This isn't weird.

Belly of a Whale

It was only a single tablet, but it must have been a strong dose; by the time they arrived at the airport, Millie was already drowsy and dreamy and wonderfully complacent, and thoroughly convinced that Rebecca was the kindest person she had ever met. The air travel experience—or at least, what she was mostly sure she remembered about it later—didn't at all match up with her expectations. Traveling in an American airport was supposed to involve a great deal of pointless indignity, wasn't it?

Not when you were flying with Rebecca Wexler, apparently.

Her clearest memories—though the bar for clear was so low it could have struck oil—were of the hours whiled away before the flight, in some low-lit lounge that was assuredly not meant for wayward white trash such as herself. There was food, good food, though she didn't remember what it was that she ate. She was fairly sure that a crystal champagne flute had been in her hand more or less the entire time, despite the small part of her that remained cognizant, at least in the beginning, that it was generally considered unwise to combine alcohol with Xanax. But Rebecca had decided that Millie would drink, so Millie drank.

The few flashes of recollection she retained of boarding the plane and drowsing in a spacious reclining seat were serene and apathetic. Had Rebecca actually held her hand and led her like a child to their seats? That part she suspected was a dream. Probably.

The combination of benzos and champagne did a spectacular job of suppressing her previously held conviction that an aluminum can full of primates had no business existing thirty-thousand feet above sea level—or at least, suppressing her awareness of the fact that she was in an aluminum can full of primates existing thirty-thousand feet above sea level. But the pleasant blur shielding Millie from her anxieties rapidly faded when their cab (when had they gotten into a cab?) pulled up to the motherfucking mansion where Noah Wexler lived with his wife and two children.

At least, she was pretty sure it was a mansion. It was possible the drugs were still skewing her sense of scale. For something so imposing, it was located in an awfully bourgeois little suburb. All the houses on the block were a similar size, but only this one looked like a sinister fortress of doom from which an unsuspecting maiden might never return. At any rate, by the time they were standing on the front porch and Rebecca was reaching into her purse for her keyfob, panic finally pierced through the alprazolam fog.

"Wait," Millie gasped, grabbing Rebecca's arm just as she was inserting the key into the lock. "I can't talk to him like this! Not now! I'm all messed up on pills."

Smiling patiently, Rebecca patted her arm. "Don't worry, darling, he's not here yet," she assured her. "You've got until tomorrow to sleep it off."

For the moment, at least, the wash of relief outweighed her frustration over Rebecca's continued lack of transparency about the timeline of this operation. Having a sleepover in Noah Wexler's fucking house would most certainly have been a dealbreaker, if she'd had any kind of advance warning-which was obviously the exact reason that little detail had been left out until she was standing at the literal threshold. It didn't really matter now, anyway. There wasn't much she could do about it in her present condition. As long as he wouldn't be there, she supposed she could endure it for one night. Rebecca pushed open the door and gently ushered Millie inside.

Stepping into this house felt a little like being swallowed up into the belly of a whale. An extremely affluent whale. A whale that wore a Rolex and owned at least one congressman.

She felt... small.

Before her was a two story foyer, a cavernous expanse of gleaming marble floors wrapped in the twin arms of a branching staircase made of polished mahogany against a backdrop of coffee colored harlequin wallpaper. The ceiling was so high, she felt a wave of vertigo looking up at the luminous waterfall of brass and crystal suspended overhead. It was the sort of thing she would expect to light a ballroom, or an opera house, yet the backdrop of warm, dark neutrals made the chandelier seem bafflingly understated.