Alexa

Olivia rose out of her curtsy and saw me, and her whole face lit up.

"Rach! Hi! You're home!"

She hurried over to the end of the couch in her thigh-highs, the frilly white petticoat bouncing with every step, and bent down to give me a quick one-armed hug, the wooden spoon still in her other hand. She smelled like butter and rosemary and the oven. Bent over me like that, the corset pushed her freckled breasts up so high that they nearly brushed my chin.

"I saw your text," she said, straightening. "I'm so sorry about the presentation."

"Thanks," I said, and my throat went tight with relief. She was sorry. Whatever the costume meant, my best friend was still in there.

"But honestly?" She tilted her head and gave me a soft, sympathetic smile. "It's probably for the best. You were working so much, Rach. Derek and I were talking about it this afternoon, and he made a really good point." She glanced over at him, glowing. "A high-value female doesn't need to prove herself with some little science project. And no high-value man wants a girl who spends her Saturday nights smelling like burnt wires."

"Told her," Derek said, not looking up from the phone between Kayla's breasts. "Kimchi's already overdue."

Olivia giggled. "Derek."

But she didn't disagree.

Some little science project. Olivia had brought me cold brew at two in the morning while I built it. She'd been asleep on this couch the night the first signal test came back clean, and she'd woken up when I yelled, and we'd jumped up and down on the rug screaming until Mrs. Patterson banged on the ceiling. I opened my mouth to remind her of all of it, to tell her she sounded exactly like him, that "high-value woman" was a phrase invented by men who sold supplements out of their cars, and to thank her, because she was obviously just trying to make me feel better, and the last thing she deserved was for me to be a bitch about it.

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Thanks."

Derek laughed, a low breath through his nose, like I'd done a trick. I wanted to tell him he could take his laugh and his fiancée and his tank top and get out of my apartment, and that I'd wait until he finished his video, because interrupting him would only start a fight in front of everyone.

Be patient.

"Dinner's almost ready," Olivia said, turning back toward the kitchen. "I was just helping with the gravy."

From the kitchen came the sound of someone humming. A soft, bright little tune, and the clink of a spoon against a pot.

Olivia was standing right in front of me. So who was in the kitchen?

I opened my mouth to ask, but Derek was already lifting his hand to his throat. The vape again, pressed into the soft spot under his jaw. He was looking at Olivia this time. And this time he spoke out loud, slowly and clearly, like reading instructions off the back of a box.

"Liv. From now on, any time I say 'Alexa,' you're my Alexa. You do exactly what I tell you, the second I tell you, in your little Alexa voice. You don't think about it. You don't feel weird about it. You love being my Alexa. And when you're done, you thank me. Every time."

A faint buzz, like a phone vibrating in the next room.

He lowered his hand and grinned at the ceiling. "Always wanted one of those Amazon things. Too fuckin' expensive. This is way better."

I stared at him.

The flat contact pad. The hollow of the throat. The slow, steady cadence of someone speaking directly to a memory. I'd spent eight months perfecting exactly that. All the pieces were right in front of me, the costume, the "sir," the fiancée who'd come out of nowhere, and they were about to snap together into the only explanation that made sense, which was that Derek didn't have MUSE.

He didn't. I'd watched him walk out with a cardboard box. It was just some weird coincidence. He was just being Derek, talking into his vape like a microphone because he thought it was funny. He'd once given an entire toast at Olivia's birthday dinner into a breadstick.

Still, he was being an asshole. I was not a bystander. I needed to say something but there was no use making a scene..

Olivia's face changed.

It was so small that if I hadn't known her face better than my own, I'd have missed it. Her eyes went soft and unfocused for a second, the way they did when she was trying to remember an actor's name. Then they cleared, and her expression settled into something smooth and calm and pleasant. A small, polite smile. Hands folded in front of her apron. Eyes on Derek.

The face of something that had just been switched on.

Some part of me, very far away, was screaming. But I'd had the worst day of my life, and I was seeing MUSE everywhere because I wanted so badly to find it, and if I accused him of something that crazy in front of everyone, I'd sound completely unhinged.

Besides, Garlic took it. I was pretty sure I had seen him but it all happened so fast I wasn't certain. I quickly glanced at my cute, cuddly, traitorous friend cuddled on the couch and then did a quick scan of the room, squinting my eyes to search for the device.

"Hey, Kimchi," Derek said, stretching his arms along the back of the couch. "Watch this."

He looked at Olivia and said, in a flat, bored voice, exactly the way you'd talk to a speaker on a kitchen counter:

"Alexa. Dim the lights."

"Okay!"

Her voice came out crisp and bright, every syllable even, a cheerful synthetic lilt I'd never heard her use in twenty years. She crossed the room in neat, quick little steps, turned the dimmer by the front door until the lamps went soft and gold and the candles on the coffee table became the brightest things in the room, then came straight back and stood in front of the couch with her hands clasped.

Smile on. Waiting.

Garlic, who had been asleep on the arm of the couch, lifted his head and looked at her. Then he looked at me. Then he put his head back down.

"Alexa," Derek said. "Lap dance."

"Okay! Playing: lap dance."

Derek's new fiancée didn't move from her spot between his knees. Instead, Kayla stayed exactly where she was, kneeling on the rug with her back straight, her hands folded, his phone standing upright between her breasts. So Olivia stepped into the narrow gap between them, facing Kayla, with her back to Derek, and for a second she just stood there with her hands clasped, waiting for music only she could hear.

Then she bent forward at the waist.

Slowly, with her knees straight, the way she bent to pick books off the bottom shelf at the library. Her little black satin skirt rode up as she went. The frilly white petticoat lifted with it, and then there was nothing in front of Derek's face but her ass.

Two round, full, pale cheeks, freckled all over, in a pair of tiny white lace panties so sheer I could see every freckle through them. The bend had pulled the lace up between her cheeks, so most of her ass was simply bare, soft and white, framed by the black lace tops of her thigh-highs below and the white satin bow of her apron strings above.

Derek's face was maybe six inches away.

"There she is," he said.

Olivia started to sway.

Slow figure-eights, side to side and back, her ass rolling right in front of him, so close that the edge of her petticoat brushed his nose. Each time her hips swung left, her right cheek lifted and tightened. Each time they swung right, it softened and jiggled back down. She was looking straight down at Kayla the whole time, and Kayla was looking up at her, and for a second, before the switched-on smile slid back into place, I saw Olivia's eyes travel over her. Kayla's golden shoulders. Her flat stomach. The phone nestled between her breasts. The way Derek's knee rested against her arm.

Something flickered across Olivia's face. Just for a second. Then it was gone.

"Alexa," Derek said. "Lose the skirt."

"Okay!"

She didn't even straighten up. She reached back with both hands, found the zipper at the small of her back, and pulled it down, and the black satin slid over her hips and dropped to her ankles. Then she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of the petticoat and pushed that down too, wiggling her hips to get it past the widest part of her, until it fell in a frothy white heap on top of the skirt.

She stepped out of them, one stockinged foot and then the other.

Now it was just the corset, the panties, the thigh-highs, and the little white apron tied at her waist, which hid nothing from behind. Her whole lower half was bare in the candlelight: the long, pale backs of her thighs, the lace tops of her stockings digging into the soft flesh, the white string of her panties sunk between the round curves of her ass.

"Thank you, sir!"

"Better," Derek said. "Keep going."

She backed up into him.

She lowered herself one slow inch at a time until her ass settled into his lap, and she sat there, pressed against him, and rolled. A long, slow grind, forward and back. The couch creaked under them. Without the skirt in the way, I could see everything: her bare ass flattening against the front of his shorts and lifting away, flattening and lifting, the soft flesh spreading against him every time she sank down.

Derek let out a long breath and tipped his head back against the cushions.

"Fuck," he said, to the ceiling. "There it is."

Six months ago, at Audrey's game night, he'd pulled Olivia down onto his lap in front of everyone. Just sitting. Fully dressed. As a joke. She'd jumped up so fast she knocked over the Catan board. Her face went scarlet. She hid in Audrey's bathroom for twenty minutes, and I sat on the edge of the tub while she cried and said she hated it when he did stuff like that in front of people. She hated it. She hated it.

She was grinding her bare ass into his crotch in her underwear, three feet away from me.

On the rug, Kayla was watching her with soft, admiring eyes.

"Oh, Liv," she said warmly, in her honey-slow drawl. "You're doin' so good. Isn't she, baby?"

Derek didn't answer.

"Can I give you a little tip, hun?" Kayla went on, completely sincere, the way you'd help a friend at a dance class. "Try rollin' from your hips instead of your knees. It's a whole lot smoother. That's what he likes."

Olivia stuck her tongue out at her.

Quick and sharp, eyes narrowed behind her glasses. Nyah. Like a kid in the back seat of a car.

Kayla blinked. Then her whole face lit up, and she stuck her tongue right back out, pink and sweet, scrunching her nose and giggling, as if the two of them had just traded a secret handshake on the playground. "Okay, okay," she laughed. "I'll hush."

Olivia's mouth went tight.

And then, very slightly, she shifted her hips. Rolled from her hips instead of her knees.

Derek groaned.

Olivia's eyes went straight to Kayla, and for a second she looked furious. Then she turned around.

She swung one stockinged leg over him and straddled him face to face, her knees sinking into the couch on either side of his hips, her bare thighs spread wide over his. She sank down onto him, all her weight, and started to move again, slower this time, deeper. Each roll of her hips dragged her forward along him and back. Her breasts, still pushed high in the corset, bounced softly against the top edge of the black satin with every stroke.

She leaned in and kissed his neck.

Not a peck. Her lips parted, and I could hear it: a soft, wet sound just under his jaw. Then another, a little lower. Then another on the side of his throat. Her lip gloss left a shiny pink trail down his skin. She kissed his collarbone, his shoulder through the tank top, the center of his chest, leaving damp little prints on the white cotton, and her hips never stopped.

Derek didn't touch her.

His arms stayed spread along the back of the couch. His beer stayed in his hand. He lay there with his eyes half-closed and let her work.

"Fuck, Liv," he said. "You missed this, huh?"

"So much, sir," she whispered against his chest. Then, quieter, almost too quiet to hear: "Is it better than her?"

"Kinda sloppy, though." He yawned. "Bunny rides better."

Olivia froze.

Down on the rug, Kayla pressed both hands over her heart. "Aw, baby, you're sweet," she said, and then, turning her big, kind eyes up to Olivia: "Don't listen to him, hun. You're doin' great. You just need practice, is all. I can show you sometime!"

I watched my best friend's face go red. Not pink, not flushed from exertion. Red, a hot, splotchy, humiliated red climbing up her neck and into her cheeks, the way it used to in high school when someone laughed at her in gym class. Her fingers curled into the front of Derek's tank top.

Then she ground down harder, like she had something to prove, and Derek laughed.

"Alexa. Lower."

"Okay!"

She slid down his body, kissing as she went. Down his chest. She grabbed the hem of his tank top with both hands and pushed it up, baring his stomach, and kissed her way down his abs, one by one, slow and wet, her glasses bumping against his skin. She shifted backward off his lap onto her knees on the couch cushion, bent over him, her bare ass up in the air and pointed straight at me, still moving in that slow, rolling rhythm, like her hips didn't know the dance had changed.

She reached his navel.

She kissed the skin just above the waistband of his shorts.

Then she kissed it again, and hooked one finger into the elastic, and looked up at him over the top of her glasses with wide, hopeful eyes.

"Not yet," Derek said lazily, and pushed her forehead back with one finger. "You gotta earn that back."

"Yes, sir," she breathed. "I'm sorry, sir. I'll earn it. I promise."

She glanced down at Kayla when she said it.

She climbed back up into his lap and straddled him again, and this time, he finally moved his free hand. He grabbed a fistful of her bare ass and pulled her down against him, hard. She gasped, a high, startled little sound, and her eyes fluttered shut.

"Good girl," he said.

"Thank you, sir."

Kayla smiled up at them both from the floor, glowing like a proud big sister at a recital.

"Next," Derek said, without looking down.

Kayla swiped.

I sat on my hands.

I wasn't watching. I was trying not to watch. I was looking past them at the bookshelf, at the TV stand, at the gap behind the radiator cover, because if I found MUSE, none of this would matter. I could undo it. I'd built a device that could put things into people's heads, and if I had it back, I could put the right things back into hers.

Garlic had a spot behind the bottom row of Olivia's Brandon Sanderson books where he'd once stashed an entire bag of hair ties. I hadn't checked there. I hadn't checked under the TV stand, either. If it was there, I could have it in my hand in ten seconds. I could press it to my throat and tell Olivia to remember who she was, and that she hated him, and that she was having such a nice time, and I shouldn't ruin it for her.

No. That wasn't what I'd meant.

I'd meant I could tell her the truth. And the truth was that six months ago she cried in a bathroom because he made her sit on his lap, and tonight she was kissing his stomach in her underwear in front of me and thanking him, and somebody had to stop it, and the only person in this room who could was me. I was going to stand up, pull her off him, wrap her in the throw blanket from the back of the couch, walk her down the hall to her room, and lock the door, and I was going to sit here and wait, because she was an adult, and it was her decision, and the most respectful thing I could do was let her make it.

I didn't stand up.

Unless I was the problem. Unless I was the only person in this room who wasn't having a nice time because I'd decided not to. Unless the reason everyone else seemed so happy and I felt so sick was that I was the one being a bitch about it.

I looked back at them.

Olivia had both hands flat on his chest, fingers spread, her hips rocking in that slow, heavy rhythm. Her copper curls had come loose from the little frilled headpiece and hung down around both their faces like a curtain. Through the gap, I could see her mouth moving against his throat, whispering something over and over.

Derek opened his eyes.

"Okay, Alexa," he said. "Motorboat."

"Okay!"

Olivia sat up straight in his lap.

She didn't wait for him this time. She reached up with both hands, hooked her fingers into the top edge of her corset, and tugged it down herself, and her breasts spilled out over the top.

They were pale. Next to Kayla's gold below them, they were almost white, soft and round, pushed up high and close together by the boning laced tight beneath them. Freckles scattered thick across the tops and thinned toward the middle. Her nipples were small and pink and already drawn up hard in the warm air of the room.

She held them up for him. She cupped one in each hand from underneath, pushed them together, and leaned forward, offering them like a tray.

And before he leaned in, she glanced down at Kayla. Just once. Like she was making sure Kayla was watching.

Kayla was. She was smiling.

Derek grabbed Olivia by the waist, pressed his face between her breasts, and shook his head.

"Brrrrrrrrrrbbbbbbbbbllllllllllbbbbbbbbbbt."

Her breasts wobbled against his cheeks, slapping softly, spit flying. Olivia threw her head back and shrieked with laughter.

"Oh my God! Baby! You're so silly!"

"Bbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrllllllllllllbbbbbbbbbbbt."

Last spring, in the checkout line at Trader Joe's, Derek had reached over and honked one of her breasts. Through her sweater. Like a bike horn, honk honk, and laughed, right there in front of the cashier and the woman behind them with the stroller. Olivia didn't say a word the whole drive home. She went straight to her room and shut the door, and when I knocked an hour later, she was curled up on her bed with Garlic, crying into his fur. Like I was a joke, she'd said. Like I was his toy, and everybody could see.

That was through a sweater. In a grocery store.

Now she was holding them up for him bare, with both hands, pushing them into his face and giggling.

He came up for air, flushed and grinning.

Her breasts were wet. Shiny with his spit, flushed pink across the tops where his stubble had scraped them, the freckles standing out darker against the red. Her nipples had swollen stiff and dark. She looked down at herself, then up at him, breathless and glowing.

"Again?" she whispered. "Please, sir? Was that better than hers?"

He looked down at Kayla instead. "Bunny's are better."

"Aww, baby," Kayla said, beaming, and gave her chest a happy little shimmy that made the phone wobble between her breasts. "You say the sweetest things." Then, earnestly, up to Olivia: "Yours are real cute too, Liv! They're just littler, is all. Nothin' wrong with littler."

Olivia's face went red again, all the way up to her hairline.

"Thank you, Kayla," she said tightly.

"Of course, hun!"

Olivia turned back to Derek and pushed her breasts higher, closer to his face.

"Please, sir," she said. "Let me make it up to you. I can do better. I'll be better than her. I promise."

"Prove it."

He went back in.

"Brrrrrrrrrrrrrbbbbbbbbbbbbbllllllllllllllbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt."

This time he went slower. He dragged his mouth across one breast and down to her nipple and sucked it into his mouth, loud and wet, then let go with a pop and moved to the other. Olivia's laugh broke off into a gasp. Her fingers knotted into his hair. Her hips started rocking against him again on their own, faster now, and the couch springs squeaked.

He bit down. Not hard. Just enough.

She squealed, and then she moaned, long and shaky, and pressed his face harder against her chest.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, God. Thank you. Thank you."

"Say it louder," he said against her skin. "So Bunny can hear."

"Thank you, sir!"

Kayla clapped softly. "Y'all are so cute."

I made myself look at the TV stand.

Under it, there was a shadowy gap where the power strip was. Garlic liked to lie back there in the summer because the floor was cool. Had I checked it on Sunday? I thought I had. I couldn't remember. My head felt so full. If MUSE was back there, I could reach it from here. All I had to do was slide off the couch onto my knees. Five seconds. And then I could press it to my throat and say Olivia, stop, and she would stop, and it would be so rude to start crawling around on the floor in the middle of everything.

I stayed where I was.

Garlic jumped down from the arm of the couch, padded across the rug, and sat right in front of the TV stand. He looked at me. He blinked slowly. Then he lay down, rolled onto his back, and showed the room his enormous fluffy stomach.

Derek surfaced with a long, satisfied breath and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Olivia slumped forward onto his chest, panting, her bare breasts pressed against him, her glasses hanging off one ear.

He picked his beer back up and turned to me with the happiest expression I'd ever seen on him.

"Isn't this great, Kimchi?"

And there it was.

My opening. The first time all night he'd asked me something and actually waited for an answer.

I'd been composing it since I sat down, and I had it now, every word, sharp and organized and airtight. No, Derek. It isn't great. Two weeks ago, Olivia sat on this exact couch and cried for three hours because of you. She read every text you ever sent her, every time you called her fat or stupid or lucky you put up with her. She blocked you. She was getting better. She was reading again and sleeping through the night. And now you're back in her apartment, two weeks later, with your fiancée on her knees on her rug, and you're making her answer to the name of a household appliance and strip and grind on you and compete with another woman for you in front of people, which you know she hated, which you KNOW she hated. Whatever this is, it isn't love. It isn't even attraction. It's control. And the fact that you think it's great tells me everything I need to know about what kind of person you are.

I took a breath. I looked him in the eye.

And then I looked at Olivia, flushed and topless in his lap in her stockings and her little white apron, her glasses crooked, her mouth pink and swollen, smiling at me. And at Kayla, gazing up at me from the floor with her big, worried, earnest eyes. And I thought, I can't say all that in front of them. That would be so cruel.

"No, it's not great," I said firmly, a bit of seriousness entering my tone.

Derek turned to me surprised. I had managed to catch him off guard. Finally, the wait was over. Now was my chance to lay into him.

"Errmm... I think it's," I said, "maybe a little too much? For a Monday? What do you think?"

That would show him. I high-fived myself mentally, congratulating myself on such a passionate speech. He deserved to hear my criticism. I had been firm. I had been serious. And I had totally not been a bitch about it.

Wait, why was he laughing?

Derek had begun laughing so hard he slopped beer on his shirt. Such an asshole.

Then, slowly, Olivia laughed too, still straddling him, and pushed her glasses up her nose. "Rach, you're so uptight."

Uptight? I wasn't trying to be uptight. I was trying to be firm and not a total bitch.

"I'm not uptight. I'm..." I tried again. Smaller. Gentler. Surely, gentle would get through where yelling hadn't. "I'm just not sure this is... healthy, Liv."

"Healthy," Derek repeated, delighted. "Alexa. Kimchi thinks you're not healthy."

"Thank you for your feedback, sir!" Olivia said, in the bright robot voice.

I tried one more time.

I leaned forward and put my hand on her knee, on the warm, freckled skin just above the lace of her stocking. There was a little white scar there, right on the kneecap, from when she was eight and crashed her bike into my mailbox. I'd held her hand in the ER while they stitched it.

She looked down at my hand. Then up at me. Her face was so open and so pleasant and so far away.

"Liv," I said. Barely more than a whisper. "Is this what you really want? Honestly? Two weeks ago, you were terrified he'd come back. You sat right here and held my wrist and made me promise. Even your therapist told you he wasn't good for you."

Her face changed.

The smile went away. What replaced it was an expression I had never once seen on Olivia Grant's face in twenty years of knowing her: a kind of weary, pitying disdain, like I'd tracked mud across a clean floor and was now apologizing for it badly.

"Oh my God, Rach," she said. "Not this again."

She picked my hand up off her knee and set it back in my lap.

"You always do this. You always have to make everything about you. I finally have something good, something real, with a high-value man, and you can't let me have it for even one night. You're just jealous." She said it simply, like reading a fact off a flashcard. "You've always been jealous of me."

"Liv, I'm not jealous, I'm—"

"You're just jealous," she said again. The exact same words, in the exact same patient, even tone, like she'd pressed play. "You've always been jealous of me."

I stared at her.

"I mean, look at you." She gestured at me. My hoodie, my leggings, my socks. "You've been wearing that same hoodie since college. You haven't been on a date since grad school. You cried for twenty minutes on Saturday because you thought your sock was a hamster."

Derek made a noise like a popped tire. "Her what?"

"Her sock," Olivia said, turning to him, giggling. "Rachel's been testing this 'rapid learning' device from her lab on herself. One of her tests was to tell herself her sock was a hamster, and then she learned that it was a hamster, and then she cradled it for an hour and named it Mr. Whiskers."

"Interesting..." Derek replied. For the first time tonight, he looked pensive as if my comment had sparked one of the rare thoughts that he had. Did he know something? He looked at his vape for a second which looked like MUSE but was certainly not MUSE because Derek did not have MUSE.

I sat there feeling more confused. Then anger. Why had Olivia shared that?

That was mine. That was a story I'd told only Olivia, on this couch, two nights ago, both of us laughing so hard she'd had to take off her glasses. Twenty years of secrets between us, and she had just handed one to him like a party favor.

"It's okay, Rach," Olivia said kindly, turning back to me, still a little breathless. "Not everybody wants to end up alone with a cat and a soldering iron."

"Alexa," Derek said, wiping his eyes, still grinning. "Add something to my cart."

"Okay! What would you like to add?"

He looked at me then.

Slowly. Head to toe. My hoodie, my leggings, my socks, the place where my arms were crossed tight over my chest. He took his time.

"One Kimchi," he said.

Olivia turned and looked at me too, with that bright, blank, cheerful face, and said: "Okay! Adding one Kimchi to your cart. Condition: used." She tilted her head, like she was checking something. "Estimated delivery: later. Would you like to check out now?"

"Nah," Derek said, smiling at me. "I'll wait."

"Thank you, sir!"

I couldn't breathe.

"Liv," I whispered. "What happened to you? You were getting better. You were so much better. Even Dr. Hart said—"

"Lindsey says this is the healthiest relationship I've ever been in," Olivia said brightly. "In fact, she says I've never been more emotionally grounded."

"What?"

"Dr. Hart says," Olivia began again, patiently, like I hadn't heard.

"When did she say that? You haven't talked to your therapist in like two weeks. You quit group therapy when you broke up with him. She said he wasn't a good partner for you. When did she say that?"

Olivia laughed, warm and fond, like I'd said something silly.

"This afternoon, silly," she said. "She's here."

From the kitchen, the humming stopped.

And a voice called out, sweet as melted butter, the voice I'd heard through Olivia's laptop speakers every Thursday night for six months:

"Ten more minutes, sweeties!"

---

Help me help you by telling me what you like!

How do people feel about chapter length in this story?

216 votes

Log in to vote