“I mean I’m going to put in a request to be the first person to have sex with you, when you get out. You know. Ask them to go easy on the exit session. They’ll do that, if you want them to.”

Your throat was dry. “Yeah, sure. Sure.”

“Okay,” Jill said. “Shall we make a date, for when you get out?”

“Okay,” you whispered.

You were so tired at work that last week, you could barely keep it together. You got back from the warehouse inspection and slumped into your cube and just stared at the computer for a while. You could feel every inch of your skin. You felt the seams of your jeans, running down the outside and up the inside of your thighs. The seams of your shirt, stroking your sides. If you closed your eyes, your watchband felt like a woman’s thumb and fingers locked around around your wrist, pulling you downward. You could feel your toes nudging into your socks, parting the folds of cotton, pushing them back against the hard walls of leather. Somehow you’d lost weight over the past couple of weeks; your potbelly had vanished. You could feel all your muscles—biceps and quads and abs—dwelling inside your clothes; like animals waiting, breathing, ready to go.

Friday, you were so zoned out, you were late to the cafeteria for lunch. As you passed the secretaries’ table there was a sudden pause in their conversation, and then a burst of laughter. You turned around, and they hushed up again. A couple of them darted you glances and looked away; the old biddy glowered disapprovingly into her soup. Rhonda from HR, though, looked up and right into your eyes, with a steady look just this side of a smile, and you felt blood shooting through your body, up through your face, up to the roots of your hair.

You made it to your table somehow. The guys weren’t talking much; Harry was still on vacation and Bharat and Alex were in a shared sour mood due to recent fuckups by their boss. You looked back: Rhonda was eating. But it was like she could feel you looking at the back of her head, because she turned to you. She was eating a shrimp and it was hanging out of the side of her mouth, and she sucked it in like a satisfied cat.

And this was bullshit. Shouldn’t you be going over to them, talking it up? “Oh, so you’re subscribers, eh, ladies? Oh, no, I sure can’t tell you what goes on in there…no, I reckon you’d have to experience the difference…”

You applied yourself to the meat loaf.