Sinners' Playground

by Caroline Peckham

  I grabbed my skateboard, pulled the screwdriver from the ignition and whistled to the mutt as I hopped out. I threw the car door closed behind me, but it resisted and didn't quite shut. I just left it. If anyone here wanted to steal it then a closed door wasn’t gonna stop them and I'd just boost another.

  I rounded the bait shop, moving to lean against the railings that stopped people from falling into the deep water this side of the sea wall and I cast my eyes over the boats which were bobbing on the waves for a few minutes before turning back to people watch.

  It didn't take me long to spot the muscle hanging around. There were a few guys who fit in with the crowd, but there was also like six dudes in leather jackets looking bored as fuck while they chain smoked.

  They weren't going to be the right marks for me though. Sworn in gang members were tight lipped motherfuckers at the best of times. I needed to find the working girls and as I looked around, I spotted them. Three girls chatting and laughing, sitting around one of the picnic benches together while flashing smiles at potential Johns as they walked by.

  I headed over to them with my board tucked under my arm and a bullshit smile on my face which they saw through instantly.

  "What are you, competition or customer?" the platinum blonde asked. She had her hair tied in loose pigtails and a smirk on her face that said she was hoping I was the latter.

  "Neither," I said with a shrug. "I'm a broke ass bitch looking for a guy I know who lives around here. I've got fifteen bucks and a dog I didn't ask for, so I was just hoping you'd take pity on my busted face and point me in the right direction."

  The girl with dark skin and a bubblegum pink bikini top rolled her eyes and pointed to the empty chair opposite her. "I'll take a favour," she said. "How long you gonna be in town?"

  "Honestly? I've got no idea," I replied. "But I'm good for a favour if you wanna trust a girl with a fucked up face."

  "Oh good, you know about that. I was worried no one had pointed it out yet," the last girl said, smirking at me as I rolled my eyes. She was a redhead with lips painted ruby red and a glazed look to her eyes that said she was stoned. I guessed she was one of the girls who didn’t love her line of work and medicated to forget how much she hated it. It was a shitty kind of life, but there were a lot worse to be had.

  "Yeah, I noticed," I replied with a tight smile to let them know I didn’t want to go into that right now and they gave me those been there done that looks which made my heart ache. "I'm hoping it'll fade fast. Either way, I'd really like to find this old friend of mine."

  The girls exchanged a look and the redhead shrugged, pushing to her feet and slapping on a bright smile which contrasted with the deadened look in her eyes. "I’ve got bigger fish to fry," she said, grabbing her purse and sauntering over to a silver BMW that had just pulled up.

  "He's a regular," the blonde explained. "I'm Lyla, this is Dianne."

  "Di," the other girl growled, flipping a look at my baseball cap. "I never went in for the Red Ranger much."

  "Green Ranger for life," I agreed. "But the kid I stole it from clearly had poor taste. What's a girl to do?"

  "I'm pretty sure that a girl is supposed to like the Pink Power Ranger," Lyla put in. "But I was more of a Pokémon kid myself."

  "Psh, the Pink Ranger was such a princess. I'm telling you, it's all about Green," I replied, waving her off and Di grinned. I got the feeling me and her were soul sisters, at least when it came to kids TV.

  "Girl knows her shit," she said, elbowing Lyla like she should know that too and I laughed.

  "You know the trailer park over by the pier?" Di asked and I nodded.

  "I grew up around here once upon a time," I replied with a shrug. "What about it?"

  "That's us. Everyone who's no one lives there or at least hangs out over there. You wanna come pay me that favour then you'll find me there if I'm not here. During the day obviously - if it's night then I'm wherever the party is happening."

  "Got it. I'll be there. I'm Rogue by the way - I know, my mom was stoned like ninety percent of the time so I blame that for the name."

  Di nodded like that was good enough for her, which it should have been. Everyone who grew up on these streets knew the only currency any of us could rely on which was really worth a damn was our word. If you kept your word then you were someone worth knowing. If you didn't, then you weren't. Simple as that. Di was willing to offer me the information I wanted to test my worth. If I showed up to pay back that favour I owed her then I was worth her time, if not, no harm done but I'd be best off not showing my face around here again any time soon.

  "Shoot then, who are you looking for?" Di asked and Lyla perked up too.

  "An old friend of mine. He was in line to be a pretty big player around here back in the day and I can't imagine him ever moving away. The name is JJ Brooks," I said, swallowing the lump in my throat as I spoke his name aloud. Those boys had been nothing but the memories of ghosts to me in all this time and now I was resurrecting them. I hadn't spoken their names in years. I hadn't so much as admitted I'd ever even known them, because I was pretty sure I never had. The boys I'd loved never would have done what they did to me. So maybe that meant the boys I'd loved had never really existed at all.

  Di sucked in a breath and Lyla laughed.

  "You really have been gone a long time," Lyla said.

  "JJ Brooks is like, Harlequin Crew royalty," Di added, raising a brow at me. "You sure you wanna mix it with him?"

  "I only need a bit of his time," I replied with a shrug. "So if you can tell me where to find him..."

  "He runs Afterlife," Di said. "Amongst other things. But that's the err, legal, side of his business.”

  "What’s the illegal side?" I asked and the two girls laughed again.

  "You're looking at us, sweet cheeks," Di taunted. "And JJ is the most expensive of us all. So if that's what you're after you're gonna need more than fifteen bucks and a stray mutt."

  "Are you telling me JJ is on the game?" I asked, arching an eyebrow as I tried to marry my memory of the scrappy little brawler with a big mouth and bigger sense of humour with the idea of him selling his body to the highest bidder.

  "Only if you can afford him," Di said with a laugh. "And like I say, you most certainly can't. But he makes a killing off of lonely housewives and rich old broads. The rumour is he fucks even better than he dances too and that's saying something."

  "Well shit," I breathed, leaning back in my seat and looking out at the sea. "Maybe he'll go down on me for a Red Power Ranger cap? Dude never did have good taste."

  The girls both laughed and I smiled as I teased my fingers through my knotted hair. Of course, I had no intention of getting anywhere near that close to JJ. I just wanted to see him, figure out what made him tick these days and try to work out where he might be keeping his key. If I could retrieve it without him ever knowing I’d been back here then that was all the better for me.

  "Feel free to tell me to fuck off, but is there any chance either of you girls has a hairbrush?" I asked, looking back to them as I pointed out the bird's nest on my head but they both shook their heads sadly.

  "Not here. But you can come down to the trailer park later and borrow some stuff if you like? We'll be having a bonfire on the beach and a few beers once it gets dark," Di offered.

  "Speak for yourself," Lyla sighed. "I'll have to work tonight too if I wanna pay my rent on time. And I'm not sucking Joe's cock to cover the rent again - he was way too rough for fifty bucks and the asshole came on my favourite shirt. Fucking savage."

  I laughed with them and pushed myself to my feet. "I may just take you up on the offer of a drink by the bonfire later. But I'm gonna need to see if I can track down JJ first," I said.

  "See you when I see you," Di said and Lyla waved.

  The mutt had been wandering around, begging fries from unsuspecting chumps and had clearly been better fed than me at this point but he showed up as I walked towards my stolen Jeep, yipping excitedly and licki
ng my ankles anyway. I guessed he valued me saving him from death by skateboard over a few throwaway scraps from those other assholes. Lucky me, maybe I should have been flattered.

  "I guess it's you and me then, is it?" I asked him and he yipped again. "No accounting for your poor taste, my man."

  The dog either didn't agree or didn't mind that I was a shitty kind of owner and he hopped up inside the open door of my new car with his tail wagging. I jumped in too, reaching up to unclip the plastic roof with some difficulty before balling the material on the back seats. With the top down - if I could call it that, was it a convertible if it still had roof bars? Whatever, point was, the sun was shining down on me, the temperature was rising and I was on my way to claim what was owed to me. So it couldn't all be bad.

  The Jeep struggled with the up hills but glided down the other side of them easy enough and I wasn't going to make any kind of comment on the level of gas in the tank. All I would say was that the arrow had passed beneath the little red bar and we were playing fast and loose with the dangerous reality of how many miles I could tease out of the dregs.

  So far the car was still going though, so I wasn't gonna waste time worrying about that.

  Afterlife had been a fairly popular strip club back when I ran these streets but when I finally pulled up outside it, my brows rose. The place was at least four times bigger than it had been when I'd last been here, the businesses on either side of it bought out and merged into it now and it looked...cool.

  It was lunch time so it was hardly peak hour but there were a bunch of cars in the parking lot and I pulled my battered Jeep up next to a flashy orange Mustang GT with the top left down.

  I wasn't totally convinced that I was going to have enough fuel to get the Jeep started again, so I pulled my screwdriver/key out of the ignition and pocketed it.

  The mutt whimpered as I turned to look at him and I shrugged because I wasn't really sure what I was doing here either. Was I going to be conducting a one woman stake out in a stolen bikini with a half starved mutt as an accomplice? Better planning may have been a good idea. But here I was and it seemed silly to back out now.

  I huffed and forced the door open before hopping out in my ruined sneakers and weighing my options.

  The club looked kinda fancy and I very much did not. It also looked closed which meant the cars parked up around me probably belonged to staff. So maybe I’d get lucky and find JJ here. Then what? If he didn't wear his key like I did then he would obviously keep it at his house, not here. So I could follow him home, but that didn't really help me because I was very much reliant on a beat up car with no gas in the tank. So maybe I needed a new car.

  I wandered closer to the GT, admiring the interior and smiling as I spotted a pair of designer sunglasses with black frames and pink lenses just sitting there begging for a new home.

  I hooked them up and popped them on with a smirk before spotting a shirt tossed on the back seat and stealing that too. It was a man's white wifebeater with oversized arm holes and a black and orange sketch of the sun setting over the sea on the front of it.

  I tossed the boho cardigan thing into the back of my Jeep and tugged on the wifebeater, tying a knot in the side of it to make it fit better and grinning to myself. Look at me with outfit options. I was practically a regular rich bitch with my own walk in wardrobe in the back of my car.

  With my fresh new look in place, I started around the club, moving into the shade beneath a palm tree at the edge of a wide outdoor bar area with a view of the sea.

  There was music playing inside the club and I could hear a man barking instructions, clapping his hands in time to the beat and cursing at someone who was clearly fucking up whatever he wanted them to do.

  I slipped closer, using the shade between the palms to cover me as if that made me any less visible in the blaring light of day while the mutt scampered away in search of snacks. I hoped he brought me back some this time because I was about to blow my fifteen bucks on something carb filled and greasy at the first chance I got, and that didn't seem like the best move for the last bit of money I could lay claim to.

  I made it to the glass doors beside the tinted black windows which ringed the club and peeked inside.

  There was another large bar area closest to the doors, but beyond that there was a main stage set up with strip poles and cages on podiums. In the centre of the stage were five ripped guys in sweatpants with their chests bare. The four whose faces I could see were a mixture of typically gorgeous dudes, but something about the guy whose back was to me made my skin prickle and my eyes were instantly glued to him as he clapped his hands again.

  "You gotta roll your hips, Adam," he snapped. "Not thrust them like you're trying to bang a nail with a hammer. Roll."

  He made his point even more clearly by placing his hands on the back of his head and pushing his fingers into his inky black hair while he rolled his hips in a move that seriously shouldn't have been legal. I bit my lip as my eyes stayed glued to the movements of his body like he was some kind of sex god and the blonde guy who I guessed must have been Adam tried to emulate it.

  He didn't really succeed and the sex god cursed him out. "I need five minutes to chill out," he barked. "You guys keep practicing while I'm gone."

  He turned to look over his shoulder towards the bar and I gasped as I recognised him. Johnny James was not the boy I'd left behind all those years ago. He was...well he'd bypassed man and slipped right on into dirty fantasy material. His black hair was pushed away from his angular face and those honey brown eyes which had always been dancing with laughter now held a primal kind of hunger in them as he searched for something by the bar. His muscles looked cut from glass, each of them perfectly defined to the point of the impossible. He had a tattoo across his lower abs of a flock of swallows which kinda forced my eyes down to his waistband as they disappeared beneath it and my gaze hooked on the bulge within his sweatpants which made me think he wasn't wearing any underwear. I was practically panting at the sight of him and all he was doing was standing there. Fuck me. I hadn't been expecting that.

  I ducked back out of sight as a flirtatious giggle met my ear and JJ jumped down from the stage before heading towards a door around the side of it with a brunette girl scurrying after him in a pair of shorts that were way too short for her. And this was coming from me while I currently had my ass cheeks hanging more than half way out of my own shorts. But like, I could practically see what that girl had eaten for breakfast.

  The door swung closed behind the two of them and curiosity won out as I slipped into the club. I cast a look at the bar but it was empty now the girl had gone and the four guys on stage currently had their backs to me as they practiced some kind of slow motion grinding thing, so I darted past them and slipped through the door too.

  It was cool inside, the luxury of aircon chilling my skin and I moved down a dim corridor until I came to a door which had been left open, letting me see into a large office.

  JJ was in there, the giggling girl on her knees before him, making promises about helping him with his stress while he looked at something on his phone.

  "Thanks, Jessie," he muttered like she was getting him a coffee instead of taking his dick out of his pants and rolling a condom onto it before sliding it between her lips.

  JJ kept scrolling on his phone, muttering a few curses about whatever he was looking at while I watched him in fascination. It wasn't even about him just getting the world's most casual BJ, though that was making my heart race a little if I was being totally honest. But it was mainly just that he was there, right in front of me, this piece of my heart who had once been such an immovable part of my life and had been gone for so long. I wanted to hug him and punch him in equal measures, but apparently I was just gonna settle on watching him get his cock sucked. I mean, he could have shut the door, so I had to assume he wasn't that worried about having an audience, but I probably should have left all the same. It turned out I was a nosey bitch with no boundaries though be
cause I just kept watching.

  As JJ typed something out on his phone with one hand, he moved the other to grip the girl's hair and guide her movements up and down his shaft with such indifference that it was somehow weirdly hot. I wondered if he fucked like that too? With a cold detachment that said this was a means to an end and his heart and soul had absolutely nothing to do with it.

  He grunted a curse as he came, thrusting his hips forward to plunge his dick deeper into the girl’s mouth and his eyes suddenly snapped up to meet mine.

  I gasped and he frowned, pushing the girl back and saying something which I didn't even hear because I was already running.

  I bolted back the way I'd come, raced across the bar where the guys on stage all stared at me in alarm and I shot out the door. I turned towards the parking lot, but a strong hand locked around my wrist and I cried out as I was yanked back into a hard chest.

  "What do we have here then?" JJ asked curiously, whirling me around and pushing me back against the blacked out window of the bar. "If you want to watch me getting sucked off that has a price you know."

  "I promise you, I had no interest in seeing that," I growled, tipping my head low so that the brim of my baseball cap hid my face, but of course he wasn't going to let me get away with that.

  JJ caught my chin and forced my gaze up to meet his through the pink lenses of my new sunglasses. I gasped, staring at the once familiar face of the boy I'd loved and seeing all the strangeness of the man he'd grown into while trying to figure out how the fuck I was going to escape him.

  "Who...is that my shirt?" he asked with a frown as his gaze trailed down me before snapping back up to my face. "And my sunglasses?"

  "No," I bit out because of course I'd had to go and steal from him of all people. "We must just have the same shitty taste in clothes."