The fluorescent lights in the break room flicker in the peculiar way they do when the ballast is beginning to go, a kind of intermittent hum followed by a brief seizure in the lighting that makes it seem, at least to Randall Sturgess, as though time itself is stuttering. Randall sits at a faux woodgrain table, the Formica peeling at one corner where an old coffee ring had long since stained the surface a deep sepia, and stares at the crumpled sheet of paper in his hand. The paper is a memo, hastily printed from the office's aging dot-matrix printer, which adds an extra level of antiquity to the missive as if it is some kind of corporate Dead Sea Scroll. The memo reads:

“To All Staff: Please be advised that as of next Monday, our new policy regarding bathroom breaks will take effect. Each employee is allowed two (2) ten-minute breaks per eight-hour shift, to be logged and monitored by the on-duty supervisor. Additional breaks must be approved in blah blah blah blah blaaah… ”

Randall looks up from the memo, scanning the break room for signs of dissent or even mild irritation from his coworkers, but finds nothing of the sort. 

Marsha is nursing her diet cola like it’s an intravenous drip, her face locked into an expression of vague bemusement that is her default setting whenever she is at work. Tom from accounts receivable sits at the far end of the table, muttering to himself as he stares at his phone, presumably engaged in a heated debate on some subreddit about libertarianism, or maybe cryptocurrency, or the inherent superiority of vinyl over digital media, which is his latest soapbox.

“Can you believe this?” Randall asks, holding up the memo like it is a piece of radioactive waste he’d discovered in his backyard.

Marsha looks up, blinks once, and shrugs in a way that suggests she could, in fact, believe it, and has already allocated the appropriate emotional bandwidth to process such a belief.

“It’s just another thing,” she says finally. 

Randall feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of anger, or maybe it is just caffeine withdrawal. He isn't entirely sure. He’d already had three cups of the office coffee, which was a dark roast only in the sense that it was dark in color, and roasted only in the sense that it had been left on the hot plate for several hours, achieving a flavor profile somewhere between asphalt and burnt toast. 

The anger, or the thing that is probably anger, rises up in him like some indignant tide, fueled by the gall of this latest policy, which seems to him not just an affront to his personal liberty but to the very concept of human dignity.

“I mean, two bathroom breaks? Two?” Randall says, trying to catch Tom’s eye. Tom looks up momentarily, gives a noncommittal grunt, then returns to his phone, where he is now, if Randall had to guess, likely engaging in a heated debate about the philosophical implications of time travel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“Yeah, I mean, what are they gonna do? Put a stopwatch on us?” Marsha says, and for a moment, Randall thinks he detects a spark of genuine outrage, or at least irritation, in her voice, but it is quickly drowned out by the ambient hum of the dying fluorescent lights.

Randall sighs and crumples the memo into a tight ball, which he then tosses into the small wastebasket by the vending machine. The ball bounces off the rim and lands with a soft thud on the stained linoleum floor. He makes no effort to retrieve it. A kind of futile gesture, but it is the best he can muster in that moment. The memo lays there, a small, crumpled testament to corporate absurdity.

Randall decides to take his lunch break early. He grabs his jacket from the back of his chair, a beaten-down gray windbreaker that had seen better days, and heads toward the exit. 

As he walks down the hallway, he feels the familiar sensation of being watched, though whether this is a symptom of genuine surveillance or just another manifestation of his creeping paranoia is anyone’s guess. He passes the office manager, a tall, thin man named Trevor, who gives him a curt nod that seems to suggest both disapproval and pity, a combination Randall finds increasingly common in his interactions with middle management.

The building lobby is cold, the air conditioning cranked to a level that seemed almost punitive, and Randall wonders, not for the first time, if this was some kind of ploy to keep employees from lingering too long in the communal spaces. He pushes through the glass doors and steps out onto the street. The sun is bright, almost unbearably so, and he squints against the glare. He had forgotten his sunglasses again, a minor annoyance that nonetheless seems to carry an outsized weight in his current mood.

He makes his way to the small park across the street. A narrow strip of green wedged between two buildings that offer just enough space for a couple of benches and a single, sad-looking tree that seems to lean perpetually to the left as if it is attempting to escape the confines of its urban prison. 

Randall sits on one of the benches and pulls out his phone. He scrolls aimlessly through his emails, news feeds, and social media apps, looking for something, anything, to distract him from the gnawing sense of dissatisfaction that has now taken up permanent residence somewhere in the vicinity of his solar plexus.

Glancing up from his phone, Randal sees, across the street, a man in a blue suit standing on the corner, staring directly at him. The man is nondescript, middle-aged, with thinning hair and a slightly paunchy build. He has the look of someone who works in an office but has never quite managed to make it up the corporate ladder. The sort of man who collects novelty coffee mugs and wears novelty ties with cartoon characters on them because it is his one allowable act of rebellion against the crushing monotony of his existence. The man continues to stare, unblinking, and Randall feels a cold shiver run down his spine.

Randall looks away, focusing instead on the pigeons pecking at a discarded sandwich wrapper near the base of the tree. He tells himself he is being ridiculous, that the man is probably just waiting for someone or something, but when he glances back up, the man is still there, still staring.

Feeling a sudden, irrational sense of panic, Randall stands up and begins to walk. Quickly at first. Then more slowly as he realizes he has no particular destination in mind. He just needs to get away from that gaze, that unrelenting, inscrutable gaze. He walks for several blocks, past the coffee shop, past the bank, past the dry cleaners where he’d dropped off his only good suit last week and still hadn’t remembered to pick it up. He finds himself standing in front of a small, nondescript building with a sign that reads, in faded letters: “The Institute for Existential Wellness.”

He has no idea what drew him here, or why he feels compelled to go inside, but before he can talk himself out of it, he pushes open the door and steps into the cool embrace of a softly-shadowed interior. A lobby designed to avoid the clinical brightness of typical institutions. Instead, it embraces a soft, almost contemplative darkness, allowing visitors to sink into their own thoughts without feeling exposed. 

A woman sitting at a small desk looks up from her computer and smiles. She has an expression of honed serenity, a smile you might find on someone who teaches yoga or sells organic kombucha at a farmer’s market.

“Welcome,” she says. “Are you here for a session?”

Randall narrows his eyes. “A session?”

“Yes, we offer various forms of existential wellness; guided introspection, mindful meditation, and self-actualization workshops. Are you familiar with our services?”

Randall isn’t sure what to say. He is vaguely aware of the term “self-actualization” from an article he’d once skimmed in a dentist’s waiting room, but beyond that, he has no idea what any of it means.

“Uh, I’m just…looking,” he says finally, which sounds absurd even to him, but the woman seems unfazed.

“Of course,” she says, still smiling. “Feel free to browse. We have some pamphlets over there, or if you’d like, I can arrange for a complimentary consultation with one of our existential coaches.”

Randall nods, though he isn’t entirely sure what he is agreeing to, and takes a pamphlet from the stack on the desk. It is printed on recycled paper and features a photograph of a woman sitting cross-legged on a beach, looking out at the ocean with a look of profound contentment. The words “Find Your Center” are emblazoned across the top in bold, sans-serif font.

He sits down in a small, uncomfortable chair in the corner of the room and begins to read the pamphlet, but the words seem to blur together, and he finds it difficult to focus. He looks up and sees the kombucha woman at the desk watching him, her smile still fixed in place. He darts his eyes away to find a single pillar of smoke like a gossamer thread rising from the orange glow of an incense stick. 

Randall looks back again, and the woman’s smile has shifted from something contrived to something softer, almost conspiratorial as if she’d caught on to a joke he hadn’t yet heard. There is a curious energy in the room now, a slight charge in the air that makes the hairs on his arms prickle. He glances back down at the pamphlet, his fingers tracing the embossed letters on the cover almost absentmindedly, feeling the texture like it held some hidden message. He is aware of her eyes on him, not just looking at him, but seeing him in a way that feels suddenly, enigmatically intimate.

“Would you like some tea?” she asks, her voice lilting.

Randall blinks, caught off guard.

“Uh, sure,” he manages, his throat suddenly dry.

He realizes then that he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and his stomach makes a small, embarrassing noise, which only seems to deepen the flush creeping up his neck. The woman stands up with a fluid motion, one she’s most likely performed a thousand times, and disappears through a doorway behind the desk. He notices how lean but shapely she is, a perfectly rounded derrière raising and lowering one cheek at a time under her skirt as she struts away. 

Left alone, Randall feels a strange flutter in his chest, a nervous energy that seems to have come out of nowhere. He has no idea what he is doing here—this place, this Institute for Existential Whatever-It-Was, with its soft music playing faintly overhead, the smell of the sandalwood incense drifting through the air like a fog. He contemplates leaving, just getting up and walking out, but his feet seem glued to the floor, and a strange, unidentifiable urge roots him to the spot.

She returns a moment later with a small tray, upon which sits a delicate ceramic teapot and two matching cups. She places the tray on a table and pours the tea, her hands moving with a deliberate grace that holds his gaze, almost hypnotically. Randall finds himself staring at her fingers, the way they curl around the teapot handle, and he feels a disorienting rush of warmth that spreads from his chest to his face.

“Chamomile,” she says, smiling that same secretive smile, suggesting her understanding of the way his thoughts are spiraling out of control. “Good for calming the nerves.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles, taking the cup she offers. Her fingers brush his for just a fraction of a second, but it is enough to raise a frisson of goosebumps across his skin. He takes a sip of the tea, which is hot but not scalding, and tastes faintly of honey.

He isn’t sure what to say next, or if he should say anything at all. There is a tension in the air now, a strange, almost magnetic pull between them that he can’t quite understand. He notices how close she is standing, closer than is strictly necessary, and he wonders if this is part of the whole existential wellness thing, some kind of therapeutic technique designed to put him off balance. Or maybe it is just his own imagination running wild, his mind playing tricks on him.

“You seem… a little lost,” she says finally, breaking the silence. Her voice is soft, but there is a hint of something nore penetrating, something that makes Randall’s heart beat just a little faster.

“I guess I am,” he admits, surprised at how easily the words come out. “I mean, I don’t even know why I came in here. I just…felt like I needed to.”

She nods in a way that indicates that it all makes sense.

“Sometimes, our bodies know what we need before our minds do,” she says. “Sometimes, we just have to follow that feeling, even if we don’t understand it.”

Randall swallows, unsure of how to respond. He feels her gaze reaching beyond his carefully crafted facade, delving into the abyss of his insecurities, finding the vulnerable truth he'd spent so many years concealing.

“And what is it you feel right now?” she asks, leaning in just a little closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. Her breath is warm against his cheek, and he has a sudden mystifying urge to reach out, to touch her, to close the distance between them.

“I…I don’t know,” he stammers, feeling his heart pounding in his chest. “I feel…like something is happening, like something is…shifting inside me.”

Her smile returns, and this time her eyes hold a tangible charge—a raw curiosity, a dark, electric current, and unguarded curiosity that sparks an almost painful anticipation within him.

“Good,” she says softly, “that’s a start.”

She leans in even closer, and for a moment, Randall thinks she is going to kiss him, right there in the middle of this strange, dimly lit room. He can feel her breath on his lips, can smell a whisper of lavender in her hair, and his whole body seems to come alive with a kind of flustering excitement.

But she doesn’t kiss him. Instead, she pulls back just a fraction, her eyes searching his, as if waiting for him to make the next move. Randall hesitates, caught in the strange, dizzying tension between them, unsure of what he wants, or if he even wants anything at all.

And then, almost without thinking, he reaches out and takes her hand, feels the warmth of her skin against his, and she doesn't pull away. Her fingers intertwine with his, and they stand there for a moment, holding hands like teenagers, both of them caught in the strange, charged silence that seems to take agency of the room.

“What’s your name?” he asks finally, his voice barely more than a crackled murmur.

She smiles once again, a slow, knowing smile, and squeezes his hand just a little tighter.

“Lila,” she says. “My name is Lila.”

Randall nods, repeating her name in his mind, feeling the weight of it settle into his chest like a small, warm stone.

“Lila,” he says, and her eyes glimmer, and for a moment the world outside seems to fade away, and there is only this moment, this strange, bewildering moment of connection between them.

They stand like that for what feels like an eternity, neither of them speaking, both of them just…feeling, until finally, Lila breaks the silence.

“Would you like to come with me?” she asks, her voice soft, almost hesitant.

Randall feels his heart skip a beat, and he knows, without knowing how he knows, that whatever is going to happen next will change everything.

“Yes,” he says, his voice steady now, filled with a quiet certainty that surprises even him. “I’d like that very much.”

Lila's eyes hold an unmistakable invitation this time, a promise of something deeper, something real. She squeezes his hand, then turns and leads him through the door, into the soft, flickering light beyond.

It’s strange, Randall thinks, how quickly moments like these can shift—how a conversation that started as nothing, just two people volleying words back and forth like a game they’d both long since mastered, can suddenly take on a different weight, a different gravity. Maybe it had been inevitable from the beginning, buried in the space between their banter, in the sharp edges of their teasing, in the way Lila’s eyes would linger just a fraction too long before she looked away.

Maybe it was always going to happen like this.

And so it did.

Though even in the moment—and certainly afterward, in the memory of the moment, which will be distorted and revised and subjected to all manner of subconscious editorializing by both parties—it seems impossible to pinpoint the precise nanosecond in which the transition occurs.

One minute they are standing in a corridor with warm, earth-green walls designed to absorb rather than reflect, the faint scent of sandalwood and chamomile swirling between them like some unspoken third presence, and the next, somehow, Randall’s back is against a door frame, the cool surface pressing into his shoulder blades as Lila’s fingers—elegant, precise, calligraphic in their movement—are unbuttoning his shirt with a controlled urgency, an exercise in the tension between impulse and his composure.

“You know,” Randall says, swallowing against the sudden dryness in his throat as she works open another button, “I like to think of myself as a man with some degree of self-control.”

“Oh?” Lila tilts her head, her fingers pausing at the next button, teasing. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Not very well,” he admits, and she laughs—low and warm, like a something shared just between them.

And, because Randall is the sort of person who exists almost entirely inside his own head, he is aware of all of it—the choreography of the moment, the micro-adjustments of posture and pressure, the way the temperature of the room seems to have risen by exactly 1.7 degrees since she pressed her body against his. He is also aware of the fact that he is aware of it, which introduces an element of self-consciousness that threatens, momentarily, to derail the whole thing.

But then Lila’s mouth is on his, and her hands are against his ribs, and her breath is warm and full of something that might be cinnamon or might be some entirely ineffable combination of chemical compounds produced in the human body during moments of acute want, and suddenly there is no more thinking, only sensation.

They navigate their way, half-blindly, into what turns out to be a room—perhaps an office, though the lack of a visible desk complicates this assumption. The light is diffuse, golden, a light that makes everything look a little softer, a little more cinematic, a little more like a memory already forming even as it’s happening.

Lila is pulling at the hem of her shirt now, lifting it over her head in one fluid motion, and Randall experiences the peculiar cognitive dissonance of realizing that despite having imagined this moment in a hundred different permutations (because of course he has, because he is Randall), the reality of it is somehow both entirely different and exactly the same.

“You’re staring,” she notes, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips.

“I’m appreciating,” he counters, leaning in.

“Mmm. Sounds like staring with extra steps.”

“There’s nuance,” he says before she cuts off whatever argument he was about to make with another kiss. This one deeper, with more aggression, more tongue. 

There is a kind of economy to the way she moves, an efficiency that suggests not just experience but a certain comfort in her own body, in its lines and angles, in the way it occupies space. She steps toward him again, and for a moment, all he can do is look at her—at the smooth arc of her collarbone, at the way the soft light traces the curve of her breasts, at the subtle, almost undetectable sheen of sweat beginning to gather at the hollow of her throat. And then she is kissing him again, and any thoughts beyond the immediate, and visceral, dissolve into static.

The thing about moments like this—about sex in general, about the way bodies move and fit and unfold against one another—is that they are always, inevitably, too much and not enough.

There is the press of skin on skin, the feverish rhythm of breath, the alternating friction and fluidity of movement, but there is also the brain, the endlessly chattering, endlessly recursive brain, the part of Randall that notes the precise pattern of condensation on the windowpane, that catalogs the peculiar acoustics of the room, that wonders, fleetingly, whether this is the sort of encounter that will be remembered more for its actuality or for the way it will later be reconstructed in conversation, in reflection, in regret or longing or both.

But then Lila makes a sound—low, almost guttural, a sound that seems to bypass his brain entirely and go straight to some profound, more primal part of him—and all of that collapses. He is pulling her against him, and she is biting his lower lip, and their bodies are moving in a way that feels less like choreography and more like gravity, like an inevitability, like something neither of them could stop even if they wanted to.

“Still in your head?” she murmurs softly against his skin.

“Less so,” he manages, breathless. “You’re very persuasive.”

“I like to think so,” she says, and then does something with her hips against his cock and makes him forget whatever words were about to follow.

At some point, clothes become a thing of the past. They are on a couch or a futon or maybe just a particularly well-placed cushion, and the world has narrowed to the places where they touch, where her skin meets his, where heat blooms between them like something almost tangible.

There is a moment—brief, barely perceptible—where Randall thinks he might actually be coming apart, like something molecular is shifting inside him, like he is not so much a person in this moment as he is a series of impulses and electrical signals and animal instinct. And maybe that is what this is, really. Not escape, not transcendence, but a temporary surrender to something older and simpler than thought.

Lila takes a gentle hold of his now-steeled erection, pulling his attention forward. 

“So,” he stammers. “This is the process? Are we in it now?” 

She chuckles, delicately, slowly shaking her head from side to side. “Yes, Randall, we are most certainly in it now.” 

When his cock touches her, he feels her moist, accessible warmth. She hovers over him with a pause letting the head just barely penetrate, savoring that first moment of connection.

Then Lila sinks down until they are completely joined.

For a second, Randall feels like time stops. He feels the thoughts continue to flash in his mind but they seem to slow, like one of those old-timey flip shows, each thought a new card flashing, and he is able to settle in that diminutive, minuscule, tiny little space in between the thoughts. 

Lila rides him up and down, stroking herself on his swollen, throbbing cock. Dripping her arousal, glistening into his tuft of pubic hair, until he feels like he cannot hold off anymore. 

“I’m there, Lila. Fuck. I’m going to cum.”

He is not sure if it is what he said or the way he said it, or if she had just been riding and waiting for him to get to that point, but she leans forward and grips his shoulders in a way that makes him wonder if he will see the marks on his skin in the shower later when he gets home. Her pussy pulses around his cock like a sheath that was made specifically for him and he feels the warm rush of her orgasm meet with his. 

Then there is only breathlessness and the slick heat of bodies cooling against each other and the awareness, creeping in at the edges, that the world still exists beyond this room, beyond this point in time. But for now, for these few precious, luminescent seconds, there is only this—Lila’s fingers tracing absent shapes against his chest, that recognizable waft of a scent diffuser now mixed with the smell of cum and sweat and sex, and the slow, deliberate return to reality.

“I should probably say something cool right now,” Randall muses, staring at the ceiling.

Lila shifts beside him, propping herself on one elbow. “Yeah? Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something suave. Something that implies I do this all the time and am, therefore, immune to its aftereffects.”

“Mmm. But you’re not.”

“Not even slightly.”

She smiles—slow, familiar now. “Good.”