Alex Carlisle has a system.
Friday nights. Hotel bars. A different city, a different woman, a different room. No last names. No second drinks. No staying until morning.
She’s thirty-one. She’s good at her job. She’s better at leaving.
The system works because she built it to work — five years of clean exits and cold drives home and a life that looks, from the outside, like exactly what she chose. And it is. She chose the silence. She chose the empty apartment. She chose the weight of her own company over the risk of anyone else’s.
Tonight is a hotel in Brookline. A woman named Nora who doesn’t fidget, who orders gin without consulting the menu, who looks at Alex the way Alex looks at everyone — directly, briefly, with professional-grade curiosity.
Tonight goes the way these nights always go.
And then Monday happens.
—
“I’m better at leaving than staying.”
A PLEASURE is a standalone sapphic short story about desire, discipline, and
the last night before a name changes everything. For readers who like their
fiction sharp, honest, and unafraid of heat.
From Alex B Porter, the author of the Branding Her steamy lesbian romance series.
