The water started on the other side of the door and I did not get up. Sarah’s shower was the same pipes I had just used. Same fan. Same cheap soap smell leaking out under the frame. I sat on the hallway floor in a body that was still damp at the waistband and listened to her move around in there like a person who had been helped by her boyfriend.

I had done that.

Not Markus. Me. I had sat his legs down across from her and put my sentences in his mouth and watched her face change because a girl who had been twelve in rooms full of grateful was better at this than the man she actually loved. She had thanked him. She had looked at him like the kitchen kiss still belonged to the same person.

It did not.

“You sound like a girl who’s lived through this.”

I heard it again in this thicker skull and my stomach went cold. The operator high was gone. What was left was the hallway, and his bare chest, and the advice sitting in his mouth like food I had eaten off her plate. Masturbating in his shower had been grotesque and containable. That was a locked door and a body and a hypothesis I could still dress up as data.

This was their life. Their money fight. Their language. I had walked into the middle of it and performed competence and she had believed him more than she had ever believed the stoic version I tried first.

Parasite. I was parasitic.

The word arrived without drama. Just accurate.

I looked down at these hands on these knees. Larger. Still faintly wrinkled from the water. A minute ago they had been boyfriend hands. Before that they had been on his cock. Both uses were mine. Both would be his memories. He would carry the advice as if it had come from some unused room in his own head, and he would never know the room had a name.

I stood up too fast. The taller center of gravity tipped and I caught the wall with his palm. Sarah’s water kept running.

I walked his body down the hall on quiet feet and did not look at their bedroom door. I went to the bathroom mirror in the half-bath by the kitchen instead, the little one nobody used unless the …