I sit on the sectional. The cushions are deep and soft and my body sinks into them, and the contrast between this and the metal bench in the van is so extreme that it feels like a hallucination. I perch on the edge with my spine straight and my knees together and his jacket clutched around me like armor.
He moves through the space with the ease of someone who could navigate it blindfolded. He opens a cabinet and takes out a glass, filling it with water from the tap and setting it on the coffee table in front of me.
"Drink."
I pick up the glass and drink because my throat is so dry it hurts to swallow. The water is cold and clean and my body wants it so badly that I drain the whole thing in four swallows. He watches me drink the way he's watched me do everything tonight. With that focused, cataloging attention that makes me feel like a specimen being observed through glass.
He takes the empty glass, refills it, sets it back down.
Then he goes to the kitchen.
I sit on the couch and listen to the sounds of him moving around behind the island. Cabinets opening and closing. The click of a gas burner igniting. A knife on a cutting board, quick and rhythmic and practiced. He's cooking. The man who just bought me at a human auction is in his kitchen cooking, and I'm sitting on his couch wrapped in his jacket with the taste of coldwater in my mouth and the smell of something savory beginning to fill the air.
I stare at the windows.
The city looks far away. Not just geographically. It looks far away in the way that the regular world looks far away when you've stepped through a door into something else entirely. Down there, people are hailing cabs and arguing over restaurant bills and watching television and brushing their teeth before bed. Normal things. Human things. And up here, in this glass tower, a girl who used to work two jobs and eat ramen four nights a week is sitting in a see-through dress wondering if the man in the kitchen is going to hurt her after dinner or before.
He comes back carrying a plate.
He sets it on the coffee table in front of me and something inside me cracks as I look down at it. The plate has food on it. Real food. A piece of grilled salmon, golden-skinned and steaming. Roasted potatoes with rosemary. Asparagus, bright green and glistening with oil. It's plated carefully, not restaurant-fancy but considered. The kind of meal someone makes when they know how to cook and they want you to eat well.
My stomach clenches so hard I almost double over. I haven't eaten since this morning. A granola bar from the box I kept on top of the fridge, the one I rationed at one bar per day because a box of twelve cost $3.49 and I was stretching it across two weeks.
He pulls a dining chair over and places it across from me. Sits down. Leans back. Watches.
"Eat."
"I'm not hungry." The lie comes out automatic, a reflex from years of my father asking if I'd eaten and me saying yes because he’d spent all his money on the track.
He doesn't argue. He doesn't push the plate closer or repeat himself or tell me I need to eat. Instead, he picks up the fork, cuts a piece of salmon, and holds it out toward me.
On the fork. Inches from my mouth. His hand steady, his face unreadable, his pale eyes locked on mine with a patience that doesn't feel patient at all. It feels like the patience of a man who has all the time in the world because he already knows how this ends.
I stare at the fork.
I understand what's happening. I'm not stupid, and I'm not naive, and I've read enough to know that this is a mechanism. A psychological framework being laid down like a foundation, brick by brick, in the first hours of captivity. He feeds me. I accept. My body learns to associate him with sustenance. With survival. With the basic biological fact that when I am hungry, he is the one who provides.
It's textbook. It's calculated. It's the first move in a game I didn't agree to play.
My stomach is eating itself, and the salmon smells like butter and lemon and herbs. My hands are shaking from hunger and adrenaline withdrawal, and the rational part of my brain is being outvoted by every cell in my body that hasn't had a proper meal in days.
I open my mouth.
He places the fork between my lips. I close them around the food and pull it off the tines and the flavor blooms across my tongue, rich and savory and warm, and my eyes close involuntarily because it's good, it's so good, and I can't remember the last time I ate something that someone else made for me with intention.
When I open my eyes, he's already cutting the next piece.
He feeds me the entire plate. Salmon, potatoes, asparagus, one careful bite at a time. His hand never wavers. His expression never changes. He doesn't eat anything himself. He just sits there in his white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms and feeds me like it's a task he could do for hours without tiring of it.
I take every bite.
Somewhere around the fifth or sixth piece of potato, I stop fighting the shame of it and just eat. My body overrides my pride with a ruthlessness that surprises me, and I realize that pride is a luxury for people who aren't starving in a stranger's penthouse. I eat what he gives me. I drink the water when he lifts the glass to my lips. I even, toward the end, lean forward slightly to meet the fork halfway, and I see something flicker across his face when I do.
When the plate is empty, he sets it aside.
"More?"
I shake my head.