I pretended to be asleep until I was sure I was alone. His footsteps faded down the corridor and then thumped dully down the staircase, leaving me alone in the quiet, dark room. The sounds of the city outside drifted in, muffled by the thick walls and curtains blocking all the windows. I drew a deep, full breath, filling my lungs with air thick with the smell of sweat. It was still, the air felt so heavy even my breath couldn’t stir it. Still, a full breath was welcome after struggling to fill my lungs with his fat, bloated body pressing down on me. He only liked to have sex one way, with his bulk crushing me and the sweat of his exertion dripping onto my face. I had learned long ago not to make any complaints, not to offer any suggestions. My utter submission was part of the deal. The deal that kept my father from ending up dead in a gutter.

My father was a gambler, and not a successful one. He and my mom had had endless fights about it. He would always claim he was about to hit a hot streak, about to win big, about to make all the problems go away. But the reality was, he didn’t even want to win. The saddest thing about gambling addicts is that it is the losing that drives them, the negativity, the pain. The trouble was, he dragged the rest of us down with him.

But when my mother died, something clicked for him. Suddenly he was a single father of an eleven-year-old girl. He stopped going to the casinos and moved us to a new house a little outside of town. He became attentive, responsible, caring. It was like someone flicked on a light switch and illuminated the best parts of him. It lasted for almost ten years.

I was in college when I started getting phone calls from him, first telling me he had to delay sending my monthly stipend, then it stopped coming entirely. I came home to check on him and found the house emptied of furniture, everything sold off, even his wedding ring that he’d kept wearing long after my mother was gone. After hours of crying and yelling, I got the truth out of him. He had gotten in deep with several different bookies. Regular casinos had blacklisted him for bad behavior and a failure to pay his debts, so he went underground. And all the bookies he owed money to worked for the same man. Peter Kovalev. The man who just lumbered out of my room.

I got out of bed and stretched my sore muscles and walked to the bathroom. The saving grace of this apartment was that it had extremely hot water. That was good when most nights I wanted to scrape my skin off to eliminate the clinging feeling of sweat and stink. I let the water run down my head and over my face as I thought about why I was doing this. It was important for me to remind myself of the stakes, otherwise I was liable to try to run away. Even if the building was stuffed with Kovalev’s goons and a few other girls that belonged to the organization, I had a chance of slipping out unnoticed. Unnoticed, at least, until the boss came for another short burst of frenzied humping.

But there was no way I could leave. When I had found out that my dad had no chance of paying back so much money to Kovalev, I decided to do whatever I could to make sure they didn’t simply shoot him, bury him, and write off the loss. I decided to offer what goods I had in exchange for sparing his life and clearing his debt.

When Kovalev agreed, I had been relieved, proud even, to have intervened, so cleverly, to save my father. But relief soon turned to apprehension and fear as the reality of what was happening settled in. Kovalev had set me up in this apartment, near to his office, so he could visit at his leisure. But apart from his visits, I rarely saw anyone. I was basically a prisoner. Food was delivered, and I was brought fresh clothes regularly, but I wasn’t able to leave the building without an escort, some bland, square-headed man with hands that looked like they could choke the life out of me with one squeeze. I wasn’t treated like a normal gangster’s girlfriend, showered with gifts and attention. I was shut in a hole, waiting only for the occasional bout of unpleasant sex to break up the monotony.

There was no end in sight. I made the mistake, once, of asking him when my father’s debt will have been paid off. He smacked me with a backhand so causal and practiced that it seemed almost a reflexive response to a woman opening her mouth for the purpose of speaking.

“It’s done when I say it’s done,” was all he growled.

I understood that he would get rid of me when he was bored with me and not before. And I didn’t have a guarantee even then that he wouldn’t then go after my dad. I had to keep on his good side and take every day as it came. I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, but I still had to keep walking forward. Shut up in this room, though, I was just walking in circles.

I loathed all of Kovalev’s visits, but at the same time I was worried that he might be losing interest in me. It was a terrible bind. I had to keep his attention on me in order to keep it off of my father. If I was of no more use to him, then what was to stop him from coming back at my dad for the money. It wasn’t like he was a man of principle, or anything. I was stuck. I couldn’t leave, and I was sickened by the prospect of staying even one more night. Inertia could be a terrible force. It made even the slightest movement, the most minor change an ordeal. Most nights I didn’t even have the energy to fantasize about a different life, about escaping and taking my father out of town, out into the country where Kovalev couldn’t find us.

I stripped the sheets off the bed. I kept a clean set in the room because I didn’t want to sleep on the same sheets after sex with Kovalev. I wouldn’t be able to relax. I slid into bed and turned off the lamp on the bedside table. The darkness closed in, but the room expanded. I couldn’t see the walls, so I could imagine them receding into nothingness.