LENA
SEVEN
The first week settles into something I didn’t anticipate, which is a rhythm. Not comfortable—I’m still learning which cabinet has the mugs and which drawer has the sharp knives. It’s not a drawer. It’s the magnetic thingy on the wall, which is positioned too high for Opal to reach, thankfully.
There’s a whole corridor off the east wing I’ve walked past a dozen times and won’t try, because I’ve already understood that not trying that door is the right call. But day follows day in a pattern I can track, and after months of barely keeping my head above water, trackable is what I need most.
Call center by day. Penthouse by night. Opal improving by the hour.
That last part is the one I keep thinking about.
Dario adjusts her medication twice in the first week—small calibrations based on what he’s observing, not standard protocol applied without thought.
By day five, she eats a full dinner without stopping to press her hand to her throat.
By day six, her color is better. On day seven, she asks, completely unprompted, whether she can go back to school.
I have to excuse myself to the bathroom for two minutes, because I am not going to cry in this man’s kitchen.
I cry a little in the bathroom. Quietly. Then I wash my face and come back and say yes, absolutely, let’s get your backpack ready.
Dario’s nurse friend Alanda starts the morning after we move in.
She arrives at eight every day with a canvas tote bag and an easy authority that fills a room without crowding it.
Opal takes one look at her and decides she’s wonderful.
By the third morning, Opal is treating breakfast as a performance, working every angle to earn Alanda’s laugh.
Alanda has an enormous laugh, and Opal treats the earning of it as a daily personal achievement worth reporting in detail every night.
Alanda goes home when I get back from work.
We’ve built a handoff routine—a quick rundown of Opal’s day, meds, food, mood—and lately it stretches into fifteen minutes of actual conversation while Opal shows Alanda whatever she drew that afternoon.
I like Alanda in the uncomplicated, unguarded way I like people when I don’t have to think about them. That doesn’t happen often enough.
About five days in, at dinner, Dario looks up from his plate. “You should quit the call center.”
“What? No.”
He sets his fork down. “The commute alone—”
“No,” I say again. “I need something that’s mine. It’s not up for discussion.”
He holds my gaze for a moment, then picks his fork back up and goes back to eating. He doesn’t push it. I wait for the push. It never comes.
What I don’t tell him is the real reason.
The call center is where I exist without context—without the penthouse or the arrangement or Dario’s presence in my peripheral vision at all times.
When I put the headset on, I’m Lena Swan, three years in, who knows the system better than most of her supervisors, working toward becoming one.
That version of me doesn’t need managing. She just works. I need her intact.
I overhear a phone call midweek. His office door doesn’t latch when he’s in a hurry, and his voice carries—clipped, precise. A name comes out clean. Giovanni.
I don’t know a Giovanni. I note it and keep walking, which has been my policy all week.
Visitors come some evenings. They arrive with the braced energy of men who’d rather be somewhere else, and they don’t stay.
The first couple of times I come out of the kitchen with an offer of coffee—a reflex, can’t help it—and they look at me like I’ve materialized from an unexpected dimension.
Dario guides them past with a look that says let it go, so I let it go.
I stop offering coffee to the visitors. It feels wrong, but also like what I’m supposed to do.
Alanda is part of the texture of this place too, and I like her too much to think too hard about which parts she belongs to. She’s a nurse—her hands, her economy of motion, the way she reads a room all say so. Most days, she’s here purely for Opal.
But some days Dario asks her to help with the complicated cases, and on those days she comes out of the back room with the flat, professional face of someone who has done something requiring detachment.
She washes her hands twice at the kitchen sink, and we make tea and talk about Opal’s drawings and don’t talk about anything else.
I don’t ask. She doesn’t offer. That’s its own kind of arrangement.
I grew up knowing what connected looks like.
My uncle ran with people. Nothing that made the news, but I spent enough Saturday dinners watching his friend Paulie come in through the back door to learn the language and signs of it early.
The way a normal life wraps around an irregular center.
The way money runs clean, even when it shouldn’t.
The way certain questions don’t get asked because everyone at the table already knows the answer.
I know what I’m probably living inside right now.
I’ve been telling myself it’s not my business, and I mostly still believe that.
I’m here for Opal. Opal’s color is good, her appetite is back.
She will get to go back to school soon. That’s the reason.
She’s my whole reason for all of this. Even the debt that got me in over my head in the first place.
My baby girl makes it all worth… whatever this is.
On Thursday evening, Opal decides she wants to make pasta from scratch.
The project is based entirely on a cartoon about a Neapolitan chef, and in the time between watching it and dinner, she wants to know about flour-to-egg ratios and presents her case to Dario with the gravity of a business proposal.
“What makes you think I know how to make pasta?”
She frowns. “You’re Italy-ese.”
He loses his composure for a flash, then says, “Italian. And I’m Italian-American, which means… you know what? Alright. Yes, I know how to make pasta. You want to try with me?”
She grins and nods, and they’re off to the kitchen. He clears the counter, gets out flour and eggs, and teaches my daughter to make pasta with the focused patience of a man who has nowhere better to be and wouldn’t go there anyway.
I know for a fact that he has places to be. But he’s choosing to be with Opal. I’m not sure what that means.
Opal wears more flour than ends up in the dough. She presses her floury hands onto the counter, then onto the front of Dario’s shirt—two small handprints, dead center on something that probably costs more than my electric bill. He looks down at them. “Nice work, kid.”
She beams. He doesn’t wipe them off.
I rinse Opal’s face at the sink and watch the two of them across the kitchen in the low evening light. Three months, I tell myself. Only three months. I’ve been saying it as an anchor. I’m not sure it’s doing what it should.
The pasta is uneven and thick, but genuinely delicious. Opal eats two bowls and falls asleep at the table. Dario picks her up without being asked and carries her to bed. I hear him settle her in. I stand in the kitchen with the dirty dishes and feel the tug again.
He comes back and does the dishes without mentioning it.
At work the next day, I take a forty-five-minute call from a man disputing a roaming charge from a country he’s never visited.
By the time I’ve traced it to a cruise his wife apparently took without telling him, I’ve forgotten entirely about the penthouse and the arrangement and the flour handprints on a shirt hanging in a closet I walk past every day.
I’m just Lena Swan doing what she knows how to do.
It’s the best forty-five minutes of the week.
Not counting the time spent in Dario’s bed.
Rhonda stops by my desk later and tells me the supervisor application has gone to the next round. She says it like it’s expected, not a gift. I sit with that for thirty seconds, then put the headset back on. Calls in the queue.
After I take the fourth one from the queue, I get a text and check it immediately, expecting an emergency. My phone is hidden between my desk and my lap, just in case Rhonda or anyone else looks down my row.
It’s Dario. “Was in the shower, thinking about you.”
“Opal okay?”
“Asleep. Doing good. No worries.”
Okay, well, now I’m confused. “What about the shower?”
“I was naked. Made me think of you.”
My cheeks flush hot. “I’m at work.”
“I am aware.”
My eyes roll without a thought.
“And now, I’m in my room, stroking myself while I think of you, Lena.”
I know exactly what he’s thinking. “I’m not even supposed to be taking texts right now.”
The picture he sends isn’t work-safe. It’s him, lying back on his bed, his hard cock in full, prominent view. My mouth waters, and parts of me twitch hard.
“Come home early, and I promise I’ll make you come often.”
I giggle, unable to help it. “You’re impossible.”
“You taste like candy, and I’m craving more.” He’s not going to stop.
I know it. “If I were there, what would you do?”
“Your mouth. I’d mount your pretty lips while I suck on your clit.”
I take a breath and hear the beep. The reminder of the queue. I have to take a call or I’ll get in trouble, so I hit the button and say the opener. But my mind is elsewhere.
Good thing I can do my job on autopilot.
I send Dario, “And after I come on your face, what will you do to me?”
“Who says I’ll let you come like that?”
I smirk down at my phone. “You will. You’re too good to me not to.”
“Spoiled.”
“You’re the one spoiling me.”
“Not this time. This time I’ll make you work for it. I’ll make you take my cock up your ass first.”
More heat rolls through my core. I hate the idea of that kind of thing.
No. That’s not true. I just don’t want to admit it. I’m not sure why exactly.
“Will you let me come with your cock there?”
“I’ll make you. Over and over. Until you’re bucking back for more.”
I take a breath, and the line is silent. I realize I have no idea what the customer needs. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”
She does, but I can’t pay attention. Don’t want to.
I want to be in the penthouse. Naked. On his bed. I send him, “Are you touching yourself?”
“This whole time, pet. Do you like that?”
“Yes.”
“When you get back, it’s going to be like every other night. We’ll play house until you’re in my bed, and then I’m going to make you beg to be mine.”
My body clenches on nothing, and it almost hurts. “Do it. Make me yours. Come for me.”
A delay, and I finish the call.
Then he sends a pic of the mess he made on his stomach. “See what you do to me?”
“Lena—”
I jump, dropping my phone on the floor. Then I look up. “Rhonda. Hi.”
She smiles knowingly and drops her voice. “I’m not going to say anything to anyone about the thing that just hit the floor. We need good supervisors too badly for that. Just… be more careful. Was there any trouble with your line? I saw that you weren’t taking calls for a bit.”
I nod and smile, like I wasn’t just the most turned on I’ve ever been at work. “All good. I think I just need some caffeine. Sort of zoned out.”
“Hit the break button and go get some. Opal okay?”
“She’s doing better, thanks.” I hit the break button and pop up. “Be right back.” I jet to the break room and fill my mug. I can’t believe I just did that.
On the bus home, I think about what that supervisor role actually means.
Real money. Benefits that cover Opal properly.
A trajectory that looks like something I chose rather than something I stumbled into.
I’ve been working toward it for two years, and it’s been just out of reach, and something has shifted.
When I get home and see the drawing on the refrigerator, everything in me stops at once. Opal has taped it there—a tall building with three people inside, all holding hands, a crayon yellow sun in the top corner.
“Opal,” I say, finding her at the kitchen table. “You shouldn’t tape your drawings to his refrigerator. Dario might not—”
“He said to,” she says, without looking up. “He said he likes them there. He said put all my drawings there because he likes seeing them.” She picks up a blue pencil. “So I did.”
I reach out and straighten the drawing slightly. Three people in a tall building, holding hands.
“Do you like it?”
“I love it,” I say.
She goes back to drawing. I stand at the refrigerator a moment longer, my hand still touching the edge of the paper. Then I leave it where it is.
Three months, I tell myself. The warning is getting quieter every day.