Braver (Runaway)

by Lexie Ray

  “Didn’t anyone do anything?” Casey asked, wetting a square of gauze with alcohol. “One, two, three, Cocoa.”

  She swept the alcohol-soaked pad over my injury, wincing when I winced.

  “God, that stings,” I groaned.

  “That’s how you know it’s working,” she said, paying special attention to each point of broken skin. “The human mouth is a disgusting place. You could get a nasty infection if we don’t clean it out.”

  An infection from that horrible man — Mike? No, thank you.

  “Do you want to just pour the whole bottle over it?” I asked.

  Casey laughed. “No need to,” she said. “I’m very thorough.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said. “And no, no one did anything until the bouncers pulled him off of me.”

  “Assholes,” she commented. “Did you defend yourself? Give as good as you got?”

  I felt ashamed as I shook my head, feeling like I deserved the sting of the alcohol on my chest. “I tried to hit at him, but he was so drunk it was like I wasn’t doing anything.”

  Casey nodded. “As soon as you get well again, I’m going to teach you some basic self-defense. It’s good to know. I took a class when I started my night job and let me tell you — once you get a reputation of being a balls kicker, you get a healthy dose of respect. You just have to threaten to do it, most of the time.”

  “What kind of night job necessitates being a balls kicker?” I asked.

  “Stripping does,” Casey said, discarding the gauze pad and soaking another in alcohol before going over the bite mark again. I was thankful she was being so methodical about it. What she’d said about mouth germs freaked me out.

  “That’s cool,” I said, sucking in my breath at the fresh alcohol burning the bacteria away.

  “Whatever,” Casey said. “I know you’re judging me. Everyone does.”

  “No judgment,” I protested. “Why would I do that?”

  “You know,” Casey said, looking insecure for the first time that night. “Everyone says that strippers are just single moms, or druggies, or nymphos. Really, most of the girls at my work are just desperate. They need to make a buck and have the body to make it possible.”

  “I think it’s fine,” I said. “You said it yourself — you gotta do what you gotta do.”

  “It’s damn good money,” Casey remarked, throwing the gauze pad away and putting a large bandage on my breast. “It’s paying for my school, and it puts a dent in the rent.”

  She handed me a soft pink robe that had been hanging from a hook on the back of the bathroom door. I took it gratefully, covering my nakedness.

  “Let’s see, injury tally,” Casey said. “Glass in head, check. Concussion, check. Boob bite, check. Your ribs are going to have to, unfortunately, heal themselves. They do that. So, check, but I’ll give you something for the pain when we finish getting you cleaned up. Now, onto that ankle.”

  She helped me prop my leg up on the side of the tub. Casey untied my sneaker and got my sock off before rolling up the leg of my jeans.

  “Oh, God,” I said, looking at the swollen mass my ankle had become.

  “I can’t believe you were walking on this,” Casey said, looking at me with amazement.

  “Running, at one point,” I said.

  “You’re a tough cookie,” Casey said. “Well, since you already said it, I can say it. The ankle looks like shit, Cocoa. For tonight, all I can do for you is ice it, elevate it, and keep your weight off of it. Tomorrow, you’re going to come to school with me.”

  “I am?” I asked, confused.

  “Yes,” Casey confirmed. “As long as you don’t mind a bunch of nursing students ogling your ankle and the X-rays we’ll do, you’ll get free care. Most of us are pretty good.”

  “If any of them are half as good as you, I’ll be fine,” I said. “You’re going to be a hell of a nurse, Casey.”

  “I’m already a hell of a stripper,” she said, grinning. “Some days, I wonder if I’m making the right career move with this nurse stuff. If I wasn’t paying for school, I’d never have to take in a roommate.”

  “For my sake, I’m glad that you’re going to school and have need for a roommate,” I said. “I lucked out.”

  “I guess we have Sandra to thank for that,” Casey said, busying herself with packing up her first aid kit.

  “Sandra,” I repeated, racking my brain. “Oh, of course. Sandra. It’s just that we called her Blue at the nightclub. It’s hard to think of her as anything else.”

  “Blue,” Casey tried out, narrowing her eyes. “Her eyes. Makes sense.”

  “How do you know her?” I asked.

  “We met at a party, before she went to the nightclub,” Casey said. “We kind of hit it off — oh. I’m bisexual. Is that a problem?”

  “Nope,” I said. It wasn’t. In my opinion, there were two types of people in the world: good guys and bad guys. Sometimes, the lines blurred between the two, but at the end of the day, they always made themselves know.

  Mama? Bad guy. Casey? Good guy. I didn’t care what got her off. I thought back to my own recent experience with the couple, Johnny and Electra. I’d had fun, especially since I was getting paid to do so, but women just weren’t my thing.

  To be honest, I wasn’t certain that sex at all was my thing. I’d had so many bad experiences — along with so many emotionless fucks — that I felt like I could go the rest of my life without having sex ever again. I was probably ruined, too, unable to open myself up to love after everything I’d been through.

  “Great,” Casey said. “That would’ve been awkward if it had been a problem.”

  “You got to cop a free feel, though,” I joked, pointing at my bandaged breast. “I let you get away with it because you were fixing me up.”

  “I’ll consider it a payment,” Casey said.

  We both laughed. “Wait, so Blue — I mean Sandra — is bisexual?” I asked. “I never knew.”

  “That was my problem, too,” Casey said. “I never knew. She’s just a free spirit. After that night, she was hard to get a hold of. Then I get a letter telling me she moved into some weird boarding house and was bartending at the same place and would I be her pen pal? It was trippy. We write letters every so often.”

  “She marches to the beat of her own drum, that one,” I said. “I love her like a sister. She saved my life tonight.”

  “To Sandra,” Casey said, raising an imaginary glass.

  “To Blue,” I agreed, raising an imaginary glass of my own. We made them “clink” and laughed at our silliness.

  “I bet you’d like to take a shower,” Casey said.

  I eyed the tub. “I’ve been taking showers for the last nine years of my life,” I said. “Would you mind if I took a bath?”

  “I’d mind it if you fell asleep and drowned,” Casey said. “So you’d better not do that. A bath’ll do you some good — ease your sore muscles and help your ribs.”

  She pulled back the shower curtain and turned on the water, adjusting the knobs until a steaming stream of hot water came out. The tub started filling as she plugged it up.

  “I don’t want to drown in your bathtub,” I said. “Do you have any bubbles? You could stay in here with me, keep talking to me to keep me awake.”

  “Are you coming on to me?” Casey teased, pouring part of a bottle of fragrant liquid into the water. Immediately, the bathroom smelled of roses, foam rising in the tub. “Let me help you with your clothes.”

  “Now you’re the one coming on to me,” I said, grinning. “I was hoping you’d ask that. I don’t think I have the strength to get them off of me.”

  Casey’s touch was gentle and politely clinical. When I was naked and the tub was full, she helped me climb over the ledge and ease down into the bubbles.

  “Fuck,” I said, drawing out the vowel at the exquisite feeling of being submerged in water for the first time in way too long. “Oh fuck. I feel like crying. I feel like singing.”

 
“Has it really been nine years since your last bath?” Casey asked.

  “Boarding house,” I said, shrugging. “Common bathrooms, showers only.”

  “Lame,” Casey commented. “So tell me about this boarding house set up. Did it have a bar or what? How did it work? Sandra never explained it very well.”

  Casey had taken me into her home, dressed my wounds, and seen me naked. I didn’t see a point in holding back. I cupped my hands and brought some of the water to my face, enjoying the way it ran down my neck and chest.

  “There was a boarding house,” I said, “but we didn’t pay for room or board. We worked for it.”

  “Is that legal?” Casey asked. “It seems like an easy way to swindle people.”

  “That became apparent to me pretty recently,” I said. “The reason I was getting shot at was because I tried to withdraw my earnings from working. There was a nightclub below the boarding house. We were all waitresses, except for Blue and a couple of other girls. They tended bar.”

  “I think I understand,” Casey said, propping her chin up on her fist. She studied her pink toenails. “So you had to withdraw the money you earned from a bank?”

  “Mama was the bank,” I said, the memory of her wild look and ugly gun making me shiver. “She kept all our earnings locked up in a safe in her office. We’d even give her our tips for safekeeping.”

  “Sounds like a swindle,” she remarked.

  “I wish I’d been able to see it years ago,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t. It’s kind of hard to explain. You get in a place where there are rules, and then you start following them. Maybe they’re not rules — just a way of life. But there comes a point where you’re not asking questions anymore. You’re just doing things. You normalize whatever situation you’re in.”

  “So, I’m starting to understand what life was like there, but it seems like there couldn’t be that much money going through there for this lady to be all bonkers about it,” Casey said. “I mean, no offense, but you all were just running a nightclub, right? Wasn’t it just a few bartenders and cocktail waitresses?”

  This was the big secret. If I wanted to, Casey would never know. But I didn’t feel like I had anything to hide. Maybe if I told her, I’d be able to forget about it forever. I took a deep breath and took a chance.

  “We were bartenders and waitresses, but there was a hidden side of the business,” I said. “The nightclub was a front for a successful brothel.”

  I stopped playing with the bubbles and looked at Casey, fearful she might just throw me out on my ass after realizing she’d brought in a prostitute.

  “Sandra seemed to leave that part of the nightclub out of her letters,” she remarked.

  “I don’t want you to have any doubts about me,” I said, “especially when you’ve opened your home to me. That part of my life is over, now, and I’m never going back. Actually, I don’t think I ever want to talk about it again.”

  If I had the ability to shut the door inside myself that housed all of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences from working at Mama’s nightclub, I’d lock it and throw away the key. For the first time, I felt a nugget of gladness that I’d lost the tote bag full of my photos and notes from all the girls at the nightclub. They would no longer be a constant reminder of what I was — no, what I had been — when I’d decided that it was high time to move on.

  What Mama had put everyone through was unfair. I thought back to all of the girls that I had known before: poor Scribbles, who had never recovered after sleeping with her first customer; Jazz, who’d almost died by the cruel hand of her last customer; and me — beaten in front of dozens of people, then almost gunned down for asking for a little recompense.

  No one should have to live like that. And I decided that I wasn’t even going to have to dwell on it anymore.

  In a mental force of will, I gathered up all of those memories — the good ones and the bad ones — and shoved them into a little room inside myself. The camaraderie with the girls went in there right along with the beating I’d taken from Mike. Maybe I’d never be able to be rid of my life at Mama’s nightclub. That would be part of me forever. But I didn’t have to let it shape who I was for the rest of my life.

  I closed the door, locked it, and turned my back on it. It was time for a new life.

  “I’m not worried about your past,” Casey was saying. “I’m just sorry that you’ve been through so much. The important thing, I think, is that it’s over.”

  “It’s over,” I repeated. “Definitely.”

  Casey waited half a beat before grinning. “So, what are you thinking about doing now?” she asked. “I guess you can’t put ‘prostitute’ on your résumé.”

  I squawked and splashed soapy water at her. Trust this crazy redhead to make a joke out of the story I’d just told.

  “I mean, you can hate me if you want for suggesting it, but there’s always need for fresh meat at the place I work,” Casey said. “Honestly, some of the girls turn tricks on the side, but no one has to.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to shimmy up any poles anytime soon,” I remarked, lifting my swollen ankle out of the bathtub. “And I’m never selling my sex again.”

  “Good for you!” Casey said, pumping her fist.

  “But maybe I will take you up on a job,” I said. “Once I can walk, of course.”

  “It’s a deal, then,” Casey said, reaching out and shaking my soapy hand.

  Chapter 5

  Casey’s apartment was nothing special, but that’s part of what made it special. She dressed up the dark-colored walls and industrial-quality carpet with bright posters of famous artwork and crazy rugs. Tiny, intricately folded origami swans hung and spun from the ceiling fan. What looked to be a secondhand sofa was embellished with a hand-knitted blanket in every color of the rainbow.

  The coffee table in front of the sofa was covered in medical books and study guides. The tiny television perched on top of a small bookcase had a piece of paper taped over the screen.

  “You can start watching again once you become a nurse,” the note read.

  “You can take that down anytime you want to watch,” Casey had said after I pointed it out. “But I adore TV. It’s a problem around midterms.”

  The kitchen was cozy but functional. Casey kept it free from clutter even as her refrigerator exploded in color. There were sticky notes in every shade imaginable touting reminders about test dates, quizzes, shopping lists, to-do lists, phone numbers, and other square-shaped bits of information. Nuzzled in between these notes were photos of Casey in various colors of hair, smiling alongside laughing people clutching drinks, glossy brochures for shows and exhibits around the city, and kitschy magnets to hold everything together.

  “I don’t like telling people this when I first meet them, but I’m not a natural redhead,” Casey had said. “I change it about once a month. I’m kind of addicted to color.”

  “There are worse things to be addicted to,” I said.

  Casey’s bedroom was so bright that I wondered how she slept in it. Posters of bands covered every available inch of the walls in there and it was a miniature disco ball that hung from the ceiling fan instead of origami swans.

  My bed was a futon crammed against the wall.

  “It folds out to a full-sized bed, but I’m not sure the old bedroom is going to accommodate that,” Casey had said, looking around forlornly. The room was already struggling to fit a twin-sized bed and a dresser alongside the futon.

  “It’s not a problem,” I said. “I can sleep wherever.”

  “Well, if you ever want to have male company over, let me know,” she said. “I’ll move to the couch to give you some privacy.”

  “Male company?” I laughed. “I don’t think I’m ever going to bring a man back to your house. I need some time to get to know myself.”

  “Female company, then,” Casey said, winking. “Should we devise a way to let each other know? Maybe I could come up with some kind of ‘do
not disturb’ sign to hang from the bedroom door.”

  “Very funny.”

  Casey had let me go to sleep that night — finally — only to wake me up a few hours later to go to the nurse’s school for an X-ray. Thankfully, having a nursing student as a roommate did have its perks, especially for how beat up I was. Casey had a pair of crutches on hand and shuffled down the stairs on her butt in a show of solidarity as we had to make our way down for the day.

  The bus ride wasn’t painful or very far. And I found all of the nursing students — Casey included — to be cute in their excited curiosity over my swollen ankle.