And I’m not surprised to realize I don’t want this to end. Instead of the practiced lines that scroll through my head when I’m with a client, my mind is wholly and only concentrated on the way Talent lights me up from the inside out, and the outside back in. He palms my breasts, my wrists, my hips.
He whispers, “Fuck.”
And he whispers, “Baby.”
I want to breathe back, “I don’t know what this is, but don’t ever take it away.”
But I wouldn’t dare.
Tie us both to the bed so we can never leave. The world outside this dark bedroom in the fourteenth-floor penthouse in the Grand Opal luxury apartments is unsafe. There’s not a place for a prince and a tramp to live in harmony.
I drop my head back and cry out, puncturing his stomach with my fingernails.
There’s no telling what’s going to happen when we return to our normal lives. We have so much stacked against us, and we might not survive the test of time and the judgment we’ll face from others and ourselves. Do we keep our relationship a secret? Or do we put everything on the line and face the inevitable?
We’re tangled in disaster.
Talent sits up and wraps his arms around me. He kisses from my chest, up my neck, to my mouth. The change in position gives him a farther reach, and I feel like I’m going to tear in half. Gladly.
I don’t know the answers.
I don’t know how to be Lydia Montgomery beyond Cara Smith.
I don’t know how to be someone Talent deserves, and I don’t know why he has chosen me.
But as my body detonates and comes undone in a fiery explosion, obliterating every indecision and fear in its path, I don’t care. I want it.
I want him in the face of uncertainty.
In inevitability.
And most of all, I want him when the lights are out.
Cricket died on a Tuesday.
The last time I saw her alive was two days prior on Sunday afternoon. I wish I could make up a false memory where we spent one last unforgettable day together before her predictable death, but that’s not how it happened. Our last conversation was volatile because I stopped looking up to her blindly and started to resent her for my life. Our relationship never mended after the night I needed money for the dollar movie theater and barged in on her fucking a stranger in the closet.
In the months between that night and when she died, Mom abandoned any semblance of herself and resigned to her addiction, and I navigated life the best I could as a sixteen-year-old girl with an uninvolved, half-dead mother. I grew apart from Cricket, and it was clear she and I were unalike. I attended school regularly for the first time, so I didn’t have to spend my days at the club or at the house avoiding Marty, but also because I enjoyed my education. I’d had sex to see what the big deal was, but it didn’t interest me. I considered drugs, but I lived with a real-life after-school special. Watching her deteriorate scared me straight.
As far as I was concerned, if I survived long enough, I’d bide my time until my eighteenth birthday. Once I was a legal adult, I’d make decisions for myself and take control of my life. Graduating from high school was my first priority. As long as I completed my education, a world of opportunities would open up for me. Earning a diploma and making it out of high school without a baby would put me strides ahead of Cricket. I didn’t have to follow her path because she didn’t care to set me up for a better life.
“Can I have money for the field trip?”
Mom and Marty sat in mismatching recliners in front of the television. He was fat where she was skin and bones. His recliner reclined back, but Cricket’s leaned too far right.
“Where are you going, baby? Somewhere fun?” Mom had asked. “Maybe I can chaperone.”
I didn’t want to be completely disgusted by the sound of her voice, but the reaction was instantaneous. “I don’t know. Some art museum.”
“Aren’t the schools supposed to pay for things like that?” Marty asked.
“It’s optional, but I’d like to go.” I hated to talk around Marty because he stared at my mouth, but I wanted to go on the field trip more than I despised him.
“Well, how much is it?” Cricket had asked. At that point, she didn’t try to hide the track marks on her arms. Her eyes were sunken in, and her clothes hung off her body like curtains.
“Forty dollars. It covers the cost of admission and lunch.”
“Is it cheaper if I make you a sack lunch?”
Reminding Cricket that she’d never made me a sack lunch in her entire motherly career would have been futile. Paired with the fact that there was never food in the house, I didn’t bother. It would have only started a fight, and I’d never had the chance to go on a real field trip before now. I was willing to say or not say anything in order to attend.
“It’s forty dollars, Mom. I need it by the end of the day on Tuesday, or I won’t be able to go.”
“I don’t have that kind of money on me, Lydia,” Mom’s voice wavered on the fine edge between composed and irrational.
As much as it pained me, I turned to Marty and asked, “Do you have it?”
He winked and asked, “What will you give me for it?”
Mom didn’t have the courtesy to look appalled, and it was all I could do not to stab him through the fucking heart with my school pencil.
“Cricket, I want to go on the school field trip,” I said with just enough false bravado. Tears brimmed on my eyelids, wetting my lashes. “I need forty dollars by the end of the school day on Tuesday. I forged your signature on the permission slip, so don’t worry about that. The only thing I need is the money. This is important.”
I’d set myself up for disappointment believing I’d wake up to the field trip money Tuesday morning. I imagined walking into the school office to hand over the permission slip and fee like the kids with responsible parents.
What happened instead was I went into the office and begged for more time.
“My mom accidentally took the money to work with her,” I lied, flattening out the crumpled permission slip on the counter. “She works at a doctor’s office downtown. I can be there and back in an hour after school.”
I ditched the last hour of school, hopped on a city bus, and arrived at the club to collect the field trip money. I planned on grabbing it from the stage, stealing it from the bar, or asking Marcel as a last resort. I was going on the damn field trip like a normal high schooler.
But nothing on field-trip-money Tuesday went as planned.
When I stepped into the strip club, it took my eyes a second to adjust from the natural sunlight outside to the artificial red light used inside. I didn’t notice right away that the music wasn’t playing or that the stage was empty. My only objective was to find Cricket and get back to school before the office employees left for the day. If I didn’t make it back in time, I was not allowed to go to the museum the next day. That was unacceptable.
Marcel grabbed me by the hood of my sweater before I made it to the dressing room.
“What the fuck?” I shrieked, reaching back to pry his fingers from me.
“You can’t go back there, Lydia,” he said. He dragged me to the other side of the club by my sweater, unmoved by my struggle to fight him off.