In the end, she realized that no decision she made would be the correct one. Vanessa’s life, at this point, felt like a steady stream of lose-lose situations, a lexicon of wrong answers to complex questions. The money wasn’t hers, but the CEO didn’t take no for an answer. She felt bad about keeping it, but then again, a part of her didn’t care. After losing her parents, losing her adulthood, becoming suddenly crushed by the weight of the responsibilities toppling onto her, two hundred dollars falling into her lap was the least of what she deserved. She wasn’t a martyr, not now, at least. Vanessa went shopping for a few cheap pieces of lacy lingerie she could wear on stage: flashy reds and smoldering blacks that would beckon men to slip money in the waistband much more than her ratty old underwear from her teenage years would.
Vanessa had worked out a deal with Jessica, their neighbor, to keep an eye on Emma during the nights that she’d have to work. The arrangement was shaky for the time being, not even Vanessa knew whether she’d be able to keep the gig. Would she be good enough? Would Talisha’s generosity be slammed back in her face by inadequacy? Vanessa felt ordinary, more like the girl who’d clean up the empty tumblers than the woman twisting herself sensually around a pole. With a head full of doubts converging into the tectonic plates of her insecurities, Vanessa made it seem like Jessica would only have to watch Emma for a few nights before the inevitable burnout, the unavoidable firing.
Riding the bus to the strip club where Talisha instructed her to be—the only one in town—at nine o’clock, Vanessa felt more unlike herself than she ever had. It felt as though the sharp, lacy lines of the lingerie were jutting through the simple boundary of her t-shirt, protruding in a way that was obvious to everyone. Her makeup was over the top, her hair was curled in bouncy ringlets. The glitter on her cheeks seemed to spell out HELLO, I AM A STRIPPER to all the bus passengers who snickered her way. Disgusted with herself, with her dead-end decisions, with the house of cards her life had become, Vanessa just glared out the window, counting the street lights once more, hoping that the constant stop and start of the vehicle wouldn’t totally expel her bike from where it was hooked onto the portable bike rack on the outside of the bus.
* * *
The lights seared Vanessa’s skin. The pole was smeared with the grease and shame and grit of other dancers, all cavorting to the tune of their own desperation. The way the men gawked—mouths agape—felt like a different kind of light all its own, casting shadows across her body. It began as a sheepish, timid foray into an underworld that was unknown to Vanessa, a world where sensuality collided with power. In her first few moments on stage, she faltered in how to move, forgetting almost how to walk. But then with a few notes of a new song, something awakened in her. Vanessa harnessed all the pain, the grief, the agony, and the anger of her parents being gone, leaving her with this life, and used it to propel herself forward. She was a powerhouse, turning the tables on the men who felt as though they were the ones who held the lightning bolts in the dynamic.
“Where did you learn to dance like that?” Talisha asked, astonished, in between dances during Vanessa’s first night on the job. “The club’s owner nearly fell over, she was so shocked that I hadn’t brought you in sooner!”
“She?” Vanessa replied, perplexed. “A woman owns the strip club?”
“Oh, yeah,” Talisha said with a smirk. “Don’t get too excited. She might as well be a man, if you know what I mean.”
Chapter 7
Aaron felt stale inside. He felt as though he’d been cut along his spine in his sleep and flipped inside out, his insides roasted under the California sun. Between the seizure in the boardroom, Mr. Lee’s swift intervention, having to fire Desiree, and swirls of Vanessa permeating his mind, Aaron needed a break. He needed to make something happen. Something to shake him up inside. Something to take the power back. Something to regain control over his life, which was tumbling ever faster out of his hands.
He needed a woman. He needed to feel the dips of her waist, the meat of her ass in his hands. It didn’t matter who. Aaron would be fine with a mannequin at this point, a doll, some faceless icon that he could use and throw away. He was too busy to date anyone, too mentally blocked to feel anything for anyone. That left him with the scraps of the ready-made sex industry: pornography, strippers, high-class escorts. This, too, tarnished Aaron’s mental landscape. If sexual contact was only a few crumpled banknotes away, then what was the point?
Normally, he would call an escort service and wait for a girl to show up. He’d pretend—in every way he could, every way he wanted—to love her for a few hours. He’d do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, however he wanted. He’d be so enraptured with this prostitute in a mask of elegance, but not because of her as a person. Because she was a walking, talking, breathing variable. He could configure her in any way he desired, filling any gaps he had in the equation of his life.
Tonight though, Aaron needed something different. He needed wind on his face. He needed to reactivate the dull, blunt tips of what used to be a sharp and glimmering lifestyle. He was fading, somehow, into a lesser version of himself. He needed to get out of this rut, to get his lust for life back.
Kümertech was headquartered in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles due to zoning restrictions and cheaper property rates back in the 1970s when Charlie Ridley founded the company. The Ridley family never bothered to move the company into the city, despite the fact that they lived in high-rises looking out over Manhattan Beach. Aaron spent most of his time in the suburbs, especially since his father fell ill. He couldn’t stand the sterile feeling of his father’s impending death seeping into his nostrils every time he went for a visit.
Thinly veiled by the guise that work took precedence, Aaron stayed in hotels close to his office building, living as the suburbanites did. He took his meals at family-style chain restaurants, filled his car with gas at one of the local mom-and-pop gas stations, and walked around the outdoor sprawl of shops that constituted a mall by suburban standards. He wanted to live like these people did. Aaron longed for normalcy, for ordinariness, for a life devoid of quarterly reports and million-dollar revenues and designer suits and year-end galas.
After the events of the day, Aaron didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to pursue. He didn’t even want to pick up the phone. He couldn’t quite understand what it was that he wanted. It was as though there was some kind of mental barrier between him and everything that he craved, all the dancing and glimmering happiness that he just didn’t have the mental fastidiousness to imagine. Driving aimlessly around the residential areas near his office in a suit that was at least three times the cost of the most expensive piece of menswear owned in the social climate of this place, Aaron saw a strip club in a parking lot off the main drag. Feeling like he had nothing to lose, he pulled in.
Immediately he recognized her. On stage, lilting around a pole with a smirk of steaminess across her face. What was she doing here? He wanted to go up to the stage, ask her to come down, to have dinner with him, to go back to his hotel suite and stay the night, but his reason took over. Who was she? And more importantly, why did he care so much?
It was late, already about half past midnight. The club was crowded for a Wednesday night, full of regular guys wearing wedding rings that glimmered under the strobe lights. Aaron kept second-guessing himself, questioning whether he was actually seeing the woman who kept flitting through his mind or whether it was some hallucination of her, some personification of the daydream haunting his reality.
She shimmered in the spotlight, and with a switch of her body around the pole, Aaron could see from across the room that this was the same woman from before. The timid, mortal girl who spilled salad all over the floor of his office building was now a goddess in the center of the room. Aaron saw the tattoo behind her ear—the one that had branded itself into his mind only a few hours earlier—and understood instantly that this was Vanessa, parading before him in full authenticity. A fantasy sprung to life.
Turning to get a drink, Aaron shouted an order to the bartender. “Whiskey sour,” he shouted over the pulse of the music through the club. With a nod, the bartender got to work, pouring and mixing, silently crafting a tumbler of overpriced, liquid courage. “Do you know where I can pay for a dance in a private room?” he added to a bartender who could barely hear him.
“You want a dance in a private room?” The bartender yelled back, distracted by the task at hand.
“Yeah, how do I arrange that?” Aaron bellowed across the bar.
“I’ll call the manager for you. She’ll be right here and you’ll organize it through her. Here’s that whiskey sour in the meantime.” He slid a napkin down in front of Aaron and placed the tumbler—already sweating in the dank muskiness of the club—in front of him.
With resolute eyes piercing across the distance to Vanessa, Aaron could barely contain himself. He had to keep switching positions, his pants were becoming tighter by the moment, with every new sway of her body. He wanted to drink her in—all of her—with a ferocity that he didn’t think he had the strength to feel after being in such a funk for so long. She had reawakened something in him this morning that was roaring even louder still right now, some piece of himself that he hadn’t encountered in years.
Aaron tapped his fingers on the bar when Vanessa’s song was over and she faded back into the wings of the stage, out of public view. Another girl was dancing now, but she (like the vast majority of women) bored Aaron. He downed his drink, feeling the instant shock of the whiskey plunder through his veins, the slick grease of relaxation sliding through his extremities.
The bartender returned in between songs, when an eerie stillness fell over the club and the patrons were left to reckon with their own whooping and hollering until the music blared again. “My manager will be right here,” he said with a nod. “Want another?”
“Sure,” Aaron replied flatly.
“What can I do for you, sir?” A husky voice melted through the air behind Aaron, who turned around to see a stocky, no-nonsense woman with greasy hair and ill-fitting jeans, which looked like they’d cut off her circulation if she sat down.
“Are you, uh, the manager?” Aaron asked in a futile attempt to mask his disbelief.
“Yes sir, I am. Ben told me that you wanted to organize a private dance?” The woman had a clipboard in her hand, as if she were a waitress asking him what he wanted for dinner.
The music pumped up again, engulfing them in an ocean of sound waves, vibrating the world around them and drowning out all logic. With a mind that was slowly eroding in the static of the alcohol, Aaron found himself inelegantly blurting, “That girl. The one who danced before. Vanessa.”
The manager frowned. “She’s off the clock, I’m afraid. That was actually her last dance for the night. I can put you down for a dance with Amber if you’d like.”
Aaron fished his money clip from his wallet and tossed a hundred-dollar bill onto the bar. “Keep the change,” he said to the bartender as he slammed his tumbler down and brushed past the manager, saying nothing more to her. He had to find Vanessa, to talk to her somehow, to breathe in her essence. Something about her was electrifying to him, the way that she gazed or moved or something. Aaron couldn’t place what it was, but she had cursed him somehow. He’d become addicted to her—in a way that didn’t even make sense to him—in the past few hours.
Chapter 8
"Want a ride home?" Talisha asked after their shifts were over.
"No, that's okay, but thank you. I really like riding home late at night. It's peaceful and breezy," Vanessa said with a smile. In actuality, she just wanted to be alone, if only for a few minutes. She wanted to inhale the freedom, the seclusion, the feeling that she was still a young woman whose life wasn’t crunched into a catastrophe she no longer recognized. She wanted the wind to whip along her back, propelling her forward as nothing else in her life seemed to be.
Vanessa wanted to escape Emma—even if just for the duration of a ride home—and she resented herself for it. Caring for a six-year-old was a full-time job in and of itself. Her constant need for attention and stimulation was overwhelming. Her little personality was so formidable that Vanessa needed to always walk the line between sensitivity and discipline, being on high alert at all times that anything she said or did could be picked up by her little sister. Vanessa always had to be ON. There was never a time to slack off, to rest, to relax.
Then of course, there was Emma’s epilepsy, piled high on top of all the other ways that immediately having to care full-time for a kindergartener was weighing down on her. The missed doctor’s appointments, the cost of medications, the heart-palpitating fear that one day Emma might have a seizure in her sleep and choke to death: these were all ghosts that haunted Vanessa, day in and day out, hissing at her during still moments when the dust settled in her mind.
She mounted her bike—her main form of transportation after the bus stopped running for the night—and rode off into the royal blue night. The commute home was pleasant, as she’d expected. There was something about using her own strength to propel her from point A to point B in the wake of her lifelong reliance on a motor vehicle back when her parents were alive and before she’d had to sell their cars to make ends meet. She felt somehow superior, biking along in her endorphin-fueled high of smugness past rows of cars whose drivers have a pulse that's slowly just creeping along, and a disposition to match. Riding a bike felt like some well-kept secret that, even in the throes of poverty, Vanessa was able to cash in on. The wind blew and the sky was clear. Despite the looming threat of 1 a.m., the sky was still blue, and not completely black. She wore her headphones for the duration of the ride in spite of the muddled law around impaired hearing while cycling. As Vanessa sped through the navy nighttime nonchalance, "Rock Me Now" by Metric just felt right leaking into her ears.
She turned onto the street where she grew up, ignoring road signs and speeding through a neighborhood intersection that, in daylight hours, is usually occupied by minivans and sport utility vehicles but now, here, in this light (or lack thereof) looked like an abandoned strip of suburbia whose glory was lost with the setting of the sun. The lights of the gated entrance to Vanessa’s neighborhood were glittering measurably through the bars that separated it from the scathing outside world. Against the golden teasing of home beyond the gate, a shape was cast in shadow. Wheels were outlined and a body was sketched across the peripherals of the night, lurking in the lack of light in a way that pricked at something inside of her, some little plastic bag of bravery out of which dread and terror and trepidation spilled out, drop by horrified drop.
Vanessa got closer, her hopes resting in both the actions of the person on the bike to speed away kindly and the benefit of the doubt on her own part: there was nothing to fear here. It didn't matter that she was wearing a helmet and he was not. It didn't matter that she was in athletic wear and he was in jeans and an oversized, ill-fitting t-shirt. It didn't matter that she was on a $500 mountain bike (a relic of a past time, before all this tragedy) and he was rolling around on a kid's bicycle, flocked in neon colors and mock-cool graffiti letters. They were simply two human beings doing the same thing at the same time.
And yet, all girls are made to fear anyone more masculine than them. They're simply engineered to feel this way. From the moment they are born, they are instructed to fear the man. There are various shapes and sizes of men, and women are programmed to fear them all. They all want to hurt each and every woman, or so women are told. They all want to take a piece of the dainty femininity, to rob women of something, to engage in a sort of New Age scalping. They want to do women harm and should never, under any circumstances, be trusted.
Vanessa was mulling it over in her mind, in the span of the six or so seconds it took for her to roll down the street toward the gate to her neighborhood, toward the man on the other bike, toward a force field of danger and uncertainty that she wasn't entirely aware was there. She knew, sure, but she wanted to d
eny it, to write it off as fiction for her own sanity’s sake. Vanessa was so steadfast in her denial, so stubborn in her manual reboot of character analysis, that she didn't notice at first when he spoke to her. And then, in a slick spreading of the lips that she knew instantly would haunt her every time she rode home in the dark, he smiled at her with a set of teeth the color of the sky on an overcast day. The smile wasn't just a smile. It was an offer. A business deal. A proposition. It was every fast-talking, pinky-ring-wearing, New England car salesman rolled into a sinister gesture of the mouth. This smile wasn't the smile of a polite stranger. It was the smile of a man who liked what he saw, a man who stumbled upon a good fortune, a man who—regardless of any rapidly perishable clamoring of decency—wanted to cause Vanessa harm.
"Hey, girl," she heard the man shout at her through her headphones as their bikes passed each other in a perfect parallel. Vanessa ignored him, putting him in a category of irritating people that a person’s brain tricks them into believing will go away if they don't make the effort to respond. To Vanessa, in that moment, this man was just another bill collector or charity fundraising cold-caller. And yet, he didn't go away. Her failure to respond to his shouting only spurred more shouting, more anger, more intent to harm. With an innocent swerve of her leg in what she believed to be an ordinary stride, Vanessa had kicked a bee's hive simply by walking along, minding her own business.
"Hey, girl, you live here?" he shouted at Vanessa as they both circled the cul-de-sac where she lived, the literal and metaphorical end of the road, the place where she needed to make a decision on where to go and what to do. She could input the access code to the gate, but it takes about a full minute to open and another to close, scraping away at its viability as an actual deterrent against intruders when a person is being pursued. He still had that smile draped across his face, that grin that hinted to Vanessa what absolute carnage was being broadcast through his mind. The smile of force. The smile of degradation. The smile of evil.
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