Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

CAROL

Carol does not know why she has never once managed to feel lucky, seeing as she is so undeniably lucky. Nine books. A tenth coming. Millions of copies sold and a writers' room and the Netflix people circling. She was only ever in it for the mortgage. It was always just a job.

She is in the parking garage again. Level four. 

This is the thing she does after a meeting with Andrew. She comes down here, gets in the car, and she sits until whatever is happening in her body is over. 

"Nobody has ever died of a feeling, Carol."

It is a recording, ninety seconds of her therapist’s voice sent for little episodes like this. Carol has it set to repeat, and by now she is on the fourth time through.

She doesn't drink any more. So this is what she has instead. 

A normal writer would be thrilled. Carol can picture her: grateful, healthy, the kind of writer with a simple relationship to her own career. Someone who hears the tenth Wycaro book might outsell the other nine combined and drives home happy. 

She would not sit in a parking garage. Would a normal writer sit in a parking garage?

It’s not as if Andrew said no. That would require a spine. “Not yet” is not no, and “the market isn’t there for female-on-female romance at this scale, Carol” is not no, and “we all love the writing” is not no, because men like Andrew, who have never had a single fucking creative idea in their lives and wear Allbirds and let their mothers mail them sourdough, never have to say no.

Female-on-female. 

Jesus. 

He said it like it was a clinical term. Like he was a fucking veterinarian describing two hamsters in a cage. And she had sat there and nodded. The good professional girl, 52 years old, saying thank you, this is all so exciting. It is the same feeling she had at fifteen, getting driven home from conversion camp, adjusted. Carol grips the wheel and tries to work out how a meeting can humiliate a person without also making it feel like the rejected thing is her.

Carol closes her eyes, and her chest is going, and the feeling wants to be a scream, or a cry, or a thrown thing-

The honk comes without warning.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP-BEEEEEEEEEEP-BEEEEEEEEEEP.

For half a second, Carol thinks she has been shot.

Then the honk keeps going. A sustained, unbroken, eat-shit honk. The kind of honk LA people deploy when they want to fuck you up as a person. 

Carol jerks her head up and looks in the rearview.

Black Range Rover. Idling four feet behind her bumper. Inside it a tall woman. Even sitting down, Carol can see tall. Dark hair. Sunglasses pushed up on her head. One hand on the steering wheel. The other hand pressed flat to the horn.

She could knock the whole car over with what is in her body right now. And Carol knows the woman has nothing to do with Andrew. Nothing to do with the camp in 1989, or one actual thing that was done to her this morning. It does not fucking matter even slightly.

The honking stops. The Range Rover's window comes down. The woman's arm comes out, gold cuff catching the strip lights.

"Are you leaving the space or not." The woman says it flat, and bored, and already done with her. "Your brake lights keep coming on. I've been sitting here five minutes waiting on you. So either drive it or get out of it, but stop sitting there hogging a spot like a fucking idiot.”

Carol puts her own window down. Slowly, for the fuck of it.

“Leaving." She can hear her own voice climbing, too loud for the space. “No, lady. I'm not leaving. I’m parked. This is a parking space, and I have parked a car in it. Like a human being is allowed to. And your response to that, your actual first instinct as a fucking person, was to put your hand flat on a horn for- what was that, an hour? You sat on a car horn for an hour. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

None of it reaches her. The woman in the mirror waits for Carol to be finished.

"I'm not arguing with you." The voice has not moved a degree. “Was the fucking speech necessary?”

Carol could honestly get out of the car and murder a bitch right now. 

“Necessa- okay. Okay. Here's what's going to happen." Her hands have come up off the wheel. "You're going to take your hand off your horn. You're going to find one of the hundred other empty spaces in this structure. And you are going to leave me, and my parked car, and my brake lights, the fuck alone. That's the list. Got it?”

The woman scoffs at Carol. 

Then she pulls a piece of pink gum out of her smug fucking mouth, and flicks it unhurried out the window. It crosses the four feet of garage air between the two cars and lands on the hood of the 911.

Carol's whole body comes forward against the belt. "Oh, you are gonna eat that, you fucking-”

But the window is already going up, the woman already not listening. A hand comes up in the gap and gives Carol the middle finger and it stays up. The Range Rover reverses, swings its nose, and goes, and the finger holds steady the whole way, until the car takes the bend in the ramp and carries it out of sight.

And then it is just Carol, alone on the deck.

She grips the wheel until her knuckles go white.

She slams an open palm down on the wheel. "You wanna fuckin' go?" Yelling it now, alone in the car. "Huh? You wanna go? Let's fuckin' go, motherfucker!”

The 911 lurches into reverse hard enough that the Volvo two spaces down lays on its horn, and Carol does not even hear it, and the car takes the ramp the woman took.

The Porsche was not built for the inside of a parking structure, and it says so, loud off the concrete, and Carol does not lift for the ramp or the blind corner or the painted 10 MPH.

The Range Rover is two rows ahead, rolling for the next ramp, unbothered, one arm out the window with the middle finger up for Carol.

"Oh, you keep that shit up." Carol is screaming it through a windshield at a woman who cannot hear a syllable of it. "Where the fuck do you think you're going? Huh? Show me your fucking face!”

Four more ramps of this, and the Range Rover takes the last one out onto the open top deck, under the flat white nothing of the sky, nowhere left to go. It guns into the only spot in the row, sloppy, half over the line. Carol pulls up alongside, kills the engine, and sits.

Neither car moves. Nobody up here but the two of them. Then the Range Rover's door opens.

It swings out full arc, and the corner of it catches the 911's side mirror. The housing cracks. The mirror folds, the glass spiders, and the whole thing drops and hangs off the door panel by one sad cable.

The woman looks at it. "Whoops." Then she turns away and reaches into the car for her bag.

Carol is out of the 911 before she has decided to be.

“Hey! Are you- what the- you broke my fucking car. You broke my car with your fucking door, you stupid little- Do you have any fucking idea who you just did that to? Huh?”

The woman straightens, bag over her shoulder, and turns, and for the first time Carol gets a real look at her. Tall. A face built to be looked at and bored of being looked at. She gives Carol a second of attention.

"It's a car," the woman says. She slams her own door. “It’s insured. Calm down.”

Then she just goes.

She slings her bag over her shoulder. Locks the Range Rover with a chirp. Strides past Carol's hood toward the bank of elevators at the far wall of the open-air top floor without breaking pace.

“HEY! You absolute fucking psychopath, what is wrong with- stop walking.”

“No.”

"Stop fucking walking, lady." And then Carol needs to throw something, and the only thing in reach is on her own foot, so she steps the heel out of her left mule and throws it. It is a terrible throw. The shoe turns over once and lands a good six feet behind the woman, soft, no sound worth the name, and the woman does not break stride, does not look, because as far as she is concerned nothing has been thrown. It was a $450 shoe, by the way. Carol walks the rest of the way after her with one bare foot slapping the concrete. 

The woman reaches the elevator bank. Punches the down button hard, twice, three times. The button glows.

Carol catches up to her, two feet between them, doing it at the limping half-speed the one shoe allows, and the woman finally turns.

"Look. I’m ten minutes late. I have a multi-million fucking morning that is currently on fire. I don't have enough time or crayons to explain this to you, you dipshit. I’ll pay for the fucking mirror. Send me the bill, and go home.”

“Pay for it.” Carol takes a step in. “Pay for what. You don't even know my name. You don't know my car, you don't know me, you have no fucking idea if I want your money or anything else that comes out of you. What you're going to do, lady, is you’re going to stand there and tell me what the fuck your problem is. From the top. Starting with the honk.”

The elevator dings. 

“Move.” The woman steps in and the doors begin to close.

Carol could put a hand in.

"And get a hobby," the woman says, through the last foot of the gap. "Or a person. Someone who has to listen to you. Go scream at them, you sad, broke-ass fucking psycho, and leave the rest of us out of your little-”

The doors close on the rest of it.

Carol stands there and gapes at it. 

Her mouth is open in shock. Some stranger backed a car door into a Porsche, and then said the most vile thing anyone has said to Carol's face in years, and Carol is just standing there, while the number above the doors counts the woman down and away, out of reach.

She walks back toward the 911, both hands curled into fists, shaking like a chihuahua, and stops on the way to pick the mule up off the concrete and jam her foot back into it.

The Range Rover sits next to her car, lights still on. The bitch ran so hard for that elevator she forgot to kill them. Battery will be a brick in under two hours, she hopes.

She stops at the back of it, lifts her phone, frames the plate. Click.

She does not key the car. Keying a car is what you do in the moment, with your hand, like an animal. This gets done after.

The phone is still open from the photo. She pulls up the plate-lookup site, the one she paid for once when some guy clipped her in a Whole Foods lot and drove off into the rest of his fucking life, and kept, because Carol keeps everything. Every grudge, every login, every receipt. Here is the day she keeps them for. She thumbs the plate in and hits search.

Eighty seconds. Then a name.

Zosia Bartoś.

An address up in the hills.  A second car, a Tesla, registered to some man, a husband or a brother or whatever a woman like that keeps. Carol googles the name and the company.

HABIT. Founder and creative director. The same punchable face, shot by some editorial photographer, the about-page of a sexual-wellness empire. The vibrator that got written up in Architectural Digest, like a fucking floor lamp. The lubricant is called Hush Nº 1. Like a fragrance flight. Nº 1 for the girlies, Nº 2 for the divorced, Nº 3 is for the menopussies and it comes in a tube you'd patch a boat with. Ninety dollars. For pussy caulk. Coming Home to Your Body. It's a podcast where this bitch tells millions of women it's okay to come once a quarter.

So this GOOP-imitating piece of shit sells horny to lonely straight women at a 400% markup. And Carol has spent twenty years selling those same lonely women a proud, haughty pirate so they have something to want at all. Hers is cheaper, that's the only difference. Ugh. 

Carol opens the glove box and pulls out the small zip pouch she has kept there since she stopped drinking. The red lipstick is inside, in its brass case, reserved for publisher meetings, interviews, book signings, and the one annual gala she still attends.

She gets out of the 911 and crosses the gap between the cars and stands at the Range Rover's windshield, and she writes, in red, in block capitals, full width of the driver's side:

GET FUCKED ZOSIA BARTOŚ

The mark over the S is all weird, but the spirit of the thing survives. She steps back.

Then back to the 911, the door pocket, a Sharpie and a Wycaro card. The card has her pen name in serif on the front and the publisher's PO box on the back. She flips it to the blank side and writes:

THE MIRROR. BY EOD.

She walks it over and slides it under the wiper. 

Her own mirror is still hanging off the panel by its cable. She leaves it. She is driving home with it exactly the way Zosia Bartoś left it, because she wants the woman's mess on her car the whole way, every mile of the 101, a thing to stay angry at.

She gets in the car, closes the door and starts the engine.

For as long as she can remember, this is the only thing being alive has felt like.

She points the 911 at the ramp and goes down.

—

ZOSIA

The elevator opens and Zosia steps out and the phone in her hand buzzes.

It is from Saskia's chief of staff. Three lines. Halcyon & Co. will not be signing the HABIT acquisition this quarter. Saskia feels the brand's momentum is a little off-cadence right now. They would like to revisit in six months.

The maths is instant, and now her face has gone hot. Two and a half years for six months. Six months for twelve minutes. Twelve minutes for the blonde fucking woman in the Porsche.

Because she has been doing it for years, hosting the morning intention, holding Wes's hand down red carpets, smiling for the founder photo, running her one life down like gas left burning under an empty pan. And the sale was the bucket of water. The sale was out. The sale was a ticket to the coast of Croatia, or somewhere far and beautiful, and at 43, finally working up the nerve to put her mouth on a woman before the whole thing was over.

She reads it again. Off-cadence. Zosia can read between the lines, it just means Zosia walked in twelve minutes late and Saskia hated it. 

Zosia had come through that glass door twelve minutes late, sweaty, still catching her breath, and Saskia Hollander had looked up from her notes as though a window had been left open. And then forty-three more minutes of sparkling water and we are so aligned on the vision, and Zosia sitting there, nodding, knowing the deal was dead.

She walks at the Range Rover and at twenty feet she sees the windshield.

Red. Block capitals. The full width of the glass.

GET FUCKED ZOSIA BARTOŚ.

"Oh my god,” she says. "Are you fucking serious?”

She covers the last of the distance fast, and there is a card under the wiper, and fucking hell the woman left a card.

She lifts the blade and pulls the card out, and the wiper cracks when she does, and that is a third thing now, a third thing on a day that is only made of them.

Heavy stock. Serif.

CAROL STURKA

Wycaro Books. New York / Los Angeles.

Zosia stares at it, and she recognizes the name, and fuck- the Wycaro woman? The one HABIT put on the gifting vertical in 2023? Zosia had signed that off herself. Maybe she is a fucking idiot.

She turns the card over.

THE MIRROR. BY EOD.

“By EOD,” she says, to the card. “She gave me a fucking deadline.”

She unlocks the Range Rover, gets in, drops the bag on the passenger seat, and turns the key.

Nothing.

She turns it again. Nothing. Dark dash, no radio, no chime. And fuck, the headlights. She had left the headlights on, the whole hour and a half she was upstairs, like a teenager.

Her hand curls into a fist, and then she brings it down on the wheel, hard, in frustration at everything, at every single fucking thing the day has decided to throw at her. The horn does not sound. The horn is dead with the rest of it. So the fist does nothing, and her breathing has gone ragged now.

"There's always something." Out loud, to a dead dashboard. "There's always fucking something.”

She could take the Figueroa garage down to rubble with her hands, all eight floors, and it would not give her back twelve minutes, and it would not un-postpone the deal, and she knows that-

“FUCK."

It comes up out of her whole body.

"Fuck this. Fuck this car, fuck this garage, fuck Saskia and her- her cadence, her fucking- and fuck you," and her eyes go to the windshield, to the red, to the backward name running across her own face, "fuck you, Carol Sturka. You fucking little cunt."

She picks up the phone off the dead dash. She presses her thumb and her forefinger into her eyes for a second, hard, and breathes. When she calls Maddie and Maddie picks up, Zosia's voice is low, and level, and nothing at all like the last ninety seconds of her life.

"Hi, Zo-”

"Maddie. Hi. Okay, so…the, uh, Range Rover’s battery is dead, it's on the top deck of the structure on Figueroa. So I need a couple of things. Can you send the tow, the white-glove people, not the regular account, to come get it? Get a car up here for me, like now, I'm not standing around in this garage. And then, okay, three. This is the- I need you to find me a name. Carol Sturka. She's a writer, she does the Wycaro books. I need a cell number for her, today, before I'm home. Call the publisher, call, I don't know, call whoever you have to.”

A small silence on the line. Then, carefully, "Carol Sturka, like, the-”

"Like the writer. Yes.”

"Okay, and is this- are you okay, did something-”

“I'm completely fine." Flat. "Today, Maddie. The number.”

She hangs up before Maddie can say anything else.

She just looks at the windshield. The lipstick reads in mirror from the inside, the words running backward across her own face in the bright open-air daylight.

Her fucking eyes burn.

“Fuck!” She yells. 

—

Walking into her own fucking house at one in the afternoon like she has all the time in the world, because well…she does now. Six free months of afternoons. She can ruin this woman before sundown and still make dinner. How whimsical. 

Thank fuck Wes is in Tulum on a five-day shoot and the house is empty.

"Fuck that bitch. Fuck her." She says it to the kitchen, kicking off one heel and then the other. "Fuck her whole little-”

Bag on the island. Phone on the counter. Straight upstairs to the office, because the MacBook will be open in ninety seconds and the founder dashboard will be live and Carol fucking Sturka is going to be unemployable by sundown.

There is already a $450 tow on her Amex and $123 for a stupid-ass wiper kit. 

And here is what this woman did today, in order. One, she sat in her car crying in the only open space on R4, like nobody else in downtown LA has ever needed to park. Two, she would not move it. Three, she chased Zosia five floors of a garage for the crime of honking at a parked car. Four, she cost her Saskia, the whole deal, a hundred and fifty million dollars, in the exact minutes it took to have that fight. And then the little bitch keyed a love note onto the Range Rover for a mirror Zosia broke fair and square, and slid a card under the wiper, with no number on it.

No number. So Zosia is supposed to, what. Call a body shop herself. Price out a wing mirror for a Carrera, on her own time, and Venmo Carol fucking Sturka before five. By EOD. EOD, motherfucker. That kind of shit. Cocksucking little shit.

Zosia has worked too hard, for too long, for this.

Office. Lid up. Password. Dashboard. She sits down hard in the chair and pulls it in.

She is going to take it all down. Nine books of a man in a coat. The six-figure quarterly that lands in this woman's account like a tide. The Netflix deal that has been simmering four years at the exact gentle temperature of a Coming Home to Your Body episode on pelvic-floor breathing. HABIT put the Wycaro books on the gifting vertical four times last year. Personally recommended. By the founder. By Zosia.

Carol Sturka has three million followers. HABIT has eleven point four.

That ends today.

New post. She starts to type.

—

CAROL

Carol has been home since 11AM. Still processing having started her fucking morning like this. What the fuck. Slavic-Gwyneth-ass vibrator-selling cunt opening her fucking Range Rover door into her fucking mirror. This is a 1989 Porsche, motherfucker. With the original chrome-edged housing. This is a discontinued fucking part. Whoops. She said whoops. The fucking wellness piece of shit said whoops about ruining her vintage Porsche mirror like she had spilled a goddamn smoothie.

She's gonna find that motherfucker.

And then she does not leave the kitchen island all day. It is, in fact, the most focused Carol has been on anything since the last book she actually wanted to write. The light goes from white to gold to gone, and Carol has not noticed any of it happen, because she has spent the entire afternoon and evening finding that motherfucker.

Alright, so. To recap.

Zosia Bartoś, 43, Polish, came over at eleven. Editorial model 2000-2018 (Carol has been on the magazine scans for forty minutes, chin in her hand. The fucking woman is gorgeous and Carol is no better than a man when it comes to these things). Founded HABIT in 2018, 11.4 million followers. That’s who broke the mirror.

However #1. Carol has bought HABIT. There is a Sunday Reset Oil 2022 in her own bathroom cabinet, sixty-four dollars, half used, bought during a bad sober week three years ago when Carol was trying to take care of herself. Carol sells corsair fantasy to suburban housewives and buys her self-care from the woman who sells the same housewives a lubricant called Hush. The cardigan on Carol's back right now is HABIT. The call is coming from inside the fucking house. That one is not good.

And, however #2. The partner is gay. Wes Dumont, @wesd.photo, 380K followers, shoots beach photography for Aman resorts, and Wes Dumont is gay as fuck. Here is the thing about a photographer’s Instagram: eventually the grid tells you where his eye goes. Wes’s eye goes to men. Men in places, men laughing in pairs and groups, men half-turned in good light, men with their sleeves pushed up, a lot of very good photographs of one man in particular, a Tobias, who has been in the grid for eight years. 

And Zosia? Zosia Bartoś, who Carol has by now spent the better part of an hour establishing she is fucking hot, appears in Wes' grid maybe nine times in twelve years, and every single one of those nine is a red carpet, a step-and-repeat, a HABIT launch. Work shit. In twelve years, that man hasn't picked up a camera and taken a picture of her because she happened to look nice doing something in their kitchen. He is a photographer, and he does not photograph that hand-of-God face of hers. Carol survived a conversion camp. She knows what this is, thank you. This is not subtle.

So a woman like Zosia Bartoś has been with a man like that. Willingly. 

Carol knows she should leave it there. A stranger's private business, none of hers, close the laptop, go to bed. Carol does not close the laptop. It is eleven at night and she is reading a fourth interview, and she is aware that something is wrong with her. Whatever.

The phone has been buzzing on and off for hours. Carol has been ignoring it since she heard the first few buzzes, somewhere around the 2008 Vogue Poland spread, Zosia in a white slip in the rain on a beach in Sopot (Sopot, motherfucker; Carol now knows where Sopot is). Now the phone is buzzing hard and often enough, that the research hole cannot cover the sound anymore.

Carol flips the phone over.

51 notifications. Manousos has called five times. Helen three. Andrew four. Maddie twice. Four voicemails. 38 texts. And a DM at the top, from her editor contact at Publishers Weekly: Reaching out re: Sturka.

Reaching out re: Sturka.

Oh.

Carol opens Twitter. Eight hours of slow build while Carol sat at her own island learning the geography of Poland, and now it is everywhere she looks.

At the top of the feed, a post from @ZBartos, blue check, 11.4 million followers, posted at 3:04 that afternoon.

Why I'm no longer recommending Carol Sturka’s Wycaro series: [goodreads.com/review/show/...]

"What the fuck," Carol says.

She clicks the link. The Goodreads page loads.

Zosia Bartoś ★☆☆☆☆

I'd like to coin a verb. To Sturka: to write technically excellent prose, for nine consecutive volumes, in the service of a franchise you do not believe in, while signing for the tenth. Carol Sturka has been Sturka-ing since 2014. It is sad to watch a gifted writer become the curator of her own decline. I believe Carol Sturka has a real book in her. Until then, I am not standing in line for the tenth Wycaro and HABIT will no longer stock the series.

1,204 likes · 88 comments

Fuck.

Carol reads it again.

I believe Carol Sturka has a real book in her.

“Fuck that bitch. FUCK.”

Carol reads it a third time. Her hands have gone cold around the phone. The weight of the sentence pulls down through her chest and her arms, and she grips the phone harder.

A real book in her.

Zosia Bartoś does not know about The Blackwater House. She does not know about The Bones of Saint Agatha, The Ladies of Ashfield, Bitter Chrysalis, or any of the manuscripts in the drawer. And she just wrote I believe Carol Sturka has a real book in her on Goodreads in front of millions of Carol's readers. Carol, meanwhile, spent twelve fucking hours studying this woman. Reading her interviews and buying one of her vibrators on a hate-cart.

And the actual fucking insulting part is that the Ayurvedic bitch was correct. Carol was the curator of her own decline. Sober for three years, divorced from Helen, her fucking mother dead, Blackwater House turned down a third time with the no still warm, and a side mirror dangling off her car on the driveway.

Fuck, she needs to call Andrew and delete her own Goodreads account before any reader scrolls the review to Carol's own page.

The phone buzzes again. New text.

Unknown: GET FUCKED, CAROL STURKA.

"Are you fucking kidding me?” To the house. To nobody.

And then Carol calls the number back. 

It rings once.

"Hello?"

“Fuck you. I’ll bury you, you hear me? This isn’t fucking yoga, motherfucker. I’ll fucking bury you, you little shit-”

"Whatever, bitch."

The line goes dead.

Carol stares at the phone. CALL ENDED, the screen says. Her mouth is open and she cannot seem to close it. 

Nobody hangs up on Carol. Nobody has the nerve. People manage Carol, people handle Carol, people nod at Carol. They do not say whatever, bitch and take the call away from her like a set of car keys.

Carol's hand will not stop shaking, and God, she feels so alive she’s going to throw up.

She is past the part where this is a choice. She is just falling now, and the only open question is how far down she is, and how much it is going to hurt when they land.

—

It has been two weeks since the parking-garage trigger and the call ending in Whatever, bitch. Carol has paid ten thousand fucking dollars to a specialist in Glendale for a new mirror on the 911 because Zosia Bartoś is not paying for shit.

And for the last seven days she has been driving past the wobbly dildo's house in Hollywood Hills at three different times of day. By Friday of the second week, Carol knows Wes Dumont's Tesla schedule by heart and the bitch's Range Rover schedule by heart, the security gate's auto-close lag (four seconds), the neighborhood-watch sticker (Hollywood Hills Patrol, Inc.).

Today, Wes's Tesla is in the driveway and Zosia's Range Rover is not. Which means Zosia is out. Which means it is time.

Carol is in the 911 parked four houses down with two empty bottles of Gatorade on the passenger seat (lemon-lime, loaded with electrolytes) and a third bottle in her hand, three-quarters drunk. Carol's bladder is on fucking fire. Has not been this on fire since the long-haul flight from Toronto in 2011 when Air Canada took the lavatory out of service for hour and a half. The bladder is the weapon. Carol catches her own eye in the rearview. Carol is fucking READY.

She gets out of the 911 and walks up the driveway and rings the bell.

The door opens on Wes Dumont. White linen shirt, tan, gay as the day is long. Up close it reads even louder than the grid did, and Carol nearly laughs in his face.

“Hi! I'm Carol, I'm an old friend of Zosia's. I, uh, was just in the neighborhood and I thought I'd say hello." A little laugh, here, like a person who says hello to people. "Is she around?”

"Carol, hi." The Ken doll says it like her name is good news, and he has the door open wide before she has finished asking. “Yeah, of course, come in. She's upstairs…let me grab her."

Oh. She's upstairs.

“Actually…” warm, sheepish, a hand half-raised. “Would you mind if I used your bathroom first? I have been in traffic for an hour, it's embarrassing."

"Oh my gosh, no, go." He points down the hall. Second on the right. He'll run up and tell Zosia she's here, take your time, can I get you a water. Carol says she's fine, thank you, so much, and means none of it, and Ken goes up the stairs two at a time to be kind to her some more.

Carol goes down the hall.

Zosia's first-floor powder room is a wellness-mogul-ass Pinterest moonshot. Travertine slab walls. Brass everything. A ceramic sink shaped like falling water. Two HABIT-embroidered hand towels on a brass ring, because the woman has branded the inside of her own fucking house.

The whole bathroom costs more than Carol's first three cars, and Carol is about to wreck it.

Carol locks the door.

She is wearing gym shorts and no underwear. She put thought into that this morning because whatever else this is, it is going to need to be fast. Shorts down. Done.

Time to fucking work, motherfucker.

Carol pees on the bath mat first. The vessel sink gets it next. She takes one of the embroidered hand towels off the brass ring, pees on it directly, puts it back. Squats over the built-in tub and pees in that, hits the ceramic dish of dried lavender on the way past, and saves enough to walk a wide arc across the travertine floor on the way to the door. The pee is acidic-yellow, because of the Gatorade.

Carol is laughing so hard she cannot stop.

She pulls the shorts up, unlocks the door, rushes out.

Zosia is on the stairs.

Zosia is on the stairs. Bare feet. The same wide-eyed look she had in the parking garage. Half a heartbeat to register what just happened.

"Did you just-”

Carol does not wait for the end of the sentence. She runs. Clears the foyer in three strides and the door in two more.

She is in the 911 in eleven seconds.

Zosia is behind her. Barefoot. Running.

"YOU FUCKING BITCH. I WILL FUCKING END YOU.”

Carol starts the Porsche. Pulls out. Rolls down the window. Gives Zosia the finger as Zosia stops at the curb, hands on her knees, breathing hard. 

Carol turns the corner laughing so hard she has to pull over a block later to wipe her eyes.

She wipes her eyes on her sleeve, reaches for her phone to text Manousos.

The phone is not where the phone should be.

She pats herself down twice. Checks the cup holder, the passenger seat, the floor.

Fuck.

She left it at kombucha barbie's house.

—

ZOSIA

Zosia is at the curb, hands on her knees.

She looks down the empty street where the Porsche was three seconds ago. Carol fucking Sturka came to Zosia's home and pissed in Zosia's foyer and flipped her off out the window of a mirror Zosia did not even break that much. The woman just committed three different federal crimes and Zosia is standing barefoot on Hollywood Hills asphalt with her chest going like she ran a fucking marathon, and somewhere under the rage there is something else and Zosia hasn’t felt this alive in-

Ever.

She walks back up the driveway, bare feet on gravel and then on marble and then she is in her own foyer staring at the open powder-room door.

What the fuck. What the actual cocksucking fuck.

"WES."

"In here, babe."

Wes is on his knees in the powder room in yellow rubber gloves, working a HABIT-branded mop back and forth across the travertine, and he has the calm face on, the retreat face, and Zosia could scream.

"What are you- Wes. What are you doing?”

"Cleaning it up, babe." He does not stop mopping.

Zosia stands in the doorway and looks. 

The pale blue bath mat is not a bath mat anymore. It is a yellow thing. The vessel sink has a tide line. There is a hand towel marinating in the bottom of the tub, a yellow streak down the curve of the tub where something clearly fled, and the little dish of dried lavender is fully swimming, the lavender is having a day. The floor, the actual travertine floor, has a long yellow arc across it where the woman walked and went at the same time. And none of it is urine-colored. It is a hot, glowing, almost chemical yellow, the yellow of a hazard fucking sign.

A healthy adult does not pee this hue. And the volume of it. The sheer fucking quantity, two or three liters of glowing hazard yellow, and it came out of a woman who is, generously, five foot, a woman with maybe a fist-sized bladder in her like everybody else. That is more than the bladder holds. That is more than the woman structurally contains. Where the fuck was she keeping it, in her lungs?

"What the fuck. What the FUCK." Zosia is pacing now, powder room and back, powder room and back. "Look at this. LOOK AT THIS. Look at this fucking shit, Wes. Look at it."

"This is travertine, you little bitch," Zosia tells the empty doorway. "This is six-hundred-dollar-a-square-foot Calacatta travertine. Italian stone, you fucking lunatic!” 

"Babe." Wes does not look up from the floor. "We don't know her story. You never really know what someone's going through, you know? Could be a bladder thing. There are women with very real continence issues.”

"It is not a continence issue, Wes, it is the psycho from the parking garage. The one I told you about. I told you about her."

"I remember."

"She found out where we live. She came into my home, my sacred fucking space, and she pissed on every single thing in it.”

Wes sits back on his heels and peels one glove halfway off, his shoulders drop and he sighs, and Zosia knows a condescending little soliloquy is now incoming.

“Babe. I hear you.” He sighs, again. “ I hear you, Zosh. But before you go all the way nuclear, can we just pause? Can we breathe for one second together? Anger… is just a transitory state of consciousness. It is just moving through you. You do not have to hold the door open for it, you know?”

Zosia looks at her boyfriend of twelve years, on his knees, mopping a stranger's urine and forgiving the stranger out loud while he does it.

"I cannot fucking do this right now."

She goes back into the powder room, steps over Wes and his bucket, and there on the back of the toilet, face-down, is a phone. Black. Not hers.

Zosia picks it up.

“I'm going to the studio," she says, already walking. "Do not knock."

—

Zosia sits on the studio couch with a black coffee going cold and Carol Sturka's phone in her lap. The lock screen is the green Porsche, in good light, taken from a low angle like Carol was crouching to admire her own fucking car.

Of course this fucking loser has a whole boudoir set for the Porsche.

She tries Carol's birthday. No.

She tries 1234. It unlocks.

Zosia closes her eyes. “Fucking Gen X. I swear.”

She kills Find My, kills the cellular, kills the iCloud sync, runs it off the studio hotspot. Four hours, maybe five, before Carol thinks to wipe it. Zosia is going to read and backup every word.

Messages. Helen Umstead, at the top of the thread. Two weeks of it, and Zosia does not know who Helen is yet but she can read a thread. Carol pls let me know you're okay. i'm okay i'm fine. did Andrew kill Blackwater. yeah. do you want to come over. i'm okay i'm fine.

Zosia scrolls up. Years of it. The thread changes as it climbs, partner to wife to divorce to friend, and the most recent photo Helen sent is Helen with another woman, the two of them laughing into one cup of wine. Ex-wife. Remarried. Still friends.

i'm okay i'm fine. Carol writes it back short and tired. Two weeks of it. The same four words, every time.

Zosia came in here for a weapon. This is not a weapon.

There is a thread under Dr. Jane Woods, Carol’s therapist.

Most of it is Carol rescheduling. The rest is, well, therapy. Did you do the homework. I thought about doing it. Carol, that is not the homework. I’m working on it. And, weeks later: Have you written the real one yet. I wrote an Instagram caption, does that count. No, it doesn’t.

Zosia has never told anyone the truth for money or for free. And out of the two of them, it is Carol, the drunk who pissed on her floor, who has been doing the actual work to be better.

There is an audio file pinned to the top of the thread. Zosia leaves it for later.

Voicemails. Manousos Oviedo. Hermanita, please pick up. Just send a thumbs-up. Eight of them in two weeks.

Mail. A draft, in the drafts folder, opened three years ago, last touched on Tuesday. Mom. I have been sober for three years and I think it might be time to- and nothing. The sentence stops there. 

Zosia reads it again and then puts the phone face-down on her own knee.

This is not the moment to feel sorry for her.

Apps. Hinge. Feeld. HER. The Feeld profile is the newest, so Zosia opens it. Queer, sober, busy, no. 

Five photos. Carol on a hike, the sleeve of the white shirt cut off at the bicep. Carol in a doorway with a cup, a ring on her hand, half a smile. Carol in a black dress looking…damn. Carol on a lounger somewhere. Carol in a navy suit vest and no jacket, bare arms, the arms.

And the arms are, the arms are just-

“Fuck me,” Zosia hears herself say, and immediately shuts her mouth. She is being stupid. She knows she is being stupid.

Of course she is hot. Of fucking course. The hands, the face, the blue eyes, and Zosia is on her own studio couch studying a stranger's dating profile in a way that is trespassing into hunger, and she keeps doing it.

Carol matches with women and mostly does not bother writing back. The few she does fizzle in a handful of messages. Interesting.

Zosia moves to the next thing. 

Photos. Zosia scrolls.

The green Porsche, over and over, from every angle a person can stand at. Bunch of screenshots. A hike. Another hike. A sunset. And then. The screenshots of Zosia.

A row of them. The 2008 Vogue Poland spread. Several photoshoots. The HABIT essays. And one Zosia knows well, the press photo from the Coming Home launch, the one where the light is good and Zosia knows she looks beautiful in. 

Zosia stops scrolling.

The hell.

So Carol Sturka has been obsessed with her. The same as Zosia, exactly like Zosia. So that is what this is, then. It goes both ways. They have spent two weeks doing the same thing. And Carol went and found a picture of Zosia's face because she wanted to look at Zosia's face.

Zosia surprises herself by blushing. The thought of Carol finding her attractive, and she is grinning at a phone. Thrilled and a little revolted, both at once, and she moves on. 

There is a video in the photo roll. 4 minutes long. The thumbnail is enough to know what it is, the POV angle of someone's own waist, a stretch of belly, the tops of two thighs, the waistband of underwear, a hand slid down past the waistband and the top of a mound and-

Zosia does not tap it. She scrolls past it. 

She is not going to watch Carol Sturka’s possible masturbation video. She is not insane.

She scrolls back up to it.

She is not going to watch it.

She puts the earbuds in and watches it.

For a few seconds it is just a body, a hand, the angle of a phone held low. It could be anyone. Zosia is most of the way to telling herself it could be anyone.

Then the woman in the video says fuck, low, half under her breath. 

And it is Carol. There is no unhearing it now, it is Carol Sturka, filming Carol Sturka, and Zosia is sitting in her studio with earbuds in, wondering who Carol sent it to. 

Zosia is going to think about that later, though.

The video is four minutes long. Zosia means to watch ten seconds of it, the way you confirm a thing and move on. She watches a great deal more than ten seconds, with a pressure climbing the base of her throat.

She stops it. Pulls the earbuds out.

She is breathing through her mouth. Her heart beating way too fast. She is hot all the way down, and she has been hot for a while now. She is fucking horny and she knows it.

Enough. This needs to stop. 

She airdrops the video to her own phone before she does one other thing. Folder marked S.

Next is Voice Memos. The top one is from November 2022.

Zosia puts the earbuds back in.

It is Carol in a parked car, drunk, breathing like she has run somewhere. I almost killed myself tonight. I came off the 101 and I do not remember the last thirty miles of it. I almost killed myself in a car. And then, Not like this. I’m not doing it like this. I’m sober starting now. Starting now. Forty-three minutes of Carol on the side of a freeway, three years ago, talking herself out of dying.

Zosia listens to all of it and when it ends she takes the earbuds out and doesn’t move for a while.

She opens Notes. Four manuscript files, locked behind the same passcode as the phone, because it is possible that Carol Sturka secures everything she owns with 1234. 

Zosia opens The Blackwater House first, because the Helen thread snaps into place. Did Andrew kill Blackwater. Yeah. Andrew killed it, so Andrew is whoever decides what Carol publishes. Blackwater is this book, the most recent rejection.

It is good. It is so far past good that Zosia reads it again to make sure, and it is still good the second time. A sapphic gothic, two women in a converted rectory in Maine, and by the third paragraph the prose is doing something Zosia has not felt in a long time. She reads the first chapter. She reads the second.

When she looks up the coffee is cold and the studio clock says she has been reading for forty minutes.

Zosia cannot at first see why a publisher would turn this down. Then she can. The leads are women. There is too much money in the pirate.

I believe Carol Sturka has a real book in her, Zosia wrote on Goodreads two weeks ago. She wrote it as a kill-shot. She was guessing. It was meant to be cruel, not accurate.

Safari. Recent searches.

Two weeks of Carol Sturka finding out everything there is to find about Zosia. Then, further down, the older searches:

Am I a bad person. 

Sober relapse statistics three years. 

Conversion camp survivors long term. 

Zosia airdrops the rest of it. The manuscripts, the Helen thread, the voicemails, the unsent letter, the voice memo, the searches, the photos. All of it onto her own phone. Carol has still not wiped the thing.

Then she turns Carol's phone off, slides it into a Ziploc and locks it inside the studio’s safe.

She sits on the couch a while longer. It is dark and quiet and her chest is still going, the same as it was at the curb this morning, watching the Porsche disappear.

Three weeks ago Zosia had not felt her own pulse in eight years. She had a beautiful house and a brand and a partner and a deal, and somewhere in all of it she had stopped being able to feel anything. And then a small unhinged woman backed a car into her morning, and now Zosia is awake at one a.m. with a stranger's whole life in her hands and her heart going like a fist on a door.

Anyway. She is alive, by the way.

—

It has been a week since Carol Sturka urinated across Zosia's powder room, and in that week the Goodreads review has gotten away from her.

To Sturka is a verb now. The Cut ran a piece, Have You Been Sturka-ing Your Whole Career? A thread breaking the coinage down has forty thousand reposts. Somebody made it a TikTok sound. Zosia wrote a one paragraph book review to end a woman and instead handed the internet a fucking toy.

Carol Sturka has been posting all week, and unfortunately, she is fucking brilliant at it. All that talent, deployed entirely in the service of making Zosia want to drive into a wall. 

HABIT's version of liberation is very modern. You’re no longer ashamed of your body. You’re simply invited to optimize it, subscribe to it, mist it, journal it, lubricate it and pay for shipping.

That one was an essay. Zosia read it standing in her own kitchen and felt it in four separate places. The next one was a knife.

Mrs. @ZosiaB seems to believe she can identify decline from a distance. I’d suggest she start closer to home.

And the one after that, because the woman can apparently also just be cruel and funny whenever it suits her:

So @ZosiaB says she is not standing in line for the tenth Wycaro. Understandable. I’d hate to make a woman wait that long for a disappointment. She's probably getting quite enough of that at home.

Carol Sturka has a sharp jaw and a sharp mouth and a sharpness behind both of them, and she has spent three decades learning how to be liked, completely, in the length of a paragraph, and she is doing it now, in public, at Zosia's expense.

Zosia cannot let her have the last word, naturally. That is the whole problem. Zosia has never once in her life been able to let anyone have the last word, and she is 43, and she is not going to learn how today.

So. Tonight Zosia drives to Calabasas.

It is eleven-forty when she takes the Range Rover down out of the hills, with a gallon of Behr Premium Plus exterior paint, flat white, on the passenger-side floor. A tray. Two brushes. All of it bought that afternoon at the Home Depot in Burbank.

Carol's house is all glass and hard angles up a short private drive, lit gold from the inside, the kind of house that costs four million dollars and needs you to know it. The 911 is in the driveway. Carol Sturka left her vintage Porsche sitting out in the open air. Fucking idiot.

Zosia parks the Range Rover at the bottom of the drive. Carries the paint up. Sets the tray on the gravel. Pours. Loads the brush. 

And then Zosia gets to work.

The first brushstroke goes across the driver's door, and it is easier than it should be. The hand loads the brush and lays a clean wet line of flat white down the dark green and comes back for more. She should not be doing this.

She shouldn't, she really shouldn’t, but the brush is already going back into the tray for more.

Zosia works through the rush of it. 

It takes a while and when it is done she stands back on the gravel and looks at it.

That is when Zosia hears it.

A sound, from one of the windows on the upper floor. A moan. 

Zosia looks up.

The upper window is a wall of glass and Zosia can see all of it. The bed. Carol Sturka, and a woman under her.

Carol is, well, fucking her. 

One of Carol's arms is braced into the mattress by the woman's head and the other is somewhere Zosia cannot see and does not need to see to understand.

Zosia feels the way the blood drains out of her body.

She should leave, yet she can’t move. She is standing at the foot of the car she has just ruined, watching through the glass, and the watching goes on longer than a second and longer than three minutes.

She is turned on, standing in the dark. Her face is hot and- oh god. She wants. She wants to be in that room. She wants to be the woman under Carol's arms, and she wants to be Carol, and- she does not consider that a meaningful distinction, and it is not wrong, and that will have to do.

—

Zosia gets in the Range Rover and sits with the door shut and her hands on the wheel. 

She breathes, and she climbs back into the Coming Home to Your Body podcast persona. She lifts the phone and films through the windshield, up the drive, at the pale ruined shape of the car.

"Hi, Carol,” she manages to say. "Haven't heard from you in a few days. Hope you're taking really good care of yourself."

She holds the shot on the car. The paint is too far into the dark to read. Carol will read it in the morning.

“Anyway, just wanted to show you something. Talk soon."

She drives four blocks from the house and sends the video to Carol. 

She sits with the engine running and the paint dried hard on her knuckles, and she does not feel delighted anymore. She feels caught.

Nobody caught her. The street is empty. Carol is half a mile back in a window, busy. Nobody on earth knows where Zosia Bartoś is.

She feels caught all the same. 

—

The house in the Hills is dark, Wes's door shut. He has been asleep for hours, in the separate room they have called a sleep-hygiene decision for eight years.

The thought of Carol fucking that woman gets Zosia through the house and up to her room. She does not dwell on the sounds, or the way Carol's hips had moved. Her brain has dedicated itself to a disastrous confusion of feelings, and Zosia ignores it. She is good at that.

She showers the night and the white paint off herself, and afterward she sits on the bed, and she is fine. She is a woman who is fine.

In the bedside drawer there is a tub of Vaseline. She glares at it. She has a meeting in the morning. She does not have time for this.

Fuck it. She takes the tub out and unscrews the lid.

Shorts off, underwear off, under the covers, and she is rolling her eyes at herself through all of it. One hand goes down between her legs, and she is already wet, and she swears.

With the other hand she reaches for the tub. Two fingers sink in. 

See, Zosia first masturbated at fifteen. She did not have a word for it then, she only knew it felt good, and so she has known her own body, known exactly what it does when it wants something, for a long time.

At seventeen she opened the wrong door. A storage room off the school chapel, dark, and two girls she knew were in it, one of them pressing the other to the wall, kissing her, a hand up her skirt. They did not see her, thank god, but Zosia stood there and watched until it was the most aroused she had ever been in her life, and then she knew. She has known ever since.

She has been attracted to women her whole life, and not once has she let herself touch one. What she has let herself have instead is a tub of Vaseline. Because when you push your fingers into it, the soft, resisting slick of it wraps around them, thick and warm, all the way up to the knuckle, and it feels, in some ways, like being inside a woman. Zosia would know, she has fingered herself before. So in the dark, when she needs to feel close to one, she makes the feeling in her fingers be something else.

Tonight she does not have to go looking for a face, though. The face has been there since the driveway, blue-eyed, half-smiling, and Zosia is so fucking angry she could put her fist through the headboard, and instead she turns onto her stomach and rides her own hand.

Carol's face comes up on its own. Carol in the window. Carol's arm braced by a woman's head. Carol's mouth open. 

Zosia pushes her fingers deeper into the tub and imagines them somewhere else. She imagines Carol under her, one hand gripping nothing because Zosia has her pinned. Zosia imagines her own fingers inside Carol and the thought hits so hard her hips jerk down into her hand.

“Fuck,” she says into the pillow.

She works both hands, the same rhythm in each, the fantasy held in place between them. Touching and entering, taking and getting off on the thought of taking. 

She comes hard enough to bite down on the pillow.

Afterward she lies in the dark. Her hands do not feel like her own.

She screws the lid back on and puts the tub in the drawer.

And she lies there with her heart still going and knows she is not going to stop the war with Carol Sturka. 

She cannot.

—

CAROL

Carol wakes at nine to a video on her new phone, from an unknown number. There is only one person it could be.

She watches it in bed. A dark driveway. A pale shape she cannot make out. And the voice over the top of it, the wellness-podcast voice: Hi, Carol. Haven't heard from you in a few days. I hope you're taking such good care of yourself. Anyway, I just wanted to show you something. Talk soon.

“No. No, no, no, no”

Carol is down the stairs and out the front door in less than a minute. 

And her beautiful Porsche is…white.

No. The 911 is British Racing Green, the 1989 factory color Carol had a panel shop in Glendale hand-match to the original chip two years ago, the only thing Carol Sturka owns that has never once let her down. The 911 is Green and someone has written all over it in white house paint, two feet tall, brushed thick into the lacquer.

The hood says I PISS ON MATS.

The driver's door says I FEAR WOMEN.

The other side says I’M A BITCH.

And Carol screams.

It is the screeching sound of someone burning up from the inside, a sound that has been clawing up the inside of Carol's throat for three weeks, since the parking garage and the mirror and the rejection. Carol stands alone in her own driveway and lets it out, both fists shaking at her sides, until her voice scrapes and cracks and a dog three houses down starts barking and there is nothing left in her lungs.

Then she is very quiet. 

Then she calls.

It rings four times and goes to voicemail, and the greeting is the same motherfucking voice from the video, Hi, you've reached Zosia. I'm so glad you reached out. Leave me a little something and I'll come back to you. The beep has not finished before Carol is talking, in a voice the scream has scraped down to gravel.

"Listen to me, you miserable little bitch. What in the goddamn fuck is wrong with you? Huh? Fuck you, you fuckin fuck. You ruined my fucking car!”

She takes a breath. 

"Here is what I think, and I have given it some thought. I think you’re just a bored, miserable, rich millennial housewife with millions of followers and not one single fucking reason to get out of bed. I bet you hate yourself. I bet you’re angry that you stood still with your thumb up your ass while your whole goddamn life got up and walked the door. You had dreams once, didn’t you, you little bitch? You had a whole big life you were promised. And then you blinked, you stupid fuckstick, you blinked. And now you are forty-something and attached to a man who does not want to fuck you because he would rather get fucked himself, and you have not had one good fuck in your entire miserable life. You have everything, motherfucker. And you are empty. Empty and rich and rotting from the inside, and you cannot stand to feel it, so you got in your Range Rover and you drove to my house, because fucking up my life is the only thing that has made you feel awake in God knows how long.”

“Well. You picked the wrong person, motherfucker.”

"I cannot be fucked with. Do you hear me. I’m not one of your sad little bitch-ass subscribers. I do the fucking, motherfucker. I’ve always done the fucking. So leave me the fuck alone and go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself with the full force of every gutless, frightened, miserable little decision that made you the empty fucking thing you are.”

"This is your last warning, bitch.”

Carol hangs up.

—

By two in the afternoon Carol has a price for the repaint, and the price is a fucking joke.

Twenty thousand to undo a thing a woman did in one night with a fucking paintbrush. Carol could buy a second car for twenty thousand dollars. She could put a kid through a year of college. Instead she is going to hand it to a body shop so her Porsche will stop saying I PISS ON MATS to the neighborhood.

She is in the living room measuring her blood pressure.

This fucking bitch is going to kill her.  

Wycaro's final book launches in five weeks. There was a marketing call Carol was supposed to be on two hours ago. There is a city list, a tour, an audiobook session, and Carol has handed three entire weeks of her one life to a six-foot bag of soggy dicks.

Blood pressure is a bit high. A bit high. 

Anyway. Here is the thing. Carol cannot let it go. Letting go is not in her, never has been, the camp her mother paid for when she was fifteen made sure of that.

She cannot let it go and she cannot afford to chase it, and she already knows she is going to do both.

—

The next three weeks of Carol's life are the most fun she has had in years.

Week one starts with Zosia Bartoś's Twitter account.

Eli, Manny's eighteen-year-old nephew, calls on a Thursday, two days after the voicemail. He says, "Okay. You're in. I'm not telling you how. If anyone asks, you guessed her password.” Then he walks Carol into the account, and then he hangs up, and then Carol is sitting at her kitchen island with a laptop and 11 million followers and a little blinking cursor in a box that says What is happening?

Carol cracks her knuckles.

She has spent three weeks marinating in Zosia Bartoś's voice, and she can ghostwrite the woman in her sleep. So she does. Carol posts something that sounds exactly like Zosia Bartoś, which is the whole point.

For twenty-eight years I have begun every morning with a practice I was too ashamed to name out loud, gentle as a hand on a shoulder. HABIT was built from the shame I chose to release. It is time I released this one too. 🌿

People start replying before Carol has finished the second one.

Your body filters your truth all night long, and then the world teaches you to flush it away at dawn. I stopped. The first urine of the morning is the most honest thing your body will make all day, and I drink mine, and I have for years, and this is not a confession. This is coming home.

And then the third one.

This spring, HABIT introduces the Hush Morning Vessel. Hand-thrown in Oaxaca. Lead-free. $185. Limited.

Carol closes the laptop and goes and makes a sandwich and does not look at her phone for two hours, which is the single hardest act of discipline of the entire war.

When she opens it again, Zosia Bartoś is the eighth-trending topic in the United States, and the hashtags are #peemogul, #HushAndFlush, and #DrinkYourTruth.

—

Week two is the good old-fashioned mail.

Carol starts mailing her things. Random things, for the fuck of it. 

A single slice of toast, in a padded envelope. 

A postcard of a Scientology center, blank on the back.

The Wikipedia entry for "clitoris," printed at home on plain paper, double-sided, with the diagram.

Fifty bags of small gummy penises, from a website that exists and is genuinely named dicksbymail. 

And at the end of the week Carol takes out the heavy cream stationery and sends a handwritten letter to Zosia. Signed with her own name.

Dear Ms. Bartoś,

I regret that your powder room had to absorb my response to your review. Some critics get a strongly worded letter. You got my whole bladder. Consider the imbalance a measure of my respect.

Yours in growth,

Carol Sturka

By the end of week two, Carol keeps noticing, is the thing.

Zosia's brand is aggressively female, but her public romantic life is weirdly, weirdly blank.

She has Wes, yes, but nothing about the two of them has heat. Carol has exactly four red-carpet interviews to trampoline herself to that conclusion, and four is plenty. They don't do the stupid couple anecdotes. No we. He is beautiful, distant, ornamental.

Carol just finds it interesting. That is all.

—

And in week three Carol joins HABIT. 

HABIT runs live virtual workshops, $250 a session, Zosia Bartoś on camera, forty earnest women in a grid coming home to their bodies. There are three that week. Carol signs up for the Monday as Diane Pelletier, the Wednesday as Margaret Voss, the Friday as Susan B. Cardoza, which is the behavior of a mentally unwell person. 

Carol turns her camera on, all three times. There is no point doing this if Zosia does not see her face in square nine, square sixteen, square four, under a wrong name, every single time.

And every session it happens. Eight or nine minutes in, Zosia's eyes do their slow pass of the grid, and Carol gets to watch Zosia find her. Gets to watch the most embodied woman in America lose the thread of her own sentence for a second. Carol, muted, alone at her kitchen island, has to put both hands over her mouth.

She unmutes for the Q&A. Obviously. 

Session one. Carol is Diane.

"Hi. Diane. So… I have a shame thing around dirty talk. Like, I need to be called a slut, a whore, a good girl, dealer's choice, in like a real degrading way, you know? And it’s even better if it’s by somebody I actively can’t fucking stand. Like, the more I hate you, the harder I come. It’s like fucking Pavlov, you know? I hear that shit and I’m fucking gone, like a dog at a doorbell. So, how do I release the shame around that? And founder to paying customer, how do you do dirty talk, Zosia?”

Session two. Carol is Margaret.

"Follow-up. You have a partner, so, gal to gal, when he is going at it and you’re lying there doing the grocery list in your head, is the embodied move to tell him, or do we fake it and protect the man? And I’m not asking in general. I’m asking what you do. With your boyfriend. I think forty of us would happily pay another two-fifty for that one."

Session three. Carol is Susan, and she is holding the HABIT vibrator off camera, the one she bought the day of the parking garage.

Carol knows one thing going in. Zosia will be looking right at her, because Zosia is not going to give Carol even that.

"Okay. So. I bought this. Your bestseller, the one in the magazine. And I want to file a report with the group, because I gave it a real, fair run. Four nights. Fresh batteries. The whole thing."

"Night two, it came apart at the base, while inside me. I had to go in after it like I was bobbing for apples. So that's a design note."

"But before that, Zosia, I had it on my clit on the highest setting for, I want to say, eleven minutes. Flat on my back, knees up, full focus, working it side to side, the way the little card says. And what I felt, on the highest setting, after eleven minutes, was that my arm was tired. That's it. That's the whole sensation the bestseller delivered. I mean, I’ve gotten closer rubbing up against the corner of a kitchen counter reaching for a wine glass."

"So my question, for our dearest founder, is just- has this thing ever once actually worked on you? Because I need you to walk me through it. Step by step. What setting, what angle, how long before something happens. Coach the forty of us through finishing on this thing, live, right now, in detail. Or don't, I guess.”

The first thing Carol notices is that Zosia was not ready for the vibrator. Carol can tell Zosia was not ready for the vibrator, for Carol holding it up to the lens and reviewing it like a toaster. 

Zosia takes a large gulp of air when Carol holds the vibrator up for the camera, and then she goes red. It climbs all the way up to her face while Carol describes using it, and Zosia coughs, and Zosia's eyebrows go up, and Carol can tell Zosia is not disgusted. Disgust does not blush like this.

Carol goes with the explanation that requires fewer miracles. This is a woman who has just pictured it, Carol and the vibrator, Carol using her product on herself, and caught herself picturing it.

Carol stops laughing. 

Oh.

Somebody at HABIT mutes Susan B. Cardoza. Nobody mutes the silence Zosia is sitting in, though. And three sessions, three unhinged questions, and not once did the woman ask anyone to take Carol off the grid.

—

And when Carol is not online, Carol is out.

Carol does not plan it, exactly. But she knows Zosia does the shopping at the Erewhon on Sunday mornings, and so Carol starts buying her coffee at that Erewhon, on Sunday mornings.

Carol knows the restaurant by the studio, and the mornings Zosia comes in at nine, and which door she uses, and how she takes her coffee, and the face she makes the moment she sees Carol already sitting there. Carol just turns out to be there. One more time than is comfortable and one fewer than is reportable.

Here is what three weeks of this has done. Carol has not thought once about The Blackwater House, the rejection, the launch, the drawer with the four best things she ever wrote still in it. She has not thought about Helen and her wife and her daughter, or Manny and Celia and the kid and the loud warm house, or the whiskey she has not had in three years and still wants more than she will say.

She has thought about Zosia Bartoś instead. Constantly, and gleefully, the way you think about a person you cannot wait to see again. And twice now, late and alone, she has thought about Zosia the other way. Both times it was the same memory, Zosia's face in the parking garage, all of that rage pointed at Carol. It is a stupid thing to get off on. Carol got off on it anyway.

So. Carol can admit a few things about that insufferable little bitch. One of them is that anger looks really fucking good on her.

That one is maybe a problem for another day.

—

ZOSIA

Carol Sturka is a fucking nightmare.

For three weeks she has been terrorizing her.

It started with the Twitter account. Millions of people now believe the founder of HABIT drinks her own morning urine from a $185 hand-thrown cup, because Carol Sturka got into Zosia's Twitter and wrote it. So, obviously, reading the tweets before the crisis team tore them down went well, and was not, in any way, a truly degrading experience.

And Saskia Hollander saw it, because she sees everything. The acquisition was supposed to close in spring. The parking garage pushed it to autumn. Then Carol fucking Sturka made Zosia the urine mogul of North America, and Saskia's people sent an email with the phrase concerns around brand health, and now the deal is twelve months out, if it is anything at all. 

$150 million and a year of Zosia's life, gone, because of Carol Sturka. For a solid month HABIT has been in the culture because this woman will not leave Zosia alone, and Zosia cannot say that to anyone, because the only thing worse than the feud is the feud becoming the story.

Carol is everywhere, too. She has signed Zosia’s work email up for what appears to be every heterosexual-marriage-rescue newsletter in the Western hemisphere, so that Maddie now scrolls past Reignite His Desire Tonight and Sacred Submission for the High-Achieving Wife and a Catholic intimacy seminar to reach the actual mail.

Her face is in the HABIT workshop Zoom, camera on, looking down the lens, saying the most vulgar, filthy things to Zosia's face and in front of Zosia's customers. The last one sent Zosia straight into the shower after.

On a Thursday night Zosia comes downstairs and finds Wes on the sofa eating a fistful of gummy penises. Carol's gummy penises. The fifty bags came in the mail two days ago, and Zosia left the boxes all over the kitchen, and now Wes is working through one of the bags in the TV light, one at a time, and he knows what he is eating, he simply does not care to sit with who, of the two of them, ended up eating the fucking dicks.

Zosia laughs because there is really nothing else to do.

So that is the nightmare. 

Here is the part Zosia would not say to anyone.

Upstairs, she gets herself off thinking about Carol Sturka. Again, and again, and again.

Some nights it is just the memory of Carol's back working in that lit window, the woman under her. But the other nights, Zosia opens the video she took off Carol's phone, four minutes of it. Carol filmed it herself, for someone who is not Zosia, and Zosia watches it because morality is not going to make her come now, is it.

So, she puts the AirPods in because she needs the sound. 

And Carol sounds…wet. Zosia can hear Carol’s fingers moving wet against herself, too close to the fucking mic, as if it were happening against Zosia's ear. Carol breathing hard. Carol low in her throat. Carol moaning when her hand goes faster. And near the end Carol says, oh fuck, I'm coming, and Zosia, with her hand between her own legs, comes on the sound of it.

Three weeks of her getting off on the hating, and she has stopped minding it, is the thing. Whatever this is with Carol Sturka, Zosia is not going to be the one to end it.

—

For the next three weeks, Zosia picks up the phone and calls the people who owe her, and fifteen years of being in this industry is a long ledger.

She wants Wycaro buried, and buried by people who don’t look like they are holding a shovel. So she places things. The Cut runs Are Legacy Romance Franchises Losing Millennial and Gen Z Women? A trade books site runs Why Women Readers Are Demanding Better Sex Writing. A wellness vertical that owes Zosia her entire summit slot runs What Wellness Culture Understands About Pleasure That Romance Fiction Still Doesn't. Different mastheads, different bylines, the same blade underneath every one of them. Nobody attacks Carol. They simply wonder, in writing, whether anyone needs Wycaro in the present tense at all.

It is good work. It is the best work Zosia has done in a year, and that is its own knife, that the best work she has done has Carol Sturka's name on it instead of her own.

—

This phone thing they start doing pushes them across a very weird, very unhinged line.

Carol calls sometimes at two in the morning. She does not say anything. She breathes, and they sit in the silence of it, and then she hangs up.

Zosia calls back at three and breathes back. She eases down into the bed while she does it, chasing the warmth, and she wakes up to a phone with a dead battery. And when, exactly, did Zosia start falling asleep to the sound of Carol Sturka breathing. She does not have an answer. She knows the scale of the thing scares her. That is all she has got.

Then Carol stops breathing and starts typing, because Carol has read The Cut's piece, and Carol is not stupid, and Carol knows exactly whose hand is in it.

CS: You think I don't know this is you.

And then, before Zosia can answer.

CS: You couldn't come at the books, so you got your little media friends to do it for you. I feel sad for you.

Zosia looks at the messages a while. Her thumb, when she finally types, is steady.

ZB: Maybe the whole industry is having the same thought at the same time, Sturka.

The typing bubble starts, and stops, and starts again.

CS: Fuck you.

ZB: Goodnight to you too, Carol.

—

Then, by the end of week four, on a Wednesday, an alert slides up Zosia's screen. Carol Sturka's publisher regrets to announce that the tenth Wycaro novel has been postponed. No new date. Author and publisher in full agreement, which is the industry saying the opposite.

This is the win, Zosia thinks. This is the whole thing she built.

Her hand is already on the phone, her thumb already over it, and for one mad second Zosia is going to call Carol Sturka and ask if she is okay.

Then she stops, because she remembers what they are.

Zosia turns the phone face-down. She has won. And the win goes cold in her hand, because the stupid truth she has not gotten around in a month is that she does not want it. She wants the phone to light up. She waits. She waits.

It does not light up.

—

CAROL

The tenth Wycaro book is postponed.

“I'm so fucking sick of this shit!” Carol is not really shouting it at anyone. “Always fucking something, man. Always fucking something.”

Carol puts the phone face-down on the counter, and then picks it straight back up, because face-down does not make the thing on the screen stop being true. 

The book did not come out. The contract is therefore not satisfied, and Carol is not getting out of her deal with these people, not this year, probably not the year after, which means the four manuscripts in her drawer stay exactly where they are. She does not get to put a single fucking page of her actual work in front of anyone, because Wycaro did not come out, because people think the pee thing was real.

So that is a year of Carol's life. Zosia Bartoś reached over and took it. The parking space all over again. The vagina lady wants a thing, and she gets it.

And Carol is furious, obviously. But mostly Carol is humiliated, because Zosia gets to keep going. Zosia gets to keep selling $90 lube to lonely housewives, and Carol gets to keep her mouth shut. The publisher has been very clear. No statement. No comment. Nothing with your name on it, Carol. The publisher is done being a punchline in this feud, and the next bad headline comes straight out of Carol's advance.

Carol did this to herself.

A year of her life is gone and her mouth is taped shut, and Carol has no statement to give, no comment to make, no headline she is allowed to be, nothing to do but swallow it and stand here while Zosia Bartoś gets richer.

It is one giant fuck-up. Carol has never felt more fucked.

—

A month after the postponement, Carol's life shrinks into a kind of nothing.

Carol does Pilates. Carol writes pages of a short story. Carol hooks up with two different tall brunettes. Carol rots on the couch with popcorn and rewatches the season of LOST with the time travel in it, because the time travel feels, lately, on theme.

See, the war was a fantasy, the imaginings of an idle brain, and the idle brain had airbrushed out the part where none of it is true. So, sure, she has some regrets. 

She imagined ending Zosia Bartoś and what she got instead was a postponed book and a year she cannot get back, and reality, it turns out, has always been a poor second best. Reality serves up duds. High hopes, and then the crashing collapse, and Carol on the couch in the LOST light holding the dud.

Manousos starts coming by twice a week. He calls it nothing, he calls it being in the neighborhood, but Carol knows a wellness check when she sees one. Helen calls three times a week. Carol says I'm fine to both of them.

Zosia still calls her at three in the morning, and Carol still lets it go to voicemail, and the voicemail is always the same, Zosia just breathing into it, and Carol lies in the dark and lets it ring and hates her.

She does hate her. That part is true.

Carol wanted out. Carol wanted out of Wycaro so badly she could taste it, the four real books, her own name on the inside of them, and Zosia Bartoś reached over and took the year that was supposed to be the way out.

So Carol goes through the days. Pilates, the pop corn, the brunettes, the couch, the time traveling on LOST. 

It is a life. It is, technically, a life.

—

Kid: bro, tío manny asked me to send you this. remember when i got into that lady's twitter? well i also got into her old email, the one she made the account on, real sloppy of her tbh. dumped everything that looked useful into a folder, link below. call it a bonus.

ZB_USEFUL.

A Dropbox link under it.

Carol sits up, popcorn going everywhere across the couch. She thinks about the publisher. Stand down. Be a professional. And that is when whatever is left of Carol's good sense lies down and dies, because she clicks the link anyway.

The folder opens. Four things in it, and the names by themselves are enough to make Carol go completely still.

HABIT_Q4_INTIMACY_DECK_FINAL_FINAL.pdf.

A subfolder, NO_MAN_IN_THE_ROOM.

A Word document, lesbian_desire_doesnt_scale_internal.docx.

And one email, saved out on its own.

Carol opens the PDF first. A slide deck. Carol reads it slowly. 

The core consumer, says slide three, is women in long-term heterosexual relationships experiencing desire loss. Slide four is brand risk, and the brand risk is that one of those women might use the product and stop needing her husband. Slide six says the word partner should stay inclusive in the copy, but the photography should default to a man and a woman for mass retail. Slide nine says sapphic imagery depresses broad-market comfort, and Carol knows that means the straights get uncomfortable.

And boxed off at the bottom of slide nine, a note from the founder. Keep the language universal, Zosia Bartoś wrote. Do not make this about orientation.

Carol’s chest goes cold, and then it goes hot, and somewhere in the hot part there is a word, and Carol is going to enjoy using it.

The subfolder is a campaign. NO_MAN_IN_THE_ROOM. Two women in their fifties in a real bed, a finished film, a tagline across the last frame that reads For Women Who Want Women, and a testing deck saying the focus group loved it more than anything HABIT ran all year. A whole beautiful thing, made and paid for and never once let out of the folder.

The Word document is the why. Why Lesbian Desire Doesn't Scale. Carol reads enough to get it: market language, the segment is real but it is narrow. Blah, blah, blah. 

The last file is one email. Four lines. From Zosia Bartoś. Hold the campaign. Indefinitely. I don’t want to see it on a calendar again. — Z.

It’s a simple fury, and it catches up to Carol the second the four files line up and Carol sees what she is looking at.

Zosia Bartoś, who spent months of Carol’s life burying Carol, is a homophobic bitch. A rich, lubricant-selling, fucking bigot.

And then there is the truth. Carol enjoyed their feud. She enjoyed every hour of it. She felt close to the woman.

Some nights Carol got herself off to Zosia's face, and she had called it admiration. Tonight the admiration feels a great deal worse than almost dirty.

Cheap. The almost three months, cheap.

Carol draws herself up to her fullest height and picks up her phone.

She takes a bunch of screenshots: The founder note. The slide with the two women. The first page of the memo. The email with Zosia Bartoś's name on the bottom of it. Four images, sent in a row, and under the last one Carol types the only line that needs typing.

CS: Oh. So you’re just a fucking coward and a homophobe.

She sends all of it. And then, under it, Zosia starts typing.

Carol watches the three dots. They sit there. They go away. They come back. Zosia starts typing again, and stops again, and the dots appear and vanish and appear, and Carol watches.

Then the dots go away and do not come back.

Nothing. Carol waits. She waits. She puts the phone face-down, turns it back over, and there is still nothing, and the nothing runs on for twenty fucking minutes, which is a long time to go quiet on a person who has just called you a homophobe.

And then Zosia Bartoś tells her where to meet.

It is an address and a time and nothing else. A Trader Joe's lot on La Brea. Seven o'clock. 

She does not deny the screenshots. She just says where.

—

Zosia has been in the Trader Joe's lot for nineteen minutes and she cannot get her hands to stay still.

She re-reads the text Wes sent an hour ago, from the Abu Dhabi airport, probably. 

WES: Hey Z. Gentle reminder to honor the breath today.

Honor the fucking breath.

The panic comes, and lets go, and comes back. Zosia sits caught in it, teetering, waiting for whatever follows nineteen minutes of this. 

She has leverage, Zosia reminds herself, firmly. There are four unpublished manuscripts in a safe in her own house, pulled off Carol Sturka's phone. There is nothing Carol can do with that folder that Zosia cannot answer in kind. She is not without a card. She reminds herself of this several times. It helps less than it should, because the folder was never really the problem.

There is more than one problem. LOL.

One problem is the deal, and the brand, and the eleven slides a hostile, unhinged woman is now holding of HABIT explaining itself in the worst language available to a corporation.

The other problem is smaller, and stupider, and Zosia cannot get the thing to leave. Carol Sturka thinks she is a homophobe. And Zosia is deeply ashamed. Sitting here, and nineteen minutes in a parked car has not talked her out of it.

So she works at it instead. Carol Sturka is the enemy. She urinated all over her bathroom floor. She got into her email and her Twitter and made the internet believe Zosia drinks her own piss in the mornings.

Carol fucking Sturka's opinion of her gets to sit in Zosia's chest and will not move. Why the fuck does she care what this motherfucker thinks of her. Except she does. She does care, and there is no version of caring about Carol Sturka's opinion that is acceptable, but so what.

And there is a last problem, the thing blooming in Zosia's chest right now at the prospect of seeing Carol Sturka, of hearing her voice again. It is relief, or it is hope, or it is something with both of those in it, and Zosia would genuinely rather die than admit that she misses her. She has missed her.

Headlights swing across her side mirror. A 911 pulls in beside her, slow, and stops. Driver's side to driver's side.

The 911 sits there with Carol Sturka inside it looking at Zosia. Zosia looks back. Then she lowers her window, because she is the one who sent the address.

The glass on the 911 goes down a second later.

"Thank you for meeting me." Zosia keeps her voice flat and level and does not let it do anything else.

Carol Sturka laughs at that, one short note of it, and rests her arm along the door. 

"Don't," she says. "Don't do the hostess voice with me. You didn't invite me anywhere. You panicked, and now we're here.”

Zosia lets Carol feel exactly as large as she so plainly wants to feel.

"So, what?" Carol is enjoying this and not hiding it. "Waving the white flag, huh? Don't want anyone finding out what a huge homophobe you are?”

The defense rises in Zosia's throat and dies there, because the true thing is not sayable. She has not said it out loud to a single person in her entire life, and she is not going to say it first to a woman who hates her, to win a fucking point.

So Zosia's mouth pulls hard at one corner, and she gives it back. "Listen, you fucking idiot. Are you done jerking your tiny dick off? What, you read four files and immediately assume you fucking know me? I’m here because I know how this looks, and if released I’m in deep shit. Okay?”

"Oh yeah? Then deny it." Carol leans her head out of the window, closer. "Go on. Tell me I've got it fucking wrong.”

Zosia rolls her eyes. 

She lets the silence go where silence goes. Being thought a bigot costs her nothing she cannot afford, and the truth costs everything she has.

"What I personally fucking believe is not your business, Carol. What is your business is that after you pissed all over my bathroom like an animal, you left your phone behind, and now I have all your unpublished manuscripts.”

The grin slides off Carol Sturka's face, and Zosia is so holistically delighted. 

“I have all four of your books,” Zosia lets that sit a second. “The Blackwater House. The Ladies of Ashfield. Bitter Chrysalis and The Bones of Saint Agatha.”

So now they both have a gun out. That is a footing Zosia understands. 

Her chakras are finally aligning after this month.

"So here is what is going to happen. I’ll take down the Goodreads review, and I’ll put the old review back up. Wycaro goes back on the HABIT list, the books go back into the HABIT store. You stop saying my fucking company's name in public, and you NEVER go near ANY of my social media accounts again.”

Carol’s head comes off the seat. "Fine. But you apologize for the review first. The fucking one-star. You started this, so you go first.”

"You wrote on my windshield." Zosia hears her own voice climb and does nothing to stop it. “In lipstick. Across the glass, where anyone could-”

"You painted my car, Zosia." Carol's palm comes down flat on the top of her own door. "With a roller. With house paint."

It goes on like this, and Zosia is aware, somewhere under the part of her that is winning, under the part of her that is enjoying watching Carol Sturka this angry, under the part of her that is very clearly attracted to this fucking idiot, that this is not how enemies sound. This is how a marriage sounds. Every tiny fucking grievance produces its twin. Neither of them started it, because both of them started it, every day, for months.

Zosia is the one who breaks the loop.

"You should take the deal," she says. "Your publisher has already moved your tenth book off the schedule. Your contract is not over, you’re muzzled for another year, and you cannot afford a fucking fight sitting on top of that. I’m actually being very fucking generous.”

Carol narrows her eyes at Zosia. "Oh. So you're still stalking me. I see.”

Zosia's face goes hot. "I- I keep tabs on a great many things, Carol.”

Carol half laughs and looks at her for a long moment, and then something turns over behind her face, and Zosia knows the joke is coming.

“Wait a minute.” Carol grins, cocky, far too pleased with herself. “Are you, uh, trying to ruin my life because you want me? Is that what’s happening? Because it’d be nice to know if you’re trying to fuck me or hate-crime me.”

It is a joke. Zosia can tell it is a joke, Carol teasing her, Carol enjoying herself, but there is an undercurrent under it, as though Carol has gone fishing and felt something move on the line.

Zosia blushes abruptly. There is no other word for what her face does. The heat comes up fast and red, the way it did when she was seventeen and caught, and Zosia goes fucking still, and looks down at the steering wheel. 

And Carol Sturka sees it, and Zosia can tell that she sees it. 

The joke goes out of Carol's face. She does not grin now. She looks at Zosia, a long second, the way you look at a thing you have only just understood.

So Zosia gets loud.

"I will tell you what it is." Her hands come off the wheel. "I hate to watch a writer get bullied by her own publisher. That is all. Your career could be exponentially bigger than it is, and instead it is the size of, like, a fun-size anal plug.”

“Excuse me?" Carol's whole upper body comes around in the seat. "My career is not an anal plug. The fuck? My career is horse-size, motherfucker. My career is a fucking Bad Dragon Pegasus. A Magnum opus.”

And Zosia laughs. She cackles actually. Because what the fuck is wrong with this crazy woman, who has just had her life's work called a fun-size anal plug and whose entire instinct is to argue for a bigger one.

A black BMW pulls up. The driver is a man in his fifties, AirPods in, and he leans on the horn for three full seconds.

BEEEEEEP.

"Hey." He leans out of his window. "Are you ladies leaving, or are you just gonna fuckin’ sit there?”

Carol's head is out of the 911 before he has finished. "I'll fucking leave when I want to leave, asshole.”

Zosia's head is out of hers in the same instant. "Eat shit, motherfucker. There are nine other fucking spaces.”

"Fuck you," the man says.

"What did you fucking say?” It comes out of them together.

"Get out of the fucking car," Carol says. “Come here!”

“Say that shit again, motherfucker.” Zosia shouts. “I dare you!”

The man looks at the two of them, two women leaning out of two cars at him with the same face on.

“Think again, fucker.” Carol says, pointing at him.

“Suck a fuck, asshole” Zosia says.

The man throws the BMW into reverse. "Psychos!”

“You're a fucking psycho!” they both shout after him, full volume.

Then the BMW is gone and the lot is quiet again, and Zosia is looking at Carol, and Carol is looking at her, and neither of them says anything.

"Look." The joke has gone out of Carol's voice. "I think we're on the same page here, yeah. And if we weren't, I’d have to start a new fucking chapter you’re not equipped for, Zosia.”

"Are you threatening me?”

Carol does not raise her voice at all. "A threat would sound like this. Do as you're told, or I’ll send your little homophobic decks to Saskia Hollander.”

For a while, neither of them moves.

"I'll take the deal," Carol says.

"Fine."

Carol then extends her arm out of the window. “Let’s shake on it.”

Zosia swallows. This idiot is going to be the end of her. She reaches out and takes the hand anyway.

It is more of a hand-hold than a handshake. Their hands go still, and neither of them ends it. They stay like that, hands held between the two windows, until Carol is the one who lets go.

She starts the Porsche. Zosia watches the 911 ease out of the lot, and her hand stays warm for a long time after.

—

It is a week before things settle into an empty sort of peace.

Zosia knows the thing she is feeling is insane, because it is insane. An ache. A craving, for a complete asshole of a woman, a stranger. Except stranger would be a lie, would it not. The two of them know more about each other than they know about half the people they would call close, and still.

There is no Carol Sturka in Zosia's life anymore. Carol made a great deal of noise in it for months, and then the deal got struck, and then Carol went quiet, and now there is the space where the noise was, and Zosia has to sit down in the evenings inside the plain crushing disappointment of it.

It is after midnight when she pulls off her clothes and gets into the ones she sleeps in.

She gets into bed, and she picks up her phone. This is the thing Zosia does now. She reads Carol's last texts, the ones from a month ago, and she reads them again, and she does this until she falls asleep. It is a small compulsive habit and Zosia is aware that it is one.

Tonight three grey dots appear at the bottom of the thread, the little pulsing ones that mean the other person is typing right now.

Zosia sits up. She blinks at the phone and does not move and barely breathes, because moving or breathing feels like it might scare Carol off the other end of it.  

The dots come up. They go away. They come up again. Then nothing happens for five minutes.

Fuck her. Fuck her. Fuck her-

Zosia types it and sends it before the rest of her brain catches up to her thumb.

ZB: it's really none of your business carol but. i'm not a bigot. what you saw, it's complicated.

She is going to be sick.

The dots come up, again.

Please. Please. Please.

CS: i know.

Zosia feels like she can breathe again. She stares at the phone and does not have a single thing in her head.

CS: did you read any of my books?

Zosia smiles for a moment. 

ZB: the blackwater house is so incredibly gorgeous. i haven’t been that moved by a book in years.

CS: are you fucking with me

ZB: no, of course not. i’m serious. 

CS: how did you get into my phone btw

ZB: 1234, really Carol? who the fuck chooses 1234. 

CS: some of us don’t go through life assuming a fucking psycho is going to be stalking them

ZB: omg you’re such a loser. i bet you’ve clicked a link that said ‘urgent message from the IRS’

CS: you’re so fucking rude. 

Zosia is smiling at the phone, despite herself, thank you. She knows what this is. She is addicted to this. To the attraction, to the whole consuming size of it.

CS: okay look. i think you owe me some honesty here, seeing as you invaded my privacy. did you look at the video in my photos.

ZB: Which video? 

Zosia knows exactly which video. Zosia gets herself off to that video every second night.

Carol is not typing. Carol is not typing because answering means naming the thing on the video, and naming it means that if Zosia somehow has not seen it, Zosia now knows it is there, and might want it, or want to use it.

This is so messed up. This is so fucking messed up.

And then Carol starts typing again.

CS: i'm too old to dance around things, zosia. it is a video of me touching myself. i just want to know if you’re going to blackmail me with it.

Zosia’s blood runs hot and cold. 

ZB: i would never blackmail you with something like that, carol.

CS: okay thank you. good to know. 

For a second Zosia thinks that is the end of it. That she has lost Carol again, tonight, right here. The sadness that comes down on her at the thought is far too big to be safe.

CS: did you watch it though. you never said.

jesus fucking fuck. 

ZB: why do you want to know.

CS: okay so you watched it.

Zosia's fingers hover, no words on them. She gulps, and then she types it.

ZB: who was it for?

CS: some woman. i didn't end up sending it. too shy, maybe. do you think i should have? ;) what is your professional advice on the technique, mrs. bartoś. do i need one of those expensive toys of yours.

Zosia could spin herself something here. But Zosia is turned on, and Zosia is lonely, and Zosia has never in her life felt this close to another woman, and none of that is being run out of her head right now.

ZB: i don't think that woman deserved the view. or the sound. 10/10, no notes.

Her hands are shaking. What is she doing. What in God's name is she doing.

Carol is typing. 

Carol stops. 

Carol is calling her.