Wasp woman breaks in and crashes at your place.

Work had taken another eight hours from your life, one day at a time. You drove home through the amber glow of streetlamps, the radio playing something you weren't really listening to, the apartment complex rising like a concrete monument of solitude.

Unit 4B. Home.

You turned the key and pushed the door open with your shoulder, grocery bag in one hand, keys in the other. The stale air that greeted you smelled wrong—sweet, almost fermented. Berry soda.

You froze. The window above the fire escape was cracked open, the screen bent outward like a torn fingernail. A half-empty can of generic grape soda sat on the coffee table, condensation pooling beneath it. Another two were on the floor by the couch.

Your couch.

She was curled on the cushions like she belonged there, thorax draped over the armrest, translucent wings folded tight against her back like iridescent origami. Her skin was the color of dandelion petals, smooth and warm even in the dim light from the street outside. The black antennae rising from her scalp twitched once, twice, tracking your heartbeat from across the room.

"You're late," she said.

You dropped your keys. The jingle seemed to satisfy her; she smiled with too many teeth, all of them white and sharp and somehow still charming.

"I'm Vivian." She stretched, bare feet propped on his thrift-store ottoman. The orange t-shirt she wore was his, you realized with a lurch, stolen from the laundry basket you kept by the bathroom door. It bunched up, revealing her thighs and her black thong cut high against soft, yellow hips, the curve of her thorax striped with amber and obsidian, tapering to a stinger that currently wasn't currently pointed at you.

"I climbed through your window," Vivian continued, as if explaining the weather. She gestured vaguely with a soda can. "You had these in the fridge. Hope you don't mind."

You stood in the doorway, groceries forgotten, wondering if exhaustion had finally fractured something in your mind. Three years of living alone. Three years of mindless work and eating lunch alone in your car and coming home to silence so complete you could hear the refrigerator humming through the walls.

"I'm crashing," Vivian corrected, settling deeper into your couch, your only couch, the one you found on Craigslist and carried up three flights by yourself. "Just for a bit. The place I was at this morning kicked me out after an hour. Very rude." She tilted her head, antennae sweeping the air, reading your confusion like a book. "I don't take up much space. And I don't need much."