Page 37 of Brutal for It
A car pulls up. Somewhere between anonymous and expensive. The window rolls down. A man leans across the passenger seat—mid-40s, tired mouth, a watch he thinks says more about him than it does.
“You working?” he asks.
The words are marbles in my throat. “Yeah.”
“How much?”
I spout a number that buys a night and a bag, and he doesn’t flinch. He unlocks the door.
I get in. The lock pops down like a period at the end of a sentence I didn’t want to write.
We don’t talk. He drives two blocks and pulls behind a shuttered store where the dumpsters smell like rot. He reaches into his pocket and produces another kind of bag. He thinks it’s foreplay. I take the line he offers and give him exactly what he expected in return. I learn how to smile around a scream.
“Nice,” he says, when he’s done. “Quiet.” He tucks cash into my palm and wipes his hands on a fast-food napkin like he touched paint.
I get out before my legs remember how to refuse. The night air is thick and too warm. I don’t cry. I don’t even blink. I walk back to my car counting the money like it’s the multiplication table, like if I say it fast enough it won’t turn into letters that spell the truth.
Back in the hotel room, the cash buys a bag and a breakfast I won’t eat. It buys an hour where the noise goes down. It buys a night where the bed doesn’t bite. It buys silence.
It also buys an invoice that comes due immediately in interest: the mirror, the sink drain full of hair from where I scrubbed too hard, the way my own name tastes wrong.
Day eighteen, the front desk clerk calls me “hon” and asks if I want to extend for the week. I look at him and wonder what it would feel like to be a person who says “yes” because she’s in town on business, because she’s seeing a cousin, because she’s waiting for the house to be tented for termites. I say “two nights” and hand over cash with a steadiness I don’t feel.
I make two more “dates.” One in a car, one in a room that smells like the dust on old Bibles. I dissociate in both, which is a word I learned in a group therapy room with cheap coffee and chairs that squeaked when you shifted. Back then it meant “you survived.” Today it means “you left and the body you abandoned took the hit for you.”
After the second, I sit in my car with my forehead on the steering wheel and try to breathe past the high and the shame. A text from Jenni pings on the burner I bought after I sold the phone (because somehow I decided I was a person who needed new numbers). You alive? I love you. Please text back.
I don’t answer. I turn the phone off. I put my face in my hands. I tell myself I am alive because the alternative is strictly worse. I tell myself a lot of things in a voice that’s getting hoarse.
If I wrote a list of the things I said I’d never do again, I’m checking them off. It’s tidy, in a nightmare kind of way. I don’t sleep much. I don’t eat. I don’t talk. The only person who says my name is the man in the alley when he says, “Back already, J?” like we’re friends. It hits my ears and slides off. It isn’t my name when he says it.
In the mirror, my face goes sharper. The healthy softness I earned with pancakes and Sunday naps and rides on the back of his bike is gone. My eyes learn how to look past themselves again. I know the drill. I hate that I know the drill.
Sometimes, at the very edge of the high where the edges go soft but not gone, I let one thought in: Tommy. The porch. The woman I was when I was with him. The hot tub steam catching in her hair—my hair—under his chin. The ring on my finger catching candlelight.
I press it like a bruise. I make myself feel it. Then I put another line between the ache and me because I am not brave enough to sit with it long.
On day thirty-five, I see a man who might be Tommy halfway down the hall of the hotel with his back to me. Same height. Same walk. A way of holding his shoulders like he could lift the whole building if he had to. My heart stumbles into my throat, and I flatten against the wall until he passes and turns out to be a stranger with a gut and a cough. I should have known when the man didn’t have a Hellions cut it wasn’t Tommy.
I miss him so much it hurts.
After, I pace my room and talk to him like he can hear me. “Don’t come,” I say to air. “Don’t you dare be the one to pull me out. If I don’t pick myself up, I will only ever be the girl in your arms, and I can’t be that girl forever. It’s not fair.” I am making grand speeches to dust mites. I am lying to make my selfishness sound like virtue. I know this even as I say it.
On day forty, the bag I buy is cut with something too harsh. The world spins wrong, and I end up on the bathroom floor with my cheek against tile, thinking about the first time I bled into Tommy’s shirt and how he said you’re mine like a promise and not a brand. The tears don’t come. I am too dry for them. I watch the water crawl down the side of the tub where the tap drips and try to remember a prayer I believed in.
I wake up to the knock I’ve been dodging. “Ma’am?” The manager this time, not the clerk. “You’ll need to arrange payment today.”
I’m out of cash. Out of tips. Out of grace.
I pick up the burner and text a number a woman in shoes too high gave me with a look that said you’ll be back; we all come back.
The reply is fast. The terms are clear. The price is higher when it’s arranged. The cut is deeper. The control is no longer my own. The shame is the only thing that remains the same.
I go.
The man in the room this time is gentler than the last two. That’s a sentence that should never be a comfort. He offers me water. He takes the edge off with compliments that mean nothing to the person he’s talking to. He hands me the envelope before I put it in my purse he gives me a soft kiss on the cheek that makes my stomach churn. We aren’t friends. He doesn’t care about me. This is another transaction.
After, he says, “You okay?” in a voice that would be kind in another context. I say, “Sure,” because all the other words in my mouth would burn us both. I leave before the smell of his cologne can climb into my hair.
