Chapter 5: The Towel

The phone in the room rang at 6:40, the hotel’s own ring, polite and accusing.

Priya got there first because Dev had said she would. Thong, his shirt dragged on against the air-conditioning, hair wrecked from a night of not washing. The voice on the line was the front desk, young, already tired.

“Hi, this is five-twelve? We had a noise note from the next room. After midnight. Headboard. If you could keep it down tonight.”

“Of course,” she said. Site voice. Steady. “We had the television up. It won’t happen again.”

A lie with a straight back. The desk thanked her. She hung up. Dev was awake, watching her from the bed, the sheet at his waist. Mark was not there. He had gone to six with the card in his pocket and the order not to use it until a thread existed.

“You booked it,” Dev said. “You answered it. Good.”

Not good girl. She had not asked twice. The economy held in the morning light.

She did not shower. The thong from the squat was unbearable, so he allowed a clean one, the same cut, and she put it on over whatever the night had left, which was less than yesterday and still not nothing. Work dress. Lanyard. In the mirror she looked like a woman who took a noise complaint and meant the apology. Her mouth was still a little swollen. She did not fix it with more than water.

The site was hotter than the day before. Dust lifted when the trucks moved. Mark nodded at her across the trailer the way a coworker nods, and the nod did not touch her, and the not-touch was correct. At ten Dev’s radio, channel two, said only, “Bathroom. East block. Now.” Anyone close enough heard a location and no reason. She went.

The site bathroom was a better box than the trailer’s, cinderblock, a sink with a rust ring, a stack of white hand towels that had never been white. Dev locked the door with the slide bolt. Mark was already there, in the shower stall with the water off, steam from someone else’s morning still on the tile. Watching. Not on the floor. The bathroom was not the floor. Dev had decided that before she arrived, and she did not argue with the geography.

“Twice,” Dev said. “Then the sink. Towel if you need it. He takes a turn after. You thank him by name when he finishes. Skip if a word is wrong.”

“I want you to fuck me over the sink.” She looked at Mark, because the second time had a direction. “I want Mark to fuck me after. That’s the second. Thank you for lending me.”

“Good girl.”

He bent her over the porcelain. The edge bit the bone of her hips. Dress up, thong aside, his cock in her in one shove that knocked a plastic cup into the basin. She grabbed a towel and bit it when the sound wanted out. He fucked her hard and short, work boots planted, one hand on the back of her neck, not choking, placing. The towel tasted like industrial soap. In the stall Mark’s breath fogged and cleared. She could see his hands stay off himself because nobody had said he could.