The light in Room 23 of the Sunny Daze motel was gray and lazy, filtering through the thin brown curtains. It slipped greasily across the carpet and walls, blurring the stains into one another. It fell across the double bed, with its crumpled orange and brown coverlet. The bed had two occupants. One of them did not notice the light. He slept on, snoring softly into the pillow as he lay on his stomach.
The bed's other occupant was a thin dark girl, with a head of short soft curls. She noticed the light, but only as a way of marking time. She knew, from the light, that it was morning. She also knew that she had spent the night here, on this dirty bed, in this dirty room. Her memory was fuzzy on certain details. How she had gotten there. What had happened.
There was nothing about the room that could provide her with answers. It was like so many other rooms, in so many other places where the tourists had stopped coming and the owners had given up. Not that this place could have been much to begin with.
A shiver rippled through her and she realised that she was cold. That she was cold because she was naked seemed obvious and she gazed at her crumpled clothes on the other side of the room. Something tickled at the back of her mind, something important. Something about the motel, something about taking her clothes off. She couldn't grasp it and the thought evaporated. She shivered again.
She curled herself up even more under the flimsy bedding, tucking her knees against her chest. She did not feel like huddling against the man for warmth. She didn't like sharing beds. The other person always woke her up, with their noises, and shifting and muttering.
The stranger was snoring. How had she slept at all?
She applied herself to thinking about how she had gotten there. She remembered yesterday, or most of it. She had taken some food from the market and pick pocketed a little as well. At dinnertime she had begun to feel off. Not sick, exactly, not like the seizures, but feverish, too warm on the inside.
She wished that she felt some of that warmth now.
She had felt weird in other ways too.
Swollen, somehow, like her skin was fitted badly, too tight to hold her insides in. Aching, wanting somebody to relieve the pressure she felt building up inside her. Touching had seemed like a good idea too. She had tried touching herself, running her hands over her face, over her stomach, over the juncture of her thighs but it hadn't been enough.
She had been burning from the inside, craving without knowing what she was craving for.
She was cold now. His hands had felt cold too, she remembered, compared to the burning of her skin. Now he was the warmest thing in the room.
There was a bite mark on her shoulder. A bruised crescent. She fingered it, gingerly. The skin wasn't broken, the mark not really painful. She sat up and there was a twinge, low in her abdomen. That wasn't really painful either but it worried her. She didn't know why.
Last night she had gone… where? A club? It had been noisy and full, the music pounding, the vibrations flowing through the air, through her. The press of bodies had amplified the way she felt, but she hadn't left, she had stayed to soak it in. Soak what in? The smell? Layer after layer of sweat and smoke, old and new, sweet and sour, lacing around her. There had been something else too, deeper and muskier, more subtle.
He had been there. The snoring man beside her. She stomped on that train of thought.
She wanted to think about something else so she thought about that tiny pain some more. It worried her, she realised, because she had never felt it before. Not even when Lydecker had punished Zack for going easy on her the morning after a seizure.
He had made Tinga, Jondy and Zane go hard on her instead. She had been in the infirmary for three days. She had felt every pain there was, she thought. Until now. This pain was new.
Sex. The word came to her suddenly. There was a memory behind it. The man. Pushing. grunting. talking. Sweat, dripping off him and onto her skin. What had he said? She was good. He had said that she was good. A good little bitch.
She realised that she had known what to do without being told. Known when to reach for him and when to spread her legs. It hadn't been bad, exactly. It had felt necessary, something she had to do, something urgent and crucial to fix herself, to ease the aching burn inside her skin.
She had felt like she knew him somehow. She didn't. He was a stranger. And she didn't feel good now. She didn't feel the strange sick-ness. But she was clammy and cold and she didn't feel like herself.
She needed to wash. Needed a shower. Needed to scrub herself, dry herself, put her clothes on and feel like Max again. Or like the soldier who called herself Max.
The man in the bed rolled over, breath easing out of him like a sigh. She froze. Was he awake?
He began to snore again.
She uncurled, slowly, carefully, ignoring the twitches as her body righted itself. She slid, quietly, not breathing, from the bed and skirted it, gathering her clothes.
She pressed them back on over her cold skin. She looked at the bed. She turned to the door and was surprised to feel the handle turn lightly and easily. She stepped out into an overcast day, the wind whipping through the deserted car park.
It was a one off, she thought to herself.
I won't let it happen again.