Noise from the street harasses your mind

You hear it before you mean to look.

Not one woman. A lot of them. Yells that are not all pain and not all want, slapping on stone, men counting out loud like they are in a line for bread. You go to the tap window because the sound is coming from the well-square and you have already been in a hole today and your body knows what that rhythm is.

The lamps over the civic wall are full. A mob around them, shoulders packed, some men waiting, some already at a hip. The wall is not two holes. It is a row of ports, women fed through the stone so their asses and hands sit on the street side, and beside that a line of mouth-slots with cheap funnels sweating in the lamp heat. Someone is screaming a name that is not being used. Someone else is laughing. A girl near the end is making a noise you feel in your own throat.

You drop the shutter edge. Your hands are shaking. The stained dress is nothing. If you walk out there with no paper you are one more pair of hips for that line.

You go back to Marr.

He is banking the last lamp over the bar. He sees your face and he already knows where you looked.

"Bell crowd," he says. "They run until the watch is bored. Don't go out."

"Please." You hate how her voice sounds when it begs. "A job. Your job. Write me. I'll do slop. Trays. I'll—" You swallow. "You can have my chest. Right now. Not the rest. Just that. If you put me on for a job with the Nail so they can't take me to that wall."

He looks at the neckline, then at your mouth, then at the shutter you just dropped.

"Tit-work is not paper," he says. "Pell writes the book. I write staff. Staff is a day if I bother."

"Then bother. Please."

He breathes out through his nose. He comes around the bar and sits on the stool like a man who has decided the price and is not going to talk it prettier. He opens his trousers. He is already half up from the talk and from what is happening in the square.

"Chest then," he says. "You offered it."

You go to your knees on the boards because that is the height of it, and you hitch the rag down so your breasts are in the air, heavy, Lenna's, and you put them around him with both hands. He is hot and dry at first. You spit because you have to, and you work him between them the way you have only ever imagined from the other side of a page. The weight of the chest is real. His cock slides the line of it and comes up to your chin on every stroke.

You keep your mouth shut. That was the point.

He lets you do that for a short stretch, watching, one hand on the bar. Then his other hand is in your hair. Dark-blonde. Hers. He does not ask. He pulls your head down and the next stroke that should have come up between your breasts goes over your tongue instead.

"Wait—" you say, and it is already in your mouth.

"You wanted a job," he says. "This is how I remember you in the morning."

You try to pull back and he does not let the hair go. He is not beating you. He is just using the angle he paid for in his head. Your lips stretch around him and you taste skin and the spit you already put on him, and when he pushes you take more than you meant because the hand in your hair does not give you a third choice. Your eyes water. Your tits are still around the base of him, doing the job you offered, and your mouth is doing the job you did not.

Outside, a woman yells like she is coming and like she is not sure she wanted to. The mob answers her. You hear it around his cock.

You put a hand on his thigh to make space and he lets you have an inch, not two. You breathe. He uses the inch to go deeper on the next push. Your throat closes and you gag and he swears once, quiet, not unkind, and holds you there until you stop fighting the reflex. Then he fucks your mouth in short hits like the keg, like work.

You drool down your own chest. It makes the rest of the slide easier and you hate that too. Your knees hurt. The rag is at your waist. You are Charlie in the panic and Lenna from the teeth out, and the hole he is in is the one you did not put on the table.

He finishes in your mouth with a grunt and a hand tight in the knot of her hair. You have to swallow or drown on it. You do the first and wipe your mouth with the back of a wrist. Your breasts are wet. The wall outside is still going.

Marr ties his trousers. He takes a scrap of slate-paper from behind the bar and he writes with the same chalk he uses on mugs.

Nail staff. Charlie. One day. Marr.

He shoves it at you.

"That keeps Pell's boys off you until tomorrow evening if you stay on my floor. It is not a season. It is not a husband. It does not make that dress decent." He points at your chest. "Put those away. Dawn we walk to the well and I put the same words in his book. You do slop first or I tear that scrap up. You go near the lamps tonight and I don't come get you."

You take the paper. It is cheap and it smudges where your thumb is wet. It is still paper.

Your look to him question why

"Because you asked like you understood the street, and because I don't want Pell charging me for a girl who slept in my back room and then got posted on my doorstep." He turns the last lamp down. "Bench. Blanket. I sleep upstairs. Door stays open so I hear if you run."

You go to the bench. The scrap is in your fist. The square is louder than the inn. You can still taste him. You can still hear the women on the wall, and you are not one of them tonight, which is the only part of the bargain that landed the way you meant.