“Making sure he’s not dead.” I stirred the soup when it started to bubble on the stove.
“Yeah, we can’t have Ben die, can we?”
“I’m alive,” he muttered. “Now both of you go away.”
“Later!” Joan said, lifting her hands up. “And you’re welcome. For the medicine.”
“Fuck your medicine.”
“Lovely,” Joan said. “You coming?” she asked me.
“Yeah, just…” I tested the temperature of the soup and then poured it into a bowl, turned off the stove, and put the bowl down in front of Ben. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked him. He really looked sick, and what was the deal with the weird dried blood on his shirt?
Not my business was what it was.
“Fine,” he said with a wan smile. “And thank you.”
“Right,” Joan muttered, “her he thanks. Let’s go, Florence Nightingale,” she said, nearly dragging me away.
Once we were outside and on the other side of her trailer, she turned.
“What the hell did I say to you?” she asked. “Stay away from the old man, Annie!”
“What were you doing bringing him a hundred dollars in cold medicine?” I asked.
“A hundred and fifty—that sinus stuff is expensive. He wakes up at six in the morning hacking away like he’s going to cough up a lung. I get home at three, I can’t fucking take it.”
“Right. Kevin asked me to look in on him,” I lied.
Joan heaved a big sigh. “Fine…just, honestly, Annie. Don’t get friendly.”
I wondered if Joan knew about the fire. The girl asleep upstairs. Probably, I decided. Joan seemed to know plenty.
“I gotta get to work,” Joan said, checking her watch. “I’ll see you later.”
Oh God, she would. She would see me later at The Velvet Touch. Or rather, maybe I would see her.
A lot of her.
—
What does one wear to a strip club?
It wasn’t like I had a whole lot of choices. In the end I picked my nicest shorts—which meant they didn’t have any holes. They were black and shorter than my other ones, which I thought made them sort of sexy. And I wore my maroon tank-top camisole, which I usually slept in.
I used two of the conditioner packets on my hair and it was actually soft and lying at least a little bit flat against my head, instead of sticking up like a haystack.
With my tan and a little lip gloss and mascara…it wasn’t half bad, I thought.
I spent the evening re-reading my favorite parts of Fifty Shades of Grey and I didn’t touch myself once, so I would be too worked up to chicken out. And truthfully, it would have been nice to have a bucket-o-something to get my courage up.
But at eleven o’clock I put down the book, grabbed my keys, and crossed the point of no return.
The Velvet Touch was three exits back on the highway. It was a dark, cement-bunker-type building sitting in a vast sea of parking, with a billboard so big and so pink it could probably be seen in space.
The parking lot was half full of pickup trucks and big rigs, and there were a half dozen motorcycles lined up near the entrance. The chrome reflected the lights and the black silhouettes of naked women on the billboard.
My courage was flagging, so I pulled out my phone and called Dylan.
“Hey, baby,” he said. “You okay?”
“I’m sitting in the parking lot of the strip club.”
The sound he made low in his throat was sexy. “Having second thoughts?”
“No. I mean…I’m nervous.”
“Nervous is okay. Nervous is exciting. This is naughty, baby. And you like naughty.”
“Yeah, but…what do I do?”
“You’re going to walk in those doors, order a drink, find a dark corner, and you and me, we’re going to talk about what you’re seeing. How it makes you feel.”
“What if it doesn’t make me feel anything?”
“Slip your fingers down your pants, baby.”
“Dylan…”
“Do it.”
Rolling my eyes despite the fact he couldn’t see, I sucked in my belly and shoved my fingers down my pants past the thin elastic of my underwear.
I gasped when my fingers brushed my clit and then again when I felt how wet I was. In my nerves I hadn’t noticed.
“What did you find?” he asked, like he knew. But of course he knew. Somehow he knew everything about this.
“I’m wet,” I whispered.
“Tell me.”
“I’m so slippery,” I moaned low in my throat, giving in to the feeling.
“Don’t come,” he said, his voice sharp, like he knew what I was doing.