I.

The mattress springs make a sound, a mechanical rhythm of penance.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

The man on top of him grunts.

"Fuck," the man breathes into Satoru's neck, hot and wet, his breath smelling like whiskey.

He's wearing a wedding ring that's currently digging into Satoru's hip.

"Fuck, you're so tight… so fuckin’ good. Shit, been thinking about this all week."

Satoru says nothing because his mouth is for other things: moaning on command, saying the words clients pay to hear, or staying silent.

He's learned which clients want conversation and which want holes, which want the boyfriend experience and which want a body they can use without the complications of personhood.

And this one wants tight and quiet, he wants to pretend Satoru's just a fleshlight with a pulse.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

The headboard hits the wall.

The room smells like old cigarettes and the accumulated sex of however many transactions have happened in this bed.

Satoru's somewhere else.

He's at the ocean again, the lake, or maybe nowhere at all.

"Fuck—oh fuck—"

The man's rhythm breaks, becomes desperate, and Satoru knows what's coming, he has felt it a hundred times, when the last pretense dissolves and it's just them taking what they paid for.

It’s like Satoru isn't even there which is true, Satoru isn't there, he left minutes ago and what's left is just meat being consumed.

The man finishes with a groan and Satoru feels the warmth even through the condom and waits for it to be over so he can shower and leave and pretend this didn't happen until the next time it does.

The man pulls out, rolls off, reaches for his wallet immediately.

He counts bills—the agreed-upon amount plus extra, quite a bit extra actually—and sets them on the nightstand next to Satoru's phone and the bottle of lube.

"You're really good at this," the man says, already pulling on his boxers and becoming respectable again, "We should do this again, you free next Thursday?"

Satoru nods because his throat is tight from not crying.

Crying is unprofessional and he's nothing if not professional, he's nothing if not good at this: making men feel powerful while they're inside him.

"Great then, I'll text you. Same rate?"

Another nod.

"Perfect."

He's at the door.

"See you next week. Oh, and—" He pauses. "Thanks, really. My wife…she doesn't—" He stops. "Anyway, yeah, thanks."

The door closes.

The room is silent except for the air conditioner and Satoru's breathing and the sound of his heart beating.

He wonders why his body refuses to understand that it should stop and give up because what's the point of continuing when this is all it's good for.

The money sits on the nightstand.

Two hundred dollars plus the fifty extra for being "really good at this," for making a married man feel like his infidelity was justified by the quality of the hole he rented.

Satoru gets up slowly because his body hurts.

The shower is too hot because he wants to scrub his skin raw, wants to wash off the smell of the man, the feeling of being full.

He washes his hair twice, watches the soap circle the drain, imagines himself circling the drain, disappearing into sewers.

He thinks about you while the water runs over him, your pretty smile.

You smile at him and he wants to grab your face and make you look at what he is—this, this thing being used—and ask you how you can smile at this, how you can love this.

But he will go home and kiss you.

He will let you believe he's been somewhere else, doing something else, because your belief in his humanity is the only thing that makes him feel even remotely human.

If he takes that away from you then what does he have left except the truth which is unbearable.

The truth that he's a whore and he's good at it and he'll keep doing it because it's the only thing he knows how to do and the only skill he's mastered.

He gets dressed.

The money goes in his pocket.

II.

Emi rides him hard and fast, her hips moving in a practiced rhythm that comes from years of learning that sex is performance and if you're going to fuck someone you might as well do it in a way that makes them think you're enjoying it.

The man beneath her is older—forties maybe—black jeans expensive enough to have a brand name stitched into the pocket, expensive cologne.

He'd offered her a drink at the bar and she'd said yes because why not, one thing leads to another and another leads to his bed which is king-sized and has clean sheets and pillows that smell like detergent.

"Fuck," he groans beneath her, his hands on her hips, guiding her movements even though she knows exactly what she's doing.

"You're fucking crazy. So fucking sexy, god, your pussy feels so good…we should've met sooner."

Emi doesn't respond because she's not really here.

She's high enough that she's somewhere else, seeing someone else, and she knows it's wrong but she can't stop it, can't push the image away no matter how hard she tries.

White hair.

Blue eyes.

Satoru's face superimposed over this stranger's.

Satoru's hands instead of these hands, Satoru's voice instead of this voice saying things she wishes he'd say, wishes he'd mean, wishes could be true in a universe where she deserves good things instead of being someone who only gets the scraps.

She closes her eyes and it's worse because now there's nothing to remind her that the man inside her isn't Satoru, that the cock she's riding isn't his, that this feeling, this chemical rush of endorphins mixing with whatever drugs, isn't happening with who she wants it to be happening with.

She moans, louder than necessary.

She rides him harder, faster, convincing the man beneath her that this she's here, when really she's miles away, years away, in an alternate universe where Satoru looks at her the way he looks at you.

She knows it's fucked.

This fantasy is wrong on multiple levels, she knows Satoru would be horrified if he knew she thinks about him like this, while she's fucking other men, while she's high.

"Fuck—I'm gonna—"

The man's rhythm breaks and Emi rides him through it, keeps moving while he finishes.

She keeps the fantasy going.

Stopping means confronting reality.

Reality is unbearable when you're this high that you've convinced yourself that the cock inside you belongs to someone who actually cares whether you live or die.

They both finish, or he finishes and she fakes it.

He rolls off her, reaches for cigarettes, lights two, passes her one like they're in a movie.

They share the cigarette, smoke curling between them, and he reaches for his nightstand.

He pulls out a small bag of white powder, starts cutting lines on a mirror suggesting this isn't even his hundredth time, this is just what people do after sex.

He snorts a line, offers her the mirror, and Emi should remember that she's already high enough.

However, remembering requires caring about consequences and caring about consequences requires caring about the future and caring about the future requires believing you have one, and Emi's pretty sure she doesn't.

Emi’s pretty sure her expiration date is approaching fast and that dying young is preferable to growing old when it means decades more of this.

She leans forward, takes the mirror and snorts the line he cut for her which is way bigger than it should be.

She feesl a sudden, terrifyingly, intense rush.

After a while, the room tilts.

The ceiling becomes the floor.

The man's voice sounds like it's coming from underwater.

"Hey…you okay? Shit, that was a lot..shit—"

Emi's not there anymore.

She’s lifted out of her body, out of this dimension where bodies hurt and hearts break.

She's on a cloud that's warm and soft, and God is there and Satoru's there too except this one loves her and they're floating together in this space where nothing hurts and everything makes sense and death isn't an ending but a beginning.

"Fuck… wake up. Hey, can you hear me—"

The man's voice is panicked now.

He’s slapping her face and shaking her shoulders, something that she can barely register through the wall separating her consciousness from her body.

She's transcended everything, she's pure consciousness without the weight of flesh.

The man thinks she's dead.

She can feel him thinking it somehow, can feel his panic rising, can feel him debating whether to call an ambulance and risk questions or just leave her here and hope she wakes up on her own or doesn't but either way it's not his problem anymore.

Eventually, her body decides it has more suffering to go through and more days to get through before it earns the right to stop.

Her consciousness gets pulled back like a fish on a line, dragged from the warm clouds down through layers of atmosphere, back into the meat cage she calls a body.

She opens her eyes.

The man is sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed now, cigarette trembling in his hand.

"Jesus fuck, I thought you were—" He stops. "Shit, you can't do that much, I gave you way too much, fuck."

Emi tries to speak but her mouth doesn't work right, and the room spins even though she's lying still.

"I should get you to a hospital—"

"No." Her voice works now, barely.

"No hospital, ‘m just fine. Just need to sleep."

"You're not fine—"

"I'm fine, just let me sleep. Please."

The man looks at her, debating, probably deciding that whatever moral obligation he might have is outweighed by the inconvenience of hospitals and questions and the risk of his wife finding out he brought a girl home while she was visiting her sister.

"Okay," he says finally. "Alright, but I'm staying awake to make sure you keep breathing."

Emi closes her eyes.

She doesn't have the energy to argue.

The truth is she doesn't care whether he stays or goes, whether she keeps breathing or doesn't, whether she wakes up from this or whether this is the last time she closes her eyes.

Maybe that would be fine too, maybe that would be the mercy she's been begging for since she was six years old.

III.

You stare at your phone., the screen is cracked.

You haven't checked your messages in weeks.

You haven't wanted to see the accumulation of concern and confusion from people who exist in your old life, in the universe where you were a person with a future instead of a person with only present tense.

Tonight something makes you open them.

Your mother.

Bible verses at first, scripture about lost sheep and prodigal daughters, Matthew 6:34.

Photos: family dinner, your cousins, everyone smiling, everyone together, everyone asking where you are, why you're not there, when you're coming home.

We miss you sweetheart. Please call.

Your friends from school.

Group chat messages: —did you finish the assignment?—then concerned—where are you?—then frustrated—seriously what the fuck we're worried—then resigned—okay I guess you'll read this when you read it but we miss you.

Kaito.

His messages are a journey from anger through concern through exhaustion.

How could you? then I can't believe you'd just leave like this then Please tell me you're okay then I'm sorry. I never loved you the way you needed. Wherever you are please be safe.

You read them all, every message, every missed call.

You feel something inside of you, small and terrible, a seed being planted in soil that's been barren.

There's a degree of separation between you and them now.

The person who went to school and had friends and the person sitting in this cabin wearing Satoru's shirt.

Perhaps you miss them.

Perhaps you miss the version of yourself that existed in that life where the biggest problem was assignments and the biggest question was what to do Friday night.

The seed grows.

Something that wasn't there before taking root in the soil of your consciousness.

Regret, like the first stirrings of understanding that you've made a terrible mistake and the only question now is whether you have the courage to admit it and leave.

What they don't tell you about this kind of love is that the amount of love you can feel for somebody is directly proportional to the amount of hate you're capable of feeling, and the bigger the love gets, the bigger the shadow it casts.

Maybe part of you is starting to hate yourself.

Maybe part of you is starting to hate Satoru.

Maybe those two things are the same, hating yourself for loving him and hating him for being worth loving despite everything are two sides of the same coin.

The phone sits in your hands.

Evidence of a life that's still moving forward while you're stuck here, static, frozen in amber made of bad decisions and worse rationalizations.

 I'll come home soon  is a promise you can't make.

Leaving would mean admitting defeat, admitting that love wasn't enough.

The first green shoot of resentment is breaking through the soil of your devotion.

The phone goes dark.

Somewhere else in the dark Satoru is washing another man off his skin and Emi is overdosing in a stranger's bed and you're here realizing that you can't save people who don't want to be saved.

Perhaps the kindest thing you can do for everyone involved is walk away before you lose yourself so completely that there's nothing left to save.

The seed is small but growing.

Patient as death, inevitable as morning, certain as the fact that all love stories end and the only question is whether they end in happiness or tragedy.

I.

The town knows.

Towns like this always know.

Information spreads through gossip networks faster than disease, mutating with each retelling.

The girl who got herself gang-raped.

The prostitute who finally got what was coming.

The whore who climbed into the wrong car.

They don’t say it to her face but Emi can feel it when she walks through the store reaching for bread.

Poor little whore.

Their thoughts press against her skin, sticky and suffocating, a second skin she can’t peel off no matter how hard she scrubs in the shower.

She scrubs until her skin is raw and red but the feeling doesn’t leave, clinging like oil.

This is what happens to girls like this.

She can feel the judgment radiating from the church ladies who clutch their purses tighter when she passes, from the men who look at her with disgust and desire that means they’d fuck her if they thought they could get away with it but would never acknowledge her in daylight.

She’s been marked now, branded.

The stares cut into her like daggers, reopening wounds that haven’t even begun to scar.

They remind her that what happened in that house with those ten men isn’t over, will never be over, will follow her through every aisle of every store for the rest of her existence.

She wants to scream at them.

She wants to grab their pressed collars and shake them.

She wants to ask them what makes them so different, what makes their fucking so holy when they’re spreading their legs for husbands who beat them and cheat on them.

Women have sex with their cheating husbands for free, she thinks, so what’s so bad about getting paid for it?

Men are going to use women’s bodies regardless.

She was just unlucky, that’s all.

Wrong place, wrong car, wrong men.

Everyone is a coward, she decides, everyone who looks at her with judgment, everyone who pretends that what happened to her is different from what happens behind closed doors in houses with white picket fences and families who pray together on Sundays.

And yet.

Even though she tries lying to herself, and tells herself that she’s the brave one, there’s something growing inside her that wasn’t there before, something that started that night in that house and has been spreading through her bloodstream like poison, slow and inexorable, turning her organs black from the inside out.

The poison of death.

The knowledge that she doesn’t want to be alive anymore, that being alive requires too much effort, too many moments like this where she has to walk through stores while people think their daggers at her.

Where she has to wake up every morning and remember that she has a body and that body has been used in ways that can’t be undone, can’t be washed off, no matter how many showers she takes or how many times she tells herself it doesn’t matter.

Kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself whispers through her thoughts, the voice of someone who loves her enough to offer mercy, and she’s starting to listen.

Emi’s starting to believe that maybe the sweet arms of Mother Death are kinder than this, more honest about what they want from her which is nothing except the end of being a body that generates sensations she doesn’t want to feel.

In her dreams Death is the final fuck you to everyone who ever thought they owned pieces of her.

Death is the warm cloud she imagines when she’s high enough, where God and the angels exist as a family that actually wanted her, voices that say it’s going to be okay sweet child of God instead of this is what happens to girls like you.

II.

The drugs start again

Ones that require veins and faith and the absolute certainty that you’d rather be anywhere except here, including the chemical wasteland of altered consciousness and the risk of never coming back.

She finds a dealer two towns over and the first time she shoots up she’s alone in a gas station bathroom that smells like piss and industrial cleaner, her belt around her arm, the needle finding the vein on the second try.

Then, she’s not there anymore.

She’s somewhere warm and weightless, floating on clouds that feel like a mother’s arms.

The angels are there and they’re beautiful, incandescent, made of light and unconditional love.

They tell her she’s forgiven, she’s clean, she’s worthy, she’s safe.

Sweet child of God, they say, and she believes them because the high has burned away her ability to doubt, has rewritten her neurochemistry into something that can believe in mercy and imagine a universe where she matters for reasons beyond what men can extract from her body.

When she comes down the bathroom is the same, the smell is the same, her life is the same.

But now she knows she has a place to go when the poison of wanting to die becomes unbearable and she needs temporary relief before the final kind.

III.

She stops talking as much.

The Emi who used to fill silences with jokes and provocations and her dark humor has gone quiet, has started sitting by the lake for hours just staring at the water.

Her spark is gone.

It has been replaced by something that looks like Emi but isn’t Emi anymore, a shell going through the motions of existing without its animating force.

She knows Satoru’s drinking again, she can smell it on him.

And it’s her fault.

That’s what she thinks sitting by the lake with her knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins.

It’s her fault Satoru’s drinking, her fault he’s backsliding, her fault his eyes have gone dead again.

If she had never let those men beat her up.

If she had lied about it, kept her mouth shut, suffered in silence the way women are supposed to suffer, then maybe Satoru would still be okay, would still have that fragile hope that was starting to grow before she crushed it with her trauma.

Everything she touches turns to poison.

Everyone who tries to care about her gets contaminated.

She’s a disease vector, proof that some people are fundamentally toxic and the kindest thing they can do is remove themselves from proximity to anyone who might still be salvageable.

IV.

Satoru comes to her on a Tuesday night when the mosquitoes are out.

He sits down next to her on the dock without asking, and you're there too.

You've been there, watching Emi watch the water as usual, feeling useless and voyeuristic.

Satoru pulls cash from his pocket—folded bills, more than Emi would make in a week.

"Here," he says, pressing the money into her hand, his fingers lingering on hers for a moment longer than necessary.

"So you don't have to go to work tonight. Take a rest, okay?"

Emi looks at the money in her hand and rage shocks her back into her body, defibrillator restarting her pulse.

She knows.

She knows before the thought has fully formed in your mind, before you've connected the dots.

You've just realized what this money means and where it came from and what Satoru had to do to get it.

"Where did you get this?"

"Emi, don't—" Satoru starts.

"Where did you get this?"

She’s standing, the money crumpled in her fist, and there’s heartbreak and fury in her eyes as she's looking at him.

"Emi—"

"Oh, you fuckin’ didn't."

But she knows he did, can see it in the way he won't meet her eyes.

"You fuckin’ idiot, you said you were done"

"Well, I needed the money"

"For what?"

She's screaming now, disturbing the fake peace surrounding them. "For me? You think I want this? You think I want your fuckin’ dirty money?"

"It's not—"

"It is."

She throws the money at him, bills scattering, floating on the breeze, landing in the dirt.

"You went back to being’ a whore" Her voice breaks. "How could you go back to that?"

"How can you?" Satoru's voice rises to match hers, angry and hurt. "You're out there doin’ god knows what with god knows who, and I'm supposed to just watch?"

"That's different"

"It’s not."

He stands now too, and they're facing each other.

"We're the same, Emi, we're the exact fucking same. So don't—don't act like you're better than this."

Emi grabs his vodka bottle—the one he's been nursing since he arrived,—and smashes it on the dock, glass exploding, alcohol soaking into the wood, the smell sharp in the summer air.

The sound of breaking stops them both.

Silence except for the lake, the cicadas, your own breathing.

Emi's hands are shaking. "We're both gonna die doin’ this, you know that, yeah?"

Satoru doesn't answer.

"We're both going to fuckin’ die and there's nothin’ anyone can do about it because this is who we are, Satoru.”

V.

You watch this happen, watching through glass.

A barrier you can't name but can feel with absolute certainty: the distance between you and them, the void that separates your understanding from theirs, the canyon that can't be crossed no matter how much you love them.

Twin lotuses in the mud.

Two flowers growing from the same filth, roots tangled together underground where you can't see, feeding from the same contaminated soil, identical in their beauty and their rot, in their bloom and their decay, in their will to grow toward light and their inability to escape the mud that birthed them.

You've never understood them.

You've loved Satoru, or convinced yourself that was was what you felt when really it was fascination, maybe, or the narcissism of thinking you could fix someone by wanting them enough.

But you don't know what it's like.

The closest you've come to it was that guy putting his hand up your shirt at a party junior year and you saying no and him stopping, being embarrassed, apologizing.

Your first time was in your high school boyfriend's bed with rose petals he'd scattered because he'd seen it in a movie, with a boy who loved you, who asked if you were okay, who held you after, who told you you were beautiful.

There's a void between you and them, a crater, a chasm so wide and deep that you could spend your whole life trying to cross it and never make it halfway.

You live in different countries, speak different languages, operate under different laws of physics where gravity works differently.

What are you supposed to say? What words exist in your language that translate to theirs?

How do you comfort people whose wounds you've never suffered, whose pain you can't imagine except in the abstract, whose choices make sense in their context but seem like pure madness in yours?

Don't do this to yourself, you could say, but that's meaningless because they're not doing it to themselves, it's being done to them and has always been done to them.

You deserve better, you could offer, but that's worse because deserving has nothing to do with getting, because the universe doesn't operate on merit, because good things don't happen to good people and bad things aren't punishment for moral failing.

I love you, but they already know that, and your love doesn't fix anything, just adds another weight to carry and another person to worry about disappointing.

You're an intruder here. An outsider. A tourist.

The lotus flowers grow in mud but you've never touched mud, not the kind that grows things and rots things in equal measure, not the kind that births beauty and death.

You live in clean water, in chlorinated pools, in sanitized spaces where pain is theoretical and trauma is something that happens to other people, to people in stories, to people like Emi and Satoru who you can observe from safe distance and tell yourself you understand even though you don’t understand.

You stand on your side with your clean hands and body and your rose petals and teenage romance, and you watch them love each other violently, with the absolute certainty that love won't save them but at least they won't die alone.

The money lies in the dirt, scattered, worthless now, bills getting damp.

Emi's hands are bleeding from the broken glass and she doesn't seem to notice.

Satoru's crying and trying not to let anyone notice.

You're standing there with nothing to offer except noticing, which isn't enough.

Twin lotuses bloom in the mud.

And you stand in your clean water wondering why they won't just climb out, why they won't just leave the filth behind.

The mud is home, the filth is familiar, trying to transplant them to clean water would kill them faster than letting them rot in the soil they know.

Some flowers only grow in dirt.

I.

Satoru drinks, drinks and drnks.

Morning vodka cut with coffee, bitterness mixing with the chemical burn until he can’t tell which is supposed to wake him and which is supposed to make him forget.

Afternoon beer at the diner, condensation leaving rings on the counter that he traces with one finger while Darlene pretends not to notice how his hands shake until the second bottle steadies them.

Evening whiskey on the porch, straight from the bottle.

His eyes go distant first, bright blue fading to mud, lake water after a storm.

Then his hands develop their tremor, the fine shake that only stops when there’s alcohol in his bloodstream.

His words begin to slur at the edges, sentences trailing off mid-thought.

He smells like it now too, not just his breath but his skin, his sweat, the sheets you sleep in.

That sweet-sick smell of a body fermenting from the inside out.

He’s becoming who he was before.

You try to help in the ways you know how: try to talk to him with your pleading voice, try to take the bottles when he’s asleep, try to be good enough that he’ll choose you over the alcohol.

He looks at you with guilt or what might be resentment for making him feel guilty, either way it doesn’t stop him from twisting the cap and drinking.

The cabin smells like it now too.

You open windows.

The lake air comes in but it can’t cleanse anything.

Some rot is too deep to air out.

II.

Emi gets discharged on a Thursday morning when the sky is grey.

You and Satoru pick her up in his truck.

She walks out of the automatic doors in the same clothes she wore in.

Ten men walk free and one nineteen-year-old girl carries their violence in her bones.

She climbs into the truck and doesn’t say anything.

She stares out the window at the passing trees, looking for something she lost out there in the woods.

Maybe she is, maybe she’s looking for the version of herself who still believed that there were lines men wouldn’t cross.

You ask if she’s okay which is the stupidest question in the world, and she says “fine” because what else is she supposed to tell you?

How do you explain that okay isn’t a place you get to anymore, that okay is a country you were exiled from and the border is closed and you’re never getting your citizenship back?

Satoru drives with his knuckles white on the wheel and vodka on his breath even though it’s barely noon.

Nobody talks about it because talking about it would mean acknowledging that everyone in this truck is in the sea and nobody knows how to swim.

You thought Emi would stop.

You thought that nearly dying might rewire something fundamental inside her but trauma doesn’t work like math, doesn’t follow logic, it doesn’t care about what should happen.

Sometimes the only way to feel alive after you’ve been made to feel like meat is to keep putting yourself in situations where you might become scraps again, because at least you have some illusion of control.

The day after, she’s gone before either of you wake.

She hitchhikes to the next town over.

Stands on the shoulder of the highway in a dress too short for the morning weather, makeup covering bruises that haven’t faded to yellow yet, thumb out, and waits for whatever’s coming.

A truck stops and the driver is exactly her type: wedding ring, guilty eyes of a man who tells himself he’s not that kind of person right up until the moment he becomes that kind of person.

“Where you headed?” he asks, and she says “anywhere”.

She climbs in and the fear that floods her system is the first thing that’s felt good in days.

Her heart hammering, her hands shaking, the knowledge that she shouldn’t be doing this sitting in her veins, and underneath it the fear.

The high of courting death and not caring if it accepts the invitation.

They drive for an hour and he keeps glancing at her legs, her chest, and she lets him look.

When he pulls over at a rest stop she already knows what’s coming.

Has maybe been sickly hoping for it.

“You know,” he starts, nervous, “I don’t usually… I mean, I got a wife and kids, but you’re real pretty and I’ve been driving for fourteen hours—”

She kisses him to shut him up, and they fuck in the cab of his truck where it smells like diesel and old fast food and her own sweat.

It’s cramped, uncomfortable, the gear shift digging into her ribs, and he’s pathetically gentle.

He keeps asking if she’s okay, if this is okay, if he should stop, and she says yes to everything because what difference does it make.

After it’s over he offers money and she doesn’t take it.

He drops her back in town, confused and grateful and already rewriting this encounter into something romantic and mutual.

Emi walks back through streets she’s memorized, past houses where families are eating dinner, where normal exists as something more than a concept.

Her thighs ache.

She can still smell him—his sweat, his cologne, the diesel from the truck cab.

She doesn’t shower when she gets home.

Lies in bed with the stranger’s smell on her skin.

She thinks about Satoru and wishes she didn’t, wishes her brain would give her this one mercy of not contaminating him with what she does.

What would he say if he knew about how she fucked the driver not for money but just because she could?

How would he look at her?

Would he be disappointed of seeing himself reflected in her choices, of understanding exactly why she does what she does because he does it too?

Would he think she’s just a whore?

Would he be right?

Is that all she is, all she’s ever been, the lamb born for sacrifice?

The body that exists to be used and used and used until there’s nothing left to use?

She thinks about Satoru and feels guilty for it, for letting him into this space where she keeps her filth, for thinking about his white hair and blue eyes while she’s got another man’s cum drying on her skin.

She shouldn’t be allowed to think about him here, shouldn’t be allowed to contaminate the one pure thing she has.

But she can’t help it.

She wonders what he’s doing right now, if he’s drinking, if he’s looking you, kissing you, fucking you.

The lamb doesn’t get to choose the altar but it can choose how it walks there.

Emi walks deliberately, keeps offering herself up because at least this way she’s the one lifting the knife.

III.

Night comes once again thick and humid.

You’re on the porch pretending to read, the words on the page blurring into meaningless shapes because you’re too aware of Satoru inside.

The door opens and he steps out.

You can tell immediately that he’s crossed from sober to tipsy, enough gone that his inhibitions are drowning.

“Hey,”

“Hey,” you answer, and then his hand is on your thigh, sliding up with intention, his mouth finding your neck, teeth scraping.

“Satoru—”

He cuts you off with his mouth on yours, tasting like whiskey and cigarettes.

“Missed you,” he says against your lips.

“Want you… need you.”

This is the old Satoru, the one who fucked you rough and left before morning.

“You’re drunk,” you say, and he laughs.

“‘Not that drunk… you want this, I can tell. Can always tell with you.”

He’s right.

You want this even though you know it’s going to hurt.

He pulls you inside, movements rough and urgent, and his mouth is on yours, aggressive, consuming.

Trying to devour you or be devoured, trying to merge into something that isn’t himself.

Clothes come off frantic.

He pushes you onto the bed and looks at you spread beneath him.

When he looks at you its unclear whether he hates you or himself, maybe it's the same thing.

His fingers slide between your legs rough and claiming, and you gasp.

“Fuck,” he breathes.

“Look at you, so fucking wet already. You like this, huh? You like when I'm a lil rough.”

The words make you wetter, make your body respond in that Pavlovian way it learned months ago.

He fucks you with his fingers, pumping them in and out with bruising force.

His thumb finds your clit, rubbing rough circles that make you bite your lip to keep from crying out.

“Gonna make you cum on my hand,” he says.

“Then gonna fuck you until you forget your own name, you want that hm?”

“Yes—” you manage, and he stops, pulls his fingers out, leaves you empty and desperate.

“Yes what?” His eyes are black, pupils blown so wide the blue is almost gone. “Say it, tell me what you are.”

“Your slut—” The words rip out of you, desperate and true.

“I’m your slut.”

“That’s right.”

He brings his fingers to his mouth, sucking them clean.

“My pretty little slut, all mine.”

He flips you over with rough hands.

He pulls your hips up so you’re on your hands and knees, exposed and vulnerable.

His hand comes down on your ass, hard enough that the sound echoes in the small cabin, hard enough to leave a mark, and you cry out.

“Gonna fuck you like this,” he says, lining himself up, the head of his cock pressing against your entrance.

“Gonna use you, you want that?”

“Yes—” you start, and he slams in before you finish the word.

Fills you completely in one brutal thrust that knocks the air from your lungs and makes your arms give out, makes your face press into the pillow as he starts fucking you hard and fast.

“So fucking tight,” he grunts, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to bruise.

“Perfect little cunt made for my cock, made for me.”

The sound of skin on skin is obscene in the quiet cabin, the slap of his hips against your ass, the wet sound of him moving in and out of you, your own breathing ragged and desperate and animal.

He’s pounding into you now, angry for being available when he needs to use something, for loving him when he doesn’t deserve it.

“Touch yourself,” he commands.

“Rub your clit, make yourself cum on my cock.”

Your hand slides between your legs, finds your clit swollen and sensitive.

You rub in desperate circles while he continues to fuck you, hitting so deep, angle perfect and terrible at the same time.

The pleasure builds fast, overwhelming, your body responding to him like it’s been trained to only function properly when he’s inside you.

“That’s it,” he growls.

“Cum for me, squeeze my cock. C'mon, show me what a good little slut you are.”

You cum with a strangled cry that you muffle in the pillow.

Your whole body clenches and spams around him and he doesn’t stop, just keeps fucking you through it.

“Fuck... f-fuck...gonna cum... where—” His rhythm is faltering now, erratic and desperate.

“Inside—” you gasp.

You know that’s what he wants.

“Inside me—please—”

He slams in one final time and goes rigid, buries himself as deep as he can get, and you feel him pulse inside you, feel the warmth of him filling you.

He stays there, both of you breathing hard, and then he pulls out and rolls away without a word.

He just lies there on his back, staring at the ceiling.

IV.

Satoru won’t look at you.

He’s lying on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes like he’s trying to block out not just the sight of you but the memory of what just happened, of what he just did, of who he just was.

His breathing is uneven, ragged at the edges.

He sits up abruptly, reaches for his jeans crumpled on the floor, pulls out a cigarette with shaking hands.

It takes him three tries to get it lit.

“Can I have one?” you ask, and he looks at you and his expression is surprised, confused, because you don’t smoke, have never smoked.

He hands you the pack without comment, the lighter following, and you light one with more success than he did, you inhale and immediately cough.

The smoke burns going down.

You both migrate to the porch without discussion.

You sit side by side on the steps, not touching, trying to give your hands something to do besides reach for each other or the bottles.

Then, you break first because you always break first.

Someone has to and it’s never going to be him.

“Will you ever tell me what happened?” you ask, desperate.

He doesn’t answer, just keeps smoking.

You watch the cherry glow and fade, glow and fade.

“I’m not fucking stupid, Satoru. I can see you’ve been drinking yourself to death. I can smell it on you, taste it when you kiss me.”

You take another drag.

“I just wish, for once, that you could be open with me. Just once you could let me in.”

The words hang in the humid air between you, true and terrible.

You half expect him to leave, to disappear the way he always disappears.

He just smokes his cigarette down to the filter, crushes it under his boot with more force than necessary, immediately lights another one.

“I was a coward,” he says finally.

“I went there to—to do something, to make them pay. And I couldn’t, I just—” He stops.

“I ran, like I always fucking run.”

You wait, giving him space, and after a long moment he does continue.

“I thought I was strong, that I could protect people. Protect Emi.. protect you.” He laughs.

“But I can’t even protect myself. I’m just—I’m a loser, a drunk, a whore. That’s all I am and all I’ll ever be.”

“You’re not—” you start, but he cuts you off with a look.

“I am, don’t try to make it better.”

He takes a long drag, then exhales.

“I told you, you should go. Go back home, back to your real life. This place—” He gestures vaguely at the cabin,.

“It’s not safe, and...and if something happened to you—if they—”

His voice breaks.

“I don’t know what I’d do.”

“I’m not leaving,” you say, and you mean it, even though leaving is exactly what you should do.

“Why not?”

He turns to look at you and his eyes are red, desperate for you to have a good reason, a reason that makes sense.

“Because I love you and because you need me. And I’m not the kind of person who runs when things get hard.”

Something crosses his face when you say it.

You realize that your love is hurting him, that your devotion is a weight pressing down on his chest.

“You shouldn’t,” he says quietly. “You shouldn’t love me.”

“Well I told you already, I do.”

He can see it in your eyes, in your face, in the way you’re looking at him.

The love you feel for him is visible, palpable, unbearable, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

It pulls him down, this love.

It makes him sink.

It makes him want to drink more, fuck more, destroy more.

Your acceptance is foreign, terrifying, wrong.

You’re looking at him like he’s good when he knows in his bones, in his blood, that he’s fundamentally not good, that goodness isn’t something he gets to have.

He doesn’t say any of this.

He smokes his cigarette and stares at the dark.

V.

Morning comes.

You’re at the lake washing clothes.

You kneel on the dock in the cold water scrubbing his shirt, your underwear, the sheets that smell like sex.

The water turns cloudy with soap and you watch it disperse.

Your phone is in your pocket dead because you haven’t charged it in days.

You haven’t wanted to see the messages that keep coming from your mother asking if you’re alive, from your roommate asking when you’re coming back, from Kaito asking if you’re done punishing him yet.

This isn’t punishment, this is just who you are now.

Inside, Satoru’s phone buzzes against the wooden table loud enough to wake him from whatever thin sleep he managed.

He picks it up, squints at the screen.

Hey. You still working? Been a while.

Unknown number but he knows anyway.

This is someone from before.

His thumb hovers over the delete button and stays there, trembling slightly.

Money is tight, tighter than tight, the cabin is Hiro’s charity and he’s been spending what little he has on alcohol instead of food.

And Emi.

Emi’s out there right now probably offering herself to strangers.

If he had money he could help her, could support her, could make it so she doesn’t have to.

This is a lie he’s telling himself because money won’t fix what’s broken in Emi but he needs the lie.

He needs to believe there’s a reason for this besides the truth.

He wants to confirm what he already knows, wants to prove to himself and the universe that running away changed nothing, that the boy who sold himself at sixteen is the same man of now.

Geography doesn’t matter when the problem is internal, genetic, written into the fundamental code of who he is.

It’s easy money, he tells himself.

Just once, he thinks, just to get some cash, just to help Emi, just to remember what it feels like to be what he’s always been.

The justifications pile up underneath them the real truth smolders.

He’s going back because going back is easier, being a whore is familiar and being loved is foreign.

At least when he’s being used for money the transaction is free of the complications that come with someone caring whether he lives or dies.

His fingers move across the screen almost without his permission, muscle memory from a thousand transactions.

Yeah, still available.

Free tomorrow night. Can send you the location.

Three dots appear immediately as the client types their response, probably smiling, already thinking about what they’ll do to him.

Perfect. I’ll text you details.

Satoru sets the phone down and stares at it.

Outside you’re hanging clothes on the line strung between trees, humming something, oblivious to the decision being made in the cabin.

Soon, he’ll prove what he’s always known: that he’s exactly what his first client paid for, exactly what his rapist took, exactly what he’s always been despite months of pretending, despite your love, despite Emi.

A body for sale.

A whore.

Nothing more, nothing less.

Somewhere in the machinery of fate, something clicks into place, locks tight, seals him into the trajectory he chose or that chose him.

There’s no difference anymore between choosing and being chosen.