Chapter 1
The live sex theater sat on a canal in Amsterdam. The dressing room did not.
The rule sheet was taped to the back of the door at eye height. Someone had measured Sidra wrong, or they had not cared.
No kissing on the mouth unless the night was marked for it. Test results on file. Condoms if anyone asks. No one has to. If you need the scene to stop you say museum. That is the safeword. The seats will not hear it as part of the act. Do not look for people you know in the audience. You will find them and you will go soft. The show is forty-two minutes. Do not fall in love with a minute.
Under that, in a different pen, smaller:
Do not take the folder off the table.
Sidra read it twice. She put her thumb on museum and left a print. The folder line she left alone.
She took off the coat she had worn on the streetcar and hung it over a chair that already had someone else’s jeans on it.
Koen was naked from the waist down and taping his knee. He did not look up. Worker’s chest, not a catalog one, a pale seam through the hair below his navel, hands too clean for the rest of him. When he finished the tape he flexed the joint once.
Raf sat on the counter with his boots still on, eating yogurt out of a hotel cup. Chip in one front tooth. He watched her read the door.
“You’re the weekend,” he said.
“I’m Sidra.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“You didn’t ask.”
Ivo came in from the booth with a headset around his neck and a smear of black on his thumb from a gel. Narrowest of the three. He looked at her face first. “The theater is two-thirds full. Tourists on the left. People who come every week in the front. They paid for Marit. They are going to notice you are not her.”
“Good.”
Koen’s mouth moved. Not quite a smile.
Raf tapped the lid against the sink. “Marit does two positions and a fake finish they can clap for. We can do that. Or you can tell us what you actually came here to do.”
Sidra unhooked her bra and folded it. She was thirty. Her stomach was a stomach. Mole low on the left breast she had stopped explaining. She looked at all three when she spoke.
“I came here to get fucked on a schedule and get paid. I also came here to come. If Marit fakes it, that is her business. I don’t.”
Ivo said, “There is no interval.”
“Then they can sit in it.”
Koen stood. Already half hard from the talk and the tape and her shirt being gone. He did not cover himself. “Safeword is museum. On stage I will still hear it. Raf talks too much to hear it the first time. Say it twice if you use it on him.”
“Fuck you,” Raf said, without heat.
“After,” Koen said.
The stage was not only a mattress. Iron frame bolted to the boards. Machine clamped to the left post, dildo already slick. Plugs in a tray. Paddle with a worn grip. Cuffs on a short chain. Under the low table: a china saucer with two unused condoms, and the folder the taped sheet said not to touch.
The folder was thicker than a night’s papers. A corner of a photograph stuck out. Not Marit’s mouth. A different jaw.
Sidra did not pull it.
Ivo put her hand on Raf’s sternum, then on Koen’s hip, then on the frame.
“Marit kneels at minute twelve and never asks for the machine,” Ivo said. “Mouth on Raf first. Koen last. I come down at twenty-eight with the towel. The paddle is hers. The plugs are whoever got there first.”
“If I want you earlier.”
“Then look at the booth. I will leave the lights.”
“Look at me, not the booth. I am not going to perform wanting you.”
Raf laughed under his breath. “She’s going to ruin the timing.”
“Timing is your problem.”
Koen nodded.
The wings smelled like warm dust and the lemon oil someone used on the frame. The recorded intro died mid-breath. A man in the front row cleared his throat as if he had paid for the right to. A woman laughed at something that was not happening on the boards. Bags shifted. A glass found a table.
One man in the second row did not rustle anything. Coat still buttoned. Hands empty in his lap. He watched the booth the way a person watches a door they expect to open.
Sidra saw it and put it away where she put other things she did not yet have a name for. Then the light found her and she left the robe on the hook.
She did not kneel.
She pointed at Koen. “Cuffs. You.”
He gave them. She buckled the leather, thumb under the cuff so it would not bite, clipped the chain so he could not lift his wrists past his ribs. She pumped lube, worked two fingers into her own ass facing the front, seated a plug until the base sat flush. The stretch pulled a breath out of her.
“Machine. On me. Slow. Ivo, from here. I don’t want you in the glass.”
Ivo came down without the towel. He set the machine against her cunt while she stood with her hands on Koen’s bound hips. The head pushed in. She took it. She said harder. She came standing, plug in, machine in, Koen’s taped knee against her shin.
She killed the machine with her foot.
She put Raf on his back and sat on his face until she came again. Then she got his cock out of the soft pants he wore for the first twelve minutes and stroked him like it was not a demonstration. His timing hiccuped.
Ivo took the paddle when she pointed. Five that landed. Heat. She did not call museum.
“Plug out. Both of you. Ivo, your cock. Don’t come down with the towel like that’s the ending. Stay in it.”
Koen’s cuffs came off because she needed his hands. He pushed into her ass while she was still open from the plug. Raf drove into her cunt under him. The thin wall of her took both with a sound the microphone caught. Ivo at her head. She took him until her throat clicked.
She came like that, full of them, shaking hard enough that the chain on the empty cuff ticked against the frame. Spit ran from her lip down Ivo. She left it shining.
Koen finished in her ass with his mouth open against her spine. Raf followed in her cunt on a sentence he never got to the end of. They stayed where they were so the front could watch it leave her, slow, obvious, nothing neat about it. She finished Ivo with her hand and her mouth open and turned her face to the seats before she swallowed, so there would be no argument later about what they had bought. The saucer on the table did not get a vote.
The clock said twenty-six minutes.
The man in the second row had not taken off his coat. He was gone before the clap that almost didn’t happen.
In the dressing room Anke was already there with a clipboard.
“You ran twenty-six. The show is supposed to be forty-two. They paid for Marit.”
“They stayed.”
“They stayed because they were busy. That is not a contract.” Anke’s eyes went to the table through the open wing door, to the folder, then away too fast. “Monday is still Marit’s. I will call her. If she wants the nights, she has them.”
“If she wants a night off, I want Monday.”
“You are the weekend. Do not fall in love with a minute.”
Koen sat and started on the tape again. Raf washed his mouth. Ivo hung the headset.
Sidra put her coat on over nothing. She went back to the stage before the work lights died.
The folder was still under the table. The photograph corner was still not Marit.
She slid it out far enough to read the name on the folder.
LENE. Pay slips and dates that stopped two years ago. Across the last page, a red stamp: closed.
Ivo’s voice, from the stair, not unkind. “The sheet on the door told you not to.”
“It said not to take the folder off the table. I didn’t take it off. I opened it.”
He came down. He did not take the folder from her. He put his black thumb on the name as if he had done it before.
“She was the weekday before Marit,” he said. “She ran the room. Then she didn’t. Anke will say she moved to another city. Utrecht. An hour away. Close enough that it sounds like an address. Raf will say she got bored. Koen will not say anything.”
“What do you say.”
“I say the lighting desk still has her old timing saved under a file I am not supposed to open.” He looked at the empty second row. “And I say that man does not buy tickets for Marit.”
Sidra slid the folder back under the table until the photograph corner sat the way it had.
“Monday,” she said.
“If Marit lets you.”
“If she doesn’t, I buy a seat.”
Koen was in the wing by then. He had heard enough. His mouth was the same almost-smile, except it wasn’t.
“If you buy a seat,” he said, “you text first. I will leave the side door. And you don’t go looking in another city with your face taped in our street window.”
“I don’t have a photo in the window.”
“Yet,” Ivo said.
Anke’s footsteps on the hall boards. Clipboard. Question coming.
Sidra left through the side door with Lene’s dates in her head and the man in the coat in the other half of it. The canal smelled like rain that had not decided to start. She wrote two lines on the back of her streetcar ticket because she did not have the notebook yet.
Never again for men who don’t watch the mattress. Monday. Ask who Lene is when Anke is not in the room.
She did not sign it. The print on museum was still on the door. The folder was still on the table. Someone had wanted both those things to stay put.
She was already not going to.
