Raja made a noise that was not words.
She went.
Water ran. They heard her piss, then the tap, then a long quiet that was probably her looking at herself in the mirror. When she came back she did not get on the bed.
She sat on the sofa.
Naked. One leg folded under her. Phone in her hand. Watching the three of them sprawled like they had been hit by a truck.
Sanjay turned his head.
“You look proud.”
“I look sore,” Puja said. “There’s a difference, Bhaiya.”
Vivek dragged a pillow over his face.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
Raja peeked from under his arm.
“That’s because you’re a virgin who just got rebuilt.”
“You came in four minutes the first time.”
“Five.”
“Four.”
Puja smiled at the sofa, thumb moving over glass, not really scrolling.
“My usual clients don’t even give me this gap,” she said, almost casual. “Last month one booking started at eleven. I thought I’d be home by two. He called two friends. Then those friends called someone. I didn’t sleep. At all. Morning I had another man waiting downstairs. I brushed my teeth in his bathroom and got on my knees again.”
The room went quieter.
Sanjay pushed up on his elbows.
“They don’t let you rest?”
“Some don’t. Some pay extra specifically so I don’t rest.” She shrugged, and her breasts shifted with it. “Thirty-seven regulars now. Not counting first-timers like you three. You get used to the way a night stops being a night and just becomes work. Mouth, then cunt, then they want the ass, then they want to watch you swallow, then they want to sleep on you so you can’t leave.”
Raja sat up slowly.
“Thirty-seven?”
“Mm.”
Vivek’s voice was smaller.
“And tonight?”
Puja looked at Sanjay when she answered.
“Tonight I talked too much. That’s new.” Her gaze dropped to his bare wrist, where last year’s thread had been. “Tonight nobody tied anything. We only remember. Last Rakhi. The knot. Your hand after. Every year on Raksha Bandhan it becomes this. You say Bhaiya like it still means protection. Then those same hands come here.”
She touched her own breast, then lower.
Silence again. Soft. Heavy.
Then Raja said, “Come here.”
“No. Sofa is nice.”
“Puja.”
“I’m watching you suffer. It’s entertaining.”
Sanjay got off the bed first.
He was still tired. It did not matter. He walked to the sofa. He did not grab her like a client first. He took her wrist—the place her fingers had worked last year when she tied him—and held it the way a blessing is held. Only then did that same hand travel: inner forearm, waist, the underside of her breast, the nipple tightening under a palm that last Raksha Bandhan had been promised something cleaner.
She let him.
Half protest. Half memory.
“Bhaiya,” she whispered. “Last year I tied you. This year your empty wrist is on my tit. That’s the whole festival now.”
“I know.”
Vivek and Raja were already moving, grabbing, hauling her back onto the mattress between three bodies that had no business being hard again and were. Three bare wrists crossed her skin—Sanjay on her breast, Raja on the curve of her hip, Vivek’s fingers at her throat when he turned her face. No new thread. Only the knowledge of where it had sat.
