One More Year: The Romantic Path of Ana Lee (The Path Less Taken Series Book 1)

by SJ Cavaletti

  SJ Cavaletti

  One More Year

  The Romantic Path of Ana Lee

  First published by Paideia Publishing 2020

  Copyright © 2020 by SJ Cavaletti

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Third edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  To my best friend in high school. You know who you are.

  Contents

  Acknowledgement

  Prologue

  Larry

  Sean Connery

  Carlos

  The Challenger

  The Cuban Unravelled

  Cirque

  Reappearance

  Wobbly Stilettos

  Sweep Me off My Seven Inchers

  Vincent

  The Apartment

  Pete

  Doubting Doter

  Like Grace Kelly

  What’s Love Got to Do With It?

  Everyone Needs It

  Angel of the Sea

  Charming

  Roll Me to the Bank

  Blood is Thicker Than Water

  Poorest Rich Girl in Town

  Just Because You Can

  One More Year

  About the Author

  Also by SJ Cavaletti

  Acknowledgement

  I want to thank Bridget Chun from the incredible podcast, Romance at a Glance, for offering me her lifelong wisdom as a romance reader and reviewer. I was a fan of Bridget and Shani as a consumer, devouring the ladies’ amazing laughs, astute commentaries and being comforted by their open-mindedness. For the love of all that is holy, if you love romance, and especially if you don’t have many people to talk to about your love of saucy books, check out this podcast. It’s like jamming with old friends about the stories you love.

  Thanks again, Bridget for all your help!

  Romance at a Glance is a podcast that uses romance novels to dive into candid conversations about life, relationship dynamics, and sexual desires. As hosts Bridget and Shani review books and interview some of romance’s biggest authors, they explore the breadth of the genre, openly embracing the sex, diverse couplings, and taboo in order to create a safe space for listeners to be exposed to different lifestyles, fantasies, and to pique their naughty curiosity. Expect 100% honest reviews, spontaneous singing, life lessons, indecent anecdotes, and bawdy humor.

  Prologue

  Don’t judge a book by its cover. This is a great idiom. It generally means that you shouldn’t determine the value of something simply by eyeing the outward appearance. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Nobel Prize winners Kahnman and Tversky but they made successful careers out of proving the impossibility of this task. There is no. such. thing.

  Although there are academic arguments to the contrary, I did not ever believe myself to be prejudiced in any huge way. I was open-minded, have had diverse groups of friends, interests… Even though I am very intuitive, I would patiently wait to make a judgment of character. I found I liked almost everyone and had no enemies. Saying that, I had few true friends as well.

  I wonder, do you live by this saying? Do you think you know all upon first glance? Few of us like to admit we are racists, bigots or sexists. But do you think someone that decides to wear upscale clothes is classy? Do you think someone who lives on the posh side of town is ambitious? Or perhaps spoiled? Do you think a doctor is intelligent? Is a lawyer curious? Is a banker a crook? Is a prostitute a drug addict or a slut?

  My name is Ana Lee and I entertained for a living. Depending on your bias, you may have various ways of describing this. But, for now, and to leave semantics to scholars, I was a stripper.

  Those years of my life seemed about one thing. The endgame was supposed to be money. I never could have imagined, that during those years of dress up and filter, I would see myself more clearly than ever before. And that beyond this inner growth, being a stripper enabled me to grow outside of myself too, and eventually find my soulmate.

  Though Carlos is likely now someone else’s prince, someone else’s sugar daddy or even someone else’s husband, he was put in my life to fulfill the first and most important step anyone needs to make in order to love and be loved.

  I needed to feel worthy.

  It doesn’t matter if others judge you, you’ll never feel worthy if you’re the harshest critic of all.

  Larry

  People trust me. They always have and I certainly hope they always will. I don’t know why an introvert like me cares so much about winning trust but I do. And that is why, without fail, I met Jamie and Angelica for a shot of Patron at the beginning of every shift. Brick Road was a place full of friendships, some fleeting, based on great music and altered perceptions (aka drugs) and some that would last a lifetime for deeper reasons. We did have a lot of time to get to know each other after all. We got to spend a lot of time around the water cooler.

  Strippers become friends in many ways but perhaps the most typical was to make a killing off the same customer, at the same time, and then celebrate with the spoils afterward. It was no different in our case. I’ll never forget Larry, not only for bringing me many nights of laughter and fun but also these two special women that have carried me through some torrid times.

  Rewind several months…I hadn’t made many friends at Brick Road yet and I was still in the dressing room putting on my shoes when one of the floor hosts, Teddy, came through on the house mom’s radio, “Do you have Ana back there?”

  Ah, what’s a house Mom you ask? The house Mom makes sure everyone gets out on the floor on time. She has supplies for any emergency: false eyelashes, bandages, mints, nail glue, nail polish… The house Mom makes sure that arguments in the dressing room don’t get out of hand. She helps the DJ shuffle around stage performances if you need another moment to finish your dinner. She soothes your soul if a customer is unnecessarily rude and she will tell you if you have lipstick on your teeth. It’s a very important position of management but one that is often taken for granted.

  At Brick Road, she was a he. Our house Mom’s name was Angelo, a mid-forties Latino man of splendor. He had gorgeous flowing black locks, chiseled cheeks and jawline and had a Benjamin Bratt thing going on. He was a great looking guy but in an unassuming kind of way, blending in with the wildflowers but impossible not to miss his individual beauty. In time, this California poppy became an advocate for my soul.

  Angelo replied to Teddy’s request “Indeed, she’s here. And?”

  “Can you send her up?”

  By this time I had buckled my shoe and had already made a move toward the door. I gave a little nod and blew a kiss to Angelo; he winked with a smile. Love and light was what he was.

  Getting called up from the dressing room before even hitting the floor to suss it out was usually a godsend. It either meant that a regular had come by or that one of the floor hosts was certain you could pull from a customer. I didn’t hesitate in running up the stairs to where Teddy was usually stationed, near the
entrance of the whimsical Champagne Room.

  Brick Road, as the name suggests, was decorated in the vein of the Wizard of Oz. The stage was like the yellow brick road itself, a smooth acrylic top speckled with gold sparkle. The poles were ruby red and green lighting illuminated the backing mirrors. The rest of the club was decidedly on point but not the least bit tacky. On the night I auditioned I was told the infamous set designer from the San Francisco Opera had created the interior. I never verified this fact but it certainly was more ‘Wicked’ than ten dollar Halloween Dorothy.

  I actually loved working in this club. The staff members were respectful, the girls were generally clean and the customers did not expect much. I’d say my job was much like the average psychiatrist’s: sofas and drugs to make people feel better. I used my brains more than my beauty to pay my bills and my feet never ached at the end of the night.

  This is why Teddy called me upstairs. He had a talker and he needed a girl that could keep up.

  I walked straight into the Champagne Room which was a VIP area with extra large sofas, a bit more quiet and intimate. In one corner of the room a short, unassuming man sat in a booth. He wore a great suit. Stylish, but conservative. My guess was that he was mid-fifties. He looked like a financial services type, East Coast, probably Jewish. I know that I’ve said to never judge a book by its cover but some jackets are pretty descriptive.

  “Well, you must be Ana,” said the man, pronouncing it wrong.

  “Indeed… but it’s Ah-nah, please, if you don’t mind.”

  I sat down immediately as I knew that once a customer detected the warmth of the human body it was harder to say no. Not that I was worried. In the time we had done our greeting I could see that this guy was pretty amped up on uppers and would have likely spent his first paid 30 minutes with anyone just to keep his jaws moving with a purpose.

  Teddy laughed in his coy but gentle way, “I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Turned out the guy’s name was Larry, he was a New Yorker, in town for a credit card conference and asked if I was Jewish (a question which did not verify my last assumption about him but gave me confidence).

  Before we move along to the entertainment that was the darling little Larry, I’d like to take a moment to linger on his Jew question. You may be wondering what I look like and why he asked if I was Jewish. I am a typical blonde haired, blue-eyed girl next door. I have always thought myself about a seven or eight out of ten, pretty in an approachable, unassuming way. I’m neither tall nor short, thick nor thin. I would not hesitate to use the word generic to describe my appearance. As such, my looks, in spite of not being the most beautiful dancer in the club, worked very well for me. Somehow, people were able to project many a personality, ethnicity or background on me. My strength was to tap into that part of me that a customer wanted to see and let it shine. I never lied about who I was, not at all. I found it boring and hard work to do so. But when people really want to see something, they have a way of not asking questions that allow for dismissal. Customers have called me Jewish, Russian, French, Californian, illegally young, a dumb blonde, a couple years older and many things in between.

  Back to Larry. He didn’t care if I was Jewish, pretty or anything in between. He wanted to know what I was up to in the present. I told him my usual easy, short version which was that I wanted to travel the world and that the job gave me the money and flexibility to do so. He was satisfied with that and we talked about our favourite locations on the globe. This easily passed the thirty minutes for which he had paid and with a few minutes left I ordered two shots of tequila.

  When they arrived, we clinked our tiny glasses together. “So, are we in or are we out?” I asked cheekily.

  I could see in his eyes he was thinking A LOT. He went from being relaxed to pensive. I needed to resolve his questions before Teddy came back.

  “Larry,” I said, scooching a little closer to him so that I could speak quietly in his ear, “Are you riding the white horse?”

  His eyes opened wide and lit up. “Is it that obvious?”

  Oh, the cute innocence of a middle-aged man on cocaine.

  He leaned over for his own whisper to reach my ear, “So, Ana, I would really like to stay longer with you, but I need two things” he paused and hesitated before saying, “Some panties and a baggie would keep us here all night.”

  I never could have guessed that this guy would have been willing to pay more than six hundred dollars for a pair of my underwear to take home. And, unlike many of my Japanese customers, they weren’t meant to have been already worn… not by me, anyway. Larry’s big reveal: he had been cross-dressing in secret for years and had arrived in San Francisco that evening from NYC after Victoria’s Secret had closed. The underpants I could supply, the drugs I could not.

  In order to complete his request I needed a bit more help. It took little time to convince him to bring in a couple more girls with supplies and conversation. I asked Teddy on the sly who might have some powder and he suggested Valentina (soon to be known in real life as Angelica). Charlie (whose real name was Jamie) ended up being his suggestion for someone who would love to talk to a man in a lace thong. Extra voices never go amiss at a party.

  Here’s a good place to stress that this was not the norm at Brick Road. Not at all. Most guys wanted to have a chat, perhaps about their wives, jobs or golf… not cross-dressing. And, I never would have trusted anyone but Teddy with this request and information. Brick Road was a very clean club. Drugs were a serious offence and many were fired without warning. Sexual acts, which were defined in our contracts as “ the deliberate touching of the breasts, penis, vagina or anus” (seriously), were met with immediate dismissal. That said, drugs still happened and the other stuff did, too. It just wasn’t out in the open nor was it standard.

  I trusted Teddy deeply. We knew each other from the last club I danced at where for some reason or another he simply decided to look out for me. I never asked him why. It just always felt right, like brothers and sisters. He even helped me pay my deposit the first month as I transitioned from a mouse infested flat in the Mission to Russian Hill after leaving my “real” job and before I had enough to live the luxurious life of a well earning stripper. In the first year we had known each other we had spent Thanksgiving together, Christmas together, birthdays together and I had been one of only three friends that had been invited to attend his father’s funeral. Supporting a grown man crying creates foundations.

  We were true solid. We also both knew that the economics of the Larry situation would work out in our favor respectively. Dancers and customers alike tipped floor hosts generously for breaking the rules and turning a blind eye. On top of bribe tips, tonight, Teddy would be getting finder’s fees as well- the most common tip of all.

  Floor hosts were there to make sure guys stayed in line, the dancers stayed in line and they were all, in their own way, outwardly intimidating types. Of the floor hosts I actually spoke with, two came off like Italian mobsters, one like Chinese mob and one was Teddy, a six foot and then some black man whose stature was his threat. The truth was, Teddy was a gentle giant but had a way of getting people to do as they were told. True, people initially paid attention because his size was impossible to ignore but the way in which he spoke invoked mystery. He was quietly spoken and he would make suggestions rather than orders. He usually spoke with a subtle cocked grin that made you wonder. It wasn’t easy for customers to see whether or not his suggestions were actually veiled threats.

  The first night I noticed his dynamics was at the old club. It was a bad night in the club, and the only guy I hadn’t spoken to was one who I could see was handsy. He had already pissed off a few of the girls by taking it a step too far but he was spending money on dances. I needed to not go negative on house fees so I gave it a go. It didn’t take long before Hand Man was rubbing my thighs. I kept myself facing him as I wouldn’t have put it past him to try an attack on my panties. No surprise, he then slid his hands over my butt. The next
thing I know, Hand Man’s eyes widen. He’s looking behind me. I turn around and there’s Teddy.

  “Hey bro,” he said to Hand Man, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Do what,” asked Hand Man.

  “That,” Teddy’s eyes and head moved toward my ass.

  Hand Man looked at Teddy carefully. He looked at me. Then he said, “Never mind, we’re done anyway.”

  I stood up and bent down to grab my skirt from the floor. I started to turn and walk away but Teddy gently put his hand on my shoulder and said ever so kindly to Hand Man, “Nah… I’m sure you can manage another dance. Just keep your hands by yours side.”

  Subtly, both Hand Man and I came back together and did as we were told. We had one more dance, he didn’t touch; obeying suggestions, not orders.

  Years later, back at Brick Road Teddy helped me get the other girls, panties, and drugs in situ and it began a night to remember. After Larry put on his panties under his sleek suit he was a changed man. I can still recall the exact look on his face as he re-entered the Champagne Room. He looked blissful, calm, even relieved. It was the kind of look one has when one turns around and faces the guests in church after saying, “I do.”

  If you are anything like I was before becoming a dancer, you probably assumed that every guy that enters a strip club is looking for a cheap thrill; a crotch rub with a knee and an ass in the face. That does exist. My trips to Vegas, where the clubs really are about naughtiness and excess, include the goal to do around eighty, twenty to sixty dollar dances every night and spend half of it seeing shows and clubbing. At my home club, I would rather engage one or two customers for an entire night. But, in many clubs, even in Vegas for that matter, conversation is a key feature of the services offered.

  Think about this: why would a guy with a wife or a girlfriend (most customers aren’t single) go to a strip club when they could get off at home for free? The answer is not what you are thinking. The answer is: men are lonely. Men and women alike struggle to maintain intimacy and vulnerability in long-term relationships. When this happens, most women can lean on a girlfriend, which gives them a sense of belonging and togetherness. But not men. Men don’t usually tell their buddies that their boss’ testicular cancer diagnosis has upset them or that they wonder if they are around their kids enough to be a good dad.