Twelve Minutes, Loop Tower

The hand dryer in the outer room cycled on, ran its eight seconds, cut out. She counted without deciding to count. That was the thing about her — she was always counting something. She had twelve minutes.

She had planned for eleven, built in one minute of margin the way she built margin into everything: the quarterly report, the commute, the amount of sleep she could lose before her performance degraded. One minute was enough. One minute was professional. The stall was the end unit.

She had checked this three days ago, the first day the dildo went into the bag. End unit meant one shared wall instead of two. Shared wall with the paper towel dispenser, not with another stall. She had noted this the way she noted everything — without sentiment, without drama, as information that would be useful later.

Later was now. She had not unwrapped it until she sat down. That had been deliberate too. Standing in front of the mirror, washing her hands after the morning meeting, she had felt the bag's weight against her calf and made a decision: not until the door is locked and you are seated.

Rules created before the wanting got loud were the only rules that held. The charcoal wool of the skirt pressed flat across both thighs. She was still sitting the way she sat in meetings — knees together, weight distributed, posture that cost nothing to maintain because she had maintained it for fifteen years. The fluorescent light above her was the same light as her office, the same light as the conference room.

She had chosen this too, without knowing she was choosing: she did not want candlelight. She did not want softness. She wanted exactly this — the clean, indifferent light, the tile, the specific cold of the metal latch against her left palm when she'd turned it. The silicone was warmer than she expected.

She had expected cold. She had expected to have to wait for it to warm. Instead it held a residual heat from three days inside the bag, inside her coat pocket for the walk from the El, and something about that — the warmth that had been building without her permission — made her exhale in a way she hadn't planned. The sound came out shorter than she intended.

Clipped at the end, somewhere in her sternum, before she had decided to clip it. She set it on her right thigh. Still through the skirt. The weight of it — more than she remembered from the product description, more than the number of grams she had read and filed — pressed the wool flat against her leg, and she felt the fabric's slight resistance against the back of her knee, the hem holding its position while everything above it was beginning, very quietly, not to.

Her left hand stayed on the latch. She didn't know why. Insurance, maybe. Or the last remaining piece of the person who had walked in here with a plan.

The hand dryer cycled on again in the outer room. She had eleven minutes.