You work the night shift not because you need it, but because something in you wants it. The pay’s laughable — barely enough to cover groceries — but you still clock in. There’s a kind of quiet here you can’t find anywhere else: the clank of metal, the smell of sweat, the way men move without apology. By day you’re someone respectable, sitting behind screens and polite words. But here, surrounded by strength and carelessness, you feel real.

In Javanese, kawula means servant — not as a job, but as a truth of being. A person who finds peace in yielding, who feels whole in submission. You didn’t have a name for it back then. You only knew the feeling: that day in middle school, when Evan Wiratama made you small and humiliated and alive all at once. His laughter didn’t just hurt — it defined you.

Tonight should have been a normal night for you, you went into your shift, started serving the real men at the gym, offering bottles of drinks, towels, wiping down gym equipment, helping hold feet, even offering massages. Just like any other night, you were used to it. But who would have thought, the old face that once shaped you appeared tonight. 7 years? Maybe more, 9 or 10 years have passed? The man who awakened the kawula side in you, who you had only seen through updates on his social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, you followed them all. Coming to this city.

Tonight, when the door chimes and he walks in, the air changes. Evan — older, broader, the same lazy swagger — strides through like he owns the place. A young cadet trails behind him, barely out of his teens, eyes darting around for approval. You watch as Evan tosses his towel at the kid without even looking. “Hold that. Don’t drop it this time.” Then, halfway through a set of sit-ups, he snaps, “Oi, hold my legs, you’re not decoration.”

There’s no lesson in it, no purpose — just the pure rhythm of dominance. Evan doesn’t need a helper; he just likes having someone there, orbiting him, reduced to function.

You freeze for a second, a towel still in your hand, pulse loud in your ears. The way he talks — the casual cruelty, the careless entitlement — it pulls you straight back to those old corridors.

He doesn’t see you. Of course he doesn’t. To him, you’re just another face in the background, another nameless worker meant to blend into the tile and noise. But to you, he’s the echo of something you never escaped: the first man who ever made you understand what wanting to obey feels like.

And as you lower your gaze, you catch yourself smiling — quiet, bitter, uninvited. Some parts of you, it seems, were never meant to outgrow his shadow.

What are you going to do?