Samantha sat on the edge of Bunk 6 and did not know where to put his hands. The mattress was new — the tick still smelled of the mill, of cotton and something faintly chemical — and it gave under him the way nothing in his mother's house gave, honest and unresisting. He had set his dress on the nail by the door, smoothed it twice, and now he sat in his slip and his panties with his knees apart because closing them pressed the gauze against the wrong place, and the wrong place had begun, an hour ago, to feel like a held breath.

The room was long and low and the eight bunks went down it like pews. Bare bulbs. A window at the far end with the shade half down. Somebody had scratched initials into the wall by the head of Bunk 2 — N.S. — and the paint had gone soft around the letters, as if the wall had given up arguing.

He looked down at himself. The white was there through the blue cotton of his panties, a pale rectangle the size of a playing card, the edge of the tape glinting where the light caught it. He touched it with one finger. The finger came away clean. Dr. Whitfield had said that was the thing to watch for — clean was good, clean meant the stitches were holding — and Samantha had repeated it back to him in the car like a boy reciting a catechism, and Georgia had laughed and said you'll be fine, you'll be fine, everybody's fine.

His cock had been quiet all afternoon. Dead quiet. Numb in a way that frightened him more than pain would have. And now, sitting here with the ache settling into something with an edge on it, it had begun to stir against the wrap, a slow heavy interest he could not account for and could not stop. He pressed his palm flat on his thigh and breathed through his nose and looked at the window.

"You're in my bunk."

He jumped. The voice came from the doorway — low, warm, unhurried, and when he turned, Izabella Cortez was standing in the frame with her shoulder against the jamb, her arms crossed under her chest, watching him the way a woman watches a card she has already decided to play.

"It's — they said any of them—"

"I'm kidding." She pushed off the jamb. "They're all the same bunk. I just wanted to see your face."

She came in. She did not hurry. Her uniform was the same blue as his own dress on the nail, but on her it sat different — the bodice pulled tight across the bust, the skirt short enough that the hem swung when she walked, and she walked like the floor owed her money. Long black hair loose to her shoulders. Brown eyes that did not blink when they found the white patch showing through his panties.

"Oh," she said. "There it is."

Samantha's hand came down over his lap before he knew he had moved it. "It's — it's a dressing."

"I can see it's a dressing." She stopped at the foot of the bunk. "Georgia told me. You want to know what he said? He said, don't you dare go up there and tease him, he's had a day. " She smiled, and the smile had a hook in it. "So here I am, not teasing you."

"You're—"

"Sitting down." She sat. Not beside him — on the floor, cross-legged, at the foot of the bunk, close enough that her knee almost touched the toe of his shoe. She tipped her head back and looked up at him along her lashes. "Better angle down here."

He did not know what to do with his hands again. He put them behind him on the mattress and leaned back, and the shift pulled something in the stitches, a thin bright line of pain that made his breath catch, and Izabella saw it — of course she saw it, she was watching his face the way you watch a clock you need to be wrong.

"Hurts?"

"A little."

"Good," she said. "Means it's real."

She reached up and laid her hand flat on his bare thigh.

It was not a question. The palm was warm and dry and it landed with the whole weight of her arm behind it, and Samantha's leg jumped under it once, a shiver he could not govern, and then went still. Her thumb moved. Slow. A circle, almost absent, like she was thinking about something else. The skin under her hand had gone hot in a way that had nothing to do with the room.

"Your legs are smoother than mine," she said. "That's not fair."

"I — I shave them."

"I know you shave them. I'm saying it's not fair." Her thumb stopped its circle and pressed, just there, at the inside of his thigh, an inch below the hem of his panties. "Georgia's are the same. He's got those legs and he wears them around this diner like a dare, and Hazel lets him, and I've been thinking about it since the day I got hired."

Samantha swallowed. "About his legs?"

"About what a man does with a pair of legs like that," she said, "when he's got nobody watching."

Her hand slid up. Not fast — she gave him every inch of it, gave him time to say the word, and he did not say the word, and her fingers came to rest with the tips just touching the edge of the gauze through the thin cotton, and she went quiet and looked at it the way a woman looks at a cut of meat she has been saving money for.

"I want to put my mouth on it," she said.

The room tilted. He heard himself make a sound — not a word, something smaller — and his cock came up hard against the wrap, a full thick throb that dragged at the stitches and made him hiss through his teeth.

"Izabella—"

"I'm not going to hurt you." She said it plainly, no flirt in it now, and that was worse, that was so much worse, because it meant she had thought about it and meant it. "I've had my mouth on plenty of men who were healing. You go slow, you go careful, you don't take the whole thing — you take what's offered and you leave the rest alone." Her thumb traced the border of the gauze, along the tape, a slow line from one corner to the other. "Ten days and it's a memory. Ten days and I'll still be here."

His hand came off the mattress and closed around her wrist.

The stitches pulled. He felt it — a small hot tug at the base of him, the skin stretching where the thread went through, and the pain went up his spine and came back down as something else entirely, a low swooning heat that pooled in his balls and made his toes curl inside his shoes. He did not let go of her wrist. He did not pull her hand away. He held it there, his fingers wrapped around the fine bones of it, and his grip tightened without his permission, and he could feel her pulse going under his thumb, steady as a metronome, unhurried, patient as a woman who has all night.

"The stitches come out in ten days," he said. His voice came out wrong. Thin.

"I know."

"Ten days."

"I heard you the first time." She had not moved her hand. Her thumb was still at the border of the bandage, resting there, warm, and she was looking up at him with those brown eyes and the hook of that smile was gone and what was underneath it was not soft but it was steady, and steady was the thing he had not known he wanted. "Georgia said you were scared. He didn't say you were pretty. He's a liar, that one."

"He's not—"

"He's a liar and a sweetheart and he's got a mouth on him," Izabella said, "and he's right about you. You're terrified. I can feel it in your wrist." A pause. "I can feel the other thing too."

His fingers tightened another notch. He could feel his own pulse in his palm now, hammering against hers, and under the gauze his cock had gone from stirring to straining, thick and hot and pinned, leaking a wet bead that soaked through the cotton and showed as a darker spot against the white. He looked at it. She looked at it. Neither of them said anything about it, and the not-saying was the loudest thing in the room.

Downstairs, somebody laughed — a woman's laugh, chesty, Sakura's, rising up through the floorboards and fading. The bare bulb ticked. The shade at the far window lifted an inch in some draft and dropped back.

"I'm not going to do anything you don't ask for," Izabella said. "So you can let go of my wrist any time you want, and I'll go downstairs and we'll never talk about it." Her thumb moved — one small stroke, up and back, along the edge of the tape. "Or you can not let go, and I'll stay right here, and you can tell me when."

Samantha's mouth had gone dry. He could not make the word go come out of it. He could not make any word come out of it. He sat on the edge of Bunk 6 with his legs apart and his hand locked around a woman's wrist and his cock leaking into a bandage and his whole body ringing like a struck bell, and what he felt was not shame, though shame was there, sitting quietly in the corner the way it had sat in the corner of every room of his life since he was fourteen years old. What he felt underneath the shame was seen. Somebody had come up the stairs and found him sitting here in a slip with a dressing on his cock and had not laughed and had not left.

"Then I'll count," Izabella said.

She said it easy. She said it like a woman settling in for a long wait at a bus stop, and she did not move her hand and she did not look away, and the room went still around them — the bulb, the draft, the far-off clatter of the kitchen, all of it dropping back behind the sound of two people breathing in a narrow room with eight empty bunks.

His fingers tightened around her wrist.

"Ten," she said.

"Nine."

He did not move. His hand stayed locked on her wrist and his breath came shallow and fast through his nose, and the number landed in him somewhere under the ribs, a countdown he had not agreed to and could not stop, and the worst of it was that he did not want to stop it. His thumb had found the cord of tendon on the inside of her wrist and was pressing there without instruction, feeling the steady come-and-go of her blood, and he thought — absurdly, with a clarity that shamed him — that he had never in his life held a woman's wrist for this long. Not his mother's. Not the girl who had kissed him behind the church at seventeen and then never spoken to him again. Nobody. He had held his own cock in the dark more times than he could count and had never once held another person still and felt them choose to stay.

"Eight."

"You don't have to—"

"I know what I have to do." She said it without heat. "I'm counting because you're not talking, and the counting is so you know I'm not going anywhere. If you want me to stop counting, say a word. Any word." Her thumb moved again at the border of the tape, that slow up-and-back, and his thigh jumped under her palm — a fine tremor he could feel starting up in the muscle and could not shut off, like a wire pulled too tight. "You've gone quiet on me, though. That's all right. Quiet men are the ones who mean it."

"Seven."

Under the gauze his cock had gone past straining into something worse — a thick, trapped, throbbing ache that had nothing to do with the stitches and everything to do with the woman kneeling on the floor between his spread knees with her hand on his thigh and her eyes on his face. The wrap was doing what it was made to do and the wrap was also holding him down, pinning him flat against his own belly, and every beat of his heart arrived at the tip of him and found the cotton there and died against it. He could feel the wet spreading — not a bead now, a patch, a coin of it gone dark and glossy through the white — and he could not look away from it and neither could she, and the two of them watched the stain grow like something being born.

"Six."

"Izabella." It came out of him at last, cracked, and it was not go and it was not stop and both of them knew it.

"Yes?"

"It — it hurts when it does that."

"I know it does." She did not look sorry. She looked like a woman who had been told the price and had brought exact change. "That's the stitches pulling. That's not damage. That's the thread doing its job." She tipped her head, and her hair slid off her shoulder and swung. "You want to know how I know? I had a man once, broke his collarbone, and he couldn't keep his hands off me for the six weeks it took to set. Wore a sling and everything. I learned where to put my weight." A pause. "There's a way to do this that doesn't pull. You just have to let me show you, and you have to stop gripping my wrist like you're drowning."

He did not let go.

"Five," she said.

The draft at the window lifted the shade again, an inch, and dropped it, and the light on the far wall breathed once. Down in the diner somebody set a plate down hard and a fork rang against it, and a man's voice said something Samantha could not make out, and the ordinary noise of the place came up through the floorboards and made the room they were in feel smaller and hotter and more secret than it had any right to. Eight bunks. Eight empty bunks, and he was on the edge of the sixth one with his slip rucked up his thighs and a woman on her knees in front of him, and he thought about the other girls downstairs, about Georgia somewhere in this building with that mouth of his and those legs, about the fact that any one of them could climb these stairs at any moment and stand in that doorway and see exactly what this was.

The thought did not make him want to stop. That was the thing he would have to live with afterward. The thought made his cock jump so hard it dragged a real hurt out of the stitches, and he hissed, and Izabella felt the jump through her wrist and smiled — a small, private, satisfied smile that she did not bother to hide.

"Four."

"You're going to make me—"

"Not yet." Her free hand came up and rested on his other thigh, so that he was bracketed now, both legs held, both palms warm and flat and claiming their ground. "Not on four. When I say. You don't spend it on a number I picked. That's not how this works." Her thumbs moved together, small circles, opening the muscle under them. "You're going to tell me when you're close. Out loud. And then I'll decide."

"That's—"

"That's the deal." She said it lightly and it was not light. "You've never had a deal before. I can tell. You've had it taken or you've taken it and there's never been a deal in the middle. So here's one. You keep your hand on my wrist and you tell me the truth and I keep my mouth off the part that's healing. Everybody walks away whole."

"Three."

He heard his own breathing change. It had gone ragged and open-mouthed, and there was a heat climbing the back of his neck and a tightness gathering low and behind, and the whole length of him from the gauze to the base of his spine had turned into one long wire pulled taut and humming. He was going to come. He could feel it building whether she counted or not, whether she touched him or not, just from the warm weight of her hands and the low steady sound of her voice and the fact of being looked at — chosen, held, counted down like something valuable — and the shame sat in its corner and watched and did nothing at all to stop it.

"Two," Izabella said.

He pulled her wrist. Not away — in, toward him, and she came with it, up off her heels onto her knees, close enough that he could smell her hair, soap and cigarettes and something warm underneath, and her face was a hand's width from the white patch and the dark stain on it, and she did not flinch and she did not look away and her breath moved across the wet cotton like a thumb across a lip.

"One," she said.

And she stopped counting and simply waited, kneeling between his knees with her wrist in his fist and her palms on his thighs and her eyes on the ruin of the dressing, and the room held still around the two of them — the tick of the bulb, the draft, the far-off clatter of a diner that did not know and would never know what was happening on the sixth bunk of its upstairs room — and Samantha sat there with his whole body ringing and did not say the word.