The bus from Chennai took eleven hours, and I spent all of them with my knees pressed together and my dupatta pulled up to my chin.

I wore black — a plain t-shirt Priya picked for me from a shop near the beach, and a long skirt that falls to my ankles, the kind Amma would have called decent. I thought black would make me invisible. I thought if I covered my arms and my legs and my hair, the men in the front seats would forget I was there.

They did not forget.

Arun drove first. His eyes found me in the rearview mirror every few minutes, the same way he used to find my knee under the canteen table. Suresh sat beside him, turned halfway around in his seat the whole ride, talking to Vinoth about something I could not follow, but his eyes kept coming back to me — my chest, my lap, the place where my skirt pulled tight over my thighs when I shifted. Karthik was behind me, and I felt his gaze on the back of my neck like a hand.

Ravi sat beside me. His knee touched mine somewhere past Vellore, and he did not move it. I did not move mine either. I did not know which was worse — the ones who stared, or the one who touched and pretended it was the road.

Vinoth laughed when I flinched. He laughed at everything. He was the kind of boy who laughed so you would not notice what his hands were doing.

Eleven hours. I counted the road signs. I counted the villages. I counted the number of times I felt eyes on me and did not turn to meet them. I lost count somewhere past Salem.

We reached Goa at night. The hotel was a white building with a courtyard and a guard at the gate who looked at me, then at the six boys, then back at me, and said nothing. Karthik paid for two rooms. The boys took one. I took the other.

That was the plan, at least.

I do not know when the plan changed. I lay down on the far edge of the wide cot, my back to the room, my skirt still on, my t-shirt still on, my body stiff with the habit of pretending. The air conditioner hummed against the humid night, and the cold air raised goosebumps on my arms, my legs, the places where the sun had warmed my skin on the drive. A single lamp was on somewhere behind me, and it cast sharp shadows across the rumpled sheets — a fold of white, a corner of the blanket, the dark shape of the lamp itself.

I heard the door open.

I heard footsteps. More than one. The low rhythm of six men breathing in a dark room, settling into spaces, the rustle of sheets, the creak of a cot somewhere to my left. Vinoth's voice, low, saying something I could not hear. Karthik's laugh, cut short. The click of a switch, and the lamp went off, and the room went black except for the thin line of light under the bathroom door.

I kept my eyes closed. I kept my breathing even. I have learned this. I learned it in the rooming house, on my cot, with Ravi's hand on me in the dark. I learned it in the theatre, in the bathroom with Suresh, in Priya's flat with Arun's hands on my chest. I have learned to lie still and let my body be a thing that is happening to someone else.

I do not know how long I lay there. Long enough for the breathing around me to slow. Long enough for someone to start snoring — Vinoth, I think, a wet rattle in his throat. Long enough for me to believe, for one small, stupid minute, that the night would pass.

Then the mattress dipped behind me.

I felt his weight settle. The cot was wide, but not wide enough, and his body took up the space behind mine, and his breath came warm against the back of my neck. I knew it was Arun before he touched me. I knew it from the smell of him — the same soap he used at the rooming house, the same faint cigarette smoke that clings to his shirt. I knew it from the way he breathed, slow and even, as if he were still asleep, as if this were something his body was doing without him.

His hand slid over my hip.

I did not move. I did not open my eyes. My heart was a bird in my chest, beating its wings against my ribs, and I did not let it out. I lay still and let his hand travel — over the curve of my hip, down the outside of my thigh, back up, under the hem of my t-shirt, onto the bare skin of my waist. His fingers were warm. His palm was rough. He touched me the way you touch something you have been thinking about for a long time.

He pulled my head back.

Gently. That was the thing I could not understand. His hand came up under my chin and tilted my face toward him, slow, careful, as if he were afraid of waking me, and I let him, because what else was I going to do. My mouth opened without being asked. It opened the way a door opens when someone leans on it, and I felt the air of the room against my tongue, and then I felt him.

He pushed his cock past my lips.

I tasted salt first. Then skin. Then the deeper, stranger taste of him, the taste that is a person and not a thing, and I stayed still, my throat working, my tongue flat, while he moved slow and shallow, in and out, in and out, the way a man moves when he is trying not to make noise. I could hear the others breathing around us. I could hear the air conditioner. I could hear the wet sound of my own mouth, and I hated it, and I did not stop.

He held my head with one hand. His other hand was on my hip, under my t-shirt, his thumb moving in small circles on my skin, and I did not know if this was worse because it was him. Arun. Priya's Arun. The boy who touched my knee under the table and then pretended he had not. The boy who looked at me in the rearview mirror for eleven hours and never once said my name.

I thought of Priya. I thought of her knuckles going white on her glass while Meena sat on his lap. I thought of her locking the door of her flat and saying no one leaves until sunset, and how she had no idea what she had locked in with us.

He pushed deeper.

I gagged, once, a small sound, and he stopped. His hand stilled on my hip. For a moment the room was only the air conditioner and Vinoth's snoring and the wet click of my throat trying to swallow around him. Then he moved again, slower, shallower, and I understood that he had heard me and had decided not to care.

"Good girl," he whispered. So low I almost did not hear it. The same words Ravi had used in the theatre. The same words Suresh had used in the bathroom, with the photo in his pocket and the door locked behind me.

I do not know why that was the thing that made my eyes sting. Not the cock in my mouth. Not the hand on my hip. The words. The way they all used the same words, as if there were only one script in the world for what a girl like me was for.

He moved faster. His breathing changed — a hitch, a catch, the sound of a man losing the rhythm he had been holding. His hand tightened on my hip. His other hand, the one in my hair, pulled me closer, and I let him, because my body had already decided that letting him was easier than not, and because the bird in my chest had stopped beating its wings and gone still.

I felt him swell against my tongue. I felt the pulse of him, the throb, the moment before, and then he came.

It hit the back of my throat, hot and salt and thick, and I swallowed because there was nowhere else for it to go. He held me there for a long moment, his cock still in my mouth, his hand still in my hair, and I could feel him shaking, just slightly, the way a man shakes when he has spent himself. Then he pulled out, slow, and I felt the wet drag of him against my lip, and I lay still with my mouth closed and my eyes closed and my hands under my body where they had been the whole time.

He did not say anything else. He did not touch my face. He rolled away from me, and the mattress lifted, and I heard his feet on the floor, and then the bathroom door opened and closed, and the thin line of light under it went bright, and I heard the tap run.

I lay there and tasted him.

The room was dark. The room was quiet. Around me, the others breathed — Vinoth's snore, Karthik's slow rhythm, the deeper sound of Suresh somewhere to my left. Ravi's cot creaked once, and I did not know if he was asleep or awake, if he had heard, if he had watched. I did not turn to look. I did not want to know.

My lip stung. I had bitten it somewhere, at some point, and I had not noticed until now. I touched it with my tongue and tasted blood under the salt, and I lay still and let the two tastes mix in my mouth.

The bathroom door opened. Arun's footsteps crossed the room, soft on the tile, and the mattress dipped again, and then his weight was gone, and I heard him settle onto the floor with the others, onto a mattress on the ground, onto whatever space he had claimed for himself before he had decided to come to mine.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling was white. The air conditioner hummed. The shadows from the lamp were gone, and the room was only dark, and I lay on the far edge of the cot with my skirt still on and my t-shirt still on and my mouth tasting of a man who was not mine and never would be, and I thought of Priya, and I thought of the beach I had not yet seen, and I thought of the swimsuit she was going to make me buy.

Somewhere in the room, someone's breathing hitched.

Just once. A small catch, a pause, and then it went back to its rhythm. I did not know whose it was. I did not turn to look. I lay still and let my body be a thing that had happened, and I waited for the morning, and I did not cry, because there were no tears left in me tonight, and because the bird in my chest had gone quiet, and because somewhere under the taste of Arun there was something else — something I did not have a name for yet — and I did not want to look at it.

The air conditioner hummed. The room breathed. And I lay on the edge of the cot, awake, waiting.