by J. C. Allen
I forced myself into an awkward stand, only now realizing how much gin remained in my system. Groaning and trying not to look like a fucked up fool, I steadied myself and looked at her. Strange how, despite how I knew I had a good body, I felt uncomfortably naked in front of her here.
“How long were you out here?” she asked, looking suddenly ashamed. “I didn’t… I hope it wasn’t long.”
It was too long. I know. It was long enough past when you woke up. And I never came back in.
I’m sorry, Stephanie. I don’t know anything about you but you almost certainly deserve better than this.
“No,” I lied again, shaking my head. “I got thirsty a little before morning, came down here for some OJ and must’ve dozed off watching the sunrise.”
You’re a terrible liar when you’re drunk, Derek. That’s the excuse you give?
Be a man. Tell her the truth.
Maybe not the whole truth, but…
“Oh…” Stephanie’s voice sounded distant and hollow—a bell tolling from a deep, distant tunnel. I tried to ignore her eyes darting to the table where my now-empty bottle of booze rested. “Right.”
But it was so obvious, I’m not sure why I bothered to play the part. An awkward silence fell over us both, as if neither of us could believe that we had woken up in this situation. In a strange way, it gave us something in common—we both wondered why the fuck we’d made the decisions we’d made.
“Hope I didn’t wake you up.”
It was a weak attempt at making up for everything that had happened, and I knew it. But anything I said that was trying to be nice or honest was going to be weak given the alcohol in me.
“Huh?” she looked up, surprised by my words, then shook her head. “No. I was… well, I have to get up early most mornings, anyway. I’d just started looking for you when I heard… you know.”
Oh, this is painful. And I deserve every drop of pain that this has.
“Right,” I said with a nod, though I still didn’t know exactly what it was that she’d heard.
And, too embarrassed to ask, I’d go on not knowing. The alternative was to have to face just how much of an asshole I was this morning, and that was about the last thing I wanted to do here. Really, I just wanted to rest, make a quick checkup on the shop, and then go back home and sleep this off.
I was stupid, but I wasn’t too stupid to do this two nights in a row.
Yet.
“So…” I finally said, dreading the silence and working to avoid it. “Would you like some breakfast or coffee, or, I don’t know, something, or…”
“Actually,” she blushed and moved to rub the back of her neck. Fuck me. “I’ve got to get going. I added another twenty minutes to my commute coming out here, and—clever me—I scheduled an early meeting for this morning, and now I’m even more pressed for time than I’d expected.”
“Ah,” I pitched, feeling like it sounded like the sound a kid might offer when they don’t understand what’s being said but don’t want to feel foolish in admitting it.
I also had a feeling she might have been lying to me, but frankly, for as much shit as I had put her through this morning, I deserved to suffer the ignominy of a lie to my face. Even she was telling the truth, I deserved to have her run out on me as quickly as she was.
“Well… I hope I haven’t set you too far off schedule.”
“No, no way” she said in a high-pitched and a shrillness that practically said, “you’re totally to blame.” And I am.
Then, perhaps catching how phony it sounded the first time, she tested out a few more times.
“No, no, no! No-no… no.”
The silence that dropped between us felt as sudden and deadly as an assassin with a one-shot kill.
Then we both chuckled at the dreadfulness of it all.
“So I guess—” we both started at the same time.
Another awkward chuckle.
That’s the first time I’ve laughed like this in… God, weeks? Even if it is laughing at my own stupidity, even if it is laughing born out of some sort of fuck up…
I guess…
Maybe it’s something?
Stephanie blushed and nodded, securing her purse over her shoulder. It occurred to me then that, when she wasn’t blasting farts capable of inflating my bedsheets, she could be quite charming.
I daresay, in fact, that I enjoyed her company, although I doubted with her current shape she would ever be someone I was attracted to.
But still…
“Anyway,” she said in an almost whisper, “I’d better be going.”
“Right,” I answered, nodding. “I’ll give you a call.”
I have no idea why I said that. Let’s be honest, I had no intentions of calling her again, not for how awkward this morning was. Even if I had “recovered” and not seemed like such a dick, the awkwardness of the morning and the confusion had killed any attraction between us.
“Oh! Right!” she said, seeming suddenly rejuvenated by a fresh mission.
She moved, beginning to hunt about for something. I was about to ask her if she needed help finding something before she snatched up a pen and notepad by my phone with an “Ah-ha!”
She definitely carried herself with the sort of overeagerness anyone would have to escape a terribly awkward situation.
After a quick moment of jotting, she tore off the topmost slip of paper and presented me with seven digits and the letters “SW” scrawled in long, wide, flowing handwriting.
“SW?” I asked, taking it.
“Stephanie Warren,” she answered, sounding almost offended at my confusion.
As she should have been, given that I realized I’d basically just confessed not knowing her full name despite the previous night’s activities. At least I remembered Stephanie, but she wouldn’t have even known that. For all she knew, I assumed her name was Sofia all over again.
I felt my face go hot. I nodded. More awkward silence came.
“Right,” I finally said. “Well… umm, like I said: I’ll give you a call.”
“Right,” she said, sounding either like she wasn’t certain I was going to hold to the promise or like she wasn’t certain she wanted me to.
All things considered, I wouldn’t have been surprised for the latter.
She quickly exited, not saying anything else. I thought of following her, but I was still naked, still drunk, and still a fucking idiot.
Goddamn Derek, I thought as she disappeared from view. You’ve done some shitty things in your life. You’ve had some shitty thoughts.
But what you just did to that girl… it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever done.
But goddamn. You can be a real asshole sometimes.
6
Eve
Sitting on the bus bench, the very early morning commuters coming by and staring at us, I was struck with one of those weird moments I would have every so often that reminded me how surreal life could be.
In about ninety-nine out of a hundred alternative universes, I would have wound up as the morning commuter who wondered why a girl wearing a blazer over a bikini top was at her bus stop. I would have silently judged, wondering why the woman didn’t know better. Or, if I was feeling polite, maybe I would have empathized and hoped that she would have found better.
No matter what, though, I probably would have found it weird.
We weren’t in Las Vegas. We weren’t in Atlantic City. We weren’t in some liberal, free-bodied European city. Our city, though it had fallen on some tough times, wasn’t what people would call liberal.
So to have fallen into the one universe in which I was the hooker… in which I worked with Crystal… in which I faced the silent mouths but glaring eyes of those who wondered how they would explain such a sight to their children…
Sometimes, words simply didn’t describe what I felt. They could approximate, they could give the superficial senses, they could give a feeling, but they could never truly describe the impact on the soul and t
he ensuing oddities that arose after.
So I did the only thing I could think to do.
I smiled back at the onlookers whenever I made eye contact.
Most of them looked away, a reaction that I knew was normal even if I wasn’t a hooker. A few mumbled something, and I knew they weren’t muttering a compliment. A few blushed, a reaction they couldn’t control and I found hilarious.
But they all never reacted positively. They all never smiled back and engaged me in conversation. They all, no matter how visceral their reaction, had the same reaction that one of my Johns had had tonight.
“You a whore or not?”
Most nights, I wouldn’t have given that question a single thought. But today… with the buildup of everything… with the weird emotions I was feeling toward Chuck…
I started to weep.
I was a whore. I wasn’t Eve Kellerman, promising economics major at the nearest university. I wasn’t Eve Kellerman, the daughter of a slightly dysfunctional but still somewhat loving family. I wasn’t that girl.
I was a whore.
I wasn’t even Eve Kellerman. Rock would almost never give me the courtesy of giving me my full name. I didn’t earn that. I wasn’t human to him.
If I had known I was going to get this fucked over, I think I would have just slutted myself out in college.
Crystal put a hand on my shoulder. She didn’t look at me, for she stood behind me, but in that moment, it was enough. It was an action that told me she understood, even if she wasn’t willing to talk about it.
And as long as one person knew me as Eve Kellerman… I wasn’t going to say that made it all right. That was laughably naive. But it at least made it so I could get through the next day.
“Nothing is forever,” she said, her voice soft and low. “Remember that.”
That stopped the sniffling and the few tears from turning into an all-out cryfest. Which was probably for the best, given that crying didn’t get men hard—at least not the kind of normal people I would want to actually have sex with.
Lights broke through the darkness, along with the words “ROUTE 56” on neon lettering. Our bus had arrived.
“I tell you what, girl,” Crystal said, nearly singing, as we took our seats on the bus. “The first thing I’m gonna do when we get home is take one of those Icy-Pops in the freezer and sit my aching keister on it! Right down on it! Oh, Lord have mercy! The way some of them Johns—”
I looked in abject horror at those around us, but no one was listening—or no one gave any appearance of listening. Over half the crowd had headphones on anyways, which made our potential for conversation very much limited to what we had between the two of us.
In any case, her conversation served a very different purpose. It put me back into the frame of mind of being silly and not thinking too deeply. I wanted intellectual stimulation, but there was a downside to it—being too smart could make me too aware of how fucked my life was.
Crystal, for as smart as she was without perhaps realizing it, was “smart” enough to remain dumb.
“Long as it’s not one of the lime-flavored ones,” I said with forced humor, albeit in a much quieter voice than Crystal used. “Those are my favorite. Don’t want to have you hogging all the good ones.”
“Did it ever occur to you that the reason the lime-flavored ones are your favorite is because they’re the ones I use to take the burn out of my bum?” she said, her wicked grin widening in a challenge for me to do the same.
I should have wanted to vomit at the thought, but instead, it was just so ridiculous and so… Crystal of her, that I couldn’t help but grin at the absurdity of her statement. I did not want the image of having second-hand salad tossing with Crystal, and yet, how could I not laugh at the ridiculousness of that idea?
“Impossible,” I said, looking down and trying not to laugh before I alerted the whole bus to our discussion on fruity asses. “Your bum’s strawberry flavored. The whole neighborhood knows that.”
Finally, finally, we both laughed.
And for just a feeling moment, for just a single moment—one cut short by the bus driver telling us to shut up this early in the day—I could feel free to laugh without inhibition.
Around 5 a.m., as the sky brightened but the sun had not yet crested over the horizon, Crystal and I got off the bus and headed for our apartment. Even before we got off, I had removed any smiles or hint of goofing around in favor of a serious yet submissive tone. I’d learned on the first night from Crystal that Rock wanted his girls submissive—a cheerful, peppy girl suggested someone who had done something on her own.
When we reached the hallway with our room, I noticed a strange, foul smell coming from the usual empty door. Suffice to say, I had no desire to explore it closer, even though the intelligent girl in me begged for more information.
In any number of books I’d read, something like this always served as an early indicator of something horrid and terrible, a dead body or, worse, a whole graveyard of dead bodies. These moments always made for great literature, exciting and all, and I held no shame in thinking those stories were made better for it.
But this was no story, no book, and the idea of sleeping and eating so close to the resting site of at least one corpse was an entirely different sort of revelation. Because, just like in the books, if corpses rested at the opposite end of a mysterious door, it was because somebody put it there. That might have made for a thrilling page 203 in a 350 page book, and it might have made for a profitable Halloween Haunted House, but it made for true abject terror in real life.
It could be me or Crystal at any moment. Even if we don’t do anything wrong.
More often than not, the sort of person that hid corpses behind mysterious doors was the same sort of person who turned living, breathing people into those corpses in the first place. There was a very crucial act that separated a person from being a “somebody” to being “some body;” an act that, though Crystal and I dealt in the business of pleasure, we were constantly and uncomfortably close to. It was the nature of our boss that he seemed to have a fetish for “diversification” if you would.
To think, I’m thinking about this operation in finance now. It’s like my brain can’t accept that that future isn’t coming back.
Since it was Rock who not only ran our operation but also provided us with these lodgings—and since we were all well aware that Rock was not only capable of killing but seemed to outright revel in the chance to—it wasn’t a huge leap to imagine that the mysterious smell coming from the other side of the mysterious door could be…
Stop.
Stop!
There’s no reason to think about it.
No, it wasn’t death that I was smelling. Maybe that was me lying to myself—actually, let’s be honest, it probably was—but the more I told myself it wasn’t death, the more I believed it couldn’t possibly be.
Death, as an odor, was a stain that assaulted the nostrils instead of the eyes. And, like a stain, it was either dealt with or it got worse. It didn’t come and go; didn’t arrive for an unexpected visit like an annoying relative.
But this smell—this stink—did just that, which… surely that meant this wasn’t the worst I feared, no?
It came and it went, always just the same—no stronger or weaker, no variation or accompanying smell. If it was death we were smelling on occasions like these, if that apartment was being used as a momentary placeholder for the corpse between being where it was and where it was meant to go, then it stood to reason the smell would change at least a little each time.
One corpse had every right to smell a little different than another, didn’t it? Betty, who wore Chanel 5 in life, shouldn’t be condemned to stink the same as Bobby and his beloved Axe body spray, right? Crystal and I, even if we powdered ourselves the same and often had gone down on the same Johns, would surely smell different…
Right?
“Forget it,” Crystal said. “C’mon, Eve. Last thing your sorry ass need
s is to see the boss getting curious about things you got no business getting curious about.”
I hadn’t even realized how long I’d been staring at the door for in morbid curiosity. Clearly, it was long enough that the veteran hooker of the group had noticed, and if she noticed, I knew for damn sure that Rock would have noticed. And if Rock had noticed, it was, at best, going to be something I would never turn to, a reflex like Pavlov’s dog.
And at worst? I wouldn’t be able to react anymore for sadly obvious reasons.
Half-stumbling, I followed Crystal into our room. I ignored the girls in other rooms, talking in subdued, hushed tones about their meal plans for the “evening.” Most rooms were silent. Just like how Rock wants it. No talking. No arguing. Just complete submission.
How did it ever get to this?
Chuck…
You…
And then I heard the terrified scream.
In movies, it was the kind of scream a woman gave when she was being chased by a classic movie villain, maybe Jason or Freddy.
But in real life, it was so much more terrifying. It was so much more real. And it was so much more foreboding.
I made sure our doors were shut and locked. The last thing we needed was for the wind of the hallway to accidentally blow our door open, leading to accusations of eavesdropping and a likely death—or a certain rape. I crawled into bed, making sure not to move so much as to let the bed creak, while Crystal remained in the bathroom.
“PLEASE! NO! PLEASE!”
The sound of a woman being dragged down the hallway reached my ears. I covered my ears, but the closer the men dragged her, the louder it got. It was like that with my whole goddamn life—the more I tried to shut something out, the worst things got.
“PLEASE! LET ME—”
She let out a loud cry, followed by whimpers. It sounded like someone had kicked her in the ribs. Make it quick, please.
I closed my eyes as tears fell down my face. The door—the door—opened on the other side. The girl screamed louder and louder, and then, almost at the snap of a finger, went deathly silent.