She Would've Done the Same

House of Midnight | III.

Some men leave when they leave. He didn’t have the decency.

He’d gotten in. It wasn’t a memory; he was still there. One sentence and a thumb on my pulse, and he was inside me before I’d even found a bathroom to wash my face. My jaw was stiff. My throat still felt stretched, a dull ache that reminded me of the leather seats and the way he’d watched me bite him.

I went to work anyway. The math of staying alive doesn’t change because a man with green eyes decides he owns a piece of you. I still needed to eat. Being a chosen girl doesn’t buy a burger.

The walk to the corner took twelve minutes. I spent it telling myself the same lies I told myself before any car. He’s just a man. It’s just ten minutes. You’ve done worse. The list was supposed to make him small. It didn’t. Every time I added a line, he felt closer, like he was walking right behind me, matching my breath.

I wore the little black dress under my coat with nothing under it. I’d been wet since I’d pulled it over my head, a cold, shivering kind of wanting that made my legs feel weak. I’d never dressed for one of them before. I’d always dressed against them. Jeans, layers, denim a man would have to fight through.

Tonight, I wanted to be easy. I wanted his hand under the hem of my dress before he’d even said hello. I wanted him to find me bare. I’d already given up and I wanted him to see it.

By the second block, the girl was gone. I was just a body delivering itself to a butcher, praying he was hungry enough to finish what he started last night. Underneath the hunger and the black dress, there was something smaller and much worse. I was wondering if he’d look at me the way he did before he came. Not the look after. The look before. The one where he tipped my chin up and held me there like I was something he’d been starving for.

I saw the car before I saw the corner. He’d pulled in too fast and hadn’t bothered to fix it. The front tire bit the line, the back tire was shoved off it. Nobody parks like that by accident. He’d either pulled in for a quick exit or he’d decided the curb was his and didn’t care who knew it.

He was behind the wheel, staring at the concrete steps with the heavy, patient stillness of a hunter who knows his prey has no other place to go. He wasn’t looking for me yet. He was just savoring the hunt.

That was the tell. He had time. The girls don’t show until ten, and the Johns don’t show until the girls do. It’s a choreographed dance for the desperate. But he was an hour early. He had watched me work the night before and he had learned my rhythm. He had no business at this curb yet, and the sight of him made my stomach drop. It wasn’t fear. Fear is for people with something to lose. This was just the cold, hard realization that the game had changed, and I was the only one who hadn’t been told the new rules. I stepped back behind the bodega wall before he could look up and catch me standing there like an idiot.

From behind the wall I could see the steps. There were two girls on them tonight. The redhead was useless. She was too old, her face already hardening into the kind of map Stephen didn’t want to read.

He had a type, a preference for things that were still soft enough to dent, a girl whose skin was so thin and new that it would hold the shape of his hands.

Maddie was perfect.

She was a shivering dark-haired thing sitting on the bottom step. She was balled up, waiting for the world to notice she had disappeared. She was younger than me by a long shot. I had seen her before but I had never looked at her until tonight. Now I looked. I saw the way her hair fell out of her braid and the way she obsessed over a melted plastic ring on her finger.

She looked giving. She looked like exactly what a man with green eyes would pay to dent and leave behind. I stood in the dark and felt the black dress sticking to my skin. I looked at the car at the curb and then at the girl on the step. I was not going to save her. I was going to trade her skin for mine.

I crossed behind the sedan, staying in the blind spot of his side mirror, and hugged the brick until I was on her side. I approached from the shadows. Slow. You don’t startle a stray unless you want to spend the night chasing it.

She flinched when she heard my shoes. Her eyes were wet from the wind and her hand went straight to that melted ring. It was a trained response. Someone had already put the fear of god into her, and I filed that away as a win. A girl who flinches is a girl who has already been broken in; she knows how to take a hit and keep quiet.

I crouched and put a hand on her knee. I used the pressure I’d seen the pros use—the kind of touch that feels like a promise but is actually a tether. I made my voice drop into that low, practiced frequency. I told her about the man in the car. I told her he was a rare find. I used the word food like a hook, watching the way her hollowed-out cheeks reacted to the sound. I told her about the heater. I told her about the sixty dollars. I sold her a version of Stephen that didn’t exist, a man who just wanted to “look” at a girl.

I watched her swallow the bait. The desperation in her face was a mirror of my own from the night before, a raw, ugly hunger that should have made me sick. It didn’t. I just watched the math resolve in her eyes. When she asked if I was sure he was nice, I gave her the look I’d been practicing in cracked mirrors for years. The “trust me” face.

She unfolded her thin, jagged frame and started walking toward the corner. I stood there and watched the braid swing against her back. I heard his door open. I heard it click shut. The cold went up under my dress and I didn’t feel a thing. I was already empty.

I watched the car pull away and told myself she would’ve done the same. She would have fed me to the dark just as fast if it meant she got to breathe for one more hour. I wasn’t a monster; I was just a girl who knew how to reconcile. Because girls like us, we were always going to be picked. I just made sure it wasn’t me.

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