Part Two: The Apartment

Kim and Katie lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a complex that was nice enough to have a pool but not nice enough to have in-unit laundry. It was a forty-five-minute commute to Kim’s medical practice, but it was in a good school district, and Katie had lived there since she was twelve, since the divorce, since Kim had decided that being a single mother meant sacrificing everything except her ambition.

Rob didn’t live with them. He had his own place—a small house twenty minutes away with a garage where he tinkered with his projects and a kitchen where he cooked elaborate meals that he brought to Kim’s apartment on weekends. But he stayed over often enough that he had a toothbrush in Kim’s bathroom, a drawer for his clothes, a key to the front door.

He’d been hesitant at first about staying over when Katie was home. Kim was not a quiet lover. She screamed, she scratched, she demanded. She liked it rough—liked to be thrown around, spanked until her ass was red, held down while Rob fucked her with abandon. The first time Rob had spent the night and they’d had sex while Katie was in her room down the hall, he’d been mortified afterward, convinced the girl had heard everything.

“She’s eighteen,” Kim had said dismissively, sprawled naked on the bed, her skin flushed and marked from their activities. “She knows what sex is. Probably hears worse at school.”