She does not pick up the phone. The screen glows beside her cheek, the heart swelling and dimming, swelling and dimming, and she watches it from the corner of one eye the way you watch a candle burn down in a room you have not decided to leave. The mattress smells of dust and latex and the warm salt of two men, and under her cheek the fabric is wet where her mouth has been pressed. Her back is cool. The come has gone from hot to cool to something like glue, tightening across her shoulder blades in a thin, stiff film. She does not move. Let it wait.

The bruise sings. It is the only part of her that is loud. Everything else — her ass, her hole, the small soft cock tucked between her thighs — has gone quiet, the way a room goes quiet after the last person stops shouting. But the bruise on the inside of her thigh keeps its pitch, a dull thumbprint of pain that pulses with her heartbeat, and she presses her knee down into the mattress just to feel it answer. She chose this one. It is hers. She presses again.

The heart on the screen goes dark. Then bright. Then dark. Maya counts the dark intervals without meaning to. Three. Four. It is not a question, the heart. Her mother does not send questions. Her mother sends the small red shape and lets Maya decide what to do with it, and Maya decides, for now, to do nothing. Her thumb does not move toward the glass. She watches it glow and die and glow.

Somewhere behind her the studio has stopped being a studio. The fans have wound down. The mics are dead. The lights that were red are now only metal, and the screen Marco was watching has gone black, and the men who were inside her are already gone, their voices already part of the hallway, already part of the street. She heard the door close twice. She did not look up either time.

The door opens again.

"Car's here," Marco says.

He does not come in. He says it from the threshold, the way you call a dog in from the yard, and then he is gone again, his footsteps moving back toward the table, back toward the dark screen, back toward whatever he does with his hands when there is nothing left to direct. Maya lets the words sit on the floor for a moment before she answers them. She does not answer them. She pushes herself up on one arm.

The sheet peels away from her chest with a sound like tape coming off skin. The air hits her all at once — her nipples, her belly, the wet space between her legs — and the shock of it is almost a relief, almost a reason to breathe. She gets her knees under her. The come on her back cracks when she bends. She feels it split along the line of her spine and she does not wipe it away. She looks at the floor for her dress.

The dress is cheap rayon, the color of weak tea, and it has been lying in a heap since the men took it off her. She reaches for it and her arm shakes once, hard, the way it did on the first take when Marco told her to keep her hand on the knot. She steadies it against the mattress. She picks the dress up. She does not look at the phone again.

She pulls the dress over her head and it catches on the come and drags across her back like a wet hand, and she has to work it down her ribs, her waist, her hips, and when the hem finally clears her thighs the rayon presses flat against her hole and she hisses through her teeth. Loud enough to hear. She does not try to hide it. The fabric is wet now in a fresh spot, and she feels it soak through in a second, and she stands there with her hand flat against the wall and her jaw tight and she waits for the sting to settle into something she can carry.

Marco does not ask. He is at the table with his back half-turned, one hand on the laptop lid, the other holding his phone, and his face in the low light is the same face he wore when he crouched beside her and told her Deja would text. He does not look at her dress. He does not look at her legs. He types something with one thumb and then he closes the lid and the screen goes fully dark and the room is only the room.

"Deja has your time," he says. "Eleven. Don't be late."

"Okay," Maya says. Her voice comes out low and used, and she hears it land, and she does not correct it.

She walks past him to the door. The floor is cold under her bare feet — her heels are somewhere, she does not remember where, she does not look for them — and the room smells like latex and sweat and the faint chemical sweetness of whatever Deja uses to take the shine off. The wet patch on the mattress is black in the low light, a dark continent on a pale map, and she does not look at it either. She keeps her eyes on the door. She does not say goodnight. He does not say it back.

The hallway is longer than she remembers. It smells like bleach and old carpet, and the carpet is the color of everything else in this building, a gray that has given up on being a color. Her dress sticks to her back with every step. Her hole clenches once — hard, involuntary, a fist closing around nothing — and she feels the come shift inside her, warm and thick and not hers, and she stops in the middle of the hallway with her hand on the wall. She breathes. She counts to four. She keeps walking.

The phone is still on the mattress behind her. She knows it. She left it there on purpose, the way you leave a light on in a room you are not ready to enter, and she feels the shape of its absence in her pocket as she walks. The heart is still glowing on it. She does not go back. The elevator doors open before she has to decide anything else, and she steps in, and the doors close, and the building lets her go.

Outside the air is night-cold and smells like rain that has not fallen yet. The car is at the curb, black, idling, its exhaust white in the streetlight. The driver is a man she has never seen, older, gray at the temples, and he does not get out to open the door. He does not look at her at all. She opens the door herself. She gets in. The leather is cold against the back of her thighs and colder still against her hole through the thin wet rayon, and she sits down anyway, all the way down, and lets it happen.

The seatbelt clicks. The car pulls away from the curb. The city slides past the window in strips of orange and black — a laundromat, a closed taqueria, a man walking a small dog, a bus shelter with an ad for a phone she does not have — and Maya watches all of it without seeing any of it, her forehead against the cold glass, her breath fogging a small circle that keeps closing and opening again.

Inside her the come shifts with the motion of the car. She feels it move low in her belly, thick and foreign, and her hole clenches around the memory of the second man — the way he had held her hips, the way he had not said anything, the way he had finished and pulled out and left her face-down in the wet without a word — and she presses her knees together to make it stop. It does not stop. The bruise answers instead, sharp and bright, and she presses her knee harder against the seat and lets the pain do the counting.

The driver says nothing. The radio is off. The only sound is the tires on wet asphalt and the small wet sound she makes when the car goes over a bump, and she wonders, for one flat second, whether he knows what she is. Whether he was told. Whether he has a daughter. She looks at the back of his head and he does not look at her and the wondering passes through her the way the streetlights do, and then it is behind her and she is only tired.

She thinks about the phone. She thinks about the heart. She thinks about the fact that her mother knew, before she texted, before she decided, before Marco counted down — her mother knew, and sent a heart, and let Maya find her own way to it. Maya does not know yet whether that is love or whether that is the same thing as the contract. She turns her face away from the window and looks at the seat beside her, empty, and she puts her hand there anyway, flat on the cold leather, the way she used to put her hand on the empty half of her childhood bed.

The car turns onto a street she knows. There are the same three stores, the same lit window with the same old woman in it, the same stretch of sidewalk where she used to walk in her first pair of heels and count her steps so she would not fall. The heels are gone. She left them on the studio floor. She will have to buy new ones, and the thought of buying new ones — of walking into a store tomorrow, of choosing a color, of paying with money she earned tonight — lands in her chest with a strange, small heat that she does not have a name for and does not try to find one.

The car stops. The driver finally speaks, and it is only an address, only a number, only a street, and Maya says thank you and gets out and the cold comes up through the thin dress and her hole clenches again and she does not hiss this time. She stands on the sidewalk with her hand on the roof of the car and she looks up at the house. The porch light is on. It is always on. Her mother leaves it on whether Maya is coming home or not.

The car pulls away. The taillights go small and red and then around a corner and then nothing. Maya stands in the cold with the come still shifting inside her and the bruise still singing on her thigh and the dress still stuck to her back, and she looks at the lit window on the second floor — her mother's window — and the phone is not in her pocket and the heart is not in her hand and for the first time all night she does not know what she is supposed to do next.

She walks up the steps. The porch light is hot and yellow and it finds the wet spot on her dress at once, the way it finds everything, and she covers it with her hand out of nothing but habit. Her hand is cold. The door is unlocked. She opens it.

Inside, the house smells like her mother's soap and the tea she makes at night and the faint, expensive sweetness of the perfume she wears even when she is only going to bed. The kitchen light is on. The kettle is still warm when Maya touches it. There is a cup on the counter with a lipstick crescent on the rim and a spoon resting beside it, and beside the cup there is her phone — her phone, the same phone she left on the studio mattress, sitting on the counter in her mother's kitchen with the screen dark and the heart finally, finally gone quiet.

Maya stands in the kitchen with her hand on the warm kettle and looks at the phone.

Upstairs, a floorboard creaks.