Page 68 of Suite 7

My color-coded to-do list for the weekend sits on the coffee table with every item already crossed off, because I did them all this morning at seven AM before the day could get ideas, and I’m now entirely and unimpeachably free to exist horizontally on my couch and rewatch Succession from the beginning, which I’ve been meaning to do for two years and which requires exactly zero emotional bandwidth.

I’m still smiling about Nordstrom.

The Sinclair-Beckett Smackdown. God, it never gets old. I don’t even remember how it started anymore — some dinner, some argument about something neither of them would concede — but it’s been a fixture for so long it feels like weather.

Kane immovable, Vera refusing to accept that, both of them sharpening themselves against each other like it’s a sport they’ve agreed to play indefinitely.

Diplomacy is just lying with better vocabulary.

I laugh again into my wine glass.

Vee, honestly.

I love them both so much it’s almost stupid.

My apartment is exactly as I like it. Which is to say: perfect. Everything where it belongs, every surface clear, the kind of order that is supposed to feel like peace and mostly just feels like evidence. I have a Gevrey-Chambertin and a crossed-off list and a Friday night that belongs entirely to me, and I’m sitting in the middle of all of it and there is nobody here to see it.

That’s the part I don’t examine. The nobody here to see it.

I reach for the remote when a memory flickers. The way Vera had gone quiet for just a second when Kane walked in. The way her face changed when he said her name.

I go still when Sidney crosses my mind, the way she does when I’m not careful. Sidney dated Kane, and I stood there telling myself it would be fine, that friendships survived these things, that we were solid enough. Instead it changed the shape of everything, slowly, the way water changes stone. By the time it ended there was nothing left of what we’d had. Not because anyone lied. Just because some things don’t survive the interference, and I was too certain we were the exception to see it coming until it was already gone.

Notice, I’d told myself, after. Pay attention. Notice.

I notice.

I sit with it for a moment. This one costs something the others didn’t. I can feel the shape of it without being able to name it yet.

I reach for the remote.

Then I put it down and laugh. Out loud. Alone in my apartment, genuinely laughing at myself, because — Kane and Vera.

Kane. And Vera.

Two people who have been arguing about everything and nothing since approximately the dawn of time. Two people so fundamentally, constitutionally, structurally incompatible that the universe would have to be running some kind of elaborate joke to even⁠⁠—

I shake my head, still smiling.

Honestly, Sloane.

I unmute the TV.

The takeout arrives eleven minutes later and I eat it on the couch and I don’t think about it again.

I don’t.

12 Kane

I’m in the room when my watch reads half past six.

Thirty minutes until she arrives.

I cross to the spanking bench and press my palm against the leather padding, cool, smooth, taut. I grip the frame with both hands and shake; it doesn’t budge. I lean my full weight into it. The wood holds without complaint.

The paddle sits on the side table. I lift it and turn it over in my hands, checking the grain: straight through, no knots or weak points. I swing it once through empty air and listen to the whoosh cut sharp and clean.

At the Cross I wrap my fingers around each restraint point in turn, pulling hard enough that my shoulder flexes. None of them shift. I unbuckle the leather cuffs and run my thumb along the inside of each one, checking for cracks or rough edges, then raise the arm restraints and measure the angle with my eye. She reaches my shoulder. So I lower them two notches.