The word still hangs there, and Maya's knees have not moved. She is on the floor beside the bed, heels braced against the worn runner of carpet, and her mouth is open, and she is looking up at her mother, and the moan is there in her throat like a swallowed stone.

"I can't," she says.

Sunita doesn't blink. "You can."

"Mama—"

"Don't." A single syllable, flat as a hand on a table. Sunita steps back and sits on the edge of the mattress, and the springs complain under her. She crosses one leg over the other, designer heel dangling off her toes, and she watches Maya the way she watches the screen when a take is going long. "You know what a man pays for, baby? Not the body. The body's the receipt. He pays for the sound. You give him the sound, he comes back. You hold it in, he fucks you once and forgets your face."

Maya's hands are in her lap. Her nails are long and almond-shaped and painted the color of wet brick, and she presses her thumb into the meat of her palm until the pain is a clean line she can follow. "It feels like lying."

"It is lying." Sunita shrugs, one bare shoulder rising and settling. "That's the job. You're not selling what you feel. You're selling what he feels. Those are two different rooms, and you live in his."

The fan clicks. Once. Twice. Somewhere down the hall the pipes tick their slow cooling arithmetic, and Maya counts them the way she used to count the ceiling tiles in the old apartment, back when her body was still a rented room she couldn't afford to furnish.

"Try again," Sunita says. "Mouth open. Eyes up. And this time mean it."

Maya lifts her chin.

The moan comes out thin the first time — a shy, girlish sound, and she hears it hit the air and die there. Sunita's mouth does something small and disappointed, and that little movement, that tiny tightening at the corner of her lips, lands in Maya's chest harder than any slap would have.

"Again."

She closes her eyes.

"No. Eyes up. A man wants to see you want it. Open your eyes and look at me like I'm the one holding the cash."

Maya opens her eyes. Her mother is sitting there in a silk slip the color of weak tea, her hair loose over one shoulder, one leg crossed, and she is looking back with an expression that is neither warm nor cold but simply patient, the patience of a woman who has done this a thousand times and knows exactly how long it takes. And something turns over in Maya's stomach — not shame exactly, but a low, hot flip, the same flip she felt when the camera was on her and her own hand was between her legs and her mother's voice was saying there, that's it, don't stop.

The moan that comes out this time is lower. It comes from somewhere under her ribs. It has a rasp in it, and it ends on a breath, and when it's finished, the room is very quiet.

Sunita tilts her head. "Better." She stands, and the mattress lifts with her, and she walks to the nightstand by the window where the incense has been burning all evening, a thin blue thread of smoke climbing toward the ceiling and bending in the fan's draft. She opens the drawer.

Maya stays on her knees. Her thighs are pressed together under her skirt, and she can feel the small, soft shape of herself trapped there, half-hard and traitorous, and she is grateful for the skirt, grateful for the dark, grateful that her mother is facing away.

Sunita turns around with two things in her hands. An amber bottle, squat and heavy, the label worn soft at the edges. And a box, plain white, the kind you'd see on a shelf in a pharmacy, the kind nobody looks at twice.

She sets them both on the bed between them, side by side, like utensils.

"Tonight we do prep," she says.

Maya's mouth goes dry. "Prep."

"For the scene." Sunita opens the box. Inside, folded flat, a stack of gloves, pale and translucent, the fingers curled like something sleeping. She pulls one out and holds it up to the lamp, and the latex glows faintly, and then she fits it over her right hand, and it snaps against her wrist with a sound that makes Maya flinch.

"What is that."

"Anima." Sunita picks up the amber bottle and turns it in the light. "Cleanser. Douche. You'll learn to do this yourself, but the first time you don't do it yourself. The first time someone does it for you so you know how it's supposed to feel."

"Feel."

"Clean." Her mother's eyes come up, hazel and steady. "And open. A man doesn't want to fight his way in, baby. He wants to be received."

Maya's hands have gone cold. She presses them flat against her thighs, and the silk of her skirt is cool under her palms, and the whole room has narrowed to the two objects on the bed and her mother's gloved hand resting beside them.

"Lie back," Sunita says. "On the bed. Head on the pillow."

"Mama—"

"Lie back."

Maya stands. Her heels make a small sound on the carpet, and she keeps her eyes down as she moves to the bed, and she sits, and then she swings her legs up and lies back, and her hair fans out across the pillow in a black spill, and she is looking up at the ceiling, at the water stain shaped like a bird taking off, at the fan turning its slow blades through the humid dark.

Sunita moves around the bed. The mattress dips when she sits down at Maya's hip, and Maya feels the heat of her through the sheet, and then her mother's hand — the bare one — lands on Maya's knee and pushes.

"Spread."

Maya's thighs lock.

She doesn't mean to. It happens the way a fist happens. Her knees come together, and her whole body goes tight as a wire, and she hears her own breath come short through her nose, and she stares up at the ceiling and does not move.

Sunita doesn't push again. She just leaves her hand there on Maya's knee, warm and still, and waits. The fan clicks. The incense thread bends. And in the silence Maya can hear the small wet sound of her own mouth, and the ticking of the pipes, and her own heart going hard and stupid in her ears.

"Maya."

"I know."

"Look at me."

She looks. Her mother is sitting above her in the lamplight, one gloved hand resting on her own thigh, and her face is not impatient anymore. It's the other face — the one from the bed two nights ago, the one that said I know, baby when Maya came with her own hand and her mother's phone trained on her.

"Nobody's ever touched you there," Sunita says. Not a question.

"No."

"Not even you."

Maya's jaw works. "No."

"Good." Sunita's hand slides up from her knee to her thigh, slow, and stops at the hem of the skirt. "First time is the hardest. Not because it hurts. Because it's the last place you kept for yourself, and now you're giving it away, and some part of you thinks if you give that away there's nothing left that's yours."

Maya's eyes sting. She blinks it back hard, and her mother pretends not to see, which is its own kind of mercy.

"Breathe out," Sunita says. "And let your knees fall."

Maya breathes out. Her knees fall open.

The skirt rides up her thighs, and the air of the room touches the inside of her legs, and she feels the small soft weight of her cock shift against her belly, and her face burns so hot she has to close her eyes against the ceiling.

"Good girl," Sunita says, and the words land somewhere low in Maya's stomach and stay there.

The bottle clicks open.

Maya hears it — the small plastic snap — and then the wet sound of liquid meeting the gloved hand, and then her mother's fingers are there, cool and slick, sliding down between her legs, past the soft shape of her cock, past the place she thought she knew, and settling behind it. Pressing. Not in. Just pressing, the pad of a fingertip against the small tight ring of muscle that has never once been asked a question.

Maya's whole body goes rigid. Her hands find the sheets on either side of her hips and grip, knuckles going white, and she hears a sound come out of her — not a moan, something smaller, something caught.

"Shhh." Sunita's thumb strokes once, slow, against the skin just behind. "I'm not going anywhere. Just feel it."

She presses. Just pressure. Just the weight of a fingertip, patient and unrelenting, and Maya feels her body resist and then, slowly, impossibly, begin to open, the muscle giving a fraction of a fraction, and the sensation is so strange and so specific that she can't name it — not pain, not pleasure, something underneath both, a door that has been locked so long it has forgotten it's a door.

"There," Sunita says softly. "That's it. That's the whole first lesson."

The cap clicks again. The smell of the cleanser rises, faintly medicinal, cut with something almost floral. And then the cold trickle — a thin line of it running down the cleft of her, over the place her mother's finger is pressing, and Maya gasps and her hips jerk and her heels slide on the sheet, and the cold is so sudden and so intimate that tears jump into her eyes before she can stop them.

"Don't fight it," Sunita says. "It's just cold. It'll warm."

The finger pushes in.

Just the tip. Just past the first ring of muscle, and Maya's back arches off the bed a half-inch and her mouth opens and nothing comes out, no sound at all, and she stares up at the ceiling and the fan and the bird-shaped stain and she grips the sheets so hard her long nails bite into her own palms through the fabric.

Sunita holds still. Her finger inside — one knuckle, maybe two — and she holds, and she waits, and the room is so quiet Maya can hear the incense burning, the faint dry crackle of the ember at the tip.

"Breathe," Sunita says.

Maya breathes. In through her nose, out through her mouth, and on the exhale she feels her body loosen around her mother's finger, just a little, just enough, and the pressure changes from invasion to fullness, and her hips settle back down onto the bed.

"Good," Sunita says. "Again."

She pushes deeper.

The second knuckle slides in, and the stretch is real now — a deep, dull, spreading pressure that Maya feels all the way up behind her navel, and her thighs tremble, and she makes a sound, a low broken sound that is half a moan and half a word she doesn't finish.

And then she feels it.

Her cock, trapped against her belly under the bunched silk of her skirt, twitches. It's half-hard already — it's been half-hard since the first moan, since her mother's bare hand on her knee — and now it thickens, and the head of it slides wet against her own skin, and a clear drop of pre-come leaks out and smears across the soft flesh above her navel, and Maya feels it happen and cannot stop it and cannot pretend it isn't happening.

Sunita doesn't look. Sunita's eyes stay on her own hand, on the place where her finger disappears into her daughter's body, and her face is calm, absorbed, the face of a woman doing careful work. But her mouth curves, very slightly, at the corner.

"There it is," she says.

Maya's whole face is on fire. "Mama—"

"Don't." The finger inside her curls, just a little, testing. "Don't apologize. Your body's answering. That's what it's supposed to do." She presses the pad of her finger up against something inside, and Maya's hips jerk off the bed again and a real moan comes out of her this time, full-throated, unashamed, the kind of sound she was practicing for a paying man ten minutes ago and could not make.

Sunita's finger stays where it is. The pressure holds. The stretch holds. The cold trickle of cleanser has warmed inside her, and the wet heat is spreading across her belly in a slow smear, and Maya's hands are still white on the sheets and her heels are braced and her long black hair is a tangled spill under her head, and neither of them says anything at all.

The fan turns.

Somewhere down the hall, the pipes tick once, and go quiet.