Page 3

TEN YEARS AGO

I stand on the stage.

My hands don’t lift to block the bright lights. My skin stings from my scrubbing. I turn in a small circle, but the gazes latched on my body don’t bother me anymore either.

It should, but some part of me has repressed the emotions. In my cell, I scream and cry and beg to be released. But out here, I am nothing.

The voice intoning the bids is incomprehensible, and soon enough I am shuffled out another door. The guard at my back stands straight and tall, using a few fingers along my spine to keep me moving. We go upstairs, into one of the private rooms, and the boy waits for me.

His parents are absent, but the lingering smell of cigarette smoke hints that they’re not far.

He’s already shirtless, and I can’t decide if it was restlessness that made him preemptively strip it off or eagerness. His fingers curl into his palms and release, over and over.

This isn’t the first time we’ve met.

Not the second either.

The guard pricks my skin with that devilish drug. The one that begs me to beg for touch. The need of it crawls along my skin, waiting for any sensation to satiate it. Pain, pleasure, I’m starting to think it doesn’t matter.

He leaves, too, and we’re alone for the first time.

After all of this, after feeling him fumble his way into me, learning the curves and planes of my body like memorizing a roadmap, I still don’t know his name.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

I shake my head, because I don’t know what he’s sorry for. Being here? Being shirtless? Choosing me again?

Truly, I don’t know if he’s ever gone with another girl. I don’t know how often he comes—I just know that sometimes I walk into a room and he’s waiting, and other times it’s scarier, bigger monsters.

The numbness I cling to is being replaced by desire, and I run my hands along my hips.

“What is it today?” I force the words out.

I do not usually talk, not to him or anyone else. There was just that first time, asking whose permission he received to touch me. And the punishment that followed after…

Well, I decided not talking was safer.

There’s a camera in the upper corner of the room. There are probably more than that, but it’s the obvious one. The one that sometimes draws my attention, no matter what room I’m in. It’s all the same anyway.

He hesitates, then steps forward.

I let him because I have to, watching warily as he plucks at the ties of my lingerie. It comes apart easily, the strings unraveling from around my hips and between my legs. They pool around my feet, but I don’t step out or away.

His fingers drag along my hip.

I’ve lost weight. I’ve lost track of time, too. My skin is paler than it’s ever been, because I cannot remember the last time I’ve seen the sun.

Even that touch, the soft pads of his fingers, aches.

His body is scrawny, but it’s easy to see the changes in just a few weeks. The definition of muscles on his upper arms, even when he’s not flexing. A hint of abdominal muscles. He’s already lost the baby fat from his face, his square jaw sharp and green eyes examining.

Apologizing?

It’s in my imagination.

He just touches my hip, sweeping his fingers back and forth, until goosebumps break out across my stomach.

“Why did you pierce one nipple?” he asks under his breath.

“I didn’t.” My gaze falls to the brassiere that’s more underwire than anything else. The cup is sheer fabric, doing nothing to hide my pebbled nipples and the silver hoop through the one. “It marks us as property, I think.”

I don’t know why they do it.

Maybe it’s to track us? Or just humiliate us?

His warm breath touches my shoulder. I’ve come to realize that they’re using me to teach him how to be a man, and I hate it more every time I’m put into a room with him. It’s been different each time, his technique altering.

Sometimes too rough, sometimes too gentle.

Sometimes too fast, others drag on and on until the guard knocks at the door and he pulls away, embarrassed.

“They talked about foreplay,” he says slowly. “About making it… intimate.”

I meet his eyes. We’re nearly the same height, he and I. Over the last few weeks, though, it seems like he’s gained a few inches. I hit my growth spurt early, and he’s now coming into his. It adds to his lean figure.

Stretch upward, then fill out. That’s what I’ve heard anyway, when my father used to grumble about Apollo’s height. Or his skinniness.

Before he went away…

His fingers dip between my legs, touching just where I need, and I bow forward automatically.

But then they’re moving again, inching down my inner thigh and coming back up on the outside.

To my hip, then higher. He undoes my bra clasp, something he fumbled with before and now does with practiced ease.

I can’t voice the opinion that he should pretend to struggle more with that the first time he gets with a girl.

Will he know the meaning of consent with her? In the outside world?

“You have to ask,” I say roughly.

“For what?”

“Anything.” I meet his gaze, but my stance is already widening. The need is bubbling, driven on by a cursed drug. “The girls you’ll no doubt seduce. You have to ask them. It’s not like here.”

He nods once.

He doesn’t ask me. Not when his fingers finally return between my legs and his body folds down so he can kiss the swell of my breast. Not when he puts my hand on his cock through his jeans and leaves me to take over that job.

There is no asking here—just taking.

And when he is done, and my knees tremble with the pleasure still rolling through my body, the guard comes and helps me to my feet.

Tears burn the backs of my eyes when the boy leaves, and it’s not because of what he did to me. It’s because this time didn’t hurt, and I don’t understand how that makes this place eight thousand times worse.

“You’re okay,” the guard murmurs.

One I’ve never seen before.

“Let me get you to the showers. Clean you up, yeah?”

I don’t know why he’s talking to me like a person, but I find myself nodding and gripping his wrist anyway. I let him guide me away, and I wash the boy from my flaming skin. There’s no cure for the drug, and it takes hours to come down. Even the cold water barely touches the fire in my blood.

The guard walks me back, his brows furrowed.

I want to ask him a question, but the words get lodged in my throat. Silence is safer, right? And I can’t afford for this to be a cruel act on his part.

“We’re not supposed to share names,” he says at my door. “But I’m going to anyway. Is that okay?”

Permission.

Asked, and, with a single nod, granted .

He gives me a smile, and then his name. “I’m Antonio.”