Chapter 1

By the time I looked up from the last box the light in the kitchen had gone gold and slanted, and the day I’d been given was mostly used up.

Daniel had given me that. One Saturday without him in the way, him at his brother’s in Yonkers watching the game so I could pack seven years into cardboard without stepping around his feet. Seven years. No ring, because next year, Marie. No baby, because next year, Marie. And then one Tuesday in March a woman from his climbing gym who was twenty six and bendy and laughed at everything he said, and I was the one moving out, because the lease was in his name.

Everything was in his name. Everything except you, and he didn’t want you anymore.

Most of the heavy stuff wore my yellow squares by now. The big sticky notes, MINE in black marker three times on each one like that would make it legal, MINE MINE MINE, on the cabinet, the bookcase, the good lamp. I’d walked the rooms all morning with the pad stuck to my wrist and every time I pressed one down I got hit with us.

Stop it. You’re labeling furniture. You are done here.

The couch got a note on the arm and I could still feel it, him pulling me into his lap after work with his tie half off, kissing me like he hadn’t seen me in a week, his hand up under my shirt, and I used to just melt there, I used to think that exact lap was the rest of my life, and I pressed the note flat with my thumb and my pussy gave this slow heavy throb like it had been invited back, “mmm…..” Into his lap. Daniel’s. Who is in Yonkers. Who is inside a twenty six year old most nights now. I was standing in an empty living room with my face perfectly straight and my thighs not straight at all.

The coffee pot got a note because I bought it, and right there on the handle were his fingerprints, a greasy smudge of thumb from this morning when he poured his cup and said have a good day like I was headed to an office. I didn’t wipe it off. I didn’t even know why. I just stood there looking at his thumb on my handle.

And the wall. The scuff by the kitchen doorway, low, a black curved heel mark at hip height that the landlord was going to take out of his deposit. The day after my birthday, two bottles of the cheap prosecco, him pushing me up against that doorway with my dress shoved up around my waist, both of us giggling and half drunk, my heel kicking the paint every time he went in, and I laughed into his mouth and the laugh turned into a moan because he was inside me and I came so fast I was embarrassed. I touched the scuff with two fingers. Just touched it, “mmm…..”, and my thighs squeezed together so hard I had to put my other hand on the doorframe and breathe.

Do it. Right here against his paint. He’s in Yonkers. The apartment’s empty.

I was thirty five years old and about two seconds from fingering myself on a scuff mark. I moved.

I’d been like that since last night. Hot and mean and empty, lying on my side of the bed while he slept on his, not touching, my whole body humming like a fridge. Months since he’d touched me. Since before the gym girl, since he started showering at night instead of the morning. All day I’d pressed my thighs together while I packed like squeezing was going to help, and it didn’t help, it made me wetter, and every time I crouched for a box I felt it, soft and slick between my lips, my underwear going warm and sticky, and I kept telling myself it was August and the fourth floor and no air conditioning.

One shoebox from the top of the closet got its own special note. I wrote BUTT STUFF on the lid in my nicest handwriting and left it on his side of the shelf for him to find. Let her find it first. A small mean wonderful pleasure.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

The movers, I thought, and dug it out of my shorts pocket with a strip of packing tape stuck to my lip from tearing it with my teeth.

The app.

Peak fertility today. And the little pink flower.

I laughed in the empty kitchen. Seven years that banner meant one thing in this apartment. It meant Daniel reading my phone over my shoulder and reaching into his nightstand drawer. It meant a condom, every single time, on every pink flower day, and next year, Marie, while he rolled it on. We were so careful. I’d scoffed at that flower so many mornings I could do the scoff in my sleep.

Of course. Of course it’s today. Of course you’re dripping into your shorts on the pink flower day with nobody left to be careful with.

I locked the phone and shoved it back in my pocket and went to the last box.

* * *

The album was at the bottom of my nightstand drawer under the lavender sachets. Not a vacation book. The one I’d made for him. Boudoir, black pages, real photo paper, me in the lace set I bought because I wanted him to have something he couldn’t get from looking at me across the dinner table. I’d shot it myself in our bathroom with the phone propped on a stack of towels and the timer going, ten seconds to run into position, ten seconds to try and be brave about my own body. Our fifth anniversary. I never gave it to him. That was the month he started showering at night.

Don’t open it. If you open it you’re going to look at your own tits and put your hand down your shorts on his floor. Do not.

I didn’t open it. I wrapped it in one of his old towels, the gray one with the bleach spot, face down so the cover couldn’t look at me while I taped, and I put my nose in the towel for one second and it smelled like him, his deodorant, the laundry soap he picked, and I thought about keeping it. Using it. Throwing it in the dumpster after.

The toys went in next, rolled in a pillowcase so they wouldn’t rattle. The little purple vibe. The pink egg with the remote that we used exactly once, at the Italian place on his birthday, him pressing the button under the table while the waiter read the specials and me holding onto the tablecloth with both fists. I pulled tape across the flaps and pressed it down hard with both thumbs, and my cunt gave one slow squeeze like it could see through cardboard, “nnn.....”

I wrote PRIVATE on the side. The marker squeaked. The letters came out bigger and darker than I meant, almost shouting.

The doorbell rang.

I jumped so hard I dropped the marker, and it rolled under the radiator. The movers. It had to be the movers.

I wiped my palms on my shorts and went to the door.

Chapter 2

They were on the landing, three of them, and I was already wet.

Heat came up the stairwell with them, August and sweat and cardboard and something under that, warm and close, a dog that’s been asleep in the sun, and my first stupid thought was that I’d ordered them. Not a truck. Them. Three men off some website for women like me, delivered to the door to take the edge off and ruin me and leave the boxes for later.

Don’t stare. You hired a company. It has a website and four and a half stars. Don’t you dare stare.

Navy work shirts on all three, PASCAL RELOCATION across the chest in white, and a name stitched over the pocket of the one in front. CAL.

“Marie?”

“Yeah. Hi. Thanks for coming.”

Coming. You said coming. It hung there on the landing and he didn’t smile. He looked at me one second too long and nodded, slow, writing it down somewhere behind his eyes, and mine went to his mouth.

He had the clipboard. His throat was shining from four flights, dark hair stuck down at his temples with a little gray at the side, a jaw that had needed a shave two days ago. The shirt pulled across his chest when he breathed. His forearms under the rolled sleeves were thick and roped, the hair on them darker and heavier than I’d have expected, running down over the backs of his hands almost to the knuckles, and there was blue ballpoint smeared on his thumb. His eyes went over me the way you’d look over a job. Door. My throat. The PRIVATE box at my feet. The rooms behind me. Then he breathed in through his nose, not loud, only long, his nostrils moving, and when his eyes came back up to my face something at the back of them caught the light from the stairwell window. A flat gold shine. There, and gone.

It’s the window. It’s a reflection. Look at his face like a normal person.

I looked at his mouth again.

“I’m Cal. That’s Rook. Jace.”

Rook didn’t say hello. He wasn’t much taller than Cal but he was bigger, the landing making room for him, shoulders that made the work shirt look borrowed off a smaller man, scraped knuckles, hands hanging loose and patient at his sides. And I dropped my eyes before I could help it. Work pants worn pale at the thighs. The weight of him behind the zipper, heavy and obvious if you were filthy enough to look, and I was. I looked right at it.

Fuck. Look up. Look up, Marie.

I could see myself on my knees in this doorway. I could see that bulge splitting me on the hall rug, and my mouth actually watered, and he adjusted himself. Once, slow, the heel of his hand at the base and a nudge with two fingers, and I snapped my eyes up and he’d seen exactly where they’d been. He didn’t look embarrassed. He looked like a man who’d just noticed which box was heaviest.

He saw. He saw and he fixed it for you so you could see it better.

Jace was the leanest of them, an easy face, a smile that didn’t do anything kind, sweat darkening his collar, sleeves shoved up over a tattoo I couldn’t make out. He leaned on the wall like he’d lived on that landing for years. His eyes went to my mouth. Then lower. Then my mouth again, and the interesting part, his face said, was that I’d been looking first.

“She’s got the box with the good stuff,” he said to nobody, chin at my feet. “Look at her hang onto it.”

He knows. He can’t know. He knows.

“I.. I’ll show you what’s mine.”

Mine. Oh my god, Marie. Shut up.

* * *

Kitchen first. I talked because if I stopped talking I’d stare. Coffee maker stays. Radio comes. Those mugs are taped already. I said the thing about the radio twice. Cal wrote on the clipboard without looking down at it, and Rook put one hand flat on the fridge and leaned his weight into it, testing whether it was alive, and the shirt went tight across his back. I pictured grabbing that shirt in two fists. Being bent over the counter we were emptying, cheek on the laminate, his hand spread on the back of my neck holding me there with no effort at all.

Stop. You’re giving a tour. You’re giving a tour of Daniel’s kitchen with your cheek on his counter in your head.

“Stairs besides the ones we came up?” Cal asked.

“Just those. No elevator. I’m.. sorry.”

“We’ve done worse.”

Jace lifted a framed print off the wall, Daniel and me at the Cape, sunburned, squinting, and turned it over in his hands. He looked at the back for a long second like there might be something written there. “This one labeled?”

“His. Leave it.”

He hung it back up crooked and didn’t fix it.

My voice had come out thin. Rook was still standing in the doorway of my head with that line in his pants, and my thighs wanted to press together, and pressing only made the wet slide against itself, slick lips rubbing, you’re going to leave a spot on his kitchen floor if you stand still, so I kept walking.

The hall to the bedroom was narrow. I stopped in the doorway to point and Cal came up behind me without a sound, and the hall was too narrow for two people, so when he slid past the whole side of his chest pressed into my back. Heat. Real heat, too much of it, standing with my back to an open oven, and hard under the shirt. And I leaned into it. For one second I leaned back into him, I’d have let him pin me right there and finish what the app had started, please, just that, just his cock through those pants against your ass and you’d come standing up in Daniel’s hallway, “mmm…..”, and I bit down on the rest.

He stopped. One second, his chest still on my back, and I felt him breathe in again, long and slow, right at my crown. At my hair. Smelling me.

He’s smelling you. A ma