The hand on her hip weighed almost nothing. His fingers were long and uncalloused, a student's fingers, and they lay there over the denim like something he had set down and forgotten how to pick up. Maya looked at his throat. It moved once, a slow swallow, and she watched it the way she watched the tap when the water first came through in the morning — for the proof that something was working.

"You don't have to keep your hand there," she said. "It's allowed to move."

He didn't laugh. His eyes went past her, to the door, to the low lamp, anywhere the light was. He was maybe twenty, maybe less, with a soft jaw and a shirt buttoned to the collar in this heat, and he smelled of soap and one drink and fear, and she had smelled fear on men before, in this room and the one down the passage, and it always smelled the same — like sweat held in too long under a clean shirt.

She took his wrist. Not gently. She lifted his hand off her hip and set it higher, flat over her left breast, over the pale blue top, over the push-up bra she had bought with the officer's money, and she pressed his palm down until his fingers spread on their own.

He exhaled. It came out of him in a long unsteady rush, the breath he had been holding since the middle man stood up and left, maybe since he walked in the door, and with it went the last of whatever he had been told to be. His thumb moved. Once. Across the top of her breast, a small arc, like he was testing whether the shape was real.

"They're real," she said. "Everything you can see is real. I paid for it the slow way."

"I've never—" He stopped. His throat worked again.

"I know." She stepped in, close enough that her breasts pressed his knuckles back against his own chest, and she reached for the top button of his shirt. "That's why you're here. Your uncle paid for it."

The button slipped free. The second one. She worked down without hurry, watching his face rather than her hands, and his eyes followed her fingers the way a man watches a knife being drawn — not wanting it to stop, not able to ask it to. When the shirt hung open she pushed it off his shoulders and it dropped behind him on the polished floor, and she put both palms flat on his chest. Skin. A little damp. His heart going like a bird in a sack.

"Breathe," she said. "You'll faint, and then I'll have to explain it to Shilpa."

That got a sound out of him — half a laugh, cut off. His hands came up then, both of them, and settled on her waist, and they were steadier than his breathing. She let him hold her there a moment. Then she found his belt, unbuckled it, drew it out through the loops in one pull, and dropped it on top of the shirt.

"The bed," she said, and took his hand, and led him.

He sat when she pushed his chest, sat heavily on the edge of the mattress like his knees had been waiting for permission, and she knelt in front of him on the floor and pulled his shoes off, one, then the other, and set them side by side under the bed the way she set her own slippers at home. His trousers came next. He lifted his hips to help her, awkward, and she slid them down his legs and off, and then he was sitting there in his underwear in the lamplight, thin-shouldered, one hand braced on the mattress, and the shape under the cotton was already straining and damp at the tip.

She looked at it. Then at his face.

"Oh," she said. "You were worried about something else entirely, weren't you."

"I don't—" His voice cracked in the middle of the word. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"Nothing." She hooked her fingers in the waistband and drew the underwear down over his thighs, and his cock came free of it — thick, flushed dark at the head, so hard it stood up off his belly and left a wet thread on his skin. She took it in her hand, and he made a noise like he'd been struck. "You're supposed to do nothing. That's the whole arrangement."

She held it a moment, feeling the pulse run through it against her palm, the heat of it, the way it jumped when she tightened her grip. Then she leaned in and took the head into her mouth.

Salt first. Then the taste under the salt, skin and soap and the sour edge of his drink, and she closed her eyes and took him deeper, her tongue flat along the underside, and she felt the vein there beat against her tongue like something with its own small heart. His hand came down on the back of her head — not pushing, just landing, the fingers spread in her hair — and he said her name, or tried to; he didn't know her name, so what he said was a broken syllable that wasn't a word at all.

She worked him slow. Down until he touched the back of her throat and her eyes watered, up until only the head sat on her tongue and she could lap at the slit, and each time she came up she looked at him through her lashes and watched his face come apart and reassemble. His thighs were trembling. His free hand had knotted itself in the bedsheet. When she hollowed her cheeks and sucked hard, pulling up the length of him, he arched off the mattress and gasped, "Stop — stop, I'll—"

She stopped. Pulled off him with a wet sound, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and left him lying there gasping at the ceiling with his cock slick and standing and his whole body shaking.

"Not yet," she said. "You don't get to finish in my mouth. That's not what was paid for."

"What—" He swallowed, eyes shut. "What was paid for?"

"For you to stop being a boy." She stood, and reached behind her back for the hook of her bra, and let the straps fall down her arms. Her breasts came out heavy and full, the nipples dark and hard in the lamplight, and she let him look. Then she unbuttoned the jeans, peeled them down her hips with the g-string under them, and stepped out of the whole pile, and stood in front of him wearing nothing but her mother's bangles and anklets and the little gold ring in her nose. "Look at me properly. You're allowed."

He looked. His mouth was open. His eyes went down her body and stopped at the small soft thing between her thighs, and she watched him see it, and she did not flinch, because she had long ago stopped flinching at that particular pause.

"I know what I am," she said. "You don't have to pretend you don't see it. You just have to want what's on top of it."

"I do," he said. It came out fast and honest, and it was the first true thing he'd said all night.

"Good." She put one knee on the mattress, then the other, and straddled him, and the bangles on her wrists rang against each other as she braced her hands on his shoulders. His cock lay up along her belly, hot and wet, and she reached back between her legs, took it in her hand, and dragged the head through the slick that had gathered there. She was wet — she had been wet since the door clicked shut, since before that, since the middle man's hand had gone slack on her thigh and she'd understood the night had changed shape — and she smeared it down the length of him, once, twice, until he was glossy with her.

"Wait," he said. "Wait, I've never—"

"I know." She fitted the head of him against her and held it there, not pushing, just resting, feeling it twitch against the place it wanted. "Hold my hips. Both hands. And don't move them unless I say."

His hands came up and took her hips, and his fingers dug in, and she sank down onto him.

The stretch came first, that slow burning fullness as the head pushed past the ring of her and kept coming, and she took it an inch at a time, breathing out through her mouth, her nails pressing crescents into his shoulders. He was thicker than she'd guessed from her hand. He filled her the whole way, and when her thighs met his she sat there impaled and still, and both of them were shaking.

"Oh," he said. Just that. His eyes were wide and wet and fixed on her face like she was the only object left in the world.

"Yes," she said, and it came out rougher than she meant it to. "Oh."

She began to move. Slow at first, a long rise until he nearly slipped out of her, then a long sink back down that took him to the hilt, and each time she came down her ass met his thighs with a soft wet slap that sounded loud in the little room. The fan turned above them, thump, thump. The lamp threw their shadows up the wall, one shape, then two, then one. His mouth hung open and his breath came in short bursts, and his hands stayed on her hips exactly where she had put them, gripping, not guiding, and she felt the effort it cost him to obey.

"You can move them now," she said. "Not to push me. Just to hold on."

His hands slid up her waist to her ribs, and then further, and he cupped her breasts, one in each palm, weighing them, and his thumbs found her nipples and rubbed, clumsy and eager, and she arched her back into it and rode him harder. The bangles rang. The anklets chimed every time she came down. She could feel him deep in her, the whole length of him dragging on the way out and filling her on the way in, and the wet sound of it had gone from soft to unmistakable, and she did not care, she wanted him to hear it, she wanted him to hear exactly what he was doing and who was doing it to him.

"Look at me," she said. His eyes had drifted shut. They snapped open. "You don't get to close your eyes. You paid to see this."

"I'm not—" His voice was thin, stretched. "I'm not going to last."

"Then don't." She leaned down over him, her hair falling forward off her shoulders in a black curtain that shut out the lamp on either side of his face, and she put her mouth against his ear. "Come inside me. That's what you're for tonight."

He broke. His hips bucked up off the mattress, driving into her, and he cried out — a raw, undignified sound — and she felt him pulse inside her, once, twice, three times, hot and flooding, and his hands clamped down on her breasts hard enough to hurt, and she rode him through all of it, grinding down, taking every throb, until he went limp beneath her and his hands fell away.

She didn't stop.

She stayed on him, working herself on his softening cock while it was still slick with what he'd put in her, and she reached down between their bodies with two fingers and found herself and rubbed, fast and hard, her breath coming in short huffs through her nose. His eyes were open and watching her, dazed, and she held his gaze while she did it, and something in his face — awe, or horror, or both — pushed her over. She came with her teeth in her lip and her thighs locked around him, clenching down on him so hard he groaned, and the sound she made was small and private and not for him at all.

Then she lifted off him and knelt there on the mattress, and the wet ran out of her down the inside of her thigh, his and hers mixed, and she wiped it with the flat of her hand and looked at it in the lamplight before she wiped her hand on the sheet.

He was still lying there, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. His cock lay soft and wet against his thigh. He looked smaller than he had when she came in — younger, and used, and something else she couldn't name, and she found she didn't want to name it.

"Was that—" He stopped. Tried again. "Was that all right?"

"You did fine," she said. It was the same voice she used on the men who paid, and she heard it come out of her own mouth and did not correct it. She reached for the g-string on the floor. "Better than fine. You'll remember it."

"Will you?"

She paused with the scrap of black lace in her hand. That was not a question the others asked. The others asked her name, or her price, or whether she'd do a thing they'd heard about, and she had answers ready for all of those. This one she had to reach for.

"I remember all of them," she said. "That's the job."

She dressed with her back to him — bra, jeans, top, the bangles pushed up her arm so they wouldn't snag — and she heard him get up behind her and start gathering his clothes off the floor. The shirt, the belt, the trousers. He dressed in silence. She checked her hair in the dark window glass, tucked a strand behind her ear, and turned around.

He was standing by the bed with his shirt half-buttoned and his shoes in his hand, and he was looking at the door.

"My uncle's outside," he said. "In the car. He'll ask me—" He stopped. His ears had gone red.

"He'll ask if you did it." She walked past him to the door and put her hand on the bolt. It was warm from the room. "Tell him yes. Tell him it was easy. Don't tell him anything else, because he'll only make it into a story about himself."

The boy nodded. He looked at her a moment longer, and his mouth opened like he was going to ask her name after all, and then he thought better of it and looked at his shoes instead.

Maya drew the bolt back. It slid with a hard scrape, and the passage beyond the door was dark and smelled of the oil Shilpa burned for the mosquitoes, and somewhere past it a chair creaked.

"Go on," she said. "He's waiting."

The boy went. His footsteps went down the passage and stopped, and she heard a man's voice, low and pleased, and the boy's voice answering, and then the heavy front door opened and closed and the house was quiet again.

Maya stood in the doorway with her hand still on the bolt. Down the passage, in the dark, Shilpa's chair creaked a second time, and a match struck, and the small yellow flare of it lit the mirror on the wall for one moment — the mirror Maya had been told not to look into — and in it she saw a woman in a pale blue top with her hair loose down her back and her mother's bangles on her arm, and behind the woman, in the glass, the lamp-lit room where the bed still held the shape of two bodies.

"Fifty thousand," Shilpa said from the dark, and the smoke of her cigarette moved into the lamplight. "And the boy's uncle wants you again next week. Same room."

Maya let go of the bolt. It was not a question, so she did not answer it. But she stood there a moment longer than she needed to, watching the woman in the mirror, and then she reached up and straightened the fall of her hair, and went to find her shoes.