Diversification
“Hurry up—”
“Stop moving.”
“Aleksa—ah, fuck . . . I’m right—right there, Jesus—can you just—fuck, there, there—”
“Don’t rush me.”
Lili lets out a sound of frustration. “Please,” she pleads angrily. Her toes press against his shoulder blades. “Just—fuck—come on, come on—”
His hand sprawled over her stomach presses down, holding her in place. “Patience.”
“No,” she whispers, frustrated. “No more patience—”
“Settle down, or I’ll leave you like this,” he says, drawing away to look up at her better: her legs slung over his shoulders,
his lips gleaming in the early light from the window.
Knowing she might pay for it later, Lili grabs his hair, and pushes him back down.
Aleksandr just laughs, settling between her thighs again.
“She has bite,” he remarks, spreading her legs wider.
His mouth is hot against her, and Lili’s grip in his hair tightens.
She lets her head fall back against the pillow, so close.
Fever heat starts to break—a low moan from her lips, as she shuts her eyes, as he makes her come, as he holds her down, her hips straining off the bed.
“There you go,” he murmurs, coaxing her through the aftershocks.
Between them, her own breath—cracking, panting—is obscene, but bright; her body is ringing like a bell.
“If I didn’t have to go to work,” he says, kissing along her inner thighs, “I would make you do that again and again.”
“Work is actually a collective societal delusion,” Lili gasps out, pleasure still skittering through her.
“Of course, it is.” He grins, sitting up, checking the fit of his cuff links. He’s fully dressed, but as he adjusts his belt,
she can see that he’s hard.
“Do you need help with that?” she teases, a bit breathless.
Aleksandr smiles, rueful. “I can wait a few hours.”
“Optimistic to think we’ll be having sex again in a few hours.”
“Is that a challenge?”
Lili lifts her chin. “I don’t know, is it?”
“For someone who’s already gotten off multiple times this morning, you’re very belligerent,” he observes.
“I could have been faking it.”
He laughs, amused. “Sure.”
Lili pushes up onto her elbows. “How would you know?” she retorts. “I could have been faking it all this time, and you just
wouldn’t have notice—ah—”
Aleksandr slides his fingers inside of her, three all at once. Lili falls back with a hiss at the chill of his ring, the sudden
surprise of it. The metal of his watch presses cold against her, too. “I know when you come, Lili,” he warns. She inhales
sharply as his fingers start to move. “Trust me. You get even tighter, when you’re close. Even after I’ve made you come a
few times, loosened you up.” He lowers his head to kiss her hip bone. “Your thighs start to shake, and your breathing, it’s
like you can’t finish one breath before you take the next one. I could listen to that all day, the way you sound when you’re
about to come—ah, there it is,” he says, a low laugh, as a stroke of his fingers elicits that response.
But then he’s pulling away, pressing a last quick kiss to her stomach. Lili whines as the warmth of him leaves her.
“Do you have to go to work?” she complains, sitting up in bed. “It’s the weekend.”
“Doing what I can to make the Protestants proud.” From the foot of the bed, he grabs his discarded suit jacket—pressed, British cut, Savile Row today.
His hair is still slightly damp from his shower earlier, getting ready for work while she was still half-asleep.
Heading out the door, he’d leaned down to kiss her, brushing her hair over her bare shoulder.
A kiss that kept going, as she’d pulled him back into bed.
Her phone buzzes on the nightstand. Grabbing it, Lili swipes it open to a fresh email from Eileen, asking if she has bandwidth
to also tackle the employee schedule for August, in addition to the volunteer one. She’s tacked on a postscript: I’m also around anytime to talk about the job offer (salary, start date, etc.)! But totally respect if you just need time
the warmth of him, something she keeps waking up to.
His phone buzzes: a text, work.
“Go,” she says, reluctantly pulling away. She presses one last kiss to his lips, chaste. “Go, you’ll be late.”
“Late is for employees,” Aleksandr says, straightening up. Lili rolls her eyes again, but smiles, watching as he heads for
the door: the line of his back, the fit of his suit.
Out of sight, she hears the ding of the elevator, as she gets out of bed.
“Have a good day!” she shouts after him, walking into the bathroom to take a shower.
Another laugh, his, and the distant sound of the elevator sliding shut, as she grabs her toothbrush from the cabinet, still
smiling to herself.
She listens to music on the train, watching the city flicker by over the bridge as she heads into Brooklyn on the J: blue
sky, reverse commute, the old Domino Sugar factory. She takes the Marcy station stairs down two at a time, almost skipping.
Amina (8:34 a.m.) anyone coming over soon? we ran out of coffee beans
James (8:34 a.m.) help
James (8:34 a.m.) please
James (8:34 a.m.) i am not above begging
Jackie (8:35 a.m.) sorry, won’t be over until pm, on a shoot
James (8:37 a.m.) help
James (8:37 a.m.) i can’t see straight
Lili (8:38 a.m.) omw!
Lili (8:38 a.m.) i’m stopping for coffee and can get beans
Lili (8:38 a.m.) anyone want food or smthing?
James (8:39 a.m.) should we get food?
James (8:39 a.m.) like food for the party i mean
James (8:39 a.m.) like provisions
Amina (8:40 a.m.) ha no, ppl can feed themselves
James (8:41 a.m.) what if people get hungry!?!?!
Amina (8:41 a.m.) they can order a pizza
James (8:42 a.m.) a pizza?!?!??!?!
James (8:42 a.m.) is hospitality DEAD
Amina (8:42 a.m.) didn’t realize i was dating an ues housewife
Smiling, Lili tucks her phone away into her tote as she shoulders open the door to her local coffee shop. The streets of her
neighborhood are comforting. With fresh coffee beans in her bag, one headphone in her ear playing music low, oat latte in
hand, she makes her way up Wythe, relaxed in the easy morning. She passes the colorful window of new book releases at McNally
Jackson, moms with Bugaboos, iced coffees, and Dansko clogs. A pack of runners rush by her, heading towards the waterfront.
I asked Garnier—Simon—for your roommate’s phone number, Aleksandr had said on Friday morning when he’d gotten back from his run. To let her know you were alright. I didn’t intend to be inappropriate, but I thought it best she knew where you were, that
you were safe.
Oh, Lili replied, taken aback. Oh, no, that’s—that was thoughtful of you.
The rest of the weekend had been quiet, together.
When she’d gotten up to make more coffee, leaving a few pages of Cancer Ward to finish later, ready to write, with Aleksandr still on a run, she’d checked her phone. Leaning against the counter, she’d
scanned the group chat, the increasingly concerned messages from her friends that dropped off in the evening, likely when
Aleksandr had contacted Jackie.
Quick, Lili had checked in, sent James an apology for missing his birthday dinner.
She felt a sharp pang of selfishness for disappearing.
She explained the contours of what happened—(7:34 a.m.) some old family stuff came up, i’m so sorry, that was really fucking shitty of me—before settling down to work, snapping open her laptop on the long dining table.
Most of the day, she’d worked on her thesis: coffee, crunch of a honey-gold apple, as she’d struck out more comments and tackled
the final edits, slow and steady. It was a distraction, but a productive one, holding onto the reassurance of routine as those
waves of guilt arose, again.
Guilt—and grief, too. As they washed over her, she tried to shakily breathe through it. She kept working, guided by the quiet
tap of her keyboard under her fingers.
When Aleksandr came back from his run, she’d been deep in her draft, considering an edit from Kerr about the mechanism of
confession within secular societies. Hearing the elevator, she murmured a greeting, absorbed. As Aleksandr walked into the
loft, looking down at his phone, she glanced up briefly—and oh, she shouldn’t like him in running clothes that much, sweat
soaked, breath exhilarated.