Note: Permission has been given by NaturalHammer to use his characters Chris and Emily.

Greater Manchester, Summer 2001.

I was eighteen the year after Big Brother started and half the country stayed up to watch strangers argue in a house on Channel 4. Blair was still popular enough that nobody talked about him the way they would a few years later. Nokia 3310s were the phone everyone wanted, the ones you could play Snake on until the battery died. Most of us still paid with cash or a Switch debit card.

I lived with Mum, Dad and my younger sister Hannah Sophia in a terrace near enough to Hulme for church on Sundays but not so close that people from the parish saw everything. Chris Hammer and I had been together since fifth form. Our families knew each other from the C of E congregation and got on well.

We talked about getting engaged once my A-levels were finished. I meant it. I had never let him further than kissing and the occasional hand over clothes, except one drunk hand-job at a party neither of us could properly remember. Waiting until the wedding still felt possible, or at least I told myself it did.

Our school was Trinity C of E High in Hulme. Ordinary state secondary with a church foundation and its own Sixth Form college. The uniform was grey pleated skirt, white blouse, navy jumper or blazer, and the knee-socks Mum still insisted on even though I was eighteen.

The blouse was the problem. I was 5’8”, and a heavy, mind-boggling 36G by then. Every button strained. Every time I reached up or leaned forward the fabric pulled tight across my chest and men looked. Teachers, bus drivers, lads from the college, the bloke behind the counter at the corner shop. They all did the same slow, hungry double-take. Some tried to hide it. Most did not. I had learned to notice the look without reacting to it, the same way I noticed the weather.

Dad and I rowed constantly. Responsibility, the value of money, taking school seriously. One Saturday I slept in until eleven and he came up the stairs already shouting about lazing about and not pulling my weight. I was eighteen now. I should get a Saturday job.

I stormed out in the uniform because it was the only clean thing that fitted. I walked until the anger settled into something colder and more deliberate.

I decided I would get a job somewhere he would hate.

The week before that decision I had walked in on him at the family computer. The door was only half closed. The beige tower under the desk was still humming; the modem had made its usual screech earlier. He jumped and clicked the mouse so hard the screen snapped back to the desktop.

For half a second the image stayed behind my eyes. A naked young woman on her knees filmed from the back side. Text I did not have time to read. Then it was gone. Just the usual icons. He cleared his throat and made a show of looking for a pen that was already in his hand. He never mentioned it. Neither did I. But the flash of that screen sat behind the choice I made later. He had his secrets. I could have mine.

Cheetham Hill Road was three or four miles north, easy enough on the 53. The shops were different up there. Fabric places, halal butchers, the thick smell of frying onions, spices and old fat that never quite left the pavement. Smoking was still allowed indoors; the air in most of the small businesses carried a permanent haze of cigarette smoke mixed with the cooking. I saw the handwritten sign in the window of a narrow takeaway.

SATURDAY HELP WANTED – CASH.

The windows were steamy. A radio inside played something with a tabla beat mixed with a commercial station that kept cutting to the charts.

I went in because it was the exact opposite of everything Dad called proper. He was quietly racist in the way that never quite said the words out loud. He called places like this filthy and said they took business from proper British chippies. Perfect.

The man behind the counter was broad, early forties, thick black moustache, white overall already marked with oil. His eyes went straight to my chest and stayed there long enough that I felt the familiar heat rise in my face and a slower, more private throb start between my legs. When he finally looked up he smiled like he had been waiting for me all morning.

“You after the job?”

“Yes,” I answered with a polite smile.

“Name?”

“Emily Mercer.”

He nodded once. “I’m Mustafa. Come through. I’ll show you the sink.”

The back was small, hot, and smelled of onions, garlic, old fat and cigarette smoke. A younger man, introduced as Abdullah, was chopping on a steel table.

He glanced up, said something low in Urdu, Dekho iske boobs, and both of them looked at the way the blouse pulled across my breasts.

Mustafa pointed at the stack of dirty trays. “Start there. Three until nine. Minimum Wage. Ten pound bonus at the end if you don’t break anything. No phone calls, no mates hanging about. Understood?”

I understood.

I tied my hair back, rolled my sleeves, and got on with it.

Every time Mustafa passed behind me his eyes dropped to my chest again. He did not touch me that first day. He did not need to. The look was enough. I registered it the same way I registered the heat of the kitchen, as a fact that would have to be managed.

At nine he counted the pound notes into my hand and closed my fingers over them, thumb stroking once across my knuckles. £20 wages plus an additional £10 bonus seemed like a fortune.

“Same time next week. Wear the uniform.”

I caught the 53 back south. The bus was half empty. I sat near the back and watched the shops change as we headed south.

Chris was waiting near the stop with a bag of chips and a soft smile. I told him I had found a Saturday job at a takeaway in Cheetham Hill. He kissed the side of my head and said it was good I was earning. He did not ask which takeaway.

Hannah was on the landing when I came upstairs. Hannah Sophia was thirteen, five years younger than me, but there were already things about her face that made people look twice. She had our Mum’s same dark, watchful Italian eyes I would later recognize in photographs of myself, the same tendency to study a person before deciding what to say. Her face was finer than mine, her features more sharply defined, and when she went quiet her expression could become almost unnervingly still.

Hannah had started developing early, much as the other women in our family. She was already noticeably curvier than most girls her age, although nowhere near as developed as I was, and more than once I’d caught myself thinking that, from a distance, someone could easily take her for a couple of years older. It wasn’t anything like what had happened to me, though. My breasts could cause a train wreck. Hannah was simply developing early.

She had another trait I’d noticed as she’d started changing. Hannah could go scarlet remarkably quickly when she was embarrassed or excited. The colour would rise from her cheeks down her neck and across the upper part of her chest, making her look even more conspicuously flushed. Everyone teased her about it, so she knew perfectly well how obvious it was. The boys used to hold her down and tickle her until her face, neck, and chest flushed scarlet red.

What you also noticed was her eyes. Hannah saw things. She remembered them. She looked at my face, at the way I was still holding the blazer closed over my chest, and said nothing. Only the smallest tilt of her head, as if she had already started collecting pieces. She had always been like that. She didn’t need to know everything to know that something was wrong.

That night I lay in bed and pressed my thighs together until the restless heat faded. My nipples were still tight from the way Mustafa had stared. I told myself it was only money and a way to spit in Dad’s eye. Even then I knew the explanation was incomplete.

By the second Saturday the blouse felt tighter.

On the 53, I kept my bag on my lap and watched the rain streak the window.

Mustafa looked up when I came through the door and gave the same single nod.

Abdullah was already chopping. He glanced at my chest, muttered Allah, dekho under his breath, and both of them smiled.

The radio was playing something current between the Urdu talk.

The shift was ordinary until half-past four. Then Mustafa sent Abdullah out for cigarettes and locked the Yale.

He came into the back, stood behind me at the sink, and rested both hands on the steel either side of my waist. He did not touch skin at first. He just leaned in until I could feel the hard heat of him through the thin blouse and the cheap bra, the thick length of his cock pressing against the cleft of my arse through the skirt. “You keep coming back,” he said, voice low against my ear.

“It’s a job.”

His breath moved the hair at the back of my neck. “Your dad hates this place. That is why you chose it. I understand.”

One hand left the steel and settled on my hip, heavy, possessive. He stayed there another ten seconds, thumb stroking once, letting me feel exactly how hard he was, before he unlocked the door and called Abdullah back as if nothing had happened.

At nine he paid me the same thirty pounds and closed my fingers over the notes more slowly than before. The radio was still playing when I left. I caught the 53 with the smell of the kitchen still in my hair.

Chris met me at the stop. He asked if I was tired. I said I was fine.

Hannah was on the landing again. She looked at the way I held the blazer shut and said nothing.

The third Saturday the touching started properly.

Mustafa waited until the lunch rush thinned, sent Abdullah to the cash-and-carry, and locked up. This time his hands came around my waist under the jumper. Thick fingers, warm and slightly greasy from the kitchen, pressing into the soft flesh above the waistband of the skirt. He moved them higher until they rested just under the heavy curve of my breasts, testing the weight through the bra.

“English schoolgirl,” he murmured. “Big soft tits. Soft boy waiting at the corner. He will never know what to do with these.”

I should have pushed him off. I stood still with the wire brush in my hand while he cupped both breasts through the blouse and the cheap bra and squeezed once, hard enough that the pressure shot straight down between my legs.

My nipples tightened against his palms.

He made a low, satisfied sound and squeezed again, slower, rolling the heavy flesh, thumbs finding the nipples and rubbing in tight circles until they ached and I felt my cunt start to slick. The shame of that wetness registered as clearly as the heat of his hands.

He pinched both nipples at the same time, rolling them hard enough that a small sound escaped me. He smiled, as if the sound confirmed something he already knew. Then he let go, unlocked the door, and went back to the counter as if the last few minutes had not happened.

I finished the trays with hands that were not quite steady. The extra fifteen pound bonus he added at the end of the shift felt heavier than the original ten.

That night I stood under the shower until the water ran cold and scrubbed the places his hands had been. My nipples were still sensitive.

Chris texted goodnight on his Nokia. I stared at the message a long time before I replied with a heart, aware of the small performance even as I performed it.

Hannah was still awake when I came out of the bathroom. She looked at my face in the landing light and simply said, “You should put the uniform straight in the wash next time.”