The lights are already hot when Marco says it. Ten minutes. Maya's back is on the sheet, the robe open down both sides of her, the bruise on her inner thigh turned out toward the lens like a coin someone left on the mattress. She has been lying here long enough that the scratch of the sheets has stopped being texture and become a place — the same scratch she fell asleep against last night, the same scratch under her knees in the first take, the same scratch she'll be lying on when this is over. The air smells like dust cooked by the lamps and something older underneath, the smell of a room that has held a lot of bodies and kept none of them.

A red light on the far wall. Below it, a screen she can't see from this angle, where the number is dropping. Marco stands at the edge of the light with his phone in his hand, hood up, gray at his temples catching a little of the glare. He doesn't look at her. He looks at the screen. Then he looks at her, once, and mouths a word she doesn't need to hear to understand.

Loud.

She nods. Her throat is dry in a way water won't fix. On the other side of the bed, the two of them are finishing up — one pulling his shirt over his head and dropping it on the floor, the other stepping out of his jeans and folding them, actually folding them, and setting them on the chair by the wall. She watches the folding. That's the thing her eyes land on. A man who folds his jeans before he fucks her on camera. She doesn't know why that's the detail that sticks.

The one who folded comes to the bed first. He's the one with the soap smell — she catches it when he leans over her, clean and cheap, the smell of a shower taken an hour ago in a locker room. His hand finds her hip, right on the bone, and rests there like it's been there before. It hasn't. It just knows where it goes.

The other one kneels at her head. He's already hard, and when he settles his knee into the mattress by her shoulder, she gets the whiskey — warm, sweet, the second glass kind of whiskey, not the first. He's been drinking while she was lying here waiting. Somewhere in the last ten minutes he was standing at the craft table with a plastic cup and he was nervous enough to pour it. She can smell the nervousness on him under the whiskey. It smells like the inside of a bar at closing.

"Hey," he says. Just that. Like they're meeting at a party.

"Hey," she says back, and her voice comes out lower than she expected, and steadier, and something in her chest sits up at the sound of it.

Marco's voice from the dark behind the lights: "Five."

The one at her hip moves his hand. Not down. Up — along the line of her waist, thumb tracing the edge of the robe where it's fallen open, and then stopping just under her breast, palm flat, feeling her breathe. He does it the way the man in the first shoot did it: slow, mapping, like he's reading something he intends to remember. She looks up at him and he's looking at her mouth, not her eyes, and that's fine, that's the job, and then he looks at her eyes and holds it and she has to look away first.

The whiskey one drags his thumb along her bottom lip. She lets him. She opens her mouth a little, not to take him yet — not yet — but because there's something she needs to do first, and she does it with her mouth open and her eyes on the ceiling, silently.

Sera.

She says it in her head, no sound, the shape of it on her tongue. The name she made up in the dark of her childhood bedroom with her fingers in her own hole and her mother's door closed down the hall. She doesn't know where it came from. It's not a name she's ever heard on anyone. It's hers. She's been carrying it around for a day like a stone in her pocket and now she's going to spend it, and she wants to know how it feels in her mouth before it's in the air.

Sera.

"Three," Marco says.

The hand at her hip slides down. Over the soft of her belly, over the bruise — his thumb presses it, just once, not hard, and it aches the way a bruise aches when someone touches it on purpose, a bright hurt that goes somewhere it shouldn't. She makes a small sound. He does it again, harder, and watches her face while he does it, and she feels her hole clench around nothing, wet, empty, already waiting.

"Two."

The whiskey one shifts his knee. His cock is right there now, an inch from her lips, and she can smell the soap on him too — no, that's the other one. This one smells like whiskey and skin and a little like sweat already, and there's a drop at the tip that catches the light. She hasn't touched him yet. She's just looking at it, up close, the way she looked at the man's wrist in the first shoot — reading it before she has to answer it.

"One," Marco says. "We're live. Nobody cut."

And then there's no more counting, and the room changes without changing. The red light is on. Somewhere out past the lights, in a dark she can't see, there are people watching, paying by the minute, and she can't hear them and she can't see them and she can feel them the way you feel a room when you know someone's behind you. Her breath goes shallow. She makes herself take one deep one, all the way down into her belly, and lets it out slow, and the hand on her bruise presses again and she lets the sound come out with the breath, loud, because Marco mouthed it and because the mics want it and because — she finds this out as it happens — she wants it too.

The whiskey one takes her by the hair. Not rough. Just enough to angle her head, and she opens her mouth and lets him in.

He's thick at the head and she has to work for it. She takes him past her lips and stops, tongue flat against the underside, feeling the pulse in him against her tongue, fast, faster than a resting man's. He's nervous. She can feel the nervousness in his cock, in the little twitch it does when she doesn't move, and something in her settles at that — she's the calm one here. She's the one who knows what she's doing. She takes him deeper, past the point where her throat wants to close, and holds it, and the sound he makes is a short grunt that goes straight to her hole.

She pulls back slow, letting her lips drag, letting him feel it. Spit runs down her chin and she doesn't wipe it. She goes down again, further this time, and the one at her hip chooses that exact moment to slide two fingers into her from behind.

She wasn't ready. She was ready. Both. The stretch comes all at once, two fingers and the heel of his hand flat against her, and her whole body arches off the sheet and she makes a sound around the cock in her mouth that comes out as a hum and travels down him, and she feels him swell at the vibration and hears him swear under his breath.

"Fuck," the whiskey one says. "She does that."

"She does," the other one says, behind her, and there's a smile in his voice that she can hear and can't see, and his fingers curl inside her like they've been looking for that spot and found the map.

She is wet enough that she can hear it. That's the thing she wasn't ready for — lying here with a cock in her mouth and two fingers in her hole and the room full of silence except for the wet sound of her, the small slick noise every time he pulls out and pushes back, and the microphone is pointed at the mattress and it's picking up all of it. She lifts her hips into his hand and the sound gets louder and she doesn't stop. She's supposed to be loud. She's supposed to be loud. She takes the whiskey one deep again and moans around him on purpose, letting it vibrate, and he grabs a fistful of her hair and holds her down on him and she lets him, she stays, she breathes through her nose and stays.

"Good girl," the one behind her says, low, almost to himself, and she doesn't know if the mic catches it and she doesn't care.

His fingers come out. She feels the empty, the sudden cool of the air on wet skin, and then his hand is on her hip, turning her, and she has to let the whiskey one slip out of her mouth to move, and the sound she makes at the loss is real and she doesn't have to fake it.

He turns her onto her front. Face down, cheek on the scratch of the sheet, one knee pulled up under her, and the robe is somewhere under her body, bunched at her waist. She can feel the bruise press into the mattress and she keeps the weight on it, on purpose, letting it hurt. It keeps her here. It keeps her in her own body.

The whiskey one moves around to her head. She turns her face and there he is, cock wet from her mouth, standing over her, and she opens for him again and takes him while the other one settles behind her.

A hand on the small of her back. Then lower, thumb spreading her, and she feels the head of him — she feels it, the blunt pressure, the whole weight of a man about to be inside her, and she makes herself wait. She learned this. She learned it from her mother's finger and her own hand and the man in the first shoot. Wait for it. Feel it coming. Don't flinch.

He pushes in.

She has taken three fingers in a week and she has taken a gloved hand and she has taken her own, and none of it is this. This is a cock, a real one, thick and hot and longer than her fingers, and it goes in slow and keeps going, stretching her, and she feels every inch of it pass the place where she was sure it would stop, and it doesn't stop, and her mouth opens around the whiskey one and she makes a sound that isn't for the mic, that comes up out of her from under the bruise and the sheet and the seven days she signed away.

"There," the one behind her says. "There she is."

He starts to move. Slow at first, long strokes, pulling almost all the way out and pushing back in like he wants her to feel the whole length of him every time, and she does, she feels it, her hole gripping him and letting go and gripping again, and the wet noise of it is the loudest thing in the room. She is so wet. She has never been this wet. It runs down the inside of her thigh, past the bruise, onto the sheet, and she can feel it, a slow hot line, and she pushes her hips back into him and takes him deeper and the sound she makes around the cock in her mouth is a moan that goes up at the end.

The whiskey one is close. She can tell — the way he's breathing, the way his hand is fisted in her hair now, the way he's stopped talking. She takes him as deep as she can and holds, throat working, and he comes with a long shaking exhale, and she swallows, and swallows again, and there's more than she can take and some of it runs out the corner of her mouth onto the sheet. He pulls out and hisses through his teeth and lets go of her hair and steps back, and she hears him breathing hard somewhere above her, out of the frame, done.

Now there's only one, and he's the one inside her, and he's still moving, and without the mouthful of cock she can finally make noise, and she does. She lets it out. Loud. A long open moan into the sheet that the mic eats up, and he drives into her harder when he hears it, and she gives him more, and the two of them find a rhythm where every thrust is answered by a sound out of her and the room is nothing but skin and wet and her own voice.

He reaches under her and finds her cock. It's soft, the way it always is, hanging and small and useless, and he takes it in his hand anyway and holds it while he fucks her, and the wrongness of it — a hand on the thing that never works while the place that does gets filled — runs up her spine and her hole clenches so hard around him that he grunts and loses his rhythm for a second.

"You're gonna come," he says. "Aren't you. From this."

"Yes," she says, and the word is out of her before she decides it, and it's true.

"Say it again."

"Yes," she says, louder, into the sheet. "Yes — yes — "

It builds from the place he's hitting, that spot her mother's finger found and her own fingers learned and now a man is hammering, and it's different this time, it's bigger, it's coming from the bruise and the scratch and the red light and the people she can't see, and she is right there, holding it, the way she learned to hold it, and she doesn't hold it, she lets go —

And the name comes out of her. Not in her head. Out loud, on the crest, torn up the middle of it, the way the sound came out of her in the first take when Marco said that's the one.

"Sera — "

Her hole clenches down on him, long rolling waves, taking his cock and holding it, and she hears the wet of it, and her whole body shakes and her fingers claw into the sheet and her cheek grinds into the mattress and she comes, hard, from inside, her soft cock spilling nothing in his hand, and she says it again into the sheet — "Sera, Sera" — and the feed catches it and loses it and catches it again, snagging on the sound like a hand on a wet rope, cutting her voice in and out in the dark where the people are watching.

He holds her hips and drives through it, once, twice, and then he's coming too, deep inside her, and she feels it — the pulse, the heat, the way his cock throbs against her clenching hole — and he groans out something that isn't a word and grinds down into her and stays there, breathing hard on her back, his weight on her for one long second before it lifts.

Then it's quiet except for both of them breathing. The red light is still on. The wet patch is under her, the bruise is singing, and somewhere out past the lamps Marco is watching the screen with his phone in his hand and hasn't said a word.

The name hangs in the air over the mattress, said twice, and nobody repeats it. Nobody asks. The first man shifts behind her, pulling out slow, and she feels the empty and the wet following it down her thigh, and she stays where she is, cheek on the sheet, eyes open, waiting for the next thing the room decides to do to her.