"Touch yourself, Angel. Let me hear you."
My hand moves without executive permission. This is mutiny. My vagina has staged a coup and installed a new government. My pulse jumps to 145—I know because I'm checking it like the medical disaster I am.
"This is the worst decision I've ever made," I breathe, fingers finding skin, finding want, finding trouble.
"No. The worst decision was texting about illegal surgery. This is the second worst."
"Third worst. Second worst was responding to you."
"What sound do you make when you come?"
"We're about to find out, aren't we?"
"Yes. We are."
My fingers know their job—medical precision applied to personal destruction. His breathing in my ear, getting rougher, less controlled. My breathing getting ragged, the tamales forgotten, my entire existence narrowed to this moment of absolute insanity.
"That's it, Angel. Let go."
"I can't—"
"You can. You will. For me."
And I do. Because apparently my body takes orders from strange men who text about murder and hell and angels. The sound I make is embarrassing, necessary, and probably illegal in several states.
"Ay, Dios, joder—" The Spanish rips out of me as I break, my grandmother's language saved for extreme moments of passion or rage.
"Beautiful," he says, his voice wrecked now, completely different from the controlled velvet of minutes ago. Raw. Affected.
"I have to go," I gasp, reality crashing back like a defibrillator to the chest.
"No, you don't."
"Yes, I do. I need to... process this. Possibly drink bleach. Definitely finish these tamales."
"Text me later."
"Probably not."
"Definitely yes."
He hangs up. I stand in my kitchen, shirtless, professionally compromised, personally destroyed, and somehow already planning what to text him next.
My vagina's thesis just got published.
My brain is filing for bankruptcy.
The tamales are perfect.
I am professionally competent and personally catastrophic, and apparently, that's exactly what attracts forty-five-year-old criminals who make me come with just their voice—that voice that went from controlled velvet to desperate gravel in the span of one phone call.
Sister Margaret would need her own therapy after this confession.
Good thing I'm never telling her. Or anyone.
Except Izzy.
Who's getting a play-by-play text in approximately thirty seconds.
