The mattress is still warm where the man was lying, and Maya stays in the dip of it, her legs shaking so hard she can feel the tremor travel up through her hips and rattle her teeth. The silk robe has slipped off her right shoulder and she doesn't fix it. Her chest is bare, her nipples hard from the cold air the fans keep pushing across her, and the come has gone tacky between her thighs, cooling in the sheet under her like something spilled and forgotten.

Marco's voice comes from behind the lights. "Cut. That's a wrap on him."

The man — the talent — rolls off the mattress without ceremony. He doesn't look at her. He pulls his jeans up over his hips, buckles the belt, and walks off toward the dark side of the room where his bag is, and the door at the back of the studio opens and closes and takes him with it, and the smell of him goes too, leaving only the dust and the turpentine and the flat warm smell of her own body in the sheet.

Maya's legs won't hold. She tries to sit up and gets halfway, propped on one elbow, and has to stop there, breathing through her open mouth like she's run somewhere.

Marco comes around the light stand. Up close he's smaller than he looks from the mattress — a compact man in a black hoodie with the hood down, gray at the temples, a tablet in one hand and a phone in the other. He stands over her the way you stand over a piece of equipment you've decided to keep.

"Don't get up yet," he says. "You'll fall."

"I'm not going to fall."

"You're shaking." He says it without interest, the way you'd read a number off the tablet. "That's normal. Your body just spent everything it had. Give it a minute."

She lies back down. The sheet is cold where the man was, and she turns her face away from it, toward the window, where the blinds cut the afternoon into strips of white and gray. The fan turns. The shadow sweeps the floor once, twice.

"Next film shoots soon," Marco says. He's already thumbing the tablet, not looking at her. "You'll want your strength back before then."

"How soon."

"Tomorrow."

Her stomach drops, small and cold, and she keeps her face where it is, pointed at the window, so he won't see it.

Marco taps the phone. "I'm ordering you something. Don't argue." He puts it to his ear and walks a few steps away, and she hears the low flat run of his voice — an order, a name she doesn't catch, a bottle, a time. He comes back and pockets the phone.

"Whiskey," he says. "Premium. You need it."

"I don't drink."

"You do now." He glances at her once, quick, and there's nothing unkind in it, which is somehow worse. "Your hands are still shaking, kid. You need something in you that isn't the floor."

The door at the back of the studio opens, and Deja comes in with her kit, the little wheeled case rattling over the floorboards. She's got a powder puff in one hand already, and she crosses to the mattress like she's crossing to a table.

"Sit up," Deja says.

Maya gets up this time, slow, her legs folding under her, and Deja drops onto the mattress beside her hip without asking and turns Maya's face with two fingers under her chin.

"You're shiny," Deja says. "And your lip's gone."

"It's fine—"

"Don't thank me." The puff comes down on Maya's cheek, cold, and Deja works it in small circles, pressing the shine out of her skin. "You held up. That's what matters."

Maya watches her own face in the small mirror Deja props against the kit. The woman in the glass is flushed down to her collarbone, her long black hair spilling over one bare shoulder and sticking to the sweat at her temple, the hoop in her ear catching the light. She looks like someone who has just been fucked and doesn't quite know it yet. She looks, she thinks, like her mother after a shoot.

The whiskey arrives in a paper bag carried by a runner who doesn't look at her either. Marco opens the bottle, pours a measure into a glass so heavy it could be used to weigh something down, and sets it on the mattress beside her knee. The label catches the window light — black and gold, a man in a coat walking somewhere.

"Drink," he says.

She picks up the glass. The condensation runs down the side and wets her fingers, and she has to grip it harder than she means to, because her hand is still doing the thing where it shakes. The first sip burns all the way down and sits in her chest, warm and steady, and she takes another.

"Loose," Deja says, working the brush through the ends of Maya's hair. "You're tangled at the back. Hold still."

The brush pulls and Maya winces, and the whiskey goes down and settles her, and for a minute the studio is almost pleasant — the fans, the light, the small careful tug of the brush, the ache in her thighs fading to something she can carry.

"Next shoot," Marco says, from behind the tablet. "Two men."

The glass stops halfway to her mouth.

"No," Maya says.

Deja's brush keeps moving. Marco doesn't look up.

"No," Maya says again, louder, and her voice cracks on it, and she hates the crack more than she hates the word. "I said one. I said one man. That's what I agreed to."

Marco sets the tablet down, screen up, and the blue glow of it washes his face flat. He folds his hands and looks at her the way he looked at her on the mattress — the way he looks at a take, deciding whether it holds.

"It's on the contract, baby," he says. "You signed."

"My mother signed."

"She signed for you. That's the same thing on paper." He says it gently, which is the worst part. "One week. You're our property for one week. Everything we can shoot, we shoot. We can't rest — there's a clock on this, and the clock doesn't care how your legs feel."

"I don't—"

"Listen." He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and for a second he looks almost like a person. "You did the thing today. The thing that can't be taught. You stayed in the room while it happened to you. Most people leave. They go somewhere behind their own eyes and you can see it on the tape. You didn't. That's worth money, and it's worth more than money, and it's the reason I'm shooting you and not the other twelve girls Nisha sent me."

Maya's fingers are white on the glass. The whiskey has gone warm in her hand.

"This time I'm not directing," Marco says. "No cuts. No me. It's all online — raw, live, everything the feed sees. Two men, every position, every angle. The audience pays by the minute and they pay more when you're loud."

"I don't want two men."

"I know."

"I'm not—" She stops. She doesn't know what she is. The whiskey has loosened something, and under it the thing she felt in the final take is still there, that flatness, that fact she already knew. "I don't want it."

"Your cry and moaning have to be loud," Marco says. "The mics are set for it and the feed drops you if you go quiet. That's the only rule. Everything else, the men handle."

Deja finishes the brush and sets it down and starts packing her kit, clicking the little cases shut one after another, and she doesn't look at Maya while she does it, and that's its own answer — the answer of a woman who knows the shape of this room and has decided not to be in it when the next thing happens.

"I'll call my mother," Maya says.

"You can." Marco picks the tablet back up. "She'll tell you the same thing I'm telling you. She signed the week. She knows what the week is."

Maya drinks the rest of the whiskey. It goes down easier this time, and the room has gone soft at the edges, the light warmer, and she sets the empty glass on the mattress and looks at her own hands — the long nails, the small white line on her hip from a bike she fell off at eight, before she was anyone at all.

"Okay," she says.

The word comes out before she's decided it. She hears it land, flat, in the quiet room, and it sounds exactly like a fact she already knew.

Marco doesn't smile. He nods once, and taps the tablet, and the blue glow moves across his face, and he says, without looking up, "Get her a car."

Deja is already at the door. The door clicks behind her. The fans turn. The blinds cut the afternoon into strips, and one of them lies across Maya's bare shoulder like a hand, and she doesn't move it off.

Marco finishes whatever he's doing and sets the tablet face-down on the table and turns back to it, and the silence in the room holds — the hum of the fans, the tick of the window, the small wet sound of the whiskey glass sweating onto the sheet — and Maya sits in it with her legs folded under her and her hair loose down her back and the taste of smoke and gold still in her mouth, waiting for the car, and for tomorrow, and for the two men she has just agreed to.

She shifts her weight on the mattress and the silk robe drags across her thigh, and that's when she feels it — a low, hot pull on the inside of her leg, just under the crease where the skin folds. She looks down. There's a mark coming up, a small dark bloom the size of a thumbprint, already shading from red into purple at the edges. From the man's hip, or his belt, or the way she was turned into the sheet. She presses it with two fingers. It aches, dull and deep, the way a bruise does when you push it to make sure it's real.

She leaves her hand there. The bruise is the only thing in the room that's hers alone — not Marco's, not the man's, not the light's. Nobody put it in a contract. It will still be there tomorrow, under the lights, under however many hands. She presses it again, harder this time, until the ache sharpens into something clean, and then she takes her fingers away.

The whiskey glass is sweating a ring into the sheet beside her knee. She picks it up and the ring stays, a perfect gray circle stamped into the cotton, and she sets the glass down again two inches to the left, and now there are two rings, overlapping, the way her thumbprint would overlap a second thumbprint if anyone bothered to look.

Marco is typing. The keys make a soft, wet click under his fingers — the tablet's on-screen keyboard, muted, the sound of an expensive device being used carefully. He types a line, deletes half of it, types it again. His face in the blue light has no expression on it at all. She watches his jaw work, small and tight, the muscle jumping once under the skin, and she understands, with the flat clarity the whiskey has given her, that he is not thinking about her. He is thinking about the numbers. She is a number now. He put her there himself, and she watched him do it, and she said okay.

The window ticks. She listens for it now, the way you listen for a clock once you've noticed it — a small dry sound, once, twice, the glass flexing in its frame with the heat of the afternoon going out of the day. Outside, a car passes and doesn't stop. Another one, further off, that doesn't stop either. She has started counting them without meaning to. Three. Four. The fifth one slows at the corner, and her whole body goes still, listening, and then it drives on, and she lets out a breath she didn't decide to hold.

"How long," she says.

Marco doesn't look up. "Twenty minutes. Traffic."

Twenty minutes. She turns the number over. It's enough time to call her mother. She has the phone right there, face-up on the mattress where she left it, the screen dark, a single smudge of powder on the glass from Deja's puff. She picks it up. The screen wakes and there's Sunita's message still sitting there, the heart, the two words — text me after — and under it the time it came in, an hour ago, when Maya was still on her back with a man's hand on her hip and no idea yet what the week was.

Her thumb hovers over the message. She types he wants two men, and looks at it, and deletes it. She types I said ok, and looks at that, and deletes it too. The cursor blinks in the empty field, patient, waiting for her to decide what her mother is allowed to know, and she realizes she doesn't have an answer that fits in a text — that everything she could send would be a lie by leaving something out, and she's too tired to build the lie properly, and so she locks the phone and sets it back down on the sheet, screen-down this time, so the message can't look at her.

The bottle is still on the floor by the light stand where the runner left it in its paper bag. She looks at it a while. Then she gets up — slow, one hand on the mattress, her legs taking her weight in stages like a much older woman's — and crosses the floor and picks it up. The glass is cool and heavy and the label turns in the window light, the little man in the coat striding somewhere with his stick, going wherever he's going, and she sets the bottle back down without pouring and stands there barefoot on the cold boards with the robe hanging open off one shoulder, feeling the floor under her feet, the grain of it, the small grit of dust and tape residue where the cables run.

This is the room where it happened. She looks at the mattress from here, from the outside, for the first time — the stained sheet, the dip where the man lay, the dark wet patch under where her hips were, the glass with its two rings. It looks like nothing. It looks like a room somebody left in a hurry. From the doorway, if you didn't know, you'd think nothing had ever happened here at all, and that thought sits in her chest next to the whiskey, warm and wrong, and she can't tell if it's grief or relief.

Behind her Marco clears his throat. "Car's close. Get your things."

She doesn't turn around. She stands there one more second with the light on her shoulder and the bruise aching on her thigh, and then she bends and picks up her heels from where she kicked them off, hours ago, beside the mattress, and holds them both in one hand by the straps, and goes to find her dress.