Damaged Goods

by Nicole Williams

  “Mr. Playman?” My morbid curiosity got that better of me.

  Jake lifted a shoulder as he pulled the door open. “Mr. Playman’s seen ten times the amount of pussy as any Playboy magazine. That’s deserving of the Playman and the Mr.”

  “Could have done without that, Jake. Thanks so much.”

  “You’re welcome so much. Have a nice night of training,” he said before winding through the now-empty club.

  I’d made it through my first night in a strip club. It hadn’t exactly been successful, or anywhere close to it, but I’d made it. I’d survived. I’d sustained. I’d lived through it.

  The goddamn story of my life—this latest chapter as The Body Shop’s newest stripper included.

  IF THERE WERE a rest stop for beat, I’d blown past it three hours ago. By the time I pulled up to the trailer, it was almost seven in the morning. After just the intermediate-level moves Cherry had demonstrated for me, I’d left the club accepting that she was the pole-dancing guru and I was an unworthy apprentice. Plus, I was pretty sure that at least a dozen of her moves defied the laws of gravity and anatomy.

  Needless to say, I’d looked like a total hack when I tried to replicate the moves she’d demonstrated. The beginner moves. She’d told me that out of all the dancers she’d trained, I was the one who’d caught on the most quickly, but I guessed she said that to everyone. If there were a prize for best tripping and surprised grunting around the pole, however, I was certain I would have been the frontrunner for that one.

  All jokes about traipsing around the pole like an enraged ape aside, at least Cherry and I’d managed to work out a basic, basic routine that would get me by tomorrow night. Or technically, tonight. Just the thought of heading back to that place in a mere twelve hours brought on another wave of exhaustion. I’d worked a lot of jobs, several at once, and none of them held a candle to what I’d experienced at The Body Shop. Didn’t. Hold. A. Candle.

  I knew that had plenty to do with the . . . how should I put it . . . emotional trauma I sustained in the V.I.P. room, but the physical piece was nothing short of daunting. That my body was so worn out after not even dancing in the main part of the club put me in a terrified zone somewhere between substantially and totally.

  I might not have been in the minute-to-minute living phase of life that I had been for the past month, but I wasn’t at the looking-twelve-hours-into-the-future phase either. So I shelved all worries and concerns about what night two in my new career field would entail and slid out of the Chevelle. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d craved sleep so badly.

  Rushing toward the door, I had to keep reminding myself to not glance at the Goods’s place. As far as I was concerned, there was no Will Goods—in either my personal or professional life. That was a concept I’d come to terms with the first night I met him, when he’d made me feel things I never had and never wanted to feel, but only recently had I accepted that as priority number one. There was no middle ground for Will and me. There was no “just friends” relationship we could slip into. When one person could undo everything I was and am and hope to be in a single look or touch or stolen kiss, that was a bright flashing sign from the universe telling me to turn and run.

  Since turning and running wasn’t an option, the only other option was to ignore him. To pretend there was no such thing as a Will Goods. To wipe my mind of him. Easier said than done . . . but that was the way everything in life was. Why should Will Goods be the exception to that axiom?

  After rushing through my front door and locking it behind me, I let out a relieved breath and leaned into the door. I’d done it. As far as worst nights in the history of a person’s life go, I’d lived three of the top five this past month . . . and I’d survived every one. I was ready for a swing of the pendulum. Any day now. Any time. I was waiting with arms wide open for some of that yin, because I’d had my fill of yang.

  As the first one felt so good, I gave myself a second relieved breath before dropping my duffel bag onto the floor and beelining for my bedroom. It wasn’t really mine—it had been Kitty’s—but since she’d left Reese and Paige without so much as a Have a nice life, I didn’t feel too bad about confiscating it. Of course, the entire room had needed to be wiped down from top to bottom, along with the rest of the trailer. And washed. And vacuumed. And sanitized. I’d done pretty much everything short of power-washing the whole damn thing with bleach. It was on a different solar system than luxurious, and I was pretty sure the skeezy hotel’s furnishings were a decade or two newer than the ones in the trailer, but at least it was dirt and needle free and every breath we took wasn’t saturated with nicotine and filth.

  As I passed the kitchen, a figure inside it caught my attention. I didn’t even jump; that’s how exhausted my body was. “Paige? What are you doing up so early on a Saturday morning?”

  Most school mornings, I had to shove Paige out of bed to make sure she caught the bus, but on the weekends, she didn’t normally emerge from her bedroom until after lunchtime. She brought new meaning to the term “sleeping in.”

  “I don’t know. What are you still doing up on a Saturday morning?” She was perched on one of the lawnchairs scattered around the card table—also known as our dining room table—picking at a steaming piece of Shepherd’s pie. Made by the mother of a certain someone I was not going to think about ever again. If it hadn’t been the only source of nourishment in the house until I made it to the grocery store that afternoon, I would have tossed the rest of it out the window.

  “I was working,” I answered with a shrug before reaching into my purse. Pulling out a fifty, I set it on the table in front of Paige. “Why don’t you go out and do something fun today? Go to a movie and get an extra-large popcorn with butter like you love. Or go shopping and get something you’ve really been wanting . . . or needing.” Lately, we’d had just as many needs as wants. “Just do something fun, okay? I’ll pick up groceries after I get some sleep.”

  Paige eyed the bill, almost glaring at it. “Maybe I’ll use that to pay for a few dance lessons. Since I’ve heard dancing can be a lucrative career.”

  Did she know? How could she know? I swallowed. I hadn’t told the girls where I was working yet, despite knowing one day I’d have to. But in a town that small, gossip spread like wildfire, and a juicy bit like one of Kitty Bennett’s daughters winding up at a strip club was too poetic not to spread to every corner of the world.

  “Spend it on dance lessons then. There are worse ways a girl your age could spend money.” I shrugged, acting like Paige’s veiled accusation hadn’t thrown me.

  “And there are better ways a girl your age could make that money.” Shoving back from the table, Paige charged around the table and past me.

  If I hadn’t been so paralyzed by her words, I would have reached out to stop her. She was halfway down the hall before I busted through my incapacitated state.

  “Paige! Where are you going?” I wasn’t quite shouting, but I was close enough. It seemed that along with my physical strength, patience had also taken a hiatus.

  “What do you care?” Paige stopped outside of her bedroom to grace me with a truly hateful expression. “You’ve figured out a way to make money again to support Reese and me. What else could we possibly need besides a handful of bills slipped into an envelope, or a fifty thrown down on table? You’ve taken care of us the way you know how, so let us take care of ourselves the rest of the way. Just like you always have. Stop pretending like you give a shit about us.” Barreling inside her bedroom, she slammed the door with such fervor that it shook the thin walls of the trailer.

  Tonight was just made of fucking win.

  After staring at Paige’s bedroom door for a while, I gave up trying to figure out what to do or say next. She was pissed, and I was exhausted. That was a surefire formula for a non-productive conversation. I’d always known Paige harbored a fair amount of hostility toward our situation and the shitty lottery ticket life had handed us, but I’d never known so much o
f that anger was directed at me. I’d been one of the few people in my sisters’ lives to give a damn about them. I was the one who’d left her brand-new life when they needed me . . . and Paige had the audacity to accuse me of not giving a shit?

  When my blood started to boil as I thought about Paige’s words, I knew I needed to get to bed. My quick-draw temper turned into a genuine rage monster when sleep was in short supply. This afternoon, after I’d slept and hopefully woken to a clear head, I could sit down with Paige and talk this out reasonably. Logically. Get to the bottom of what she was so pissed at because really, it couldn’t be me. Could it?

  I didn’t bother changing out of my clothes when I stumbled into Kitty’s old bedroom. I barely even got my shoes off before I collapsed face first onto the old mattress. The blackness of sleep came at me immediately, but the last thing that flashed into my mind was the way Will Goods’s ragged breath sounded outside my ear.

  IT HAD BEEN another week. It could have been a year. It felt like a decade.

  These past weeks had aged me inside to the point that I felt like an old, crippled woman who ached when she got out of bed and ached when she got back in it. Every time I looked in the mirror, I expected to see the ancient person I felt like, but if my reflection was an indication of how much I’d aged, no time had gone by at all. Or very little. Other than my eyes, which were a shade or two . . . deader, everything on the outside looked the same as when I’d rolled back into Death Valley last month. That my insides could feel so close to wearing out when my exterior hadn’t changed could only mean one thing.

  My life had become one quintessential clusterfuck.

  I danced at night—I stripped at night—and by day, I squeezed in a few hours of sleep between battling with Paige and trying (and failing) to get Reese to open up about anything. Oh yeah, and in between all of that, my primary objective was to avoid Will. That was about the only thing I’d been successful at. The dancing and stripping I was getting better at, but I was still floundering through rookie territory every night.

  Somehow Paige’s and my relationship had gone from complicated to downright explosive. She couldn’t be in the same room as me without blowing her lid within five minutes. The harder I tried to dig to the bottom of what was causing her recent Liv-loathing, the more volatile she became.

  Reese wasn’t giving me any grief, but she wasn’t giving me anything else either. She’d almost become a ghost in the Bennett trailer, floating about the place silently, making as little disturbance as possible. Thanks to my new job and its long, crazy hours, I couldn’t seem to find the time or energy to figure out what was the matter with her.

  I felt like my guardian report card had gone from a D- to a big fat F. Sure, I was bringing home money that solved problems like food in stomachs, hot water streaming out of the shower, and recommenced dance lessons, but that money seemed to be strangling the intangible things in our household, like communication, our tenuous-at-times-but-always-present sisterly bond, and general concern. If there were a sea of apathy on the North American continent, the Bennett trailer in Death Valley would have been smack in the middle of it.

  The girls still didn’t know where I was working Thursday through Monday nights, or at least not that they’d let on. If they did know, it sure wasn’t because I’d told them. I wanted to tell them before they found out secondhand, but given the present time, energy, and volatility constraints, I’d shied away from it every time I worked up the courage to sit them down and explain how big sister was bringing home the bacon.

  Most of the time, I wasn’t ashamed of my job—I’d done what I’d needed to, and that was a sacrifice plenty of others wouldn’t have made—but whenever I stepped inside the trailer and saw their shadowed faces, thick, heavy shame poured over me. Mostly because I’d been telling them for years that they could do whatever they wanted if they stayed focused, worked hard, and didn’t let some douchebag set them off course. And there I was, letting dozens of douchebags tip me for taking off my clothes. I’d told my sisters to use their minds to advance themselves, and I was using my body. I’d told them not to let this place suck them dry, to do anything it took to keep that town from getting its fangs into their pulse points, and there I was, every last drop of me sucked dry. I was a living, breathing vampire. I lived in the dark, I hid in the daylight, and I felt nothing. My heart still beat, but only out of instinct. Not with any purpose. Not anymore.

  It was three o’clock on Thursday, which meant the girls would be home from school soon and I’d have to go back to work after having a “relaxing” couple of days off. I was deciding whether to hop in the shower or give myself a kick in the ass since I obviously needed one when a knock came at the front door.

  The sound froze me in place in the hallway. Since I’d moved back, I hadn’t heard a single knock on that front door. The only people who ever came to it were one of us girls. We certainly didn’t get visitors or friends randomly stopping by to catch up. Back when I’d been living there before, plenty of people had shown up on the other side of that door, but most of them had been pond-scum men or drug dealers. None of them had ever knocked. They’d pounded on that door like they were taking out their life’s anger on it. Probably explained why it looked like it was about to fall from its hinges any day.

  When another minute passed with my feet still planted to the hall floor, another knock sounded, as gentle and non-threatening as the first. I tiptoed to the door and peeked through the peephole. When I saw who was on the other side, a flood of emotions coursed through me—some good, most bad, but all intense.

  Leave it to Will Goods to unleash in me literally every emotion known to humankind.

  “I know you’re in there, Liv,” he said after another minute passed.

  It didn’t matter how many more minutes passed, I wasn’t opening that door. Or even acknowledging him . . . Then why the hell was I still spying on him through the peephole? I lowered myself from my tiptoes and forced myself away from the door.

  “Your bike’s here by the porch,” he stated. “I should know since I just tripped over it.”

  I’d have to start hiding it in the back so people like Will Goods couldn’t use it as an indicator that I was home. After last Friday’s “incident,” I knew I couldn’t keep driving Will’s Chevelle. So after picking up an old ten-speed bike at one of the thrift stores in town, I’d returned the Chevelle Saturday night before heading to my second shift at the Body Shop. Ten miles of biking each way. That probably explained my mono-like exhaustion. Once I’d parked the Chevelle in the Goods’s driveway, I’d hightailed it out of there. That was the last I’d seen of anything of his.

  Until now. When he, in all his six feet of muscled goodness, had just arrived on my front step.

  I gave myself an internal lashing for that last traitorous thought. I’d managed to not think about him all week, which was a feat that deserved nothing short of sainthood, but that my mind had just gone there—six feet of muscled goodness—meant his absence hadn’t erased my feelings for him. I’d been hoping for an “absence makes the heart grow dead” sort of a thing, and I’d wound up with “absence makes the heart grow crazy stupid.”

  “Plus, I can hear you moving around in there. Kind of hard to be stealthy in this old thing.”

  Only because I was back to watching him through the peephole did I notice him shift on the porch. Proving his point, the porch groaned so loudly that it reverberated inside the trailer. Reason 591 why I hated this hunk of junk: sneaking around inside it, hoping to evade confounding next-door neighbors, was impossible.

  “Okay, you’re still going to play the ‘I’m not here’ act?”

  He waited long enough that it became uncomfortable. I was so uncomfortable that I wanted to shift in place too, but thanks to the traitorous trailer, I couldn’t chance it. Any noise would alert him that I was just on the other side of the door. Or at least alert him to the fact more than he already had been.

  “Is there a reason you’ve been av
oiding me?” he asked at last.

  Yeah, there’s a reason. Pick one. Any one of the million I have over here in this Reasons to Avoid Will Goods Until the Day I Die pile.

  “I mean, did I do something to offend you?”

  Yeah, you undid my whole entire world and slipped out the door without saying a word.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  Yes. And no. I’m mostly mad at myself. I gave my head a swift shake. No, I was mostly mad at him. The harder I tried to convince myself of that, the more it became apparent how much of a lie that was. A few more minutes passed, and all he did was stare at the porch while all I did was stare at him.

  “Liv?” His voice was quieter, almost sad. “Are you there?”

  As I watched those words slip from his mouth, I remembered how his mouth had felt against mine. Remembering that made me glance at his hands, which made me remember how they’d touched me. Remembering the way they’d touched me had me remembering the way his touch had made me feel, and that was all the reminder I needed to remember . . .

  Why I needed to stay away from him. He was the worst possible thing for me. I was lucky to keep my head above water most days, and adding Will into the mix would ensure that the drowning I was just keeping at bay would finally overcome me.

  No, Will. As far as you’re concerned, I’m not here. I never was, and I never will be. I bit my lip and closed my eyes. If staying away from him was so good for me, why did I feel so damn bad?

  “Whatever’s happening between us, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve brought some stuff down, and I’ll start working on the Suburban tonight since you either can’t or won’t bring it up to me, since you either can’t or won’t let me work on it. Since you either can’t or won’t drive the Chevelle anymore, I want to get the car you will drive up and running soon,” he said. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know in case you or one of your sisters saw some strange guy banging away on the Suburban. The strange guy is only me.”