You lie down to sleep, the street does not care

You lie down with the scrap in your fist and the blanket up to your chest and you tell yourself you are going to sleep.

The square does not care.

It comes through the open door and through the boards: men talking over each other, a woman swearing, another woman making a high sound that breaks and starts again, wet slaps on stone, a laugh, a name that is not told gently. You turn your face into the blanket. The blanket smells like other people. Your mouth still tastes like Marr.

You try to count the steps you will do at dawn. Buckets. Water. Pell’s desk. Soft shoes. Ledger. You get as far as the well and while the sound from the wall is the problem.

Your hips move once without you. Small. You put a hand on them to make them stop and the hand stays. The stained dress is still on, rucked from how you lay down, and there is nothing under it. Your fingers rest on the inside of your own thigh and you can feel the dried mess from the keg and the newer heat that is just you.

"Stop," you say into the blanket, in her voice.

You do not stop.

A girl on the wall cries out in a way that is not a performance and the cry goes straight between your legs. You hate it. You press your thighs together and that makes it worse. Your chest is heavy on the bench, nipples tight on cheap cloth, and every shout from the lamps seems to pull at them. You slide the hand up because you are going to prove it is nothing, just skin, just a body you stole, and then your fingers find the cleft and it is wet enough that there is no proving left.

You snatch the hand away.

The square keeps going. Someone finishes with a grunt you know in your spine now. Someone else starts. A woman laughs like she did not mean to. Your hand is back. Two fingers. You are clumsy in this body. You miss the place you want and then you do not miss it, and your knees come up on the bench and the scrap of paper crumples in your other fist.

You try to make it small. Quiet. Just enough to take the edge off so you can sleep. That is a lie you last about ten strokes. The sound outside gets into the rhythm. A man saying hold her, a girl saying don't, a girl saying please in a way you cannot sort, and your fingers go harder because your body has already picked a side and it is not the side that wants the noise to stop.

You bite the blanket. It does not keep the sound in. Your hips jerk up off the wood and the breasts bounce under the rag and you are suddenly all the way in it, past the point where you could call it an accident. The first peak hits ugly and early, a hard clamp around your own fingers that makes your vision go white at the edges, and you keep rubbing because stopping in the middle of it feels worse, and the second wave is stupider than the first, wet all over your palm, a noise you do not recognize as yours even though it is her throat. The scrap is crushed. Your eyes are wet. You shake through it until your wrist gives out.

After that there is only the square, a little farther away, and the shake in your thighs, and the fact that you came to other women being used while you hid on a bench with a piece of chalk-paper.

You cannot keep your eyes open. The exhaustion lands like a dropped tray. You pull the blanket over the mess you made and you leave the dress where it is. Your fingers are still wet when they go slack. Marr’s door stays open upstairs. The lamps stay on. You are asleep before the next girl on the wall finishes shouting.