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was grateful that the next few minutes of banter didn’t regard any manner of sex—just enlivened chit-chat. He wasn’t necessarily grateful for Carol’s hand on one thigh and Therese’s on the other. Flood slowly grew erect again, painstakingly so, and at this point—the futility of it all now burying him as if in a hole—he felt as though an abstract bullet had been put through his head. Flood was the diabetic working in the Godiva chocolate factory; the Olympic swimmer standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert. So he drank gluttonously, pretending to listen to the girls’ chat but hoping that enough alcohol would deaden his sexual nerves.
    “Well, I better get going now,” Carol said. “Thanks for everything, Jake. It was great hanging out with you.”
    Flood took a last useless look at the perfect breasts suspended in the big fishnet cups. “Likewise.”
    Therese gave his thigh another squeeze. “Where are you staying, Jake?”
    “The Rosamilia Hotel, just up the beach.”
    Her breasts jiggled flawlessly when she stood up. “Cool. That’s where I’m staying too.”
    “Maybe we’ll run into you before you leave,” Carol offered.
    Flood was done talking, done thinking, and very much done with seeing what he couldn’t have. “That’d be great,” he said for formality. “You girls have a great day.”
    “‘Bye.”

    “‘Bye!”
    Two more pecks on the cheek (and a final insufferable crotch-rub from Therese), and they were off. It was relief from the humiliation that overwhelmed Flood when they left. Their shadows lengthened to sultry jet-black threads as they departed back to the sand.
    His head droned with an arid silence, noise that wasn’t noise. The sound of his soul? Because that’s what his soul felt like just then. Arid, sterile. A husk.
    It occurred to him that if he died at that very moment...he wouldn’t have cared in the least.

    His hangover dragged through the dinner hour and on into the night. He didn’t bother checking in with Farris and Nathans to see how the day’s business went; he didn’t care. He lay naked and dried out on the hotel bed, head thumping, sparks of pain behind his eyes, throbbing along with the images of those two impeccable women: the abundant flesh of Carol’s breasts blaring through the fishnets, the sparse mist of downy red hair covering Therese’s mound. The coltish legs and flat abdomens. Each image twinged in his head with his heartbeat, and each heartbeat made him feel more hopeless. He thought of calling Dr. Untermann and telling her he felt like maybe committing suicide but didn’t for two reasons.
    One: She’d think I was even more pathetic than I really am.
    And, two: I don’t have the balls.
    The sun had set brilliantly—a fireball that looked nuclear—and soon full dark bled into the room. Flood stared at the ceiling, not listening to the baseball game that shot scatters of wavering light on one wall. He wished he could fall asleep, erase the humiliating day, and begin a new man in the morning.
    But he wouldn’t be a new man, would he?

    He’d be the same impotent, royally-fucked-up-in-the-head man he was today and had been for the last three years.
    As his senses began to drift, he heard voices...
    “It ain’t bad really, we’re doing better than the rest. We got fifteen girls and only a handful went bad. I’m sure Jinny won’t fuck us over again. I think the skinny bitch learned her lesson.”

    Flood sat up in bed, glanced to his window. It was Oscar’s voice, the big bad bald guy. I left the window open, Flood realized. The curtains billowed at a breeze. And the maids hadn’t come in because he’d left out the do-not-disturb sign.
    Flood sprang out of bed, seized, but not exactly knowing why. Just as he arrived to the window’s edge, Leon’s voice was floating up.
    “I know. You’re one terrifying motherfucker, Osc. Jinny’ll have nightmares about you.” A laugh.
    “Bitch sucked my balls the whole time I was driving