“Oh God. Oh, honey, no. I shouldn’t have let you see that movie.”
“No, of course you should. It’s her favorite movie.” She glances at my mother’s face, her expression softening. “She deserves to watch whatever she wants to watch.”
“Gabriel Miller would never cheat on you.”
“Right,” she says, but she doesn’t sound sure.
“And if he did, I would cut off his balls and feed them to—”
“He probably isn’t cheating. I just wish he’d come home.”
The hint of doubt in her eyes makes me furious. Not the kind of furious where I want to yell at someone or stomp around. The kind of furious that’s cold and empty. Helpless. That’s what it makes me feel. Which is exactly what my mother’s cancer makes me feel.
Helpless.
The word stays with me through the rest of the long night, through dreams of kings and goblins. I wake restless, as if something has been uncovered—but I don’t know what. I spend the day giving my mother a manicure, a mud mask. A whole spa day in the comfort of her own bathroom. Only after dinner, when I put her to bed, when she drifts to sleep, do I get in my leased BMW and drive to the library.
My tools are neatly stashed in the trunk. The place that I park is right next to the side door, which has a lock. I normally step inside and get to work, my mind already spinning with ideas of new things to try with the wall. Except tonight I’m more interested in what’s outside the library.
It’s not only being in this building, Harper. It’s the whole damn west side. We want to revitalize it, but it hasn’t happened yet. That means it’s full of crime and violence. It’s fucking dangerous.
There are cracks in the sidewalk, pieces of the curb missing. Large potholes in the street. Those things didn’t really stand out against the backdrop of a building blasted to pieces, but of course this damage must have been here before Christopher and Sutton ever purchased the land.
Behind the library there’s an uneven parking lot that ends with a chain-link fence around the construction happening on the Bardot Tower. They aren’t stuck in an infinite cycle of evaluation like the library, because they tore down whatever poor building stood there. I hate Christopher for his efficient dismantling of the past. And I envy him, too.
Low animal sounds slow my step. It sounds almost like the growl of a rabid dog in the alleyway up ahead. The hair on the back of my neck rises. I should turn around and go inside the library. No, if I were really concerned with safety, I’d get back in my car and drive home. Do you have a death wish? Christopher asked me the question the first day we met, when he found me on the railing of the yacht smoking a joint. Maybe I do have a death wish, or at least morbid curiosity, because I keep creeping forward. Brick is cool against my palms as I lean close to peek around the wall.
There isn’t a wild animal, at least not in the usual sense. Instead there’s a man with his back against the library, his head thrown back, his hands grasping the hair of a girl at his feet.
His rough sounds bounce off the walls on either side, her wet sucking sounds the most sexually graphic thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m standing with my mouth open, more shocked than I would have thought to see sex performed so publicly… so degradingly. I’ve seen plenty of frat party shenanigans, even a few that went down in the record books. Girls on girls. Multiple partners. Drunken acrobatics.
None of them come close to this.
He turns them so she’s against the wall, him shuffling with his jeans around his ankles. Then he thrusts into her hard and fast, so hard her sounds become louder, his ass muscles tensing on every push forward. He looks down at the top of her head like it’s the hottest thing he’s ever seen. Her hands are splayed against the brick behind her, holding her up in a crouch.
A roar and then he’s coming into her mouth, pressing his hips flush against her face. I watch as her hands fist, my insides twisted with worry for her throat, for her ability to breathe. I take a step forward, ready to intervene, when finally he lets her go. She falls to the ground, panting against the gravel and decades’ worth of detritus. He zips up, still panting loudly enough to be heard from twenty feet away. Then he pulls something out of his pocket. Money? He tosses it onto the floor in front of her before leaving the alleyway toward the street.
God. God. He just paid her for that blowjob. My body is confused as hell, torn between being hot at the explicit sexual display and angered by an act she probably did not enjoy.
Someone from my sorority was a cam girl. One corner of her room was decorated with frilly pink pillows and carefully placed composition notebooks and banners from a nonexistent sorority so she couldn’t be traced. Sometimes we would join her for a playful little striptease to watch the horny Internet anons go crazy and make enough money to order shots at the bar later. She didn’t enjoy what she did, not in a sexual way. It was a job to her, the way you might be a clerk at the bookstore or a waitress at the diner off campus. She didn’t get off on it, but she did like the money. And she had options. It wasn’t a last resort to her, but as I watch the girl snatch the money and shove it into her shoe, I think this isn’t a choice for her.
She stands gingerly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You like the show?”
I stand there in silent shock before I’m sure she’s talking to me. There’s no point in hiding anymore, so I take a step into the alleyway, my body still flushed in confused arousal. “I’m sorry.”
“There’s usually a charge for someone watching.”
“I didn’t mean to… but I can pay you.” I fumble for my purse, feeling slow and disconnected. This was happening outside the library, maybe every single night that I was inside, sculpting as if I could change the world with art. “How much is it? Never mind, I can just give you what I have—”
A harsh laugh. “Don’t worry about it. I know you weren’t with him.”
“How do you know?”
“Besides the fact that you look like you stepped out of an ad for Anthropologie? Because he’s a regular. And he doesn’t bring girls around or ask for anything more complicated than a BJ.”
There are things more complicated than that blowjob? Because it looked intense and difficult, every movement with subtle undertones of power. “A regular. Do you live around here?”
“Guess you could say that. I stay closer to here than you do, I’m guessing.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions based on jeans and a T-shirt.”
“Am I wrong?”
That makes me laugh. “Nah, I guess I’m easy to read.”
“I’m surprised you stuck around once you saw what was happening. You a perv?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t know that it was a… you know, a professional situation at first.”
She giggles, which unsettles me because of how young she sounds. “A professional. Well, I’m not putting on a suit and carrying my briefcase into work, but yeah, I’m a pro.”
I take a few steps closer, but the shadows don’t reveal her face to me. “How old are you, anyway?”
That makes her stop laughing. “You aren’t a cop, are you?”