Chapter Eight - KATYA
This is the cycle of life.
You struggle, fail, win. Struggle, fail, win. Struggle, fail, win. Nowhere in there is actual success because it’s a cycle and it never ends. What is success? Something final, right? Well, there’s only one final outcome to life so I’m convinced that success does not exist. It’s just struggle, fail, win.
I have won enough times. More times than I ever expected after the complete and total fuck-up that was my teen years.
I have enough money, and a nice-enough car. The condo isn’t mine. I can’t afford something this fine. But I have my own business—regardless of how people view it. It’s legitimate. I pay taxes on it and it has a steady track record of paying the bills.
I am almost free. That’s a big deal. Money is worthless without freedom. Hell, everything is worthless without freedom.
And I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen and I’m still alive, never been to jail, and managed to raise my sister through some turbulent times over the past several years.
So I’ve had a few wins. But it’s the failures that haunt me.
My parents are dead. My dreams shattered. My future as uncertain as it has ever been. I have no love life—have never had a love life aside from Oliver Shrike. And the scar on my neck is a constant reminder of my complete and utter defeat eleven years ago.
Half my life, I realize. I’ve been living with that for half my life. More than half. The anniversary of that incident was a couple weeks ago.
In those last eleven years I had one brief interlude of… not quite happiness, but I’d certainly call it contentment. And that was during the few months I spent with Oliver Shrike back when I was seventeen.
I was minding my own business the day we met. Kind of depressed, filled with hopelessness and defeat, and sitting at a bus stop wearing a mismatched Parson School for Girls uniform—a white silk scarf wrapped around my neck to hide my scar—as I waited for my first client.
He liked underage rich girls, which is why I was wearing the uniform. Lily and I were living in a hotel off Prospect, miles away down near the interstate, and I really needed this job if I was going to keep my promise to get her life back on track.
I can’t even laugh at my level of self-delusion when I think about that day.
I had been doing private camming using the back-door access on the Hook-Me-Up website to make connections, but it wasn’t enough money since I was too young to actually take off my clothes. I wanted everything on the up and up. So it was just dirty talk.
God, I was delusional back then.
Eighteen was only a few months away so I was thinking about building an escort business. Not whoring, not exactly. I didn’t want to sleep with them. I only wanted to fulfill their fantasy. But one goes with the other, doesn’t it?
The guy I was waiting for was a good prospect. He wanted to seduce his daughter’s best friend, he told me. Not for real. He just wanted to live that fantasy… without actually living that fantasy. The threat of a pedophile charge was enough to keep him in check, I guess.
So I agreed to be Charlotte. I went to the Goodwill store down the street and pieced together a school uniform from the Parson School for Girls. We agreed to a time and that bench as the pick-up place, and I sat my ass down to await his offer of a ride home from school.
He was handsome enough for a man in his mid-forties and even though it was not how I planned my life before it all fell apart a few years earlier, I could think of a lot of ways in which things could be worse.
I had a condo lined up for us. Hotels were a no-go for me. I had to keep some semblance of self-respect. So I used the guy’s credit card to get a short-term vacation rental and that’s where we were gonna play out the fantasy. The key was left in a lockbox on the property, so I had picked it up that morning just to keep the fantasy seamless.
I did it all with no feeling whatsoever. Like nothing. I wasn't afraid. I had vetted this man carefully. I had his credit card, did a background check (courtesy of Hook-Me-Up, once again) and had the name of his employer and his wife, just in case I needed to make threats. I also had a gun tucked into the waist of my tartan skirt, hidden by my blue blazer, if I needed a little extra persuasion.
Fool me once, right?
My fingertips automatically go to my neck and I trace the thin white line down to the little dent at the base of my throat.
I wouldn’t be fooled again.
He drove up next to my bus-stop bench in a large black Mercedes. Rolled the window down on the passenger side and said, “Charlotte? Is that you?”
“Oh, hi, Mr. Jones. Yes, it’s me.” I stood up and walked to his car. Leaned into the window, hoping I was flashing the appropriate amount of cleavage to get him excited.
“Do you—”
He was going to ask me if I needed a ride home. And I was going to bite my lip, like I was mulling it over, and then agree and get inside the car with him. We’d chat about my fake best friend relationship with his daughter, school sports, classes… shit like that. He would take me to that vacation rental. And then when we got to “my house” I’d tell him I was afraid of being home alone and might he possibly come inside and keep me company until my father arrived in a few hours.
He was going to agree, of course. And then… well, his fantasy illicit relationship with his daughter’s best friend would start to unfold in the most natural way we could possibly plan. A hand innocently brushing against my leg as we sat on the couch, maybe. Or me stumbling into him, forcing his arms to reach out and steady me. An excuse to pull me close. Kiss me. I did agree to kissing on the first “date”.
We’d have an afternoon of fantasy play. Small touches, maybe fondling each other. Me worrying out loud about my father coming home and getting caught.
But that’s not how it happened at all.
At least not with him.
Because I spent that afternoon playing out my own, much dirtier fantasy, with Oliver Shrike.