"I'll be fine," he mouths, with a smile that doesn't reach anywhere near his eyes as the guards swing open his door and escort him out.
He's gone four hours.
They drag him back, bruised and barely conscious, throwing him on the mattress then locking the door behind him.
With my heart hammering, I reach for to thread my fingers through the fence.
"Matt?"
He turns his head, his hand moving, fingers touching mine. He's got a split lip, fresh blood crusting under his nose, the left side of his jaw is swelling red-to-purple. He moves like his ribs are screaming at him, one arm pressed tight against his side
"I'm okay." He eases himself closer, wincing, and I squeeze his fingers tighter.
"Don't bullshit me."
"I would never." He tries to grin. The split lip reopens and bleeds fresh down his chin. "Okay, I would absolutely bullshit you, but not about this."
I tear a strip from the bottom of my sweater, already ruined, stained and stretched from days on concrete, wet it from my cup and push it through the links. He presses it to his lip, flinching.
"What did they do?"
His eyes move away from mine. Down, to the left, the way people look when they're deciding how much of a thing is safe to share.
"They—" He stops. Swallows. His jaw works under the bruising. "It's not just beatings."
I wait. The strip of fabric turns pink in his hand.
"They raped me. They've done it every day before you got here." Flat and quiet, the way you'd report someone else's bad news. " Then it stopped, and I thought—I thought maybe—" he sighs. "Different guards. Not always the same ones. They just—" His voice cracks. "They take turns."
The world contracts to the space between his mouth and my hand.
I don't sayI'm sorry.Don't sayoh my God.Those words are vapor, the kind of thing you say when you don't know what to do with someone else's pain and want to package it into a sentencethat makes you feel less helpless. I've been on the receiving end of that enough to know its worth.
I motion for him to move closer, until his face is against the chain between us, and through it I clean the blood from his chin instead. Move the cloth to his cheekbone, dab at the bruising. My hands are steady even though my chest is a live wire.
"The tall one with the scar, or the short one?"
"Both." A pause. "And others. There's a rotation."
A rotation.
Acid burns up the back of my throat. I clamp down on it. Wring the cloth out and don't look at him, wring it out again even though there's nothing left in it.
That's what they do behind the door?" My chin motions at the door on top of the metal staircase.
"Yeah."
I think of the women taken there all throughout the day, sometimes more than once a day. Yesterday Elena went through that door three times. Each time she came back more dazed then the last.
Matt tips his head back against the wall. Blood still seeps from his lip, sluggish now. Under the fluorescent buzz the bruises look worse than they did two minutes ago, but his breathing has evened out. He's recovering fast. Good.
"'The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief,'" he says.
"Shakespeare?"
"Othello. Act one." He opens one eye. "My students hated that play. Called it 'old-people drama about bad communication skills.' I guess it is."
"How's your Othello impression?"
