Down Payment

The deposit used to be twenty thousand. Now it is fifty, and the gap gets wider every month. Sophie has stacked shelves and tutored after school. It is not enough. What is enough, so far, is the hour she steals in her own classroom once the building has gone quiet.

Phone on a music stand. Skirt, tights, blouse into the bag. A challenge for the regulars: make her come while she plays, naked, and she will take requests for the rest of the hour. Chopin has not done it. Mozart has not done it. Tonight she has promised them Brahms, thirty minutes, and she has promised herself she will finish the piece even if they finally break her.

She is one clasp away from the piano when the door handle moves.

Deborah only means to be kind. She calls Sophie's name, tuts at an empty room, and takes the handbag so it will not be stolen. She closes the door behind her. The stream is still live. The clothes are gone. Sophie has a phone, a bra, and no way to walk five miles home.

The lost-and-found is locked. The spare key is three floors away. A gym shirt from the box barely reaches her waist, and then that tears. A towel from the changing room is the last thing she has to throw. Two girls who should have left hours ago are still in the building, and one of them has already seen a blonde woman with nothing on.

Sophie tells herself she can end the show. The tokens say otherwise. Every corridor is a risk and a donation. Every near-miss keeps the audience paying. By the time she is shut in a locker with two students on the other side of the door, the down payment and the orgasm have become the same problem.

Down Payment is an ENF story about money, a school after dark, and a private stream that stops being private. A music teacher who calculated the risk. A colleague who took the bag. A building she has to cross before she can get dressed again.