I am Maria Eduarda. People who want to live call me Duda. People who are losing an argument call me Maria Eduarda, every syllable a little weapon. I am twenty-six. I live above a bar in Botafogo that I own half of, brown hair with mechas the colour of burnt sugar, long enough that I tie it up when I am about to fight and it still escapes. My breasts are silicone. I chose them. I like the weight, the way they hold a shape in a black top when the rest of me has been on my feet for ten hours. They are not a secret and they are not a joke. Lower, I am a problem of a different kind. When I come hard I squirt. Not a party trick. A fact my body does whether the room is ready or not. Most men get proud or get frightened. I have not decided which I hate more.

Davi is the other half of the bar. Thirty. Handsome in the way that makes suppliers knock the price down and makes me want to throw a lime at his head. We have been at war since the second month, which was the month he changed my Sunday playlist and called it a correction. We fight about the ice, the lighting, the…