Damaged Goods

by Nicole Williams

  “If you’re going to ask someone if they have any questions, you shouldn’t follow it up by stalking your watch and all but tapping your foot impatiently.”

  Jake nudged me as he passed by. “I’ll take that as a no.”

  Jake had long disappeared into the club when I worked up the courage to fit my hand around the doorknob. I wasn’t shaking on the outside, but everything on the inside was. As had been my only saving grace for the last couple of hours, I took a few calming breaths. I repeated Cherry’s, and now Jake’s, advice under my breath.

  Make eye contact.

  Difficult given this mask was impairing my vision to the point I could barely make out my hand in front of my face. Especially difficult given the area outside of the V.I.P. room was even darker than the main club.

  Smile.

  Next to impossible as I felt so paralyzed with fear and uncertainty that I could barely blink.

  Be a good listener.

  How was I supposed to do that? Jake had pretty much said this wasn’t the room for “talking.”

  No sob stories.

  Most of my stories were sob stories, although telling them was a moot point thanks to the aforementioned no-talking policy.

  Rock ‘em, roll ‘em.

  That was about the only piece of advice I didn’t have an immediate rebuttal for. Okay, so “rock ‘em and roll ‘em” would be the theme of the night. Damn, I hoped the guy liked hip action because that was all I had for him.

  I said a silent prayer that he wouldn’t bail out of the room in boredom after five seconds flat then twisted the doorknob and stepped inside. The V.I.P. room was even darker than the area outside. Instead of the low-thumping music in the club, there was something different playing in here. The room must have been sound proof because I couldn’t hear or feel the bass from outside. I didn’t listen to this kind of music often, but I knew it was classical of some sort. It was beautiful . . . in a haunting, emotional kind of way.

  There was a fully stocked, self-service bar in one of the back corners of the room, and the V.I.P. room stuck to the club’s cosmopolitan-meets-urban theme, but it amped it up a few levels. Instead of leather-tufted arm chairs and couches, there were a couple velvet wingback chairs and a chaise, all in dark, rich colors. Instead of dark, shiny tile, a silver plush pile carpet covered the floor. When I saw the pole in one of the front corners, I swallowed. If this guy was expecting me on that pole, I was done.

  A giant chandelier hung from the center of the room, its strands of crystals falling at varying lengths. A few strands fell so far they skimmed the carpet. It wasn’t turned on, but there was just enough light in the room that the crystals twinkled and shimmered softly, like dozens of far-off cameras snapping photos.

  Other than that, the room was open. It was sophisticated without being overstated, classy without being pretentious. Really, it was a lovely room. When my eyes fell on that pole again, I was thrust back into reality and remembered where I was and what I was about to do with . . .

  Him.

  I’d been so busy inspecting the room, I hadn’t even noticed the dark figure seated in a one of those clear, modern-style plastic chairs. Thanks to the dark room and this ridiculous mask, I couldn’t make out anything but a dark form. He could have been tall; he could have been short. He could have been young; he could have been old. He could have been my high school algebra teacher; he could have been the Prince of England.

  I didn’t know . . . and guess what? I didn’t want to know.

  When I realized that the dark form sitting silently in the shadows was and could remain a stranger if I wanted him to, the first flash of relief I’d felt in weeks flooded me. He was a customer, and this was my job. There were no strings, no expectations, nothing that would extend past tonight. I’d dance, he’d touch, and when it was all said and done, there’d be a clean break.

  I can do this. This time when I said that to myself, I actually believed myself. Somehow realizing that this moment, or these collective moments, were nothing that would accompany me into tomorrow made crossing to him that much easier.

  He must have known I was in the room—the door hadn’t closed noiselessly—but he didn’t stand or turn around or even glance back. When I was a step behind him, I paused. The music had grown softer, and even though it sounded like something that could be a lullaby, it was a melancholy one.

  I tried to make out the specifics of the man sitting just a foot in front of me, but all I could make out was lightish hair, a wide back, and dark clothes. I stayed frozen behind him for a few more seconds, unsure how to make the first move or if I even should. How did a stripper go about the illusion of seducing a man who hadn’t even acknowledged her?

  I knew one thing: just standing there doing nothing and hoping providence would throw me a clue wouldn’t help me.

  I dropped my hands to his shoulders and stepped closer so my stomach was running against the back of his head. My thumbs skimmed up and down his collarbone while the rest of my fingers kneaded the muscles running across his chest and shoulders. He felt as tense as I was, but he noticeably relaxed under my continued massage. From the feel of how rigid he’d been and the knowledge that it had taken Jake months to get him there, I guessed the guy wasn’t a typical strip club fly. I could almost sense how unsure he was. I almost felt the conflict coursing through him.

  I wasn’t sure if us having a combined strip club experience of just one night would make things easier or more difficult, but I’d have the answer soon.

  My hands moved lower, past his chest and down his stomach. As they began their return journey, his hands found mine and enveloped them. His skin was surprisingly warm, but that wasn’t what I noticed most. I noticed how the warmth from his hands spread to mine, heating them. I didn’t realize I’d been frozen until the warmth coming from this stranger melted the ice I’d been encased in for days . . . or weeks . . . or months . . . Or my entire life.

  It was as much a welcome surprise as it wasn’t.

  One of his hands pulled me around him as he released the other one. As I came around the chair, I adjusted the mask with my free hand. That was right when he gave my hand a sudden tug, and in one seamless move I could take no credit for, I was straddling his lap. My mask had been bumped from mostly impairing my vision to totally impairing it (which I got to take all credit for).

  Before I could readjust the mask, he’d found my other hand and was pulling them both around his neck. When my hands reached the back of the chair, he fixed them there and dropped his hands to his sides. That move—his hands dropping away from me—was almost as confounding as the way the warmth coming from him had crept right through me. But now that I was pressed against him in several key places, the warmth felt more like heat. The good kind and the foreign kind. So much was confusing about this moment and this man, and we hadn’t said a word or spent more than a minute together.

  I waited for his hands to form to my body, but they didn’t. The only reassurance that he was still there was his steady inhalation and exhalation and the heat flowing from him to me. After a few more moments, I realized I shouldn’t be waiting for him to do something. He was the one waiting for me to do something.

  God, this was so different from the male/female world I knew. This was, of course, the 21st Century, and we women were just as capable of approaching men as they were us, but I was used to, and preferred, the guy making the first move. Mainly because I’d never come across a guy worth getting so excited over that I’d go out of my way to pursue him. But here, right now, was different. He was waiting for me to make the first move, and though it was a move I wasn’t especially familiar with, at least rejection and an awkward breakup months down the road weren’t a factor.

  Bracing my hands, I straightened my arms and lifted my hips from his. I rocked my hips back into his, so gently the fabric covering me just barely skimmed his pants. I had no idea what I was doing and I couldn’t see his face to tell if he was enjoying what I was doing, but I could .
. . feel that he was. No, not feel that he was enjoying himself that way—although every time my hips rolled into his, I could feel that form of enjoyment—but from the energy around us. I almost felt like an invisible ball of electricity and magnetism had encircled us, encapsulating us in its dizzying energy.

  If I had been in more control, I probably would have slapped some sense into myself and hightailed it out of that room. Attraction was not a component of this place. Romance was not a part of the V.I.P. room package. Passion and heat and chemistry and energy and all of the things I felt zapping to life in the space around us were not the things of this kind of life, or even my life. I needed to forget about this man and our inexplicable experience and have my mind wiped of them both. I needed to get a grip and remember why I was there—it wasn’t to forge a bond with some random stranger . . . who’d been comped by the club owner to come watch me strip for him.

  Talk about a reality check.

  I was there to dance. I was there to strip. I was there to entertain. Get a grip and be a goddamn professional, Liv. I could do that. And yes, I realized that was the fifty billionth time I’d reassured myself of that before failing at every turn.

  The guy’s hands not touching me seemed to be throwing me as much as the rest of it, but that was something I could fix—the electric field charging around us, not so much. I pressed one of his hands into the bend of my waist, and the other I formed on the place where my leg met the rise of my backside. I held my hands over his for a moment, making sure they’d stay put, before lowering my hands to his chest. I recommenced the gentle rock-and-roll hip pattern before realizing I should have adjusted my mask first. But once I’d found a pattern, I wasn’t changing anything, sliding my mask up so I could see included. I figured that would be too much like jinxing myself.

  I was a whole handful of seconds into my “rhythm” when the hand I’d formed around my lace-covered derriere slid up to my waist. His hands stilled my movement, holding me in place before lowering me back into his lap. The movement didn’t come across as illicit or him just wanting to feel my weight and warmth against him; it was something intimate and gentle and almost . . . worshipful.

  Once I was settled on his lap, his hands grabbed mine and pulled them behind him again. Instead of attaching them to the chair again, he wrapped my hands around the back of his neck. My fingers laced together, tangling in the hair at his nape.

  That was when his hands slipped from my waist to my stomach and started crawling up. I inhaled when they crested the curve of my chest. One part of me hoped they’d stop there and show me all of the things those hands could do that I’d never known before. Another part of me hoped they’d keep moving so he wouldn’t fall into that category of man who went for the soft, sensitive spots on a woman at the first opportunity . . . which was pretty much every man I’d known. When they kept moving, his fingers trailing along the lines of my neck, I sighed with relief at the same time I moaned in disappointment.

  Oh, shit. Had I really just moaned?

  Since I couldn’t see jack, I couldn’t inspect his face for that cocky smirk most men would form from making a woman moan with one touch. His hand paused on my neck, melding into the bend of it. It wasn’t intentional, but I leaned into his touch. His other hand crept up beneath my jaw until it reached the tip of my chin. From there, his fingers fanned out and slid up the rest of my face. They curved around the peaks and valleys of my nose, they outlined the skin around my mask, they smoothed over the plane of my forehead. They didn’t miss a thing, nor were they in a hurry. All I could do while this man touched pieces of my face I was certain no man had touched before was sit there, silent and unmoving. At the same time it sparked something to life inside me, his touch froze me in place.

  His fingers slowed on the base of my jaw before his entire hand fell away from my face. Just when I was sure it would adhere to the fullness of my breast or the space between my legs, a single finger pressed into the canyon at the base of my neck. His touch was so light that I could barely detect it, but it was enough to make my hurried breathing pick up even more. His finger moved up my neck, tracing a straight line to the base of my chin, and then, ever so subtly, his finger curled, coaxing my face closer to his.

  I went from hurried breathing to a notch below panting in one understated suggestion. My response to his suggestion was the opposite of understated. Of course, being unable to see might have contributed to my reaction, but I knew that even if I could have seen clearly, that wouldn’t have stopped my mouth from seeking his. Nor would it have stopped my mouth from finding his.

  When my lips pressed into his, that ball of electricity we were trapped in spread until I doubted there was enough space on earth to contain it. When his lips pressed back, moving ever so slightly against mine, I forgot all about energy and magnetism and everything else. I forgot my fake name and my real name and what I was doing there.

  I didn’t remember anything. I lived that kiss.

  His hand was still attached to my neck, but as the pace of our mouths picked up, his hand curled into my neck, gripping it as if it were the only thing grounding him. God, I didn’t even know what my hands were doing or where they were going. I could barely maintain a shred of consciousness from keeping up with the pace of his mouth; I had nothing left to guide the path of my hands. They moved of their own accord. They grew their own will, and I let them do what they wanted for however long they wanted to.

  When his tongue slid in my mouth, connecting with mine, his other arm wrapped around my waist, cinching me tighter to him. The friction generated between our laps from that motion had me moaning again. Into his mouth. Tangled up with his tongue. Oh, dear God. If this was what I’d been missing out on, I never wanted to miss out on it again. His mouth continued its relentless pursuit of mine while mine conquered and surrendered to his.

  I had a shred of my consciousness still around, reminding me of what I was doing, where I was doing it, and whom I was doing it with, but I silenced it and let my body take over for once in my life. I’d never succumbed to moments of reckless abandon before. I’d gone into all of my former relationships and romantic encounters with my brain leading and my heart following a good ways behind. It had been the only way to ensure my emotions, which were irrational by definition, didn’t lead me astray.

  But sharing kisses and caresses and sensations with this man made me wonder why I’d been so adamant about not letting my emotions lead me. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that had I not let them slip through, I wouldn’t be experiencing what I was. I would never have known that a man could express things to me through touch he couldn’t say with words. I never would have known that a carefully placed hand applying just the right amount of pressure to the skin covering my hipbone could make me come close to climax. I never would have experienced how one kiss could make me feel that, my whole life, I’d been doing something else when my mouth had connected with another man’s. It certainly hadn’t been kissing because this, right here, was kissing.

  Time became lost as we continued, unyielding and unrestrained. Seconds could have passed just as easily as hours. I was nothing but a ball of instinct, and the only thing my mind was capable of processing was my increasing desire for the guy who was unraveling my world one touch and one kiss at a time. As something in the pit of my stomach coiled tighter, the kissing became almost painful. Not because it wasn’t pleasurable, but because my body needed more. It had to get to the next point of intimacy to alleviate the ache spreading from the center of my body.

  My hand covered his, which was still grasping the curve of my hip, and guided it up my body. Just as I was leading it to toward my breast, his hand stiffened beneath mine before twisting and grabbing my wrist. His other hand found my other wrist pressed against his chest, and with one smooth motion, he had both of my arms tangled behind my back, my wrists crossed behind my backside. I let out a small gasp at the strength he possessed. I’d felt his defined muscles earlier, but to feel that power firsthand was
a totally different experience.

  One hand cinched my wrists together, his fingers formed like manacles around them. If I’d thought my heart had been thundering before, I’d been wrong. His mouth slowed against mine when everything inside my body screamed to speed up. That, combined with my hands being held captive, was enough to make me question who was selling the illusion to whom. At that moment, his body and his movements and his caresses were making me think about one thing and one thing only. How this man, this customer, had managed to turn the tables on this whole encounter was baffling to say the least.

  No matter how intently my mouth moved against his or how urgently I worked to break free of his hold, I was powerless. Yet somehow, I’d never felt so free.

  When his free hand returned to the bend of my neck, his fingers curling into the sensitive skin at my nape, I shifted higher on his lap until he emitted something that wasn’t quite a sigh but almost a moan.

  That did nothing to slow my runaway train of a body. Nothing.

  I pressed my chest into his and was about to get back to rocking my hips into his because if the only parts of him I could connect with were his mouth and below-the-belt region, I was going to make the most of it. That was when a phone chimed.

  In comparison to the symphony in the background tangled with our combined breathing, the shrillness of the ring punctured whatever bubble we’d created enough for a sliver of common sense to seep back into me. He must have silenced the phone, because it stopped ringing after the first chime. Even though that bubble had cracked, when his kissing and touching slipped back into urgent territory, I stayed exactly where I was and met him kiss for kiss. Touch for touch. Common sense might have made a reappearance, but a sliver wouldn’t cut it. At that point, if common sense were able to materialize into a concrete block and hit me over the head repeatedly, I doubted I’d even feel it. My body was that gone. My mind that lost in whatever fog this stranger had brought with him.