The first week was a lesson in how much of her she had never noticed.

She had thought of herself as someone who didn’t think about sex much. That had been true, in the sense that she had not thought about it; it had happened to her body every few days like hunger, and she had dealt with it like hunger, quickly and alone, and gone back to work. What she learned in the first week was that the not-thinking had depended entirely on the dealing-with. Take away the four minutes and the thing underneath them did not go away. It spread.

By Wednesday she was aware of her own underwear. By Thursday she was aware of the seam of her trousers when she walked, and she walked differently, and a paralegal asked if she’d hurt her back. On Friday she sat through a two-hour call with the Brennan team and took notes in a hand that got smaller and tighter as the hour went on, and when she looked at the page afterward she had written the word week in the margin four times and did not remember doing it.

Abby texted every night. Not much. Good girl, on Tuesday, which Lea read in the elevator and then stood in the lobby of her own building for a full minute before she could make her legs work. Your resting rate is up six beats, on Thursday. That’s not stress. I know what your stress looks like. And on Friday, at 10:30 p.m., when Lea had been in bed for an hour with her hands under her pillow where she’d put them on purpose: Call me.

She called.

“Put me on speaker,” Abby said. “And put the phone on the pillow next to your head. I want you to be able to hear me without holding anything.”

Lea did. Her voice, when she found it, came out thin. “What are we doing.”

“You’re going to touch yourself.”

The relief that went through her was so total it was almost grief. “Okay,” she said, and her hand was already moving, and Abby said, “Stop.”

Lea stopped. Her fingers were at the waistband.

“I didn’t say how. Listen first.” The voice on the pillow was close, unhurried, the voice Abby used on investors. “You’re going to touch yourself exactly the way you did last Thursday. Two fingers, same speed. I’ve seen the trace, I know what it looks like, I’ll know if you change it. And when you get close — and you’ll know when, you’ve done this a thousand times — you’re going to take your hand away and put it flat on your stomach and say my name. Then you’ll wait until I tell you to start again.”

“And then —”

“And then we’ll see. Go.”

She went. It was different from the start — she was already wet in a way she never was before she’d begun, her underwear was soaked through at the gusset and had been, she realized, for some time, and the first touch of her fingers through the cotton made her hips come up off the mattress. She pulled the shorts down to her thighs and found herself with two fingers and the familiar circles, the efficient circles, and they were not efficient at all now, they were a disaster, she was shaking in under a minute.

“Slower,” Abby said. “That’s not Thursday’s speed.”

“I can’t —”

“You can. You’re going to.”

She slowed. It was worse. The slower circles let her feel each one, the way the tip of her finger dragged over the hood and then under, the small lewd sound her own body was making in the quiet of the room. She was aware of the sleeve, warm, broadcasting. Aware that the line was lifting. The thought that Abby was watching the line, right now, from the kitchen island or the bed or wherever she was, watching the exact curve of Lea’s pulse climb — the thought went through her like a hand.

“Abby — I’m —”

“Hand away.”

She took it away. She put it on her stomach, flat, and her whole body howled. Her clit was pulsing on its own against nothing; she could feel every beat of it, isolated, obscene. “Abby,” she said, as instructed, and it came out as something close to a sob.

“Good. Breathe. Tell me what it feels like.”

“It feels like — God. It feels like I’m going to die.”

“You’re not. Your pulse is a hundred and twelve. That’s a brisk walk.” A pause, and Lea could hear her smiling. “Again.”

She lost count after the fourth. Somewhere in the fifth or sixth she stopped being able to tell where close was — it was all close, the first touch after each pause put her on the edge immediately and she would have to stop in seconds, and the seconds stretched, and the flat hand on her stomach was wet because she had started, without deciding to, pressing her fingers into her own mouth between rounds to keep from screaming. Abby’s voice on the pillow talked to her the whole time. Low, continuous, approving. There. That one was close, wasn’t it. I can see it. Look at you. Look at what you are under all that.

“Please,” Lea said, finally, and she did not recognize the voice. “Please. Please let me.”

Silence on the line. Three seconds. Five.

“No,” Abby said. “Hand on your stomach. Leave it there. Say goodnight.”

“What —”

“You heard me. You asked what more meant. This is it. Say goodnight, Lea.”

She lay there with her hand on her stomach and her thighs apart and the room spinning slowly around the bed. The pulse between her legs did not slow. It would not slow for a long time.

“Goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight. Don’t you dare. I’ll know.”

The line went dead. The sleeve was warm against her leg. She lay in the dark and did not dare, and sometime after two she fell asleep with her legs still open, and in the morning the first thing she saw was a text that had come in at 2:14.

Abby You were still awake at two. Your pulse never dropped under ninety. I watched the whole thing.* And then, a minute later: *Dinner tomorrow. My place. Wear a skirt.

Dinner was roast chicken and a Chablis and Abby’s hands never touched her once. That was deliberate; Lea understood it to be deliberate by the second course and the understanding did not help. They ate on the terrace. Abby talked about a supplier in Taiwan. Lea sat in a skirt with her knees together and the sleeve between them and every time Abby looked at her, which was often and unhurried, she felt her pulse go and she knew Abby could feel it too, had it on her phone face-up beside her plate the whole meal like a second guest.

“You’re doing very well,” Abby said, over the dishes.

“I’m not doing anything. That’s the problem.”

“That is what you’re doing.” Abby dried a glass. “Eight days. How many times did you want to shove your hand down your underwear and rub your clit until you came?”

Lea’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“Don’t be coy. You’re thirty-seven.” Abby set the glass in the rack. “How many times did you want to make yourself come. Give me a number.”

Lea didn’t answer.

“I’ll tell you, then. I counted.” Abby folded the dish towel over the oven handle. “Sixteen distinct events where your conductance went up and your HRV dropped in a pattern that is not stress, not exercise, and not the gym. Sixteen times in eight days your cunt got wet and swollen and your body started getting ready to come, all on its own, with nobody touching it. Four of them at work. One in a taxi. Three in bed, which you’ll say is the only one that counts, and you’d be wrong.” She turned, finally, and leaned back against the counter with her arms folded. “I had a good look at the one in the taxi. Tuesday. Two-forty in the afternoon. What was that.”

Lea’s face went hot. “Nothing. I was — I was thinking.”

“About?”

“You know what about.”

“Say it.”

A long moment. The river, below, doing nothing. “About Friday. About your voice. About you saying no.”

“Good.” Abby crossed the kitchen. She stopped a foot away. She did not touch. “You liked that I said no.”

“I hated it.”

“You thought about it in a taxi on Tuesday until your pulse hit a hundred and five.” Abby’s voice was very gentle. “You can hate it and like it. Most people can. You’re not most people, though, are you — you’ve spent your whole life being the one who’s fine. Who handles it. Who doesn’t need.” A pause. “I’ve watched you handle it for six years. Do you know how much I’ve wanted to see you not.”

Lea’s eyes were wet. She didn’t know when that had happened. “Why are you doing this.”

“Because I can. Because you’re letting me.” Abby tilted her head. “Do you want to stop?”

The question sat there, real, with a door behind it.

“No,” Lea said.

“Then here’s what happens next.” Abby went to the drawer at the end of the island — the one Lea had always assumed held takeout menus — and took out a case and set it on the counter between them. Matte black. The same make as the one the sleeve had come in, on the terrace, barely a week and a half ago, only larger. Abby thumbed the catches and lifted the lid.

Inside, in a cutout of grey foam, lay something smooth and contoured and the color of gunmetal, and Lea looked at it and did not understand it, and then she did.

“It’s the next version,” Abby said. “The sleeve was always the prototype. This is the product. Sensor array’s the same, just in a different place. Better placement, better data.” She lifted it out of the foam, and it was a curved shield, contoured, with a thin band that would go around the hips and another, thinner, that would go between the legs, and there was a lock. There was unmistakably a lock. “It’s not uncomfortable. I’ve worn it. It doesn’t prevent anything you need to do. It prevents the one thing you want to do.”

“You want me to wear a chastity belt.”

“I want you to wear the device I’ve been developing for eighteen months. Which is a chastity belt, yes.” Abby’s mouth moved. “There’s a market. You’d be surprised. But I’m not asking as the company.”

“What are you asking as.”

Abby turned it over once in her hands. Then she held it out across the counter, offered, the way she’d offered the wine.

“As the person who’s going to keep the key,” she said. “Lift your skirt.”

Lea didn’t move.

“I don’t want to,” she said. It was the truest thing she had said all evening, and she watched it land on Abby’s face and do nothing at all.

“I know you don’t.” Abby set the device down on the counter, gently, and folded her arms. “So don’t. Go home. I’ll delete the data tonight — all of it, Friday included — and the sleeve goes in a drawer, and we have brunch on Sunday, and you’ll be fine.” She let that word sit. “You’ll be exactly what you were before. Fine. Handling it. You’re very good at fine.”

The word went into Lea like a hook. She thought of her apartment, the man from the dating app and his apartment that smelled of dryer sheets, the four efficient minutes, the nineteen months of fine.

“That’s not fair.”

“No,” Abby agreed. “It isn’t. Skirt, or door. I’m not going to ask twice.”

Lea stood there for a long time. Then she gathered the hem of her skirt in both fists, and lifted it, and found that her hands were shaking so badly the fabric trembled, and she could not have said — then or ever — whether it was fear or the other thing.

It was cold at first, and then it wasn’t. The shield sat flush over her, its inner surface lined with something soft, and down the center of the lining ran a narrow raised ridge — slight, rounded, no wider than a fingertip — that Abby seated with one careful press so that it nestled just between her lips. It didn’t enter her. It barely parted her at all. It simply lay there, inside the outermost edge of her, the smallest possible trespass, and rode up at its top end to rest against her clit with a pressure that was constant and faint and utterly indifferent. Behind, the rear strap ran back between her legs and then split into a narrow Y that framed her rather than covering her, rejoining at the small of her back; at the fork sat a small steel plate with a round, empty socket in it that she didn’t understand yet. Low on the front of the shield the metal was finely perforated. And the hip band settled low on her pelvis where a belt would sit. Every detail of it, Lea would realize later, had been designed for wearing for a very long time. Abby fitted it standing, with Lea’s skirt held up in Lea’s own two fists, in the middle of the kitchen with the lights on. It took her four minutes. She was focused and quick and her fingers went everywhere they needed to go and nowhere else. When it was seated she stepped back and looked.

“Walk.”

Lea walked to the terrace door and back. It moved with her. With every step the ridge shifted a fraction, slid, resettled — never more than a millimetre, never less — a tiny insistent intrusion she could not stop noticing. Already she could feel it going slick.

“Fine?”

“It’s — yes.”

“Good.” Abby stepped in again, and this time her hand did touch, flat on the shield over Lea’s cunt, pressing it, and the pressure went through the plate and the lining and into her like a bell being struck. Lea’s knees nearly went. Abby held her hand there and looked at her face. “You’ll feel that,” she said quietly. “Every time it moves. Every time you sit, every time you walk, every time you think about me. And there’s nothing you’ll be able to do about it. Not one thing. Not ever, until I decide.”

There was a small sound. It took Lea a moment to understand that it was the lock.

“Say thank you,” Abby said.

Lea didn’t.

Abby’s hand was still flat on the shield. She pressed, slowly, harder, until Lea had to grip the counter, and held it there, and waited, and didn’t say anything else at all.

“Thank you,” Lea whispered.

Her skirt fell. Abby rapped two knuckles against the plate through the fabric — once, idly, like testing a door she’d just shut — and went back to drying glasses.

“You can let yourself out,” she said. “Text me when you’re home. I’ll want to see what the train does to you.”

HALO BIOMETRIC — PARTICIPANT NOTES (PRIVATE)

Subject: L.
Day: 0.
Entry by: A.M.

Continuous device fitted 21:47, kitchen. Fit good. Lock confirmed 21:51.

Subject stated “I don’t want to” once, clearly. Offered exit. Exit declined after 41 seconds. Note: the word fine moved her more than any physical stimulus tonight. She is afraid of being fine. Use sparingly; it will stop working if overused.

Did not kiss her. Correct decision. She expected it, and the absence will do more work than the kiss would have.

Sleeve data, eight days: sixteen arousal events, zero relief. Baseline 64. She thinks she is near her limit. She is nowhere near her limit.

Back room ready. Not yet.