Chapter 2: The Pact in the Mirror
Enya stood beside the tall mirror in her bedroom, one hand resting on her hip as she studied her reflection beneath the warm yellow glow of the vanity lights. She had abandoned the idea of wearing a dress halfway through getting ready and instead chose an outfit that felt sharper, more confident, and a little rebellious. A fitted black crop top hugged her figure, the design combining sleek matte fabric with narrow mesh panels beneath the bust and thin shoulder straps connected by small gold metal rings and buckles that caught the light whenever she moved. Around her neck sat a slim black choker with a tiny gold clasp, subtle but deliberate. Her white asymmetrical skirt wrapped tightly around her waist and upper thighs before falling into a soft translucent overlay that drifted down unevenly around her legs, giving movement to every step without feeling overly formal. Three small black-and-gold buckles lined the side of the skirt, adding a slightly industrial accent that matched the hardware on the top. Heavy black lace-up combat boots grounded the entire look, their thick soles and worn leather balancing the softness of the flowing fabric above. Her long dark auburn-brown hair fell loose over her shoulders in slightly messy natural waves, glossy under the light and framing her pale sun-warmed skin and calm grey-green eyes. The overall vibe landed somewhere between rooftop elegance and alternative nightlife confidence — stylish enough to turn heads at a summer party. She playfully smiled at her reflection and tested how stretching her top was– she put a finger of each hand under the cup on each side and slightly pushed it aside: fabric easily gave way and her full breasts were momentarily in the open. She put the fabric back and tried a few moves; her top stayed where it should, so it was safe to dance and party until she wanted it removed.
The doorbell rang.
Maryshka arrived just before the lights dimmed, her shoulder-length medium-brown hair falling in soft slightly tousled waves around her oval face, the ends brushing her collarbones with a relaxed, natural volume that looked effortlessly unstyled. She wore a fitted white cropped V-neck “The Strokes” t-shirt made from thin semi-sheer fabric that revealed her black bra underneath; the short sleeves covered her shoulders while the cropped cut left her toned stomach exposed above a high-waisted black denim mini skirt hugging her slim silhouette. Heavy black lace-up combat boots with thick soles and worn leather completed the outfit. Funny enough, they ended up with an asymmetric pair costume: white top and black bottom for Maryshka and black top and white bottom for Enya.
"Not a dress, huh?" Maryshka said, leaning against the doorframe. "Cool. I like this much better."
Enya laughed and invited her friend in. She caught herself envying a bit: Maryshka was a bit shorter than her and with the push-up the bra gave, Maryshka's breasts looked much fuller than hers even if she knew they had approximately the same size– they were even swapping bras when they lived together before. But the look Maryshka had was fantastic. Then they stood both next to the mirror and Enya realized that she also looked great and expensive.
“You look like you’re about to storm a boardroom and then burn it down,” Maryshka said, grinning.
“You look like you already did and stole the t-shirt off the CFO’s son,” Enya countered.
They smiled at each other’s reflections, a brief, silent acknowledgment of the armor they’d chosen. The studio around them seemed to hold its breath, the ghost canvases watching.
Maryshka’s eyes dropped to the small stack of cash and Enya’s ID on the dresser. “Ready?”
“No.” Enya picked up the money, slipping it into a small black pouch she’d wear cross-body. “But let’s go before I change my mind and put on sweatpants.”
They moved through the studio, turning off lights. The space fell into a deep blue twilight, the streetlamp outside etching the easel’s skeleton across the floor again. Enya paused, her hand on the doorframe, and looked back. The blank canvas on the easel was a pale, accusing square in the dark.
“Hey.” Maryshka’s voice was gentle but firm behind her. “It’s just a night. It’s an experiment. Remember?”
“I remember the parameters,” Enya said, her voice flat. “Convertible. Older man. Trio of losers. It sounds like a bad film premise.”
“It’s a checklist. A scavenger hunt for feeling something.” Maryshka nudged her forward into the hall. “Think of it as field research.”
The stairwell smelled of old carpet and mildew. Their boots were loud on the concrete steps. Outside, the evening air was thick and warm, clinging to the skin like damp silk. Maryshka’s car, a beat-up vintage VW Beetle in a faded seafoam green, waited at the curb.
They slid inside. The interior smelled of cherry air freshener and hot vinyl. Maryshka cranked the engine, which sputtered to life with a sound like shaking pennies in a can.
As they pulled into the sluggish Friday traffic, Maryshka turned the music low—a driving bassline that vibrated through the worn seats. “Okay,” she said, eyes on the road. “Final review. So we’re clear. No theoreticals.”
Enya watched the city blur past, the shops and cafes glowing like lit stages. “Review.”
“Item one. The boy. Younger than you. Arrives in, or has immediate access to, a convertible. You get in that car. You ride him. Cowgirl. In the car. Yes?”
The words were so blunt, so stripped of the wine-soaked laughter from which they were born. “Yes.”
“Item two. The older man. Twice your age. You find a dark corner, a toilet, a staff room. You get him to fuck you from behind. His hands are all over you. No holding back. He doesn’t get to be gentle.”
Enya’s throat felt tight. She nodded, staring at a neon sign for a kebab shop as they passed. “His hands. Yes.”
“Item three.” Maryshka’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “The trio. The biggest loser of them all. You give him a topless blowjob. His friends watch. He finishes on your chest. The… optional charity work after is at your discretion. As is my potential involvement.”
The list hung in the air, denser than the humid night. It wasn’t playful anymore. It was a set of directives. A demolition order for her own dignity.
“Why are we doing this, Mary?” The question came out whispered, lost under the music.
“Because you’re trying to disappear,” Maryshka said, not taking her eyes off the road. “You want to become a law student, a good daughter, a person who doesn’t make messes. Before you fold yourself into that small, clean box, you need to make the biggest, messiest fucking painting you can. With your body. So you remember what it feels like to be a creature that makes marks on the world, even ugly ones.”
Enya said nothing. She looked down at her own hands, folded in her lap. They were clean. Cool. Inert.
The car slowed, merging into a line of vehicles crawling toward a converted warehouse in the hip, gentrified district by the river. The building was a monolithic slab of aged brick, but its roof sprouted a jungle of fairy lights, neon tubing, and the pulsating thump of a bassline that they could now feel in their teeth. The air buzzed with the collective energy of a hundred conversations, laughter sharp as broken glass, the clink of bottles.
Maryshka found a cramped parking spot two blocks away. She killed the engine. The sudden silence was abrupt, filled only by the distant party hum and the ticking of the cooling engine.
They sat there for a moment in the dark.
“Last chance to go home and watch documentaries about alpacas,” Maryshka said, but her voice lacked its usual mischief.
Enya unclipped her seatbelt. The sound was startlingly loud. She reached for the door handle, the metal warm from the summer night.
“No,” she said. It wasn’t resignation. It was something colder, clearer. A decision. “I made a pact.”
She opened the door and stepped out into the electric night. The pavement felt solid beneath her boots. Maryshka joined her, and together they walked toward the thrumming light, their shadows stretching long and thin behind them, then swallowed by the glare. Enya adjusted the strap of her pouch, feeling the weight of the cash inside, the weight of the checklist in her mind. She didn’t look back.
The walk to the warehouse was a short parade through buzzing humidity and fragmented laughter spilling from open pub doors. Enya’s boots clicked a steady, deliberate rhythm on the pavement, a counterbeat to the chaotic thump of bass growing louder ahead. She focused on the sensation of her skirt’s light fabric brushing her thighs, the tight hug of her crop top, using the physical details as anchors.
Maryshka whistled a tuneless tune beside her, but her eyes were sharp, scanning the stream of people converging toward the same brick facade.
They turned into the designated parking lot, a cracked asphalt rectangle lit by solitary, buzzing sodium lamps that painted everything in sickly orange. Cars were crammed in haphazardly, a mix of dented hatchbacks and trendy crossovers. And there, parked with arrogant neatness near the entrance, gleamed a silver convertible BMW, its black fabric roof down, revealing pristine cream leather seats.
The car looked surgically clean, alien among the urban dust. No one was in it. No one stood near it.
“Oh. My. God.” Maryshka stopped dead, her words dripping with delighted astonishment. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but her eyes crinkled above it. “Who would have guessed there would be a convertible at the indie-rock party?”
Enya’s stomach hollowed. The object of their first theoretical requirement sat before her, glinting under the ugly light. It felt like a trick, a taunt. Her skin went cool.
“Don’t fret yet,” Maryshka said, looping an arm through Enya’s and leaning close. Her voice was a stage whisper of mock consolation. “Usually such cars are driven by someone with a mid-life crisis. No saying if the driver is a man, or younger than you.” She squeezed Enya’s arm, her enjoyment palpable.
Enya swallowed, the noise of the party now sounding distant, muted. She stared at the empty driver’s seat. The pact was no longer a list. It had a location, a make, a model. It had real leather.
A strange, defiant calm washed through her, rising from a deep well of frustration. She was so tired of being haunted by blank canvases. This, at least, was a defined shape.
She found her footing.
“Actually,” Enya said, her voice firmer than she expected. She turned to Maryshka, a tight, challenged smile on her lips. “I wish it is someone younger. From all three reqs we built, I honestly hope it will be this exact one.” She showed Maryshka her tongue, a flash of pale pink in the orange gloom, a gesture from their university days that meant watch me.
Maryshka’s amusement softened into something closer to respect. She nodded once, decisively. “Okay then, soldier.”
They left the convertible humming silently in its pool of light and joined the crowd funneling toward the warehouse entrance. The bass was a physical pressure now, a subsonic throb in the sternum. A bouncer with a bored expression glanced at their IDs, his eyes lingering for a half-second on Enya’s neckline, then stamped their hands with smudged ultraviolet ink.
Inside was a wall of heat, sound, and bodies. The air tasted of spilled beer, sweat, and a cloying fog machine juice that smelled like synthetic cotton candy. The main space was a cavernous former factory floor, now strung with miles of fairy lights that blurred in the hazy air. A stage was set up at the far end, where a four-piece band with deliberately disheveled hair thrashed through a crescendo of feedback and distorted vocals. People clumped in islands, shouting over the noise, their faces flashing in the strobe of a single, erratic laser.
Enya’s senses were immediately overloaded. The careful armor of her outfit felt ridiculous, a costume for a play that had already descended into chaos. Maryshka grabbed her wrist, her fingers tight, and pulled her toward a makeshift bar constructed from plywood and pallets.
“Gin!” Maryshka shouted directly into her ear, the word hot and sharp. “Double! Now!”
They got their drinks in plastic cups, the gin warm and tonic flat. Enya took a large gulp, the alcohol burning a familiar, welcome path. She leaned back against a cool brick pillar, observing. She forced herself to look at people not as humans, but as potential matches for the checklist.
A group of boys near them, maybe twenty, wearing identical vintage band tees and too-clean leather jackets. They jostled each other, laughing too loud, their eyes darting around to see who was watching. Possible candidates for the trio, she thought with a detached, clinical chill. One of them, with a weak chin and desperate eyes, caught her stare. He looked away quickly, his neck flushing red.
Not that one. Too easy. The pact demanded the biggest loser.
Her gaze swept on. A man in his late forties stood by himself near the fire exit, sipping a whiskey. He wore a crisp, expensive-looking shirt untucked over dark jeans, his salt-and-pepper hair carefully styled. He surveyed the room with an air of faint, patronizing curiosity. His hands, holding the glass, looked strong, veins standing out on the backs.
Possible Item two had a face.
Enya’s heart began a slow, heavy drumming against her ribs. She took another sip, the gin not burning enough.
Maryshka followed her line of sight. “See something?” she yelled over a sudden cymbal crash.
Enya just nodded toward the fire exit. Maryshka’s eyes tracked, widened a fraction, then slid back to Enya. She raised her plastic cup in a slow, deliberate toast.
The song ended with a screech of amplifier noise, plunging the room into a momentary, ringing silence before a scattered applause erupted. In that brief quiet, Enya heard her own breath, shallow and quick. The weight of the pact settled on her shoulders, a mantle she had chosen to wear.
She pushed off the pillar. The music kicked in again, a relentless, driving rhythm. The crowd swayed and compressed.
The crowd swayed and compressed.
Enya turned to shout something to Maryshka about the salt-and-pepper-haired man by the exit, her lips parting to form the words. The music swelled, a crashing wave of distorted guitar. A body slammed into her from the side, solid and unsteady, the smell of stale lager and cheap cologne flooding her senses.
Two figures lurched into their space, all blurry grins and glazed eyes. One, a blond guy in a football jersey, wrapped an arm around Maryshka’s shoulders before she could react. His hand found her breast, his mouth finding hers in a sloppy, insistent kiss.
The second, his darker-haired friend, pressed Enya back against the brick pillar. His palm grabbed the curve of her ass through the thin skirt, fingers digging in. His stubble scraped the sensitive skin of her neck as he buried his face there, wet lips and hot breath against her collarbone.
Time thickened, stretched. Enya’s mind blanked, a white noise louder than the band. Her body went rigid, a statue of shock. She felt the press of his hand, the weight of him, the alien intimacy of the kiss on her throat. It lasted three seconds. Four. The world narrowed to pressure and heat and violation.
Maryshka made a muffled sound of outrage, a gasp choked by the drunk’s mouth. Her hands came up, palms flat against the guy’s chest, and she shoved with all her strength. He stumbled back, blinking, a confused leer on his face.
The motion broke Enya’s paralysis. She brought her hands up, not as a push but a sharp, upward jerk of her forearms, breaking the hold around her. Her knee came up on instinct, missing its target but making him grunt and sway backward.
“The fuck?” the blond guy slurred, wiping his mouth, looking between Maryshka and his friend. His eyes tried to focus, the leer dissolving into dawning, horror-struck recognition. “You’re not… Becky?”
“No, you idiot, she’s not Becky!” A woman’s voice, shrill with fury, cut through the din. Two women shoved through the crowd, their faces twisted in anger and embarrassment. One, a redhead in a green dress, grabbed the blond guy’s arm, yanking him hard. “That’s my friend! You absolute piss-head, you grabbed the wrong girls!”
The other woman, her eyes wide with apology, stepped between the darker-haired guy and Enya. “Jamie, you moron! Look at her! Does she look like Clara?” She turned to Enya, her words tumbling out in a frantic rush. “I am so, so sorry. They’ve been texting to find us, they’re wasted, they thought you were us from behind, I’m going to kill them—”
The two drunk boys now looked like chastised children, all color drained from their faces, muttering incoherent apologies. They were pulled away by their furious girlfriends, disappearing into the swarm of bodies, the redhead still hissing recriminations.
Silence pooled around Enya and Maryshka, a sudden vacuum in the roaring room. They stood frozen, two feet apart, staring at each other. Enya’s neck felt branded, the ghost of the wet kiss cooling on her skin. Her ass throbbed where his fingers had been. Maryshka’s lipstick was smeared at the corner of her mouth.
A wild, shaky sound erupted from Maryshka’s throat. It was half-gasp, half-laugh. Enya felt her own breath hitch, then a bizarre, bubbling surge rose in her chest. It wasn’t amusement. It was pure, chaotic release.
They both started laughing.
It was harsh, loud, almost painful laughter that bent them over at the waist. Enya clutched her stomach, tears prickling her eyes. Maryshka held onto the pillar for support, her shoulders shaking. The absurdity of it—the clinical pact, the convertible, the older man, and then this—was too perfectly, horribly ironic.
“Field research,” Maryshka finally wheezed, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Her voice was raw. “Unscripted… participant observation.”
Enya straightened up, the laughter dying into shaky exhales. The adrenaline was ebbing, leaving a hollow, jittery feeling behind. Her skin crawled. She needed a drink that wasn’t warm gin. She needed to not be standing in the middle of this pressing, noisy crowd.
“Side bar,” Enya said, her voice thin but decisive. “Now.”
They pushed through the mass, not toward the main throng, but to a narrower, slightly quieter bar tucked into a brick archway at the far side of the warehouse. It was darker here, the lighting dim amber, the music a duller throb. A few people sat at scattered high-top tables, deep in conversation.
They didn’t speak. Maryshka held up two fingers to the bartender. He slid two shots of clear liquid toward them. Vodka, likely. They clinked glasses, a wordless toast to survival, and threw them back. The fire was clean and sharp, scorching a line down Enya’s throat, burning away the phantom sensation on her neck.
“Two Moscow Mules,” Maryshka said, slapping the empty shot glasses down. “Doubles.”
They took the heavy copper mugs, the condensation cold and welcome on Enya’s palms. The sharp bite of ginger beer and lime cut through the vodka’s afterburn. They found an empty table tucked into the deepest corner, partially shadowed by a structural beam. Enya slid onto the stool, her back to the wall, wanting to see the whole room.
She took a long, slow drink, letting the cold spread through her. Her hands were steady. She watched Maryshka do the same, her friend’s eyes scanning the space with a new, guarded intensity.
“Well,” Maryshka said finally, her voice low. “That was item zero on the checklist. ‘Get assaulted by mistaken identity drunks.’ Didn’t see that one coming.”
Enya didn’t answer. She was tracing the rim of her copper mug, feeling the precise groove of the metal. The shock was metabolizing into something quieter, more complex. It hadn’t been the violation of the pact. It had been a violation, period. Anonymous, clumsy, and deeply real.
It made the theoretical checklist waiting in the room feel different. Not less dangerous, but differently so. More stupid, perhaps. Or more necessary. She couldn’t decide.
She looked out from their dark corner, past the beam. The party churned on, a galaxy of oblivious movement. Somewhere out there was a silver convertible, a man with experienced hands, a trio of losers. The shapes of her chosen degradations waited for her.
Her neck still tingled. She took another drink, and waited for the feeling to subside, or to tell her what to do next.