Random Acts of Hope

by Julia Kent

  Amy just stared. She’d never asked me what happened, either. Comforted me? Yes. Just been there? Sure. But I’d never spilled my guts to her. Didn’t see the point.

  And then she’d come to me about how Sam had disappeared on her, and we’d, well…

  Now was definitely not the time to talk about Charlotte.

  Amy opened her mouth to say something just as Sam reached over and stuffed a piece of frosted cupcake in there.

  Best timing ever, dude.

  “Mocha cream cheese cupcake,” Sam moaned, rubbing his stomach. “I got two and can’t eat them all.”

  “Are those toffee sprinkles on top?” Darla said, eyes wide, licking her lips. For a moment, she looked like Bridget last night, who had viewed me as quite the cupcake to taste.

  Thinking about Bridget made me think about Mom, which made me think about Charlotte, and right now, I wanted none of that.

  The barista came over, a hot chick named Cari. Tiny waist, big tits trying to escape a scoop-neck t-shirt, and an ass with grab handles for two.

  She shoved a wall of long black hair behind one shoulder and smiled at us, perky and sweet. “They’re a new addition. Jeddy’s Diner started selling their baked goods to coffee shops, so look for more here. Next week we get peanut butter pistachio!”

  We all groaned. Sam looked at Amy and kissed her cheek. Then he licked a dot of chocolate frosting off her mouth and she giggled.

  Something in me clenched.

  God damn Charlotte. You spend five years pushing down the pain and then suddenly it appears at work, playing with vibrators on a kitchen floor, bent over with an ass that won’t quit and a smile that pierces your soul.

  Karma. Maybe Darla was right.

  “Your mom touched your ass?” Trevor added, flashing me a look as his eyes flicked to Amy, then back to me. Message received, dude.

  I cocked one eyebrow. “She wanted the officer to cuff her because she’d been a bad, bad girl.”

  Me, Sam, and Trev all started gagging. Boners across the room sagged in horror.

  Darla and Amy laughed until tears ran down their faces, their brays carrying through the tiny place and bouncing off the walls like a chorus of donkeys.

  “You asses,” I joked.

  “Yo mama’s ass,” Darla shot back.

  A new round of laughter.

  “Ha ha.” Now I knew what Trevor felt like when the topic of chickens came up. Great. Even my boss, Louise, had cracked up when I told her what happened last night, and Louise rarely laughed. Running an entertainment management corporation that featured male strippers like me and Sam should have been fun, but you wouldn’t know it from her no-nonsense attitude.

  She’d asked whether the tips had been especially good, and when I told her Celeste had slid a $20 down the back of my g-string and come damn close to giving me an unsolicited prostate exam she’d laughed so hard she needed an inhaler afterwards.

  “Because I’ve provided you all with so much entertainment, my fee is another macchiato.” I nudged Trevor. “Go on! I won’t require tips if you get me some more.”

  “What about that nice big tip you got from the blue hair?” Sam asked. “Blue hair” was code for “old lady,” because so many of them did something to their hair to make them look like they washed it in steel shavings.

  Darla and Amy raised their eyebrows while Trevor let go of Darla and obeyed my command.

  “Good dog,” I called after him. He flipped me the bird.

  “Good chicken is more like it,” Darla whispered, triggering a round of snickers. Not aimed at me. About time. Trevor had gotten high on peyote last year, hitchhiked to western Massachusetts, stolen a chicken he named Mavis, and tried to marry her (no bestiality) when Darla’s uncle, a trucker, found him on the Mass Pike. He gave him a ride (sans chicken) to Ohio, and that’s how Darla met Trevor.

  Joe drove out to the sticks to rescue Trev, and when he met Darla, well…now they were the weirdest fucking “couple”—triple?—I’d ever known.

  I sighed and watched Cari fix Trevor’s order, those luscious breasts bouncing and practically calling my name. Liam, Liam, they begged, like little mewling princesses needing to be saved by—

  “Take a picture, Liam. It lasts longer,” Darla said, studying me.

  “Oldest joke ever,” I snapped back.

  “The oldest joke ever is your face.”

  Trevor came back with my coffee and a cupcake the size of his head. “Cari said they’re about to close and she has to throw this away anyhow,” he said, shoving it my way.

  “What is it?”

  “Cheesecake cream.”

  Darla and Amy moaned.

  “I never hear you make that sound for me,” Sam said, pretending to pout.

  “Cover yourself in cream cheese frosting and fresh raspberries and I’ll moan,” Amy said, waggling her eyebrows.

  “So will I,” he muttered, shifting in his seat.

  “It’s mine!” I said, curling my arm around it.

  “Share?” Darla begged.

  “Oh, now you like me,” I groused.

  She frowned, eyes turning down. “Of course I like you. Why would you think I don’t?” She swooped in with a finger and took a big chunk of frosting, shoving it in Trevor’s mouth.

  He moaned like a girl.

  “Because you rag on me constantly.”

  “That’s how you know Darla likes someone,” Trevor said through a mouthful of ecstasy.

  “If she’s not giving you shit, she doesn’t think you’re worth her time,” Amy added, reaching for her own paw full of my cake.

  Two hands planted themselves on my shoulders, sensual and warm, kneading my neck. “Hey, Liam. How’s the cheesecake? It’s a mouth orgasm, isn’t it?” Cari’s voice in my ear made me come close to an orgasm, and it wasn’t in my mouth.

  Holy fuck.

  I turned around to a face full of bare breast, the tiniest hint of a nipple’s edge peeking out from her bra.

  I groaned.

  “That good, huh?”

  That good.

  “You closing up?” I said, my voice all jagged gravel and need. “Want to get a drink after this?”

  Her eyes, green and perky, clouded with disappointment. “Can’t. I have to be at my other job tonight. But maybe another time?” She reached for my hip. Considering space was at a premium in my general crotch area, this filled me with alarm.

  “What are you doing?” And keep doing it, a little to the left.

  “Where’s your phone? I’ll program my number in it.”

  I lifted my hips up and fished around in my back pocket, sure everyone could see my growing erection.

  “Here.”

  She programmed it with lightning speed, her movements making her breasts bounce. In front of my face.

  “Call me whenever. You know. I know you guys work late.”

  I bristled. Did everyone know I was a stripper? Hell. Was that a pro or a con?

  “I mean, being in a band and all,” she added.

  “You follow them?” Darla asked, reaching in her back pocket for a card. “Here’s a free pass for the next performance on Friday.” Always a promoter. Because of her and our show on the resort at Eden, bookings had doubled. If we could double them again, Sam and I could quit stripping and live off the band earnings exclusively.

  “Thank you so much!” Cari squealed. She bent down for an awkward hug with me, giving me a mouthful of creamy chest.

  “No, thank you,” I murmured.

  “Your mouth orgasming yet, Liam?” Darla asked with a wink, and she and Amy dug into my cupcake.

  My mind, though, was on one thing. And one thing only.

  God damn Charlotte.

  Charlotte

  The stack of orders from last night was a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I counted them—twenty-six orders. Out of thirty-some attendees, that was a fabulous sales rate. My district manager would be pleased.

  I began moonlighting from my day job doing
these parties about three months ago, and quickly became the third-highest seller in the district. With a degree in health education and working on my master’s degree in higher education administration, I was (sort of) the perfect candidate. Most of the other sellers just thought of this as an easy way to make money. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to empower women sexually—and make even more money.

  The curse part came in two ways. One—all those orders had to be hand-entered into our online system. I was staring at two to three hours of work entering item numbers, credit cards, addresses, and so on.

  And two—because of my day job, I had to be careful no one at work knew I was moonlighting. When you work as a Resident Director for a residence hall at a smaller state university in western Massachusetts, things get tricky.

  The job fell into my lap at the end of senior year, and I’d been a Resident Assistant for two years. Miscarrying in the middle of my freshman year just as the RA on my floor came into the bathroom had turned out to be the only bright spot in an otherwise horrific life moment, because Candy and I had become best friends after that mess. From comforting me to calling Campus Medical Services to holding my hand during the D&C, she’d been there.

  And what better way to help others than to emulate her? Plus, RAs got free room and board on campus. My mom loved that, and it meant my student loans weren’t too bad.

  My own Resident Director had suggested I go into higher education administration and become a residence life specialist. I thought I’d be a health teacher, instructing students on sexuality issues, but this was even better. Live in a dorm with a free apartment, get paid $30,000 a year, free grad school tuition and benefits—could it be more perfect?

  Well…I kind of forgot that whole part about living with three hundred eighteen- to twenty-year-olds.

  If word got out in the dorm that I conducted vibrator races at parties where strippers prevailed, my credibility would be shot. So I took great care, scheduling parties at least fifty miles from my college.

  What I never expected was that an even bigger risk loomed out there.

  And it had come to life last night.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Liam in a g-string, oiled up and being drooled over by a room of customers didn’t help, either. Sybil’s words cut through me like a knife.

  To call last night a shocker would be an understatement. Who the hell did she think she was? And what had Liam told her to make her react like that?

  My phone rang. Caller ID said it was my mom. If I didn’t answer, she’d just leave voicemail after voicemail, hunting me down like I was Katniss.

  “Hey, Mom,” I greeted her.

  “Charlotte, how are you? How is the start of the new year? Find any flaming underpants yet?” Mom had moved to the United States from Britain when she was a teen and still had that razor-sharp prep-school British accent. She was one of the oldest moms, having me at forty-one, and it sucked when the Harry Potter books and the Dolores Umbridge character were popular, because Mom looked just enough like her—short, greyish hair, a penchant for boiled wool suits—to make people tease me.

  We moved from New York to MetroWest Boston when I was in seventh grade, the same year I met Liam. He had never teased me.

  I laughed, “No, Mom, no flaming underpants yet. But it’s early in the semester.” Last year had started with a courtyard campus barbeque that inexplicably led to a group of freshman men stripping naked and setting their underpants on fire. Unfortunately, they used a little too much charcoal fluid and singed off their eyebrows and half their hair.

  “Thank goodness. Give it time, though.”

  We chatted a bit as I tried to keep my voice in check. Dad died the year before we moved, his heart condition finally winding his body down like a child’s top, inertia no longer enough to keep it upright and in motion. Losing my father at eleven had been damn hard.

  The only event harder than that had been losing Liam and then, the baby.

  I’d never told Mom about any of it.

  “I do think the move to Portland might be just the right answer,” Mom said, making me realize I’d faded out of the conversation.

  “What? Move?”

  Exasperation filled her voice. “Charlotte! You weren’t listening.” Only someone who knew her intimately, who had known her for decades, even, could catch the trace of a strange, hard-to-pin-down lisp. Three years ago Mom had a mini-stroke that had gone untreated for half a day. She’d gone to bed feeling “fuzzy” and woken to movement in only half her face, a weak right arm, and the awareness to dial 9-1-1.

  “You’re thinking about moving? Why?”

  “There’s a buyer for the house. Someone who lived in it as a child and who has made a generous offer.”

  “Buy the house?” We lived in a tiny two bedroom home, the kind you rarely found in a good school district, and most of my middle school and high school years had been spent helping Mom fix it up.

  “Yes. I can retire comfortably off the proceeds and my pension.”

  “Retire? Mom, what are you talking about?” Mom worked as an administrator at a local boy’s prep school. “You’re not old enough to…”

  Wait. I did the math as she laughed softly.

  A low whistle came out of me. “Sixty-five. You’re turning sixty-five in December, aren’t you?”

  “No need to make a fuss,” she said primly.

  “You’re really leaving the school? And selling the house? And moving to Portland?” We’d spent summers in a lovely beach house in Maine that Mom rented with another British ex-pat family.

  “I’ve found a very reasonable, adorable little one-bedroom cottage with a den for guests, and it’s only five houses away from a lovely beach!” she exclaimed.

  “It’s affordable?” I couldn’t keep the skepticism from my voice.

  “I’ll own it outright if all goes well, and my pensions and what’s left from your father will do me just fine.”

  I blew out a long sigh. “Wow.”

  Her voice was gentle as she said, “We all grow up sometime, my dear. You had to let me go eventually.”

  My laughter filled the room like hot air. “Oh, Mom. When will you come visit me?”

  “When do the young men parade around without their underpants?”

  “Mom!”

  “And, of course, I’ll come to enjoy a weekend with you, dear. But it couldn’t hurt…”

  I got off the phone as fast as I could, because Liam’s stripping and Mom’s joke were just a little too close to be comfortable.

  I felt like all the tectonic plates of my inner self were shifting madly, a shaky vibration inside me making life hard to live moment by moment. This feeling wasn’t new, but it was firmly rooted in the past. For six months after my miscarriage, daily life had been unbearable, something to be endured hour by hour, minute by minute as the aftereffects of everything from Liam’s rejection to my body’s betrayal felt like a conspiracy against me.

  Thank God for student health services, both medical and psychological. Without both, I’m not sure I’d have risen from the ashes.

  Memories of his display last night made me curl inward, my sex on fire, heart racing to pump blood where it found the most heat. No way to erase that. He’d moved with the grace of a large game lion, with eyes that couldn’t stop turning back to me. Challenge filled his look, a deeply smoldering stare that made me wet against my will.

  Once again, my body had betrayed me. All because of Liam.

  I’d tried to leave the room but the way he’d ripped off his costume so fast, right in front of me and Sybil, meant the women came running like pregnant women to an ice cream sundae.

  And he was good enough to lick, I’ll tell you that. My mouth watered at the memory. The landscape of that body, sandy hair scattered across thick muscles, his six-pack more of an eight-pack as he moved his hips and shot every woman in that room (other than his mother) a cocky grin full of fake promises, surface sex that was designed to sell.

 
; None of those grins reached his eyes, though.

  Until he looked at me.

  The heat in his eyes burned so bright it was like a blue flame morphed to white, reaching so far into the color spectrum it threatened to turn invisible, taking me and Liam and every molecule of matter with it. In that look I saw want and need and apology and regret, but the look wasn’t enough. Would never be enough. He displayed his body like a trophy, like an object, but his eyes…those were a weapon.

  Whatever made him turn so cold, so cruel, five years ago still lived inside him, and I could never trust him again.

  That didn’t mean I didn’t want him. Grieve him. You would think that spending years mourning our would-be child would have taken all my sorrow, but I had so much more to spend on the Liam I thought I knew. He’d been my friend long before he became my lover, and the betrayal that cut me through the core wasn’t that he’d left me as a pregnant lover.

  It was that he took away the friend I needed most in that moment. The emptiness, the loneliness—the pure abandonment—in that phone call and his words as he dumped me unceremoniously on the telephone were like being eviscerated.

  Why?

  I had no answers. Had spent five years trying desperately to find one that was logical—hell, one that was illogical would have been fine—and countless hours in psychologists’ offices brought me no closer to the truth.

  All I could know was my own experience.

  Whatever he was thinking and feeling remained a mystery.

  I had to put him out of my mind. Had to. The stack of orders stared back at me, begging for attention. Like my sex drive, except I got paid to process these orders.

  Sighing, I picked them up and began to key the first few in to the online form that the company used for party hostesses like me. So many butt plugs and anal beads. So many. The dirty little secret about sex toys is that backdoor action is where it’s at. People are curious, but inhibited. Sex toys break through that, because you can’t ignore a six-inch, squat little cone made of silicon that vibrates.

  You bring that into the bedroom and you pretty much have to talk about it.

  I was in my office, door closed, trying to get this done when a soft knock on the door interrupted me.