One was a diabetic with a wound on his foot that wouldn’t heal. It used to be just a regular cut, he said. But then the blood couldn’t flow there. For two years he’d been doing what he could to make it better. He wanted me to rub his pain cream into the skin around its puckered little maw, gouged right in the middle of his heel. I thought maybe he’d be one of those guys who wants to pay you for an ordinary moment, hand-holding or bathing, but it turned out he wasn’t one of those. “Okay,” he said, once I’d finished with his foot. “Now we fuck.”

I spent my off-hours in casinos. Midday was when the hopeless cases showed up. I liked their stubborn dreaming. I watched what they ate, what they wore, when they started drinking in the afternoons. I watched the ways they got lucky, blowing on the dice or calling phrases: Baby needs new shoes!

The first guy who got rough with me, he wasn’t the worst, because I didn’t blame myself for him. I’d never seen how suddenly the switch could flip, my body pinned under his: You think you have a say? You don’t have a goddamn fucking say! I blamed myself for the ones who came later. I should have learned by then. They were animals trapped in their own lives. When they saw me, they saw they could do anything they wanted.

One man left me bruised for days. He almost strangled me. He tried to do me up the back, and that was the reason he got mad, he said, but I think he was looking for a reason to get angry. The whole time he was doing it—pinning me with his knees, squeezing his fingers into my neck—he told me some girls had it worse: fingernails dug out, hands tied with cords, heads stuck underwater. Did I know that? How bad they had it? He made me say thank you. He pulled my hair so hard I felt my forehead drawn back. He whispered, Say it.

He paid me extra when I left. I was still catching my breath. I was scared that maybe if I tried to speak, I wouldn’t be able to. Some part of my throat had been crushed. “You’re one lucky whore,” he said. “You know that?”

Once that kind of thing is born in a man, it can’t ever die. It has to go somewhere. If it wasn’t me, it might have been some woman walking down the street. I woke up with a bruise across my neck and thought, Give me one good reason. I only needed one. Maybe now it won’t be some other girl.

Abe was one of my richest customers. Our first time, he stopped right in the middle, still inside, and it took me a second to realize he was sobbing. That’s why his body was shaking. He pulled out and lay there without explaining himself. After a while, he said, “I almost had a kid a ways back. But she didn’t keep it. We didn’t.”