Her Size, Her Taste

Content warning: gun violence, blood, and intimate-partner coercion.

Blood had dried across her clothes in a perfect paintball array, fanned out over the black tee and down one thigh of the camo jeans, so even and so deliberate that it looked designed. As if it wasn't real. As if it was only the way it was supposed to be made.d

Aubriene stood in the middle of the hall and studied it the way you study a painting you aren't sure you like. She knew she had suppressed a lot in her life. But this. This was not what she expected on the other side of finally letting go of the control she'd held with both hands for as long as she could remember.

A truck. She is three years old. The vinyl seat is cracked and someone has folded a towel over the split so it won't cut the backs of her legs.

That's all of it. It comes and it goes and it takes her balance with it, and she puts a hand flat on the wall until the floor agrees to hold still.

"Come on." Leila was at her elbow the way she kept turning up, without footsteps. "I've got something you can change into."

Aubriene followed. She didn't ask where the something had come from, or why it would fit.

From the doorway Archie watched her go, and she felt him watching, and she knew what he was making of it, because she was making the same thing of it herself. There was no reason on earth to trust this woman. She trusted her anyway, immediately and entirely, the way you trust weather.

"Fuck your mood," Leila said, to no one, to an earpiece maybe, to the house. "Follow the plan."

What plan. Whose plan. Her plan?

The room Leila put her in had a mirror, a chair, and nothing else.

She pulled the elastic out of her dark auburn hair, out of yesterday's lazy, out of the shower, thrown-up style, and flipped her head down and back up, shaking it out, letting the curls fall soft and fierce around her face. Framing it just right. Her skin in the glass was pale, porcelain, as if she'd never seen a day outdoors in her life. Her plain auburn didn't look plain Jane anymore. Under this light it had gone a little orange, a little red.

She did all of it slowly and with great care, with someone else's blood drying on the shirt in the corner of the room, and not once while she was doing it did she ask herself why she was being so careful.

The dress hung on the back of the door. The heels sat underneath it, side by side, almost too perfect.

Not almost. They were her size, and they were exactly, precisely what she would have chosen for herself if she'd ever had the money for shoes like that, and there was no one alive who had that information about her.

She put them on anyway.

Then she looked up, out across the elaborate castle of a house that was supposed to be a tour. A walk-through. One hour. That was the whole of it. An hour ago she'd come through that door in camo skinny jeans and Free Soldier boots and a black V-neck American Eagle tee that used to be her boyfriend's, and she'd been bored, and she'd been safe, and she'd been so tired of both that her teeth ached with it.

She never entered the raffle. That was the part she kept circling back to. She'd never entered anything. She hadn't so much as looked up from her phone at the gas station where the flyers were, let alone filled out a card with her name on it, and her name had been drawn anyway, and a letter had come to a house where the mail was usually somebody else's.

They'd known her size. They'd known her taste.

Thirty minutes, she'd thought, when she understood what the tour actually was. Thirty minutes to decide.

She'd stopped counting somewhere around the blood.

The knock came from the front of the house. Not a knock, exactly. Three flat raps, official, unhurried, the sound of someone who does this eleven times a day.

Leila went very still. The whole house went still, in the way a room does when everyone in it decides at the same moment to be a different kind of person.

Aubriene crossed the hall, because somebody had to and because she was dressed for it, and her eyes went out across the room first the way they always did, and found Archie's.

She always knew she would always find his eyes first, no matter the number of people or where she was.

She was right.

She was also looking down the barrel of the 9mm in his hand. She knew that gun. She knew the sight, melted flat, ruined on purpose, and she knew it not because she could read a sight from thirty feet with a barrel on her but because she had seen it before, in a kitchen, in his hand, and had told herself it was nothing worth asking about.

It smelled like it had been fired. The whole room smelled like it had been fired.

She opened the door.

The investigator was young and apologetic and holding a clipboard against his chest, and he said he was just checking on the folks who'd come in for the tour, ma'am, there'd been a call about a noise.

Her body answered before she did. She heard her own voice come out warm and even and completely unhurried, thanking him for stopping by, so sorry for the trouble, everyone's just fine, what a thing to happen on a Tuesday. She was appalled at how good she was at it. Fear is efficient. Fear is fluent. The barrel stayed at the edge of her vision the entire time and she tracked it every second, the way you track a wasp.

He touched the brim of his hat. He went back down the steps.

She swung the door most of the way to, and somewhere in the last inch of its travel she stopped tracking the gun. Not because she'd forgotten it. Because she no longer needed to know where it was.

And there it came, arriving half a second behind her, into a place fear couldn't reach: she was glad. Not glad to be alive. Glad about the door. It surprised her the way cold water surprises you, and it didn't pass, and she stood there in someone else's shoes with her hand flat against the wood and understood that she wasn't lying to herself.

There is nothing more right than this.

She shuts the door.