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He doesn’t. He pushes his sweats down with one hand, holding me against the railing with the other. I feel his cock against me. Hot and heavy and hard, dragging through me, and I’m so scared I can’t breathe, and I’m wet. Oh my God. I’m wet. I’m sitting on a railing over a hundred-foot drop, screaming, and I’m wet.

“I hate you,” I tell him. “I hate you…”

He pushes into me.

I’m so sore from last night that it burns like fire. He stretches me open slow, his cock dragging over every swollen spot inside me, and I sob into his neck and clamp my legs around him so tight my thighs shake. The railing’s cold and hard on my ass. The wind’s blowing on my back. All I can feel is air behind me and him in front of me and him inside me, and I’m holding on to his neck for my life.

He starts to move.

He fucks me on that railing, out in the open, in broad daylight, with my ass hanging over nothing. Slow at first. Deep. Every time he pulls back, I feel myself tip backward, that drop in my stomach like a rollercoaster, and every time he pushes in, he pulls me back to him, and the drop turns into this deep, full ache that makes me scream.

“Let go,” he says.

“Are you crazy?”

“Let go of my neck.”

“No!”

“You’re not going anywhere, Dylan.”

I don’t let go. I hold on tighter. My nails dig into his back. He laughs, low, against my ear, and fucks me harder.

My nipples are grinding against his chest hair. His hands are holding my ass so tight it hurts. I can hear us. That wet, filthy sound echoing off all that glass. I can feel the sun on my back. I can smell the ocean and the eucalyptus and him. And I’m coming, I’m coming so hard I scream it out over the whole city, over the hill and the canyon and the houses, and somewhere a dog starts barking.

He comes with me, deep, and holds me there on the railing while he does it, pumping into me, his fist wrapped in my braids, holding my head back so he can watch my face.

When he finally lifts me off and puts my feet back on the warm balcony floor, my knees won’t hold me. I sit down right there.

Twenty minutes later, there are flashing lights at the gate.

I can see them from the bedroom window. Red and blue, way down the hill. A cop car. Somebody heard me. Somebody called.

I’m saved. I’m saved. I’m already pulling on his T-shirt and running for the stairs.

Then I watch through the window as one of the guards walks out of the booth and leans down to the cop car’s window. They talk for maybe thirty seconds.

The cop car backs up, turns around, and drives back down the hill.

I stand at the window and watch the red and blue lights disappear around the bend.

Behind me, Sasha’s drinking his coffee.

* * *

So that’s the first day.

The second day, I find the closet.

It’s bigger than my old apartment. I’m not exaggerating. I measured it in steps. Three racks of clothes. Shelves of shoes. Drawers of bras and panties and lingerie, in every color but black. Purses. A whole section of silk bonnets and scarves. Everything brand-new with the tags still on. Everything in my exact size.

I pull out a dress. It’s buttery yellow silk. The tag says a name I can’t afford to pronounce.

I put it back.

I go downstairs and dig through the boxes with my name on them until I find my old jeans, my gray UCLA hoodie, my black leggings, my two T-shirts from Target, and my one decent sweater. I take them upstairs. I don’t touch anything else in that closet.

He watches me do it and doesn’t say a word.