The orgasm built fast and gracelessly. No slow build of pleasure—just a brutal coil of heat pulling tighter in my belly, hips grinding in small, desperate circles, water hitting my clit in relentless pulses while my fingers worked the spot he’d never cared enough to find.
“Fuck—Peter—”
His name tasted like a bad habit on my tongue.
My back came off the wall, thighs locking around my own hand, a ragged sound tearing out of me as my body gripped and pulsed and finally, finally gave me what the last hour had been promising and withheld. I held the shower head against myself through the aftershocks, riding each one until they thinned into nothing.
I turned the water off.
Stood there breathing. Steam rising, the last of him disappearing down the drain in pale, dissipating streams.
Better, I thought.
Not what I wanted, but better than nothing.
I toweled off and stepped back into the bedroom, still smelling faintly of sex. My phone sat on the counter, screen lit with a notification.
Peter.
I stood over it without touching it. The message would be the same—the lunch plans, the casual check-in, the performative sweetness he deployed when he sensed, on some level, that he’d taken from me without giving anything in return.
Part of me wanted to throw the phone across the room.
Part of me hoped he was canceling tonight so I could be abandoned rather than voluntarily used. That was easier. Abandonment had clear edges. What we were doing had none.
But the part I hated most—the part that had survived every version of this, every man who had treated my patience like a renewable resource—that part was quietly, pathetically hoping he was asking me to come home early, offering to make it up to me, as if the phrasemake it up to youhad ever once passed his lips. I wouldn’t let him try, anyway.
I left the phone where it was.
Let him wait, I thought. For once, let him be the one waiting.
I knew I’d answer before I finished getting dressed.
But for right now, in this small moment—I let myself pretend otherwise.
* * *
It was still raining by the time I made it out of the downtown loft Peter and I leased.
Not a gentle mist, but a relentless downpour that saturates everything—fabric, spirit. The kind that bleached color from the cityscape and shrinks pedestrians into themselves. Growing up in Seattle had inoculated me against finding any romance in weather like this.
Six years ago, I’d fled across the country for my position at Bay City Aquarium, my second “adult” job and the first I’d truly fallen for, despite days like today when even breathingseemed like drowning.
I pulled my jacket tighter around myself and jogged across the lot toward the parking garage, my flats slapping against the wet concrete. My hair was already damp, strands clinging to my cheeks. Perfect. Exactly how I wanted to start the day: frizzy, sexually frustrated, and drenched like a wet cat. And… late. Again.
I pulled my keys from my bag, pressed the unlock button, and the familiar chirp of the car echoed softly through the empty garage.
I slid into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut behind me, sealing myself into the stale, familiar quiet. For a moment I just sat there, hands loose on the steering wheel, going nowhere.
I should have left earlier.
But that would have required motivation, energy, the will to participate in my own life.
Instead, I’d laid in bed too long, staring at the ceiling while the rain tapped against the window, pretending I had nowhere to be, pretending I wasn’t already dreading him.
I started the engine and pulled out into the gray morning, merging into the slow crawl of traffic. Brake lights bled red across the wet pavement ahead of me, bleeding into the puddles.
Callan was going to be insufferable today.