Forgive me a close reading of this story. It’s an occupational hazard.
The best part of this story is “the little pink toenails” which give the reader a sense of the girl’s age and her innocence, that she is maintaining an attempt at innocence in the horror of her world, but the story misses the mark several times. What pimp allows a marketable young girl to spend the night with one customer? Were his friends that wealthy that they could pay for hours and hours of her time? He notices her age, “too young,” but skips over that and doesn’t consider that it might be her age which hampers his performance. He feels no remorse for assaulting her but is concerned with her coming out of her shell with him. “The baby turtle realized she was not dealing with a seagull.” Way too romantic. Way too cutesy in a story about prostitute. Sounds like a girl writing a boy’s story.
And word choice: “later that night we managed to make love.” Make love, really? Was she involved romantically in this bumbling first attempt? Managed to? Were there multiple attempts? This doesn’t mesh well with the prostitute situation. She was not making love. She was in effect being raped, albeit for money. She couldn’t have had the experience to see this as her opportunity to teach a young man how to make love to a woman in the old “prostitute as sexual teacher” mode. This character is not believable. Her character is written as though this were her first time with her high school boyfriend on a blanket in a moonlit meadow, not a scared, abused child who would take every opportunity to hide in a corner when her predator moved away. She would not write his name in the steam on the window and smile when he awoke as though she were waiting to bring him a bagel and coffee for breakfast. Not believable.
The core of this story is improvable. The idea of her pink toenails catching his attention is a key point which could be played out. He could remember her innocence. He could feel guilt, work harder at rescuing her, become the real hero, not the bumbling teen he is. He could be conflicted by his testosterone-driven opportunity to be as violent as he wishes in the loss of his virginity with his awakening sense of her own loss. Her pink toenails could become the trigger for the male character’s evolution. Good fiction requires change in its characters. These characters are static.
Keep working on it.
