The yard is making noise and none of it reaches me.
Because I have been property.
I've been a line item with a room number and a duration and a dollar figure beside it.
I've been a thing men shared on a schedule the way you'd share a boat.
I've been inventory that got replaced inside a season, and a shape somebody built a plan around, and a body in a room, and the word for all of it is stitched across the back of the jacket in my two hands.
My throat closes. My eyes go hot and full.
And I keep standing there holding it, because nobody's put it on me.
Nobody bolted a door and told me what I was.
Somebody sewed this and put it in a box and set it in my hands, and it's not going anywhere near my back unless I carry it there myself.
Nine years, and not one person asked.
"Somebody should make it official," Python says loudly, from somewhere behind me. "That's all I'm saying."
"Python." Amara doesn't turn around.
"I'm saying it's a hell of a thing, handing a woman a cut before you've asked her?—"
"Would you shut up," Ruby says.
"I'm only saying?—"
"Everybody shut up." Amara doesn't raise her voice, and forty people go silent.
Finn takes the cut out of my hands.
He's got his own colors on and there's still a smear of somebody's blood dried along his jaw from Arizona.
He holds my cut folded over one arm and looks at me like the two of us are the only people standing in that yard.
"I want to say something first."
"Okay."
"I didn't order this." He says it fast, low, only for me. "Ruby did. Ruby, Kelsey, and Lashes, weeks ago. I found out an hour before you got in that truck to Arizona and I've been sick about it ever since."
"Why?"
"Because of what that word did to you." His voice drags rough. "Because of what you were to those men and what they wrote you down as. It isn't the same and I know it isn't the same, but you'd have to hear it every time somebody read it off your back, and it's not my call whether you can stand hearing it."
My eyes spill over and I let them.
"So I'm not assuming." He shifts his grip on the leather. "I'm not deciding this one for you. I'm asking you in front of everybody, and you can tell me no in front of everybody, and tomorrow we'll eat breakfast and nobody will ever bring it up again."
He holds the cut out on both hands.
"Camila Bacani." His voice cracks straight down the middle. "Will you be my ol' lady?"
I look at the black leather sitting on his palms.
And I think about a hallway eleven feet under the ground.
