by Cora Black
Ben felt some ridiculous fluttering in his stomach, nervous and excited at once. “That’s… too bad,” he said honestly. “You should be able to move on from this.” From me, he added to himself.
“When are you going to learn?” Charlotte said. “I want to help you, Ben, but it’s not just about you anymore. I have to help things get better around here, and I know I can do it, even if you don’t. Even if you don’t believe in me at all, I’m still going to stick around and annoy the shit out of you until things get better. I know you expected me to run away from this shit after showing me the girls, but it’s exactly the opposite. I’m more determined than ever to stick around until I see results.”
Ben thought about it, chewing onto his lip until he tasted blood. “I— What—” He groaned, frustrated with himself for being such a nervous stuttering mess. Why did he always seem to fall apart around her? “Do you really think that we can fix it?”
“Fix it? No,” Charlotte said, shaking her head. “We can’t ever undo what happened to those women. But we can make things better for them now. We can give them a home. We can make them a part of the family.”
The family. That word used to make Ben feel so bitter, so fucking angry. How could the club think of itself as a family when it got people killed, when it hurt people, when it tore people apart? But coming from Charlotte, it sounded almost sweet. “We could make it into a family worth having,” he murmured, his voice low. He was somehow afraid of being heard, like his idea was stupid, like Charlotte was going to laugh at him.
But instead, she smiled. “Right. Right, Ben. That’s what I want. And I think we can do it. Together.”
He didn’t know what to say, so instead he just walked over and kissed her, pressing their lips together lightly. “I still don’t know if it’s going to work,” he admitted.
“I know,” Charlotte said. “But that’s okay. You can let me be the believer. I can believe enough for the both of us.”
Ben’s heart was pounding in his ears even though he was standing still. He’d never felt this scared and this safe at the same time before. What could he do with this feeling, this huge feeling in his chest that Charlotte had built inside of him? It felt so big that he wasn’t strong enough to push it away, but he wasn’t large enough to hold it inside, either.
“I have another idea, unrelated to club business, if you’re interested,” Charlotte said, interrupting his inner panic attack.
“A psychobabble idea or a sex idea?” Ben asked, rolling his eyes because he felt like he already knew the answer.
“A sex idea,” she said, and he had to harden his face to hide his surprise.
“Go on,” he prompted her.
“What if you and I go to the clinic, the one across town, and get tested? We’ll see if… if we can lose the condoms,” Charlotte said, her eyes falling to the floor next to Ben.
“But, um, what about the other thing? I don’t wanna knock you up,” Ben said, wincing a little at his tone. He didn’t want to sound like a dick, but it was just the truth. A kid would be a fucking terrible idea, honestly.
“No, no, I’m on the pill, it’s okay,” she rushed to say. “Trust me, I don’t want that either.”
“Oh,” Ben said, realization dawning on him. “I’ve never… I’ve never actually done that.”
“Sex without a condom?” Charlotte asked, her hand coming up to rub his shoulder.
“Um, yeah,” Ben said, feeling stupidly young and immature. How did he get to 29 without doing it raw? Even with Danielle, they’d never gotten to that point. She was too busy self-medicating with other shit to bother getting on the pill, so they’d never gone without a rubber. “I never got the opportunity, I guess.”
“That’s good,” Charlotte said. “Smart. Really smart. I, um, really want you to try it with me, though, if that’s okay?”
“Yeah, fuck yeah,” Ben rushed to say. “Believe me, I want that.” He smiled at Charlotte, and she smiled back, and it was only afterward that the full implications of the agreement dawned on him. If they got rid of condoms, what did that mean? What did that say about them? Were they together? Like together-together?
Charlotte must have sensed his anxiety, because she said in a low voice: “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Ben found himself nodding, not even remotely prepared to start a conversation about it. If she was offering him an out, he was going to gladly take it. Maybe that made him a coward, but he could live with it, at least for the moment. “Yeah,” he finally said. “It sounds like a good plan.”
Chapter Six
Ben woke Charlotte up the next morning with his pacing, going back and forth over the wooden floor of his apartment, lost in thought with his eyes screwed shut. “What’s going on?” she asked him, a little apprehensive. She’d never seen him like this before.
“I got an idea,” he muttered, continuing to move without opening his eyes. “It’s either really smart or really stupid and I can’t tell which.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me about it and I can help you figure it out?” Charlotte suggested, still rubbing sleep from her eyes as she straightened up in Ben’s bed.
Ben shook his head. “No, no, can’t do that,” he said without explanation.
“Uh, okay…” Charlotte said as she got out of the bed and stumbled toward the bathroom, feeling a little miffed. She thought they had moved past the point where he kept things from her, at least where he did it consciously.
After showering, she went back into the main room of the apartment to pull a new outfit out of her oversized purse and get dressed. Ben was still pacing. What the fuck was going on?
Charlotte decided to sit at the edge of the bed and wait for Ben to chill out enough to speak to her. It took about five full minutes, long and silent and uncomfortable, before he finally flicked his eyes open and said something. “I need you to come with me to the senior members’ meeting today.”
“Senior members?” Charlotte asked, completely oblivious.
“If we’re going to make things better for the girls, we gotta bring more money into the club. The guys will never go for it if they have to take pay cuts, so we gotta find a way to keep everything the same or improve it while still making room for better housing for the girls, and, and, and other stuff, the stuff you said,” Ben said in a rush. Charlotte was about to interrupt and say that she still didn’t understand when he opened his mouth and spoke again, still at a ridiculously fast pace. “The senior members are the guys who have been around for twenty-five, thirty, forty years. The old fuckers. Wally’s the leader, but they all vote on important missions and stuff. They run the show. I gotta get them to listen to me so we can make this shit work. Will you come, back me up if I need it?” He wasn’t looking at her, facing the entirely opposite direction. It was almost like he was addressing his toaster, asking it for precious back-up.
Charlotte cleared her throat, trying to gather her thoughts. So he really had listened to her last night about the sex workers. She felt a bubble of pride rise up in her chest, all for Ben. He was changing. He was growing. He wanted to make a difference.
But he still needed her. Charlotte got to her feet and walked around Ben to look him directly in the eyes. “Of course,” she whispered. “Of course I will be there. I know you can do it, though. I’m with you all the way.” Ben smiled at her, small and sweet, and Charlotte felt something in her chest break apart at the sight. He looked like a kid, for once. He looked like he had hope.
They had to wait several hours for the meeting to commence, and Charlotte could feel the anxiety wafting off of Ben in waves. She finally got sick of it, the idleness, and suggested that they go ahead and go to the nearest walk-in clinic to get tested. She always suggested her clients go to this clinic after they’d had some dubious encounters with a stranger or with a needle, mainly because the nurses there worked so fast.
It only took them a few hours to get the results back. By the time the senior members started to file into t
he club for the meeting that afternoon, Charlotte got the phone call from the clinic: They were all clear. She decided to wait to tell Ben until afterwards. She didn’t want to distract him from the meeting.
They stood just outside the central meeting room, watching the older guys file toward them one by one. Charlotte could feel how nervous Ben was. If she looked closely enough she could see his fingers twitching, like he had too much energy for his body to contain and it was all threatening to leak out of him before the appointed time. Charlotte reached behind his back and gave his hand a light squeeze before letting it go. I’m here for you, she thought. I’m proud of you. I’m here. She hoped he could sense what she was feeling.
The senior members started to walk into the meeting room without even acknowledging Ben, but he reached out and grabbed his uncle by the elbow before he could walk away. “Excuse me, excuse me, Uncle Wally. I have a plan to present before the senior members. If that’s okay with you,” Ben said in a rush, trying to convince his uncle before he could disappear into the meeting room.
“Um?” Uncle Wally turned to look at Charlotte, a quizzical look on his face.
“He has an idea for a club mission,” she said. “I really think you should give him a chance.”
“Well, we’ve got a pretty full agenda today, son,” Uncle Wally said to Ben.
“Five minutes,” Charlotte suggested. “Just give him five minutes. That’s all he needs.” In reality, she had no idea how much time he really needed, but she was confident he could make it work.
Uncle Wally was quiet a minute, considering it. “Okay, five minutes or less, all right?” he finally said, opening the door to the meeting room wider so that Ben and Charlotte could walk in. Charlotte stood behind Ben at the edge of the table, practically hiding in the shadows. She didn’t know if the senior members would be offended that Ben brought his not-even-girlfriend into this apparently sacred, exclusive space.
The old men sat down around the table, Uncle Wally at the head. “First order of business,” Wally started. “Young Ben has something he wants to say to us.”
Some of the men turned to stare at Ben and Charlotte, looking confused. Ben stepped forward to the empty spot at the opposite side of the table from Wally and cleared his throat. “I have an idea for bringing more money into the club.”
“I’m all ears,” one of the older guys, Old Man Trevor, said with a broad smile on his face. The others laughed in agreement.
“Um, so, right now, we’re only operating in the desert,” Ben started, his voice a little unsteady. Charlotte wished she could lean in and take his hand to give him confidence. “But there’s stuff on the other sides. Um, yeah.”
The room was silent, and Charlotte felt her skin crawl. She bit her tongue, resisting the urge to jump in and start suggesting ideas to compensate for Ben’s shyness.
“So, I was thinking. I know we used to have some issues, like twenty years ago, with the Browns in California. But last night it hit me: They’re cut off from the Texan sources we’ve got, partly because of the distance but also because of that war five years ago. They don’t want to have to cross hostile territory. They don’t have the good blow we do, and they’d be willing to pay top dollar for it. I made a map of the path, too,” he said, pulling a piece of paper out of his pants’ pocket and spreading it out on the table. He pointed to black circles drawn on the map. “We go here first, to drop half the product off at Neptune bar to distribute to the desert clubs later, then we cross state lines in the morning, crack of dawn, when police presence is at a minimum. Then it’s just an hour and a half until we hit the Browns’ den.”
“And we make that trip how, exactly?” another old guy, George Sr., asked, a skeptical expression on his face. “You’re not thinking about the resources, son.”
“The gas will more than pay for itself,” Ben interrupted.
“But what about the boys, Ben?” Wally said. “You’re not taking into account the amount of time that it’ll take for the men to ride across the desert with the stuff. That’s taking them away from other business.”
“Well, yeah, that’s true,” Ben admitted. “But that brings me to the important point. I know there’s been talk of bringing other boys in, but we don’t need them. We need the boys we got now to do more. What are they doing every day? Sitting around shooting the shit, drinking, smoking, you know,” Ben said. He paused to clear his throat again, pushing his fists down on the table like he was bracing himself. “It’s time for them to step up. Be men. Do more for the club. We’ll put them to work, pay them more, make the family better.”
A few of the senior members started mumbling under their breath, but Charlotte couldn’t make out what they were saying.
“And what about the Browns?” one of the senior members asked. “We’re just going to forget the war? Everything we went through? The injuries we sustained?”
Charlotte flushed with anxiety and concern for Ben. This was the hard part. The mission itself was easy enough, just a matter of balancing resources like organizing an Excel spreadsheet. But this was the emotional part, the part that was immersed in personal history, personal wounds that didn’t go away overnight. Can he do this?
Ben nodded, but then he blew out his breath forcefully. “Honestly, Joe? Fuck it. Fuck it! It’s in the past. Let bygones be bygones, and let’s make some fucking cash,” Ben said, causing everybody to look up from their laps and stare at him. “What? Nobody else was thinking it?”
“Uh, no, at least I wasn’t,” Old Man Trevor said, putting his beer down onto the table. “Where the hell is this coming from, son?”
“I just don’t want to sit around and wait for the opportunities to come to us, you know. We gotta be proactive, we gotta be out there like salesmen making it work,” Ben said in a rush. Charlotte was a little worried that he had too much caffeine that morning or something. “We have people to take care of. We can’t let that slide anymore.”
Uncle Wally was staring at him from the head of the table, only tearing his eyes away briefly to cough into a handkerchief. “You really thought of this all on your own, boy?” he asked.
Charlotte wondered what the fuck that was supposed to mean. Who else was Ben supposed to be speaking for? Just then, she noticed that Wally’s eyes flicked over to her in the corner, and realization dawned on her like a cold shower. Oh. They think I’m feeding him ideas?
She knew it was bad form to speak up in a meeting that she was lucky to be attending at all, but she cleared her throat anyway. “I haven’t heard anything like this before,” she said. “Ben, did you just come up with this on your own?” There. Maybe that will convince them I had nothing to do with it. Or they’re convinced I’m orchestrating this whole thing and just pretending to be in the dark. Fuck. I’m bad at this.
In any case, Ben nodded and turned back to the table. “Yeah, I don’t know, it just hit me last night. I really… I really believe in it,” he said, and Charlotte felt herself flush in pride. “It’s the way to go. I know it, guys. Can we vote on it?”
The old men all looked at each other for a long moment. Finally, Uncle Wally spoke up. “Can you two leave the room, please? It’s got to be senior members only for the vote.”
“Yeah, of course,” Ben said, his voice now strong and secure. He walked over to Charlotte and put a hand on the small of her back, ushering her out of the room and closing the big door behind them. “What do you think?” he asked her in a hushed tone.
“You’re asking me?” Charlotte said. “I don’t know thing one about this business, remember?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “Are you still fucking hung up on that?”
Charlotte just glared at him. She honestly wasn’t that bothered by the comment he’d made weeks ago, but he needed to learn consequences for his actions if he was ever going to grow.
Ben averted his eyes from her and shrugged. “Fine, fuck, I’m sorry. What more do you want?”
She pursed her lips, starting to feel a little bit irritated.
“Maybe, like, a real apology. That might be nice.”
Ben sighed loudly, but it sounded more like exhaustion than exasperation. “I’m sorry I was a dick. Does that work?”
Charlotte still felt dissatisfied, but she figured she wasn’t going to get any better than that, at least not today. “It seems like a good plan to me. Why sit back and watch money slip from your fingertips when you can grab it?”
“Exactly!” Ben said. “It wouldn’t even need that many more men on the job. Half of the guys sit around here drinking half the time anyway, and we could get them on their bikes, making money for the club and for themselves. It’d boost morale.”
“Morale?” Charlotte said incredulously. She couldn’t believe her ears. “You’re concerned about the group’s morale? Who the fuck are you and what did you do with Ben Wiseman?”
Ben laughed a little and gestured to the other side of the bar. “I mean, look at these guys. They’re just sitting around drinking, bored out of their fucking minds. What if we can change that, and make things better for the women?”