Shared Bodies

The first thing I learned about the men who paid for me was that they never looked at my face. Not at first. They looked at my hands, my throat, the curve of my waist where it dipped under my shirt. They looked at the parts of me that promised something, and they saved my eyes for last, like a dessert they weren't sure they'd earned.

I was eighteen and I was good at being looked at. That's not a brag. It's a skill, like knowing when to laugh at a joke that isn't funny or how to stand in a doorway so the light catches the hollow of your collarbone. I'd been practicing since I was fifteen, since the first time a man twice my age pressed a folded twenty into my palm and told me I had a mouth made for quiet things.

Tonight the apartment smelled like cedar and sweat and expensive cologne that couldn't quite cover the first two. I was on my knees on a rug that cost more than my rent, and there were four of them arranged around me like I was the center of some private constellation. Marcus sat on the leather sofa, his thighs spread wide, one hand wrapped around a glass of whiskey he hadn't touched in ten minutes. He was the one who'd brought me here. He was the one who'd found me on the street three weeks ago, shivering under a broken awning, and instead of driving past like everyone else, he'd rolled down his window and asked if I was hungry.

I was always hungry.

The other three I didn't know. That was part of it. The not knowing. The way their names slid off me like water because names didn't matter when you were face-down on a rug with your shirt already gone. There was a man in a gray suit who kept checking his phone, thumb scrolling through something that made him frown. There was a younger guy, maybe twenty-five, with a boxer's build and a tattoo of a serpent curling up his forearm. And there was the quiet one in the corner, older, silver at his temples, who hadn't said a word since I walked in. He just watched. That was somehow worse. Or better. I couldn't decide.

"You're shaking," Marcus said.

"I'm cold."

"You're not cold."

He was right. I wasn't cold. I was something else, something that lived in the space between my ribs and my stomach, a tightness that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite want. I'd felt it the first time, too, back when I was fifteen and the man in the parking lot behind the grocery store told me to take off my shirt and I did, because he'd promised me forty dollars and I hadn't eaten in two days. The tightness had been there then, and it was here now, and I'd stopped trying to name it years ago.

The man in the gray suit put his phone away. "How old is he?"

"Eighteen," Marcus said. "I told you."

"He looks younger."

"He's eighteen."

The man in the gray suit looked at me then, really looked, and I made myself meet his eyes. That was another skill. Meeting their eyes when they expected you to look away. It made them uncomfortable in a way that usually worked in my favor.

"Come here," he said.

I crawled across the rug. My knees made soft sounds against the fibers. When I reached him, he put his hand on my head, not gentle, not rough, just there, his fingers threading through my hair like he was checking the quality of something he'd bought. I closed my eyes. It was easier with my eyes closed. The tightness in my chest loosened a little, the way it always did once things started, once I stopped having to think about what came next.

"You're pretty," he said. "Marcus said you were pretty."

"Marcus says a lot of things."

The man laughed. It was a short sound, surprised out of him. I opened my eyes and saw Marcus watching me from the sofa, his expression unreadable. He'd told me once that I was too mouthy for my own good. I'd told him that mouthy was all I had.

The boxer stood up. He was the kind of big that made furniture look small, his shoulders blocking out the lamp behind him. He crossed the room in three steps and stood over me, and I had to tilt my head all the way back to see his face. He was handsome in a way that didn't care about being handsome, his nose a little crooked, a scar cutting through one eyebrow.

"You ever done this before?" he asked.

"Done what?"

"Four at once."

I shrugged. "A few times."

"How many is a few?"

"Enough to know I can handle it."

He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who'd decided he was going to enjoy proving me wrong. I felt the tightness come back, sharper this time, and underneath it something else, a heat that started low in my belly and spread outward like spilled wine. I hated that heat. I craved it. Both things were true.

The quiet man in the corner finally spoke. "Let him breathe, Cole."

Cole. The boxer. He stepped back, just a little, just enough that I could stand if I wanted to. I didn't want to. Standing felt like a kind of defeat, like admitting I was a person instead of a thing, and tonight I didn't want to be a person. Being a person was exhausting. Being a thing was simple.

Marcus set down his whiskey and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "You remember what we talked about?"

"I remember."

"You can leave whenever you want. You know that, right?"

I did know that. He'd said it three times on the drive over, and twice more when we walked in. It was the kind of thing men said when they wanted to feel good about themselves, and I let them feel good about it, because it cost me nothing. But we both knew I wasn't going to leave. I never left. That was the whole point of me.

"I know," I said.

"Say it."

"I can leave whenever I want."

"Good."

The man in the gray suit had unbuttoned his shirt. I could see the top of his chest, the beginning of dark hair, the kind of body that came from hours at a gym and a diet that didn't include ramen. He reached down and hooked a finger under my chin, tilting my face up.

"You're going to be good for us," he said. It wasn't a question.

I didn't answer. I just let him look, and after a moment he let go, and the night began the way nights like this always began, with hands and breath and the slow unraveling of everything I'd built around myself. The quiet man stayed in his corner for a long time, watching. I could feel his eyes on me even when I couldn't see him, a weight that was different from the others, patient and assessing.

Later, much later, when the others were spent and the room smelled like sex and sweat and the whiskey Marcus never drank, the quiet man finally crossed the room. He knelt beside me and touched my face, just two fingers against my cheek, and his hands were warm in a way the others' hadn't been.

"You don't have to do this," he said.

"I know."

"Do you?"

I looked at him. In the dim light, his eyes were the color of old pennies. There was something in his face I couldn't read, something that made the tightness in my chest twist into a shape I didn't recognize.

"I don't know how to do anything else," I said.

He didn't answer. He just looked at me, and I looked back, and somewhere in the apartment a clock ticked toward morning, and I understood, with a clarity that felt like a bruise, that I had just told him the truest thing I'd said in years.