My head is throbbing and my eyes feel like they’re glued shut. I can’t move right away and I’m not sure where I am. I’m lying on my side, I know that because I feel a rough fabric on my cheek. It stinks and I want to vomit, I feel like I might. And maybe I already have. Maybe that’s one of the scents I’m smelling. That and unclean bodies. Sex. The stench of it, of cigarettes and sweat and sex.

I turn my head, moan with the pain over my eye. Try to reach to touch it, but I can’t. Something cold circles my wrists and they’re bound up over my head. I force my eyes open and for a moment, the room spins. The threadbare blanket I’m lying on is a 1970’s orange/brown combination. The walls are yellow but I think they used to be white. On top of a beat-up desk is an old-fashioned box TV and there’s a jacket hanging over the back of the chair. It’s the only nice thing in here. There’s a can of Coke beside the TV and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. I roll onto my back and look up at the blobs of stains on the ceiling, then toward the large window with its curtains drawn shut. They match the blanket I’m lying on.

Footsteps outside, heavy ones, have me turning toward the door. My head throbs with the effort. It opens and a man I don’t recognize comes inside. He’s talking into a cell phone.

“Yeah. Got it.” He gives me a grin and sits on the edge of the bed. “I’m not fucking stupid,” he says and disconnects the phone, sets it on the nightstand. He never stops looking at me.

He’s not the one in the suit. The one who grabbed me. Punched me. He’s wearing a yellow T-shirt stretched too tight over his beer belly. It’s got a stain on it. Tomato sauce I think. Or blood. Mine, maybe.

When he leans in toward me, I press my back into the mattress.

“You up, pretty girl?” he asks.

I don’t react and try to pull away when he reaches out a hand and presses a fat finger into my temple. I suck in a breath and he smiles, digging deeper. Warm blood slides over my ear. He’s opened a cut. I guess it happened when the suited man punched me.

“That’s for puking on me,” he says.

He rubs his finger on his shirt and my first guess was right. The stain I saw was tomato sauce because blood is much darker.

I look up at my hands, tug at my arms to test the handcuffs that are linked through the headboard.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the man says, standing. He’s tall. Really tall. And the way he looks, the way his eyes travel over my chest, my belly, my legs, it scares me.

“What do you want with me?” I croak. My voice isn’t working, my throat is dry and I know I did vomit on him. I taste it.

He shrugs a shoulder, turns his attention to the TV and switches it on.

“Nothin’ much,” he mutters. “You ain’t my type.” He sits back down on the bed and is wholly engrossed in the channels he’s flipping through. A pistol is tucked into the back of his jeans. “I like tits,” he adds on, picking up his coke and slurping loudly.

I try to pull myself up to a seat, but my head throbs with the effort and when he turns and grabs hold of my ankle, I freeze.

“Where you goin’? Ain’t nowhere you need to be.”

I guess he’s not as inattentive as I assumed.

“Where am I?”

He releases my leg, returns to flipping TV channels. Settles on a black and white cartoon. I feel like I’m caught in some time warp. Like this place is stuck in the past. A glance at the window tells me it must be nighttime, or I’d see sunshine coming around the curtains, I think. I listen, but either the room is soundproof, which I doubt, or there’s absolutely no traffic outside.

“Where am I?” I ask again, a little louder this time as I manage to sit up a little, drawing my bound hands in front of me.

“Quiet.”

“Can’t follow the cartoon?” I ask.

He mutes the TV and turns to me and I realize how stupid that was.

“Want me to shut you up, pretty girl? I can do that right good and I’d like it,” he says, getting up, walking around to my side. I cringe when he grabs my ankle and tugs me so I’m lying back down.

“I told you you ain’t goin’ nowhere, didn’t I?”

I stare up at him, unable to answer.

“I asked you a question,” he says, leaning his big face close, his stale breath on me.

“Yes,” I say. “I just wanted—”

“Don’t matter what you want. It matters what I want and I want you to shut the fuck up. Understand, cunt?”

I swallow. Nod my head.

He nods his, straightens, looks at me again, his eyes moving from head to toe. I watch his hand move toward me, toward that sliver of naked belly where my sweater has risen up. I make a sound when his fingers touch my skin, and when his hand fists the waistband of my jeans, I scream.

The door opens, slams against the wall and lets in a gust of cold wind. We both turn. Suit man is standing there minus his jacket. He looks pissed. Two others, these from the back of the car, flank him.

“Don’t fucking touch her, fucking imbecile. You know the rules.”

The man curls his hand tighter around the handful of material, lifting my hips off the bed. Although he’s bigger than the man at the door, when the one at the door takes a step into the room, he backs off, releasing me.

“I just want her to shut the fuck up so I can watch TV.”

The leaner man looks at me. “You think you can shut the fuck up so he can watch his cartoon?”

I nod.

“There,” he says to the big guy. “She says she’ll shut up.”

“What if she don’t?”

The man cocks his head to the side, looks at me. “I’ll let you stick your dick in her big mouth. That’d shut her up, wouldn’t it?”

I feel the blood drain from my face.

When I shift my gaze away from him, I see the swell at the crotch of the fat one’s pants.

“Yeah. That’d shut her up good,” he says, rubbing his stiffening dick.

“Fuckin’ idiot,” the man mumbles with a chuckle, picking up the jacket hanging over the back of the chair. He turns to the two men who are younger than the big one. “Remember the rules or the boss will have our heads,” he reminds them.

“No problem.”

Suit man heads back to the door but one of the guys stops him.

“When do we get the money?”

Suit man pauses and I see evil in his eyes. He’s smarter than the others. He’s manipulating them. “Tomorrow morning when I come back to pick her up.”

The guy nods and suit man heads out the door, closing it behind him. I hear a car start and when I know he’s gone, I look back at the three men I’m left with. The two younger ones walk through a door that I notice leads to an adjoining room. Fat guy picks up the remote and gives me a disgusting grin, his hand in his pants now, rubbing his erection.

I turn away and I shut up.