“My mother was a stripper.”
Shock reflects in his eyes for seconds, so swift I wonder if it was even real. For half a second it looked like he cared. I expect him to ask if that’s why I strip, even though the answer must be obvious. So maybe he’ll just mock me for it, a verbal version of humiliation to match the nakedness of my breasts. I’m flushing, my neck and chest pink from embarrassment of what I’ve already admitted.
It’s not much of a legacy she left me. It’s all I have.
Instead he prompts, “So Mrs. Owens?”
He’s like a dog with a bone. And well, I’m the bone. “One of my foster moms.”
That alertness again. “After?”
After he left, he means. After I sent him away. After I lied. “Before. I would have stayed there longer, but she was already old. I was the last foster she had. They removed me after her official diagnosis.”
“Kidney disease?”
My hands clench. He’s done more than a little snooping if he knows about that. “Dementia was the main problem. She’d forget to go to the store, forget to meet my caseworker.”
So they’d removed me from the home, but no one h
ad thought to help her. It was a wonder she’d survived as long as she had before I’d turned eighteen and found her. Though the heat had been turned off and rats had made nests. I’d gotten the biggest paying job I could find—at the Grand—and moved in to help her ever since.
She may not have been very capable by the end, but she’d genuinely cared about me. Don’t let them get you down, she’d tell me when I came home with bruises on my arms and a split lip. They can never touch you on the inside.
She didn’t know I sought out boys like that, ones tough enough to protect me. Even if that protection was just a twisted form of ownership. A dog with a bone—like Blue.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice soft enough to be sincere. His eyes hard enough to make me shiver.
“She’s doing fine.” Despite what the doctors say. “She’s stronger than they think.”
Those cold eyes soften by a small degree. “So are you.”
It’s strange to be talking about any of this while I’m naked from the waist up, while he can see my breasts—even if he’s mostly been looking directly into my eyes, as if he can see deep inside, as if he’s uncovering my secrets brick by brick. Even after all the time I’ve spent naked, being exposed, I’m still not comfortable this way.
“They always think I’m strong,” I tell him, lumping him in with every client, every man. “I’m not like Honey was, or even Candy now. Men come to me because they know they can be rough with me and I won’t break.”
The words hang in the air between us, a challenge I didn’t mean to make.
His lids lower. “No, you won’t.”
My breath catches at the promise in his voice. Mine comes out as a whisper. “I’m doing everything you ask me to.”
Sometimes I don’t know why I’m doing that, but the fact is that I am. And this is a form of asking for mercy, of placing myself in his keeping.
His gaze flickers to my breasts. “Yes, I think you’ve been very obedient. You’ve been sweet, even. That’s what I thought about you all those years ago. Did you know that?” He laughs. “That you were sweet.”
A current of shame runs over my skin, making goose bumps appear over the hills of my breasts, turning my nipples into tight buds. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Enough.” His eyes are ice now, a dark lake solid all the way down. “You’re doing everything I say? Then get on the table. We’re done eating. It’s time for dessert.”
Chapter Fourteen
There’s no room on the table. That’s the excuse I tell myself as I stand very still, staring at the plates and the candles and the strips of dark wood where he wants me to sit.
“Go on,” he says, the spider to the fly.
My stripper persona has deserted me now. Lola is nowhere to be found. I’m almost Hannah now. I don’t know how he’s stripped me down this quickly. A little kindness, a faux date, and suddenly I’m reduced to the girl who’s scared and naked and turned on when she shouldn’t be.
“I can’t,” I whisper.