Eleven Minutes, Fourteenth Floor

She is already writing it before she has done anything.

That is the thing about her — the part she has never explained to anyone and does not intend to. The entry exists in draft form somewhere behind her eyes while the fluorescent light buzzes its single flat note overhead and she stands with her back against the door and her left heel pressed into the tile grout, feeling the cold of it through the leather sole. *Fluorescent buzz overhead*, she thinks. *Left heel against tile.* She is not dissociating. She is the opposite of dissociating. She is paying very close attention.

Eleven minutes. She checked the time when she locked the door.

The blouse is still tucked. She does not untuck it. She has learned that untucking is a variable she does not need — the trousers open at the waistband with two hands, and she uses both, and then they are open, and she notes the specific resistance of the fabric at her thighs, the way the wool-blend holds its shape even now, even when she shifts her weight and feels the waistband gap and the cold air arrive at her hip before any warmth does.

The paper towel dispenser is in her peripheral vision, slightly left of center. She does not look at it directly. She is aware of it the way she is aware of the buzz — as a coordinate. She notes it.

Her right hand is at the waistband. Her left hand is flat against the door behind her, palm pressed to the painted metal, and the metal is cold enough that she can feel it in her wrist, that specific cold traveling up toward the inside of her elbow. She notes that too. She notes the contrast — the door behind her, the warmth collecting in front of her, the wool still holding its shape across both thighs even now.

She has not moved her right hand yet.

This is the part she has never been able to explain and does not try to: the moment before she moves it is itself a kind of information. The wanting is data. She is recording it. The low pull in her stomach — not ache, not urgency, something more precise than either — the way her thighs have not parted yet and the fabric between them is still pressed flat and she is aware of that pressure as a fact she is about to change.

The exhale that comes out is longer than the inhale that preceded it. She did not decide to exhale. She notes the length of it, the way it ran past the point where she would normally have stopped it, unfolding into the small room's flat air.

Her right hand moves.

The wool does not slide. She has to press, and she presses, and her left heel digs once into the tile, and she notes: *left heel against tile*, and the fluorescent light buzzes its single note above her, and she is still writing.