Be Patient

Dr. Hammond’s lab meetings started at ten on Monday mornings, and by 9:58, every seat around the conference table was full.

Word had gotten around. For six months, I’d been the postdoc in the corner who never came to happy hour and stayed until the cleaning crew kicked her out, the one who’d booked the soldering station every weekend since March. Today I’d promised to show them why. Twelve people, coffees in hand, laptops closed. Priya from the Anderson lab had come over from the next floor. Even Marcus, who usually spent lab meetings answering emails under the table, had put his phone face down.

I walked them through all of it. The theory. The signal modeling. The circuit layout. The self-trials, the Krebs cycle backward in eleven seconds, the Portuguese vocabulary retained at a hundred percent after twelve hours. I’d practiced it so many times I didn’t need my notes, and I could feel the room leaning in. Somewhere around slide fourteen, Dr. Hammond took his reading glasses off and started chewing on the earpiece, which, according to Marcus, meant he was impressed.

Slide twenty-two said LIVE DEMONSTRATION in forty-point font.

I’d known it was coming. I’d been dreading it since Sunday night. I’d told myself I’d think of something on the way in, and then I hadn’t, and now here it was, filling the screen behind me.

“So,” I said. “About the demonstration.”

Twelve faces looked at me.

“There’s been a... small setback. With the prototype.”

Dr. Hammond put his glasses back on. “What kind of setback?”

“It’s... temporarily misplaced.”

“Misplaced.”

“I know exactly where it is. Approximately. It’s in my apartment. Somewhere in my apartment. I’m confident it hasn’t left the apartment.”

“Then go get it,” Marcus said helpfully. “It’s, what, a twenty-minute ride?”

“I don’t... know where in the apartment.”

Somebody’s chair creaked.

“Rachel,” Dr. Hammond said slowly, “where is the prototype?”

I’d prepared for this. I’d planned to say in a secure location pending recalibration, which was technically true if you considered the inside of a cat’s secret hoard a secure location. I opened my mouth to say it.

“My cat took it,” I said instead.

The silence was total. I could hear the projector fan. I could hear the air conditioning. I could hear Priya, very quietly, trying not to laugh into her coffee and making a small wet sound in her throat.

“Your cat,” Dr. Hammond said.

“He likes small shiny things,” I said. “He has a whole... collection. We found an AirPod behind the fridge once. After three weeks. So it’s probably just—”

Marcus put his hand over his mouth.

“—it’s probably just somewhere he hasn’t been yet. I mean, I haven’t been. Where he’s been. I’ve checked behind the fridge already. And the litter box.”

Someone at the end of the table actually did laugh, then turned it into a cough.

“Have you checked under the couch?” Priya asked, completely straight-faced.

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you. I have.”

Dr. Hammond let me finish the presentation. I don’t really remember the last eight slides. When everyone filed out, nobody looked at me, which was worse than if they had.

He called me into his office afterward and shut the door. He took his glasses off again, folded them, and set them on the desk, and he didn’t raise his voice even once.

“Rachel,” he said. “This is not high school. You cannot walk into my lab and tell me your cat ate your homework, and expect us to be fine with you losing tens of thousands of dollars of research materials. That prototype was built with lab equipment and grant funding. It is the property of this lab.” He folded his hands. “I need it on my desk by Friday. If it isn’t, I will be speaking with HR and the grant committee about your judgment.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t think you do.” He put his glasses back on. “A cat, Rachel.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon at my desk, staring at my screen and making a list.

Places Garlic could have hidden it (unchecked). Inside the dryer. In the toe of one of Olivia’s winter boots. Under the bathroom radiator, if I took the cover off. Inside the box spring of Olivia’s bed, where there was a tear in the fabric he liked to crawl into. I’d ask Olivia to help. She’d been so sweet yesterday, holding the flashlight while I lay on my stomach checking under things. Tonight we’d do it properly. Room by room. Grid search. If I had to follow that cat around the apartment on my hands and knees until midnight, I would.

I texted her from the lab bathroom before I left: it went really bad. need your help tonight. please help me search!

She didn’t answer.

---

I walked the last few blocks home in the fog with my hands jammed in my hoodie pocket, running the list over and over in my head. The dryer. The boots. The radiator. The box spring. If it wasn’t in any of those, maybe I’d have to think about the possibility that he’d taken it out somehow, through the window or under the door. Maybe I should knock on Mrs. Patterson’s door and ask if she’d seen anything in the hall. Maybe I should...

I could smell dinner in the stairwell. Butter and garlic and something roasting. Olivia must have seen my text and started cooking. She did that on bad days.

My eyes stung again, the good kind.

I let myself in, still half in my head, shrugging my bag off my shoulder, toeing off one shoe.

“Hey, Kimchi. Welcome home.”

I looked up.

Derek was on my couch.

He was sitting dead center, knees spread wide, one arm slung along the back cushions like it was his couch and his apartment and I was the one who’d wandered in. A backward cap. A white tank top with a Nike swish. His bare feet propped on our coffee table, next to a row of lit candles I’d never seen before. Garlic was curled up on the couch comfortable next to him, his chin on Derek’s thigh.

As soon as Derek noticed, the dumb look on his face vanished and he gave me a smirk.

That was when I noticed there was someone else in the room.

She was on the floor, half-hidden behind the coffee table, kneeling between Derek's spread knees with her back to me. I'd walked right past her. All I could see was a long fall of honey-blonde hair, a bare golden back, and the thin black string of a bikini top tied in a bow between her shoulder blades. And on top of her head, sticking up out of all that blonde, a pair of white, floppy bunny ears.

I stood there with one shoe in my hand and tried to make it make sense.

A girl. On her knees. Between Derek's legs. In a bikini. In bunny ears. In my living room.

Was she Olivia's friend? No. Olivia didn't have friends who looked like that. Had Derek brought her? Maybe he had brought a family member or something. But with how she was dressed... no way. Was she... I looked at the bikini, and the Playboy bunny ears, and the way she was kneeling, and the only explanation my brain could come up with was so absurd that I almost laughed. Had he hired someone? Had Derek brought an escort into my apartment?

Before I could decide, she turned around.

"Oh my lands, she's home!"

She came up off the floor in one bouncy motion and was across the room before I could step back, arms flung wide, and then I was inside the hug.

She was taller than me, a lot taller, so my face didn't land on her shoulder. It landed in her chest.

Her breasts closed around my face on both sides. They were enormous. Heavy and warm and so soft that my cheeks sank into them, like pressing your face into a pillow that had been lying in the sun. They smelled like coconut sunscreen. The black bikini top was barely there, two thin triangles of fabric, and the rest of her was bare skin, smooth and hot against my cheeks and the tip of my nose. Every breath I took was full of her.

Something hard bumped my cheekbone. A small, firm edge, right in the middle of all that softness. It stung a little. I didn't know what it was.

"Hiii!" She squeezed me tighter, rocking me side to side, and with every rock, her breasts shifted and swelled around my face, pressing in, then easing off, then pressing in again.

"Oh, sugar, I have been just dyin' to meet you all day long. Derek told me all about you. Y'all have the cutest little place. And all those books!" Squeeze. Rock. "My mama always said you can tell everything about a person by their bookshelf, and honey, you must be the smartest girl in all of San Francisco."

She had thick Southern accent. I could instantly tell she was the type of person who could make others feel like sunshine and butter. In any other context, meeting someone like her would have made my day. Instead, she left me feeling awkward in my own apartment.

Not sure where to put my hands, I held them out stiffly at my sides.

"And I just want you to know," she said into my hair, "that anything you need, anything at all, you come to me. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Okay?"

One last squeeze, and she let me go.

I stumbled back a step. My glasses had slid down my nose. My cheeks were flushed hot, and I could still feel the warmth of her on my skin, the impression of her pressed into me. I touched my cheekbone where something had bumped me and looked up.

A black phone was sticking out of the top of her bikini. It was standing straight up wedged into her cleavage. I had probably felt it hit me during the hug but in all the shock of what was happening, I had barely noticed. What was a phone doing there?

"I'm sorry," I said. "Who... who are you?"

"Oh my gosh." She slapped both hands over her mouth, eyes huge. Then she laughed and pressed them to her chest instead, right over the phone. "Silly me! Pardon my language, but I just got so gosh darn excited to meet ya."

She bounced on her toes giddily, a big genuine smile plastered across her face. "I'm Kayla! Derek's fiancée!"

I stared up at her.

She was beaming down at me. Big blue eyes. A soft pink mouth. A sprinkle of sun across the bridge of her nose. The kind of face you'd see on a girl laughing in a beach commercial, if beach commercials made you feel like the girl in them would actually be nice to you.

And her body.

I'm a scientist. I try to be precise. Her body didn't make sense.

Her breasts were huge. Round and full and heavy, swelling out of the black bikini triangles on each side, the phone still stuck upright between them. Below them, her waist went in, and in, and kept going in, so narrow it looked like someone had drawn it. Then it flared back out into round, soft hips. She was neither skinny nor fat. Somehow, she had reached the perfect equilibrium of looking fit but not too muscled like a fitness model, either. There was a softness to her stomach, a give to her thighs when she shifted from foot to foot, a slight sway to her hips when she bounced. Her skin was golden everywhere with no tan lines that I could see. Just warm, smooth gold, from her collarbones all the way down to her bare pink toes.

It was a body that looked like someone had designed it on purpose for a beach commercial.

She held out her left hand to show me the ring. A diamond the size of a chickpea.

"He asked me yesterday," she whispered, glowing.

"She's still in training, though," Derek said from the couch. "Gotta make sure she's ready to be a good wife. Isn't that right, bitch?"

Kayla giggled. It was soft and delighted, like he'd said something adorable.

"That's right, baby."

Then she turned back to me and tilted her head, and one of the bunny ears flopped down over her eyebrow. "Oh, darlin', can I ask you somethin'? Why'd he call you Kimchi?"

"He doesn't, my name is—"

"Stupid question, babe. It's cause she's an Asian," Derek said talking over me. "They eat that shit every meal. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Makes the whole apartment stink. You can still kinda smell it on her if you get close."

Kayla's mouth made a little O.

"Well, I'll be. I never knew that." She turned and gave Derek a soft, adoring smile. "Thank you for teachin' me, baby." Then back to me, all sunshine: "It's real nice to meet you, Kimchi!"

"Bunny," Derek said. "Come back. I want to watch more videos."

"Of course, baby! Anything for you!"

She trotted back across the room, and I saw the back of her for the first time.

The black bikini bottom was a thong. A thin strip of fabric that disappeared between two full, round, golden cheeks. And perched at the top of it, right where the string met at the small of her back, was a puff of white cotton.

A tail.

It bounced as she trotted. Her ass bounced under it, soft and round, a little sway on each side with every step, and the tail bobbed along on top.

She dropped happily back onto her knees between Derek's feet, sat back on her heels, folded her hands in her lap, and lifted her chest toward him. He reached down and pushed the phone a little deeper into her cleavage, settled it, then hooked one finger into the left triangle of her top and tugged it tighter around the phone.

He tapped the screen. A video started: some man shouting about masculine energy in front of a Lamborghini.

"Next."

Kayla lifted one finger and swiped. Her breasts gave a soft little bounce around the phone, then settled.

A girl in a white thong bending over a pool table.

"Next."

Swipe. Bounce.

I stood in my doorway with one shoe on.

"Derek," I said. "What... what the fuck is happening?! What are you doing here?"

"I'm just watching some videos," he said lazily, eyes on the screen.

"In my apartment? How did you get inside? I swear if you stole a key I will—"

"Nah, Liv let me in."

I was flabbergasted. "Olivia would never let you in..." I said cautiously.

Unfortunately, taking this toxic piece of shit back was exactly the type of thing Olivia would do. In fact, she had done it many types in the past. I loved that girl, but statistically, she was not the best at making good relationship decisions. But I didn't need to let this asshole know all of that.

"She wouldn't." I reaffirmed, mostly for myself.

"She's in the kitchen making us dinner. You can ask her yourself." He squinted at the screen. "Next."

Swipe. Kayla's boobs jiggled slightly.

"Why is she making you dinner? Why is your... your fiancée here, in a... why is she..." I gestured at Kayla, at the ears, at the phone. My voice was climbing. "What the actual fuck is going? You were with Olivia literally two weeks ago. You can't just..."

"Do you mind?" Derek said, his eyebrows furring in annoyance as he turned to look at me for the first time. Then, he pointed down at Kayla and the phone between her breasts, like I was the one being unreasonable.

"I'm kind of doing something here."

"Yes," I said. "Yes, Derek, I mind. I mind a lot. I mind that you're in my apartment, and I mind that you're calling me Kimchi, and I mind whatever the hell this is." I waved at Kayla, who smiled up at me sweetly. "You're a racist, lying, disgusting... get out. Get out right now, or I'm calling the—"

Derek rolled his eyes.

Then he smirked, reached into his pocket, and pulled something out.

It was small and black. A slim, matte little cylinder, about the length of a lipstick tube. He pressed one end of it into the soft spot under his jaw.

I knew it.

For one second, I knew exactly what it was. The shape. The flat contact pad on the end. The way he held it to the hollow of his throat, the way I'd held it, the way I'd designed it to be held.

And then I didn't.

Because Derek didn't have MUSE. That was simply a fact. I'd watched him leave with nothing but a cardboard box. MUSE was somewhere in this apartment, in Garlic's hoard, behind something or under something. So the thing in Derek's hand had to be something else, and when I looked at it again, of course it was. A vape. One of those sleek black ones all the guys at the gym had. They all looked basically the same.

He lowered his hand to his throat. He was going to use the device on himself to vape.

"Be patient, Rachel," he said. "Try not to be such a bitch."

I already had my phone out. My thumb was on the screen. I was ready to call 911 right in front of him, and when they picked up, I was going to tell them a man had broken into my apartment and I'd walked in and immediately started being a bitch about it.

My thumb stopped.

That wasn't right. Derek was the problem in this situation, not me. I was the one who was being a bitch.

It was hard to accept. But it was true, wasn’t it?

I looked down at Kayla. She was gazing up at me with big, worried blue eyes, her bunny ears tilted sideways, the phone glowing between her breasts. She’d hugged me. She’d told me I was the smartest girl in San Francisco. She’d asked about my books.

And I'd stood in the doorway yelling.

I put my phone back in my pocket.

"Next," Derek said.

Kayla swiped. Her breasts bounced softly around the phone and settled.

I stood there. I didn't know what to do with my hands, or my bag, or my one remaining shoe. Derek didn't look at me.

After a long moment, without taking his eyes off the screen, he reached out and patted the couch cushion beside him. Twice. Lazily. The way you'd call a dog.

I wanted to scream. I was not a dog. But I needed to be patient to get to the bottom of this. Clearly something was going on here, and I needed to find out what. The best way to do that was to collect information.

With a scowl on my face, I walked slowly over and sat down next to him, on the far end of the couch.

I dropped my bag at my feet and crossed my arms.

Garlic lifted his head from Derek's thigh. He looked at me for a long moment, then got up, stretched, and padded across the cushions to me, chirping softly. He climbed into my lap and pushed his head into my hand.

"Hi, buddy," I whispered. I scratched behind his ears, and he purred and leaned into it, and for a few seconds, something in my chest unclenched. At least someone in this apartment was normal. I ran my hand down his back, and he arched up into it, and I scratched the spot at the base of his tail that made his back leg kick.

Then he hopped off my lap, walked right back across the couch, and curled up against Derek's hip again with his chin on Derek's thigh.

Derek scratched his head without looking. "Good boy."

Fine.

From where I was sitting now, I could see Kayla from the front.

She was kneeling on our rug between his feet, close enough that his shins framed her shoulders. Back straight. Hands folded on her lap. Her knees were spread a little, her thighs golden and soft, pressed into the rug under her weight. The black bikini bottom was barely a triangle in front, tied at her hips with two little bows, the strings sinking slightly into the soft flesh there. From the side, I could see the white cotton tail perched at the top of her ass, a round puff against all that gold.

And the phone.

It stood upright between her breasts, the screen tipped back toward Derek's face. Her breasts held it in place from both sides, full and round and heavy, swelling out of the little black triangles so that the fabric covered only the very centers of them. Everything else was bare, smooth, golden skin, and I could see where the edges of the phone pressed into it, the soft way her breasts gave and folded around that hard black rectangle.

When she breathed in, the phone rose. When she breathed out, it sank.

"Next," Derek said.

She lifted one finger and swiped, and her breasts moved with her arm, lifting a little, then settling back around the phone with a small, soft bounce. Blue light from the screen washed up over her chest, and for a second her skin looked pale, then gold again.

She wasn't looking at the screen. She was looking at him. Her face was tipped up, lips parted, eyes soft and shining, the bunny ears bending slightly backward with the tilt of her head.

I made myself look away.

Okay. Information. Derek was in our apartment. Olivia had apparently let him in. Derek had a fiancée. He'd gotten engaged yesterday, which meant he'd met her sometime in the last two weeks, because until two weeks ago, he'd been with Olivia. His fiancée was wearing bunny ears and a tail. And she was using her breasts as a phone stand so he could look at other girls on Instagram.

That was as far as the facts would take me.

"Next."

A redhead in a sports bra doing squats in front of a mirror.

"Damn," Derek said. "That ass. She's like a seven, but I'd still smash."

"She's real pretty," Kayla agreed warmly, peering at the screen upside-down.

"Shame she's, like, twenty-eight, though. Probably hit the wall already. That's why you gotta lock 'em down young." He tapped Kayla on top of the head, between the bunny ears. "How old are you again, bunny?"

"Twenty-one, baby," she said, beaming like it was an accomplishment.

"See?" Derek said to me. "Twenty-one. Prime. Kimchi's what, twenty-six? Clock's ticking." He looked me up and down, slowly. "Better hurry up, Kimchi. Those tits aren't gonna stay up forever."

I opened my mouth so fast my teeth clicked.

I had so much to say to him. About that. About all of it. What an asshole.

He was sitting there with the sweetest girl I'd ever met on her knees in front of him, using her body as furniture so he could stare at strangers. Somebody needed to tell her she deserved better. Somebody needed to tell him exactly what he was. And that somebody was going to wait until he was finished.

Which made sense, I guess. He'd said he was busy. Yelling at him now would only make things worse for everyone.

I closed my mouth and swallowed the insult.

He'd hear it eventually. At the appropriate time. Whenever that turned out to be.

The smart move was to wait. You don't argue with a man like Derek in front of an audience; an audience is exactly what he wants. You wait until you can get the person alone. Later, I'd pull Kayla aside somewhere quiet and talk to her, woman to woman, and tell her the truth about him, plainly and kindly, without making her feel stupid. That was the mature thing to do. That was the effective thing to do. And if Derek got in the way, then I'd just have to look him in the eye and tell him I was sorry for being such a bitch earlier.

Wait. That wasn't...

It was, though. I had been a bitch earlier. It would be good to apologize.

"Next."

A man in front of a Lamborghini, jabbing his finger at the camera. "Women don't want a nice guy. Women want a man who TELLS them what to do."

"Facts," Derek said. "You hear that, bunny?"

"I heard, baby." Kayla reached up and squeezed his calf. "You're the best at tellin' me what to do."

"Damn right. Next."

Swipe. Bounce. A girl in a schoolgirl costume, sticking her tongue out at the camera, eyes rolled up, making that face. I'd seen it before in memes and in the corners of the internet I tried to avoid. I knew what it was called.

Derek paused the video.

"Bunny," he said. "Do that."

Kayla blinked up at him. "Do what, baby?"

"That face. The ahegao. Do it for me."

"Oh!" She peered down at the screen, studying it with total seriousness, the way I'd study a diagram. "Okay. Okay, I can do that."

She took a deep breath, which lifted her breasts so the phone tipped back against Derek's knee. Then she rolled her eyes up, slowly, until the blue nearly disappeared under her lashes, let her jaw fall open, and pushed her tongue out as far as it would go.

It wasn't right. Even I could tell it wasn't right. Her eyes kept sliding back down to the phone, trying to match the girl on the screen, and her eyebrows were pinched together in concentration instead of slack, and somewhere along the way, she'd gone slightly cross-eyed. She looked less like a girl losing her mind with pleasure and more like a girl trying very hard to read a menu that was too far away.

And still.

Her tongue lay flat over her bottom lip, pink and soft and shining wet under the lamp. Her chest was rising and falling fast from holding the pose, and the phone rose and fell with it, glowing against her skin. A thread of spit gathered at the tip of her tongue, stretched, thinned, and finally let go. It fell onto the swell of her breast just beside the phone, and then, slowly, the way a raindrop slides down a window, it ran down the curve of her and disappeared into the shadowed line between her breasts, under the edge of the phone.

She didn't wipe it away. She held the face. Eyes up. Tongue out. Breathing hard. Waiting.

And for a horrible moment, before I could stop it, my brain did what it always did with a problem. Her brows are the issue. She needs to relax the corrugator muscle, let the forehead go slack, and stop checking the reference image. The tongue's fine. The tongue is actually...

I shut that thought down so hard my jaw hurt.

Derek burst out laughing.

"Jesus, bunny. You look like you're having a stroke."

Kayla's tongue went back in. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist and looked up at him with big, earnest, apologetic eyes, her cheeks pink.

"I'm sorry, baby. That was awful, wasn't it? I'll get better. I promise." She sat up even straighter, shoulders back, the phone settling between her breasts. "I cheered all through high school and two years at A&M. I know how to practice. I'll practice every single day, as long as it takes, until it's the best one you've ever seen."

"Yeah, we'll practice." He scratched her under the chin. "Real sluts make it look easy. You'll get there. Next."

She swiped, glowing at the praise, and the wet trail across the top of her breast caught the new light from the screen and shone.

What was going on?

Seriously. What was going on?

Two weeks ago, Derek Hale had been a gym-rat loser who'd needed to be dragged into couples therapy by a girlfriend who was far too good for him. Now he had a beautiful twenty-one-year-old fiancée who'd cheered at A&M, and she was on her knees on my rug in a bunny tail, making sex faces for him and apologizing for not making them well enough. And Olivia was hiding in the kitchen. And Garlic loved him. And I was the only person in this room who seemed to think any of it was strange.

Which, statistically, should mean something. In any dataset, when one value disagrees with all the others, the first thing you check is whether the outlier is the one that's wrong.

That was just good methodology.

But I had to say something. If I sat here and said nothing while he did this to her, I was part of it. I was going to stand up and tell her she didn't owe him anything, and tell him to get out of my home, and if he didn't, I was going to sit here quietly and give everyone a minute to calm down.

Including me. Especially me. Olivia always said I came in too hot.

And I wasn't going to let him humiliate Kayla in front of everyone, so I definitely wasn't going to humiliate her myself by making a scene.

I sat on my hands.

"Next."

Swipe. Bounce.

Olivia.

She was still in the kitchen. She'd been in there this entire time. She'd heard me come in, and she'd heard me yelling, and she hadn't come out. Was she okay? Was she scared? Was she hiding in there from him, or had he... had he done something...

I needed to check on her. I needed to get up right now and walk into that kitchen, and I'd do it the second Derek finished with his phone, because walking out in the middle of something was rude, and the polite thing to do was wait.

Even though nobody was talking.

"What is going on," I said quietly. I hadn't meant to say it out loud.

Derek glanced up at me. Smirked.

Then he turned his head toward the kitchen and called out, loud and lazy, "Yo, Liv! Get out here!"

This whole situation had been difficult to believe. I had no idea what to expect.

Thankfully, I wasn't left in suspense as only a few seconds later the kitchen door swung open.

Olivia came out frantically as if someone had yelled "fire!"

However, her frantic expression was completely overshadowed by the fact that she was in what could only be described as a slutty French maid costume.

Black satin, cut so short that the frilly white petticoat underneath barely reached the tops of her thighs. A white lace collar at her throat. A tiny white apron tied at her waist. A black corset laced tight up the front, pulling her waist in and pushing her freckled breasts up and together so they swelled over the top of the neckline. Black thigh-high stockings with lace bands around the tops, digging into the soft, pale, freckled skin of her thighs. A little frilled headpiece pinned crookedly into her copper curls. Her glasses on. Her cheeks flushed pink from the stove. And, to complete her outfit, she was holding a wooden spoon.

She saw Derek, and her face went soft. Then she saw me sitting at the end of the couch, and she smiled, warm and bright, like nothing in the world was wrong.

She tucked the spoon under her arm, took her little skirt in both hands, and sank into a deep, wobbly curtsy.

"You called, sir?"