of her back for a moment before he went back to plate things up.

She sat down.

Looked at the candles on the table and the bedroom door and did the math she’d been doing for months now. The equation that had stopped being complicated and started being just — sad.

Dinner was good. It always was. Jacob could actually cook, which had been an early mark in his favor, and tonight was the pasta she’d mentioned once in passing six months ago that she’d loved as a kid. He’d remembered. He’d gone and learned to make it.

She ate and listened to him talk about the piece he was working on — a city council story that had real legs, he thought, if he could get one more source to go on record — and she asked questions and meant them and watched his face animate with the particular passion he brought to work he believed in.

I love you, she thought, looking at him across the table.

I’m so tired.

Both things sat in her chest with equal weight.

He refilled her glass without being asked.

“How was your day?” he said.

“Long.” She smiled. “Better now.”

He reached across the table and covered her hand with his. Squeezed once. The gesture was so genuinely tender that she felt the backs of her eyes threaten something she was not going to do at the dinner table.

She looked at the bedroom door.

The candle flickered.

Anxious was the word. Not dread — she wasn’t there yet. Just the low hum of a body that already knew what was coming and was quietly taking inventory of what it had left.

Not enough. That was the answer. Not enough left tonight.

She looked back at Jacob. At his face, open and warm and already carrying that particular brightness in his eyes — the one she’d learned to read the way you learn to read weather. She’d been reading it for two years. She could see it from across a room now.

He wanted her.

Of course he did.

She breathed through it.

“Jacob?”

“Wassup baby?” He took the last bite of his pasta. Relaxed. Content. A man who’d cooked a good meal and set a table and had no idea there was a storm anywhere on the horizon.

“I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

He set his fork down. To his credit — and there was credit to give — he didn’t look away.

“Okay. I hear you. What can I do?”

She looked at her glass. Took a breath.

“Can we pull back on how much sex we have?”

Something moved across his face. Not anger, not yet. More like — here we are again, arriving somewhere familiar from a different direction. “Baby, come on. We already cut back. We’re down to three times a week.”

“No.” She kept her voice even. She’d practiced this part in the shower. “We’re down to three days a week, Jacob. That’s not the same thing. Last night was twice. I’m exhausted. I’m sore. I’m sleepy.”

“Is this about me waking you up?”

“Yes. But also everything else.” She met his eyes. “It’s inconsiderate. You know I have to be up at five.”

He leaned back slightly. The defensiveness was beginning its slow arrival — she knew that posture too. “You know how my libido gets. And you’re just right there. Why sleep in the nude if I can’t—”

“Sleeping in the nude is for me.” The patience in her voice cost her something. “I find it liberating. I find it comfortable. It’s not an invitation. Not every time.”

He smacked his teeth. The sound landed in the quiet apartment like something small breaking.

“So what now? You decide when we make love?”

“You’re making it sound like I’m punishing you.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.” She said it clearly. No heat, just — clear. “I just want a break, baby. Can I have a break? I’m sore. I’m tired.” She looked at him steadily. “My holes are tired, Jacob. I don’t feel like we’re making love. I feel like your personalized sex toy.”

The words sat between them.

His jaw tightened. “You’re overstating it.”

“I’m not.” She felt something loosen in her chest — not relief exactly, more like the feeling just before you let something heavy down. “I’m so close to just — giving you a hall pass. Or, if we can’t reconcile this, just walking away. Because we are not sexually compatible.”

“You don’t think we fit together?”

“Oh my god, Jacob.” She pressed her fingers to her eyes for a moment. “Yes. You make me come. Usually. But I’m not in the mood sixty percent of the time lately and I just—” she dropped her hands, “I want a break. That’s all I’m asking for.”

He was quiet for a long moment. She watched him work through it — the frustration, the hurt underneath the frustration, the thing he probably didn’t have language for yet.

“How long?” he said finally. His voice had gone quieter. Not softer. Quieter.

“I don’t know.”

“Seriously?” The composure cracked just slightly. “I can’t go more than two weeks, Erica. For real. I don’t think I can do one. Especially not if it starts tonight. I been thinking about you all day.”

She looked at him. At the candles he’d lit and the table he’d set and the pasta she’d mentioned once in passing six months ago and the bedroom door with the amber flicker behind it.

And underneath all of that — underneath the tenderness and the effort and the very real love she had no doubt about — the 2AM alarm. The second round she’d barely been present for. The orgasm she hadn’t gotten and he hadn’t noticed she hadn’t gotten.

The pillow between them that they’d never talked about.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I know you have.”

She picked up her glass.

Finished what was left.

Outside the city moved through its evening. Inside the apartment the candle on the table burned down another millimeter and the one in the bedroom threw its amber light across the doorframe and Erica Hayes sat across from the man she loved and tried to figure out how two people who wanted each other could still be this far apart.

She pushed her chair back from the table.

“Can you wait here, Jacob. I’m going to make a call.”

He looked up. Read her face for a moment — she kept it neutral, which she was good at — and nodded.

She grabbed her phone from the counter. Their no-phones-at-dinner rule had been his idea originally, which felt mildly ironic right now. She scrolled while she walked toward the bedroom, stopping just short of the doorframe and its amber candlelight.

The contact had been sitting in her phone for four months under a name that told nothing to anyone who might scroll past it. She’d added it after a conversation she hadn’t expected to have with a woman she hadn’t expected to meet, at a bachelorette party for a coworker she wasn’t even that close to. They’d talked for forty minutes on a balcony away from the noise and Erica had thought, walking home that night — I hope I never need that number.

She stared at it now.

She thought about the pillow between them. The clock checks. The second round she’d been mostly asleep for. The orgasm Jacob didn’t know he owed her.

She thought about walking away and felt something in her chest refuse the idea entirely.

She pressed call.

It picked up on the second ring.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice. Warm, unhurried, the voice of someone who answered private lines with complete composure.

“Hello.” Erica kept her own voice low, measured. “I don’t know if you remember me. It’s Erica, from—”

“The lil red bone with the pretty lips.”

She paused. “I suppose.”

A low chuckle came through the line. “How can I help you, baby girl?”

Erica exhaled slowly. “I remember when we talked, you mentioned you provide a special service. To couples.”

“Oh, honey.” The woman’s voice shifted slightly — still warm, but attentive now, professional. “This is my personal line. I gave it just to you. But if you want to talk business — what are you looking for?”

“My man, he—” She stopped. Started again. “He has needs I can’t keep up with. And I love him. I’m not trying to lose him.”

“A threesome? I can do that. Little pricey, but—”

“Sorry. Not that.” Erica glanced toward the dining room. The quiet sounds of Jacob clearing plates, patient, giving her whatever space she’d asked for. “Just you and him.”

A pause on the other end.

“Oh?” The woman said it carefully. “That’s…rare. Coming from the girlfriend.” A beat. “How long would you require my services?”

Erica looked at the ceiling. “The entire night.” She steadied herself. “Maybe some time in the morning. You might be there for breakfast.”

Silence.

Then: “Damn. Baby girl. Are you giving me your man or a stud horse?”

Erica almost laughed. Almost. “Sometimes I wonder.”

The woman on the phone made a sound — something between a chuckle and a nervous exhale.

“I’m not cheap.”

“We’ll pay.”

A longer pause this time. When the woman spoke again the professionalism had softened just slightly at the edges. “Baby girl. Are you sure? One on one arrangement is complicated enough, but what you’re describing — spending the night, breakfast — that gets messy. Emotionally messy.” Her voice was careful now. Genuinely careful. “Please tell me you won’t be there.”

“I won’t get violent or anything.”

“Oh honey.” Flat. “That’s not what I meant.”

Erica stood in the doorway of the bedroom she shared with a man who had lit candles for her tonight and looked at the amber light and the turned-down sheets and thought about how tired she was. How genuinely, completely tired.

And thought about how much worse tired was than lonely.

“Just send me your rate,” she said. “I’ll send you the address.”

A breath on the other end. “…alright. You’ve got my number. Text me the details.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” A pause. “Take care of yourself, baby girl.”

The call ended.

Erica stood there for a moment in the quiet. Phone warm in her hand. The candle throwing its light across the bed she was about to get a full night’s sleep in for the first time in longer than she could remember.

She walked back out to the dining room.

Jacob was at the sink. Doing the dishes without being asked, which was also him. Which was always him.

“Hey,” she said.

He turned. Read her face again — less careful this time, more just — her.

“You good?”

“Yeah.” She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him from behind, her cheek against his back, his hands going still in the water. She held on. “You’re a good man, Jacob.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then his wet hand found her forearm and covered it. “What’s going on, Erica?”

“Nothing bad.” She closed her eyes. “I figured something out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She pressed her face into his back. “Finish the dishes. I’m going to run a bath.”

He turned the water off. Turned around in her arms and looked down at her — that open, unguarded face. “Talk to me.”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tonight I just want to sit in hot water and then sleep a full eight hours.”

Something moved through his expression. Understanding arriving slowly, then landing.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” He kissed her forehead. Simple. Clean. “Go run your bath.”

She stood up on her toes and kissed the corner of his mouth.

Then she went and ran the hottest bath she could stand, and sank into it up to her chin, and stared at the ceiling, and didn’t think about what tomorrow’s conversation would look like.

She thought about sleep.

Beautiful, uninterrupted, nobody’s alarm but hers, full eight hours of sleep.

She was asleep before ten for the first time in three months.

Jacob was on the couch when the knock came.

He hadn’t moved much since Erica disappeared into the bathroom. Just sat there with the television on mute, which was how he processed things — visual noise, mental quiet. The dinner sat in him warm and unresolved. The conversation too. I feel like your personalized sex toy. He’d been turning that over since she said it, looking at it from different angles, trying to find the one where it didn’t land the way it landed.

He hadn’t found it yet.

The knock was confident. Not loud. Just — certain of itself.

He frowned. Got up. Opened the door.

She was standing in the hallway like she’d been placed there by someone with an eye for composition. Trench coat belted at the waist. Heels that added four inches she didn’t need. Hair and makeup assembled with the precision of someone who understood exactly what they were doing and had never once done it by accident. The scent reached him before anything else — warm, deliberate, the kind of perfume that didn’t announce itself so much as arrive.

She was attractive in a way that was completely different from Erica. Nothing unaware about it. Nothing unstudied. This was beauty as architecture. Beauty as intention. Every element load-bearing.

She looked at him with large, calm eyes.

“Jacob Lee?”

He blinked. “Yeah.”

She nodded once. The confirmation registered somewhere behind her expression and filed itself away. Her gaze moved past him briefly — taking in the apartment, the dining table with its cleared dishes, the open bedroom door with the candles burning themselves down inside — and then came back to him with the same unruffled composure.

“The guest room, please.” She tilted her head slightly down the hall. “We can begin whenever you’re ready.”

Jacob stood in his own doorway. “I’m sorry — who are you?”

“Destiny.” She said it simply, the way you state a fact about weather. “Erica sent me.” The faintest softening at the corner of her mouth. “You’ve been a very eager boy. Your girlfriend is at a loss.” She tilted her head. “I’m here to take some of the load. So to speak.”

He stared at her.

“Sorry?”

She reached for the belt of the trench coat.

Let it fall.

Royal blue lace. Precise and deliberate and leaving very little to the imagination and what it didn’t leave to imagination it rendered entirely unnecessary. The coat pooled on the floor around her heels without her looking at it.

Jacob stiffened. Immediately and involuntarily and with absolutely no input from the part of his brain still trying to form a coherent sentence.

Destiny glanced down once. Glanced back up. “The bed, Jacob.”

“Down the hall.” His voice came out slightly altered. “Second door on the left.”

She turned.

The heels clicked against the hardwood with a rhythm that suggested she’d practiced walking in them until the walk itself became a statement. Hips moving with a precision that was frankly unfair. She glanced back over one shoulder.

“Follow.”

He followed.

Got three steps down the hall and stopped.

The bathroom door. Light coming from under it. The faint sound of water.

Erica.

“Hold on.” He said it to Destiny’s back. “I need to ask Erica—”

“Jacob.”

She had stopped. Turned halfway. Her voice had changed — still composed, but something firmer underneath it now. Not unkind. Just clear, the way a person is clear when they understand a situation better than the people in it.

“Do not make this harder for her.” She said it quietly enough that it wouldn’t carry through a bathroom door. “You’re going to take me to the other room and handle your business and be grateful.” She paused. “I don’t know the full story. I don’t need to. But this—” she gestured between herself and him and the hallway and all of it “—this was her solution. Her effort. For you.” Her eyes held his steadily. “This is her cry for help. I’m the help.” She turned back toward the guest room. “Now come on.”

Jacob stood in the hallway.

Looked at the bathroom door.

The water running behind it. Erica in there — doing what she’d said she wanted. Hot water. Quiet. Sleep. Things she’d apparently been deprived of long enough that she’d picked up a phone and called a number she’d been hoping never to use.

For him.

Something moved through his chest that was more complicated than gratitude and less comfortable than guilt and sat somewhere between the two like a thing that needed to be dealt with later.

He looked at the guest room door.

Destiny had already disappeared inside.

He stood there one more second.

Then he walked down the hall and pushed the door open and closed it quietly behind him.

Inside the bathroom the water was hot and still and Erica was submerged to her chin, eyes closed, the candle she’d lit on the edge of the tub burning low.

She heard the guest room door.

She didn’t open her eyes.

She breathed in the steam and the quiet and the particular peace of a decision made and enacted and no longer hovering over her like a question.

Her body ached pleasantly in the water. Her mind was finally, blessedly, going soft at the edges.

From down the hall, muffled through two closed doors, the sound of heels on hardwood.

Then nothing.

Then — much later, when the water had cooled and she’d dried off and found her oldest, softest sleep shirt and gotten into bed and pulled the comforter up — she heard it. Faint. The guest room.

She reached over and put her AirPods in. Turned on the playlist she used for long flights — ambient, wordless, designed to take the brain somewhere with no weather.

She closed her eyes.

Thank you, she thought, to no one and everyone. Finally.

She was asleep in six minutes.

No alarm but hers.

Jacob sat on the edge of the guest bed and looked at the floor.

Destiny was somewhere behind him. He could hear the quiet sounds of a woman who was entirely comfortable in situations that would undo most people. A clasp. The soft shift of fabric.

He looked at the wall.

This wasn’t — he needed a second. He needed Erica to come out of that bathroom and tell him this was a test and laugh and he’d apologize for every 2AM and every second round she’d never asked for and they’d go to bed and he’d hold her and not try anything and just — be there.

The bathroom light was still on under the door. He could see it from the hallway gap.

“She actually set this up,” he said. Not a question. Out loud. To the room.

“She called me herself,” Destiny said behind him. Straightforward. No performance in it. “Personal line. Specific instructions.” A pause. “This isn’t a test, Jacob.”

He looked at his hands.

She called. Erica, who handled things quietly and never asked for help and had been sleeping with a pillow between them for weeks while he’d been reading it as preference instead of message — Erica had found a number and pressed call and arranged this so he could have what he needed without her having to pay for it with her body every time.

He felt something in his chest that he didn’t have words for yet.

He’d find them later. Right now he just sat with it.

“Okay,” he said finally. Quietly.

He stood up. Undressed with the efficiency of a man not making a ceremony of anything. Reached for the condom she’d already placed on the nightstand — of course she had, she’d thought of everything — and when he turned around Destiny was already positioned, kneeling on the bed, face forward, her back to him. Deliberate. Businesslike in its own way.

Not intimate.

He understood. That was the arrangement.

He put the condom on. Moved into position. His hands found her hips and they were unfamiliar in his palms and he registered that and set it aside and took one long, slow breath.

Erica.

He hesitated.

One more second.

Then he pushed in.

And stopped.

Because it wasn’t Erica.

That was the thought — clear, immediate, unavoidable. Not a moral thought. Just a physical one. The warmth was different. The particular way Erica fit around him, that specific pull of her, the thing that had become the only thing for two years — it wasn’t there. He’d thought he could override it. He couldn’t.

But.

What was there was its own thing. Wetter. Cooler than Erica’s heat but present in its own right.

And when she registered that he’d stilled, there was a deliberate squeeze — a practiced, concentrated grip that made his jaw go tight before he could prepare for it.

Different. Not lesser. Just — not her.

Good, something in him said, unexpectedly. This is its own thing. Let it be its own thing.

He started moving. Slow. Measured. Old habit, old consideration, his whole body oriented toward easing in.

“You don’t have to ease me into it.” Her voice was steady. Almost amused. “I’m not fragile.”

He stopped.

Something released in him. Quiet and significant.

This wasn’t Erica. He didn’t have to hold anything back. He didn’t have to measure, calculate, ration himself against the knowledge that she had a five AM alarm and a body with a limit he’d been pushing up against for months. There was no clock on the nightstand. No pillow barrier. No woman beneath him doing quiet math.

Just this.

Not all at once — in stages, like pressure releasing from something that’s been sealed too long. His grip changed. His pace changed. Two years of held-back compressed into something that finally had somewhere to go, and he gave it somewhere to go, and Destiny made a sound that told him she could handle it, and he stopped thinking about anything at all.

The robe ties were still damp.

Erica had knotted them loosely at her waist, barely. Her body was soft from the heat of the water, hair pinned up, skin still carrying the flush of a bath too hot and too long and entirely worth it. She padded out of the bathroom on bare feet into the dim hallway.

The apartment was quiet.

She stood there a moment.

Maybe she didn’t come. The thought arrived with a strange mix of relief and something else she didn’t examine. Maybe Destiny had another booking, or changed her mind, or—

“Jacob—”

The voice came through the walls like it had no interest in walls.

“Jacob, please—”

Erica went still.

The sounds followed. Unmistakable. The rhythmic impact of skin on skin, low and percussive, traveling through the guest room door and down the hall and into the living room where Erica stood in her robe with her hand on nothing.

Her moans bounced off every surface. His name in her mouth like a prayer that kept collapsing before it finished.

Please. That word again. Stripped of everything composed.

Then Jacob’s voice. And Erica felt the back of her neck do something.

Because it didn’t sound like Jacob.

“Please what?” Low. Deliberate. Something in it she’d never heard aimed at her. “Please give you this dick? I got you.”

She stood in her own living room and didn’t move.

She’d heard Jacob in every register. Laughing, asleep, frustrated, tender, half-awake at 2AM reaching for her like she was water. She knew the sounds he made. Thought she did.

This was something he’d been keeping somewhere she’d never reached.

The roughness of it. The confidence. The absolute absence of restraint.

He mounted her at every opportunity — she knew that. But it had always come wrapped in something that needed her permission, her presence, her active participation in receiving him. This was different. This was Jacob uncontained. Jacob with nothing to protect and nobody to be careful with.

The pace picked up.

She heard it in the rhythm, in the sounds Destiny was making, in the way his name kept leaving her in pieces.

“I’M GONNA CUM—”

The walls did nothing to soften it.

He didn’t slow down. She heard that too — the absence of mercy in it, the relentlessness, and then his voice dropping into something that should not have done what it did to Erica’s nervous system.

“Go ahead. I’m not gonna stop, but go ahead.”

Destiny’s response wasn’t words. It was something past words.

Erica was standing at the entrance to her own kitchen. She didn’t know when she’d moved there. Her hand had found the doorframe. Her robe had loosened another inch.

Her body, which had been a tired, grateful, pleasantly aching thing thirty minutes ago in a bath that smelled like lavender — her body was doing something she hadn’t asked it to do and hadn’t budgeted for.

Oh, she thought.

Oh no.

She stood there in the dark of her apartment, her man’s voice coming through the guest room door saying things to another woman in a register she’d never unlocked, and felt something she had absolutely no right to feel right now:

Jealous.

And beneath the jealous—

Curious.

She pressed her lips together. Looked at the ceiling. Pulled her robe closed and knotted it properly.

She went to the bedroom.

Closed the door.

Put her AirPods in.

Turned the volume up.

Lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to the ambient playlist and did not think about what was happening thirty feet away and also could not stop thinking about it.

That Jacob.

She’d never met that one.

She wondered, for the first time, if she’d been so focused on surviving him that she’d never told him who she actually wanted him to be.

The playlist moved through its paces.

Erica did not sleep for another hour.

Ten minutes.

She counted them roughly, in the way you count time when you’re trying not to think about what you’re not thinking about. The AirPods were out. She’d given up on the playlist somewhere around minute six because it required a level of mental absence she no longer had access to.

The guest room had gone quiet.

She didn’t know when exactly. Didn’t know what quiet meant in this context and was not going to spend energy constructing theories. She’d made a decision. The decision had been executed.

Whatever was happening in that room was the point.

She was fine.

She was lying on her back staring at the ceiling in the dark being completely fine.

The bedroom door opened.

She sat up.

Jacob stood in the doorway. Still dressed from the waist up, somehow. The condom still on.

His face carrying an expression she didn’t have a clean category for — not guilt exactly, not satisfaction. Something worked through. Something that had gone somewhere and come back changed.

She stood up. “Jacob?”

He looked at her for a moment. Then he pulled the condom off with the quiet efficiency of a man who had made a decision. Tied it. Dropped it in the trash by the dresser.

“Erica.” His voice was different. She’d noticed it through the walls and she was noticing it now up close. Something unwrapped in it. “I tried.” He shook his head once. “I can’t finish with anyone but you. I don’t want anyone but you.”

She stood at the foot of the bed in her robe. “Destiny. What happened?”

“She’s getting some sleep.” He took a step toward her. “So I’m going to get some you.”

Her heart did something she hadn’t felt in months.

Surprised. That was the word. She was surprised. By Jacob, who she knew the sleep schedule of, who she could predict to the minute, who she’d been surviving rather than living with — she was surprised.

Because this Jacob was different.

Whatever Destiny had unlocked in that room, he’d brought it back with him. She could see it in the way he was standing. The way he was looking at her. Like he’d been somewhere and come back knowing something he didn’t before.

“Condom,” she said. Automatic. Practical.

He shook his head.

Took her hand.

Walked her to the bathroom.

“Here?” She looked at the tile floor, the low light, the damp towel still on the rack from her bath.

He didn’t answer with words.

He untied the robe and it fell and a moment later he was inside her and her body hitched — a full involuntary catch of breath and muscle — because he was already different. The angle. The depth. He buried his face in her neck and his right hand found her shoulder and gripped and she felt the intention in the grip.

“This is it,” he said against her skin. Low. Certain. “This is what I need.”

She dug her nails into his back because she needed something to hold.

He pushed deeper. Further than he’d gone before or further than she’d allowed before — she couldn’t tell which and it didn’t matter because all she knew was the pressure of it, the specific overwhelming fullness that made her chest seize.

“Jacob, I’m scared.”

“It’s okay.” His mouth moved against her neck. “You won’t be in a second.”

“Wha—”

The word dissolved.

The thrust that followed drove the air from her lungs completely and the one after that did it again and the one after that and she couldn’t gather enough breath to make sound, could only open her mouth and feel each one move through her like a current looking for ground. He wasn’t the Jacob of the 2AM reach. He wasn’t the Jacob she’d been rationing herself against.

She didn’t know this Jacob. She wanted to.

“I love you Erica.” His voice was ragged now. Wrecked at the edges in a way she’d never caused before. “I love you.”

I feel it, she thought. I actually feel it right now.

She tried to say it back. Couldn’t find the air.

Then the pace changed.

Shallow. Slow. Each stroke barely leaving before returning, focused at the entrance, and the electricity of it ran straight down her spine and branched out everywhere simultaneously. Her eyes went somewhere without a ceiling. Her hand found his chest — not to push, to anchor. To keep herself attached to the room.

His fingers found her.

Two fingers. Slow circles matching the rhythm of his shallow strokes, the double sensation layering into something her body had no existing framework for. She felt it building from somewhere she’d never accessed. Something geological. Something that had been forming under pressure for longer than tonight.

The words came out quietly. She never spoke during sex. Had never been somewhere she needed to name.

“I’m coming, Jacob.”

“Me too.”

“Come inside.”

“Erica—”

She found his eyes through the blur of it. Held them with what she had left.

“Cum. Inside.”

He didn’t argue again.

His pace shifted — deeper, more urgent, the shallow strokes giving way to something that made her stop trying to keep her voice down because she couldn’t and didn’t want to and the walls could do whatever they wanted with the sound.

It arrived like weather.

Like something that had been offshore for a long time finally making landfall. Her back arched until it hurt and she let it hurt and her toes cramped from curling too hard against the tile and she felt herself convulse around him in waves she couldn’t control or count and then — the heat.

Not the surface warmth of before. Not the few drunken seconds from ten months ago that she’d filed away as anomaly. This was fire. Pressure and heat moving through her core in a way that didn’t stop, that kept arriving, that she felt in places she hadn’t known were waiting.

Him.

Jacob cradled her against him, pushed his tongue into her mouth, rocked his hips through the end of it — and she squeezed each time, deliberately, to pull more of him into her, to feel more of it, to keep the heat coming as long as it would.

Two minutes.

She counted those too.

Then he stilled. Then he pulled back slowly. And what he’d left inside followed — spilling from her in thick warmth against the tile and she registered this from a very far distance because her body was not responding to anything as mundane as gravity.

She was on the bathroom floor.

She was on the bathroom floor and the tiles were cool against her back and Jacob was breathing above her like a man who’d run somewhere and arrived and the light was dim and her robe was in a pile somewhere and she had been awake since before five and had taken a bath and gone to bed and gotten up again and none of that mattered even slightly.

She stared at the ceiling.

Felt her heartbeat in places she didn’t know had heartbeats.

“Jacob,” she said finally. Her voice came out like something found at the bottom of a drawer.

“Yeah.” His wasn’t much better.

“We have to talk about the 2AM thing.”

A long pause.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“And the five AM thing.”

“I know.”

“And the—”

“Erica.” His hand found hers on the tile. Covered it. “I know.” A breath. “I’ve been selfish.”

She looked at the ceiling.

“You have,” she said. No meanness in it. Just — true.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know you are.”

His thumb moved across her knuckles. Back and forth.

“Destiny’s in the guest room,” he said.

“Mm.”

“That was—” he stopped. Started again. “That was the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m serious, Erica.”

“I know you are. That’s what’s making it weird.” But her fingers turned in his hand and held on. “Go check on her.”

“In a minute.”

“Jacob.”

“In a minute.” His head dropped back against the cabinet. “Let me just — be here for a minute.”

She looked at the ceiling.

Outside the guest room down the hall Destiny was presumably asleep, which she’d earned, and the apartment was quiet in a way it hadn’t been all night, and the bathroom floor was cool and hard and neither of them moved toward getting up.

“The 2AM thing has to stop,” she said.

“It’ll stop.”

“For real.”

“For real.” He squeezed her hand. “We’ll figure it out.”

She breathed in. Out. Felt the last of the tension leave her body like water draining.

“We’ll figure it out,” she agreed.

She closed her eyes.

For the first time in three months she felt like she was lying next to the right person in the right amount of quiet.

The floor was uncomfortable.

Neither of them moved.