8. The Green Room Broadcast #2
Outside my own window the light had shifted from the flat white of midmorning into the longer gold of afternoon, throwing a bar of it across my desk that I only noticed because it had crawled far enough to touch the edge of my phone.
I’d sweated through my shirt sometime in the last two hours, the fabric sticking to my back against the leather chair, and a faint smear had started building across the corner of my screen where my thumb kept dragging over the toggle, sweat from my own hand fogging the glass, making the angle switch stutter for half a second before catching.
In the green room, the water bottles on the station had thinned to a scattered few, the stack of plastic cups down to a lean handful, and the couch cushions had gone visibly disturbed, one seam pulled loose at the corner from however many bodies had pressed into it over the course of the day.
Sara’s dress lay discarded somewhere near the mirror by the third hour, and she moved between sessions now naked, unhurried, refilling her cup at the water station and drinking it standing, shaking her hair out with both hands like a swimmer clearing her ears, and every time the door handle turned again her chin came up and her spine straightened before the door had even finished opening.
She didn’t break. That was the thing I kept cataloguing, hour after hour, my own shirt soaked through, my own throat gone dry enough that I’d finally reached for the scotch and abandoned it again after one sip that tasted like nothing at all.
The fourth hour of use should have left her diminished, worn down into something smaller than she’d started.
Sara only seemed to open further, her eyes holding that wild brightness at the same pitch it had carried since the first man dropped his lanyard on the floor, her body marked now with faint red patches at her hips and knees, evidence of use rather than damage, and none of it seemed to cost her anything she wasn’t willing to spend.
The last man of the day came through a little after five, shorter than the rest, thick through the shoulders, and he didn’t linger once he’d finished, adjusting his collar with the same brisk economy every man before him had used.
The door swung shut behind him, and the rear-angle feed caught it settle into its frame, and the room went quiet except for the fluorescent hum and Sara’s breath, slowing now, evening out.
She leaned back against the couch, her legs loose, her nostrils still flared, staring at nothing in particular the way she’d stared at nothing through four separate men, and I sat in my own dark study with my shirt stuck to my spine, a metallic taste in my mouth, already counting the hours until the feed would open again tomorrow.
***
My phone buzzed against the water glass at 9:03 the next morning, the screen lighting cold and blue in a study I hadn’t bothered to leave dark on purpose, just hadn’t gotten around to changing anything about since the day before.
The login page dissolved and the four tiles bloomed back into color, the overhead angle resolving first.
Sara stood in the middle of the green room in lingerie I didn’t recognize.
It was damp at the seams, as if she hadn’t fully dried from a shower before someone dressed her.
Her hair clung to her shoulders in wet strands, dark where it touched her skin, and she rolled her neck once, a slow half-circle, before crossing to the mirror bolted into the cinder block and checking her reflection the same flat way she’d checked it the day before.
The rotation resumed exactly where it had left off, the door opening on schedule, a new man filling the frame every hour or less, each one issuing his order the way you’d give a command to staff who already knew the job.
“On your knees,” one told her, and she went down before he’d finished the sentence.
“Both hands behind your back,” another said, and she folded them there without a flicker of hesitation, letting him position her exactly how he wanted with nothing offered back but her open mouth and her steady breathing.
A third simply said her name, flat, the way Charles said it, and she crossed the room to him like the single word had been a full paragraph of instruction she’d already memorized.
By early afternoon the marks of the day before had multiplied.
Her hair hung plastered flat against her forehead in places, damp with sweat rather than the shower she’d started with.
The dress she’d worn into the room that morning lay discarded near the water station, and she moved now in nothing but the ruined lingerie, one strap slipped loose at her shoulder that nobody had bothered fixing.
Her knees, when the overhead angle caught them, showed red and raw where the floor had taken its toll across two days of kneeling, small abrasions that would have made another woman wince to look at.
Every time the door handle turned, though, something in her reset.
Her chin came up. Her spine straightened.
Her nostrils flared once, sharp, and whatever exhaustion had been sitting in her shoulders a second earlier folded itself away, replaced by the same flat, willing readiness she’d carried into the room the morning before.
I watched it happen four separate times across the early afternoon, cataloguing it the way I catalogued everything, and each time a warm, proprietary tightness coiled in my gut as I watched her snap back into full commercial availability, like a switch had been thrown somewhere behind her eyes.
One man, broader than most, paused at the door on his way out, his hand already on the lever, and looked back at her without any particular warmth in his face.
“Best corporate perk I’ve ever had,” he said, flat, the kind of line a man delivers to a room rather than to a woman, an assessment closed out and filed.
Sara didn’t look up from the mirror, where she stood smoothing her hair back from her face with both hands. “Tell them to book me again,” she said, even, unbothered, the words coming out with no more weight than if she’d been confirming a dinner reservation.
I watched the exchange twice on the close-up channel, rewinding it with my thumb to catch the exact flatness in her voice both times, and something in my chest settled into a satisfaction I didn’t examine too hard.
Confirmation of asset performance at full contracted value.
The words still fit, mostly, if I didn’t look at them for too long.
Sweat had gathered at my brow and I wiped it away with the back of my wrist without taking my eyes off the screen, my collar long since gone limp and damp against my throat.
The feed flickered to static somewhere in the gap between that man leaving and the next one arriving, the picture dissolving into a gray hiss across all four tiles at once, and I felt my breath catch hard in my chest, my thumb jabbing at the toggle like the motion itself might force the signal back.
It held for three seconds, four, long enough that I’d half risen out of the chair before the picture snapped back clean, Sara still standing exactly where she’d been, refilling her cup at the water station like nothing had interrupted anything at all.
I sat back down slow, my jaw aching from where I’d been clenching it without noticing.
It happened twice more over the next two hours, the same gray hiss swallowing the picture and then releasing it, and each time my chest went tight and my mouth went dry until the tiles resolved again and I could see her, upright, moving, unhurt, tracking her the same way I’d tracked her since a hotel bar three states and what felt like a lifetime ago.
The last man of the second day came through a little before seven, and he didn’t linger any longer than the ones before him.
He said something to her I couldn’t quite catch over the fluorescent hum, low, and she answered with a single nod, and whatever passed between them ended with him tucking himself away and crossing to the door without another word.
The rear-angle feed caught the door swing shut, caught the handle settle back into its resting position, and then the room held still.
Sara stood alone in the middle of the green room for a long moment, her chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate pulls, her nostrils still flared from whatever the last man had asked of her.
She didn’t move to the mirror this time.
She didn’t refill her cup. She simply stood there under the flat fluorescent wash, her damp hair hanging loose down her back, her body marked everywhere the two days had touched it, and stared at nothing, just as she had through every session before this one.
The overhead feed held on her a few seconds longer, and then the screen dimmed at the edges, the picture fading out tile by tile until all four angles had gone dark at once, the fluorescent hum cutting off mid-buzz, and the login page bloomed back into the space where she’d been, Encrypted Feed — Session Terminated printed clean across the black in the same bloodless font Charles used for everything.
The phone screen was quiet, blue, empty.
My soaked shirt clung to the chair. The room held only the hum of the building’s climate system and the faint tick of my watch.
The login page went dark, but I didn’t move.
I remained in the chair, caught in the silence, already waiting—the way I always waited now—for whatever came next.