by JA Huss
And look at myself. Take a good, long look at myself.
I pull off the wig, still staring at the reflection.
There’s not one thing I like in that mirror. Not my green eyes. Not my high cheekbones. Not my small nose or even the deep cupid’s bow of my lips.
I hate all of it.
“Hey,” Raven says behind me.
My eyes meet hers in the mirror.
“Cleo called in sick, so one of us will have to do an extra act tonight.”
“Not me,” I say.
“I wouldn’t waste the opportunity on you.” She snorts. “I’m giving it to Jasmine.”
“Really?” Jasmine says next to me. She pauses her application of red lipstick. “Thanks, Rave. I appreciate it. My kid’s daycare bill went up this month and I’m strapped. I need all the attention I can get.”
“Well, if Cleo calls in again,” Raven says, “she’s out of here. And you can pick up all her acts until I find someone new.” Raven smirks at me as she says it. She knows a girl like me—single, no kids, college-educated—would not be here if I had any other options. So she thinks she’s getting even with me for making that crack about her age.
I do need the money. And after Cleo, Jasmine makes more money than all of us. She goes for the slutty look, which, as she pointed out earlier when she turned her nose up at my outfit, these men like a lot more than the girl-next-door look.
I have a few moments of regret for not following her lead.
My phone buzzes in my backpack.
“And turn that fucking phone off when you come into work, Scarlett,” Raven says. “It’s been vibrating since you went out on stage.”
My heart skips a beat. This cannot be good. First that asshole who works for Carlos shows up out there in the club, now someone’s been calling me the whole time?
I suck in a breath of air as I reach for it. But the anxiety eases as I see the name on the screen.
“Hey,” I say, after tabbing accept. “What’s up?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Annie says. “My night just went from bad to fucking bad in the span of twenty minutes.”
“What happened?” My heart is beating fast again. Did Carlos get to her? Is he going after my friends now?
“My fucking date!” Annie wails. “He left me at the motel!”
“Motel?” I ask, confused. But she sounds like she might start crying. So I go into crisis-management mode. “Shit, can’t you grab a cab?”
“He took my fucking purse! I got no money! He got my cards too!”
“Jesus,” I say, trying to picture all that shit happening so early in the night.
“I’m stuck here, Maddie. Can you come get me?”
“Where’s here?” I ask, getting a very bad feeling about this. Because I’m totally confused. Annie isn’t a stripper, she’s a call girl. A very high-class one. She’s the one who suggested I take this job, against my better judgment, to make some quick cash. She usually works out of five-star hotels. The Aria, or the Bellagio, or the Four Seasons.
“Some cheap-ass fucking place out on the north end of town. Just standing on this disgusting carpet is making me itch!”
“What the fuck are you doing out there?” I ask. Seriously. Nothing she’s saying makes sense right now.
“I have no clue. I met him at Planet Hollywood and then he said, ‘Come with me.’ And we ended up out here. My gun was in my purse too!” she says, on the verge of hysterics.
“Shit,” I say.
“Shit is right,” she says. “I’m so fucking tired of this shit!”
“I’ll come get you. Just stay put.”
“You’re not leaving,” Raven says, listening in on my convo. “I’m already short tonight.”
“Fuck,” I mumble into my phone. “Can you call Diane? Or Caroline?”
“No,” she says. “They’re working the whole night. Their phones are off. My calls didn’t even ring through.”
The four of us share a house out in the desert. They’re all call girls. I actually went to college with them, then lost track, but ran into Annie about three months back—just when this Carlos shit was starting to go sideways. They had an empty room in their house, so I signed on to be roommate number four. I didn’t know they were call girls at the time. I found that out after. Four girls went to college together, three of them became hookers and one is a stripper. Probably not a great ad campaign for UNLV.
But I figured it couldn’t hurt to disappear from my usual surroundings for a little bit while I decided what to do about this Carlos business, right?
Good while it lasted, I guess. Because obviously Carlos has found me again.
But back to Annie. “Can you hold tight until after my shift?” I ask.
Annie gulps on the other end of the connection. “Oh, my God. I just want to go home, Maddie.”
“I get it,” I say, cutting her off. Raven is still standing behind me, tapping her fucking stiletto on the floor with her arms crossed across her tits. Like I’m on her last nerve. I don’t want this job—but I do need this job. “Text me the address and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I quickly change outfits and head back to the floor, constantly scanning for the henchman sent to warn me of my outstanding obligations. But he’s gone. Or he’s hiding in some corner, waiting to spring on me. Snatch me away, take me out to the desert and kill me.
I have to laugh at that. I mean, this is a serious situation. But I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault I owe Carlos Castillo a hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. It’s his stupid daughter’s fault.
I decide I’m overreacting. Carlos sent the guy to rattle me into delivering what I owe him. Even though I don’t owe him. I was planning his daughter’s wedding. He gave me two hundred grand for the event. What did he expect me to do with that money? I spent it on wedding shit. Catering, and the church, and the reception hall. All but fifteen grand, which was all I was able to return to him after his daughter called off the wedding and Carlos decided he deserved a refund.
You don’t get a refund on a wedding because your stupid daughter was pregnant with another man’s child and her fiancé called it off. It’s not even reasonable.
But Carlos Castillo isn’t exactly a reasonable man. He’s some Mexican tequila mogul, but I’m pretty sure that’s mostly a front for his drug-running empire.
How was I supposed to know he was some kingpin? I mean, really? I don’t run in those circles. And what kind of drug lord books a wedding planner online without even meeting her?
Well… maybe that should’ve been my first clue.
I just can’t win. I really thought I could make a go at the whole wedding planner gig. I mean, I fucking majored in business at UNLV. I’m capable. I’m smart. I have ideas. Good ideas. No. Great ideas. It should’ve worked.
But then again… I did have that pet bakery business, and the whole multi-level marketing make-up business, and the information research business. Not to mention the cleaning business.
All of which failed. Miserably.
And now I’m in debt up to my fucking eyeballs. Every credit card I have is maxed out. And my parents have already loaned me more than twenty thousand dollars for the first two businesses. I owe them too. They’re too nice to ask for it back, thank God. Because I don’t have it. I don’t have shit.
My newest venture—aside from stripping to pay back Carlos money I don’t owe him so he doesn’t start imagining me better off dead than alive—is an aerial photography business. I already have ten realtors on my books looking for video of their multi-million-dollar property listings.
This one is a winner. I can feel it. I know it. I’ve tried and lost too many times not to catch a lucky break soon. I even have a cool drone to take the photos and shit. It set me back almost two months of stripper pay… money I should’ve been paying Carlos. But it was worth it.
And fate seems to agree. Because tonight I make more than three thousand dollars in lap dances before closing time.
I have so many customers, I don’t pick Annie up from the dumpy motel on the north edge of town until well past three AM.
She’s too tired to complain, so she slips wordlessly into the passenger seat of my car and doesn’t speak again until forty-five minutes later when we enter the living room of our modest four-bedroom ranch house.
“I quit,” she says, flopping down on the couch and kicking her shoes off so hard, they go flying into the wall.
“What?” I ask, sinking into the cushions next to her.
“I’ve had it, Maddie. What the fuck are we doing?” She looks up at me with sad brown eyes. “We’re educated women. Why the hell do we have to sell ourselves just to make a living?”
I start to say, “I don’t sell myself, we’re not the same,” but then I decide that right now isn’t about me and try to be a good friend instead. I shrug. “Bad luck,” I say. “That’s all.”
“It’s not bad luck,” she says. “It’s… it’s something else. It’s bad planning, or bad decisions, or bad whatever. I don’t know. But it feels like fate.”
“Fate?” I laugh. No. That’s not what this is. It can’t be. I can’t believe that this is what fate has planned. “We’re not fated to be losers, Annie. We’re just stuck, that’s all.”
“Men,” she says, growling out the word. “You don’t owe Carlos shit. And no matter how much I make, I can’t seem to get ahead. Fucking student loans, and credit cards, and that damn car. I want to burn it. And Kimberly. Why the fuck do I give her fifty percent of my take when she only fixes me up with guys like this all the time?”
“All the time?” I ask, completely confused. Annie’s clients are high-end. Aren’t they? “Since when?”
Annie looks away. Sighs. “We… we might’ve… embellished our status a little.”
“Embellished how?” And then I get it. “You don’t get guys like this all the time, do you? Assholes who leave you stranded in shady neighborhoods? Low-class jerks in town for what… a convention? Trying out the old ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ thing?”
Her guilty, embarrassed silence is the only answer I need.
Wow. She’s not raking in the money. She’s not some high-class call girl. She’s nothing but a fucking prostitute.
Not that I’m judging. I mean, come on. I’m a stripper. I have no room for self-righteous judgment.
But it makes me sad. For her and for me. I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier. Why live out here, in the goddamned desert, sharing a house with two other women in the same profession and a damn stripper, if you didn’t have to?
“I want to go home,” Annie says, sniffling. “I want to go back to Iowa, find my high-school boyfriend, and pretend I didn’t fuck up my whole life with one bad decision after another starting when I got out here for school. I just wanna be eighteen again and start over.”
I just stare at her for a second. Imagining this other life she lived before she knew me. And then thinking about the other life I lived before I knew her. And how she made bad decisions starting at eighteen and how at eighteen bad things, one after another, just kept delivering themselves to me, and now, seven years later, here we both sit. It makes me want to cry. Or scream. Or run away. Or all three. But I can’t. It’s not who I am. I can’t quit, I can’t lose it and give in to weakness. I have to just knuckle down and keep going. Sometimes… sometimes I wish I was a quitter. It would be easier.
“I’m tired, Maddie.” She curls her legs up onto the couch, placing her head in my lap. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to fuck strangers for money. I don’t want to drive that car. I don’t want to live in Vegas. I want this to be over. I want to go home right now.”
I play with her long, dark hair as she gives in to sleep. Silent. And introspective. And wishing I had such an easy way out.
It’s not the money I owe Carlos, either.
It’s everything else.
This is home. This is all I have.
There’s no going back to something else. Something easier. Some more innocent time when things were good.
Those days are gone. Forever.
All I can do is pull myself back up to ground zero.
Chapter Three - Tyler
There she is again. My angel. I see her coming towards me with my tea like the last time, her red hair in sharp contrast to all the clean and white that surrounds her. And in its fiery redness, it feels like a portent of things to come.
I feel like I know her. Do I? Have we met before? Nah. Probably just seems that way because she’s an angel and she’s trained to make you feel comfortable and loved. I bet they have whole seminars on that shit in angel school. Because I don’t know her and she doesn’t love me. We’re just tacitly agreeing to this whole interaction because… I dunno. Because we’re both dead, I guess? We have that in common.
She’s smiling. I’m not. Because I know what she doesn’t. That in about two minutes this whole place will be soaked in fire. Maybe it’s because I touched her tits the last time. Yeah. Know what? That’s probably it. I sullied up this whole joint with my craven, feral desire. So I’m careful not to press up against her now. I keep my distance. I say, “Thank you,” super polite, and—
Fuck.
Flames, screaming, agony, the whole nine.
And I wake up.
OK. What the hell is going on? Not only am I dreaming, but I’m now having recurring dreams? I don’t like this shit. Not one little bit.
I look over and there’s no one in the bed next to me. It’s probably not a great sign that I have to look to know whether or not I brought someone home last night. I’m not even sure what day it is. I barely know what century it is. I should get out of here. I should see people. Dr. Eldridge says I’m spending too much time alone. Maybe she’s right. Being alone allows my mind to drift to places it shouldn’t. Never a good thing.
“Of course it’s not a good thing, genius. Just figuring that out?”
And now I’m talking to myself out loud. Dynamite. Insanity is wooing me hard.
I stumble out of bed, walk past the massive windows, making sure to give the street below a nice long look at my cock (although I doubt anyone’s looking up here—everyone’s so focused on their own bullshit), plod into the kitchen past the burnt charcoal brick that used to be toast still sitting in the toaster, past the fridge, straight to the liquor cabinet. There’s an impressive selection from which to choose. Did I buy all this? I must have. I don’t remember buying all this. Oh, well. Johnny Walker Blue to start the day. Which, I mean, it’s the smoothest of the bunch, so duh.
My phone is sitting on the counter. There’s a text from Evan. “Lunch at the station?”
Phone says it’s ten-thirty AM. Still morning. Nice. Earliest I’ve been up in a while.
I pick up and text back. “Dunno. Pretty busy.”
I take a sip of Blue and wait while little thought bubbles appear on the screen. They disappear. They reappear. He must be composing an essay. Finally, his text comes through.
“No, you’re not.”
Christ.
I take another pull from the bottle. Sigh. Then…
“S-U-R-E,” I type. “Be there in a bit.”
I can’t say no to Evan. I really can’t. I don’t know why. Most everyone else on the planet I can take or leave, but Evan… I dunno. I actually kind of know. History. Shared experience. But it’s more than that. It’s what most people would call chemistry. That thing one person has with another person that they can’t explain. When people call it chemistry, they’re wrong, of course. Chemistry is science and finding someone you can stand being around, that’s alchemy. Some people just get you. Others, not so much. But whatever you call it, Evan and I have always had it since we were kids. I don’t remember us ever even having a fight. Is that true? Man, that’s crazy. Anyway.
I take a couple more hard swigs, give the city one last good cock shot (you’re welcome, world), and pull back on the jeans, boots, and t-shirt I left sitting on the
living room floor last night.
I smelled them. They’re fine.
OK. I’ll admit it. This car is pretty awesome. I really don’t love to drive, but this thing might make me change my tune. It just got delivered last night. (Turns out it’s Friday. Don’t ask me where Sunday through Thursday went.)
When Evan and I got to the swanky Land Rover dealership last week, I saw a poster of this one on the wall. I don’t get hard over cars. I’ve never been a gearhead. But this one looked badass so I told the showroom guy, “I want that one.”
He was all, “Oh. Well, that one’s not actually for sale.”
I was like, “Fuck you mean it’s not for sale? You sell cars, right? That’s what you do?”
Evan laughed. He got a kick outta that.
Car dude goes, “Well, yes. But that is a photo of a limited-edition Land Rover Defender that was made specially for one of the James Bond films. It is quite something. Black-on-black wheels, thirty-seven-inch tires bolted directly onto the wheel rim, suspension upgrades, a full roll cage running both externally and internally. It has a hundred and eighty-five brake horsepower and five hundred newton meters of torque!”
He looked at us like we should know what any of that means or give a damn. You know, like a toddler who just took his first big-boy shit and wants you to think it’s amazing.
“Wow. Neat. How much?” This seemed to me like it should be a simple transaction.
“No, no, no. Again…” Fuck. Again? “Only ten of these were manufactured. Eight are in the hands of private collectors, one is in our museum, and the other one is owned by our CEO, so—”
“Great. Get him on the horn. Find out how much he wants for it.”
Car guy stared at me like he’s never sold a car before. I didn’t understand why this was hard. He looked at Evan, who shrugged. Because of course he did, because JUST SELL ME A FUCKING CAR.
— By the way, that? There? That whole thing that I just described? THAT’S why I don’t like to talk to people. Jesus. —
Anyway. The CEO was much more business-savvy and, yadda, yadda, boom ching, I now have a car. And it only cost me five hundred K. Which, yes, is a lot of money. Unless it’s not. So. Whatever.
