"I don’t have to do anything."

"You do though. Liability. If I die on your watch your two girlfriends and your scary accountant will find out and they’ll bury you in a shallow grave, and honestly I’d help them." She let her head loll again, milked it. "Carry me, McKnight. Prove you’re a saint. Or don’t, and prove you’re exactly what I think you are."

The Cane’s sign glowed red up ahead. He pulled into the lot behind her building, killed the engine, and the quiet after it was loud.

He looked at her. Really looked, the way he’d looked at the blue-haired one in the parking lot, except this time it was aimed at Lila and she couldn’t breathe right and it had nothing to do with the corset.

"You want to be carried," he said. Flat. Not a question.

"I might fall."

"You won’t fall."

"I might."

He got out. Came around. Opened her door, and she’d expected a lot of things but she hadn’t expected him to just crouch, slide one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and lift her out of the seat like she weighed nothing, like the corset and the boots and the chains and the whole weaponized package of her was a bag of groceries.

"Oh," she said. It came out smaller than she wanted.

"Which apartment."

"2B. Up the stairs. Told you. Stairs."

He carried her toward the stairwell, and Lila had a full-scale internal riot happening, because his chest was solid against her side and he smelled like cedar and sweat and something underneath that she didn’t have a word for, and he was warm, he was so annoyingly warm, and this was the part. This was exactly the part. A guy carries you up the stairs at eleven at night, drunk, easy, and you feel his hand shift, feel it slide, feel the fingers wander toward the hem of the skirt or the underside of the thigh, feel the breath change, feel the want leak through the mask, and then you know.

His hand did not shift.

His hand held her behind the knees like she was cargo he’d been asked to deliver undamaged. He climbed the stairs one at a time, careful, checking his footing, and when she nuzzled her face into his neck and let out a small breathy sound that had ended relationships, he said, "Which key."

"Ngh," Lila said, which was not a word.

"Which key, Lila."

"Purple one. The keychain’s a little skull. It’s very me."

He got her door open with one hand while holding her with the other arm, which should not have been physically possible and which she filed away as more evidence of the impossible thing about him, and he carried her inside into the dark, and this was it, this was the room, this was where the mask came off if it was going to come off.

"Bedroom," she mumbled. "Back. Left. The one with the cat posters."

He carried her back. Nudged the door with his foot. Her room, her chaos, string lights and the RGB glow of her sleeping stream setup and the pile of clean laundry she hadn’t folded and the rubber duck collection lined up by size on the windowsill.

He set her down on the bed.

And Lila made her move, the move, the one that had never once failed to break a man, the drunk sleepy flop, going limp mid-lower onto the mattress so her back hit the sheets and her skirt hiked and her knees fell open, boots and fishnets and a corset and eighteen years of learning exactly how to look like an unconscious invitation, and she cracked one eye the tiniest sliver to watch.

Here it is, she thought, heart slamming against the corset boning. Here it comes. Show me who you really are, Jordan McKnight. Show me you’re just like the rest of them.

She held her breath.

Jordan yawned.

Not a fake yawn. A real one, jaw cracking, the yawn of a guy who’d done ninety minutes of boxing and gotten his ribs turned into a xylophone by a woman who could kill him and then sat through a two-hour dinner. He rubbed the back of his neck.

Then he clicked his tongue. Tsk.

"That’s twenty-five," he said.

Lila’s fake-sleeping eye opened all the way.

"What?"

"Twenty-five dollars." He wasn’t even looking at her legs. He was looking at his own arm, rotating his shoulder like she’d strained it. "Ten for the ride. Fifteen for the carry. You’re heavier than you look. It’s the boots, probably. And the chains. You’re basically hardware."

"Did you just—" She sat up, and the drunk act evaporated because she was too outraged to maintain it. "You’re charging me a carrying surcharge?"

"You said you might fall. Falls are liability. Liability’s extra." He said it completely straight. "Venmo or Cash App. Not both. Don’t split it weird."

She stared at him. He stared back, mild, exhausted, entirely uninterested in the fact that she was sprawled across her own bed in a state that had ended engagements, and something in Lila Martinez’s chest did a slow, sick, terrifying flip, because the experiment had a result now and the result was not the result she’d built her whole worldview around.

He wasn’t looking.

He genuinely wasn’t looking.

He’d carried her up a flight of stairs, set her on a bed, watched her lay herself out like the world’s most obvious trap, and his only reaction had been to yawn and invent a fee.

"You’re not—" She couldn’t finish it. She didn’t know how the sentence ended. You’re not going to touch me? You’re not going to try? You’re not the deviant I need you to be so my whole model of men stays intact?

"I’m not what," Jordan said.

"Nothing." She yanked her skirt down. Crossed her legs. The heat in her face had migrated from performance to something real and awful and she hated it. "Nothing. Get out."

"You want water first?"

"What?"

"You had three shots. You’re gonna wake up at four with a headache and hate everyone." He was already walking out of the bedroom, and she heard him in her tiny kitchen, heard the cabinet open on the second try after he found the right one, heard the tap run, heard the freezer, heard ice crack out of the tray she never refilled and clatter into a glass.

He came back. Set the glass on her nightstand, on top of the water ring from the last glass she’d never washed, next to the phone charger and the half-dead vape and the framed photo of her and her grandmother she kept face-down when guys were over and which was, right now, face-up, because she’d forgotten, because she’d never actually brought a guy this far to have to hide it.

"Drink that before you sleep," Jordan said. "You’ll thank me. Or you won’t, because you’re you. Either way." He straightened. Rolled his shoulder again. "Twenty-five. Tonight. I know where you stream from now."

And then he left.

Just like that. Footsteps back through her apartment, the front door, the click of it closing, the quiet after, the distant complaint of his clean Civic turning over in the lot below.

Lila sat on her bed in her corset and her fishnets and her ruined experiment, staring at a glass of ice water sweating onto her nightstand next to a face-up photo of her dead-eyed teenage self and her grandmother, and she said, out loud, to no one, to the rubber ducks, to the RGB glow, to the whole insane fact of Jordan McKnight:

"What the fuck."