The gravel ground under the mules and then the door, a single steel door in a concrete face, and the man's hand flat on it, pushing it inward without a word. Willow went through because there was nothing else to do with her feet. The room on the other side was low and close, the ceiling pressing down at the top of her vision, one bare bulb on a cord throwing a hard yellow circle on the floor, and a mattress against the wall, stripped to the ticking, a dark stain near the edge of it that could have been anything. No window. The air smelled of dust and old cigarette and something colder underneath, like a basement that had never once seen a summer.

The man pointed at the far wall. Two fingers, no words, and Willow walked to it, the mules clicking on the concrete, the plug shifting inside her with each step so that she had to keep her face still. She put her shoulders to the wall and her hands at her sides and looked at the floor, at the seam where the wall met the concrete, at a chip in the paint the size of a thumbnail. The dress hung open at the sternum. The points of her nipples pressed the latex, and she could feel them, and she could not cover them, and the man had not told her to.

He crossed to a small table against the near wall — a folding table, gray metal, the kind someone had dragged down here and forgotten — and on it lay a single folded piece of paper. He picked it up. He unfolded it with both hands, deliberate, the way a man does when he wants you to watch him do it, and he held it at reading distance and read it aloud in the same low measured voice he had used at the car.

"You will answer to the name I give you."

He paused. He let the first one sit in the room the way a coin sits at the bottom of a well.

"You will not speak unless I ask."

Another pause. The bulb hummed. Willow's eyes stayed on the chip in the paint and her tongue stayed behind her teeth.

"You will not look at my face."

He folded the paper back along its creases, one fold and then the other, and set it down on the table with the same care he had taken to open it. Then he turned and looked at her, and she looked at the floor, and he said, "What is your name?"

"Willow." It came out of her before she had time to weigh it, the name she had worn all night, the name on the profile, the name the driver had used, and she heard it land in the room and knew, even as it left her mouth, that it was the wrong answer.

"No." Flat. Not angry. Correcting a figure on an invoice. "Your name is Toy."

He crossed the room. She watched his shoes come into the yellow circle — black, polished, the toes of them, and then his legs, and then he was in front of her and she was still looking at the floor and her heart had gone up into her throat and stayed there. Two fingers came under her chin. Warm. Dry. They lifted, and her face came up with them, and she kept her eyes down, on his tie, on the knot of it, on the second button of his shirt, anywhere but the face above the collar, and he held her there like that, chin up, eyes down, for three or four breaths.

"Say it."

"Toy," she said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. It came out like something she had been keeping in a drawer.

His thumb moved. It came off her chin and brushed across her lower lip, once, slow, from one corner toward the other, and it left a wet shine on the gloss and it was gone before she could decide what to do with her mouth. The first touch. Brief. Unhurried. He took his hand back and stepped away and the yellow circle was empty in front of her again.

"Good," he said. "Now take off the dress."

She reached for the zipper at her side. Her fingers had gone clumsy and she found the tab and pulled it down, and the latex let go of her with a soft wet sound, and she worked the dress off her shoulders and down over her hips and stepped out of it, and she did not know where to put it, so she held it, folded over one arm, and stood there in the mules and the sheer stockings and the black tanga and the breast plate and the collar and nothing else, the bare bulb on the tops of her breasts and the hard nipples of the plate standing up in the cold.

"On the floor," he said. "At your feet."

She laid it down. The latex pooled on the concrete and caught the light, and she straightened up and put her hands at her sides again and looked at the chip in the paint.

He walked around her. She felt him go behind her first, and then the sound of his shoes on the concrete tracked him around her left side, and she kept her eyes forward and her chin level and her arms at her sides while he made the circuit, and she could feel where he was looking. The back of her neck. The strap of the breast plate across her shoulder blades. The small of her back where the tanga sat. The backs of her thighs above the stockings. He stopped behind her and stood there long enough that she could hear him breathing, and then he came around the other side and stopped in front of her again, and she felt looked at, all of her, in a way that had nothing to do with the bulb.

"Turn around," he said.

She turned. The mattress came into the edge of her vision, the stain on it, the ticking, and she faced the wall and the folded dress and the mules she had stepped out of and not been told to put back on, and she stood with her back to him and her hands at her sides and waited.

He did not touch her. That was the thing she noticed most — that after the thumb on her lip he did not touch her again, not once, the whole time he walked his circuit, and the not-touching was worse than touching would have been, because it left her with nothing to react to and nowhere to put the wanting. Her clitty had gone wet inside the tanga. She could feel it, the constant slow ooze of it, the way it had been since the car, since the gravel, since the door, and she could not do anything about it and he had not asked her to and she stood there with her back to him and dripped.

"You came here for money," he said. Behind her. Not a question, but she had been told not to speak unless asked, and she did not know if this counted, and she held her tongue and her shoulders went tight waiting to find out. "You will not be paid tonight. You will be paid when I decide you have earned the name you came in with. Until then you are Toy. Toy is not paid. Toy is used."

Her clitty throbbed at the word used. She felt it happen, the little jump of it, the wet spreading, and she hated that he could not see it and hated more that she wanted him to.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes," she said. Then, because the floor was still the floor and the name was still in her mouth, "Yes — Toy understands."

She heard something in his breathing change. Approval, maybe. Or amusement. She could not see his face and was not allowed to, and she stood with her back to him and her hands at her sides and her nipples hard under the plate and the wet tanga clinging to her and she waited.

"Good," he said. "You learn fast. That's useful."

He moved. She heard the shoes cross the concrete, past her, toward the door, and she kept her eyes on the wall and did not turn her head, and the yellow circle of the bulb swung a little on its cord as the door opened and a strip of warmer light came in across the floor from somewhere beyond. The door. The only way in or out of this room, and he was standing in it, and she could feel the warmer air coming through it, and she stayed where she was, facing the wall, stripped to the plate and the tanga and the stockings and the mules, and waited for the next instruction the way she had been taught to wait.

"Come," he said. "We are going to have dinner together now."

She turned. Through the open door she could see a slice of the room beyond — a long table, the gleam of it, two chairs, two place settings laid out with the precision of a hotel, and a man in a white jacket standing beside the table with his hands folded in front of him, waiting, his face turned slightly toward the door. The waiter. Beyond him, the walls were mirrored. She saw the edge of a mirrored wall and the reflection in it of the table and the waiter and a stretch of ceiling that was also mirror, and the room went on in there, doubled, endless, and she was standing in a bare concrete box in six-inch mules looking at it through a doorway.

"Tell me your story," he said. He was in the doorway with his back to the light, and she could not see his face, and she was not to look at it anyway. "How you got here. What you are. Everything from the beginning — the first pair of panties you ever put on, and every pair after that, and every man, and every time you told yourself it was the last time. All of it. From the beginning. You will tell it at the table, while we eat, and you will not leave anything out, and you will not stop until I tell you to stop."

She stood in the concrete room in the mules and the tanga and the plate, the dress on the floor behind her, the plug inside her, the collar around her throat with its words turned in against her skin, and she looked at the doorway and the long table and the waiter and the mirrored walls that went on forever in there, and she understood that the story was the price of the name, and that she did not know yet how much of it she had to give to get it back.

"Yes," she said. "Toy will tell you everything."

He stood aside from the doorway and waited, and she walked toward him across the concrete, the mules clicking, the plug moving, the warm light from the dining room coming up the floor to meet her feet, and she did not look at his face as she passed him, and the story she was going to have to tell was already starting somewhere far back in a bedroom that was not this one, in a drawer that was not this drawer, and she had not yet decided how much of it she was going to be able to say out loud.