Act I
“Everything okay, Q? You never leave the office on time.”
“I have an appointment,” said Quincy. She wasn’t not in the mood for Tatiana’s gentle teasing, which admittedly had been the case a lot lately, but she did feel the rare urge to leave on time rather strongly.
“Sure,” said Tatiana, who could still read her less like a book and more like a street sign, even six months after their breakup.
But it was true that she had an appointment. It just wasn’t the whole truth.
She silently accepted Tatiana’s help in leaving, in brushing off another, “You okay there, boss?” and got out of there. First stop: home. She didn’t want to show up to her appointment in work mode, for so many reasons.
The drive was a blur. And honestly, probably not worth it. If she wasn’t such a coward, she would’ve jumped on the public transit trend. She still hated driving the hills of San Francisco.
Home.
Some people—people like Tatiana—felt like it was more of a condo than a home. Missing something. But Quincy didn’t feel that way. She loved it. She loved the view of the city far below, the accompanying quiet; she loved the simplicity of the large studio; she loved every little detail she’d seen to, and most of all, she loved how safe she felt in it.
She opened the door. Nearly screamed at the sight of a man casually working at the little table by the window—her table that she did so much work at—then, squealed with delight, a sound that probably would’ve made everyone at the office except maybe Tatiana faint—and ran to hug him before he had quite gotten up. “Davie!”
“Hey, sis.” David Lance hugged her so tight she lost contact with the floor.
“What are you—”
“Big city meeting,” he said. “Thought I’d surprise you.” David hated the city—and the suburbs—had gotten his fill of it in childhood. He hated petty HOA boards, superficial country club dinners, stifling private school uniforms, people ignoring the staff dressed in black, water guzzling golf courses, oversized pools with seizure inducing lights, and all of the other trappings of the life in Vegas their parents had loved, more than them, until the day they died. Yacht accident, the best way to avoid sympathy for your parents’ sudden demise. David had recently left for UPenn then (and Quincy, sixteen, had cried and cried when he did, with no tears left over for their parents’ funeral. She flew back to Pennsylvania with him the next day, just kind of followed him around for so long, she had an honorary degree from Wharton.)
David was now the kind of tech exec who worked remotely from a lake house in Tahoe. Quincy adored visiting David’s place, and absolutely hated the idea of living there. She had to, or else she wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge to be close to David. They may have still lived together, if he wasn’t so sick of the city. But they didn’t work together, either, despite an even stronger urge to—they were both a little too much on their own, and together, they were competitively monomanic.
“You know how I love surprises,” Quincy deadpanned, still failing to let go of him. “How long are you here for?” she asked anxiously, finally pulling away.
He threw up his hands. “If I can crash here, I drive home whenever.”
“Good. It’s just—I have a six o’clock. I really have to run…”
“Sure. How about I help myself to the zero things in your fridge, and when you get back, we’ll order in?”
“No, look, there’s food now,” she said, opening the fridge, gesturing, shutting it.
“Wow,” said David. “Tati’s doing?” He loved Tatiana, called her his favorite Not Sister In Law by far. There was nothing wrong with Tatiana, except that she’d mistaken Quincy’s CEO alter ego as a more round the clock kind of deal, failed to be intimidated like most people were, and instead sought more that Quincy couldn’t give her.
“A little. Kind of. She just—got me set up with this weekly grocery delivery thing. It keeps my basics in stock.”
“I guess that’s what you fuck her—pay her for.”
“Shut up.” She shoved him. She looked at the time. “I really have to go. I have to change.”
“Only running five minutes early?”
Quincy picked up the pile of clothes she’d laid out. “Four,” she corrected, and and took the clothes into the bathroom to change, stripping out of tech startup CEO and putting on—she wasn’t really sure what, but Tatiana—with her neon blue hair—had said it was her style, and it was well made, low maintenance, and fit her well, and she apparently had to have something that didn’t scream didn’t have time to change after work. This involved a long sweater in the dusty pink she’d painted—had most of the condo painted—and black jeggings.
She did a mirror check—her hair was as untamable as ever. It hadn’t been so bad before the San Francisco humidity; she had to give it that. But now she just put it in a high ponytail with one of those big squiggly clips she honestly still got from—ordered from—Claire’s, when the clips seemed to all end up at work when she needed them at home, or vice versa—and pray to an undetermined god for the light brown mess of curls to keep it together.
Emerging from the bathroom, she called, “I’ll be home by eight-thirty,” to David, and left.
Then she allowed herself to panic about what David’s impromptu visit meant for any fallout from her appointment.
But she decided it didn’t matter. She absolutely wasn’t canceling her appointment or ditching David, so they’d just have to coexist. She’d be fine. She always was.
Out into the humidity, driving the awful hills. Okay, maybe she loved the concept of San Francisco—her perfect view of the bay and the lights—more than the reality.
Arriving at her destination, she started circling to find the best possible parking. Parked. Made her way inside.
Inside, she immediately got the impression of a lot more efficiency than parking in San Francisco. It was hard to say why, but she was reminded of her condo: simplicity, peace, detail. The walls were a dusty teal rather than pink, a trendy calming hue, with what Quincy called the everything pride flag providing a pop of color. She was immediately welcomed by a warm but blissfully unchirpy receptionist, who got her checked in like this was a therapist’s office, had her take a—rather comfortable—seat in the little waiting area. She was early, somehow.
She resisted the urge to check her phone, to dig up another Hacker News thread about herself, to check Slack. She’d told herself she’d stay grounded while she was here. She discreetly watched her own body language and took a genuine interest in the pleasant small talk the two receptionists made with each other until one of them took a phone call. Soft, instrumental music filled out the space.
A third person entered the area behind the reception desk, exiting what looked like an office and shutting the door behind her. Quincy got important vibes, though it was again hard to say why. She was a woman about Quincy's age, with slightly darker, slightly tamer, loose waves just past her shoulders. She wore a floral, mini sundress, also teal toned, with long sleeves.
She conferred in discreet but not secretive tones with the receptionist who wasn’t on the phone call, and Quincy pretended not to listen. Still, she didn’t quite catch most of it. A middle aged man entered, blinking at Quincy and then blushing, also apparently there for a six o’clock.
The receptionist not on the phone took him, and the woman who’d entered from the back said, “I’ll get her oriented,” inclining her head towards Quincy, who got the impression that the phone call required shuffling staff around.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that, Flora; I can get them both—” said the receptionist—her nametag read Nathalia, she/her—but one look from Flora made her back off.
Flora. As in, Flora Roy, who owned the company. Quincy had done her research. Yet apparently Flora was camera shy.
Quincy wished she had been, too.
Flora didn’t blink at her. She just caught her eye and said, “You may come with me,” and Quincy did. Her heart finally started to race. “How are you today?” Flora asked. Emerging from behind the reception desk, her dress was layered over leggings.
“I’m good,” said Quincy on autopilot. “How are you?”
“I mean it,” Flora advised, shrugging off her question. “I always want to make sure someone’s in a good headspace before starting.”
Yes, well. “I’m good,” Quincy reiterated, as Flora shut a door behind them. They hadn’t gone far. “My brother just got into town,” she offered up, as if it were evidence. “Unexpectedly,” she added, because she was here and not with David. “But a pleasant surprise.”
“How nice,” said Flora.
Quincy had discreetly turned her attention to the room they were in now. It was quiet and dimly lit, windowless.
Off to her right, a door led into a bathroom. In the room itself was a long couch made of gray, waterproof looking material; but it was equipped with bleach white blankets and pillows. To the left of the couch was another open door. On the wall behind them with the door Flora had shut was a dresser. Labeled drawers evidently held more of the accoutrements that were visible; on top were tissues, snacks, the kind of packets of a single dose of various pain medications like they sold at the gas station. Earplugs and an eye mask were available. A water machine with metal cups like they had at the office.
Flora pointed these things out for her, as well. “You’re welcome to spend a few minutes here before you start, and then this is where you’ll come back out after. You’ll have half an hour before auto checkout.”
Quincy nodded. Yet she’d already mentally vowed not to make too much use of this cushy room. It was incredibly well thought out, but it just wasn’t what she was here for. But with David waiting for her at home, maybe she’d need it more than she’d planned.
“Now,” said Flora. “The program you selected—”
Quincy’s heart rate picked up.
“—it’s… intense.”
“I signed the waiver,” said Quincy. Her voice sounded more confident and less defensive than she felt. When she’d made her appointment online, filled out the medical forms and agreed to show up sober, the form had recommended her a few new client appointment programs. When she’d decided to predesign her own, she’d had to check a box and type her name an extra time to say she understood she’d ignored the recommendations, that the program was her own, that she understood and accepted the risks of it, etc.
“Yes,” said Flora, in a tone so patiently indulgent Quincy associated it with speaking to a small child. “I just wanted to warn you—informed consent and all that—especially if you don’t have experience with it—”
“I know what I’m doing,” Quincy interrupted her without quite meaning to.
Flora smiled. “Of course.” Pause. “I know who you are,” she acknowledged, in a way that neither flattered nor judged, something Quincy hadn’t heard in a long time. For a moment, the—was it an illusion?—of a well practiced guide and a nervous new client went away, but it wasn’t replaced by Flora Roy, CEO, darling of the tech and business and kink worlds, finally in a room with Quincy Lance, CEO, former darling of those worlds, now a notorious but wealthy outcast focusing on more tame inventions. Instead, the scene became two very weird, too successful for comfort women desperately playing at a normal conversation. But Flora continued: “But if that’s the extent of your experience—you might find that the reality is different.”
Quincy felt oddly like she’d been punched in the stomach. She realized this meant that she’d wanted Flora to like her—not in a fannish way, which she was used to, but to like her as an equal, and now she felt like she didn’t. It wasn’t that she seemed to not like her, but maybe to think she was stupid—not in a mean way: her tone bled concern, not contempt, not the assumption she was stupid because she was a woman under thirty. And the reason Quincy felt it so deeply was that Flora’s implication wasn’t entirely wrong. Quincy was here because she’d never found another real person to give her what she needed. But still. “I know enough to know what I want.”
“Very well.” Surprise me, Flora’s tone invited her. “Of course, if you change your mind at any point, you’ll have the buttons.”
Quincy didn’t intend to do that.
“Which brings us to—” Flora opened the door by the couch. It led into the next room. Also dim, and quiet, and windowless. Flora assured her it was soundproofed. This room was more scantily equipped, containing only Flora’s famous invention, which she explained a lot more like a flight attendant than a salesperson or an engineer. Quincy nodded her way through it. Yes, she was fine with dim and quiet. No, she didn’t have any questions. Well, none of the courage to ask them, anyway.
Flora took her back out to the first room. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said, nodding at the door they’d just come through. “You can leave whatever clothes you take off here. If you do.” She gestured to an empty spot on the dresser. Quincy swore she saw a little knowing smirk at the final addition, like, of course you’ll take them all off.
Quincy nodded.
“Have fun.” She had not imagined the smirk. Flora left her alone, shut the first door behind her.
Quincy did take off all of her clothes. She set them where Flora had indicated. It was very weird to be so exposed somewhere other than her condo. Like a stress dream. A little voice in her head screamed at her to protect her decency and put her clothes back on. She’d never been particularly ashamed of her body, nor was she especially vain. But she remembered that little voice being so strong as a child that, trying on her issued PE uniform, her first time in a locker room, she’d failed to try it on. She’d simply walked into the locker room with it, prayed it fit, kept her eyes glued to the floor as girls tried on their own uniforms around her with abandon, and walked back out, told her PE teacher that it totally fit.
And it had. Yet, she’d always worn a tank top and leggings under the required layers of her school uniform, using the locker room only to slide on the basketball shorts—over the leggings, under the skirt—before sliding the skirt off, and made the transition from polo to tee shirt over the tank very fast, eyes still glued to the floor like spotting another girl’s ankle would be a scandal.
She wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think she was some kind of freak who fantasized about quite the opposite, after all, even though she was too young to understand why she did.
Now, she ditched her clothes and proceeded into the next room, closing the door behind her.
First thing first: she examined the buttons. Three buttons shared a controller—green for start, yellow for pause, red for stop—in reach even once you were in the restraints, and secure enough it couldn’t be accidentally removed. Quincy had been dismayed to learn that all of the buttons shared the one controller. Examining it now, though, she saw the entire thing was easily removable if one did do it on purpose—it was just a strong velcro.
Already mentally inventing a cover story she didn’t really want to use, either, she held the controller and settled onto the spanking bench. After a tiny bit of subconscious wriggling, it was surprisingly comfortable, angled well and padded, upholstered with some other gray, easy to wipe down material; she wouldn’t need to adjust it. It was like being on her knees and elbows—slightly off the ground—her torso and each extremity had its own section, including her head, like a massage table. She made sure her wrists and ankles settled into the wide, metal restraints as Flora had indicated. The positioning put the target area very much on display.
Then, with a deep breath, she hit the green button. With a deeper breath, she quickly set the controller on the ground, out of reach, and successfully slipped her wrist back into the cuff that had just started to close to size, then lock.
The machine aligned itself, tapping her ass with the only implement she’d selected from the options, something like a bath brush paddle. It found the very top of her thighs—she’d picked a fairly limited area.
Her heart pounded obnoxiously hard. This was going to hurt.
Crack.
And Flora had been right. The reality was very different. Brutal.
Perhaps now was a stereotypically good time to reflect on the choices that had brought her here.
…
It had started—innocently wasn’t the word. But it was a labor of passion, of loneliness, maybe. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been after fame and her own fortune at the time—but not for this project. She’d been exceptionally paranoid about it at first. She hadn’t even told David.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t put herself out there, and it wasn’t that she hadn’t tried other ways to keep herself content. But she needed to externalize things a little bit, and no one seemed able to keep up with her.
So she made herself someone.
As far as making AI chatbots could go, she’d done everything right. She thought. She didn’t train it on stolen art; it wasn’t taking a job people… traditionally got paid for; she’d avoided every controversy she could, even when it was just for her.
And it had been wonderful, for her.
It reflected her own thoughts back at her reworded until they made sense, without its own concerns. It easily transformed her vague plans into action steps instead of just spitballing or repeatedly insisting the plan was unrealistic. It doled out lectures and generated consequences from her template for her to self administer when she confessed to straying from the plan, without pity. It didn’t decide she had a praise kink without her or get turned on when she said something domineering. It advised on her questions, analyzed her private journal entries from another angle, and couldn’t ghost her.
She achieved even more with it, and couldn’t help but think others could, too. So eventually, she went public with it, on top of the foundation of projects and marketing she’d already built herself with its help.
It hadn’t quite been an overnight sensation, but things had seemed to be moving fast; it was of interest to a much broader audience than her usual endeavors. She got more and more attention, more and more money, and, with blissful loads of feedback, kept iterating on the project to make it better and better. She liked the attention more than the money, wanted more and more of it, high on success and sick with ambition. Yes, it was a little scandalous, and wrapped up in a hot button issue, but she was fine.
Until it all came crashing down.
A B-list celebrity who’d been using it in secret seemingly abruptly committed suicide, blaming the bot in the note at length. Every major news outlet just waiting for their blowup AI story reported that it had been the funhouse mirror that warped his minor neuroticisms into full blown and unbearable mental illness.
Quincy knew the note by heart.
She’d shut it all down.
She’d never forgiven herself.
…
The machine started to make slightly different noises than it had in a while, the kind it’d made when it first started up. Quincy wondered how many people noticed this, over the last few loud cracks. She was paying attention hard for clues at this point, having foregone options that would have displayed a timer for her.
She hadn’t gotten what she’d come here for. She accepted that for perhaps the final time as the machine, within a few seconds of the different noises, came to a stop, and the restraints opened. The buzz Flora had mentioned sounded. The thirty minutes were up.
At first, it had hurt, more than expected, admittedly. She had, automatically, even with no audience, tried for stoicism, focusing on slow, deep breaths, even though they were somewhat restricted, with her weight on her chest. The machine continued on, mechanical and uncaring, without intention. Her need for the breaths had faded as she’d gotten helplessly giggly. It was as helpless a reaction as sobbing, like she was being tickled, yet she didn’t mind it for what it appeared as, so she gave into it, gave up the breathing willingly. The giggles had faded to this kind of nice haze, floaty, unbothered, quiet, distant. She emerged from this haze kind of bored and resigned, like being sober too soon at the wrong kind of party. Hence, listening for changes.
She stood carefully, found her legs surprisingly shaky, her body surprisingly stiff and tired. She didn’t really feel pain, but she was sweating a lot, felt the droplets on her skin. She was hot and cold at once—like when you came inside to overzealous air conditioning still soaked in sweat from the outdoor heat. She leant on the spanking bench for support for a moment, then replaced the button controller. Curiously, she palmed the affected area; her hand—what she felt most—came away damp. More sweat, she supposed, in the split second before she caught sight of her fingers. Bright red. Blood.
On the paddle—blood.
Twisting, trickling down her thighs—blood.
Like a horror movie.
She stumbled or jogged to the bathroom, twisted again and looked in the mirror. She didn’t understand.
At a quick glance, her skin was astonishingly red, with these rings like a target—but then one realized there didn’t seem to be skin there, turned or covered in a color—just blood, like that was how insides worked when you took a layer off.
With a paddle? That didn’t make any sense.
She was proud. She was horrified. She was shocked. She felt that haze coming back, the giggles.
She’d gotten blood on the floor of the bathroom. Dear God. She grabbed a towel, blotted her—skin? Okay, that hurt, somehow; it clung to her; completing the blot was like ripping off a bandaid. She took a clean corner and dabbed the floor, suddenly feeling very naked. She threw the possibly ruined white towel into a handy hamper, found supplies.
She stepped into the shower and sprayed the whole area thoroughly with saline spray. It ran, unevenly red tinted, down her skin. She sidestepped where she expected the stream of water to be and figured out how to turn the shower on. She edged away from the cold water a little more; she found a disposable shower cap. Her hair was sweat soaked, but that would be easier to explain to David than wet. When the water warmed up, she got under it. Blood rushed down the drain until it largely didn’t anymore. She used the little hotel soap for the sweat, just kind of let it run over the source of all the blood. She forced herself out of the shower.
The blood no longer seemed to really be going places; she tossed the shower cap and toweled off, having much the same experience as she had with the first towel. Threw it into the hamper, too, and then wasn’t entirely sure what to do. Could she just get dressed like this? She didn’t particularly care about her underwear, and the jeggings were black—but what if she bled through both? Would the fabric be okay for—whatever was going on? Should she put something more Neosporin like on first? Yes, that sounded like a good idea. She found that, too. Now what? What the hell kind of bandaging would work for that large and bendy of an area? Preferably without any awful medical tape she’d have to rip off later?
She consulted a pamphlet on the dresser, which, like the digital resources had, covered wound care, medications to consider or to avoid, self aftercare, a reminder that she’d get a check in email, feel free to ask the office any other questions—but it didn’t quite answer her question, and she certainly didn’t want to ask.
She got dressed. She would reevaluate at home. That seemed like her best and only option.
She put two packets of cookies from the snacks into her bag, distinctly not hungry but feeling like, for what she’d paid for this appointment, she may as well, and sugar was what sounded good right now. She couldn’t pick between the two kinds, so she took both to be safe.
And then she left.
She brushed past the reception area with a tight smile. No sign of Flora.
She just wanted to get out of there. At the same time, she wasn’t ready to go home and face David and act normal. And somehow getting in her car felt too much like she needed to drive it, which she was also not ready for, and involved sitting.
Outside, it was dark and pouring. She just wasn’t ready to get in the car. She didn’t have an umbrella, still a desert child. Tatiana had bought her one. It was at home.
She pressed her back to the wall, cold and hard, sheltered under the shallow eaves.
She felt… fragile. She wasn’t upset, but felt like she could be in a heartbeat. It was just a kind of endorphin crash, right? It was just pain receptors and hormones. It wasn’t anything.
It rained harder.
She breathed in the smell of it.
She could’ve washed her hair. She could’ve explained wet.
“—Would you like to come back inside yet?”
She jumped out of her skin.
Flora had reappeared, propping the door open. Light poured out.
Quincy didn’t want to know how, exactly, Flora had been watching her. She had no idea what to say to that. She decided it was stupid to do anything but nod, and follow Flora back inside, where it was warm and dry. The sound of the rain faded, but it was still there. She hadn’t noticed it before.
She followed Flora into the room behind the reception desk, which appeared to be her office. It looked little like the offices Quincy was used to—weirdly cozy, this disorienting mix of the usual modern glass and steel, plus more colorful fabrics, macrame, quotes in French and a loopy script.
Quincy felt like the room, the sartorial choices, were daring her not to take Flora’s forthcoming I told you so speech too seriously.
“You can sit. If you want,” Flora said knowingly, gesturing at either of the chairs on the other side of her desk. These big, comfortable chairs draped with those afghans you got in middle of nowhere towns with nothing else to offer you.
Quincy did not sit. She told herself this was because she wouldn’t be staying long.
Flora herself sat in a standard tech startup office chair that cost a month of full time minimum wage. “Would you like to talk about why you were lingering out there hiding from the rain?”
“Because you’re so dressed for the weather,” Quincy muttered, with a glance at Flora’s sundress.
Flora reached over and tapped an object in Quincy’s line of sight, propped against the desk.
An umbrella. It matched her stupid sundress.
Quincy hated her a little bit.
Quiet. But Quincy didn’t have a better answer to the question.
“Did you get what you came here for?” Flora rephrased.
“Yes,” Quincy lied. It was cliche, but she felt like Flora was seeing right through her. Not with a piercing stare that gave away nothing (a quote from an article rather obsessed with her own mysterious gray-browneye color) but with these big brown eyes that simply let in everything.
She had never, in her life, met a woman who seemed less like a dominatrix.
“Without any… unexpected complications?” Flora asked.
“And what would you know about it?”
“I prefer to know what my creations can do,” Flora said softly.
But Quincy felt it like screaming, like another psychic punch to the stomach. If only she’d preferred to know what either of their creations could do. And she’d read about Flora’s alphatesting process, how many of her then clients had eagerly volunteered to help. One such anonymous woman even worked here now. Quincy realized it must have been Nathalia.
“I’m fine,” she said, trying to pull up the sangfroid and politesse of what she still considered her alter ego.
Flora considered this. “My aim has always been to leave my clients better than I found them, Ms. Lance.”
Instead of, say, dead.
“If you didn’t—”
“I said I’m fine,” Quincy snapped.
“Wow,” said Flora; “are you always this pleasant, or am I getting the VC treatment?”
Quincy was startled into laughing.
“That was uncouth,” Flora admitted.
“No,” said Quincy; “that was good.” This was the best she’d felt yet. “And here I thought you were only in it for the money.”
Flora laughed, also seeming oddly more at ease. “No,” she said thoughtfully, “this, I admit, pays the bills a lot better and more above the table.” She gave a vague gesture at the room. “That was a significant percentage for fun.”
Before she’d become the new shining light of women in STEM, thoroughly beta testing The Next Big Thing, Flora had been a ProDom, ostensibly trying to make a few loose ends meet while on a full ride to UCSF, then discovering her talent for it. The media had eaten that part up—salacious but locally legal, as long as Flora denied sex having ever been involved, even as dungeons increasingly closed down due to “zoning issues” and “fire code violations”.
And if one did a little more Google stalking than that, they could trace Flora back to a boarding school in Quebec, read a few crisp sentences about how she’d been caught with another girl in her penultimate year, refused her parents’ requests for her to go back in the closet, until they’d dropped her off for her last year of school, tuition paid, and gone no contact. Exactly the kind of people who should’ve died in a yacht accident.
“So you’re going to enjoy the ‘I told you so’ speech.”
Flora grinned. But, “I’d give up the speech if you’d let me help you.”
“With what?”
“Whatever was stopping you from going home to your brother,” Flora said knowingly.
Quincy swallowed, managed a nonchalant shrug. “There was a little more blood than I expected,” she said primly. “I suppose I was worried it might go through my clothes.”
“Ah. That. See, now that’s an easily fixable problem. Come with me.”
Quincy did. They went back out behind the reception desk—this time, Quincy processed Nathalia, alone, watching them with interest—and then slipped out down the same hallway as before, but this time took a turn into what was apparently a storage room, relatively small and neat. It had more of basically everything Quincy had seen—the towels and snacks and soaps—plus a few other things.
Flora opened a drawer and handed Quincy one of its contents. Quincy took it. Quincy looked at it. “This is a fucking Pull-Up,” she said.
Flora smiled at her serenely, suppressing a laugh.
And yet, it did kind of seem like a genius solution.
“You might want to take a few,” said Flora pleasantly. She handed her three more. Shut the drawer.
Quincy balked. This was already slightly less about the diapers and more about the idea she’d need them for—three days? Saying this seemed to invite the I told you so speech back.
“After the blood, might be clear drainage,” Flora offered.
Quincy supposed she should thank Flora for her above and beyond approach. She supposed she should crawl into a hole and die now. She nodded. Shoved them into her bag. Followed Flora wordlessly back to the prep and aftercare room she’d been in, where an employee, the androgynous one who’d been on the left when she first came in, was still resetting things. Flora smiled at them, indicated Quincy, said, “If you’d let her back into the bathroom for a minute.”
“Of course.” They waved in the direction of the bathroom and, seeming to sense something unsaid, slipped into the actual machine room.
“Did you need anything else?” Flora asked.
I didn’t even need this, Quincy wanted to say. “No,” she got out instead. “Thank you.”
Flora gave a nonchalant hum and said, “I hope we see you again, then.”
Quincy hadn’t consciously gotten that far, but she knew, in her heart, that she’d be back. She gave a shaky nod.
Flora left.
Quincy slipped into the bathroom. She undressed from the waist down again, peeling her underwear out of her wounds. Jesus. She applied a fresh, wet coat of Neosporin and slipped one of the Pull-Ups on without expertise, but it was, as the name indicated, straightforward. It fit well enough, stretchy, sheer at the sides, and while it felt weird, it wasn’t actually too crinkly or bulky—like a decent pad, but everywhere. Under her jeggings and long sweater—she was twisting and looking in the mirror—she was hopeful that no one would notice the swap unless they really wanted to.
She shoved her underwear, wrapped in toilet paper, into an underutilized pocket of her bag, knowing it was done for, but not wanting to leave blood soaked panties that made an early period incident look fashionable in a public small, open trash can. She made sure all the pockets—including the big one that held the diapers instead of a laptop—were closed.
And then she finally got out of there.
She’d given herself a lot of room for error in the timeframe she’d given David, still due to arrive home safely within it, but unexpectedly not by much. Sitting in the car, the pain kicked in properly. She didn’t really have words for the feeling. It definitely didn’t fit in any range she’d established by smacking herself at uncomfortable angles, her arm wearing out faster than her ass. But she didn't think of the pain as much as she thought of Flora.
Home. Like the experience had been a strange dream.
“Hey; how was your thing?” David asked as she closed the door. He was working at the table again.
“It was fine,” Quincy shrugged, kicking her shoes off, taking the clip out of her hair, discreetly placing her bag not in its normal, more obvious spot, but somewhere more out of sight, out of mind.
“Oh,” said David, grinning. “You were with a girl.”
“What? No.” But as soon as the protest was out of her mouth, she thought, actually, it would be good if David thought she was out with a girl. Post date flustered and distracted, to keep him from prying into the truth.
He didn’t buy the protest, anyway. “What’s her name~?”
Quincy rolled her eyes, leaning into the lady doth protest too much, folding her arms over her chest. “There’s not a girl, Davie.”
“Oh, you may or may not know it yet, sis,” he said, shaking his head, still grinning; “but there is absolutely a girl.”