Sophie turns to me, slipping her hands into mine and kissing along my collarbone, along my neck and chin. “You said I couldn’t come yet,” she says.

Instead of letting me answer, she covers my mouth with hers. The windows along two walls are uncovered and the light from the hallway behind us creates a perfect silhouette to anyone looking in.

“Someone might see,” I whisper but I don’t stop kissing her back. Not when Sophie is like this, hungry and brazen.

“Let them,” she says. Standing in front of me so I’m blocked from view, she slides her hand up the inside of my denim-clad thigh.

“What are you doing?”

“You said I couldn’t come yet. You didn’t say anything about you.”

I moan against her mouth at the pressure of her fingers through my clothes. I’m so revved up from sitting beside her in that club, from kissing her on the stairs, from watching her display of competency porn in action. There’s so much I want to do to her, do with her, and not all of it involves my mouth between her legs. But between the stress of the show and stress of our looming debts, it never feels like there’s enough time. The end of Amy & May’s feels like it will mean the end of all this, too.

“The tour isn’t over yet,” I say.

“There’s nothing else to see. My apartment is small.”

“Bathroom? Laundry?” I ask. “A den?”

She pulls her fingers away but it’s the loss of her mouth that pulls me forward for one more kiss, two.

“Yes, yes. I have all those.” She wipes at her mouth where the last of my lipstick has smudged along her chin. “This way.”

I follow her down a short hallway, past a bathroom with a stacked washer and dryer set to a small office without a door. While her bra was simple cotton, her panties are black lace, the kind of cut they call “cheeky.” The curves of plump, muscular ass flex as she strides into the small room ahead of me. The back panels of the underwear are held together with satin ribbon, crisscrossed into a small bow at the top of her ass. I want to pull the knot apart with my teeth.

“Were those comfortable to wear in those pants?”

She doesn’t respond, just holds her hand out in a Vanna White pose. “The den.”

She makes no move to turn on the lights so the small desk and chair are bathed in silvery moonlight. There’s a bookshelf along one wall, filled with more cookbooks, memoirs and biographies of famous chefs, a novel about a chef of the Roman Empire, and different variations of How to Ferment for Dummies. On another wall is a bulletin board and it’s covered in little Sophie-isms: a cocktail napkin from a restaurant in Quebec, photos of family, and friends I’ve never met, and her with the kitten version of Fifi in her lap, and one of the full cast of Pop-Up Kitchen. I recognize the set from the night of the finale—I’ve watched the episode enough times that her hair, her clothes are imprinted on my brain. The entire cast had been flown back in for the finale and Sophie stands next to the winner and celebrity judge, wearing the kind of smile you wear when you’re trying to pretend you’re happy. Everyone else in the photo looks at the camera, except for Paul. He stands at the edge of the frame with a few other people I never saw on-screen. He looks at the group; he looks at Sophie.