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Her hand is on the partition between my desk and Mark's. The partition is gray. Her nails are painted a color between red and orange, autumn-themed, the kind of seasonal detail that women like Barbara pay attention to. She's looking at me the way she looks at all of us, the supervisory gaze that catalogs appearance, posture, the visible signs of burnout. She doesn't see anything worth cataloging. My shirt is pressed. My eyes are clear. The eleven minutes of hot water erased everything that needed erasing.

"Thank you, Barbara."

She nods and leaves.

Mark pulls his headset off during the 3:00 lull. Leans back. The chair squeaks.

"You good?"

"Fine."

"You look different."

The sentence freezes my hands on the keyboard. My fingers stop. My breathing adjusts before my face does, slow in, slow out, the pause between them timed to read as nothing.

"Different how?"

"I don't know. Rested, maybe. Less tense." He shrugs. The observation is already leaving him, the way observations leave people who make them casually. He's not studying me. He's filling a lull with conversation. "Just looks like you slept well."

"I did."

He puts his headset back on. The lull ends. The next call comes through.

I did sleep well and my dreams were delightful.

His body underneath mine. The heat of him. The sound he made when he came, the same sound from the phone call, the groan that breaks at the top, except this time my hips were against his, my hands on his skin.

Fuck…

I stop thinking about it before I pop a boner at my desk.

The recording plays through my earbuds while I type notes from the 3:00 call. His voice. The word closeness.

My body filed it as someone being close. Being inside the space I usually keep empty.

Inside the space.

I close my eyes for a second, then two. The keyboard waits and the recording plays.

5:00 p.m. The day shift ends. Barbara has given me a break before my night shift, so I drive to Groundwork. I implanted the idea of seeing me again and now I want to see if he bites. The outdoor table, the one he'll pass on the evening walk, the one where he looked for me and found an empty chair.

Tonight the chair won't be empty.

I park down the block, walk in, and order a pour-over, black. The barista with the septum ring rings me up without recognition.

A different book accompanies me this time, a used paperback with a cracked spine, the kind of prop that reads as authentic because it is. I've been reading it. Behavioral ecology. The chapter on parasitic relationships, organisms that infiltrate a host's body and redirect its behavior to serve the parasite's reproductive needs. The cuckoo wasp that lays its eggs in another wasp's nest. The jewel wasp that stings a cockroach's brain and leads it by the antenna into a burrow.

The reading is professional development.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

5:38 p.m. The light is disappearing from the horizon. The sidewalk traffic has picked up, dog walkers, joggers, a frazzled woman pushing a stroller. The coffee is half finished. The book is open on my knee.

5:52. Movement at the corner of Birch. A leash. A small body close to the ground, the legs moving fast, the quick trot of a terrier with somewhere to be. Bean rounds the corner first, nose working, tail high. Behind her, the leash taut, Milo.

He's wearing the gray shirt again. The one he put on for the phone call last night, the one I've seen through his window, the one he described putting on in the bathroom mirror. Bean sees me. Her ears go forward and her tail speeds up. The leash jerks in Milo's hand and he looks down at the dog, then up at the table, then at me.

Eye contact. Brown meeting brown, different shades, but cut from the same cloth all the same. The afternoon light is lower than last time, the angle changed, the shadows longer. His face changes, ever so slightly. The flicker I planted two days ago, the one that lives in the part of the brain that catalogs safety before the conscious mind asks why.