Closer to yes than sunrise

The fixer's grammar reads like a script I was handed to calm myself down. Your driver may wait at the gate. We will not approach your door. Two sentences of reassurance. Zero sentences about the other sixteen rooms, or who else is in them, or how the gate guard changes shifts at 2 a.m., or how long the drive back to the highway is when I am the only woman in the car with a man whose name Suresh does not know.

I screenshotted it. I added it to the file under scope creep. I texted Suresh free Thursday, long drive? without saying where or why. He said yes in two minutes. He said the water in the cooler is yes. I owe him vada pav for the rest of August. He has never asked me what a thing is for in three years of driving me to things. That is the only reason I can keep asking. ~~I am allowed to be that kind of friend to him because I am not allowed to be it to anyone else.~~

Kabir sent the PDF at 11 p.m. with the lock brand in brackets and a line that bars the fixer from any adjacent room. I saved it as farmhouse clause v1. The v1 is the part that lands on me. I have a version. I am a woman who files her own exploitation against herself in a folder on her phone.

I posted the marigold dupatta. I pressed send. I used my own body in a colour a stranger has now assigned a room to. I did that. I keep doing the next thing, and each next thing is closer to yes than the last.