Objectify Me: A Fireworks Novella (The Fireworks Novellas) (3 page)

As I wash my hands, I hear someone say something from one of the stalls, a kind of moan. Great. A guy is grunting out a shit. Nice. But as I quickly dry my hands, I realize that’s not what’s happening.

“Oh….yeah…” he says.

I freeze. I don’t know why. I live in a dorm; it’s not like I’ve never heard a guy jerking off before. Maybe he didn’t hear me come in. Or maybe he doesn’t care. Or maybe me being there is getting him off.

“
Fuuuuccckkkkkkk
…”

Without even trying to be quiet, I bust out the door. The hallway is empty. I hear voices just on the other side of the blue curtain. For some reason, I feel like a little boy who has been caught doing something gross. I haven’t done anything wrong. But I still don’t want anyone to see me right now. I just need a second to get my thoughts together.

There’s another door on the other side of the hall. I register what it says on the door with only a couple of spare brain cells before pushing it open and walking through. It’s a nearly identical room – sinks, toilet stalls, paper towels – only it smells of roses. Perfect.

I’m now hiding in the ladies room at a high-class titty bar. That’s a new low, even for me.

Chapter Four – Charlotte

Well, that was weird. Not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me here at Objections. But most of the time when weird stuff happens, I have one of the bouncers deal with it. How do I get a bouncer to deal with a guy who’s just too respectable to enjoy a lap dance?

“Hey, Paulo, give me a Mimosa please, and don’t tell Jack?”

Paulo side-eyes me, but he dribbles a bit of champagne into a glass of orange juice and hands it over.

“Someone get in your face, kid? Want me to get one of the boys?”

“No. It was just a guy. He was by himself and…I don’t know. He was so not into the dance that I kind of feel like I violated him.”

“
You
violated
him
?” Paulo tops up my mimosa with a bit more champagne. “That’s a new one.”

Barbie comes up behind and presses her tits into my back. “Come on beautiful. The ding-dongs at table six want a double act.”

I chug the rest of my drink and follow her back into the lounge. We dance and I try my best to make it work for this table of ‘dings-dongs’ as Barbie describes them. But I’m distracted. I keep looking over to table eight to see if Levi comes back from the men’s room, but he doesn’t. Then Barbie talks the table into another ten minutes, so there I am shaking my tits and twirling my ass over these fat Texans wondering why I care that some dweeb from Seattle left without saying goodbye.

Finally, Barbie calls time after the Texans have huffed and puffed and rained cash all over us. We divvy it up on the way to the bar.

“I’m going to take my break,” I tell her as I drop my share in the jar. I’m up to about three hundred already, so that’s my student loan paid this month. Whoop-di-doo.

I duck into the dressing room and grab my kimono before heading back out to the ladies. We have a sink and mirrors in the dressing room, but if we need a toilet, we just use the guest one. There are hardly ever any ladies in here apart from staff, so it’s cool.

The blue curtain and the bathroom door are enough to drown out the music, so it’s blissfully quiet. I choose the first stall and peel myself out of my satin panties so I can pee. Champagne always goes straight through me. When I’m done, I wash my hands and try to tidy my hair a bit. My lipstick looks fine. I use that super long-lasting stuff that’s like latex paint. Eyelashes check. I sniff under my arms. Check – fresh as a daisy. When I’m just about to leave, I hear a noise coming from the disabled toilet down at the end. Weird. I didn’t see any women here tonight. Sometimes, couples come in for a little foreplay; and sometimes the ambitious corporate girls come out to prove they can shake their cocks with the big boys, but I don’t think there are any women here tonight.

“Hello?” I say. I hear a distinctly masculine mumble in reply. I consider getting one of the bouncers, but when I peek under the stall, I recognized the well pressed chinos. The door is not even latched. I push it open.

Levi is sitting on the floor by the toilet, greener than the tiles on the wall.

“One Hurricane too many, huh?”

He looks up at me, nodding, his pathetic puppy dog eyes doing something to the inside of my panties. How sad is that? I’m turned on by a cute drunk guy sitting next to a toilet in a strip club bathroom.

“You know this is the ladies’ room, right?”

“Some guy was wanking in the men’s.”

“Oh. We don’t allow that. I’ll send someone in.”

“It was a while ago. I’m sure he’s done now. He seemed to be pretty close when I was in there.”

The way he says it makes it seem way yuckier than I’ve ever thought. Obviously, I know guys do it. We leave a pile of absorbent paper towels on the back of the toilets for just that reason. Get caught, sure, one of the bouncers will kick you out. It never actually happens.

But hearing Levi tell it changes it somehow, like suddenly I’m an innocent person just trying to take a leak and someone is fapping in the stall next to me. It’s really gross when I think of it that way. I wonder if they do that and then come out for another dance. I shake my head to get that image out of my mind.

“Where is your hotel, Levi?”

“Bourbon Street. The LaFleur Guesthouse.”

“God, it will be
insane
there right now.” I’m hesitant to even let this kid out into the streets of New Orleans. He’s the kind of innocent who will wake up a vampire, or with a dead body next to him. Or both. “My shift ends at eleven, when the floor shows start. Why don’t you hang out for a while? I’ll get you a cup of coffee, then when I punch out, I’ll walk you back to your hotel.”

“I don’t need an escort. I mean, like not that kind of escort.” He hangs his head and shakes it.

I crouch down so I can be eye level with him, putting my hand on his head. The texture of his hair is surprising – wavy and soft even though it’s cut super short. “What’s going on with you?”

He holds his head still so I can stroke it. “What do you mean?” As he looks at me, his eyes kind of glass over. It reminds me of the way my neighbor’s cat looks when I scratch his ratty ears.

“I mean, you were in a state when you arrived here. I have a feeling you’ve been in a bit of a state for a while. So what’s going on?” Rule two of lap dancing, after ‘no touching’, is ‘I ain’t your therapist,’ but I guess I’m not much of a rule follower.

Levi sighs. “God, I’m pathetic. I used to be a man, you know?”

“What changed?”

“I spent a year chasing the wrong girl.”

“That’ll kill a person’s inner man for sure. Who was this dumb twat that didn’t know what a catch you are?”

He laughs this low sexy laugh into his knees, and when he looks up at me, it’s like I’m looking at a different person, as though his inner bad boy is just peeking out. And he does this check-out swirl with his eyes, all fast and subtle, like he’s drawing a figure eight in the air. I mean, I’m a lap dancer. It’s totally legit to really check me out – feast your eyes, son. But he’s too polite, so he just flashes those eyes down to my Betty Boop shoes, over my knees and back up to my face. If I wasn’t so practiced at reading guys, I might not even have noticed.

“I like your kimono,” he says.

Well, I was not expecting that. It kind of works though. “You do? What do you like about it?”

“It’s pretty. I like the pattern. I like lilies. My mom has them in her garden.” He seems to process what he’s said about five seconds after it comes out. “Oh my god, what a dork.” He covers his eyes with his hand.

“That was cute, actually. Really cute. Do you live with your mom?”

He shakes his head, still hiding. “My parents live down in Portland. I live on campus. In a dorm.”

“Is that fun? Party central?”

“It was at first. But now I just kind of want to study and get it over with.”

“So why don’t you move out? Get your own place?”

He nods, running his hands over that soft hair. “I don’t know. I can’t seem to make any decisions lately. I think I was just on hold while I tried to get with this girl. Like everything stopped. It was so dumb. I can see that now. I’m not really sure how to boot up again though. I only know I need to.”

“You need to go back to being a man, I guess.”

His smile is so cute. “Yeah. How do I do that?”

I put my hand on his face the way I did when I was dancing. This unshaven thing he’s doing is scratchy and sexy. It feels rough on my hands, in contrast to his head. “I think you might be on your way. You had a lap dance. You checked out my kimono. I think if you make out with some random girl on Bourbon Street, you’ll be all up in your manhood again. And hey, it’s Mardi Gras. If you can’t make out with a random girl during Mardi Gras, you never can.”

“That sounds deceptively simple.”

I stand up and hold my hand down for him. He waves it away and pushes himself upright on his own.

“You want that coffee now?”

“Nah, I think I’m good.”

He follows me out of the stall, stopping to wash his hands and rinse his mouth.

“I’m going to head out first and you wait for a few minutes,” I say. “If my boss thinks I was in here finishing you off, he’ll kick me out on my ass.”

“Jesus. Okay.”

“Bye, Levi. It was sure nice meeting you.”

“You too. Thanks for cheering me up.”

What the hell. I dive forward and give him a little kiss on the cheek. Then I run out of there before temptation gets the better of me. He’s far too pretty and way too nice for a lap-dancing Louisiana girl who can’t afford to buy milk.

I feel a little…something…as I walk back down the hall and through the blue curtain. Like I just walked past someone on the street I thought I recognized. But then I slip off my kimono, chuck it behind the bar and get back to work.

By the time Levi comes out, I’m stuffing twenties into my bra at a table of grey-haired old perverts. He doesn’t even turn around as he walks out the door.

And that’s that, I guess.

Ever have that feeling that someone lives in the same part of the messed up mental universe as you do? That maybe they’re also teetering on the edge of figuring shit out and falling apart all the time? That they might actually get you? I never get that feeling. Except that was what I felt walking down that hall away from Levi, the clean-cut kid from the west coast. I felt like he might be one person who could process it all. I don’t know why he would give me that feeling. He’s obviously a mess.

But it’s always easier tidying up someone else’s mess than your own.

The song ends. The old farts order drinks. I wiggle away, my mind sort of floating about five inches above my head. And then I see Jack barreling though the tables toward me. He does not look happy.

“In the office, Charlotte. Now.”

I set my tray down and follow Jack back through the tables, now feeling like everyone is looking at me for all the wrong reasons. I actually try
not
to wiggle as I walk. Jack closes the door behind me and sits on his messy desk.

“So here’s a conversation I just had with a fucking Texas billionaire,” he starts, as though if he’d had this conversation with an ordinary nine-to-five schmuck, it might have been okay. “He didn’t take kindly to my reprimand about inviting Felicity into the bathroom to suck his cock because, and I quote, ‘that cream pie girl in the tutu finished off the college kid. Why is
that
okay?’”

I open my mouth to protest, but he stops me. “Fat Texas apparently saw Frat Boy coming out of the ladies’ room with a big dumb grin on his face just after you came out. So what’s the story there?”

Jack is really mad and I don’t blame him, even though I’m innocent. If word got out that more than tame lap dances were going on here, he would lose everything. Nicer clubs than this have been closed down for less. And people have gone to jail. Girls have even ended up on the sex offenders list. But like I said, I’m innocent.

“I didn’t do anything! I found him in the ladies room when I went on my break.”

“Just because you’re on your break doesn’t mean you can hook up with patrons.”

“I didn’t hook up with him! Jeez, we just talked.”

“In the ladies room?”

Now I’m getting mad. Jack should trust me after all this time. I’ve been making money for him for nearly a year, and I have
never
done anything even a little bit across the line. “He went in there because someone was playing handball in the men’s.”

Jack closes his eyes and sighs. “Charlotte, we’ve talked about this before. You girls need to be conscious of what things
look like,
as well as what actually happens.”

“Well, how would it look if I had just left him there to cut his wrists or choke on his own vomit?”

“Was that a danger? We let him just walk out of here!”

I cross my arms. Being hauled up by Jack makes me feel like I’m in high school again. Not even college. High school. What is even the point of college if it doesn’t make you forget that high school ever happened? And normally, for obvious reasons I’m not self-conscious about being practically naked around him. But now I feel exposed and vulnerable. I wish I’d brought my kimono. If I’d known I was going to get bitched at, I would have.

“I’m sure he’s fine. He had sobered up and cheered up by that time.”

“And what cheered him up?” The son of a bitch doesn’t believe me. Now I’m getting mad.

“Jack, what the hell do you think I am, anyway? If I wanted to be a prostitute, I guess I’d be a prostitute.”

“We have an image to maintain here, Lottie.”

“Don’t call me that. You’re not my dad.”

Standing in my underwear getting grilled by a seedy strip club owner is not the moment to be thinking about my dad. He’s the reason I’m stuck in this situation. Also the only reason I don’t jump off the Crescent City Bridge. And now I’m crying. Crying because I’m afraid that Jack is going to fire me, and even though that would probably be the best thing that ever happened to me, it would also be the end of the world. There’s no way I could find another job that lets me take home nine hundred a week. My rent. Dad’s rent. Student loan. Bills. Medication. Food. I
will
have to start sucking cocks if I lose this gig.