Chapter 3: Serena Diaz
“I wish you didn’t have to work so much, baby girl.”
I smiled across the dinner table at my father, who had made short work of the platter or tamales and nachos I had prepared for dinner. The look of love and concern on his weathered face made my cheeks flush, even though we had replayed this exact scene every week for months now, always with the same outcome. I came to his house for an early dinner every Friday evening before heading off to my second job for the weekend. It was the fact that I worked a second job to pay for school that bother Papa so. It hurt his pride and made him sad. Which made me sad, but not sad enough to change my plans.
Papa was old fashioned. He thought a college education was for rich people who were too lazy to work with their hands. People like us, first and second-generation Mexican-Americans, worked for a living. We didn’t go to school for years just to sit behind a desk to get fat and lazy. The men worked with their hands and their backs, and the women pumped out babies and cleaned houses and hotel rooms for extra money. It was a stereotype that I had faced my entire life, one promoted by my own people who had never done any better.
Cleaning other people’s houses and changing scummy hotel bed sheets and squeezing out babies was not the life for me. Papa just couldn’t seem to accept that, hence the weekly Friday afternoon guilt trip.
“I don’t mind working, Papa,” I said, putting on a happy face so he wouldn’t feel so bad about not being able to help with my university expenses. Not that I needed his help. I made plenty of money. Several times more a year than he had ever made doing construction.
In fact, if he knew how much money I made he’d flip his lid and demand to know what I was doing for a living because girls like me didn’t make that kind of money unless it was on our backs. For all he knew, I was working two jobs just to get by when the opposite was actually true.
He thought I lived in a ratty little apartment in Bingham Heights with my girlfriend, Angela, and drove a twenty-year-old Camry that was passed down from my older brothers. The truth was, I lived alone in a very nice apartment downtown and drove a brand-new BMW. I never drove the Beamer to Papa’s house and never let him visit my apartment, so he was clueless when it came to my finances. Ask him and he’d tell you his baby girl was living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to get by. That’s how it had to be.
I ate the last nacho on my plate and kept smiling as I chewed. “Besides, I don’t work that hard, really. It’s not like I’m doing construction out in the heat with you and the boys.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” he said, his sunbaked forehead cutting into a frown. He waved his big hands in the air. “You should be going out and having fun on the weekends. You should meet a nice young man and start a family. Give me grandchildren, like your brothers.”
“Papa, you have enough grandchildren,” I said, rolling my eyes. “And I enjoy what I do. I make more than enough to pay for my school and all my expenses. So stop worrying about it and finish your dinner. I have to leave soon and I want to get these dishes done.”
“A man can never have enough grandchildren,” he grumbled as he picked up the last bite of tortilla and wiped the sauce from his plate with it. Carlos Diaz was a proud man. He did not like the fact that his youngest child and only daughter had to work so hard to pay for the college education that he could not afford.
College was expensive, but I easily covered the cost. I was six months away from getting my Masters in Physics, with a Minor in Microbiology, from San Jose State. I wanted to be a cancer researcher because my mama had died of the horrible disease when I was just six-years-old. I barely remembered her now, even though Papa said I could see her every time I looked in the mirror.
I was the youngest of seven kids and the only one to go to college. My six brothers all worked with Papa hanging sheet rock and doing masonry work in the valley. It was hard, sweaty, backbreaking work, but they all had families to support and were grateful for what they had. I could see every year of the hard labor in my father’s eyes and the scars on his hands. I wished that I could help him monetarily, but if he knew I had money… well… I just couldn’t go down that road. At least not yet.
Papa was under the impression that I worked part-time as the personal assistant to Amy Rossetti, the super successful cybersecurity consultant and now, after hooking her up with Isaac, the love of her life, one of my best friends. The truth was I worked at Amy Rossetti & Associates four hours a day, four days a week, then spent the weekends working at a ritzy country club in the mountains north of the city. Well, Papa thought it was a country club. If he and my six brothers knew what really went on there he’d shit a brick and kill me with it.
The place was called Club Votre Désire. Club D, for short. It was this super-exclusive, private club located on this massive estate in the hills north of the city where rich men went to do unwind and get their rocks off with gorgeous women far from the public eye.
Like a resort, Club D was continually open from Friday night at midnight till Sunday night at ten. It was so secret the owners bused in the employees like me. I’d worked there for almost two years now and couldn’t begin to tell you how to find the place. The cool thing was they had a huge guest house where the girls could stay during the weekend. I pulled two ten-hour shifts as a waitress, then had the rest of the time to enjoy the place. There was an Olympic-sized indoor pool, tennis courts, a spa and salon, a restaurant and room service, all available to the girls for free.
The real moneymakers, the girls who worked as Escorts and Specialists, all had rooms in the main house, where they sold their goodies for tens of thousands of dollars to men who considered that pocket change. The Escorts were all gorgeous women who offered the members straight sex, anal, and blowjobs. The Specialists were Escorts who could do really freaky things with their bodies, like deep throat a twelve-inch dildo (or cock) or take on multiple guys at once or bend double to lick their own cooches.
The more unique, the more the Specialist could charge. They were probably the highest paid sex workers on the planet. Mr. Lemon, the concierge and director of client services, had offered me an escort spot several times, but that kind of work wasn’t for me. Although, the money was tempting, but it would have killed my father to discover that his baby girl had turned out to be a high-end whore, which the judgmental Catholic girl in me branded the Escorts and Specialists to be.
A redheaded Russian beauty named Carina was the top earner. I won’t even tell you what she could do because it was just gross. Still, word was she pulled down over a million dollars last year doing it.
Good for her.
I was just fine making six figures as a waitress.
Don’t get me wrong, I was not opposed to sex, free or paid. In fact, I loved sex and had been quite the little slut in high school. I still slept with a number of guys and probably thought more about sex than I should have. I wasn’t a nympho, but sometimes I could fuck all night without stopping to catch my breath. It depended on the guy, of course. I had a certain type. Handsome, smart, funny, independent, not interested in anything serious. If that package came with a killer body and a big cock, more the better.
So there, I wasn’t a prude and I didn’t see the harm in letting girls sell—or rent out—the goodies that God gave them, but for me, sex was a deeply personal thing, something done out of passion and love, not purchased by the hour or billed by the orgasm.
“You see this joker on TV this morning?” Papa was asking. I blinked at the sound of his voice and let my eyes follow the direction in which his finger was pointing. Papa was a TV-holic. He had a TV in every room, even in the kitchen, sitting on the counter next to the toaster. My mouth hung open when I saw a familiar face frozen on the screen.
The caption below the image read: Billionaire Puts Foot In Mouth On National TV.
“Uh… what happened?” I asked, frowning at the TV, trying to pretend that I didn’t recognize the smirk on Denny Chambers’ handsome face. Few people knew it, but Denny, the famous tech billionaire from Silicon Valley, was one of the founders of Club D. I knew him because he was there every weekend, fucking his way through the stable of girls like a stud bull on a Texas cattle ranch.
“He’s some internet billionaire or something,” Papa said, grimacing as he said the words as if they had left a bad taste in his mouth. He picked up the remote from the table and aimed it at the TV, then jacked the volume up a few notches. “They’ve been replaying this all afternoon. It’s hilarious!”
A blonde with big boobs and a plastic smile was asking, “So, Denny, what’s the best part about being you?”
Denny didn’t skip a beat. He just looked at her and smiled.
And said, “The pussy. Duh.”
They bleeped out the word “pussy”, but it was clear what he had said. You could tell by the way his lips moved and the way the blonde’s mouth fell open when she heard the word.
I nearly choked on my iced tea. Papa chuckled and shook his head as he turned the volume back down. “Can you believe this guy? Got more money than Trump and says the best thing about being him is the pussy!”
“Papa! Watch your mouth.”
Papa grinned at me. “What? The billionaire can say pussy on TV but I can’t say it in my own house?” He huffed and shook his head. “Okay, fine. But you know what I mean.” He pointed the remote at the television. “It’s guys like him that don’t know what hard work is. Got more money than he can ever spend, but he spends his time whoring and drinking like a common thug.” He leaned back and crossed his arms over his belly. “Don’t ever bring a guy like that home, baby girl. Your brothers would skin him alive.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, getting up to gather up our dishes. “Guys like that don’t even know I’m alive.”
“You’re better off,” Papa said with a heavy sigh. “Guys like that are after one thing and one thing only. And you know what that is.”
“I know, Papa,” I said, moving the dishes to the sink. Under my breath, I whispered the words we were both thinking. “The pussy. Duh.”