“Is there some kind of simp music site you get recommendations from?”

He laughs. “It’s my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist,” he says. “Normally it’s pretty good.”

“Algorithms are demonic,” I say. I really do feel this way. They take the art out of everything. I hate that I participate in Instagram culture. I hate that I’m not in the same room as Beau anymore. I hate that I have stooped so low as to go back to Thomas, the biggest embarrassment of my past five years.

Thomas keeps talking about the playlists, defending algorithms like a freak.

I inhale the smoke deeper into my lungs and wait for my ire to fade.

Soon enough, Thomas’s monologue becomes funny to me. Something about his cadence. His cuck cadence. Cuck cadence. I giggle to myself.

“Did I miss the joke?” he asks.

“You always miss the joke,” I say.

And then I push his head down.

That night in bed, I am staring at the plastic stars on my ceiling and thinking about how sad it is that I am nearly thirty and have plastic stars on my ceiling. I look at my clean duvet cover sitting on the floor, doused in artificial light from the streetlamp outside my window, and think about how hard it will be to put it back on and how I will put it off for days, and it will be dusty by the time I do it, defeating the whole purpose of cleaning it. I think about letting Thomas go down on me, my robotic orgasm, and how both of us are losers with no dignity whatsoever. I look at Lydia, angelically perched on the windowsill, and think that she doesn’t deserve to be trapped in this hellhole with me. I’ve made all the wrong decisions. I should have gone to college. I could have gotten a scholarship to USC—I always scored off the charts—and wooed the son of a director or the next Tim Burton. I would be making auteur cinema now instead of being trapped in this dead-end life. I think about Riverside, its dry monochrome expanse, and I jump out of my bed. I almost tip over my Gatorade but catch it before it spills blue all over my clean laundry on the floor.

I put on my burgundy tracksuit and grab my wallet and phone and head to Mirror Box. I rarely go at nighttime, but I need to do something. I need to talk to someone who isn’t Thomas.

Unfortunately, Cinnamon is the first face I see when I enter. She is wearing a baby-pink negligée and her hair is in pigtails.

“Long time no see, babydoll,” she says. I guess it has been a while since I’ve been here. I’ve been so busy looking for Beau.