by Alex Lucian
“I’ve got a busy day ahead,” I told her. “I’m going to go hop in the shower.”
If I wanted her to tease, to beg, to plead with me to stay, I would have been sorely disappointed.
“Okay,” she said, smiling at me before taking a sip of her coffee.
I showered quickly, using rough hands to wash my skin off, trying desperately to forget how she’d looked at me in the mirror the night before. Like I was the force of gravity holding her down to the earth. Because it wasn’t real.
She was a professional, and I was the chump believing every second of it.
Chapter Fifteen
“I think I need to change your food, Fletcher,” I told my ball of white fluff as I picked up yet another hairball beside my bed. “And brush you more often.” After throwing away the paper towel wrapped hairball, I scooped him up and ran my hand over his long, white hair. “Sorry I left you alone all day.”
He purred in my arms and rested his head on my shoulder, something that was common for his breed. He was a Ragdoll, and didn’t object to me picking him up for a snuggle from time to time. I was scratching behind his ears when I heard the knock on my door, alerting me to Stella’s arrival.
After setting Fletcher back down and wiping the white hairs that clung to my black silky chemise, I opened the door and immediately moved aside for the hurricane that was Stella on girls’ night.
“I got beer. And Riesling. And,” she paused, her arms laden with plastic bags as she pulled out a bright green bottle.
“Jager?” I asked her. “Are you tending bar, or are we drinking?”
“The wine’s for you, pussy.” She stepped in my tiny galley kitchen and leaned down to let the bags fall from her arms to the counter. “But after the fucking week I’ve had, I need me some bitch slap number threes.”
I closed the door and followed her into the kitchen, a look of pure confusion on my face. “What’s a bitch slap?”
“A bitch slap number three,” Stella amended, setting glass bottles onto the counter with a loud clank. “It’s Jager and grape soda.” She held out the two-liter of grape soda and shook it to illustrate what she was saying. “It’s basically like wine.”
I pulled my corkscrew from the drawer next to the fridge and gave her a raise of my eyebrow. “It’s not quite ‘basically like wine.’ It’s more like soda and a liqueur.” I handed Stella one of the ice cold glasses I’d put in my freezer just for her. “And what happened?”
Stella spun the top off the grape soda and poured it over the jager in her cup. “Let me get a little buzzed first. But let’s just say, Lenore got her revenge on me after our lunch together.” She rolled her eyes before tipping the glass back, downing the full cup in one go.
“Are you trying to get drunk before you spill the beans?”
“Oh, God. Beans.” Stella gagged on air before making a sour face with her mouth. “Just wait. Before I fill you in, distract me. How’d the thing go with Godzilla dick?”
She certainly had a way with words. I laughed and she did too, shaking so hard that the high pony she wore shook, fanning her auburn hair all over her face. “Great. He kept me busy, to say the least.”
Stella’s sour face returned and she pushed her drink to me. “You get preferential treatment; I know you do. Lenore loves you, so she gives you the Godzilla dicks and I get the dudes with flatulence problems and creepy obsessions.”
Ooh, this was going to be good, I could tell. But to assuage her, I filled her in on my night with Elias.
“You gave him a blowie in the elevator?” she asked, on her third drink and the color high in her cheeks. “Up top,” she said, holding her palm up for me to high-five her. “I knew you had it in you.”
“Oh, I certainly did,” I said with a coy smile, sipping my wine and leading Stella to the couch so we could sit before she delved into her own exploits. “But if it makes you feel better, Nicholas showed up at the hotel bar.”
“Fuck outta here,” she said. “He did not.”
“He did.” I’d hardly thought about it, not since running into him. “Elias asked who he was, and I told him a former client.”
“Why? From how you described Elias, he could’ve kicked your ex-boyfriend’s ass just with a look.”
“He probably could have,” I agreed. “But Elias isn’t my boyfriend. He’s my client. He’s not paying me for my baggage, and besides,” I shrugged, “I don’t think he needs to know who I’ve dated. Or really, anything about my past.”
Stella nodded thoughtfully, sipping her drink as she looked off at one of the walls of my apartment. “Okay. But you still could have said he was an ex and then not gotten into it.”
“I just didn’t want to create any illusion of intimacy.”
“Are you serious with this shit?” she asked. “He’s fucking you. A whole hell of a lot, from the sounds of it. What’s more intimate than that?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “I can fuck—that only requires my body. But intimacy, for me at least, is deeper than me spreading my legs. It’s my past, my future, and talking about those things with someone who isn’t important to me personally is not something I take lightly. I’m certainly not going to put myself through that with a client, of all people.”
“Whatever,” Stella said, blowing her bangs out of her eyes. “As long as you’re not mixing up feelings, who cares? It’s just sex, like you said. And after these thirty days, maybe you’ll see him again. Or maybe you won’t. But him knowing a part of you doesn’t mean he owns that part.”
I gave her words some consideration. Stella and I approached escorting from different directions. For Stella, she was bored. Being with different men kept things interesting for her and required zero emotional effort from her. Though she might play at being closed off, under her armor she wore her heart on her sleeve. I escorted purely for the money. The fact that we both enjoyed sex made it much easier to stomach accepting money for our services.
“How did Nicholas know where you’d be?” she asked, bringing the conversation back.
“I’m not sure. I don’t even know how he got my number.” I sipped my wine and thought. “I mean, we ran in the same circles a year ago. Maybe someone, a mutual friend, gave him my number. But I still don’t know how he knew where I’d be.”
“Maybe it was a coincidence. That hotel is near where he interned his third year, isn’t it?”
She wasn’t wrong. I’d known Stella longer than I’d been escorting, and she’d kind of pulled me into it after my breakup, but she’d been around when the Nicholas bullshit had been happening. “Yeah, I guess it is on the same block. Maybe he used to drink there. Beats me.” Nicholas had never taken me out when we’d dated. He was usually too busy, or his manipulative ways were too exhausting. That dress is too short, he’d tell me when I’d get ready to go out with him. Or, do you really need that much lipstick? Everyone is going to be staring at you. My appearance had been one of the things he worried about more than nearly anything else.
“Well, be careful. And find out who gave him your digits. That’s not cool. He could’ve creeped in your direct messages, like dudes do nowadays.”
“I’m sure he’d have realized I’d block him,” I told her dryly. “But the whole exchange reminded me how badly I needed to be in control.”
“Which is why I brought you in to the business,” Stella said. “Sex is great, but at least you know you always are in control as an escort.” Stella shuddered. “Nicholas gives me the mega creeps, Rubes. I hope you’ve blocked his number from your phone.”
I nodded. “I did. Now tell me why half of that bottle of Jager is already gone.”
Stella dropped her head on the back of the sofa and sighed. “Fucking Lenore thinks she’s got jokes.” She lifted her head and pinned me with an unamused look. “She set me up with a dude who likes sploshing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s where you eat food off of the other’s body.”
I pursed my lips. “Tha
t doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Of course it doesn’t, because you didn’t have someone pouring baked beans all over your body while you laid on a tarp. Five cans, Rubes. Five fucking cans of baked beans, from my neck down to my,” she circled between her legs. “I had to cut him off when his tongue traveled past my belly button, but dear God, I felt like I was wet dog food.”
“And he was the dog, slurping you up?”
“Yes. And he made eye contact with me the entire time.” She winced and her lip curled in disgust. “Do you know how fucking awkward it is to make eye contact with a guy for ten minutes as he, loudly, slurps up beans off of your body?”
I shook my head.
“And he had beady eyes. Beady eyes! Who gets off on eating baked fucking beans off of someone? And that was just the first course. The second course was spaghetti. From room service. He poured that shit all over my chest and slurped up each noodle. One by one.” Her mouth opened in a silent wail. “And he kept making these moaning sounds while he was slurping the spaghetti,” she closed her eyes and mimicked a very obnoxious moan noise, “and what made it all the worse was that he sounded like a teenage boy beating himself off for the first time while simultaneously going through puberty.” She mimicked a boy’s voice cracking from high to low pitched. “He sounded like a dolphin trying to bark like a dog. Jesus.” She gagged as she continued, “And he kept getting flecks of sauce all over me and him, and he would not fucking stop poking me with his dick. After he was done eating spaghetti off of me, he poked my tit with his dick three times before he came all over the goddamn place. Then he said, with a smug, satisfied look, ‘Are you close?’ Like, was he fucking kidding? I had just spent twenty minutes with some balding, middle-aged asshole eating baked beans and noodles off of my body. I had zero penetration!” She threw up her hand, illustrating the tragedy she had been dealt.
It sounded awful. I didn’t blame Stella for being disgusted. “That’s pretty awful,” I said. “But I know Lenore has assigned some of the weird fetish guys to you before.”
“It’s like she thinks I have a fetish for weird fetish dudes or something. But then he insisted on washing me in the shower, and again, I had a flash where I wondered if he was a virgin. Like, did he think this was how sex went? Spend several hundred bucks to eat your dinner off your date? He did some kind of weird shimmy in the shower, dancing around me instead of helping me wash off the remains of his meal.” She pounded the rest of her drink. “It was almost as bad as the guy who made me fake breastfeed him, Rubes. Almost that bad.”
I winced in sympathy for her, remembering the guy who had been obsessed with being a baby in her arms. “I don’t even know what to say,” I told her honestly.
“Yeah, because you’re getting regular giant penis penetration. Us peasants have to make do with our baby-dicked baked beans fetishists.” She groaned. “Enjoy that while you got it. Get that peen as much as possible, because once your thirty days are up, Lenore might hand off the perverts to you.”
I shuddered at the thought and reminded myself that Elias was just a thirty-day commitment. Just thirty days of him was all I would get, and after? I watched Stella go to the kitchen to pour herself some more of her drink and hoped to god that I’d never have to do the things she did. I was lucky to have a man like Elias as enamored as he was with me, but it was just a temporary arrangement. As long as I kept reminding myself of that, I should be fine.
I hoped.
Chapter Sixteen
“I think he’s dead, Daddy,” a tiny voice whispered somewhere by my head. I groaned, turning into my pillow. The voice giggled and I couldn’t help but crack a smile.
“Not dead, sugar plum,” Jack said from somewhere further away. “Hungover, probably. But not dead.”
“I’m not hungover,” I mumbled into my pillow, but I was sure they couldn’t understand me. The night before, I’ll admit that I stared at the bottle of bourbon for a solid hour before slamming it back into the cupboard. Over-sexed was a likely diagnosis, as was emotional instability due to one Grade-A escort who already had me tied in knots. I lifted my head, pinning Jack with a glare. “How did you get in here?”
“You gave me a key, dipshit.”
“Don’t swear, Daddy,” Grace said.
“Yeah. Don’t swear, Jack.” I grinned up at him, and I could tell he wanted to flip me off if not for the little angel next to me. “The building. How’d you get into the building?”
“The cute old lady who lives on the floor above you let us in.” He winked at his daughter, Grace, who was perched on the edge of my mattress. “She can’t resist me.”
“She’s eighty-two. That’s hardly a compliment,” I said dryly, tweaking the edge of Grace’s long dark hair when I sat up. She giggled, and the innocent sound instantly made me feel better. I didn’t see her all that often, maybe a few times a year when I was in town, but she was easily one of my favorite people in the world. That was probably a sad commentary for me, that a six-year-old topped the list of people who always made me happy. And she was probably the real reason I’d never actually get rid of Jack. “How’s school going, Princess?”
She giggled, and my heart wanted to fucking explode. “It’s summer.”
“Shit. Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Don’t swear, Uncle Elias,” Jack and Grace said at the exact same time. She didn’t look much like her father, since Grace favored Jack’s late wife, Natasha. I’d never met Natasha; she passed away from a brain aneurysm when Grace was only a baby, and I didn’t meet Jack until about a year after that. But if Natasha had half the sweetness and compassion that her daughter did, she must have been one hell of a woman.
“Do you want to come to the farmer’s market with us?” Grace asked, giving me the big puppy dog eyes that she knew worked on me every single fucking time.
“You paying, Princess?” I tickled her until she was gasping for breath. When she yanked on my beard to get me to stop, I glared at Jack. Only one person would have taught her that.
“Daddy is.”
“Sold. Okay, you two go wait in the other room and let me get dressed, I’ll be out in a minute.”
Jack hustled Grace out of the room and I took a minute to flop back onto my pillow. The way I’d left the hotel the day before, with a curt nod to Ruby, stuck in my gut like a block of cement. I’d acted like a pussy, and it was my own fault.
Before giving it too much thought, I reached over to grab my cell phone where it was plugged in on the nightstand and tapped out a quick text to her. I’ve got a thing at a bookstore tomorrow late afternoon. It’s casual, no pressure if you can’t make it. Sorry I was a dick when I left the hotel, I added as an afterthought. She might not have even noticed that I’d pulled back a little, but in case she did, I didn’t want her feeling like I was mad at her.
I rolled my eyes. It sounded like I was asking her on a date. It felt like I was asking her on a date. And the truth was, if I’d met Ruby at a bar or on the subway, I’d have noticed her. But even if we’d managed the same type of stimulating conversations that I already knew we were capable of, I doubt I’d have asked her out.
That’s how far down the path I was of refusing to see women as the potential partners they were. Even with her stunning looks, her quick brain and dry sense of humor, I really didn’t think she would have registered. Because I would have worried that if we went on a date or two, spent some time in bed together, that she’d start nagging. She’d complain about my travel and strange hours, the occasional inconsistency in jobs. She’d hate when I traveled with a female photographer.
I shook my head and rolled out of bed, pulling on the first jeans and t-shirt that I laid hands on. I’d never dissected a relationship with any of the woman I’d paid before. There were a handful of girls in Vegas, way back at the beginning of when I thought of escorts or high-class prostitutes as a viable option for my pent-up sexual proclivities. The very first girl that I’d paid had natural red hair, a crooked smile, and breasts so fake t
hat I was afraid that I’d pop them if I squeezed too hard.
But she’d ridden me like a fucking rodeo queen and came four times in the hour we spent together. Then she kissed me on the cheek and made me promise to visit her again the next time I was in town. And boom, just like that, a lifestyle change had been born.
Even through all of those women, though, I’d never met one like Ruby. And it pissed me off that I seemed incapable of keeping my thoughts about her compartmentalized. Normally I wouldn’t think about the girl until it was time to meet up with her, when I needed the outlet, needed a warm body to sink into.
Grace knocked on my bedroom door. “Daddy says to hurry the hell up.”
I chuckled, opening the door and scooping her up in my arms. “Don’t swear, Princess.”
“It doesn’t count if you’re repeating what someone else said first,” Grace said, giving me a solemn expression that made my heart squeeze. She wrapped her arms around my neck and gave me a hug. I patted her back, accepting the fact that a hug from her still gave me a thick ball of emotion somewhere in the base of my throat.
“Aww, sugar plum, you made him smile,” Jack said when we walked into the living room. “For that, you get an extra donut from the market.”
Since it was a beautiful day, with flawless blue skies and enough breeze that it cut through the heat, we walked to the market with Grace chattering away in front of us. A blonde woman passed by, smiling at the three of us. Jack turned his head to watch her and then swore under his breath.
“Do you think she thought we were gay? Because that was like a, oh how sweet are they with their daughter smile, not I need to bed him now kind of smile.”
I gave him only a cursory glance, keeping my eyes on Grace skipping on the sidewalk. There was always a slight murderous feeling humming under my skin when someone bumped into her or didn’t move to the side to let her pass. It was probably best that I never planned to have kids, because I’d probably commit homicide before the hypothetical kid’s second birthday.
