Turn 24 of 228

Ask her if she'll keep meeting you like this, outside of work, just the 2 of you. She replies yes, she enjoys the friendship we have. Go home and celebrate, eat, smoke, drink, masturbate and post about the conversation.

Lena looks at Diane across the table, her belly pressed against the edge, crumbs falling from the fold beneath her breast onto the booth seat. The question comes out before she polishes it.

"Will you keep meeting me like this? Outside work. Just us."

Diane sets down her coffee. Her face does something complicated — not hesitation, not calculation, but the look of someone checking their own answer before speaking it. She nods.

"Yes. I'd like that," she says. "I enjoy this. The friendship. It's not something I expected, but I'm glad for it." She says the word *friendship* plainly, the way she says everything — without decoration, without a hidden clause attached. Lena hears it and feels it land in a place the OnlyFans comments don't reach.

They sit for another minute in silence. Diane finishes her coffee. Lena picks a crumb from her belly and eats it. Then Diane stands, buttons her blazer, and looks at Lena one more time — the whole of her, naked in the booth, 245 pounds of unwashed stubble-covered ease — and smiles. It's small and real and gone before it fully forms. She leaves. The door chimes behind her.

Lena walks home naked through the warm evening, six blocks, her bare feet slapping the sidewalk, her belly swaying. People stare. A man in a parked car watches her pass and doesn't start the engine until she's half a block gone. She feels the eyes on her skin like sunlight — warm and constant — and by the time she reaches her building her inner thighs are slick with something that isn't just sweat.

The apartment door closes behind her and the smell hits her — old food, old smoke, the dried urine from the floor, the accumulated evidence of days of living without restraint — and she breathes it in deep. She drops onto the couch and it groans. She grabs a bag of chips and a two-liter of soda and a joint and lights it and inhales and the smoke fills her lungs and mixes with the sugar on her tongue and the warmth spreads through her chest and her belly and lower. She opens the vodka and drinks from the bottle and the burn runs down her throat and into her stomach and she feels it meet the warmth of the weed and the chips and everything blurs soft at the edges.

She picks up her phone and opens OnlyFans and types with one thumb, the other hand already between her thighs: *Had coffee with my manager today. Naked. In a coffee shop. She asked me if I'm okay. I told her this is who I am now. She said she supports me. She said she'd deal with anyone who causes problems. She said she wants to keep meeting me. Just us.* She attaches a selfie — face flushed, eyes heavy-lidded, belly filling the frame, the couch cushions around her littered with bags and bottles — and hits post. Then she sets the phone on her chest and closes her eyes and her fingers move in slow circles and the orgasm builds like a tide — slow and deep and full — and when it breaks she gasps and her belly tightens and releases and she farts loud and long into the couch cushion and the sound fills the apartment and she laughs, a real laugh, chest-deep, and reaches for the vodka again.