I get to my desk at eight-thirty, like always, coffee in one hand, the other smoothing the front of my knee-length pencil skirt. The office is already humming with quiet keyboards and low voices. My blouse is buttoned to the collar and my hair is pinned back, and I settle into my chair the way I settle into most rooms: without drawing attention.

I am good at that. I am a data analyst. I spend my days inside spreadsheets, where nothing looks at me and nothing expects me to talk. I am twenty-eight years old, and in four years at this company I do not think I have said more than fifty words at a stretch to anyone but the woman who orders the coffee.

The first note is waiting on a Tuesday, folded small and tucked beneath my keyboard. I open it behind my monitor, pretending to check a figure.

You look beautiful today.

My cheeks go warm. I glance around the cubicles, but nobody is looking at me. Nobody ever is. I slide the paper into my top drawer, and I run the usual reports, and my pulse stays a little faster than normal until lunch.

Wednesday there is another one, in the drawer this time. Your smile when you think nobody sees it makes me hard.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, with my hand flat on my stomach, because something has started to hum underneath it. I do not know who writes like this. I do not know who would think of me, plain Lila in her buttoned-up blouses, and want to say it. I only know that I put the note in the drawer with the first one, and that when I stand up to refill my coffee my knees are not entirely steady.

By Friday the messages are bolder.

I wonder if your nipples are as pink as I imagine, pressing against that plain white bra.

Heat floods between my legs so fast it frightens me. I cross my ankles. I feel the cotton of my panties shift against skin that has gone slick, and I keep typing as though nothing is happening, because all around me the office is perfectly ordinary. Phones ring. A printer jams. Someone in accounts laughs at a joke I did not hear. I stare at a column of numbers and see none of them.

It is Friday evening, with the floor emptying around me, that I do the thing I never expected to do. I take a pen from my cup and a yellow sticky note from the pad, and I write three words on it. Who are you? I stick it under my keyboard before I go home, and I do not sleep well all weekend.

On Monday there is a reply.

Someone who would like to be told to stop. Tell me to stop and I will.

I read it standing at my desk with my coat still on. I read it until my hands are shaking, and then I write on the back, in handwriting that does not look like mine: Don’t.

That is how it starts. It becomes, over three weeks, the strangest correspondence of my life. I leave my answers in the drawer, and his come back in the morning, and I never see who delivers them. He tells me what he notices. He tells me, in plain, unhurried sentences, how my inner thighs tremble when I shift in my chair. He tells me that he would like to see the tight pink ring between my cheeks, the part of me I touch only when I am alone at night, and that the thought of seeing it, of putting his mouth on it, has kept him awake for a week.

I read that one in the bathroom stall with one hand braced on the door and the other pressing between my legs through my skirt, and I come so quietly I bite the inside of my cheek. I stand there afterward, breathing, with my face burning. I have never told anyone that I touch myself there. I have never told anyone that I wonder.

I write back: How did you know?

The answer comes the next morning. I pay attention. Was I right?

I look at that for a long time. Then I write, with my heart going like a trapped bird: Yes.

I never report the notes. I never throw one away. By the end of the third week there are twenty-three of them, folded and flat at the bottom of my drawer, and I carry them all day long like a secret in my pocket. Each morning I check the drawer before I take off my coat. Each evening I leave at six with my thighs slick and my mind racing, and I go home and make dinner and stand at my own kitchen counter with my hand between my legs, thinking about a mouth I cannot picture.

The note that changes everything is waiting on my keyboard when I come back from the break room on the Thursday before the holiday weekend.

Tonight I will show you how much I have wanted to. Stay late. If you don’t want it, go home and I will never mention it. I mean that.

My fingers shake as I fold it. I put it in the drawer with the others and I stay at my desk, pretending to finish a report, while the office lights go off one section at a time. The holiday weekend has emptied the place early. Desks are cleared, chairs tucked in, screens dark. The air handlers hum. A printer somewhere ticks and settles.

I have an hour in which to leave. I know that. I sit with my coat over the back of my chair and my handbag at my feet, and every few minutes I think: I could go. Each time I think it, the heat between my legs gets worse instead of better. I clench my thighs. I look at my screen. I do not go.

The final elevator dings. The last voices fade down the corridor. And then I hear footsteps, a heavier tread, and I know it before I see him.

Marcus stops at the edge of my cubicle.

He is the IT guy. He is thirty-two and six foot two, broad through the shoulders, with thick forearms and a trimmed dark beard and the kind of steady brown eyes that I have been looking away from in meetings for two years. He is the man who comes to my desk when my machine crashes, who leans across me to type a command and smells of cedar and clean cotton, who never says anything more than try that now. I have thought about his hands. I have never once thought about the rest.

“Just checking the network drop,” he says, in his low, even voice, with a cable in one hand he is clearly not inspecting.

I nod without looking up. My pulse jumps anyway.

He stays longer than he needs to. The cologne drifts over the partition. When the last echo of the corridor has died and the main door has clicked shut, he straightens, and he walks to the entrance, and I hear the deadbolt turn with a solid, final thunk. He comes back. He stops behind my chair. I feel the warmth of him through my blouse without his touching me.

“It was me,” he says quietly. “Every note.”

I close my eyes.

“There’s something else,” Marcus says, “and you should hear it from me before anything else happens.” His voice is level, but I can hear what it costs him. “There are cameras on this floor. They feed to the server room, where I work. I’ve been watching you on them for months. At your desk, after hours, when you think the floor is empty.” A breath. “I know how you touch yourself, Lila. Through your skirt, with the chair pushed in. I know how you bite your lip. I wrote the notes from what I saw.”

For a moment I cannot feel my hands.

It is nearly every private thing I have done in this building. “Not the restrooms,” he adds, as if he has heard me think it. “Never. There’s nothing in them, and I never looked for anything.” But it is the late nights and the careful, trembling, secret hours at my desk, the ones I thought belonged only to me. I think of the evenings I stayed late on purpose, with my thighs slick and my pulse in my ears, and a small red light on the ceiling that I have walked beneath ten thousand times and never once looked at. Shame goes through me like a scald. Under it, right beneath it, so close that I cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, something hotter.

“You watched me,” I whisper.

“Yes.”

“For months.”

“Yes.” He does not look away. “It was wrong. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t. I should have said something the first week, or stopped. I didn’t, because I’m a coward, and because I’d never seen anything like you.” His jaw works. “Tonight I deleted every recording I had, and I’ve turned off the feed to my screen. You can check. And if you want me to unlock that door and go, I will, and tomorrow I’ll go to HR and tell them what I did. You don’t owe me one word.”

I do not know what I expected. I had built a man out of paper and ink, and a voice in the dark, and some part of me had been waiting for him to turn out to be frightening. He is only standing behind my chair with his hands open at his sides, a little pale about the mouth, as nervous as I am. A man who watched me, and confessed it, and is standing here prepared to lose his job.

I think of two dozen notes in a drawer. I think of every one I answered.

“You should have asked,” I say.

“I know.”

“You should have asked me before you ever looked.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

I hear him swallow. “Lila—”

“Say it. All of it. If you’re going to be in this with me, I want to hear what you know.”

He says it. He says it quietly and exactly, the way he explains a network fault: the Friday I read the nipples note and my breath changed and I crossed my ankles for ten minutes, the night I pushed my chair in and slid my hand beneath my skirt and held absolutely still, with my eyes closed, until I came without a sound. By the time he finishes my face is burning and my legs are pressed so hard together that my thighs ache. The shame has not gone. But it has gone somewhere I did not know it could go. It has turned into a different kind of heat, bright and low, and I know with sick, dizzy certainty that I will be thinking about this for the rest of my life.

“What did you mean,” I say, in a voice that is not entirely mine, “in the notes? About what you wanted to do.”

“I meant it exactly the way I said it.”

“Say it again.”

I hear him breathe.

“I want to bend you over the conference table,” Marcus says, very low, “and lift your skirt, and kneel down behind you. And I want to put my mouth on your ass and not stop until you’re shaking. I want to taste you, Lila. All of you. But that first.”

My nipples are doing the thing his note described, pushing at the cotton of my bra, hard and sensitive and obvious beneath my blouse.

“No one’s ever,” I begin, and cannot finish it.

“I know.”

“I’m not— I don’t know if I’d—”

“Then we’ll go slowly. You’ll tell me if it’s too much, and I’ll stop, and it won’t change a single thing between us.” He waits. “Do you want that? Say it, or say nothing and go home.”

It is the quietest I have ever said anything, and the most certain.

“Yes.”

He takes my hand and pulls me up from the chair as though it is the most natural thing in the world. His grip is warm and firm and perfectly gentle. My legs are unsteady as he walks me across the dim floor to the big conference table by the windows. The city glows outside, a field of small lights. In here everything feels too exposed, though only the emergency lamps are on.

He stops me at the end of the table. He turns me by the shoulders until I am facing the polished wood.

“Tell me again,” he says.

“Yes.”

“Bend over for me.”

I put my palms on the table. I lean forward. The wood is cool through my blouse, and then against my cheek as he presses one hand between my shoulder blades and bends me down, gently, until my forehead is almost touching the surface. My heart is pounding so hard I think he must hear it. I feel the hem of my skirt slide up the backs of my thighs. Cool air touches the skin above my stockings. I feel him gather the fabric and bunch it at my waist.

His fingers hook into the waistband of my plain white cotton briefs.

“These are very you,” he murmurs. “I have wondered about them for two years.”

“Marcus.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve never—” It comes out as a whisper. “No one has touched me there. Not ever.”

His hands go still against my hips.

“Not even yourself?”

“Only a little.”

I hear his breath leave him in a rush. When he speaks his voice is rough. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll be careful, I promise. If it’s wrong, or you want me to stop, say stop. Any word. I will hear it.”

“Okay.”

He draws my panties down over the curve of my ass, slowly, until they sit just beneath my cheeks, and then he takes both cheeks in his hands. They are big hands. They cover me. He squeezes once, as if learning my shape, and then he spreads me wide.

I cannot describe what it is to be looked at there. The air touches the small, tight ring that no one has ever seen. I feel it flutter. I feel my face burn, and I grip the table edge until my knuckles go white, and I think: he can see all of me. I have never been so exposed. I have never been so hot.

“God, Lila,” he whispers. “Look at you. You’re so pink.”

I make a small, helpless sound.

Then he is on his knees. I hear the soft rustle of his slacks against the carpet, and I feel his breath on me, warm and close, before his mouth.

The first touch is his tongue.

It is flat and wet and hot, laid directly against the puckered center of me, and I jerk so hard that the table shifts. A startled noise comes out of my throat. He holds me open with his thumbs and licks again, slowly, dragging the soft muscle across my skin in one long, deliberate stroke. It is so strange. It is so intimate that I cannot find any word for it. There is nothing sharp in it, nothing hurried, only the slow, patient warmth of his mouth on the place I have always kept hidden.

“Oh god,” I breathe. “That feels— Marcus, that’s so strange.”

He hums against me, a low sound that vibrates straight into my body. He licks again. He circles the rim with the tip of his tongue, a tiny wet ring, and then another, and my legs begin to tremble. Slick runs down my thighs from the front of me. I can feel how wet I am. It embarrasses me and it does not matter.

“Is it all right?” he asks, against my skin.

“I don’t know.” I laugh, a shaky, astonished sound. “Yes. I think so. Don’t stop.”

“I won’t.”

He doesn’t. He settles in. I can feel him get comfortable behind me, one knee sliding wider, his hands finding a better hold, and then he puts his whole mouth on me and begins to lick with a patience that makes me whimper. Long, slow strokes. Soft kisses between them, small and open, that make the wet sounds of his mouth shamelessly loud in the empty room. He licks from just beneath my pussy all the way up across my crack, and back, and back again, and every time he passes over the center of me my whole body clenches.

“You taste like soap,” he says, and I hear the smile in it. “And you. Mostly you.”