Ivy glared at her phone as it buzzed yet again, skittering across the top of the coffee table. Everyone on her contact list had received a very firm text message from her informing them that she was not to be contacted this weekend unless there were dire, apocalyptic emergencies.

She glanced out her open window. There weren’t any helicopters circling her street with spotlights. No orange glow of flames on the horizon. No nearby sirens, though that, for this time of night in Washington, D.C., was something of an anomaly. As far as Ivy could tell, the world wasn’t ending.

But these text messages had to. She couldn’t focus. And she had to focus.

Lunging forward, she grabbed her phone, intent on firing off an irate message to whoever was bothering her.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered, the phone’s display illuminating in her hand. The most recent message read: “Hey, sugar tits.”

Ivy groaned. It was a Whisper Line client. She’d told the company to disable her direct line a few days ago, but evidently, they’d forgotten. Or, they just hadn’t cared.

Ivy knew herself, she knew her limitations. She knew that, given the opportunity, she wouldn’t be able to resist making a bit of extra money on Whisper Line. It was her inherent frugality, the desire to get ahead on rent, pad her savings account, surreptitiously repay her parents for going into debt because of her.

She gnawed at her bottom lip. She could reply to just one of these messages, just for a little cash. She’d count it as a break from studying. She couldn’t just push straight through the night without taking little breaks. Her work with Whisper Line would be a distraction, but at least she’d be earning some money and getting out of her head for a moment.

She selected the message that would soon expire if she ignored it. The man who’d texted her—and it was, with few rare exceptions, always men who texted—had started off fast and furious.

“I want to fuck you so hard,” he’d typed.

When Ivy hadn’t responded right away, he’d taken the initiative to text her again. “I’m going to cum all over your face.”

It wasn’t the worst opening salvo she’d received. Not even close. Over her time with Whisper Line, she’d received some truly outrageous texts. These were about par for the course. It was funny. The clients paid per text they sent. The guy obviously had money to burn, and Ivy was more than happy to help him spend it.

“I bet you have a big, fat cock,” she typed, smirking to herself. Guys loved to have their egos inflated—among other things. Once, though, and very memorably, she’d had a client who’d wanted to be humiliated. It was a domination and submission dynamic, and Ivy had done her best. She hadn’t been sure she was the right woman for the job. She knew there was a whole subset of Whisper Line for kink. But he’d been a satisfied customer. That was what was important. Client satisfaction and the number of times she got the men to text her.

Her longest streak? A record-shattering 342. She’d gotten an email from a Whisper Line administrator congratulating her, and she’d taken herself out to a nice dinner to celebrate. It could be grueling work unless she treated herself from time to time for all the effort she put into it.

“It’s all for you,” the client typed back.

Ivy weighed her options. It was always something of a game to her, how long she could keep the clients texting before she got the alert that they’d left the chat service. Still, though, she couldn’t afford to keep this up all night. Part of her wanted to be through with it. To put in a bit of time and get a bit of money for it.

“Where are you going to put that cock?” she texted.

“Where do you want me to put it?”

Not that easy.

“You can put it anywhere. Just tell me so I can get ready for it.” If she gave them the choice, it was another text. And the other text was always about anal.

“And if I want it in that ass?”

So predictable.

“I’m going to lube myself up for you. Make myself all nice and slippery for you. Where else should I put it?”

“Rub it all over your tits.”

“So cold,” she typed. “Makes my nipples hard.”

The client left the chat. Ivy blinked a couple of times. Hard nipples had set him off? The image of a pair of breasts glazed with shiny, sticky lubricant? Part of her hated when they logged off without saying goodbye, not least because it deprived her of income.

Three more invitations popped up to chat on her phone, and Ivy groaned.

She turned her phone off in frustration. The temptation to respond to the rest of those text messages was just too great. Being a phone sex operator with Whisper Line was the easiest money she’d ever made. Right now, though, she couldn’t focus on money. She had to focus on her future—her real one. The one she could tell people about.

And that future hinged on passing her finals. Of course, after those finals, she still had another whole year of school, but that was neither here nor there. She needed to take things one step at a time. And that tricky first step had been turning her phone off and focusing.

There would come a day when horny, anonymous men wouldn’t be the only ones texting her. When the only calls she received would be from her office, or patients. Because she was going to become a doctor. She was going to help people in a way she could actually tell her parents about.

Though, if she really tried to wrap her head around it, she was helping people who texted in to Whisper Line. They were lonely, or hurting, or in need of her professional expertise.

And Ivy didn’t mind helping. She enjoyed it, actually. Because when it didn’t make her feel sexy and altruistic, typing just the right thing to make them forget all their inhibitions and really submit to her, let themselves go, completely come apart at those few words on the screen, it was a great way to make money. Plus, she'd learned a veritable lexicon of new vocabulary to describe sexual acts. If she ever had time for a boyfriend, she figured she’d be dynamite at dirty talk.

Except that she wasn’t looking to make money tonight. Ivy pointedly turned her thoughts away from her phone. She was looking to shoo all of the various filthy one-liners she had stored up in her mind and fill it instead with science. Anatomy. Medicine.

Ivy had wanted to be a doctor since she was little. For Christmas one year, her parents had given her a plastic medical kit, complete with all the tools she’d needed to give both her mom and her dad rudimentary checkups. It had been a simple, cheap gift, and one that had probably been lost to the years, but Ivy sometimes wondered whether her parents realized just what a catalyst that present had been. Having that little stethoscope at her disposal, being able to hear the heartbeats of anyone she pressed it to, had opened up a world of curiosity for her.

When she’d visited the doctor’s office for checkups, Ivy hadn’t been afraid. She was fascinated. The processes felt familiar, comforting. The doctor knew exactly what to do, what tests to perform to rule out or diagnose illnesses. The quiet, professional reliability—a calm in the storm. Because Ivy was an only child, any time she got sick, it drove her parents crazy. They worried so much about her that it was hard to stay calm herself when they rushed her to the doctor’s office. But the presence of a professional had flipped a switch inside of her. It was a shelter.

When she’d gotten into college, she hadn’t been completely sure, even then, that she had what it took to become a doctor. Being a doctor was a pipe dream. A polite interest. She checked out presentations by visiting speakers, half-heartedly joined a biology club full of people who looked at her askance. Ivy had never fit the mold of science nerd. None of the boys would approach her. She was too pretty, one bespectacled girl helpfully informed her. The guys were terrified of her. Being interested in science was a lonely pursuit. And as an only child, Ivy already had trouble making friends.

It wasn’t until a college biology professor, praising her work on an anatomy experiment, had asked her if she’d ever considered medical school that Ivy had thought it was a possibility. But with that possibility had come a grating regret: she’d kind of attended the wrong college for an easy pipeline into med school.

“None of that matters, now,” she told herself, trying to shake off the tendrils of the past. She’d gotten too distracted responding to that Whisper Line text. Now she was stuck in a loop, thinking about her past. Doubting herself.

“You’re here now, and that’s what matters.” That, and being able to focus on her study materials. She was scheduled to take her final in a handful of hours and she really needed to be preparing for it.

Ivy steeled herself, then reopened the thick textbook she’d been poring over. She knew this. She’d spent the entire semester learning this. What she needed now was to refresh her brain. Remind it that all of this information was in there. She was a diligent student. Never missed class. Took excellent notes. She’d set herself up for success right when it counted.

The biology professor who had led her to medical school had pointed out Ivy’s natural aptitude for the subject, but that didn’t mean Ivy didn’t work hard. She wanted to do well, if only to justify the alarming cost of getting her education.

Ivy blinked a couple of times. She’d nodded off without realizing it, forehead planted on the open pages of the textbook as if hoping for some kind of osmosis to make sure the information transferred from the book to her brain.

This was getting ridiculous. It was still several hours before the final, but she gathered up her study materials, shoved them into a backpack that barely zipped shut, straining at the seams.

She piled her blond hair in a messy topknot and yanked on some sneakers. Ivy was already dressed in scrubs—it was her default loungewear these days—so all she did was shrug on a jacket to ward off the early morning chill and she was outside, striding toward campus just as the sun was breaching the horizon.

Very few people were out at this hour, and it felt like D.C. belonged to her. All those monuments, all that granite, pink and red in the strengthening light, for Ivy. It was a silly thought, but she could pretend.

There was no harm in pretending. Like how sometimes she pretended, when she was walking back to her apartment after classes, that there was someone there waiting for her there. Waiting to take her in strong arms and sweep her off her feet and hold her close and tight.

And, yeah, okay, maybe have dinner ready. That would be a plus with her busy schedule.

But it was that same busy schedule that kept her from having someone to come home to. It wasn’t fair to have a boyfriend. It would stress her out, and whoever the lucky guy would be, he’d be unsatisfied most of the time. She didn’t have the time to devote to a real relationship. Not with school, and not with Whisper Line.

One of these days, though. One of these days she was going to graduate from med school, be a full-time doctor. Then, everything else would fall into place. One step at a time.

That decided it. The easiest course of action was that she was going to kick this test’s ass. She parked herself on a bench in front of the campus medical building, waiting for someone to unlock the doors, and resumed studying.