Always in My Heart

by A. C. Arthur

  Eva, he could now see, was not.

  “Thank you for today,” she’d said as she reached for the door handle to get out of the truck. “I really appreciate you introducing me to your brother, and your family.” She said the last with a little chuckle.

  He’d smiled too. “I wasn’t really counting on all of them being there. But I guess I should have figured they would be. Actually, the only ones missing were Bree’s older sister Lynn and her husband Brice. Their son, Jeremy had a soccer tournament this weekend. Still, they can be a lot to digest all at once, so I’ll apologize if they made you uncomfortable.”

  “Oh no,” she’d replied, shaking her head. “I had a good time with them. I didn’t know how today would turn out, but I’m actually glad I accepted your invitation.”

  “I was happy to extend it,” he said, not wanting her to get out of the truck. “How about you call-in sick and we go somewhere for a late dinner?”

  “No,” she replied immediately. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why? I haven’t been such a bad host today, have I? I mean, I think I only hit on you once considering we spent over an hour standing in a room full of naked sculptures.”

  She laughed again and Rico thought he’d never heard anything as endearing. She was very pretty, a small dimple appearing in her left cheek when she really laughed. Her skin looked so smooth, he barely resisted the urge to rub his fingers along the line of her jaw, or to pull her close and kiss her mouth softly.

  “I’m a working woman, Rico. I need my paycheck and my tips. Calling out is very rarely an option for me,” she told him.

  “I heard you telling Bree that it’s been you and your brother for a long time now. Is he much younger than you? Do you support him financially too? Is that why you work here?”

  Because, for the life of him, he could not figure her out. She was beautiful and smart, a talented dancer and painter. So why wasn’t she doing one of those things professionally? Why this club and why be a stripper?

  “I have a responsibility,” she said. “To myself and to my brother. I know you may not understand it, since I’m sure I’m not the type of woman you’re used to meeting, but it is what it is. This is my life.”

  Her words had been said so simply and matter-of-factly as if there was no reason to ever question them. Yet, Rico did. She was so much more than what she thought she was and he hated that she couldn’t or wouldn’t see that.

  She’d stepped down out of the truck and ran—as it had begun to drizzle—into the side entrance of the club, while he’d sat behind the wheel watching her go.

  This was it, he thought. She was gone and now he could leave as well. Sure, the weekend wasn’t technically over, but he’d had the terrific sex he’d planned for last night, and he’d assuaged his guilty conscience for not paying her by taking her to the gallery to meet Renny. They were now even and he could just drive back to the hotel, order room service and check his emails. In the morning he would check-out and head home to his normal life.

  So why was he driving further up the street to where he’d glimpsed a parking spot?

  Rico had never been in a strip club before. Sure, he’d attended a few bachelor parties where strippers were the main attraction, but those had been in hotels or rented venues, never in an actual strip club. He’d shaken his head as he paid the cover charge and walked inside, listing another “first” for this trip.

  It didn’t take long, he thought, about fifteen minutes after he’d arrived and had found a booth seat way in the back of the place. Her name was announced by a woman dressed in a long black silk robe with more sparkling things on it than a Christmas tree. The room was pretty dark, with most of the light coming from the small purple holders in the center of each table and the spotlights that surrounded the stage. It was a simple introduction, one that resulted in immediate applause from the just about full house of men and, to Rico’s surprise, women.

  When the curtain opened the applause was still going as the eerie intro to The Weeknd’s “The Hills” began to play. It wasn’t a song that Rico listened to frequently, but Gabriella loved to blast anything by The Weekend while she was working out, so he’d just heard this song a few days ago. But never, not in all his dreams, would he have imagined watching someone dance to this song, the way Eva was now doing.

  The first thing he noticed was that her hair had changed. She’d put on a wig, with long curly hair that moved over her skin, brushing the heavy mounds of her breasts the way he figured each man in this room wished his fingers could. Her outfit was simple and yet jaw-dropping at the same time—a red thong, with rhinestones marching down the back disappearing between the plump globes of her otherwise bare ass. The top was red also, with more rhinestones, this time lining the top edge of the bra so that it almost made the generous cleavage she displayed appear highlighted by the sparkling. The shoes she wore were silver, with dangerously high heels that she moved in as easily as if she were barefoot.

  The crowd was captivated by her.

  Rico was captivated by her.

  It seemed like much longer—a lifetime perhaps—but was most likely only seconds later when she ripped the bra away, tossing it across the stage, her breasts jiggling with the motion, as something like glittering stickers covered her nipples. The crowd went wild, people immediately jumped out of their seats and headed for the stage. Rico’s dick had grown so hard, his eyes so glazed as he’d been watching that he couldn’t move. Forget about moving, right about now, breathing was a task.

  She dominated that stage and the attention of every one in that room as she moved. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, even though he wanted to when he saw the men rushing up to tuck the dollar bills in the ban of her thong. More money was tossed on the stage as she danced from one end to the other, giving the crowd exactly what they wanted. A part of him, the very primal part, wanted to pull her off that stage and sink his length deep inside of her once more. Especially when she lifted one leg, stretching it straight up while her hand gripped the heel of her shoe, to keep the leg upright. Rico had immediately recalled holding that same leg up while thrusting in and out of her last night. He recalled it and damn, he wanted to do it again.

  All of these thoughts were in immediate contrast to the possessive part of him, the part that hated the fact that her breasts, and just about every other inch of her body was bared for these strangers to ogle and fantasize about. That part wanted to run up there and carry her away from this madness. But he couldn’t. This was her job. Eva Romaine was a stripper. It was her life, as she’d told him not too long ago. There wasn’t anything he could do about that. Nothing, he should want to do. He shouldn’t have come inside. Going back to the hotel and checking his email now seemed like a much better idea.

  Yet, Rico still did not move.

  He couldn’t.

  Not until the song was over and Eva was taking a bow. She bent low at the waist before coming back up to smile at the crowd. That’s when she saw him. Rico felt her gaze as it locked with his, through that dark room and over all those people. He stared and so did she. Until the curtain began to close and she hurriedly backed up behind it before the material was caught around her body.

  He was up and out of his seat in seconds, heading back toward the bar, and the walkway he’d seen other staff members using.

  “Whoa, there, handsome. Just where do you think you’re going?”

  A woman—wait, Rico did a double-take—yes, it was a woman, dressed in jeans that sagged just a bit below her waist and a black t-shirt that didn’t quite hide the curve of her breasts, and black Doc Martin boots. She’d stepped into the doorway he wanted to walk through to get to Eva, and now she had a hand flat on his chest as if that were going to be enough to keep him there. Actually, for the sake of not making a scene, it was enough. Still, he frowned as he looked down at her hand, then back up to her face. She’d cut off all her hair, until the barbered style was closer to her scalp than Rico usually received.

  “I need
to see someone,” he told her, again looking down at the hand that was still pressed against his chest.

  A slow smile began to spread across her light-skinned face.

  “You wanna go back there and see Eva Romaine, I bet,” she said, before shaking her head.

  “That’s big bucks, my man. And you’ve got to wait over there in one of the booths for her to come out,” she continued.

  “Now you know Eva don’t do no booth work,” the bartender, who for some reason had come all the way to the end of the bar to enter the conversation, announced.

  “I don’t want her in any booth,” Rico told them. “Look, if its money you want. I’ll pay whatever the fee is, I just have to get back there to see her.”

  He’d already pulled out his wallet and was getting to the bills when one of his business cards almost fell from its slot. The woman finally moved her hand then, to reach down and scoop it up before Rico could be shocked that she’d done that in the first place.

  “Ricardo Bennett,” she said as if tasting the name to see if it satisfied her. “You some fancy pants corporate guy, huh, Ricardo?”

  She was waving the card back and forth in front of her face like a fan. “A fine ass fancy pants,” she added, looking him up and down. “How much you willing to pay?”

  “What’s the regular fee?” Rico asked.

  “There ain’t none for Eva, ‘cause she don’t do no booth time. I said that already,” the bartender, with the long rusty colored beard stated.

  “How much you willing to pay for that ass?” the woman continued. “I can set it up so you have a real good time, Ricardo.” She moved closer to him, this time rubbing the edge of the card along Rico’s jaw. “A really good time. What you think about having two along for the ride?”

  “He thinks that’s gross,” Eva said as she pushed through the black curtain that served as a door. “One man, one woman, and one, whatever you’re trying to be. No thanks, Nadja.”

  Eva now wore a short gray trench that was belted tightly at her waist. She still wore the silver shoes she’d had on while dancing and the curly wig was still affixed. Grabbing Rico’s arm she pulled him away from the woman he now knew was named Nadja.

  “Let’s go,” she told him.

  He followed her out of the club without another word and without looking back.

  They weren’t outside two seconds before she released his arm and whirled around to face him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? That’s where I work, Rico. Where I dance and nothing else. I told you before, I’m not a prostitute.”

  The wind had picked up since they’d been inside, blowing her curls until they were partially covering her face and she used her fingers to push the hair back behind her ear.

  “I know you’re not a prostitute,” he replied. “I wasn’t implying that you were.”

  “You were going to pay Nadja to let you come back and see me,” she insisted.

  “To ‘see’ you, Eva. That’s all I was going to pay her for.”

  “Well, she obviously got another impression.”

  “I don’t give a damn what impression she got. I wanted to see you. If it meant paying off that petty bouncer, then so be it,” he stated.

  She was shaking her head. “I just don’t understand you. I don’t get why you’re still here. Why you came to see me? Why any of this is happening?”

  “That makes two of us,” he told her. “Look, let me just take you for a drink. We can talk some more and see if either of us can figure out this connection between us.”

  When she opened her mouth to speak, Rico raised a hand and shook his head this time.

  “Please don’t insult us both by denying it. There’s something that keeps pulling us together. I don’t know why and neither do you. Don’t you think we at least owe it to ourselves to try and figure it out?”

  She looked like she wanted to tell him no, but she didn’t.

  “Fine. One drink,” she said with a pointed look.

  Rico nodded in agreement. “One drink.”

  Chapter 6

  She never said where they had to go to have that ‘one’ drink, Rico thought as he let her into his hotel room.

  A few minutes later he’d fixed them both a glass of wine at the mini-bar in his suite. She’d put the duffel bag she’d carried out of the club down by the couch and walked to stand near the patio doors, arms folded over her chest, still wearing her coat.

  “Tell me how you came to be responsible for taking care of your brother,” he said as he approached, arm outstretched offering her the glass.

  The look she gave him said that was the last thing she wanted to talk about. Still, she took the drink and sipped from it slowly as her gaze returned once more to the outside. He’d used the company’s directory to find a hotel for the weekend, but had called to book the penthouse suite himself. The glass doors opened to a rooftop patio that he hadn’t had time to go out and explore. The way Eva was staring through those doors, he couldn’t help but offer.

  “We can go outside if you’d like.”

  She took another sip and then nodded. “I would like some air.”

  With a nod Rico flipped the latch on the door and slid it to the side. “After you,” he said and watched her walk out before him.

  He followed, closing the door behind them. She walked immediately to where the lounge chairs and tables were set.

  “I guess people have lots of parties out here,” she said, her back turned to him.

  “I guess,” he said. “I’m not really a party person.”

  “Neither am I,” she said as she turned to face him. “I guess that’s something we have in common.”

  “I guess so.”

  They fell quiet again as Rico gave her time to decide whether or not she was going to answer his request.

  She moved further away from him, going to stand near a potted plant. Her gaze fell to her glass, her fingers gripping the stem much too tightly. It was obvious this wasn’t an easy topic for her and he was just about to tell her it was okay, that they could talk about something else, when she looked up at him.

  “My parents died when I was seventeen years old,” she began. “A man—Theodore Tremill—had a heart attack while driving his eighteen-wheeler. He was traveling from Daytona to Maine, driving along the highway on that rainy night in April, when they say the pain radiated up his left arm so fast and so strong that he let go of the steering wheel to grab it. As he opened his mouth to yell his chest seized and the truck, going more than eighty-five miles an hour, crossed two lanes and jumped the median strip to crash head-on into my father’s Ford Taurus.”

  Rico gulped the rest of his wine, then set the glass down on the small table closest to him.

  “They were dead instantly. No suffering,” she continued. “That’s what the doctor told us, but I’ve never really believed that. I mean, there was an instant where they had to see that truck barreling toward them. Just a few seconds when they knew they would never see their children again. That, would have been suffering for them. It would have been heartbreaking.”

  “Just as it was for that seventeen-year-old girl,” Rico said.

  She inhaled deeply, dumping what was left of her wine into the plant soil. “For the first few hours I was too stunned to really feel anything. I heard people around me talking but I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. Nothing except that my parents were never coming back.”

  Still twisting that glass between her fingers she shook her head in an attempt to keep the hair out of her face.

  “Makai had just turned ten two months before. When the police officer and the social worker had showed up at our house that night with the news, he’d been in bed. I let him sleep until the morning. Since it was close to four a.m. when they’d arrived, the social worker agreed to stay a couple more hours until I could wake him and tell him at a decent hour. We spent the first week in a foster home. The woman, Mrs. Fields, she didn’t want a seventeen-year-old girl
, but she was willing to keep Makai. He screamed like he was in pain at the thought of us being separated and I thought of the first thing I could to keep us together.

  “We had a neighbor named Ms. Ruby. She’d babysat for us a few times when I wasn’t old enough to stay at home with Makai by myself. I figured she’d been okay then, so why not ask her if she could let us stay with her a few more months. My birthday is July first. I was going to turn eighteen then and I could legally take care of Makai on my own. Ms. Ruby didn’t like the idea at first, not until the social worker told her how much money she would receive from the state, per child. So she agreed and Makai and I stayed together.”

  “When you turned eighteen you took him?” Rico asked when she’d gone quiet again, this time looking up at the starless sky.

  “I was so naïve back then,” she said with a sigh. “I didn’t have anything when I was eighteen. Our parents had life insurance policies, but they were both small and they’d borrowed against them so many times that there was hardly any value left. On my eighteenth birthday I received a check from the insurance company for seventeen hundred dollars. I knew that wasn’t enough to find a place and pay bills, so I looked for a job instead of leaving Ms. Ruby’s immediately.

  “The state check for me stopped coming, so my seventeen hundred dollars went to Ms. Ruby as my room and board for two more months. Ms. Ruby didn’t like us being there and she didn’t even try keeping that a secret. One day she slapped Makai because he’d spilled the milk from his bowl of cereal. Makai hated milk, but Ms. Ruby was insistent that he eat and or drink whatever she put in front of him. I hit her with the broom and told her if she touched him again I’d kill her. From that moment on I was every ungodly name in the book. Ms. Ruby did nothing else for Makai, except let him eat and sleep there. I cooked for him, cleaned up after him, washed his clothes and got him ready for school.”