The room stays quiet for a long moment after Marco says it. Nobody moves. The fans keep turning. Somewhere past the white bounce cards a chair leg scrapes, and that small sound is the first thing that tells Maya the take is actually over.

The man's hand lifts off her hip. Just like that. His thumb leaves the silk strip, and the strip falls back against her skin, and he steps away from the bed, and the light that was on his face is now on nothing, on the wall, on the scuffed floorboards, on the dust motes turning slow above her like something the fans stirred up from the wood.

"Good," Marco says, from the dark. "That's a wrap on her."

Maya doesn't move. She can't, is the thing. Her thighs have gone hollow, the same way they used to go after the long walk home from school in the wrong shoes, and there is a soreness between her legs that has nothing to do with anything being inside her and everything to do with how hard she clenched on nothing. The sheet under her ass is wet and cooling. Her robe is still open. Her chest is still bare. The microphone above her catches her breathing and she can hear it come back to her, tiny, delayed, from somewhere behind the lights.

Deja appears at the edge of the bed with a robe belt in her fist and a bottle of water under her arm.

"Sit up," she says. Not unkind. Just the voice you use on a piece of equipment you have to move to the next location.

Maya sits up. The room tilts, catches, settles. Deja pulls the robe closed over her chest without looking at her, ties the belt at her waist, and hands her the water. Maya's hands are shaking enough that the bottle cap takes two tries.

"Drink it slow," Deja says, already turning away. "You'll cramp."

She drinks it slow. Cold, plastic-tasting. It goes down through her chest and into her belly and she feels it arrive, which is strange, because she didn't know until this second that her body had been waiting for anything at all.

Marco comes out from behind the lights. He's smaller than he looks from the bed — gray at the temples, black hoodie zipped to the throat, phone in one hand already lit up with the time. He stops at the foot of the mattress and looks at her the way he looked at her this morning, at the door, when he called her an appointment and not a person. It doesn't sting the way it did then. It just is. She's been looked at by worse.

"You did the thing," he says. "You know that, right? The hand thing. That's the whole scene. That's what I'm selling."

"I know," Maya says. Her voice comes out lower than she expected, and rougher, like she's been asleep for a week.

"Good." He thumbs the phone. "Then listen. Don't shower tonight if you can stand it. Keep it on you, the — " he gestures vaguely at her, at the whole of her, at the bed, at the wet spot under her, " — the smell. It photographs. It reads on camera. You'll shower tomorrow before the shoot."

"Before the shoot," she repeats. The words come out flat, and she hears herself say them, and she doesn't recognize the flatness as hers.

"Rest tomorrow morning. Drink. Eat something with salt." He looks at her legs, at the fine tremor running through the right one, and something in his face does a small calculation and files it away. "You're going to be weak for a day. That's normal. That's the take. Your body spent it."

He says it like it's a receipt. Like he's telling her what the invoice says.

The man is already dressed. He pulls a gray sweatshirt over his head and it comes down over the small crescent scar on his wrist and he doesn't look at Maya again, not once, the whole time he's gathering his bag from the floor by the light stand. He's done. He was hired to do the thing and he did the thing and now he's going home and Maya is a bed he passed through.

She watches him go and doesn't feel anything about it. She thought she would. She waited, in the second take, for the part where he would look at her like she mattered, and he never did, and she came anyway, and that's a fact about her she'll have to carry around now.

The door clicks. The cold dust smell comes in stronger for a second, and then it's just the room again.

Deja sits Maya on the folding chair by the mirror and starts on her face. The sponge is cold and slightly gritty — the powder, or the sweat, or the take, one of them — and she dabs at Maya's cheekbone, at the hollow under her eye, at the corner of her mouth where the lipstick has smeared from being pressed into the sheet.

"Don't thank me," Deja says, before Maya can. She doesn't stop dabbing. "I hate when they thank me."

Maya doesn't thank her. She sits still and lets the sponge move across her face and watches herself in the mirror instead — the heavy black hair spilling loose over her shoulder, past her hip, the big hoop earrings, the nose ring catching the light. She looks like a woman who just got laid. She looks, if she's honest, exactly like the woman she was trying to build.

Deja picks up the brush and starts on the hair. Long strokes, root to tip, working out the tangle at the back where the sheet pulled it. The brush drags through and Maya's scalp pulls with it and it hurts in a clean way, the way a comb hurts when someone else is doing it and you don't have to think.

"You want it up or down tomorrow?" Deja asks.

"I don't know what tomorrow is."

"Down, then." Deja keeps brushing. "Easier to change."

Marco comes back with a bottle. Amber, no label, heavy glass. He sets it on the makeup counter with a thud that makes the powder tins jump, and pulls two plastic cups from the stack by the water cooler, and pours three fingers into one of them without asking.

"Here," he says, and pushes it across the counter at her.

"I don't—"

"You need this." He's already pouring his own, smaller, and he doesn't sit down. "Premium. If you're going to be in my week you're going to drink like a professional."

Maya picks up the cup. The glass of the bottle was cold and the plastic cup is cold too, sweating already, and it sits in her palm like something alive. She takes a sip. It burns all the way down and then blooms warm in her chest and her eyes water and she blinks it back.

"Again," Marco says.

She drinks again. The second sip is easier. The warmth spreads out through her shoulders and down into her arms and she realizes she's been holding her shoulders up around her ears since she got on the bed and she lets them drop.

"Better," Marco says. He checks his phone again. The click of the screen lighting up is loud in the small room, and he looks at the time and then at her, and something shifts in the way he's standing, like he's finished with the part of the day where she's a person and is moving on to the part where she's a schedule.

"So," he says. "The next one."

Maya keeps the cup in her palm. The cold of it is the only thing in the room that feels like it's on her side.

"No next film," Marco says. "Film's done. What we're doing now is live. Streaming. No takes, no cuts, no second pass. It goes out and it's out."

"Live," Maya says.

"Raw recording. Every camera we've got on you at once and the whole thing on the feed as it happens. You get paid on the viewer count, not on the delivery." He taps the counter with two knuckles. "Which means you can't do the thing you did tonight. No stopping the take. No hand on his hand. There's no Marco to call cut. There's just the room and the men and the feed."

The whiskey sits in her chest, warm, and the warmth does not reach her hands. Her hands are cold around the cup.

"Two men," Marco says. "Both of them—" he pauses, weighs the words, says them flat, "—both of them big. Black. You'll be working both in rotation. Every position we've been building toward. Every angle. Missionary, side, the one on the back, the one on your knees."

"No," Maya says.

It comes out before she's decided to say it. Her voice sounds like her mother's voice, she notices, in the flat way she's heard Sunita say no on the phone to men who thought they were negotiating.

Marco doesn't react to it. He takes a sip of his own whiskey and sets the cup down and looks at her with the same small, patient expression he had this morning.

"It's on the contract, baby."

"That's not—"

"You signed up for a week." He says it gently, which is worse than if he'd said it hard. "One week of production. That's the deal. You're not an appointment anymore, you're an asset. You're our property for seven days and we record maximum in those seven days and then you go home and you don't hear from us until the next one."

"Property."

"It's a word," Marco says. "Don't make it bigger than it is."

Deja's brush keeps moving through Maya's hair. Long strokes. Root to tip. She doesn't stop, doesn't look up, doesn't take a side. The brush drags through the tangle at the back and Maya's scalp pulls and she lets it pull.

"You want the money," Marco says. "You've got the body for it. You've got the face. And tonight you proved you've got the thing that can't be taught, which is that when it's actually happening to you, you don't go somewhere else in your head. Most of them go somewhere else. You stayed." He picks up his cup. "That's rare. That's why I'm telling you straight instead of selling you."

"I said no."

"You said no and you're still here." He drinks. "So."

Maya looks at the bottle on the counter. The amber light in it. The cold sweating down the glass. She thinks about the contract, which she has not read, which her mother read, which her mother signed for her because Maya was eighteen exactly and the agency needed a guardian signature and Sunita's hand was the hand that went on the line. She thinks about the word property and how it landed, how it didn't hurt the way she expected, how it landed like a fact she already knew and had been waiting for someone to say out loud.

"I need," Marco says, and pauses, and starts again, "I need you to understand what tomorrow is. It's not a film. It's a broadcast. There's no slate, there's no second angle, there's no me in the dark telling you to do it again. It's you, on the bed, and two men, and every camera we've got, and an audience paying by the minute to watch you take it. And what sells that—" he looks at her, actually looks at her, for the first time all day, "—is your face. Not your body. Your body is good. Your face is the product. They want to see you feel it."

"You want me to cry."

"I want you to mean it," Marco says. "If meaning it is crying, then cry. If meaning it is coming, then come. Whatever it is, it has to be real, because that's what they're paying for. Tonight was real. Tomorrow has to be realer."

He sets his cup down and picks up his phone and checks the time again, and the click of it is the third click and Maya notices she's started counting them.

"Your cry and moaning must be loud," he says. "That's not me being crude. That's the tech. The mics are set for it. The mix is set for it. If you go quiet, the feed drops you. So you don't go quiet."

Maya takes another sip. The whiskey is warm now, warm as her chest, warm as the room, and her hands have finally stopped being cold around the cup. The tremor in her right leg has settled. The soreness between her legs has settled into a low ache that she can feel when she shifts her weight, and she shifts her weight, deliberately, to feel it.

She looks at herself in the mirror. The hair down. The face clean. The robe tied at the waist, the silk strip of the bed still printed on her hip in a faint red line. She looks like her mother. Not in the face, exactly — in the shoulders, in the way she's sitting, in the way she's holding a glass of whiskey in a folding chair in a studio at night with her legs crossed at the ankle like she's been doing it for years.

"Okay," she says.

Marco looks up from the phone.

"Okay what."

"Okay," Maya says, "I'll do it."

He studies her for a second. Whatever he's looking for, he finds it or he doesn't and either way he nods, once, and puts the phone in his pocket, and picks up his cup and finishes it.

"Good girl," he says. It lands the same way it landed from Sunita and it doesn't land the same way at all, and Maya files the difference away to look at later.

"Get some rest," Marco says, heading for the door. "Drink the rest of that. Sleep in tomorrow. Deja will call you with the time."

The door opens. The cold dust smell comes in again. The door closes.

Deja finishes the last stroke of the brush and sets it down on the counter and looks at Maya in the mirror, at her face, at her eyes, for the first time all night.

"You want me to call you a car," she says. It's not a question, but it is, the way she's holding the brush like she's already put it down.

"No," Maya says. "I'll call my mother."

Deja nods, and doesn't say anything else, and gathers her kit and goes, and the door clicks behind her, and Maya is alone in the studio with the fans turning and the lights still on and the whiskey in her hand.

She takes out her phone. Sunita's name is at the top of the messages, the last one from this afternoon, a heart and a "text me after." Maya looks at it for a long time. Then she drinks the rest of the whiskey in one swallow, and the glass is empty and cold in her hand, and the room is very quiet, and Marco's voice is still in it, flat and unhurried, saying it over and over.

Your cry and moaning must be loud.