There’s a tight feeling in my gut. Every time I’ve felt it, I end up getting hurt. It’s a little like falling, though. Knowing doesn’t help you stop. There’s no way I can avoid getting close to him. I’m already close to him. There’s no way I can avoid shoving my ass against his dick, dry humping him for a handful of bills.
That’s when he grabs my wrist. I freeze.
“No touching,” I say, my voice low in case one of the bouncers is walking by. They keep a pretty tight watch on the VIP rooms. That’s what I like about this club—at least, I did before Blue became head of security here.
It doesn’t matter that I tried to keep it down, because his voice booms in the small space. “What the fuck do you mean, no touching? What’s the fucking room for if not touching?”
It’s true I’m more likely to let a little groping slide when we’re in private. Especially if I know the tip is going to be nice. But I don’t let anyone grab me. I don’t let anyone hold me down. I’m not a scared foster kid with nowhere to go.
“No touching,” I say again. “Or you can take it up with one of the bouncers.”
Of course that only makes him hold me tighter. He yanks me off balance, and on these heels, I don’t stand a chance. I fall right into his lap, into his arms, in a sick parody of a romantic embrace.
Then his hands are on my breasts, squeezing, twisting, pinching.
I gasp in shock—and then pain. Other than that, I don’t make a sound. My brain is shutting down on me. My body too. I know he’s touching me, hurting me, pinning me in place.
But I also know how to block it out. My body does that automatically now, almost against my will. I could shout and scream. I could fight. But when has that ever helped me?
Not ever.
Some part of me is made of steel—a small, dark part. I’m a metal pipe covered in blood at my core. My arms are pinned, but I can still reach down. I reach for his lap, and it makes me laugh, almost, the way he moans when I touch him. As if he thinks this will get better for him. As if he thinks I will give in. I grip his dick through the cloth of his pants and then squeeze as hard as I can.
He yelps and jumps up, knocking me to the floor. I land hard on my ass, my head knocking against the wall. The chair hits the other wall with a thud.
“You stupid bitch,” he snarls. He’s coming at me.
With one hand on my throat he drags me up the wall.
That’s how Blue finds us. The look on his face is pure rage.
He slams Travis back, pushing his elbow against the man’s windpipe. There’s hardly room for two people in these tiny rooms—and not three. Definitely not three when one of them is bellowing breaths like a bull, when his muscles are bulging and he looks like he’s about to charge.
Without a hand on my throat, I slide to the ground, sitting my bare ass flush against the cold concrete floor. I’m trembling. How am I trembling? I have enough experience for this not to affect me.
There will never be enough experience.
This is my life, but I’m still not used to it. I’m still afraid.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Blue says, his voice deadly even, belying the wild look in his eyes. “If it were up to me, you’d leave this club crawling on your fucking hands because I’d have taken a bat to your knees. Understand?”
He waits until the guy gives a quick, wide-eyed nod. The sound of his choked gasps fill the space.
“Instead I’m going to let you walk out of here. Your ass. On the street. Got it?”
There is a pause where I imagined the guy arguing with him. No way. It’s not fair. It’s my fucking party. I’ve heard every one of those excuses. I know Blue has too. Maybe that’s why he seems to lean in, pressing his forearm harder on the guy’s throat until he chokes and sputters and nods his head.
“Good.” Blue steps back, and the guy slumps against the wall. “Now get out your fucking wallet.”
Now the guy does argue, his voice thin and wheezy. “I’m not paying her. She didn’t finish the fucking dance."
“You should’ve thought of that before you put her in a choke hold. Now pay up.”
The guy must realize he’s lost, especially when Blue looms in the opening, the only way out. A handful of bills are tossed around me like confetti. I watch one land on my knees with a sense of unreality. It’s all so strange—being hurt, being used. And Blue coming to save me. So strange and yet familiar too.
Blue drags the guy outside and disappears for long minutes. Only when Candy appears to help me up do I realize he’s not coming back.
* * *
Candy leads me through the floor, ignoring the curious stares of the customers.
She’s one of my fellow strippers at the Grand—and my only friend. When we started here, we were both young and hustled hard. On top of the fucking world. Just a few years can change all that. Maybe I was still young in years, but it felt like I’d been dancing and fucking and fighting off men all my life. And really, I had been.
She knows almost everything about my past, more than I know about hers. So she wasn’t surprised to find me practically catatonic on the floor of a VIP room. It didn’t used to bother me—when men grabbed my wrist, when they forced me. They’d have to really hurt me to get a rise. But lately I’ve been getting more sensitive. In this profession, that could be dangerous.
Because the Grand had once been a fancy theater, there’s an enclave with a musty sofa between the dressing room and the showers. Candy settles me there and covers me with some kind of blanket. I don’t even know where she got a blanket—maybe it’s a cape from someone’s outfit.
She leaves my side for a minute, and in her absence, I hear the chatter from the girls.
What’s wrong with her?
She think she’s too good to work?
Someone fucked her up.
They know better than to talk about us where Candy can hear. She’s the queen bee, and I wouldn’t exactly call her a benevolent ruler. But I can’t blame them for wondering. Yeah, someone fucked me up. It shouldn’t matter if a customer touches me. If they rough me up. I should be able to shake it off, but I can’t. So I guess I do think I’m too good to work. At the very least, I’m too broken.
And as for what’s wrong with me? That list is too fucking long.
Candy returns with a glass of something that’s definitely not water. “Drink,” she says, pushing it into my hands.
It burns on the way down. “Shit. What is this?”
Then she puts something else in my hand—a small white pill. “Swallow.”
“I charge extra for that.”
She gives me a faint smile. “Come on. You’ll feel better.”
“That’s what they all say,” I grumble. But I take the pill, swallowing it down with whatever liquid’s in the cup. I don’t know what either of them are, and it doesn’t really matter. Candy always has the good shit. That’s what I need right now—good shit to make me feel human again. To make me forget.
I feel the warmth spread through me almost immediately. It’s like she’s taking care of me, giving me milk and cookies in the form of alcohol and drugs.
The girls in the dressing room are quiet again, only murmuring to each other or back out on the floor. After all, we’re here to work. And even if they wanted to gossip, Candy remains by my side.
“You can go,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “For what? The crowd’s too fucked-up tonight. It’s not worth it.”
That’s a lie. It’s always worth the money to work a crowd that’s hot. Even if it’s a little dangerous. Fuck, this job is always dangerous. That’s why we show up night after night, because it’s worth it.
She’s staying for me, because she knows I don’t want to be alone right now. How does she know that? Why does she care? Even though I know we’re friends, it’s hard to trust that. It’s hard to believe in it.
“How’d you know to come find me there?”
I can’t read the look she gives me. “Blue
.”
“Oh.” I shiver. “He handled the guy who messed with me. Can you give him a tip out from my stash?”
Tip outs are money paid to the bouncers and other staff members for helping us. Like if the DJ cuts you out of the lineup so you could work the floor longer or if a waitress brings extra drinks around to get a client spending. The client wouldn’t exactly tip the staff extra for their service—they especially wouldn’t tip a bouncer for throwing them out. So the girls say thank you with cold hard cash.
Curiosity fills Candy’s blue eyes. “You can’t do it yourself when you see him?”
“I don’t want to see him tonight.” Or ever, but that’s hoping for too much.
Hoping for anything is too damn much.
“Then don’t. Blue isn’t going to stop doing his fucking job because you didn’t pass him a twenty.” Her smile is sly. “In fact I don’t think he’s going to stop watching over you like a hawk no matter what you do.”
I shiver. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
The Grand doesn’t have mandatory tip outs per night. It’s optional. The owner, Ivan, is a scary fucking dude—but he’s fair. For that reason and many others I won’t strip at another club. Even so, we still sometimes tip the staff for going above and beyond, and I definitely want to pay Blue for what he did.
I don’t need to owe him anything more.
She shrugs, one slender shoulder rising and moving the pale pink silk ruffles of her bikini top. “Why are you so sure he hates you? From where I sit, it looks like he wants to fuck you.”
“What’s the difference?” Hating. Fucking. They’re the same thing. I swallow hard, forcing down my fear. And my desire. There isn’t much difference between those two either. “We have history.”
“Oh no, honey. You can’t tell me that and then just stop.”
I sigh. “It’s not a pretty story.”
“Those are the best kind.” She pats my feet, and I scoot them out of her way so she can curl onto the couch next to me. It feels good, having her close, feeling her body heat. Comforting.
I was never the girl with a bunch of friends in school. I got moved around too much for that, foster home to foster home, wearing clothes that didn’t match and didn’t fit. I learned early on that if a boy liked me—if the toughest, meanest boy in the school liked me—then no one else could touch me.
So I learned to make that boy like me however I could. Until Blue.
“He was in one of my homes. My foster homes.”
Candy says nothing, just strokes my ankle lightly, her gaze on the empty dressing room we can see from the sofa. Maybe she knows it’s easier to talk if she isn’t looking at me. I wonder what secrets she’d have to tell if I stopped looking at her.
My throat gets tight as I think about those first days when Blue showed up. I’d been scared of him. Turned on by him. Confused by him. And by the end, he’d made me the happiest I’d ever felt then or since.
“I got him in trouble,” I whisper.
“What, like you told on him?” Candy’s words are challenging, almost mocking, but her voice is soft—like she knows. She knows that whatever happened between us, it was more than pulling pranks and sibling rivalry. “Was he doing something bad and you told someone?”
“No, just the opposite,” I say, my voice thick. “He didn’t do anything wrong. But I said he did. That’s why he hates me. Because of me, because I lied, he got sent away. And one of these days, he’s going to pay me back.”
Chapter Three
I guess it’s an acquired taste because by the second glass of this stuff, I’m feeling really good. I’m almost floating; that’s how good it feels. Though maybe that’s because of whatever pill Candy gave me.
That stuff should just be…breakfast. I should have it every morning and go through the rest of my day like this, seeing beautiful things everywhere. Even the crack in the wallpaper in front of me looks beautiful. The corner of this sofa cushion with stuffing poking out looks beautiful.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell Candy.
She giggles. “And you’re drunk.”
That is probably true, but her laugh sounded very drunk too. I think we might both be drunk, and that seems like the greatest thing ever. Every day men are coming in here getting wasted while we work our asses off. Now it’s our turn to get drunk.
I sigh with total relaxation. “I never want this night to end.”
“We should just not end it,” she says seriously.
“God, that’s a good idea.” It’s actually the best idea I’ve ever heard. I never want to leave this couch, never want to stop floating, never want to crash. “Let’s just stay here.”
“It’ll be like a sleepover, except without the sleeping.”
I raise my glass, which is now sadly empty. “And with alcohol.”
She tilts her head. “Did your sleepovers not have alcohol?”
“I never had a sleepover,” I confess. “I also never had friends. Or, you know, a house where they could sleep at.” Not unless I wanted them getting pawed by whatever foster father or brother happened to live there. Which I did not.
“That’s sad,” she says, sounding like she’s about to cry.
Suddenly I feel like I’m about to cry. And then I am crying, tears wet and thick down my cheeks. God. I’m so drunk. “No, really,” I say, sniffling. “What the hell did we just drink?”
She just smiles with her eyes closed, head leaned back on the sofa like she’s sunning on the goddamn beach. “Happiness.”
Silence fills the small lounge for a brief moment before we both bust out laughing. I don’t even know what’s funny, except that it is. The dressing room is quiet and dark. All the girls have packed their shit and left. It must be late. Or early.
I squint toward the doorway as if I’ll somehow be able to see outside that way.
And then I can’t see anything. There’s just a broad chest filling the opening. A chest I did not want to see tonight.
Even if it is a very nice chest. Beautiful, even.
I want to cry again.
“Ivan wants to see you,” he says.
Candy stiffens beside me. We both know he’s talking to her. Ivan is the only person, man or woman, who intimidates her. And I think he might enjoy doing it.
She pouts. “We’re having a sleepover.”
Blue’s lips twitch. “Is that what I should tell him?”
“Of course not. That would only make him jealous.” She stands and crosses toward the door—somehow steady even though I can’t sit upright. Blue steps aside, and she turns back to wink at me. “Don’t wait up.”
My cheeks heat as Blue studies me. Could she have been any more obvious? I don’t want to give him any ideas. Not that I think he’s struggling for them. No, I can feel him thinking, calculating, weighing what I’ve done every time he sees me.
I don’t even see him cross the room. Suddenly he’s standing right in front of me, his eyes narrowed. “Are you drunk?”
“God,” I say. “No.”
I’m not sure why I say that when I must smell like I bathed in whiskey. And he doesn’t exactly believe it. If anything his expression becomes more severe. “Are you high?”
“Nooo,” I say, drawing out the word as if that will convince him. Or at least make him stop looking at me. Because it’s uncomfortable in a twisty, hot, itchy way. “I would never do that.”
“Liar.” His voice is mild, but I know he’s not just talking about right now.
“I don’t owe you anything,” I shout. Then I cringe, like he might slap me. Tears sting my eyes. I need to get control of myself, but whatever was in that bottle and that pill, whatever happiness means, I can’t seem to think straight.
“Christ,” he mutters.
“Don’t hurt me.” My voice is small and weak, and I really wish I’d stop saying everything I feel.
He just studies me, judges me. Another man might reassure me. I’m not going to hurt you. But he doesn’t say that. He does
n’t lie. We both know he’s going to hurt me, even if he hasn’t yet.
And if I’m really honest, he already has.
“Let’s get you home,” he says instead.
“I don’t need your help.” But when I try to stand and tumble into his arms, I prove myself a liar. He’s strong and firm and warm. Like a bear. I think he’s like a big beautiful bear. And even in my drunken state, even now I know you’re never supposed to run from a bear.
“You can barely stand up, much less walk.” He sounds disgusted. “I can’t believe she got you high knowing you’d have to walk through one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city.”
“We were having a sleepover,” I sniff.
He doesn’t respond to that. Instead he leans me against a wall and finds some clothes in my bag. He holds them out to me. “Get dressed.”
I don’t take them. Clothes seem so complicated. I mean, I’m a stripper. What’s even the point? Taking them off, putting them on. “Why?”
“Because if you go out into the street like that, you’ll start a fucking riot. Now get dressed.”
He shoves the clothes at me, and I catch the shirt while the sweatpants fall at my feet. It’s not that I want to philosophize about clothes right now. It’s just that all the holes and directions seem like a puzzle. And I can’t really bring myself to care. Or stand up straight.
“Christ,” Blue says again, but with more anger. I like that because it seems more honest.
And beautiful. He’s so beautiful when he’s angry.
He takes the shirt back and helps me put it on. Then he puts my legs into the pants and pulls them up.
It takes me a few moments to process that. He just dressed me like a doll. And now he’s talking to me, saying something like, can you walk?
“Duh. Can you walk?”
He shakes his head, but I don’t think he’s saying no. I think he’s frustrated with me. “God, Hannah.”
I flinch, because that’s not my name anymore. I’m Lola now, fierce and sexy. On top of the fucking world, that’s me. Hannah is my old name, the old me. The one who gets pushed around. The one who gets touched.
Dark Romance Collection: A Sexy, Dark Bundle Page 46
