PRETTY FLOWER... CHAPTER THREE - by Khadijah Mohammed

Chapter three... Some Kind of Freedom The months that followed were the worst of Amber's life, and she had already lived through more than most people survive in a lifetime. The clients Madame Loranne sent her way were the ones nobody else wanted — rough men, cruel men, men who paid less and took more. Her body kept a record even when she tried not to. Bruises in places that didn't show, because Madame still needed her beautiful enough to sell. She stopped looking in mirrors. There was no version of her face she wanted to see anymore. It was one of the other girls, Blessing, who told her the truth, whispered late one night when the house had finally gone quiet. Timothy hadn't been caught alongside her. Timothy hadn't been dragged into the courtyard or felt the whip crack against his own skin. Timothy had walked into Madame Loranne's room three days before that morning in the storage house and told her everything himself. "He sold you," Blessing said, "for his own peace with Madame. That's the only kind of love men like that know how to give." Amber didn't believe it at first. She spent a night convincing herself Blessing was lying, jealous, mistaken. But the more she turned it over, the more it fit — the way Madame had known exactly where to find them, exactly when, no search required, no guessing. Someone had told her precisely where to wait. She cried for three days after that. Not the kind of crying that makes noise, because noise cost you privileges in that house, but the quiet kind that leaks out of a person even when they're scrubbing a floor or feeding a baby, the kind that doesn't stop just because you have work to do. Rose was six months old by then, and Amber held her through most of those nights, rocking her in the dark, thinking about how she'd once believed a man's roses meant something different than what they turned out to mean. Then came the Sunday. Madame Loranne had been unwell for nearly a week, coughing through the house, snapping at anyone who came near her with more force than usual, until one morning she couldn't get out of bed at all. Two of the men carried her out to a car and took her to the hospital, and for the first time in longer than Amber could remember, the house felt like it was holding its breath. Nobody was watching the girls the way Madame watched them. Nobody would notice, not for hours, maybe not until evening. Amber looked down at Rose, asleep in the cot beside her cardboard bed, and made a decision she would spend the rest of her life turning over in her mind. She measured out a small dose of the same sleeping medicine that had quieted so many nights for both of them, enough to keep Rose settled and safe for a few hours, no more, and pressed a kiss to her daughter's forehead before she left the room. She needed to breathe air that didn't belong to Madame Loranne. Just once. Just for an afternoon. She dug out her one good dress from the bottom of a box she kept hidden beneath a loose floorboard — blue with small white polka dots, a dress she'd bought for herself in the very first weeks after she left home, back when she still believed a girl could build a whole different life for ten thousand naira a night. It still fit her, loosely now, her body thinner than it used to be, but she put it on anyway and looked at herself properly in a mirror for the first time in months. She looked decent. She looked, for just a moment, like a girl who had never set foot in that house at all. She slipped out through the back gate the workers used for deliveries, the one Madame's usual watchers never bothered to guard on a Sunday, and walked until the brothel was well behind her. The town knew her, or thought it did — she passed a few faces that flickered with recognition, quickly looked away, quickly looked back. She didn't stop for any of them. She wanted to see the parts of the town she'd never had reason to see, streets she'd only ever heard mentioned by clients bragging about somewhere better, a market she'd never once walked through as a customer instead of a body for sale. So she kept walking, past the edge of everything familiar, into the city. It was there, outside a small shop with its shutters half drawn for the Sunday quiet, that she saw him. He was young — not much older than her, she guessed — and handsome in the kind of clean, unhurried way she'd almost forgotten men could be. He wasn't looking at her the way the men from the house looked at her. He was simply standing there, waiting for something, glancing up the street, and when his eyes landed on her, he smiled like he had absolutely nothing to hide. "You look lost," he said. Amber opened her mouth to tell him she wasn't. She wasn't sure, in that moment, whether it was true.

Pretty Flower

Referral Earning

Points-to-Coupons