The three of them had been following us for two blocks before I let myself admit it. It was late enough that the street had thinned out, streetlamps buzzing over empty vending machines, and Elara was walking half a step ahead of me the way she always did, unbothered, humming something I didn't recognize. I heard them before I saw them properly — the particular loud looseness of boys who'd been drinking somewhere they shouldn't have, laughter with an edge on it. "Oi, look at this one," the tallest of them said, peeling off from the wall he'd been leaning against, moving to block the sidewalk ahead of us. He had the kind of face that had learned, early, that being large was a substitute for being clever. Two others fell in behind him, grinning the specific grin of boys who'd decided, collectively, that tonight was going to be interesting. "We're just heading home," I said, stepping slightly in front of Elara, the way you're supposed to, the way every instinct I had told me to. "Wasn't talking to you." He wasn't even looking at me. His eyes had already found Elara and stayed there, moving over her with a slowness that made my stomach turn. "Hey, gorgeous. What's your name?" "Elara," she said, pleasantly, like she'd been asked the time. "Elara." He said it back like he was tasting it. "You wanna come hang out with us, Elara? We know a place." "Let's go," I said, taking her wrist, and one of the others — shorter, wirier, quicker — stepped sideways to cut off my path, close enough that I could smell the alcohol. "She didn't say no," he said, and there was something ugly and practiced underneath the casualness of it, the tone of someone who'd learned exactly how to make refusal feel unreasonable. "I'm saying no," I said. "For her." "Nobody's talking to you, man." The tall one had moved closer now, close enough to reach out, and he did — one hand landing on Elara's shoulder, sliding, slow and deliberate, down toward her collarbone. I said something. I don't fully remember what — a warning, a shove maybe, my body already moving to put itself between his hand and her body. What I remember clearly, with a clarity that has stayed sharper than almost anything else from that night, is that Elara didn't flinch. She turned her head toward him, unhurried, and smiled — the same delayed, assembled smile from the bathroom, except this time there was no hesitation in what came after it. She reached up and covered his hand with her own, pressing it flatter against her skin instead of pulling it away, and said, in a voice with no fear in it at all, "Okay." "Elara—" She was already closing the distance to him, and he was already laughing, delighted, calling something back to his friends that I didn't process because I was too busy watching her mouth find his, too busy watching his hand slide lower while the other two hooted and one of them pulled out a phone, too busy standing frozen on a sidewalk while something that wore my cousin's face let a stranger's hands map every inch of her like she was furniture being appraised. He pulled back only far enough to say something filthy against her mouth, something about how easy this was, how lucky he was, and she answered — not with words, but by reaching down and unbuttoning his jeans herself, unhurried, methodical, the same careful precision she used for everything, like she'd catalogued exactly what this particular hunger required and was simply, dutifully, providing it. I should have pulled her away. I told myself that for a long time afterward, lying awake, replaying the two, three, four seconds where my body simply didn't move. Some small, traitorous part of me — the same part that had noticed the light on her skin in that bathroom, the same part that had lied when she asked if it bothered me to see her — watched the way her hand moved, slow and sure, watched his head fall back and his breath catch, and felt something twist low in my stomach that had no business being there, heat curling up under the disgust like a fire that refused to care what it was burning. I hated myself for it instantly. I hated the way my pulse had picked up watching a stranger's fingers dig into her hip, hated that some ugly animal part of my brain had registered arousal before it had registered horror, hated that I was standing there half-hard and sick to my stomach at the exact same time, unable to tell anymore which reaction belonged to me and which one I'd absorbed from whatever was happening in front of me. It was the shortest boy's phone flash that finally broke it — a flare of white light, a laugh, "get this, get this" — and something in me snapped loose from the paralysis. I grabbed Elara's arm and pulled, hard, harder than I meant to, and she came away from him easily, without protest, without any resistance at all, like a door that had never been locked. "The fuck, man—" the tall one started, and I didn't wait to hear the rest of it. I dragged her down the street until the noise behind us thinned into nothing, until my own breathing was the loudest thing I could hear. "You're hurting my arm," Elara said, mildly, not pulling away, just noting it, the way you'd mention a light left on in another room. I let go like she'd burned me. "What was that?" My voice came out cracked, too loud for the empty street. "Elara, what the hell was that?" She looked at me with genuine, unbothered confusion, the same blank patience she'd worn in the bathroom mirror. "He asked. I said yes." "You don't just — you don't say yes to strangers grabbing you on the street, that's not—" I stopped, dragging a hand down my face, disgusted with how badly I wanted to be angry at her and how much of that anger kept curdling into something closer to shame, aimed entirely at myself. "Do you even understand what almost happened there?" "He wanted something," she said, slowly, like she was working through a math problem I'd assigned her without warning. "I gave it to him. Isn't that what people do?" "No. God, no, that's not — you're supposed to want it too. You're supposed to have a choice." "I did have a choice." She tilted her head, and for one unsettling moment I thought I saw something like curiosity behind her eyes, real and searching, the closest thing to genuine emotion I'd caught from her yet. "I chose yes." I didn't have an answer for that. I stood there on that empty street with my own body still humiliatingly unsettled, disgust and want tangled so tightly together I couldn't find the seam between them, and looked at a girl who had just proven, with total sincerity, that she didn't have a single internal reason to ever say no to anything — not fear, not shame, not desire of her own. Just an answer, given freely, to whatever question the world happened to ask her loudest. "Are you upset with me?" she asked, and there was something almost plaintive in it, a flicker of concern that arrived, as always, a half-second too late to feel entirely real. "I don't know what I am," I said, which was the truest thing I'd said to her since she arrived. We walked the rest of the way home in silence, and I spent it hating three things in roughly equal measure — the boys on that street, the thing wearing my cousin's face beside me, and most of all myself, for the sick, traitorous heat that hadn't fully gone away even now, blocks later, walking beside the proof of exactly how empty she was underneath the skin.

Book 1, Chapter 4 : The Wrong Kind of Yes