Chapter 7
Aaron felt stale inside. He felt as though he’d been cut along his spine in his sleep and flipped inside out, his insides roasted under the California sun. Between the seizure in the boardroom, Mr. Lee’s swift intervention, having to fire Desiree, and swirls of Vanessa permeating his mind, Aaron needed a break. He needed to make something happen. Something to shake him up inside. Something to take the power back. Something to regain control over his life, which was tumbling ever faster out of his hands.
He needed a woman. He needed to feel the dips of her waist, the meat of her ass in his hands. It didn’t matter who. Aaron would be fine with a mannequin at this point, a doll, some faceless icon that he could use and throw away. He was too busy to date anyone, too mentally blocked to feel anything for anyone. That left him with the scraps of the ready-made sex industry: pornography, strippers, high-class escorts. This, too, tarnished Aaron’s mental landscape. If sexual contact was only a few crumpled banknotes away, then what was the point?
Normally, he would call an escort service and wait for a girl to show up. He’d pretend—in every way he could, every way he wanted—to love her for a few hours. He’d do whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, however he wanted. He’d be so enraptured with this prostitute in a mask of elegance, but not because of her as a person. Because she was a walking, talking, breathing variable. He could configure her in any way he desired, filling any gaps he had in the equation of his life.
Tonight though, Aaron needed something different. He needed wind on his face. He needed to reactivate the dull, blunt tips of what used to be a sharp and glimmering lifestyle. He was fading, somehow, into a lesser version of himself. He needed to get out of this rut, to get his lust for life back.
Kümertech was headquartered in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles due to zoning restrictions and cheaper property rates back in the 1970s when Charlie Ridley founded the company. The Ridley family never bothered to move the company into the city, despite the fact that they lived in high-rises looking out over Manhattan Beach. Aaron spent most of his time in the suburbs, especially since his father fell ill. He couldn’t stand the sterile feeling of his father’s impending death seeping into his nostrils every time he went for a visit.
Thinly veiled by the guise that work took precedence, Aaron stayed in hotels close to his office building, living as the suburbanites did. He took his meals at family-style chain restaurants, filled his car with gas at one of the local mom-and-pop gas stations, and walked around the outdoor sprawl of shops that constituted a mall by suburban standards. He wanted to live like these people did. Aaron longed for normalcy, for ordinariness, for a life devoid of quarterly reports and million-dollar revenues and designer suits and year-end galas.
After the events of the day, Aaron didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to pursue. He didn’t even want to pick up the phone. He couldn’t quite understand what it was that he wanted. It was as though there was some kind of mental barrier between him and everything that he craved, all the dancing and glimmering happiness that he just didn’t have the mental fastidiousness to imagine. Driving aimlessly around the residential areas near his office in a suit that was at least three times the cost of the most expensive piece of menswear owned in the social climate of this place, Aaron saw a strip club in a parking lot off the main drag. Feeling like he had nothing to lose, he pulled in.
Immediately he recognized her. On stage, lilting around a pole with a smirk of steaminess across her face. What was she doing here? He wanted to go up to the stage, ask her to come down, to have dinner with him, to go back to his hotel suite and stay the night, but his reason took over. Who was she? And more importantly, why did he care so much?
It was late, already about half past midnight. The club was crowded for a Wednesday night, full of regular guys wearing wedding rings that glimmered under the strobe lights. Aaron kept second-guessing himself, questioning whether he was actually seeing the woman who kept flitting through his mind or whether it was some hallucination of her, some personification of the daydream haunting his reality.
She shimmered in the spotlight, and with a switch of her body around the pole, Aaron could see from across the room that this was the same woman from before. The timid, mortal girl who spilled salad all over the floor of his office building was now a goddess in the center of the room. Aaron saw the tattoo behind her ear—the one that had branded itself into his mind only a few hours earlier—and understood instantly that this was Vanessa, parading before him in full authenticity. A fantasy sprung to life.
Turning to get a drink, Aaron shouted an order to the bartender. “Whiskey sour,” he shouted over the pulse of the music through the club. With a nod, the bartender got to work, pouring and mixing, silently crafting a tumbler of overpriced, liquid courage. “Do you know where I can pay for a dance in a private room?” he added to a bartender who could barely hear him.
“You want a dance in a private room?” The bartender yelled back, distracted by the task at hand.
“Yeah, how do I arrange that?” Aaron bellowed across the bar.
“I’ll call the manager for you. She’ll be right here and you’ll organize it through her. Here’s that whiskey sour in the meantime.” He slid a napkin down in front of Aaron and placed the tumbler—already sweating in the dank muskiness of the club—in front of him.
With resolute eyes piercing across the distance to Vanessa, Aaron could barely contain himself. He had to keep switching positions, his pants were becoming tighter by the moment, with every new sway of her body. He wanted to drink her in—all of her—with a ferocity that he didn’t think he had the strength to feel after being in such a funk for so long. She had reawakened something in him this morning that was roaring even louder still right now, some piece of himself that he hadn’t encountered in years.
Aaron tapped his fingers on the bar when Vanessa’s song was over and she faded back into the wings of the stage, out of public view. Another girl was dancing now, but she (like the vast majority of women) bored Aaron. He downed his drink, feeling the instant shock of the whiskey plunder through his veins, the slick grease of relaxation sliding through his extremities.
The bartender returned in between songs, when an eerie stillness fell over the club and the patrons were left to reckon with their own whooping and hollering until the music blared again. “My manager will be right here,” he said with a nod. “Want another?”
“Sure,” Aaron replied flatly.
“What can I do for you, sir?” A husky voice melted through the air behind Aaron, who turned around to see a stocky, no-nonsense woman with greasy hair and ill-fitting jeans, which looked like they’d cut off her circulation if she sat down.
“Are you, uh, the manager?” Aaron asked in a futile attempt to mask his disbelief.
“Yes sir, I am. Ben told me that you wanted to organize a private dance?” The woman had a clipboard in her hand, as if she were a waitress asking him what he wanted for dinner.
The music pumped up again, engulfing them in an ocean of sound waves, vibrating the world around them and drowning out all logic. With a mind that was slowly eroding in the static of the alcohol, Aaron found himself inelegantly blurting, “That girl. The one who danced before. Vanessa.”
The manager frowned. “She’s off the clock, I’m afraid. That was actually her last dance for the night. I can put you down for a dance with Amber if you’d like.”
Aaron fished his money clip from his wallet and tossed a hundred-dollar bill onto the bar. “Keep the change,” he said to the bartender as he slammed his tumbler down and brushed past the manager, saying nothing more to her. He had to find Vanessa, to talk to her somehow, to breathe in her essence. Something about her was electrifying to him, the way that she gazed or moved or something. Aaron couldn’t place what it was, but she had cursed him somehow. He’d become addicted to her—in a way that didn’t even make sense to him—in the past few hours.