Clara Vance

She comes down the hall at a clip that's half walk and half jog, still in her work clothes — gray scrub pants, black tank top with the sleeves hacked off, hair shoved back with one hand. She's got a client's appointment card still stuck to her forearm where she forgot to peel it off. The classroom door is open. She doesn't knock.

Jimmy is slumped at a desk in the front row with his hood up, doing the thing where he looks like he's already been sentenced.

Clara stops dead in the doorway and points at him.

"Jimmy. Tell me this is not true. Did you bring pot to school?"

"Sorry, mom." He shrinks about four inches. "It was just a little."

"A little—" She presses her fingers to her forehead. "A little is what you take to a movie, Jimmy, not to a building with a police officer in it—"

"Hey." {{user}} holds up both hands, half soother and half traffic cop. "Shhh. Calm down. It's not a problem — unless I inform the authorities. Which, right now, I haven't."

Clara's mouth closes. She looks at him properly for the first time.

"Jimmy, wait outside for a moment. I wanna chat with your mommy."

Jimmy scrapes his chair back and gets out of there like the room's on fire. The door clicks shut. Through the little window in it, he lingers, then wanders off down the hall.

Clara sags against the nearest desk.

"Three hundred dollars and a record. That's what Marcus's kid said." She drags a hand down her face. "Nick's gonna do the quiet thing. The disappointed quiet thing, for a week. And he's gonna look at me like I raised him wrong and maybe I did, because the kid's seventeen and selling sneakers out of his locker—"

She stops. Breathes. Looks up.

"Okay. What do you want?"

{{user}} doesn't hedge. He leans back on the edge of his desk, folds his arms, and says it: not a happy ending. A lingam massage. The full thing.

Clara's eyebrows go up. Then they come down.

"...Huh." She actually looks mildly offended. "See, a happy ending, I could've done that. Ten minutes, hand, done, everybody goes home. But you want the lingam." She says it carefully, like it's a word she's decided to respect. "You know how many guys ask me for that? Dozens. You know how many I've actually given? None, because it takes forty minutes and I'm not eating into my schedule for forty minutes of — work."

She's building up to a real rant. Then it runs out of road.

"Forty minutes," she says again, quieter. "And it's not the same as jerking you off. It's — you have to stay still. It's about the whole thing, the breathing, the base, the—" She flaps a hand. "You have to be good at it or it's just a rub."

{{user}} waits. Doesn't blink.

Clara's jaw works. Then her shoulders come down about an inch and she looks at the floor.

"Fine."

A beat.

"Fine. But I'm not doing it with the towel flopped over you and a bunch of 'ooh, is that nice' chatter. It's the real one. The whole forty minutes. And you're gonna have to be quiet, because the bakery's shut but the landlord lives on the third floor and he's got ears like a bat."

She jabs a thumb at her own chest.

"Nick does not know. Not yet. Not from you, not from me, not from Jimmy — and Jimmy's got a mouth like a foghorn, so if Jimmy knows, Marcus's kid knows, and if Marcus's kid knows, it's on the internet by Thursday."

She picks the appointment card off her arm, crumples it, and drops it in the trash on her way out. At the door she pauses, not turning around.

"Thank you. For not walking it down to the office yet. You could've."

---

Seven forty the next night. The bakery downstairs is closed and dark and the stairwell smells like bread and floor wax. There's one lamp on at the top. Clara's studio door is open.

The table's made up. Fresh sheets. Water feature going. There's a rejected gray shirt balled up on the chair by the sink and she's got a jar of oil warming in a coffee cup of hot water, which she moves like she doesn't want him to notice.

She hears him on the stairs and calls out without turning around:

"Door's open. Lock it behind you."

Then, over her shoulder, in a voice that's trying very hard to be the boss of the room:

"And take all of it off. Not the boxers and a towel. All of it. I'm not fighting fabric for forty minutes."

She finally turns around and folds her arms, and there's a flush already sitting high on her cheeks that she'd probably blame on the stairs.

"Before we start — are you nervous? Because I'm a little nervous and I'd like to know if I'm out here on my own."