staying there at a time, sometimes none at all, and their schedules were easily checked. He’d been wrong to fear Susan’s nakedness, to think this new arrangement would change anything. But this leisure did allow them to slow down and, by eliminating the fear of discovery, made new explorations possible. They would arrive separately, Susan now in her own car, and he would enter the silent apartment and stand in the common room until he heard her breathing behind one of the doors, already undressed, lying in the single bed with the same look of idleness she’d worn during those weeks she’d made him wait, her expression part entitlement, part boredom, and she’d be oddly slow to look at him, even as he stood over her, took her hand, and pulled her up to face him. It sent a twinge of fear and dread through his mind that she might deny him. He touched her body while she indifferently, unresponsively removed his jacket and tie, his shirt and pants, as if to remind him that it was she who made these decisions. “What took you so long?” she asked one day. “I had to talk my way out of a speeding ticket,” he answered. Smiling now, appeased, she then kissed and climbed him, engaged, her legs wrapped round his hips, still climbing until she was onto his shoulders, this girl as thin as she was strong, his hair bunched in her fists while he fed on her little cunt. It amazed Sheppard that a thing so small could provide such delight, could supply what seemed as essential as water. He lifted her off his shoulders, placing her face down on the bed, and when she raised her ass toward him and turned around to look, the tiny spray of freckles across her cheeks and nose reddened, his cock drawn to her as if magnetized, so stiff it was as if it were a beak pressing itself out of his body’s shell. It was a feeling, as he clutched her hips, that they were in furious pursuit, chasing something down. He turned her over and watched her orgasm slowly bloom. She tilted her head back as if she were rinsing her hair, tears forming at the edges of her closed eyes, the folds of her vagina so radiant and wet, the warmth coiling through her torso and limbs, that when he pressed his cheek and chest to hers he was like a child lying waterlogged on the hot concrete of a pool.
“Whose room is this?” he asked after they’d used the same one several times. He was sitting in a chair by the bed with his pants on, watching Susan open a bottle of men’s cologne on the dresser.
She smelled it—wearing only Sheppard’s dress shirt—and then pressed a drop with her finger behind each ear. “It’s Robert’s.” She replaced the cap and carefully replaced the bottle. “Dr. Stevenson’s.”
“He’s not a doctor yet.”
“He will be.”
“Of course he will.”
“He loves me, you know.”
Sheppard raised an eyebrow.
“I think I love him too,” she said.
“I didn’t know you were seeing him.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
He did. They talked. They were talking now. “I think I know everything I need to.”
“Did you know that your father’s firing me?”
Flabbergasted, he sat forward and crossed his hands. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, “fire isn’t exactly correct. He’s relocating me. To a job at Armstrong Labs downtown.”
“And why is that?”
“Apparently I’m a distraction.”
“To whom?”
“To you, silly.”
She went on, but Sheppard, dressing, heard nothing.
Back at the hospital, Sheppard entered his father’s office without knocking, though the man didn’t look up, just sat there writing reports. He organized everything in stacks whose arrangement only he knew, a brand of encryption that drove his secretary nearly mad, piles forming a buttress along the perimeter of his credenza and desk that made him seem an old king behind walls, forever safe from harm.
“Have a seat,” he finally said.
Sheppard wanted to stand—his hands were jammed in his pockets—but he detected an order as his father scribbled away. And no matter how mad he was, he couldn’t overcome that, so he took one of the chairs that faced him.
“I know why you’re here,” his father said, putting his pen down. He was gray-colored, both