Page 10 of The Client
She fishes out a tube of red MAC lipstick from her bag, gently grips my chin to turn me to her and slicks it on my lips.
A pang of tenderness hits the center of my heart. Her touch is light and tender, like Eva’s when we’d play dress up and pretend to be movie stars. This isn’t her first auction. Far from it, it sounds like. She shouldn’t even be here. None of us should be here.
“What am I supposed to do when it’s my turn?” I hear myself ask her.
Assessing her work, she wipes a little bit of lipstick from my lower lip. “You stand on a stage, all alone. You’re supposed to smile. Force yourself to have the biggest, most radiant smile that you can. If you look scared, you might get a certain kind of man. A man who…” Her voice trails off, and she drops her gaze.
“I understand,” I say. A predator. Someone looking for a victim. Someone like Zoric.
““I pretend that I’m gutting them all when I’m in the spotlight. Like pigs at the harvest. Just pray you get one who’s nice,” she adds.
Her accent is pronounced now. Czech.
“To mi je líto,” I tell her.I’m sorry, one of the few Czech phrases that I know.
She doesn’t react to it, and I think maybe I’ve gotten it wrong. Then she puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes, and I know I’ve gotten it right. She walks away, leaving me to look at myself again in the mirror.
I look scared. And I am. Remembering her warning, I force a smile. It doesn’t help much.
The door suddenly bangs open and the brawny guard comes in. There’s a pistol strapped to his hip that I hadn’t noticed before. Is that to keep the men in line, or us? We’re hustled out of the room to navigate the dim hallway, all of us lining up like obedient children, about to perform on a stage that none of us wants to be on.
We’re told to stop, and then a different man comes down the line, stripping off our robes and tossing them over his arm. Someone behind me begins to sob quietly. My ribs ache from constantly controlling my breathing. My abdominal muscles are a vice, holding back the anxiety that threatens to drown me. We’re rearranged in a different order, and I’m moved from near the front to almost the very back.
The voice of an announcer—the auctioneer?—sounds from behind the black velvet curtains at the end of the hall, and the first girl is pushed through. A crack between the curtain panels and the stage gives me a glimpse of bright lights and then suddenly the announcer’s voice becomes fast and jumbled, like a real auctioneer showcasing prime livestock for sale.
My mind sinks in on itself, my heart jackhammering in my chest as the young women ahead of me disappear one by one. I don’t want to do this. There has to be a way out.
When there’s nobody left in front of me, my body starts to tense up. I have to run. I have to hide. I have to—
“Go.”
A hand pushes me between the shoulder blades, shoving me through the curtain, and I stumble onto the stage, washed in blinding white lights.
Everything beyond the lights is dark, so dark that I can’t tell how large the room is or how many bidders are here. Ten? Fifty? A hundred? I have no idea. The air conditioning is cranked up in here, and I start to tremble. I lift my arms to cover my chest, but the auctioneer barks “Arms down!” and I drop them at my sides and freeze.
“Twenty years old. Polish. Speaks English. Five foot nine,” the auctioneer drones, ticking off my hair color, eye color, bra size, weight. “Natural breasts, no augmentations, no scars. A new girl, so we’ll start the bidding at three thousand.”
My brain latches onto the number, playing it over and over as I scan the crowd. My vision adjusts to the low light, the old, lecherous faces leering at me like I’m a prize horse. One of these men is going to be the person I remember for the rest of my life as my first. And who knows how many more I’ll be forced to remember after him? My breathing starts to speed up, and I realize I’m not smiling. But I can’t do it. I can’t. It’s all I can do not to burst into tears.
The bidding quickly begins to climb, from three thousand, four thousand, five thousand. The auctioneer occasionally commands me to turn my body or lift my chin, and I obey each time, a perfect puppet. Each bidder’s dimly-lit, shadowy face is more terrifying than the last. I’ve gone numb. I feel like I’m floating outside my body.
“Five thousand going once—”
This is it. I’m about to be sold for five thousand dollars.
“Twice—”
And then a man in the second row from the stage raises his paddle. He’s middle aged, in his forties or fifties maybe, lean and dressed in a suit that looks like it was cut to his exact measurements. He’s…handsome, actually.
“Six thousand dollars,” he declares confidently, making eye contact with a few of the other bidders before he sits back down.
The men he stared down were also bidding on me, but they look reticent now. The auctioneer raises the bid, but no one raises their number, as if they’d been intimidated out of it.
Which is how I know that the man who bought me is the worst one of all. Because every other man in this room is afraid of him. He’s a wolf.
“Sold to number 110 for six thousand dollars!”
I’m ushered off stage, into a holding area, before I can wrap my head around what just happened.
