The Billionaire's Command (The Silver Cross Club) (7 page)

“Good,” Trixie said. “Maybe you’ll finally listen and get the message through your thick skull.”

Their bickering escalated behind me as I left the dressing room. Poppy was a petty tyrant, gone mad with her tiny amount of power. The only way to deal with her was to avoid her as much as possible. Easier said than done, of course.

Not my problem anymore. I was done.

Maybe permanently.

God. I couldn’t believe I had just
walked out
on him. Definitely a firing offense.

There was no point in worrying about that. It would happen or it wouldn’t. I just had to wait and see.

I changed into my street clothes, packed my bag, and swung by Germaine’s office on my way out. She was talking to one of the waitresses, but when she saw me in the doorway she told the girl to come back later, and beckoned me inside.

I went in and closed the door behind me. “I’m leaving early,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows at me, silently telling me to go on.

“You didn’t tell me,” I said.

She sighed. “I’m sorry. He instructed me not to.”

“Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “Let me down easy if he decides you need to fire me.”

“That’s not going to happen,” she said. “He’s never interfered with my personnel decisions.”

“No time like the present,” I said, and then wished I had kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Whatever. I’ll be in tomorrow night. I already talked to Poppy. Trixie’s going to cover for me.”

“Very well,” Germaine said. She gave me a long, searching look. “He wasn’t—”

“No, it was fine,” I said. “I just need a break. I’ve been working too much.”

“Very well,” she said again. “In that case, I’ll see you tomorrow evening.”

I walked home in the late afternoon light, through the bustling, leafy streets of the West Village, replaying my encounter with The Owner in my head and cursing myself for all of the stupid things I had said and done. If I had known, if Germaine had told me, if I were less of a smart-mouthed idiot—

Too late. Too late. There was no point thinking about it.

But I stewed all the way home anyway, and stewed climbing the steps to the front door, and then the narrow stairs to the fifth-floor walk-up that was my biggest indulgence in life. I still felt like an impostor, living in the West Village and routinely spotting Hollywood types on the street. I loved the neighborhood, and I loved my apartment, and I had gotten a shockingly good deal on the rent—but I still felt guilty writing my rent check every month, thinking of how I could be sending more money home, even just a few hundred extra dollars. And then telling myself that it didn’t matter, that I was already sending
plenty
home and they didn’t need more, and that it was okay to be selfish sometimes. And then telling myself I was an asshole.

My brain wasn’t always a pleasant place to live.

I made a lot of noise coming in the door: jingling my keys, scratching deliberately at the lock, kicking off my shoes and putting my bag in the closet. I was never home this early, and I didn’t want Yolanda to be surprised or like, eating cereal naked.

“Yolanda?” I called, just to be safe.

“You’re home early,” she called back, but she didn’t sound too distressed, which I took as a sign that there wouldn’t be an unfortunate nudity.

I met Yolanda when she responded to an ad I posted looking for a roommate. Well, her and about eighty-five other people, but she was the only one I liked. She moved in a week later and we’d been living together ever since. She was just about the best friend I had, after Scarlet. She was a few years older than me, and she’d been working at a fancy investment bank downtown since she graduated from college, so I
knew
she could afford a swankier apartment, but she said she didn’t like living alone. I didn’t either, for that matter. I liked the company, and Yolanda’s relaxed and easygoing presence was good for my nerves.

I walked down the short hallway into the living room, and she was fully dressed and sitting in front of the TV, her hair combed out in a big puffy cloud, and her sister was busily twisting her hair into ropes.

“Hey, Sash,” Yolanda said. “Didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

“Yeah, I bailed early,” I said, collapsing onto the couch. “Poppy fucked up the scheduling again, so I didn’t see any point in hanging around. Hi, Tanya.”

“What’s up,” Tanya said, fingers flying. “You don’t care if we watch this show, right?”

“No,” I said. It was some political comedy show that they were both obsessed with. I didn’t care about politics
or
comedy. “Knock yourselves out. I might order some food, though.”

“Ooh, let me get in on that,” Yolanda said. “Thai?”

“That’s cool with me,” I said. “We’re going to have a wild Saturday night, huh? Why aren’t you out clubbing or something? You’re like an old lady.”

“Maybe I’ll braid your hair again,” Tanya said.

“No way,” I said. She’d tried to cornrow my hair once, and I’d only gotten three braids in before I couldn’t handle it anymore and made her stop. My scalp was too delicate. White people looked ridiculous with cornrows anyway. “You want food too, Tanya?”

“Sure,” she said. “Let’s get some spring rolls.”

I ordered the food, and then sat on the couch for a few minutes and watched Tanya braiding. Her fingers moved so fast I couldn’t even keep track of what she was doing. It was a relief to be home with people I knew well, who wouldn’t suddenly reveal themselves to be powerful and mysterious businessmen who could fire me and who also wanted to touch my pussy.

Christ.

When the show switched over to commercials, Yolanda said, “By the way, your bird is angry.”

“Like,
actually
angry, or is he just acting the way he always does?” I asked.

“The latter,” she said. “He exists in a stage of rage at the inequities of the world. He’s oppressed by capitalism. Nobody understands his art.”

I rolled my eyes and went into my bedroom to check on Teddy. Yolanda had covered his cage, and when I lifted one corner of the cover, he just blinked sleepily at me and said, “Hi Teddy! Teddy’s a good boy.”

“Good boy, Teddy,” I agreed, and dropped the cover again. He would hopefully sleep until I woke up in the morning and let him out.

Teddy, like the apartment, was an indulgence. I adopted him from a girl I worked with shortly after I moved into my first apartment in the city, a crummy one-room hole in Chinatown, and he had been my constant companion ever since. That didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of what a pain in the ass he was. He cost a lot of money, he needed about as much attention as the average toddler, and it was hard to find roommates who were willing to put up with him. He hated everyone but me; he tolerated Yolanda, and would even let her feed him and take him in and out of his cage, but he made it very clear that she was still The Enemy. He was noisy, and he pooped a lot, and I spent a lot of my free time cutting up expensive fruit for him to eat.

I adored him.

I went back out into the living room. “He’s passed out. I don’t think even Teddy can manage to be angry in his sleep.”

“Well, he wasn’t asleep earlier,” Yolanda said. “He kept muttering to himself, and when I went in there to see what the problem was, he screamed at me until I left the room again. So then I put the blanket on him.”

“God, he’s such a pain,” I said. “Sorry, Yo. I don’t know why he’s such a jerk.”

“He’s a one-woman bird,” she said. “I understand. I get my love and validation in other ways.”

“You should get a dog,” Tanya said.

“What a terrible idea,” Yolanda said, and they launched into their well-worn argument about the pros and cons of dog ownership. Tanya had one of those little yappy dogs, I didn’t know what kind, and she liked to carry him around in her purse, even on the subway. I thought it was kind of weird.

They wound down, finally, and Yolanda said, “So you said Poppy’s giving you trouble at work again?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. She’s got that thing, what do you call it, like that guy in France—”

“Napoleon Complex,” Yolanda said. “That’s only if you’re really short, though.”

“She’s not that short, so I guess she’s just an asshole,” I said.

“Why don’t you just quit that job?” Yolanda asked. “You don’t want to be a stripper for the rest of your life, do you?”

That was easy for her to say. She had a college education and a real job, and she didn’t understand that my circumstances were different. “Maybe someday,” I said.

“Someday, what does that mean?” she asked. “You can do it whenever you want. I told you I’d help you. It’s easy. Tanya knows a guy who just got his GED, so we could get you in touch with him and he’ll tell you all about how it works.”

I
really
didn’t feel like listening to a lecture on my life choices. “I’ll think about it,” I said, and then the doorbell rang, thank
God
, and I got to escape and go pay the delivery guy.

* * *

It wasn’t like I set out to become a sex worker.

Nobody did, except maybe a few spoiled rich girls who thought it would be empowering to have men pay them for sex. But the women I knew did it because they actually
needed
to, because they had no other options.

It wasn’t like any five-year-old’s list of dream jobs included “high-class stripper.”

Mine sure didn’t. I wanted to be a nurse, from the time I was old enough to have some vague notion that nurses existed and did things. I wanted to wear a little white uniform and a cap and bandage people’s boo-boos. That was my dream. I took all the right classes in high school—calculus, biology—and I didn’t exactly ace them, but I did well enough to get by, and I thought there was a fighting chance I would actually graduate and go to college and get out of Wise County and
escape
.

I wasn’t unhappy, growing up. Pretty much the opposite, really. We were poor as dirt, but my parents were loving and attentive, and I spent most of my childhood playing in the woods behind our house with an assortment of neighbors, cousins, and siblings. We mostly had enough food. There weren’t any dark secrets. There wasn’t anything for me to escape
from
, other than poverty and a backwoods nowhere life. Well, I wanted a somewhere life. Nursing was my way out.

And then my dad got sick, partway through my junior year of high school. He worked in the mine until it closed, and smoked like a chimney every day of his life, and it didn’t come as a surprise when he got cancer. But it still changed everything.

He couldn’t work. He hadn’t
really
worked for years, not since the mine shut down, but he’d done enough odd jobs to keep us afloat. But he went downhill fast, and was forced to spend most of his time watching television with his oxygen tank nearby, and there was nobody else. My mom was helpless, sweet as a child and dependent on my dad for everything, and my older brother was stationed in Okinawa and couldn’t do much. I had three younger siblings, and someone had to keep food on the table. My mom’s disability checks weren’t enough.

So I dropped out. Maybe there was some other way, something I could have done to stay in school and still keep a roof over our heads, but I couldn’t think of anything, and I didn’t have anyone to turn to for advice. The guidance counselor was so accustomed to kids dropping out that I didn’t even cross her radar.

I was seventeen. There were three kinds of legal work in my hometown: Wal-Mart, waitressing, and running the cash register at the gas station. None of them were enough to support five people and pay the mortgage. My illegal options were selling drugs or stripping, and I picked stripping as the less morally repulsive of the two.

The money was good. Or I thought it was good, at least; it was good to me, then, the half-starved girl I was, hungry for life and experiences. The owner probably knew I wasn’t eighteen, but he didn’t look too closely at the fake documents I gave him, and nobody else cared. I could make a hundred bucks a night, on a good night, and it was like manna from heaven. I bought my sister the first new pair of shoes she’d had in five years, and I almost cried at the expression on her face: ecstatic disbelief, like it was too good to be real.

You didn’t start stripping because you wanted to. You did it because you couldn’t do anything else.

The problem with making money was that once I had a little bit of it, I wanted more. There were so many things that I
could
pay for, if only I could make more money: my one brother’s medication, my other brother’s baseball uniform, a new chest freezer to replace the one that broke. I realized pretty quickly that there was an upper limit on how much money I could make if I stayed in the boonies and worked at a third-rate hole-in-the-wall strip club. It didn’t take long for the shine to wear off, and then I started dreaming of bigger and better things.

And then my sister got into college, and dreaming turned into planning.

I didn’t even know that she had applied until she came to me with the acceptance letter: admission to Tech with enough financial aid to cover her tuition, and I was so proud I could have cried.