The summer heat clung to everything in the house, thick and lazy, the kind that made clothes feel optional. Sarah had sent her own kids to camp for two weeks, leaving the big place quiet except for the low hum of the AC and the occasional creak of floorboards.
Twenty-one-year-old Ethan had been crashing on her couch since his mother, Sarah’s oldest friend took an emergency work trip to Dubai. He’d offered to house-sit his own place, but Sarah insisted. “You’re not staying alone in that empty apartment,” she’d said, voice warm but final. “Besides, someone needs to keep me company.”
That first night she wore a thin white tank top, no bra, n*****s dark and obvious through damp cotton whenever she moved past a fan. Ethan tried not to stare. Failed. She caught him twice and only smiled, slow
