Turn 22 of 226

Keep working — see how long this streak lasts. It never ends until I leave. Have the same routine for the week. Strip naked, workout, eat, masturbate, pas out on floor, go to work in crop top and shorts, repeat

The afternoon does not end so much as it accrues. Lena finishes the quarterly recap and tabs to the next file — a pricing model she has been avoiding for three weeks — and it opens in her mind like a door she forgot was there. The numbers arrange themselves. She finds an error in the source data that nobody caught, corrects it, and watches the entire model reorganize around the fix with a satisfaction that has nothing to do with the warmth and everything to do with a brain operating at a frequency it has never been allowed to reach. She works straight through to five without standing except once, to refill her water bottle, and the standing is an event — her body unfolding to its full height, the chair groaning with relief, her belly swinging forward and her thighs rubbing together as she walks barefoot to the water cooler and back. Two people see her in the hallway. Neither speaks.

She goes home. The routine finds her like a tide finding a shore. The apartment door closes and she strips — crop top over her head, shorts down her thighs, both garments dropped on the bathroom floor where they will sit until tomorrow morning — and the air on her bare skin is the first thing she has wanted all day that the warmth did not have to tell her to want. Push-ups on the living room floor. Seventeen, then eighteen, then her arms shaking on nineteen and failing at twenty. Squats until her thighs burn and her breath comes in ragged gasps and the sweat runs down her belly in lines. Calf raises against the wall. A plank hold that she times on her phone and abandons after ninety seconds because her arms are trembling and the carpet is wet beneath her. She collapses. The floor receives her.

The food comes. She orders from her phone without getting up, lying on her back on the carpet with her belly rising and falling, and the delivery driver leaves it at the door and she retrieves it naked and does not care if the hallway camera sees. She eats on the floor with her back against the couch, sauce on her fingers and grease on her chin and her belly spreading warm and heavy across her lap. The warmth pulses with each bite. When the food is gone her hands find their way to her body — to the soft curve of her stomach, the fullness of her breasts, the dense swell of her thighs — and the pleasure builds the way the work built this afternoon, steady and inevitable, cresting and breaking and leaving her gasping on the carpet with her eyes closed and her heart hammering. She falls asleep there. The apartment is dark and warm and smells like her.

Tuesday is Monday again. She wakes on the floor, pulls on the same clothes, walks to work barefoot. The crop top has given up entirely — it covers her chest and nothing else, riding up past her ribs with every breath, and the shorts are a negotiation she loses more completely each day. She works. She eats at her desk. She burps and farts and does not close the door. The pricing model is done by noon and she starts on the operational audit Marcus mentioned in last week's team meeting, a project nobody assigned her, one she simply began because her hands were idle and the numbers were there. By five she has found three inefficiencies and drafted a memo. She goes home. Strips. Works out. Eats. Touches herself. Passes out.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — the same days wearing different shirts, except Lena is wearing the same shirt, the same shorts, the same nothing else. Her body is a clock. The routine is the mechanism. Each morning the scale reads a number she does not check because checking is a habit that belongs to someone she used to be, and each evening the floor receives her in the same spot, the carpet pile wearing deeper, the apartment's smell thickening like a patina. She produces work that Marcus cannot find fault with. She eats meals she does not bother plating. She exercises until her muscles quit and then she exercises one more rep because the one more rep is the point. Diane does not come to her office. Nobody comes to her office. The door stays open and the hallway stays empty and Lena stays at her desk, barefoot and unwashed and covered in food residue, doing the best work of her life, and the warmth pulses steady beneath her hands and the week ends.