Karthik fans the deck one more time, the gold chain swinging forward off his chest, and the cards go around the circle — past Vinoth, past Divya, past Meena with her wet-rimmed glass, past Ravi who is already drunk enough that his laugh comes a half-second late. The rug's coarse wool is scratching the backs of my bare legs where I sit cross-legged, and I have been sitting here so long that the scratch has stopped being a scratch and become a kind of map, a grid of small rough points pressed into my skin, and I keep pressing my palms down onto it, hard, the way I used to press my palm against the mud wall of our house in the village when I was small and I wanted to feel something solid that was not going anywhere.

The deck comes to me.

I look at the card. I do not pick it up. Karthik reaches over and takes it out of the fan himself, because he is the dealer, because he has been the dealer all night, because the deck belongs to his brother and his brother is not here and so the deck is his. He holds it up. He reads it aloud in his fight-announcer voice, the one he used for Meena, the one that made her spine go straight.

"Let two men touch your breasts in a room that starts with A."

The room hoots. Vinoth slaps the rug. Divya says ohhhh and covers her mouth and then uncovers it because she wants to be heard. Ravi laughs and his laugh is a half-second late again and his eyes are on my chest, on the cotton, on the shape of me under the cotton, and I can feel the shape of me under the cotton because his eyes have put it there. Priya's glass is in her hand and her knuckles are white on it, white the way they were when Meena sat on Arun's lap, white the way they get when she is holding something she does not want to put down.

And Suresh's breath is on my neck.

He is sitting behind me now. He moved behind me somewhere in the last round, when the deck went around, when I was watching Meena walk back to her place with her spine first, and I did not notice him move, but he is behind me, and his breath is on the back of my neck, on the small fine hairs there that I did not know I had until tonight, and it is warm and it is even and it is patient, and his smile is not something I can see, it is something I can feel, the way you feel a lamp behind you before you turn around.

The photo is a stone in his pocket. I do not know if he is sitting close enough that his pocket is touching me. I do not want to know. I keep my shoulders very still.

"Room starts with A," Karthik says, and he is grinning, and he is looking around the flat, at the walls, at the ceiling, at the one window with the sea in it, at the kitchen door, at the bathroom door. "What room starts with A?"

"Attic," Divya says.

"There's no attic."

"Anteroom."

"There's no anteroom, Divya, this is a one-room flat."

Vinoth says, "Arun's room," and laughs at his own joke, and Arun does not laugh, Arun is sitting on the floor with his back against the bed leg and his knees up and his glass balanced on one knee, and he is looking at the rug, at the same coarse wool I am pressing my palms into, and he has not looked at Priya since Meena sat on his lap, and he has not looked at me either, not once, not even when Karthik read the card.

"Arjun's room," Karthik says, and the room goes quiet for half a second, and I feel that half-second in my chest like a dropped coin, because Arjun is the quiet one, the one who has said almost nothing all night, the one who sits with his back very straight and his glass very full, and the room does not know what I know about him, and I do not look at Bhavani because Bhavani is not here, Bhavani did not come, and I am suddenly, sharply glad she did not come, and I do not know why.

"Fine," Karthik says. "Arjun's room. Two men. Arun and Arjun. Both of you."

Arun does not move.

Arjun does not move.

The room waits. The sea is a low grinding sound through the window, the same sound it has been making all night, and the smell in here is wine and warm skin and the stale smoke of a cigarette someone put out on the windowsill an hour ago, and under all of it there is the smell of the rug, which is old and dusty and has been sat on by a hundred bodies before tonight, and I can smell it because my face is close to it, because I have been looking down at my own hands.

Then Arun puts his glass on the floor. He does it carefully, he sets it down on the rug and turns it so the wet ring on the bottom does not print, and then he gets up, and he crosses the rug, and he kneels in front of me. And Arjun gets up too. Arjun gets up without putting his glass down, he carries it with him, and then he seems to notice he is carrying it and he sets it on the windowsill, and then he comes and kneels beside Arun, on my other side, and now I am on the rug between them, and the room is watching, and Karthik says, "Ten seconds," and starts to count.

One.

Arun's hand comes first. He puts it flat on my chest, over the cotton, over my left breast, and his palm is warm and dry and heavier than I expected, and it covers me entirely, and I can feel the heel of his hand pressing just under my collarbone and his fingers spread wide across the top of me, and through the cotton I can feel the heat of him, and I can feel my own skin under the cotton going tight, going small, the nipple drawing in against the fabric like something trying to hide.

Two.

Arjun's hand comes second. He is gentler, or he is slower, which is not the same thing — he puts his fingers down first, the tips, and then the rest of his hand follows, and his hand is on my right breast and it is not as heavy as Arun's and it is cooler, and his fingers are long and they reach almost to the center of my chest, and I can feel the bones of his knuckles through the cotton, and I can feel the exact place where his hand ends and the air begins.

Three.

Nothing happens. I mean — nothing happens in me. I am waiting for something to happen in me, the way it happened in the bathroom with Suresh, the way it happened in the theatre with Ravi, the way my body has learned to go hot and wrong and low, but nothing happens. My body is a room with the lights off. Their hands are on me and I can feel every part of it, the weight and the heat and the exact grain of the cotton under their palms, and none of it is going anywhere. I am not here. I am somewhere above the rug, above my own head, looking down at a girl sitting cross-legged on coarse wool with two men's hands on her chest, and the girl is very still, and her braid is hanging down her back, and she is not moving at all.

Four.

Then Arun's thumb moves.

It moves in a circle. Small, slow, right over the place where my nipple is, and the cotton drags with it, and the drag is the thing — the drag is what I feel, the fabric pulling across the tip of me, back and forth, and it is not a good feeling and it is not a bad feeling, it is a feeling that goes straight down through my chest and into my stomach and sits there like a swallowed stone, and I do not move.

Five.

Arjun's thumb moves too. He matches Arun without meaning to, or he matches him because he is watching Arun's hand the way I am watching Arun's hand, from the corner of his eye, and his thumb starts its own circle on the other side, and now both of them are circling, both thumbs, slow and even, and the cotton is dragging on both nipples at once, and my breath is going somewhere, it is going up into my throat and stopping there, and I am not breathing out, I am holding it, I have been holding it since the door of this flat closed and I am still holding it.

Six.

Priya's glass. I look at it because I cannot look at their faces. Her knuckles are white and her glass is half full and she is holding it so hard that the wine is trembling in the bowl, small tremors, the way water trembles in a bucket when a lorry passes outside, and her face is doing the hostess smile, the fixed city smile, and her eyes are not doing anything at all. She is looking at Arun's hand on me. She is looking at it the way she looked at Meena on his lap. And I hate her a little, and I understand her completely, and the two feelings are sitting in my chest under Arun's palm and neither one will move over for the other.

Seven.

Suresh's breath is on my neck. It has not stopped. It comes and goes, even and warm, and I can feel it on the small hairs and on the skin just behind my ear, and I know he is smiling, I do not have to see it, I can feel the shape of the smile in the way his breath moves, and his pocket is behind me somewhere with the phone in it and the photo in the phone, and I think — I think, very clearly, in the middle of all of it — that he does not need to touch me. He has already touched me. He touched me in the bathroom and he will touch me again whenever he wants, and this, this thing happening on the rug, this is not the thing he is holding over me. This is just the room. This is just the game. The game is not the danger. The game is the part I can see.

Eight.

Arun's thumb presses harder. Just a little. Just enough that the cotton goes tight over the tip and I feel it sharp, a small sharp pull, and my spine wants to arch, my back wants to curve forward into his hand, and I do not let it. I hold my spine straight the way Meena held hers. I count my own ribs from the inside. I look at the rug and I find one thread in it, one dark thread among the grey, and I follow it with my eyes from one edge of my vision to the other, and I do not move.

Nine.

And Arjun's hand slides lower.

Not much. An inch. His palm shifts down the slope of my breast and his fingers find the hem of my salwar kameez where it crosses my chest, the little embroidered edge, and his fingertips are on the bare skin just above it, just the tops of his fingers, just the first joint, and the skin there has never been touched by anyone but me, and it is warm from the cotton and from his hand and from the whole hot room, and he stops there, he does not go further, he stops with his fingertips on the edge of the cloth like a man standing at a doorway he has not decided to walk through.

Ten.

Karthik says ten and the room hoots and Vinoth whistles and Divya claps, and Arun takes his hand away first, he takes it away fast, like he has been burned, and he sits back on his heels and looks at the floor between his knees, and Arjun takes his hand away slower, he lifts his fingers off my skin one at a time, the way you lift your hand off something sleeping, and then he stands and goes back to the windowsill and picks up his glass, and the glass is still full, he has not drunk from it all night.

I do not move.

The wool is still scratching the backs of my legs. My palms are still pressed flat on the rug. My braid is still down my back. My breath is still up in my throat, held, and I let it out now, slowly, through my nose, so no one hears it, and the air I let out is hot and it smells of rum and of the flat and of the rug, and I do not look at Priya and I do not look at Suresh and I do not look at Arun, and the room is loud around me and I am sitting in the middle of it like a stone in a river, letting the water go past.

Then I feel it. Behind me. Suresh's breath on my neck, and under the breath, lower, against my shoulder blade, a small hard pressure, the corner of something square, the shape of a phone in a front pocket, pressing into my back through the cotton of my kameez. He has leaned forward. Just a little. Just enough. And he is close enough now that the pressure is not an accident, it is a message, and I do not turn around, and I do not move away, because moving away would be a thing he could see, and I have learned that the safest place in a room like this is very still.

Karthik is shuffling again. The cards go around his hands, the gold chain swings, and he is already telling Ravi something about a bike, and the deck comes back to him and he fans it, and I sit with my hands under my thighs now, my own hands, my own thighs, holding myself in place, and my mouth tastes of Ravi and my chest is warm where two men's hands were, and Karthik looks up over the fan of cards and his grin is already forming, the next dare already in it, and he says, "Kavi. Again. You're hot tonight."