Page 3 of Cherry Auction

BROOKE

Five minutesearlier

I breatheout and stare at myself in the brightly lit mirror after the stylist spends over two hours on my hair and make-up.

Like every mirror I’ve looked at the past eight weeks, a stranger stares back.

Who am I?

My hand lifts unconsciously to the mostly healed bash on the side of my head that landed me in thehospital two months ago with no memory of how I’d gotten there. Or any memory. At all. Even of my own name.

The long, lank dark hair I’ve been pulling back with a tie is now glossy and slightly curled in a cascading fall over my shoulders. My brown eyes look bigger somehow, with longer eyelashes that make me look startled when I blink at myself.

Virgin. Auction.

Holy fuck, I’m really doing this.

“You look beautiful!” Moira says gleefully, popping up in the mirror beside my face with an excited smile. “Quinn! Look what a grand job they did. She looks so much better!”

I bark out a laugh, grateful for the relief of tension. This past week was a harrying ride of introductions, contracts, and NDAs. And that was all between setting up my own bank account and getting settled in at Moira’s apartment, not to mention buying a wardrobe of clothes, which Moira insisted on charging to her card.

I met Moira at the women’s shelter—she volunteers there—and she let me crash at her place when they released me. I all but latched onto Moira andmadeher be my friend as soon as I met her six weeks ago. I might not know my own name, but it’s been nice to feel like there’s still some sort ofmeinside—a personality that lights up when I’m around the right people.

Moira’s got these big brown eyes that make her look all innocent and sweet, but she’s actually bawdy as a sailor. She loves sex and is unapologetic about it. She’s always tellinghilarious stories about her latest hijinks—and she doesn’t shirk on the details. Turns out I swear like a trucker, so we fit like peas in a pod.

Some people with amnesia wake up and find they still speak a foreign language. I woke up telling people thatfuck, I’ve got to go shit a cunting brick.

I didn’t have a purse or phone on me when I showed up at the hospital, so they assume I got mugged. I’ve scoured the thin folder of medical records they gave me like a detective seeking any clues to my own life:

Female. Estimated between twenty-two to twenty-four years of age. No broken bones. No evident sexual trauma at the time of the attack. Good teeth, but no dental records to be found anywhere. That made them think I grew up off grid or abroad, but I don’t have an accent of any kind. No surgical scars or anything else that could give them clues about my identity.

I’m perfectly healthy apart from the blow to my temporal lobe that caused significant trauma to my hippocampus.Thatlittle detail from the doctor’s report, I can pull up with perfect recall.

But anything before blinking groggily awake in the hospital in downtown Dallas?

Nothing. Zilch. Blank canvas.

But that’s not really true. Iwassomebody. And she’s still a ghost inside me. I wake up shaking from nightmares I can’t remember, feeling cold down to the bone.Hernightmares. Ihave to turn on all the lights afterwards each time. Whoever I was—whoever Iam—is scared of the dark.

“Moira,” chides Quinn from the corner of the elegant changing room. “Don’t make it sound like she wasn’t beautiful before they put all that shit on her face.” Quinn stands with her arms crossed, intimidating in sleek black head to toe latex.

“Of course she is!” Moira says to Quinn, then makes eye contact with me in the mirror again. “Of course you are. You’re justmorebeautiful this way.”

She says it so without guile, I laugh again and turn to hug her. “I love you to bits, M.” Really, she’s made it all feel as smooth a ride as something like this could be.

Right now, we’re in a back room of the club,Carnal, with tons of bidders from what Moira casually described as “Billionaire’s Row” out front.

She seems so unaffected by wealth, but then again, she’s around it all the time with her rich brother, I guess. I still haven’t met him; everything’s been so busy. They weren’t always rich, I know from some of the conversations we’ve had. Moira grew up in poverty back in Ireland, but she still seems at home wherever she finds herself, in some of the fancy places she’s taken me this week or back at the women’s shelter. She got to the states when she was young, so she doesn’t have an accent anymore.

I’m generally so overwhelmed by the details of every room I enter that I’m just wide-eyed wherever I go. I couldn’tstop staring at everything at the salon earlier when Moira and Quinn took me to get my long hair trimmed a couple inches.

“You can still back out,” Quinn says.

“I’m fine.” I suck in a deep breath. “I’m doing this.”

“Or at any time,” Quinn keeps at it. “You say no, and we call it all off. This isn’t like some medieval shit. We’re all about consensual play.”

I look the stranger in the mirror in the eye and declare, “I want to play.”

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