by Gabi Moore
“Yeah, it’s like his vacation home, like a summer house. But kid, can you wait? Let me gather some muscle, let me--”
“I’m not waiting. She could be in trouble. I’m going right now.”
Silence.
I could tell he didn’t take me seriously. None of them did. But I didn’t care. This had gone far enough, and I was now going to end it.
“Good luck,” he said, and hung up.
Chapter 14 - Sophia
I know it’s just my imagination, but it feels as if the bright spotlights on my near-naked skin have set each and every tiny hair on fire. I’m wearing next to nothing, but have never felt more covered, covered in light, covered in greedy gazes from the darkness around me, covered in my own veil of thrilling fear… I’m sucking it all through my pores.
I’m sparkling.
I stand for a while, a deer in headlights, waiting for death. But they don’t kill me. They applaud.
I take one ginger step out onto the stage, and then another, my feet light and empty like they belong to someone else, and the small crowd around me erupts in cheers. I stand still for a moment, knowing all at once how I must look to them: a naïve, ‘normal’ girl, one who doesn’t belong here. No self-tanner, no fake tits, no hair extensions. In a way, I’m more obscene than that.
My heart’s beating so hard in my ears that I don’t hear the announcer’s voice blaring over the speaker, but the music starts up and the lights dim. And now I have to dance. In front of all of them. I have to slowly remove what few items of scanty clothing I’m wearing, and writhe around, and tease, and taunt, for the pleasure of those shadowy faces gathered loosely around and beneath the stage.
They’re all perverts.
They’re disgusting.
Or maybe I’m disgusting? I can’t really figure it out in my mind, but as I raise my snaking arms up over my head, what I feel is not disgusting. What I feel is delicious. I know that every eye in the room is on me, the weird outsider who’s on a dare, on drugs, on vacation, something. Everyone senses that this is no ordinary dance, and pricks their ears toward the tacky stage. This feels real. This feels dangerous. They’re watching to see me expose myself. So, I decide to give them what they want. Or is it what I want?
I look out at the hungry, amorphous faces and all at once they blend together and become one face: his. I see Leo out there, veiled in shadows and watching me with hunger in his dark eyes. The thought makes my hips tilt to one side, then to the other, serpentine, as though it’s the eyes that are doing it.
I tilt my head back and let my hair fall to graze the bare skin of my back. I shake my head as well, slowly and side to side. I have never danced like this before. Not for anyone else. Not in the privacy of my own home. Not even in the privacy of my own fantasies. But the movements come naturally all the same.
His eyes are on me, and I’m dancing all the things I want. What he wants. My hips describe the arcs and curls of the more horizontal motions I’m imagining in my mind. It’s not a dance to suggest fucking. It is fucking; only he’s not here.
I arch my back and thrust out my breasts to offer them to his gaze. I stretch out long and lean, moving with the low, heavy beat, imagining that he is the source of that rhythm, he is the pulse, he is the unstoppable force that moves me.
Aside from the music, the room is now strangely silent around me. I step further out onto the precipice of the stage, where the light is brightest and I can see barely anything of the crowd below. My body melts. I have never been more terrified in my life. Or more aroused. I slink my hands behind my back and unlatch the bra I’ve been given. My breasts bounce free, relief washing over me as the tight, flimsy thing is dropped to the floor.
There are no cheers. But I can feel the gaze on me intensify all the same. The entire room is watching me. The lights, the eyes, even the space between the eyes are prickled tight and observing my every move. I shake my shoulders and feel it go through my breasts, each nipple now tight and hard. I slip my thumbs into the rim of my g-string and hover there, teasing, threatening.
It’s all for him. All for Leo.
Why had I never done this for him before? Never danced? Never flicked my hair or waggled my ass on his lap? I realized all at once that I wanted nothing more than for him to look at me like that, to move for him, to watch his face respond to me.
A mere hour ago, I was sure I was going to be killed. JD had found me scrambling around to free my hands, looking for an exit, and had slammed me against the wall. I had laughed in his face and told him to do his worst. He sneered and told me I was pushing my luck, and taking up room, and that he was sick of babysitting me. And I had said, “so what, are you going to force me to work?” And then we had both stared at each other, me more shocked than him.
And he had laughed and shook his head. He had released me and muttered something about how crazy I was. How he’d like to see me try. And so here I was. I had been kidnapped by unknown people for unknown reasons and was stashed here in a seedy strip club and, most insane of all, some small, sick part of me was enjoying it. It was insane. I was insane. But even still, some irresistible force kept drawing me along. The same force that was moving my hips now. The same force that felt like it was penetrating my very mind, in the form of his gorgeous face. The same force that was building up inside me, roaring somewhere deep inside my core, radiating through my hips like something molten, something so hot it melted all resistance.
I bent over; ass in the light, my legs stretched straight and teetering on the cheap Perspex heals. I hovered here for a moment, relishing the thought of them relishing me, and then snapped back upright again, flicking my hair and arching my back into a back bend that put my naked chest on full display. I bent at the knees, realizing that squeezing my legs together only made the ache between them more intense, and then shimmied down, snaking off my g-string in one long, fluid movement.
I kicked it up with the spike of my heel and caught it, then flung it out into the crowd, which responded instantly with a dozen hands reaching out from the void to catch it. The room throbbed and hummed around me, but it was nothing compared to the throbbing I felt inside. I tilted and swirled my hips, lost in the music, lost in the madness of it all, wishing with all my heart that he were here to see me. He was the only one I wanted to dance for. It was all for him. I was for him. I was his.
When the music stopped, so did I. My body came to rest in the center of the stage and the only thing left moving was my chest, gasping for air. The room was silent, and then all at once exploded into surprised applause. I had entertained them. They hadn’t expected any of that. I was the outsider. Just someone’s girlfriend, someone’s sister, a girl gone a little crazy, a girl who wasn’t really meant to be there. I was supposed to be awkward. I wasn’t supposed to enjoy it this much. In fact, some depraved part of me got a kick out of knowing that they might even be able to see how turned on I was, that the molten fire in my belly might have melted right out of me and slicked the inside of my thighs, so they could see that not only did I move like a degenerate whore, but I was one, inside and out.
I turned on my heel and walked off stage, back into the fold of the thick black curtain behind me. I couldn’t resist the ridiculous grin that now seemed plastered to my face. I wobbled on my heels down the steps and into the back room, but as I did, the friction of my legs moving past each other sent the most delicious jolt all through my body. All at once something ignited and exploded inside me and I started to come.
A strange, intense orgasm rushed through me like I was being electrified. I yelped and reached out for the railing and steadied myself there, stunned as tight wave after wave kicked through my naked body. It was unbelievable. When I finally managed to hobble into the dressing room, hands still trembling, JD and the two strippers were standing out in front, mouths hanging open.
“Girl, you sure you’ve never done that before?” said the redhead, laughing nervously.
I could do nothing but laugh with her. I ha
d no words. JD looked at me, but his expression was different now. He didn’t seem so angry anymore.
I basked in the feeling that he had dared me, he had pushed me, and I had done it. I was un-humiliatable. In fact, I killed it. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But like a dream unfolding around me, the impossible seemed to be happening, and I was at the center of it, naked, panting, and still twitching a little. I had to be insane. I’d surely wake up soon and discover that all of this had been a dream. Or a nightmare. A delicious, dirty nightmare.
They started to all talk rapidly but in my flustered state all I could hear was Leo’s voice. All I could think of was how desperate I was to hear his approval. “That was pretty good, I knew you had a little something about you…” It all came in his voice. I tried to take deep breaths as I put my clothing back on, coming back to reality.
The redhead was preparing to dance again and the other started doing her nails. When I had gathered myself I lifted my head to see JD standing over me, that strange look still in his eyes.
“Here, you earned it,” he said and handed over a bunch of notes. I eyed it suspiciously. It was $300.
“Take it. You got balls, I’ll give you that.”
I took the notes and stashed them in my pocket. We locked eyes for a moment, a new sense of shared respect between us, then I turned around and offered him my wrists.
“Well?” I said. We both paused for a moment, taking in the ridiculousness of it all, then he gently began to knot a rope round my hands. He tugged it once, patted me on the back and turned me around by my shoulders. It wasn’t exactly ‘sorry about kidnapping you’, but it felt pretty close.
I sighed and went over to the corner and slumped down into it. Like a kick to the chest, the thought of Leo now only made me sad. I missed him terribly. If I could just morph into a stripper with the slightest provocation, what’s to say that he wasn’t also …that he also …?
The thought that Leo could have some hidden, secret life from me infuriated for me for a split second. But then it excited me. I kept imagining what he would think, if he could see me now. I tried to imagine his face when I told him that dancing naked on a stage in front of a crowd of dirty old men had turned me on so much it had literally made me come. And what’s more, I had come with to the thought of him. I couldn’t explain it. I only knew that something dark and dormant had woken up on that strange, and it had frightened and thrilled me.
Had my life become so drained of color that even the cheap glitter and crude music of a strip club had seemed like an elixir to me? Wasn’t I supposed to be the body expert? The woman with the golden hands, a devoted proponent of holistic healing and stress release and yoga and balanced living and clean eating and all the other crap? I nearly laughed out loud at the idea of it. All I had needed was some old-fashioned exhibitionism and a good, hard orgasm that hit me like a lightning bolt from heaven.
The ache in my chest deepened. I missed Leo. I had missed him for a long time. When had we stopped being thrilled with one another’s bodies? When had I stopped wanting to coax out that look of bliss that only he could make, and only on the brink of pleasure?
The other two strippers, plus a third I didn’t recognize, drifted in and out of the room as the evening wore on. I dozed, woke up again, dozed again, all in my little corner. Dreaming partly of running away, partly of just living here, forever, with all these strange new ideas that seemed to be springing into my mind.
It must have been the small hours of the morning when the music on the stage seemed to quieten a little, and then the one stripper went home. The redheaded stripper agreed to stay with me overnight until another girl came in the early morning to take over. I curled up with her on a makeshift bed in the corner of the dressing room, little flutters of adrenaline in my blood even then, and settled in for a surprisingly comfy sleep.
It was pitch black and quiet when she silently shook me awake and told me to get up.
“What are you doi--?”
“Shhh, just keep quiet” she hissed, and started guiding me to the door.
“Are we…?”
“Just pipe down, OK? Fatso outside has gone for a smoke so we’ve got a few minutes to make a run for it.”
I could vaguely make out her quickly moving hands in the darkness as she packed up her bag with a few things and hastily threw on her shoes and a coat. I tried to do the same.
“Why are you helping me?” I whispered, as she peaked around the corner to see if the coast was clear.
“Let’s just say my time here is up, too,” she said, then hurried us both through the now deserted corridors.
The place was dark and cold and completely abandoned. It looked so bare without the strobing lights and patrons filling up the seats. A faint smell of beer and something stale hung in the air, but I almost didn’t recognize the stage as we hurried past it. Had I really…? I must have lost my mind. I pulled my coat more tightly round my body and rushed after her. We scurried past a long bar and then out through a foyer, and eventually out through a small back door with a bar across it like a hospital door. The cold air outside immediately woke me up.
“Thank you,” I said, still scampering after her as she moved swiftly down the alleyway, hugging the bare brick wall.
“No problem. Just get out of here, OK?” She reached into her purse and handed me a five dollar bill.
“What about you, though?” I asked, and stood looking after her like a lost puppy.
“I’m done with these guys. Shit’s hitting the fan and I’m moving on.”
“What do you mean?”
“The whole family’s under investigation. You didn’t hear it from me, but from what I’ve heard, the Feds already have ‘em, they’re building a case, they just need to know where big boss is hiding and then it’s all over. I don’t want to be around when that happens, you know?”
It was as though the cold was helping me think more quickly than I could in the thick smoke and perfume inside the club.
“What family? What ‘big boss’?”
The look she gave me was a little like the one JD had given me earlier that night. Confused. A little pitying.
“Jesus, where did they find you? The Rosellis. Uncle Vito owns this place, obviously. Anyway, I’ve already stuck my neck out here, just scram, OK?” She turned to carry on down the alleyway.
“Wait, don’t go!” I yelled after her.
“What?”
“Do you know Leo Bianchi?” I asked her.
“Never heard of the guy,” she said, and in an instant she was gone.
I stood stunned for a moment. Vito Roselli? The guy who was permanently in the news for every crime you could think of plus all the ones you never had? The guy who’s name shared newspaper space with big scary words like ‘murder’, ‘trafficking’ and ‘drug ring’?
I quickly felt to check that the stolen notebook was still in my pocket. I had no phone, no money, and I had no idea where I was. I smelt like cheap perfume and hadn’t slept properly in days.
I turned to walk in the other direction. I had to find Leo as soon as possible to understand what the hell was going on. It was a few hours before sunrise in a rundown neighborhood and I was alone and lost.
But as I walked a strange thought popped into my head: I wasn’t scared. In fact, I was having the time of my life.
Chapter 15 - Leo
I didn’t get what the big deal was. They just looked like fat cigarettes. How could such a thing cost so much money? But I kept my mouth shut. Vito had taken care of me, and as long as I didn’t mess up, as long as I kept keeping my mouth shut, one day maybe I could blow lots of cash and stupid things like cigars. Or whatever was in those boxes.
Vito waved his hand for me to come stand at the table. Sometimes, he let me help out on quiet nights like these, when the guys came over and they had a friendly game of poker or whatever. They were all right. They teased me about the fluff growing on my top lip, and poked me in the ribs and slapped the back of my neck a
nd called me ‘kid’, but when they knew that I was the one responsible for delivering the boxes, well, they usually went quiet and gave me a lot more respect. Or at least, it felt like respect back then. I didn’t know what was inside them. I didn’t need to know. It was just business, right?
“Hey kid, come over here, you want a drink?” he said to me.
I couldn’t believe it. I was only thirteen. But sitting at Vito’s table for a scotch wasn’t an honor for just any old schlub, nevermind a loser like me.
I nodded and tried to play cool, and he poured me a glass of bright yellow liquid. He had his broad, gnarled hand on my shoulder, patting me affectionately.
“This kid, this kid’s my real right hand man, ain’t that right, Leo? This kids got balls on him. Smart. Good kid,” he said and ruffled my hair.
“Hey Leo, you got a girlfriend or what?” cracked one of the guys across the table, and everyone laughed.
I was mortified. Puberty hadn’t been kind to me. I was taller than I wanted to be, gangly. Full of spots.
“Nah,” I said, voice breaking comically. The table burst out laughing.
“Vito, this kid’s priceless. You should set him up with a nice young thing,” said the same guy across the table.
I pretended that I wasn’t following this line of conversation with laser-focus. The banter continued but then Vito turned to me, a little glazed in the eyes, that way he got some evenings, and smiled.
“Yeah? You’d like that? We got a girl upstairs for him?” he said and turned to Plank, who was on guard duty tonight but not happy about it. He eyed me with disgust, looked to Vito and then made his way silently upstairs.
When he came back down again, he had with him a quiet girl, her mousy hair pulled back into a braid and a cotton shirt with a print of the Simpsons on it, but like a knockoff one where all the colors were wrong. She made me feel sad. She was my age maybe, and didn’t look at anyone in the room.
The guys took turns slapping my back and making jokes, but I suddenly didn’t want to be there anymore. I knew about the girls. I had seen them coming and going, and I knew that other people were entrusted with that side of the business. I didn’t ask questions. I had an idea of what happened with them, but I didn’t like thinking about it too much.