She looked at my knives.
Tuesday, after dinner. The apartment had the warm post-dinner light of a kitchen lamp left on at seven-thirty, the kitchen still smelling like the lemon she'd put on the chicken. She'd been on the couch, and then she was on her feet in the kitchen, the gray t-shirt of mine she was wearing tonight long enough to cover the basics and not much else, the platinum hair loose down her back. She was looking at the knife block on my counter, a six-slot wooden block I'd bought at Target the second week I lived here, with five knives in it and an empty slot, the way she looked at things she'd already decided were wrong.
"Someone bought this set as a set," she said.
"Yeah."
"And then bought one knife separately." She slid the chef's knife on the far left out of the block, the only one with a darker handle, and turned it once in the light like she was greeting something she already knew. "This one. You dropped the original."
"I dropped the original. Replaced it."
"Mm. The weight's different, the bolster sits back further, and whoever sold you this one knew more than whoever sold you the set." She set it down against the block with a small, fond click. "It's the only honest knife you own. The other five are pretending."
I looked at my knives. I'd used them to cut things. I didn't have a counterargument.
"So I've got five liars and a chef's knife," I said.
"Now you're getting it." She went back to the couch, pleased with herself.
Two days later she looked at my floor lamp.
The lamp was a six-year-old IKEA piece in unpainted steel with a single goose-neck and a shade I'd bent at the joint somewhere along the way that I'd been compensating for by always pointing it the same direction. It sat in the corner by the couch. It threw a cone of warm yellow on the right end of the couch cushion and faded off into nothing by the coffee table.
"It's aimed at the seat," she said.
"That's what lamps do."
"It lights a point. Not a space. You've been living in a spotlight on an empty chair."
I looked at my apartment. The cone of light on the empty couch cushion. The rest of the living room, the framed print, the bookcase, the kitchen archway, in the dimmer ambient kitchen-lamp light. It looked the same as it had every evening I'd lived here, eight months.
"Should I get a different lamp?"
"Move this one to the bedroom. Get one for here that throws."
I was going to get a different lamp.
Thursday the delivery app said eleven to three. She answered the door.
"Have a nice day," the guy said.
"You too," she said.
The door closed. The words were right. The timing was right. Something was missing.
"The words were right," I said. "The timing was off. When somebody says *you too* they're already halfway down the hall in their head. You were all the way in it."
She didn't argue.
Two days later, second package. She said *you too* while doing three other things. The delivery guy wouldn't have caught it. I caught it. She knew I caught it.
Wednesday morning she woke me up with her hand around my cock, stroking me slow under the sheets, her mouth on my neck. She pushed me onto my back and climbed on top and took me inside her before I was fully awake. Rode me with her eyes closed and her hands on my chest, her pussy wet and tight. I came inside her while the alarm was still going off. She turned it off.
"Gym's cancelled," she said.
The gym was still there when I got home.
Saturday I took her to the Korean place.
The woman at the counter had my order started before I reached her: galbi combo, soup on the side, barley tea. Then she saw Amber. Two seconds. Back to my order. I'd have done the same.
We got a table. The two tables next to us lost their conversations briefly when she sat down, then recovered. She was actually reading the menu. Same focus she gave everything.
The food arrived. She ate more than she should have been able to. I let her finish my portion. The counter woman came by with the barley tea refill, took in the plates without comment.
"What does the routing optimization change in practice," Amber said.
I'd apparently mentioned my job at some point. "For the carriers it cuts deadhead mileage. The algorithm clusters pickups so drivers aren't doing extra loops."
"What's the variance on the window prediction."
Surface questions about logistics software don't make it to variance.
"About twelve percent on the longer hauls. Better in dense urban."
"And the error cases. When the optimization gets it wrong."
She was waiting for the answer the way she waited when she was checking my squat form. Direct. Patient. Nine hundred years, and she wanted to know about error cases in routing software. The question was real.
"Demand spikes, mostly. Rush orders that hit after the morning batch runs. The algorithm doesn't see them until the next cycle. By then the efficient route is gone."
"That's a timing problem."
"Yeah."
She ate the rest of my portion. I drank the barley tea.
Somewhere at the same table she said something meant to be helpful about my career.
Something about the industry and the trajectory and how the support role was a stage, not a destination. She wasn't wrong. She'd seen every pattern many times.
She also wasn't built for the scale of a Tuesday in Koreatown at twenty-three.
"Yeah, I know," I said.
She watched me, waiting to see if there was more.
"I'm fine," I said.
She let it sit, and we moved on.
Thursday Marcus texted to ask if I wanted to come out. I said yes and then I said I was bringing Amber, and he replied *finally,* which was not the word I would have chosen.
He had the table in the back when we got there, two beers on it. He stood up. He doesn't always do that. Every conversation in the bar briefly lost its thread when Amber walked in. Three tables. Four. Marcus felt all of it and held on to his end of the conversation with both hands.
The bartender hadn't lost the thread. She'd looked up when we came in. Not the door-check. Something more deliberate. Then back to what she was doing. Dark hair pulled back for work, both arms still sleeved in that dark dense ink, the black tank doing the same job it had done last time. The kind of face you clock in pieces. She stopped at our table to take Amber's order, looked at me briefly, direct, a question she wasn't asking, and moved off.
Her right eye had the amber fleck. Brown eyes with something else underneath at certain angles.
It cost Marcus visible effort.
"Owen has told me almost nothing about you," Amber said to him. That handed him the information edge, which relaxed him. She didn't let him have it for long. Within ten minutes she had his role, his firm, how long he'd been there. One follow-up per topic. Marcus told her things he hadn't planned to tell someone he'd just met.
He mentioned a deal he'd been working and she asked a question three levels into the mechanics of it. Marcus stopped.
"How do you know about that?" he said.
"Owen explains his job. Some of it's adjacent."
It was not adjacent. I said nothing.
My phone buzzed. *Follow me.*
Amber's chair was empty. I hadn't seen her get up. Marcus was mid-sentence about something.
"Sorry. Give me a minute."
Marcus looked at me.
Bar bathrooms are not built for this.
She was leaning against the sink when I came in. Door locked behind me. Her dress hiked up past her hips. No underwear. She hadn't been wearing any since we sat down for dinner. Her pussy was bare and wet, slick on her inner thighs.
This is a scene from a video I watched at nineteen. This doesn't happen.
That thought lasted about two seconds.
I dropped to my knees on the tile. Her hands went into my hair immediately. I put my mouth on her pussy: my tongue flat on her clit, circling, then two fingers pushing inside her. She was soaked. The wet sound of my fingers in her was loud in the small room. She gripped the edge of the sink with one hand and the back of my head with the other and her thighs tightened around me and she came on my face, her pussy clenching around my fingers, a sound that anyone in the corridor could've heard.
She didn't give me time to stand. She turned around and bent over the sink, hands flat on the counter, and looked at me in the mirror.
"Fuck me," she said.
I pushed into her from behind. Watched in the mirror: her tits swaying under her dress, her face, the expression on it losing every trace of the composure she'd worn at the table. I fucked her hard, watching my cock slide in and out of her pussy in the mirror, the slick of her, her ass pushing back to meet every thrust. She was loud. Somebody was going to hear through the door.
"Don't stop," she said. "Harder. I want everyone in this bar to hear me come."
Then I felt it: pushing deep, extra pressure, something inside her I didn't expect. She watched my face in the mirror when I registered it.
"I've been wearing a plug since this morning," she said. Flat. Like she was telling me the time.
My cock in her pussy and a buttplug in her ass, and she'd been sitting across from me talking to Marcus and ordering drinks with both of those things being true.
I came inside her. She stayed bent over the sink, breathing hard, my cum starting to drip down her inner thigh. She watched it in the mirror for a moment.
She pulled the dress down. Checked her reflection. She looked exactly like she had at the table, except my cum was running down the inside of her thigh under the dress and she was making no effort to clean it up.
"Go first. Two minutes."
I needed the two minutes.
Marcus was on his phone when I got back. He put it down.
"Your water's warm," he said.
"I know."
He looked at me. I drank the warm water.
She came back and picked up her conversation with Marcus exactly where she'd left it. We stayed another forty minutes. Marcus said he had to be up early. We split at the corner.
Midway up the block something shifted. Not external. Nothing moved. Just a brief sense that something was watching, in the direction of my building. I checked the street. Parked cars, a couple walking the other way, a convenience store doing its usual business.
It passed. I caught up to her.
I was half a block from my building when my phone buzzed.
*I've had the experience of losing a conversation thread before. Never with another person in the room. Never had to hold on like that. What is she?*
I read it twice. Amber was walking slightly ahead. She got the lock on the first try. It takes me two.
I typed: *She has that effect.* Sent it. Phone in my pocket.
Four flights. My door.
She dropped the form on the way through. Easier than holding it, she'd said once, and tonight wasn't a holding-it night. She sat down. Her tail wrapped around the couch cushion and she unmuted the show she'd been watching before we left.
Something on the television was not up to her standards. She was going to tell me about it whether I asked or not.
The lamp was still wrong. I was getting a new lamp.