Turn 7 of 11

Bring up the fact that through this job you have been forming an incredible, attractive, erotic harem of women at the call of yourself and your ever-beautiful lesbian lover, Sasha [as these comments are made, more beautiful women begin to fill the house and you and Sasha fall deeper into love and increasing beauty]

You lean into the screen, into the warm wash of the call's blue light, and you feel the words building in your chest like a held breath. But something catches — a flicker, a hesitation, a hairline fracture in the voice that has been so steady all night. You glance at the doorway. Sasha is still gripping the doorframe, and her face is doing something complicated. The gloss is there — the sharper cheekbones, the shinier hair, the pulled-in waist — but underneath it, behind the eyes, there's the girl who sent you stop-sign emojis, the girl who said *I can't*. She's looking at you with an expression that is half terror and half something else, something rawer, and for one unsteady second the two versions of her overlap like a double exposure: the roommate and the model, the friend and whatever the story is turning her into. Your mouth opens. The next sentence is right there — something about a harem, about women, about Sasha as your lover, about beautiful bodies filling the apartment — but it doesn't come out. Not because you can't say it, but because for the first time all night you can feel the weight of what the next lie would do. Not just to the room. Not just to your body. To her. To Sasha, who is standing three feet from you, transformed into someone she doesn't recognize, staring at you with a look that asks a question you don't want to answer. Theo's voice is patient, mild, a warm presence on the other end of the line. "You were saying?" he prompts, his cursor still resting near the search bar. "It sounds like the work has been really transformative for you both." Sasha's hand tightens on the doorframe. Her knuckles are white. She's shaking her head — barely, almost imperceptibly, a motion so small Theo can't see it on his end. But you can. You can see it, and you can feel the next lie sitting behind your teeth, ready to reshape everything again, ready to make the apartment fill with beautiful strangers and the two of you into something more than friends, more than roommates, more than whatever you are right now in this unsteady, flickering moment. And suddenly you let it out. Describing your wonderful lesbian harem and how deeply in love you all are, particularly you and Sasha. You describe the wonderful curve of each other's hips and the incredible fullness of each other's bosoms as you go deeper and deeper.