Helen

I’m shaking. I’m literally trembling from the tips of my toes to the top of my head, and I think I might throw up.

It’s just my boobs.

It’s dark.

No one can touch me.

I’m thinking all these things as I shuffle out of the changing room in a see-through crop top and booty shorts. I feel like I’m walking toward my executioner; I move slowly, my head mostly down, as the sound of people chattering gets closer and closer and the lights change from the bright fluorescent ones in the hall to the darkened ones in the club.

I try not to focus on what I am wearing, or rather, not wearing. With a deep exhale, I find the courage to walk across the room and to the bar. It’s still early in the evening and the club is mostly empty. Luckily, the rest of the employees are busy doing their work and talking with coworkers, and no one is looking at me. Ridiculous as it might be, it feels as if the moment I step into the room, all eyes hone in on me. My face warms and my heart starts beating faster and faster. It feels like I’m coming out of my skin. With all the things I’ve gone through in my life, this is what is going to defeat me? A little nudity?

I can do this. I can do this.

But even as I’m chanting my internal dialogue, I realize . . . I can’t do this.

I can’t do this.

“Hey, I’m Kevin and this is Linda—we’re working with you tonight. You’re Helen, right? I’ve seen you at meetings.” I look up at the gorgeous black man in front of me. He’s shirtless, with a silver handlebar piercing his nipples, his abs are washboard, and he has a tattoo of someone’s name across his heart. Next to him is a beautiful redhead with a sweet smile and a ton of makeup. But the well-done, YouTube kind. She’s dressed exactly like I am. But unlike me, she’s completely unfazed by the fact that I can see her nipples. She’s leaning casually against the bar and extends her hand.

“Hi!” she says, perkily.

I clear my throat and smile. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you both. Well, not meet you, exactly. I’ve seen you around, but it’s nice to—”

“Relax, girl,” Kevin says. I’m babbling. Great.

“First-night jitters. Completely normal,” Linda says, waving her hand around. “Once this place is crowded, you’ll be too busy to think about your boobs. And after a few days, you’ll want to show a little more. The more you show, the bigger the tips.” Linda winks cheekily.

I don’t know about that.

At the Swiss finishing school I attended one summer, I was taught to cross my legs at the ankle, to not show too much skin if wearing a skirt. A skirt that would never have gone more than a few inches above my knees to begin with. I was taught the proper way of exiting and entering a car, God forbid I accidently flashed my “knickers.” I was taught to have proper posture and to keep my head held high. Madame Dupont would have a coronary if she saw me now.

I don’t think I’ll ever want to show more boobs. This is as much as I can stomach.

We all go to our stations and start prepping for the night, and Kevin and Linda are nice enough to show me around and give me some pointers. “Stop fidgeting, girl. I’m not looking. And even if I was, it’s nothing I haven’t seen a hundred times,” Kevin says.

“You’ll draw more attention to that area if you keep slouching or pulling the top down,” Linda adds.

Admittedly, the top isn’t quite as see-through as I expected. It’s a sheer material, but what is actually more provocative is that it ends just under my nipples. Luckily, I don’t have huge breasts and mostly, you can see the bottom swells. Unlike Linda, who has big breasts, most of which are exposed. The dress code requires our hair to be up in a tight ponytail, and that leaves me feeling even more on display. At least with my long hair down I could cover some of my chest.

I exhale and get back to work, trying to take their advice as I begin to cut limes and spear cherries. I receive a few hellos from the staff as they walk by, by but no one looks at me twice. This is their job. This is normal. I’m the abnormal one, freaking out. Tonight, I’m doubling my tips and in a week, I’ll be able to pay for the lawyer. That thought alone does give me a boost of confidence.

Alex

My attorney was able to find the server who Glen groped and offered her an exorbitant amount of money, which Archer Technologies happily paid, and the charges were dropped once she told the police she wouldn’t be testifying. Obviously, Glen was grateful.

His wife . . . not so much.

And now the deal with PharmEc is finalized and I’m exponentially richer.

“I can’t have this conversation right now, Mother.” I finish signing a few checks and stuff them into a drawer. “The plane leaves in an hour.”

“You don’t even care that I’m dying.” She touches her forehead as if checking for a fever.

“You’re not dying, Mother. You weren’t dying three weeks ago when I left for Miami and you’re not dying today. You do this every time I have to leave.”

Regally—apparently forgetting her fake death scare—she sits down on the tufted leather settee in my office. “Why can’t you have Bradley go?”

“If you’d gone to visit him in the hospital you’d know why.”

She rolls her eyes and looks away. “You know very well I don’t go to hospitals.”

I close my briefcase and stand. “You have Lindsey.” Lindsey is my mother’s companion. “She’ll advise me if there are any problems.”

“You’re leaving me. That’s the problem.”

“I’ve told you a dozen times you’re welcome to come. It’s only a year or so and I’ll come back often. At least monthly.”

“I’m not leaving your father,” she says. It’s sad. I pull up a chair in front of her and take her hands in mine. “Mother, father is dead. It’s a grave.” She hardly ever goes out anymore, except to go to the grave site every early afternoon. Every single day. “It’s not healthy. Come with me. It can be a vacation.”

Her eyes water, and she pushes me away and stands up. “No,” she says firmly.

“Fine. I’ll call you later.” I’ve been dealing with my mother’s depression and mood swings since my father’s death. It weighs heavily on me, but I have to live my life. I can’t do more for her than I already do.

“What are you going to do about that woman?” she asks as I stack the papers on my desk for my secretary to take care of on Monday.

“Helen Blackwood?” I told her about my encounter with Helen last week when I flew back home to Seattle to wait out the purchase of PharmEc. I shrug, because I don’t know what I’m going to do.

She’s all I’ve been thinking about since I saw her at that club. I think it’s partly why I returned to Seattle. The temptation to go back to the club and get some answers was too great. I need to stay away. When I told my mother about Helen, she spiraled. She asked a hundred questions I didn’t have answers to but that I’d been wondering myself: Why was she in Miami? What had she been doing all these years? How did she manage to get away with stealing all that money after all the investigations? Why was she working in a nightclub?

“You should have her arrested,” my mother says, haughtily. “If the police discover she’s been living off stolen money . . . Let’s hire a PI to find out where she’s hiding it.”

“Mother, you have all the money you need. We don’t need that.”

“It’s the principle of the thing, son,” she says. “Don’t you want to avenge your father?”

“Avenge my father?” I roll my eyes. “This isn’t a soap opera or a superhero movie, Mother. Focus on your health and I’ll see what I can find out about Helen.”

“Conniving little bitch,” she mutters under her breath, and I’m shocked. My proper mother never curses.

“Mother!”

“What? Don’t pretend you don’t feel that way too. You of all people. If I ever see her again, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

“You’ll what?” I help her up and kiss her cheek. “You’ll do nothing. Come on, I’ll have your driver take you home.”

“Fine. Safe travels, darling.”

I landed in Miami three hours ago. That’s how long I avoided going to Duality. Three hours. But ridiculous unreasonable curiosity has me walking back into the club.

I’ve gone to one nightclub in my entire thirty-five years of life, and that was in my twenties. It was purely peer pressure and alcohol that led me into the loud and dark establishment in Seattle. I hated it and never went back, even after years of being teased and provoked by my friends.

Now, I’ve been to Duality, the loudest, darkest, and most scandalous club in South Beach, twice in less than one month.

Seeing Helen again after a decade is already wreaking havoc on my life.

But, I need to see Helen. Bradley seemed speculative at my sudden change of attitude about heading back to Miami so quickly, but in the end, one of us has to be here, and Bradley is out of commission for the time being.

I’ve given myself a million excuses why I had to come here, but there’s only one: Helen.

For the last twelve years I’ve hated the Blackwoods. Their name is synonymous with pain and deceit. But growing up, I’d see her all the time. On my school breaks, at parties, family vacations . . . She always looked at me as if I’d hung the moon. But I could never see past her age, nor her . . . openness. In polite society you didn’t just go around voicing every thought or feeling that crossed your mind. She didn’t follow any of the rules, and it was jarring.

Truth be told, she was the one and only person who made me laugh. She never knew that, because I would bite the inside of my cheek to keep it in. Or maybe she did know.

My parents never laughed; it was ‘‘childish and outlandish” and beneath us. They were almost militant in the way I was brought up. Mostly maids and nannies tended to me until I was shipped off to boarding school. We didn’t hug or show much in terms of emotions or affection. My father, who had Asperger’s, was a good man, but exceedingly methodical. Often, we sat in his home office, where he talked numbers to me. As a financial advisor and a CPA, he understood numbers. Numbers made sense. Emotions, not so much.

I know it’s unusual, but it’s the one thing that always connected us. We’d watch the stock market together, and even at a young age I’d tell him what I thought would happen the next day. He’d ask me, “Was it a good day today?” even though he already knew the answer. I’d run to grab the newspaper and then tell him if it was good or bad, depending on the dips and rises of the market.

To anyone looking in, it was weird. A kid connecting with his father via the stock exchange. I didn’t realize that until much later in life. But it’s how I grew up, and it’s a fond memory. In fact, it’s the fondest memory I have of my father. And, it’s the reason I am so successful now. He taught me everything I know, and I was able to rebuild our business after we lost everything. Not just rebuild it, triple our wealth.

Except, he never saw that realized. He killed himself when our home went into bank auction.

I wish you would have waited, Dad. I wish you would have had faith in me.

How Mr. Blackwood and my father were best friends is something I’ll never understand. Whereas my father was ridiculously reserved, Mr. Blackwood was funny and outgoing, just like his daughter. Helen . . . she was that little girl who made me laugh. With her small splay of freckles over her nose, and her thick mass of dark brown hair, and her unapologetic, quirky attitude.

And I kept her at arm’s length. Until that last time I saw her on her birthday.

The unusual way she made me feel had always made me uncomfortable. Especially when I came back from college one summer and saw her in a tiny bikini, lying out on the deck of her pool during a Fourth of July party at the Blackwood estate. It took everything I had in my twenty-two-year-old body not to look at her long, leans legs or the way the knots on the sides of her bikini fell against her hip bones, or the way she had filled out the cups of her tiny purple bikini top.

I clenched my jaw and looked anywhere but at her. After all, I was still just a horny guy and even though I had a lot of self-control, that was the one and only time I thought I’d embarrass myself in front of a group of people. I hid the erection by leaving the party the moment she stepped out of the pool, flung my way, and hugged me tightly, her lithe bikinied body plastered against mine. It was the first time I realized she wasn’t just a quirky little girl. She was becoming a woman, and one day she’d be one helluva stunning woman.

So, naturally, I avoided her.

She, on the other hand, did everything to get my attention. She giggled and twirled her hair, asked me about school, brushed her hand on my shoulder. But I was impenetrable. She was too young. Too close to my family. Too off-limits. Her father would’ve kill me if I ever tried anything; hell, my father would’ve killed me.

And a year later when her father fucked us all over, little Helen Blackwood went from the forbidden fruit to the rotten apple I loathed. She deceived us all. She and her dad, a pair of liars.

Maybe she hadn’t known how she’d gotten the money, but she’d taken it anyway and was living in a perpetual party world, where she never lifted a finger and had servants at her beck and call.

Except, maybe that’s not what had happened. Doubt creeps in.

I searched her online.

Not a single social media account.

Not a single piece of property under her name.

Not a news article or rag magazine with her face on it.

Nothing.

After the media shitstorm of her father’s being arrested and subsequently pleading guilty, all news of Helen Blackwood disappeared.

I knew she had denied knowing anything. I knew she vowed her father was innocent. I saw when her house, the one directly next to mine, was seized by the feds, along with the cars and furniture and all the possessions under the Blackwood name. But I was so self-involved in our own ruin, I didn’t bother to dig much further. And every time I thought about my father or had to take out a loan for school, or get a second job to help pay bills, or watch our home being taken, or watch my mother fall into a deep depression, I hated her a little more. Until the hate clouded every thought I had about her.

My multibillion-dollar business was built on the heels of blood, sweat, and hatred toward the Blackwoods.

But, then I walked into Duality and ran into the brown-haired girl who is now a full-blown woman, through and through. My breath caught when our eyes met, electricity ran down my arm when I felt her skin, and a protective nerve I didn’t even know I possessed surged through me when I saw that bruise on her face.

Everything I thought I knew went flying out the fucking window, and I’m left bereft and dwelling on the past. Something I avoid at all cost.

I’ve spent the last week back home in Seattle, confused and moody, but mostly intrigued.

Her genuine smile at seeing me that then morphed into a genuine grimace when I belittled her job is all I see at night. Her smile and her frown haunt my dreams, equally. Her emotions were raw and open, but she’s always been that way. There is no wondering what she feels; it’s all laid out for anyone to see. When I hurt her feelings by refusing to take her to a middle school dance, she cried with reckless abandon. Not an adolescent tantrum kind of cry, but a deep, pained sob. But I was older than she was; I couldn’t go to a middle school dance when I was already in college. It would’ve been completely inappropriate. Yet she never hid that she had a crush on me.

Even to this day, I’ve never met another woman who was as sure of herself as Helen. When she set her sights on something, there was no changing her mind. Back then it was me.

I wonder who it is now.

Is she married? Boyfriend?

The poor guy. I wonder if he knows how deceitful she is.

Edward Blackwood is the reason my father isn’t here anymore, and as I look around for Helen, that tiny bit of guilt—the tiny thought that maybe I had been wrong about her—that crept up on me for a moment goes away. Helen doesn’t deserve my pity. She deserves my wrath.

Heading straight to the VIP lounge, I look around to see if I can spot her and when I don’t, I ask one of the bouncers about her. “There’s a woman who works here. Her name is Helen. Brown hair—”

“She’s upstairs tonight,” he says, cutting me off, and quickly turns his attention to the group of people behind me.

“Upstairs?” I say out loud but to no one in particular.

Confused, mostly because I know that’s the nude part of the club, I press the button to one of the four elevators and when it doesn’t come quickly enough, I look around for the stairs. Taking two steps at a time, I’m immediately hit by loud noise. I adjust my tie, which suddenly feels suffocating, and look around trying to get my bearings.

In the middle of the big room, there are two women hanging upside down completely naked as men and women whistle and dance to electronic dance music around the stage. Unlike other strip clubs, this is more of a nightclub with naked dancers in the background, as opposed to clubs where the naked dancers are the entertainment. Here, there are as many women as men in attendance, some oblivious to the strippers, while others stare.

There’s a lot of noise and people, and I don’t know how I’ll ever find Helen in the chaos.

As I glance around, I notice the other female employees, the ones who are not strippers. Some are in tiny shorts, others in thongs. There is absolutely no way that boarding-school-bred, socialite, conservatively raised Helen Blackwood is working here.

If I was confused when I first saw her at the club, now I’m in a hazy dream where nothing makes sense. Where men and women are barely clothed—some actually completely naked—where there are fire-breathing men on stilts, where the tempo of the music feels like it’s in sync with the heartbeats of the mostly inebriated crowd.

I walk around and I’m relieved that I don’t see her. I don’t know if I’m prepared for that. The bouncer must’ve misheard me, or perhaps he was speaking about another Helen.

I sit down at the bar and order a drink.

“What can I get you, hon?” a stunning redhead asks.

“Scotch. Double. Neat. Best you have.”

“Sure thing,” she says and gets to work.

“I’m looking for someone. An employee. Helen Blackwood,” I yell over the music.

“Not sure. There’s a Helen, but I think her last name’s James.” She shrugs and keeps working.

It’s hard to see what’s happening between the bodies pressed together, but I keep craning my head around the masses to see if I can find her in the crowd.

Moments later when I’m finally relaxing, relieved that she isn’t here, I feel an odd pin prickle in the back of my neck that makes me turn my head. A woman’s walking out of a storage room carrying a box against her chest and I only see the top of her head. But I know it’s her. It’s Helen.

She drops it down on the bar top and proceeds to take out bundles of red mixing straws.

She hasn’t seen me yet, although I’m only a few feet away from her. Last time I wasn’t able to fully take her in. I was too surprised. Now, I study her fully.

Her thick hair is up in a high ponytail and she has red lipstick and black makeup around her big, wide eyes. She blows a chunk of hair that has fallen out of the ponytail out of her face, but it falls right back over her right eye almost immediately. The bruise on her face is gone. She looks frazzled, but her face is fresh and youthful, as if the last twelve years didn’t age her. I’m sure I look older than my thirty-fiveyears of age.

Certainly, I feel much older. It’s been tough, carrying all this rage in my heart and working hours upon hours, nonstop, to build the empire I’ve built. Maybe if I’d had money just handed to me, like Helen, I’d look fresh and young too.

I almost forget that there are topless men and women all around me, except that the perky redhead with full tits, nipples peeking out of her mesh shirt, leans forward. “Get you another one?” She tips her head to my drink and I nod my head, affirmatively.

Then, in a blink of an eye, everything changes.

Helen closes the box and tucks it under the bar. Slowly she stands back and looks around and as if making a decision, she straightens her shoulders and exhales. That’s when my eyes drift down to what had been covered by the box.

I see red.

I also see the most gorgeous set of tits I’ve ever seen in my life.

And then I realize I’m not the only one who can see them.

I slam my drink on the bar, amber liquid swishing out of the glass and onto my hand, but I ignore it and take long, calculated steps toward Helen, not caring one fuck that I’m bumping and pushing people out of the way.

“What the hell is this?” I bark, pointing to her chest.

I undo the button on my suit jacket and quickly remove it. Her eyes are wide and her face is flushed, and she looks around the room with a mix of humiliation and anger. “Let’s go!” I snap my fingers and push my jacket against her chest. She still hasn’t said a single word. Her bow-shaped lips, colored bright red, form an O and her eyes blink rapidly. Her hands are suspended midair and she’s looking at me, confused.

A moment later there are two meatheads crowding me. “What is going on here?” One looks at me, then at Helen.

“I . . . uh . . .” she stammers.

“Helen. We’re leaving. Now.” I reach across the bar to pull her by the arm when suddenly my own arm is being bent awkwardly behind my back and I feel a burn from my rotator cuff.

“Listen, buddy,” warns one of the security assholes. “You can’t touch any of the staff. You either leave quietly or you leave in cuffs. Your call.”

I try to pull away, but he pushes my arm higher and I stifle a groan through gritted teeth. “I leave only when she leaves.”

“All right, so cops it is,” the guy says before signaling to asshole number two, who takes out a phone. During the entire conversation my eyes haven’t left Helen once. People are staring, and she clutches the jacket closer to her body, her cheeks on fire.

“What are you doing?” she whispers. “Get out of here. You’re going to get arrested.”

“Then leave with me and that won’t happen.”

“Helen, doll, do you know him?” one of the guys asks.

“Doll?” What the fuck? I try to pull my arm free again, but my face is slammed against the bar. Fuck, that hurt.

“No.” I look up at her and glare. “Okay, yes, I know him, but . . .”

“Boyfriend?”

We both yell out a resounding, “No!”

“Family?”

Without hesitation, I blurt out, “Yes. She’s my sister and her tits are out for the entire goddamn bar to see. Now let me the fuck go!” I growl. “Helen, damn it. Let’s go.”

“Helen?” One of the bartenders around her nears, and then another . . . 

“You okay, babe?” the redhead who was helping me earlier asks her. “He was asking for you. Didn’t know he would be trouble.”

Helen waves her hand around and feigns a smile. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

I know what Helen’s smiles look like and that’s not it. She’s faking. Everything is not okay. Mostly, I’m the cause for that.

But reason and logic have flown out the window and I don’t care why I feel the way I do. I just know that come hell or high water, I’m getting Helen out of this place tonight.

Even if I have to buy this entire fucking place. And then, I’ll fire her.