Damaged Goods

  I was plagued by three problems: I didn’t want Will working on the Suburban, I didn’t want him anywhere around me, and I didn’t want to feel like I was in his debt. I wanted him to forget about me like I’d tried to forget about him. However, blurting all that out would blow my cover . . . or whatever wasn’t already blown of my cover. If I said something to acknowledge him, I didn’t doubt Will would get right back to his string of questions, and those were questions I wanted to avoid at all costs. Those questions were a Pandora’s Box I didn’t want to open. Keeping the lid sealed on those babies was almost as high of a priority as avoiding the person asking those questions.

  “All right, I’m leaving now. Nice talking.” Will sighed before his footsteps moaned down the stairs. “Maybe I’ll see you around. Hopefully.”

  I was as hopeful as I wasn’t that Will’s farewell words would come true.

  IT WAS FRIDAY night again. My one week stripper-versary. Not exactly something to get the party hats and confetti out for. After working my first Thursday Night College Night, I was convinced Thursdays and colleges were the creation of the devil. There was no other explanation for the whirlwind of wickedness I’d witnessed last night. The college guys drank a lot more than the rest of the clients, they were twice as loud and obnoxious, and they were about a hundred times more confident than the average Joe. Not to mention they were fiscally challenged, which meant I had to work twice as hard for half as much. What did that equate to? A night that had mastered the art of suck.

  As epically awful as Thursday night had been, I was dreading one night even more. Friday night. V.I.P. night. Tonight.

  Not because a certain someone was scheduled to make a reappearance—if he actually did show up, I wasn’t sure if I’d be more overcome with the urge to slap him or the desire to kiss him—but because the possibility of him showing up, minuscule as it might have been, was there. That fraction of a percentage—that fraction of a fraction—was enough to unsettle every nerve in my body while it scrambled whatever else was left. If Will came walking through that door again, I didn’t know what I’d do and, as it generally always was, not knowing was the hardest part.

  The only thing I knew was that I couldn’t trust myself around him. So not knowing what I’d do around him, combined with the knowledge that I wanted to smack him as strongly as I wanted to crush my mouth to his, made for a perfect storm. I liked control. I thrived off of it. I wanted it as much as I needed it, and even though I’d been powerless to control my environment for the majority of my life, I’d always been able to control myself, control how I reacted to my surroundings. I’d mastered the art of self-control until the day Will had burst into my life.

  Now control was a foreign concept. If I couldn’t control myself around him, the only logical solution was to never be around him. Outside of work, that wasn’t a problem. I could hide out in my trailer and play invisible as many times as he wanted to show up looking for me. But when I entered through that back door at The Body Shop, I had no control over staying away from Will.

  He hadn’t shown up at the club since last Friday night, but that didn’t mean he never would. That didn’t mean he couldn’t slip into a chair in front of the table I was dancing on or join the table I was circling a pole on any minute he chose to. Outside of work, all the power was in my court. Inside work, all that power transferred to his court. I hated abdicating power, to someone like Will most of all, but as dancing was seemingly the only way for me to make money, I couldn’t just walk away because of Will’s potential to make a reappearance. When and if he did, I’d just have to figure out how to deal.

  Figure out how to deal . . . Yet another story of my life. So many stories, so few happy endings.

  I was pushing the clock again when I pedaled up to the back door of The Body Shop. It took me about an hour to bike the ten miles to work, but since I’d left later than normal, thanks to getting into yet another battle with Paige, I’d had to really push it to get there in time. Which meant I was a panting, sweaty mess. Which, of course, made Bird Brain—I’d affectionately nicknamed him—grace me with the smirk to end all smirks.

  “Nice night for a bike ride?” he asked as I chained my bike to a pipe.

  I didn’t know why I bothered chaining it. The lock and chain had cost as much as the bike—a whopping five bucks. Last week, five bucks had been a fortune. This week, after making the money I had, five bucks could have been construed as a drop in the bucket.

  “Nice night to be a glorified rent-a-cop?” I smirked back as I waited for him to open the door.

  He lifted an eyebrow and waited.

  “Really? After one week of this routine, you still require me to give you my ‘name’ before you grant me access to the Taj Mahal?”

  “No name, no access,” he said with a shrug.

  “You know my name.” Bird Brain. I kept that last remark to myself, but no promises I would tomorrow night.

  Another shrug. “You’ve got a forgettable face.”

  And you’ve got an ugly one. “Noelle. First name, Noelle. Last name, Bite Me,” I said in a syrupy voice, giving him an overdone smile.

  He checked my name off on his clipboard before swinging the door open. “Here’s a free piece of advice—take a shower before you take the floor. You smell a little skanky, and since you already look it out there, we wouldn’t want to paint the whole skank picture. That’s just too predictable.”

  I resisted the urge to knee him in the nutsack, set my jaw, and let my mind whip off all of the nasty responses I wanted to fire at him. Really, though, Bird Brain wasn’t worth it. I had a V.I.P night to get ready for, which meant no time for drama and, more importantly, no energy for it.

  I rushed to the changing room, keeping my fingers crossed that Jake hadn’t decided to go for another theme night. The masks last Friday had been quite possibly the worst idea of the decade, and ever since Cherry’d mentioned Jake’s fondness for Maid to Order night, I’d been holding my breath and practically praying I wouldn’t find a feather duster waiting on my changing table.

  I exhaled my relief when I burst into a room full of dancers wearing a variety of outfits. No theme night. Thank God. I flashed Cherry a wave before rushing for the shower room. As much as I didn’t want to take a single piece of advice from Bird Brain, I needed a shower after that all-out bike ride. I was the only one in the shower, but it wasn’t like I was worried about privacy. Working in a place like that—where walking around with your boobs on display came standard—all inklings of modesty were long gone in a week’s time.

  After shampooing, I lathered up with body wash in shower-taking record-setting time. I had forty-five minutes to get my hair dried and styled, makeup on, and my outfit into position. For the average woman, forty-five minutes was plenty of time to get ready for the day, but I wasn’t the average woman anymore, and I wasn’t getting ready for the day. Telling a stripper to get ready in forty-five minutes was like telling any other woman to get ready in five—both basically required a miracle.

  I dried off, slowing just enough to carefully pat my nether-region. I’d taken Cherry’s advice and plucked my cat bare last weekend, and I’d regretted the decision ever since. Mainly because every time fabric touched it in any kind of a manner that wasn’t feather-gentle, I cringed in over-sensitive pain. It was like removing every single hair that was supposed to be there had exposed every last nerve, and they were taking payback seriously. Cherry kept assuring me that the day would come when my lady business didn’t feel like an open wound every time something grazed it, but I wasn’t taking bets on that.

  “How much longer are you going to ride that bike into work, Noelle?” Cherry asked as I skidded up beside her with a towel around me.

  Thankfully, Jake had put my vanity beside Cherry’s. The total number of co-worker friends I’d made this week was one, and that was the redheaded soccer mom by day, highly-sought-after stripper by night to my left. I’d made a hell of a lot of co-worker enemies though. As evidenced by
my vanity neighbor to the right glaring at me with such contempt, it seemed the only reason she was filing her nails was so she could better claw my eyes out.

  “However much longer I work here,” I answered Cherry, looking away from nail-filing/clawing girl. “Which hopefully isn’t much longer.”

  Cherry laughed. “That’s what they all say and, other than you, new girl, the next newest girl has been here for two years. If I didn’t live so far away in the opposite direction, I’d come pick you up myself, but the only person who’s almost as late as you every night is me.” Cherry dabbed a few drops of jasmine essential oil on her neck as I plugged in my hair dryer.

  “Thanks, but I kind of like to bike. Something about the fresh air clears my head. Gives me time to think, you know?”

  “That’s exhaust you’re mistaking for fresh air, sweetie. On that stretch of highway, this time of year, there’s no shortage of it either. Really, you should get a car. It’d be safer, faster, and you wouldn’t have to push your body another ten miles after the million and a half we do out there every shift.”

  I sat in the chair and pulled open my dresser drawer, fumbling for my wide-toothed comb. “I like the exercise.”

  “Why? Because we don’t get enough of it in here?” Cherry gave me that look I’d grown all too accustomed to. It said she saw through my shit and wasn’t buying an iota of it.

  I replied with a tight smile and cranked on my blow dryer. I should have known better than to hope a blow dryer would persuade Cherry into silence though. The girl loved small talk, or talking about the not-so-small stuff, as much as I didn’t like to talk about any of it.

  “You ready for your dance tonight?” she hollered above the din of the blow dryer. She scooted her chair next to mine so we were both sharing my vanity.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  Cherry lifted one eyebrow while she took an eyebrow pencil to the other.

  “Yeah, I know so,” I corrected with an eye roll.

  “There’s the girl I’ve spent the past week training for three hours after every shift.” Cherry patted my cheek. “My little girl’s all grown up.”

  “And flashing her boobies for the whole world to see.”

  “I’m so proud.”

  I flashed the blow dryer in her face and stuck out my tongue.

  “Do you have any client appointments in the V.I.P. room tonight?” she asked.

  If there was a basement in this place, my stomach had just dropped into it. “Um . . . no. Not that I know of.”

  “And I take it from your tone that you’re still not ready to talk about your last experience in the V.I.P. room?”

  “Not ready now. Not ready ever.” I clamped my mouth shut.

  “I don’t know what you’re so tight-lipped about, Noelle. We’ve all had our fair share of slip-ups and mistakes in that room. You wouldn’t be the first girl to land her ass on the floor when she was going for a corkscrew on the pole.”

  Yeah, but I was probably the only girl to make out with the client. Who also happened to be my next-door neighbor. Who also happened to be the club owner’s good family friend. Who also happened to be the person I need to have wiped from my memory bank. Instead of spewing all of that, I went with a half-hearted shrug.

  Cherry stayed quiet long enough for me to finish drying my hair. The only reason I got that reprieve was because she was outlining those ginormous lips of hers. It took a solid two minutes to line those babies and another two to fill them in with color and gloss.

  “So,” she said, smacking them together, “what were you doing before the prestige and power that comes with this job?”

  I huffed before rolling my Velcro rollers into my hair. “I was an accountant.”

  Cherry nodded as she grabbed one of my rollers and rolled a chunk of my hair onto it. “You know, I could see that. You strike me as more the accountant type than the stripper type.” She smiled at me through the mirror. “It’s that flat expression of yours. It’s like you’re tallying every smile you give to make sure you don’t get overextended and possibly audited.”

  Instead of giving her a shove, I handed her another roller. “I’m joking. I wasn’t an accountant, nor did I have any plans of becoming one. I was in college.” I swallowed and focused on getting the last of my hair rolled into place instead of letting my mind wander back to my life pre-Body Shop.

  “No shit? College?”

  I shrugged then grabbed my makeup bag from my duffel bag. I upended the contents on my dresser table. Time to layer on five pounds of makeup in five minutes.

  “I went to college too.” Cherry scooted her chair back over to her table and put the finishing touches on her makeup.

  “Yeah? When did you drop out?” I wondered if she’d made it to her junior year like I had, only to say sayonara the week of spring finals.

  “I didn’t drop out. I graduated.”

  My forehead wrinkled, which wasn’t the ideal facial expression when I was trying to apply foundation evenly. “You graduated?”

  She nodded. “I’ve got the degree framed and hanging in the family room. I even graduated with honors . . . cum laude. So just barely with honors.”

  “What did you get your degree in?”

  “High Profit Stripping. I went to Hedonism University, graduated from the School of Sin.” When my head snapped in her direction, Cherry tossed a wadded-up tissue at me and laughed. “Journalism. I got my degree in journalism. I wanted to be a news anchor one day. You know, be in front of the camera, inside thousands of people’s living rooms, delivering the day’s news. It sounded so . . . glamourous.”

  “And it wasn’t glamourous?” I guessed.

  “I don’t know. I never found out. I was working here my last two years of school, and when it came time to find an adult job, I figured out real quick that I’d have to take a serious pay cut to get a job as a journalist. And by serious pay cut, I mean a hundred thousand less a year.”

  My eyes bulged at the number, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. If this past week was any indication of the kind of money I could expect going forward, I’d be a member of the six-figure club too if I rode it out for a year. Which I could only hope with every fiber of my being I wouldn’t do.

  “I mean, I thought that’s why people went to college. So that when they graduated, they could do what they love in life and make decent money doing so,” Cherry said.

  I would have settled for doing something I liked and making so-so money.

  “But that’s when I realized that I already was doing something I loved. I was already in front of the camera, in a way, entertaining people every night. I liked being a dancer, and I really liked the money that came along with it.” Cherry winked at me. “So I framed that fancy diploma, hung it on the wall, and showed up for my shift here that night . . . and every night since.” Cherry grabbed the bottle of baby oil and lotion she’d mixed together, squirted some into her hand, and rubbed it into her legs. “Listen, I get it. For you, this is a necessary evil. Plenty of other girls feel the same way, and there are other girls like me who’ve made stripping their chosen career. It’s like any other profession, Noelle. Some people grumble their way through their job, and some smile their way through it. At the end of the day, it all comes down to a matter of choice.”

  After that, Cherry was quiet as she finished rubbing in her lotion/oil concoction before slipping into her ten-inchers. She’d said a lot in the span of five minutes, but the one thing that had caught my attention was the last thing she’d said—that it was all a matter of choice. How I dealt with this job was a matter of choice. How I dealt with my life was a matter of choice. How I dealt with anything and everything was a matter of choice. I could set my jaw and make it all a chore, or I could lighten up a bit and smile through it. I wasn’t sure which option I preferred, but I couldn’t stop thinking about both options.

  When I was almost done with my makeup, Cherry stood and rested her hand on my shoulder.

  “Do you need help w
ith anything else?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Thanks though.”

  “I’m going to hit the floor a few minutes early then. See if I can tag the highest mark before the rest of these slackers make it into their thongs.” Flashing me another wink, she weaved through the room before shoving out the door.

  Cherry’d just left when my phone buzzed. When I pulled it out of my purse and saw who’d texted, I sighed. January, my friend and co-worker from back home—back at my old home—had been calling and texting like her motto was If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And by “try, try again,” I mean try times a thousand. I knew she was concerned and just calling to check in and make sure I was okay.

  The thing was that I wasn’t okay—not the way I had been when she’d known me. So how could I answer her when I knew she was looking for reassurance? I could lie, but January could smell bullshit almost as well as she could pour a shot blindfolded. I could tell her the truth, but what good did that do? So obviously, my choice had been to avoid her, to erase her messages and hope she’d give up and forget about the Liv Bennett she’d known. I’d been able to do it, so I didn’t understand why she couldn’t.

  This message, however, got my attention. If you don’t return my message(s), letting me know you’re alive and not buried in some unmarked grave on the side of some backroad, I’m calling the police and filing a missing person’s report. You have until 9am tomorrow. Friend.

  So she was pissed. Rightly so. And worried. Just as rightly so.

  There was no reason to leave January in suspense or have her call the police and file a report, because I didn’t doubt for one second that she wasn’t bluffing. Filing a missing person’s report would alert the authorities, who’d eventually show up at my house and find out that my younger sisters were under the care of their older sister. Who wasn’t their legal guardian. Who also happened to be a stripper. That was a whole heap of disaster I wanted to avoid.

  I took out my curlers and slipped into my outfit before texting back: I’m fine. Sorry for the radio silence. Things have been . . . crazy. Miss you.