You wake up (...continue story)

You do not wake to slop.

You wake to a boot hitting the crate and Marr standing over the bench with daylight in the open door. The blanket is on the floor. The dress is still at your waist. Your hand is still between your own legs like you fell asleep in the middle of it, and the bench is tacky under your ass.

He looks. He does not look away to be polite.

"Staff," he says.

You yank the rag down. It does not cover what he already saw. The scrap is stuck to your palm with sweat. You sit up too fast and the chest goes with you, heavy, and your head is thick from the late hour and the orgasm that dumped you.

"I—" Her voice is worse in the morning. "I was going to—"

"You were going to do the bucket before I came down. You did that instead." He jerks his chin at the wet mark. "Give me the paper."

You hold it. That is the only thing you did right last night after the mouth.

He takes it anyway. He does not tear it. He puts it in the front of his apron like it is his now.

"You walk without that in your hand. I keep it until Pell sees it. You run, I tell him I had a common girl on my bench and he can have her."
"Bucket. Now. Then we walk. You smell like a hole."

The slop is a bucket of last night's ale-water and a brush that has done this for years. You do the boards on your knees with the hem fighting you and your own mess still on the inside of your thigh. The older girl is on the tap already, tying her hair. She sees the bench through the door and makes a small face that is not surprised.

"He found you like that?" she says.

You wring the brush. You do not answer.

"He didn't burn the scrap. That's the kindness. Doubt he'd give you another one."

Marr puts a crust in your hand on the way out and tells you to eat. The street is pale and ugly. The well-square is not the mob anymore. Morning crew with a bucket and a rag wiping stone. One woman still in a port, half-asleep, wrists red, hands hanging through the rings, while a man with a ledger-strap waits like he is owed the last of her shift. The lamps are out. You can still hear last night in your body when you walk.

You keep a hand on the hem. No shoes. People look at the dress first, then at your face. Nobody looks at you like a man named Charlie.

Pell's desk is a board under a faded canopy at the edge of the well, not a palace. Soft shoes. A book already open. A pot of chalk. A line of two: a woman with a household ring wanting a season extended, a man filing a daughter off a slate. Marr puts you at the end of it by the shoulder.

"You speak when he asks a name," Marr says. "You say Charlie. You do not say you put another woman's clothes on and grew her tits. He will write curse and I will still have to house you. You say you work the Nail. I say the same. If he wants hours on a wall instead, I argue once. Not twice."

Pell does not look up until the daughter-filing is done. When he does, he takes you in the same order everyone else has: rag, chest, bare feet, face.

"Yours?" he says to Marr.

"Day staff. Scrap's here." Marr puts your paper on the book. The chalk is smeared from your hand.

Pell opens a clean line with a fingernail.

"Full name."

The square is quiet enough now that you can hear the brush on the wall behind him. The woman in the last port makes a small sound and the crew tells her to hold still. Your mouth is dry.

He waits, chalk ready, and the book is open to common as much as it is open to staff.