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When I realized someone was watching me naked from the building across the way, I didn’t feel afraid. I felt a tingling I could no longer ignore.

When I crossed the bridge and saw the woman in the black coat waiting for me, I knew nothing I wrote in my piece could tell the truth of that week.

We had been talking for three weeks without meeting. When I finally crossed the door to his apartment that night, I knew I wouldn’t come out the same.

Lucía went upstairs with four women and closed the door. I stayed at the bar with their men. No one imagined what was about to happen in that booth.

For three years I sold my body for money. What I’m about to tell you I never told even my closest friends. Some clients weren’t clients: they were predators.

I’ve spent months thinking about it. Three different people fell in a single week at a roadside truck stop. The last was me, and I still can’t explain it.

I was about to get to the motel when his phone rang. He went white. I stayed burning hot, in my coat and stockings, twenty minutes from home.

My shoes had worn holes through my pantyhose, and every step burned like penance, but I didn’t stop until I rang his bell.

I climbed the metal staircase with my skirt pressed to my body and my backpack full of bills, feeling every gaze in the garage crawling up my legs.

I promised myself I wouldn’t fall again. But when he opened the door and looked at me like that, I knew all my rules would break before dawn.

He was twenty-one and had been looking at me for months in a way I pretended not to notice. That night my son went to bed and we were left alone.