Turn 28 of 228

Check reactions to the office floor post on the way home. Confirm with Diane via text about Thursday coffee at Marlow's. Stop at the bodega for more food on the way home. Stop at the game store to pick up the latest consol and games.

Lena sits in the back of the bus with her phone in one hand and a warm soda in the other, the afternoon light slanting through the window and catching the grease on her bare skin. She opens OnlyFans and the office floor post has already passed everything she's put up before — a hundred and four likes in two hours. The subscriber count reads ninety-one. Comments pile on top of each other: *you actually did this at WORK?*, *the carpet comment is sending me into orbit*, *I'm reporting this and also I'm subscribed and also I can't stop*, *the fact that you're still employed is the funniest thing on this website.* A twenty-dollar tip arrived forty minutes ago with the message *you're going to get caught and I want to be here when it happens.* She reads the comments twice and feels the familiar heat build — not just between her legs but in her chest, in her belly, in the warm core of her that the wish unlocked. She's being seen. She's being seen for exactly what she is and people are paying for it.

She switches to her text thread with Diane. *Still on for Thursday? Marlow's, 5:15?* The reply comes in under a minute: *Confirmed. I'll be there. Looking forward to it.* Lena pockets the phone and pulls the bus cord and steps out barefoot onto the hot sidewalk. The bodega is three blocks from her stop and she walks the distance slowly, her belly swaying, her bare feet slapping the concrete. The afternoon crowd thins around her the way water thins around a stone — people step aside, look away, look back. A teenager films her from across the street and she doesn't speed up or slow down.

The bodega clerk — the one who's seen her before, the one who sold her snacks in the destroyed bikini last week — looks up from behind the counter and his face does the thing it always does. He doesn't speak. Lena walks the aisles naked and fills a basket with chips, cookies, donuts, two liters of soda, a sleeve of cup noodles, a bag of jerky, and a family-size box of cheese crackers. She sets it on the counter and he rings it through without a word and she pays with her phone and the tip jar sits there and she doesn't put anything in it. She takes the bags and walks out and the door chimes behind her.

The game store is two blocks further, tucked between a laundromat and a nail salon, and Lena has never walked into it naked before. She pushes through the door and the air conditioning hits her skin and her nipples tighten and the guy behind the counter — mid-twenties, beard, a lanyard with a store logo — looks up from a magazine and his mouth opens and stays open. She's 245 pounds of unwashed stubble-covered naked woman standing in the narrow aisle between racks of used controllers and the smell of her fills the small space immediately. She picks up the new console box from the display shelf — heavy, sleek packaging — and grabs three game cases from the wall without reading the titles. She sets them on the counter and the guy stares at her and his hands don't move.

"Ring these up," she says.

He does. His fingers shake on the scanner. The total comes up and she pays with her phone and picks up the bags and the console box and tucks it under one arm and walks out. He says nothing. She doesn't look back. The walk home is six blocks with the bodega bags in one hand and the console under the other arm and her body bare and heavy and the late afternoon sun warm on her skin. She reaches her building and climbs the stairs and the bags pull at her arm and her thighs burn and her belly presses against the console box with each step. She lets herself into the apartment and the smell hits her — her smell, the floor mess, the couch stains, the accumulated days — and she drops everything on the kitchen counter and stands in the doorway and breathes it in and feels the pride swell again, hot and solid. She carries the console to the living room and sets it on the floor by the television and plugs it in and sits down on the couch and the cushions accept her weight and she opens a bag of chips and starts the system downloading.