**LILITH’S POV**
The sales job was a convenient lie.
It wasn’t completely false — I did move product, I did travel, and the money was good — but the product wasn’t anything you’d find in a normal catalog, and the clients weren’t the kind of people who scheduled polite Zoom calls.
I had built a careful version of myself for the outside world: competent, charming, always just vague enough that no one asked too many follow-up questions.
Alex had accepted the “sales industry” answer without pushing.
That was one of the things I liked about him.
He didn’t dig unless I left the door open.
I sat in the back of a quiet café three districts away from our apartment, laptop open, scrolling through encrypted messages while my coffee went cold.
Another overnight trip was coming up at the end of the week.
The kind that required a different name, a different phone, and a version of me that smiled easier and asked fewer personal questions.
I had been doing this long enough that the switch felt almost automatic.
What didn’t feel automatic anymore was going home.
Home used to be just a place to sleep between jobs.
Then the quiet engineer with the strict-family eyes moved in, and somehow the apartment started feeling like something I returned to instead of something I escaped from.
The roommates-with-benefits pact was supposed to keep things clean.
Physical only.
No strings.
Other partners allowed.
The pact ended only if one of us fell into something real.
I had proposed it.
I was already starting to hate how carefully I had worded it.
My phone buzzed.
A message from a number I hadn’t saved under a real name.
**Julie:** *You free later this week?
Need to talk about the delivery schedule.
Also… your roommate called in sick yesterday.
Everything okay over there?*
I stared at the screen longer than I should have.
Julie.
Alex’s cheerful, slightly chaotic colleague from the office.
The same Julie who had called him yesterday morning while I was still riding him and trying to make him break character on the phone.
The same Julie who had no idea that the “roommate” who supposedly got him medicine was currently sitting in a café reading her message with a completely different face on.
I had known who she was for months.
Not because I was stalking Alex’s life.
Because our circles overlapped in ways he didn’t know about yet.
Julie handled certain logistics for people who preferred to stay off official channels.
She was good at looking like an ordinary office girl who forgot deadlines and needed favors.
She was also good at keeping her mouth shut when it mattered.
We had crossed paths professionally long before Alex ever introduced her name into our apartment.
I had never told him.
At first it was simple caution.
The less the two parts of my life touched, the safer everyone stayed.
Then the physical thing with Alex started, and telling him suddenly felt more complicated.
How do you casually mention that the girl who calls him about work reports is someone you’ve shared encrypted files and quiet late-night conversations with?
How do you explain that without opening doors you carefully kept locked?
I typed a short reply.
**Me:** *Everything’s fine.
He’s just under the weather.
We can meet Thursday.
Same place.*
Outside the café window the city moved the way it always did — indifferent, noisy, full of people who only ever saw the version of me I chose to show.
I finished the cold coffee, paid, and started the long way back toward the apartment.
Toward the engineer who still looked at me like he was trying to solve a problem he didn’t have all the variables for.
The pact said we could keep other partners.
The pact said no strings.
The pact said this stayed physical until one of us found something real.
I walked home with the taste of the lie still in my mouth and the quiet, stubborn knowledge that I had already started breaking the spirit of the agreement long before either of us admitted it.
Alex didn’t know about Julie.
He didn’t know about the real work.
He didn’t know that the woman who left him notes with little hearts and let him record her for a private collection was still running an entirely different life in the hours he thought she was just “traveling for sales.”
I told myself I would come clean eventually.
When it was safe.
When the physical thing had cooled enough that the truth wouldn’t land like a bomb.
The problem was that it wasn’t cooling.
If anything, every night we spent tangled together made the careful walls feel thinner.
I unlocked the apartment door, stepped inside, and breathed in the faint leftover scent of him.
The place already felt more like home than any of the temporary rooms I used for work.
That realization should have scared me more than it did.
I set my bag down, kicked off my shoes, and went to change into something comfortable — something that would make Alex’s eyes darken the moment he walked through the door after work.
Roommates with benefits.
No strings.
Physical only.
I was very good at lying to other people.
I was getting worse at lying to myself.
**ALEX’S POV**
The conference room was too bright, the air-conditioning too cold, and the slide deck on the screen in front of me was somehow both extremely important and completely meaningless.
“—so if we adjust the load-balancing parameters here,” I said, clicking to the next slide, “we can reduce latency by roughly eighteen percent without increasing server costs.”
Twelve faces nodded.
Someone took a note.
Julie, sitting two seats down, gave me a small thumbs-up like I had just solved world hunger.
I kept my voice steady and professional.
My brain, unfortunately, was not cooperating.
*Who’s your Daddy, whore?*
The memory hit without warning — Lilith’s back arched, voice wrecked, nails in my shoulders while I said those exact words into her ear last night.
I blinked hard and forced the next sentence out.
“As you can see from the quarterly metrics, the prototype performed within expected parameters under stress testing.”
Another slide.
More nodding.
My collar suddenly felt too tight.
I had spent most of my adult life being the quiet, reliable engineer who never raised his voice in meetings and definitely never called anyone a whore while recording them for a private folder.
That version of me still existed.
He was the one currently pointing at a bar graph.
The problem was that another version — the one who told Lilith to shake her ass for the camera and called her his toy — kept trying to take the microphone.
I cleared my throat and continued.
“Questions so far?”
A senior manager asked something about scalability.
I answered on autopilot, drawing on the same clean technical language I had used for years.
Inside, a different monologue was running:
*You’re standing in a glass conference room talking about server architecture while last night you had your roommate on all fours telling her she was only allowed to come when Daddy said so.*
I almost laughed.
It came out as a polite cough instead.
Julie tilted her head. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
“You okay?
Still feeling under the weather?”
“Fine,” I said quickly.
“Just a lingering headache.”
Lingering something, anyway.
The presentation crawled forward.
Every time I clicked a new slide, another flash of the previous night tried to surface — Lilith making peace signs for the camera, moaning that she was my whore, the way she clenched around me when I told her the videos were only for my private collection.
I kept my expression neutral and my voice even, but the effort was starting to feel physical.
My ears were warm.
I could feel a ridiculous, traitorous heat crawling up the back of my neck.
*Get it together, Summers.
You are an engineer.
You design systems.
You do not get hard in budget meetings because your brain decided to replay “wave that ass for the camera.”*
I finished the final slide, summarized the recommendations, and opened the floor for discussion.
Twenty more minutes of technical back-and-forth.
I handled every question cleanly.
No one seemed to notice that part of my mind was still in a dark bedroom listening to Lilith sob “Only yours, Daddy” while she came.
When the meeting finally ended I stayed seated for an extra thirty seconds, gathering my laptop with exaggerated care so I wouldn’t have to stand up immediately.
Julie lingered.
“Nice job today.
You sure you’re okay?
You’ve been a little… spaced out.”
“Just tired,” I said.
“I’ll catch up on sleep this weekend.”
She accepted the answer and left.
I waited until the room was empty, then walked straight to the nearest restroom, locked myself in a stall, and stared at the opposite wall.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I muttered under my breath.
No answer, obviously.
I leaned against the stall door and kept talking quietly to the version of myself that kept sabotaging ordinary workdays.
“You used to get flustered if someone mentioned underwear.
Now you’re out here calling your roommate a whore on camera and then acting surprised when your brain decides to replay it during a latency presentation.
This is your fault.
You and your sudden ‘Daddy’ phase.
One month of careful roommate distance and you fold the second she walks into the kitchen naked.
Excellent impulse control.
Really textbook.”
I rubbed both hands over my face.
The worst part wasn’t even the dirty talk.
It was how natural it had started to feel.
How easily the strict, polite engineer had made room for the man who told Lilith exactly what to do and then recorded her doing it.
The two versions were supposed to stay separate.
Instead they were starting to bleed into each other, and I could feel the change happening in real time without fully knowing how to stop it.
Same way Lilith was changing, probably.
Neither of us was admitting it out loud yet.
I flushed the toilet for cover, washed my hands longer than necessary, and looked at myself in the mirror.
Same face.
Same shirt.
Same ordinary engineer who had just delivered a clean presentation.
Only the eyes looked a little more tired, and a little more aware that the careful “roommates with benefits, no strings” arrangement was already harder to believe than either of us wanted to admit.
I straightened my collar, checked that nothing was visibly wrong, and walked back out into the office like a man who had everything under control.
My lust-brained counterpart, still lingering somewhere behind my ribs, remained unconvinced.