“Bridgett,” she replied quietly. She looked down at her hands on her lap and then tried to pull her skirt down a bit. I saw her hand tremble slightly before I looked back up at the road.
“I’m Evan,” I told her. “Evan Arden. You haven’t been doing this long.”
“A while,” she responded.
“You’ve never had anyone take you home before.”
She glanced sideways at me and then shook her head.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I told her. “That ain’t my thing. I’m an ass-man, though. You take it in the ass?”
She blinked rapidly a few times, and her fingers tensed around themselves.
“I have,” she said quietly.
Her throat bobbed up and down, and her eyes tightened along with her jaw. She’d been hurt – I didn’t have any doubt about that. Hookers often were, and I didn’t think there was such a thing as one who wasn’t broken in some way or another. This one was new, though – recently damaged.
I pulled the car over to the curb and turned sideways. Her whole body tensed up, and she pushed herself a little towards the door. I reached over and took her chin in my hands.
“Hey,” I said. “I told you I wasn’t going to hurt you, right?”
“Yeah.” She nodded rapidly as her eyes widened.
“I meant that. I got lube, we’ll go slow, and if you decide you don’t want it, we’ll stop. I can always just fuck you from behind – I’m good with that. Okay?”
She nodded again and relaxed slightly. I leaned over the console and placed my lips against hers firmly. She responded like she was on autopilot, which she probably was. After a couple of kisses, I backed away and looked her over once more as I tried to decide if she was going to be all right with this or not. She looked good, though – the right hair color, at least. Her eyes were light brown, though. I wasn’t sure what her nationality might have been, but she wasn’t Italian. Regardless, I really wanted to keep her. It was too much trouble to go all the way back and pick out another one.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded her head a few times, so I pulled back into traffic.
Bridgett was obviously new. She was young – maybe twenty or so – and definitely didn’t have the demeanor of a street-hardened hooker. If I was a different kind of guy, I would have just taken her to some motel and given her the night off or whatever, but I was more pragmatic than that. If I wasn’t doing her tonight, some other guy would be. Maybe he’d be a nice guy and maybe he wouldn’t, but at least she wasn’t going to get hurt with me.
At a red light, I looked over at her again, and my mind immediately began to catalog information. Long, soft-looking black hair – maybe Latino, but no accent, so she wasn’t an illegal from Mexico or Cuba or anything like that. She was dressed in the typical whore attire – red mini skirt, thigh-high stockings, black lacy top that showed her lack of bra quite clearly. Nice, big, round nipples.
“Bridgett?” I asked quietly. It took her a moment to look from the window over to me. Bridgett wasn’t her actual name, and she hadn’t been going by it for very long. People responded very quickly to hearing sounds even remotely like their own names, and her delay was far too long. “You hungry or anything?”
“No, thank you,” she replied. “I’m fine.”
“There’s a restaurant in my apartment building,” I said. “We could eat first, if you want. It’s a nice place – good food, maybe get you a drink or two? I know I could use one.”
Come on, baby – go with me here.
“If you want to,” she finally said.
Very complacent.
It was almost ten-thirty, and the full menu wasn’t available after ten, but I ordered a couple of sandwiches with chips and a beer for me. I got her one of those vodka martinis that were a lot stronger than people realized. I tried to get her to relax a bit, but she kept glancing around the restaurant.
I contemplated for a moment.
“No one here cares what you’re wearing,” I told her.
Her eyes found mine.
“I look like a hooker,” she said quietly.
No shit.