There's a single-occupancy bathroom at the end of the east corridor — the one with the accessibility sign and the slightly sticky lock that everyone knows about and nobody has ever put in a maintenance request for. I've used it before when the men's is occupied. Today I go there first, directly.

I push the button to lock the door and it clicks.

The anatomy makes the mechanics different in ways I'm still working out. The approach, the position, the wiping — this morning was a long private education and I'm applying what I learned, or trying to. I'm mid-process, focused, when the door opens.

Seo-yeon.

She has her phone in one hand and the expression of someone who has come here to be alone for five minutes and found the room occupied in a way she did not expect. The expression lasts a fraction of a second. In that fraction several things move across her face — the first response, whatever it was, then something settling, then a kind of focused stillness that I recognize as her arriving at a decision.

She looks at what I'm doing with the toilet paper. A fraction of a second — she takes it in, decides.

"Other direction."

Then she steps back and closes the door.

I sit there.

Long enough for the heat in my face to recede slightly. Long enough to process the sequence: door open, Seo-yeon, the fraction of a second, the two words, door closed. She saw enough. She said the useful thing and nothing else, and she left.

I finish, wash my hands, look at myself in the small mirror above the sink. My face looks back — unchanged, unhelpful.

I stand there a moment longer than necessary. The encounter keeps replaying: the door, the fraction of a second, her voice saying those two words in that register.

There's also a warmth spreading through me now that has nothing to do with embarrassment. Heat low in my abdomen, a slickness between my thighs that wasn't there five minutes ago. And my chest aches — has ached all day, I realize, the tissue tender against the wool in a way I'd been managing to not notice until I stopped moving. I straighten my jeans and go out.

She's not in the corridor.

Back at the lab she's at her desk, head down, pen moving. She doesn't look up when I come in. I sit down and open the data and we work. The afternoon proceeds. At some point she asks about the confidence interval on ARIA's projection and I tell her I've already set up the full dataset run and she nods and says good. Her voice is exactly as it always is.

I keep looking at the data.

I've been thinking — still thinking, in the background, through the pathway logs and the calibration check and the procurement email — about what her face did in that fraction of a second. The first response, the one she didn't use. I don't know what it was exactly: surprise, probably, and possibly something else, and then the decision to put it all away and leave me with only the practical information. The practical information was useful. I needed it and she gave it and then she removed herself, which was also the right thing.

I want to thank her. I also want to never mention it. These two things are both true and the second one is going to win.

When she said other direction she said it the way you say something to a person you're concerned about. The tone was warmer and more careful than the correction of a stranger's mistake, and I found, in the moment, that I wanted to be spoken to in exactly that register. I'm still not examining why.

At five-thirty I close the logs. Seo-yeon is still at her desk. I say goodnight and she says goodnight and neither of us says anything else.

♦  ♦  ♦

Home by six-thirty. The apartment is exactly as I left it. I drop my bag and stand in the middle of the living room for a moment, not doing anything.

The day has been a lot.

Toast, because toast is the simplest available thing. I stand at the kitchen counter and eat it and look at the wall — the biometric reader, the hallway, Seo-yeon's face in the bathroom doorway. The heat afterward that I still haven't fully accounted for. The afternoon at my desk aware of the seat, the jeans, the ache in my chest.

I put the plate in the sink and go to the bathroom.

There's a smell I've been half-aware of since mid-afternoon. Not unpleasant, just unfamiliar — organic, warm, coming from me. From the warmth between my legs that has been present and absent and present again throughout the day, leaving evidence in my underwear each time. I want to wash it off. I want to feel like myself again, or a version of myself that isn't tracking its own body temperature every forty minutes. I turn the shower on.

I've turned it down without deciding to — the skin calibrating to heat differently now. The water hits my shoulders and runs down and this is immediately not the simple act of washing I came in here for. The chest, first — the tissue tender, the water against it a continuous low-level signal I have to consciously ignore. I soap my arms and stomach, trying to be efficient. The inner thighs report the contact with more detail than I want right now. I keep going. Between my legs the soap and the water and my own hand produce a sharp upward pull and I stop moving for a moment and breathe.

I keep going. Efficient, or trying to be efficient, which is not the same thing.

The smell of the shower is different — steam and soap and underneath it something warmer, something the water is lifting from my skin rather than washing away. I reach up to adjust the showerhead and the movement pulls across my chest and I make a small involuntary sound.

I fight it for a while. I don't win.

My hand moves before I've decided it should — down my stomach, through wet curls, the angle different, the pressure different, everything different, and I brace the other hand against the tile and my knees go slightly loose and it doesn't take long, the buildup faster than I remember, the crest closer. A shudder runs through me. I stand there afterward, hand still pressed to myself, water running over my fingers.

I soap everything again. The lather between my thighs is almost too much, the skin reporting every pass of my fingers with exaggerated clarity. I turn the water cooler. I stand in it until my knees decide to be reliable again.

The towel is worse — terrycloth dragging across the chest, a friction that makes me wince. I end up patting dry instead of rubbing, careful around the places I'm still learning. I wrap the towel around my waist and look at myself in the mirror. Flushed. My face doing something I recognize.

I have laundry to do.

I pull on a t-shirt — the fabric moving across still-sensitive skin, nipples reporting it immediately — and sweatpants, gather the bag from the bedroom, and take it down to the basement.

The laundry room is empty when I get there. I start the machine and stand against the far wall with my phone.

The door opens at the seven-minute mark. The woman from the third floor, with her bag, and behind her a man I haven't seen before — taller than me, a kind of easy proprietary energy, someone who has come along because that's where she's going. I step back to let them get to the machines and hoist myself up onto the top of the dryer to be out of their way.

The dryer is warm from a previous cycle. The machine starts up and the vibration comes through the metal and I realize, about thirty seconds in, that this was not the best place to sit. The warmth, the low steady hum of it — present, impossible to tune out given everything that's already been happening in my body today. I shift. That doesn't help.

The cold air from the corridor is still dissipating and my nipples, already pressed against the thin t-shirt, respond to the temperature change. I'm aware of this the way you're aware of something you can do absolutely nothing about.

The woman glances over. Friendly, neutral. The man clocks me with a brief assessing look and turns back to her.

I look at my phone. The dryer hums. The warmth radiates up through the machine's top and I am acutely aware of exactly how thin the sweatpants are, and of the fact that I am wet from the shower and possibly from other things, and of the smell — faint, warm, recognizably mine — rising in the heat of the room. I breathe through my nose and look very intently at my phone.

"Cold out tonight," she says.

"Yeah." I glance up, smile, look back.

She starts her machine. He leans against the counter. I sit on the dryer and wait for my cycle to end and think about literally anything else, which works moderately well until the machine starts its spin cycle and then doesn't work at all. The man says something to the woman and she laughs. I stare at an article I have not read a single word of.

I pull my laundry out the second the cycle ends, bag stuffed rather than folded, and take the stairs back up.

In bed I look at the ceiling. The apartment quiet around me. I try to order the day into something coherent — the reader, the hallway, the bathroom, Seo-yeon saying two words in a particular voice, the dryer — and the attempt at coherence falls apart about halfway through. The parts don't add up to any shape I recognize.

The Premium Patreon version of this post includes images of Caleb in the bathroom at work discovered by Seo-yeon, showering and in the laundry room at the apartment complex. Additional chapters are published weeks ahead on Patreon, along with exclusive content.