The knock at the apartment door startled Kerry out of a reverie. A slant of sunlight in the kitchen had made her daydream herself back to her cabin off the Point, and she needed a moment to collect. Almost ten now. Celia had been gone when she woke up. Three days on, it was starting to seem to Kerry like the girl might be her roommate only in a theoretical sense: she never did more than settle briefly, like a bird on a perch, before flitting off to whatever inscrutable next thing she had going. This morning she’d left Kerry a note, waiting for her on the kitchen table in a loopy teenager’s hand: a reminder the internet guy was coming.

Kerry scowled at the thought. Why on earth she had to have an in-person tech visit to do, what, register an account, configure some router something, whatever?—Celia had been vague on it and Kerry hadn’t pressed. She didn’t want to seem annoyed. And plus, the internet was already perfectly usable! Still, free was a powerful inducement in Kerry’s current economic climate of having abruptly quit her entire life, she could put up with a little useless bureaucratic rigamarole if that’s what it took.

The knock sounded a second time, sharper now. Kerry was dressed, but she wasn’t visitor dressed. She grabbed one of Celia’s robes out of the bathroom and shrugged it over her as she headed to the door.

The man in the peephole looked completely what he was: polo shirt with some kind of company emblem on it, chinos, laptop bag slung around one shoulder with tools studding its various outer pockets. He was even carrying a clipboard. Kerry suppressed her automatic feeling that she should make him identify himself before opening the door; she would have felt ridiculous.

He came in staring down at his work order. He was the model of a nondescript middle-aged tech functionary, light paunch, balding on top and obviously shy. Dude probably had a dozen of these to endure in a day, Kerry thought. He offered her his hand, and just the briefest flicker of eye contact along with it. “So you’d be, uh, Kerry?” She nodded. “Welcome to the building,” he said, with an odd formality.

He glanced towards the hall off the living room. “And your room is…” “Down the hall to the left.” She gestured the direction. “Cool,” he said. He checked something on the clipboard. “Twenty minutes, give or take. In and out in no time.”

His manner seemed painfully constrained. Kerry wondered if she should offer him something, a cup of coffee maybe? Put him more at ease. Just then he pulled a pen from the front of his bag and looked back up at her. “OK, if you could just—“ and he gestured with the pen and pointed it between her eyes.

Kerry felt suddenly, hideously like she was encased in ice. Then there was a light. It was pretty, very very pretty, a rose light, and it was all around her, like a rain of light falling from a long long way away in the morning air.

Kerry folded up her panties and placed them next to her bra on top of her blouse and her shorts. The robe, also folded, was in its own spot on the couch beside them. Before she straightened back up she checked to make sure both the little piles were neat and square to each other. It was important to keep things tidy.

She heard clattery typing as she approached her bedroom, punctuated with occasional small electronic beeps. The hallway felt cooler than the rest of the apartment, and she chafed her arms together against the goosebumps. It was a little weird, standing naked in the hall outside her door with the tech guy at some inscrutable work within and just waiting there like that: still, procedure was procedure. It wouldn’t do to just barge in on him. At some point it occurred to Kerry she could kneel instead, and it was surprising how much warmer and more comfortable she felt when she did.

A sound that was unmistakably the man snapping his fingers brought her back to attention. I guess he wants me now, Kerry thought. It seemed way too much trouble to get all the way back up, just for the few steps separating them, so instead she fell onto her hands and came in on all fours. He didn’t look away from his screen. One hand was pointing down at a spot next to him, next to the desk chair. Kerry took the hint and crawled over and knelt there.

He glanced down at her sidelong and shook his head and clucked his tongue at her. “This way,” he said. He poked around for something on his phone and held the screen in front of her. There was a pic of a naked blonde girl, her head inclined, kneeling with her legs spread and her hands resting palm up on either side of her exposed, shaven pussy. Kerry had the weird thought the girl could have been Celia, though you couldn’t see her face. She mimicked the position and glanced up at the man for confirmation. “Wider,” he said, and she worked her knees further apart.

“That’s position one,” he told her, looking back at the screen. “Basic submission. You’ll learn others, but if somebody tells you just to kneel, this is the pose you use.” He did a bit more typing, and Kerry relaxed into Submission. She was surprised at how right the pose felt, how natural, even more than when she was kneeling just now out in the hall. She wasn’t even all that self-conscious about how much she was on display.

He seemed to get to a stopping point, and turned back to her. “Position two is submissive attention. Same exact thing as one except you interlace your fingers and put your hands behind your head. If you’re kneeling and you hear ‘attend’ or ‘attention’ that’s what that means, position two. Go on try it. Attend.” She attended. “Elbows wider,” he said. “Relax the shoulders. Good. Head straight but keep your eyes down. This is a good position for when you’re being questioned.”

It was, too. He had a checklist of things he wanted her to confirm, IDs, passwords, social handles, stuff about her medical and sexual history. He put his questions in kind of a quizzing tone, and Kerry had the feeling he already knew all the answers, even the ones he couldn’t possibly have known. It didn’t bother her though. Even him asking about very private things, it’s not like she wasn’t going to tell him the truth. She wouldn’t have been able to. It was cool, actually, you could feel how just being in the pose made it impossible for you to want to hold anything back.

She was so wrapped up in Attending that she almost didn’t register it when he packed up his gear and left the room. Without a word. Is that it? she thought. Was that really all he needed from her? She hadn’t heard him leave the apartment, and when she finally crawled back out to the living room there he was standing at the door, just sort of idling, looking if anything a little lost.

Shit, Kerry thought. Money. Celia’s note hadn’t mentioned that. She went over to the door and knelt facing him—position one, Submission, she reminded herself—and he passed down the clipboard to her and a pen and told her she needed to sign at the bottom of the sheet. She looked up as she handed it back and asked, haltingly, “Is there any, um—do I need to pay…”

He cut her off. “Nope. Free gratis.” He looked away from her, taking refuge in his clipboard again, and made a brief throat-clearing noise. “It is, it’s kind of—totally optional, you know, but people do sometimes, maybe just a small tip …” He trailed off.

All the cash Kerry had on hand was a twenty, and she wasn’t eager to part with it. Chagrined, she racked her brains. It took a minute to realize that inspiration was literally in front of her face. It made her feel very naughty and very daring. Looking up at him, consciously going kind of doe-eyed, she said, “Maybe—I don’t know, could I—maybe a blowjob would be a good thank-you?” Her heart was pounding. She tried to make herself sound as innocent as she possibly could, afraid she might scare the poor guy off. Or scare herself off, for that matter.

It turned out he didn’t really want his pants pulled down, so she had some work extracting his stiffening cock from his shorts and giving it room. It was bigger than she expected, and thick, and Kerry always had a little anxiety about giving head but his thing felt really good in her mouth. It went in easy and it was easy to open up to and she got kind of excited about the whole deal. He pulled out before he shot his load, and there was a lot of it, some going on her face but most of it on her tits, and after he zipped up and left she stayed kneeling for a while, in a kind of daze, playing with her fingers in the spooge and letting it spread itself as it would, over and over her tits and her belly and down onto her thighs.

When Celia came in and saw Kerry she guffawed. It might have been, two hours since the internet guy left? The day had got away from her. She ought to have showered by now, Kerry thought, put some clothes on, but this whole time she’d just been zoning out there on the couch. Her body felt like a lead weight. Everything around her seemed enclosed in this gray fog.

She’d done great, handling the tech visit. She couldn’t figure why she felt so depressed.

“So I guess you met Captain Internet?” Kerry laughed in spite of herself. “I can never remember the guy’s name,” Celia said, walking past. Her voice carried in from the kitchen. “I swear I actually called him that to his face last time! Didn’t seem to notice it though.”

She came back in toting a water. “He’s a dweeb.” Celia took a swig and then pressed the bottle into Kerry’s hand. She reached down to pull her heels off. “Glad that’s out of the way though.” After the heels she pulled off her short, tight skirt, then the blouse went over her head and onto the floor. Kerry was a little surprised to see she’d gone out not wearing any underwear.

The blonde jokily pushed her breasts forward and flounced her hips at Kerry. “Now we won’t have to wear all these clothes at home!”

Celia patted Kerry on the rump to get her to scooch, then climbed over and slid up till she’d fit herself into the crevice between Kerry and the back of the couch. When she brought her face level with Kerry’s she crinkled her nose up and waved her hand theatrically underneath it. She winked. “Don’t have to ask how you gave the Captain his tip.”

Kerry blushed and looked away from her. “Hey, no, what do you think I do?” Celia laughed. “I mean who has cash just lying around?” She snuggled in and rested her head against Kerry’s shoulder. “Besides, that dweeb? What do you think it’s worth, a guy like that, getting a blowjob from a legit hot girl? Way better than some rando just handing you a ten-spot.”

Celia started stroking her fingers idly over the dried cum on Kerry’s belly. She was making small almost purring noises into her roommate’s chest. In the warmth and pressure of the girl’s body, the two of them breathing there together, Kerry felt herself drifting back to herself across whatever distance she’d been exiled to.

The blonde shifted down a bit and raised her head. She licked at the bottom of Kerry’s rib cage and up into the hollow between her breasts. It was where most of Captain Internet’s cum had landed. She licked there several times more, heavily, languidly, her eyes closed. She looked up and met Kerry’s eyes. “I’m glad you didn’t wash him off yet,” she said. Her voice was throaty and low. “I like the way it tastes.”

Celia smiled and her face went soft and she went back to her licking. Kerry settled her head down lower in the pillow and let herself be lulled under the girl’s tongue. Celia was purring again, a soft intermittent hum, and the last thing before sleep took her Kerry heard her own voice, her own purr, answering.