We’d actually met at the one and only Youth Cancer Support Group I’d gone to in Vancouver. Ruby had been diagnosed as a kid with brain cancer. She’d battled it for four years before finally going into remission. She’d succumbed to the disease again when she was seventeen, this time in her bile ducts. After a year of intense treatment and three surgeries, she’d beaten that too. Ruby Jewel was a fighter. I’d known it the second I had seen her sitting in the depressingly empty classroom on a plastic chair waiting for group to begin. She was wearing a tiny dress held together with silver safety pins and her hair was out to there. Somehow, even rocking all that, she didn’t look like a whore. She just looked super cool, someone who had grown to love themselves and was comfortable not only in their own skin but in their own personality, flaws and all.
I’d sat beside her and left two hours later with a new best friend.
“Is it the joint?” I asked mildly, as she pushed her dark red bangs back from her sweaty forehead and waved a hand to cool herself.
She was wearing blue, red and white spandex short shorts and nipple coverings shaped like miniature American flags. It was one of my favourite outfits she wore.
“Nah, it’s the complete ease you got goin’ on out here. I’ve seen you, from afar obviously, livin’ the classy life. You go to a church every Sunday and to a school where you wear uniforms for Christ’s sake. And yet here you are, Louise Lafayette leaning against the wall of a fucking strip club as if you were born an’ raised here.”
She shook her head but it was with awe and warmth that she turned to me to say, “You’re incredible. Weird as shit, but also incredible.”
“Back at you, babe,” I said.
We smiled at each other before hers broke off and her eyes darkened.
“How’re ya feeling?”
“Why?” I snapped.
I didn’t like to talk about the cancer, about Louise and her life when I was at the bar. Ruby knew that and, normally, she respected it.
She bit her scarlet painted lip and shifted on her heels. “Just that something weird is going on tonight and I don’t know if you should be here or not.”
I straightened instantly, my foot jarring against the pavement as I stood up. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Dunno really. Debra told us girls that tonight had to be the best show we put on in our lives.”
A little shiver scuttled down my back. I knew Debra was frustrated with The Lotus. It was a lot of work and she was tired, not just of the club but of hard living. Her third husband had left her five months ago for a newer model and she hadn’t recovered.
I’d had a feeling for a while that she wanted to sell but the thought of her doing so slayed me. I’d found a little oasis of crazy calamity in my perfectly ordered life. It was what got me through the hours spent hooked up to poison that was supposed to cure, it was what pulled me through the teeth aching monotony of my day-to-day existence.
“Shit,” I swore.
It was a bit excessive but I’d found out that I liked cursing. There was some kind of release attached to the words that always made me feel better.
It didn’t then, not with the thought of losing The Lotus weighing on my mind.
“The new owner might not want to change things up,” Ruby offered. “I mean, they’ll definitely keep on the dancers but probably the serving staff too.”
“What use will they have for me though? I’m an underage, unpaid hang around.”
“Yeah, but you’re super cute so let’s hope that the buyer is a man with good taste,” Ruby said with a smirk.
I snorted but her attempt at easing me fell short. There was anxiety like arsenic in my blood.
“Cool it, Lou, everything will be golden,” Ruby said.
I chuckled darkly and dropped my joint to the ground to crush it beneath my high heel. “Nothing in my life is golden, Rue.”
“Your bush is,” she quipped which startled a laugh out of me. “If you had any that is.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Come on, let’s go see what’s going on.”
We linked arms as we headed inside, laughing about something Molly, a sweet but dumb dancer, had done the night before. I was mid-laugh when I noticed Debra heading into her office behind a few shadowy shapes. She caught my eye and looked uneasy. I raised an eyebrow at her in question but she only bit her lip and shook her head slightly, like she was sorry.
A shiver of trepidation shot up my spine.
“Deb,” I called out to her.
“Behave tonight,” was her response in a voice that brooked no argument.
Ruby and I shared a look after she’d closed the door.
“Shit,” we both cursed at the same time, then broke down into giggles.
He’d been watching me all night.
I’d felt his eyes for hours but not in the way I was used to the men in a strip club looking at a woman. That was the feeble falling to sin and temptation, hoping to prey on the assumed weaker sex. Those eyes left hot greasy marks against my flesh, disgusting but easily washed off, easily ignored.
These eyes were not. They tracked me across the room, embedded under my skin like some clever device, not losing track of me even when I left and entered again, even amid the glittering mass of mostly naked women and excitable men, between the high backed semiprivate booths and the tall, mirrored bar.
I hadn’t looked his way, positioned with his back against the wall to one side of the main stage, his position open to the entirety of the club. It had taken more determination than I wanted to admit, I was curious about a man like him, a man who watched someone the way a computer might, or a camera, without bias or emotion. Only stone-cold calculation.
I wanted to meet him because I wanted to learn that.
I wanted to never meet him because it was dangerous that he watched me like that.
I had secrets, big ones, though none so scary as to threaten my life.
Something about the way those eyes watched me though, warned me that he could become that threat to my life and more that he wanted to.
The hair on the back of my neck had been on end all night and a little voice at the back of my head told me one peek wouldn’t hurt.
The rest of me knew better.
So, I avoided the watchman and continued my Wednesday night as if he didn’t exist. I helped Ruby tuck her curves into a tiny sequined costume, sewed the buttons onto half a dozen more just like it, served drinks because Margie had called in sick and mopped up the puke in the bathroom after the bachelor party went awry thanks to too many tequila shooters.
I was mindful of the women, dancers and customers alike, who gravitated toward him as the night carried on. They were beautiful women who had no qualms about displaying their wares and their interest but the man seemed to have no qualms about rebuffing them, sometimes brutally if their sour mouths and thunderous brows were anything to go by.
Still, he watched me.
It was quarter to two in the morning and things were winding down at The Lotus. The bachelor party had long since departed, the couples looking to heat up their love life had found their ignition and left back to their beds and it was only the devout that remained. It was my favourite time of night at the club because the men who lingered were regular enough to have made friends with the crew, including me.