“You also do the books for the club.”
“And now I’m a freaking scam artist.”
“Or a social activist. You hooked us up.”
Sort of. I hooked her up with a drug dealer who killed a guy in front of her—accidentally, but still. Jules, though—maybe he made up for it, if anything can make up for that. “Tell me about Jules,” I say.
Crystal smiles a faraway smile like she’s reliving last night.
“He didn’t mind the Walmart apron? Did you tell him you have a kid?”
“I kept it one hundred,” she says. “Told him the truth, that I was just in it for a free meal and to pay off a favor to you.” While she’s talking she digs through her purse for makeup and starts doing her face up in the flip-down mirror.
“Dude couldn’t stop laughing. Like he thought I was joking. He livestreamed the whole thing.”
Wow, that is way more publicity than I paid for. He was only required to do two Insta posts. A hundred grand is starting to seem like a deal.
“While you’re explaining my life to me, do you know where I live?”
She stops putting on her lipstick and looks at me with a shocked expression and only half her mouth painted. “OMG girl. You really don’t know shit, do you?”
“Do you?” I ask.
“I don’t know where you’re crashing now, but you have some stuff at the office.”
My jaw drops. I have an office! My own space. “Will you help me find it before I drop you off?”
“When I say ‘office,’ I don’t mean ‘office,’ if you catch my drift.”
“Sure, whatever. Take me there.”
I turn up the music and start belting out some tunes. I’m going to my office, baby! This is the best news I’ve had since finding out I’m a mogul.
“Don’t get too excited, girl. It’s not that great. And I need to pick up Kai from my mom so we need to hurry.” Maybe that’s why she’s doing her makeup and hair in the car.
“Do you want to get him on the way?”
She gives me a weird look. “I’m not bringing my baby there!”
An office not fit for children—that’s interesting. “Just tell me how to get there.”
She shakes her head. “Take a left at the next light.”
“It’s one way. Do you mean the next one?” Between going through her purse to look for something, texting Jules (at least I think that’s what she’s doing), and giving me directions, she spills her coffee all over the place.
“OMG. This isn’t my car!”
“I thought you were locking this mofo down.”
“Really?”
She shrugs. “You mentioned something about getting engaged.”
“We’ll see. I’m not who I was last week.” Right now, I want to return the Ferrari to JP and move in with Crystal, wherever she lives. I feel such a kinship with her. Not to mention Kai seems sort of like he might know me. Like he knows I suck at giving him bottles and stuff, but he’s used to seeing me. “You were just teasing me before. We’re besties, right?”
“Bitch puhlease,” she says.
The way she says it, I know we’re besties. “Do we talk a lot?”
“Ugh, just drive.”
When we pull up to my office, I gasp in excitement. “Is that it?” We’re in front of a low-lying building. It’s not fancy, but it’s big. If I own all that space, I’m not going to complain. It looks like a relic from the ’70s with a flashy marquee that spells out GOLDRUSH in yellow lightbulbs. I own an entire building. I thought it was going to be a classy little office next to a nail salon, not a full-on club with its own parking lot.
Sophisticated and elite dancers! Studied dance at the Royal Ballet! Former beauty queens! Best of California! And then…All nude!
Everything on the marquee is pretty much what I have on my matchmaking app, except…the all-nude part. “Um, what’s with the all-nude thing. Is this my building?”
Crystal laughs. “Oh my God. You know nothing, girl.”
“I’ve been telling you that.” I notice that the building has no windows. “I don’t get it. This looks like a strip club.”
“That’s because it is a strip club.”
Posters on the side of the building show the same girls from the GoldRush app. Tatiana the Russian ballerina. Real tits! On my app she’s described as a Russian ballerina looking for a soulmate. No mention of her tits.
Brandi, Miss Orange County 2016, is also on my app, except that in her headshot she’s wearing a dress instead of titty tassels.
And there’s Crystal.
“It all started when management asked you to make a website for the place and then decided not to pay you.”
“Assholes,” I mutter.
Crystal explains it all to me. All of the GoldRush girls were sick of our jobs, sick of getting groped by customers and management, sick of working as independent contractors with zero paid time off, no benefits, and long hours. “Stripping is sexy and all, but the job sucks,” she adds.
“So I decided to get us all sugar daddies?”
She nods.
The GoldRush matchmaking app is just the GoldRush strip club with a makeover. “You just glossed us up online.”
I look at the club. I didn’t even change any of the marketing. “Does the club know?”
“They didn’t until a couple of weeks ago when that article came out about you being one of the hottest young entrepreneurs in SoCal.” She laughs. “That was pretty fucking funny.”
Crystal seems to be softening toward me a bit. “Sorry I snapped at you about Kobra. That wasn’t your fault.”
She holds a big metal door with chipped paint open for me and ushers me in. “Welcome back.”
Like a lot of strip clubs, GoldRush probably looks better at night. A strip club in the day is like a living room decorated for Christmas in February—completely wrong. Maybe it looks sexy when the lights are low, the music is pulsing, and a girl is booty-popping on the runway. At the moment, it’s Christmas in February. Someone’s kid is running up and down the stripper walk and fooling around on the pole.
“I thought you said this place wasn’t for kids.”
She shrugs. “Not my kid, I should say.”
As I walk through, a big greasy-looking dude shouts, “Where the fuck you been, Mia?”