He left for the shop right after dinner. Mom didn’t ask questions. She never did when he mentioned a shipment.
I told her I was heading to a friend’s.
The back alley still held the day's heat. His truck engine ticked in the shadows. He was already here.
I found the spare key under the receipt paper. I slipped inside, pressing the heavy door shut until the latch caught softly. I kept my weight on the balls of my feet to avoid the loose floorboards.
I walked past those fake faces. Their glass eyes seemed to track my steps in the dark, but I pushed forward.
The scent of his clean soap hung in the air. It should have felt safe. Instead, the smell made my stomach twist.
I followed the silence toward the back of the shop. I held my breath, listening hard for his heavy boots or the rough scrape of a chair. Nothing.
I slid the key into the final lock. I turned it slowly, easing the studio door open without a single creak.
Then I stepped inside.
Last night’s doll was back on its stand.
I looked at it properly this time. Same mouth. Same mole. Same gray tank I had sworn I lost last spring. Up close, the shoulder seam was obvious, and the eyes were a little dead. This was the one he had called too cold while he came in it and called my name.
On the table sat a new carton. The tape was already cut, the packing film shoved aside.
I pulled the foam back.
The new one had my face the way a mirror has your face. No hard mouth. No cheap matte. Hair cut to the length I had this week. The tiny uneven place in my left eyebrow. The faint line across my knuckle. If last night’s doll had been a good guess, this one was a theft.
My stomach turned. For a long second, I only stood there with the foam in my hands and let the ugly choices line up.
I could take a picture and end his marriage before midnight. I could put the new one in the front seat of his truck and let him explain it to my mother. I could smash its face against the concrete until it stopped looking like me.
I almost did the last one. My arms were already tight with it.
Then I did something I had not planned in the shower, or at breakfast, or in the car.
I set the new doll back into the carton, smoothed the foam over its hair, and closed the lid until it looked untouched.
After that, I took the gray tank off the stand doll—the one that still smelled faintly like the studio and like my own missing laundry—and I pulled it on over my naked body.
It sat wrong on my skin. Too thin and familiar. If he noticed the shirt, he would think the manufacturer had copied last spring as well. If he noticed anything else, I would already be past the point of getting out clean.
I hid the old doll behind the other two, face to the wall, and left the closed carton on the table where he had left it.
Then I climbed onto the posing bench the way I had watched him place me last night. Vinyl against my cheek. Wrists through the padded cuffs.
I closed the last wrist strap with my teeth because my fingers were shaking too hard to work the buckle. Then, I did the ankles the same way and shifted until my knees were wider and my hips were tipped.
If he was going to keep a version of me that could not speak, I wanted the next pair of hands on skin that could feel it. I wanted him to praise a box for what my body did better.
So, I waited.
I counted my breaths and tried not to think about the thick, flushed shape of him from the doorway, wet from a body that had not been mine.
I clenched around nothing anyway, like a girl who had never had anything inside her except her own fingers.
The lock turned, and the air went out of me. I heard his boots on the concrete first, then the rustle of his work shirt, and I kept my face turned into the vinyl so I would not do something stupid like look.
He left the overheads off. Only the low lamp came on, and the heat of it ran down my spine.
Then he was close enough that I felt him along my left side, warm through the cool air of the studio, and my whole body went tight without my permission.
“Finally,” he said. “Took them long enough.”
A fingertip touched the back of my shoulder.
For two years, I had imagined what his hands would feel like in a moment like this. But I had never imagined them like this…
The contact was slight, and it still went through me like a swallowed sound. Heat pooled low in my stomach. My nipples drew tight against the stolen tank. I had to lock my jaw to keep from leaning back into a man who thought he was touching a shipment.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “You’re warm.”
His palm opened between my shoulder blades, rough from resin and tools, and dragged down my spine as if he were checking a seam that was not there.
I did not make a sound. I could not. The kindness he used on me in the back room… was gone from his hands. These hands were working.
“Soft,” he said. “That's going to mark.”
His hand reached my ass and stopped. He squeezed once, appraising, and a sound left his throat that I had never heard across our kitchen table.
“Yeah. That’s her.”
He walked around the bench. Fingers in my hair. He turned my face an inch toward the lamp, and I kept my eyes shut so hard I saw white. His thumb brushed my bottom lip.
“That's her mouth.”
My name on his lip again almost undid me. I held still and let him believe the shirt and the mouth and the heat were all something he had paid for.
He moved behind me again. Both hands on my hips, adjusting me like a mannequin—knees wider, pelvis tipped. The cuffs bit.
His palms slid down the backs of my thighs. No one had ever touched me like that. Not once.
Heat punched low in my stomach, and I locked my throat against it while his hand stayed on my thigh and the other traced the crease where my ass met my leg, then lower. Two knuckles dragged through my already soaked pussy.
I felt him go very still.
“…the fuck.”
He did it again, slower, parting me, the pad of one finger staying on the slick as if he did not trust it.
“You’re wet. That’s not… fuck!” he said, almost angry.
He pressed in. First knuckle. My body tried to take him, and I bit my cheek until I tasted blood.
“Christ… So tight.” His other hand bruised my hip.
My thighs started to shake in the straps, and I could not make them stop. He said my name again, quieter, not to a box this time, and his fingers curled and found a spot I did not have a name for.
My whole body jerked against the cuffs.
A sound ripped out of me before I could swallow it. Small and wrecked. Impossible to take back.
His hand left me so fast as I realized what I'd just done. Then his palm slammed the vinyl next to my face.
“Summer?”
My heart rate increased.
Oh shit, shit, shit!!