Chapter Two - Maddie
There is a right way to do everything. A right way to make toast, for example. Or the right way to get to work. Or take your clothes off once you get there.
Toast is easy. You pop the bread in, make sure the setting is halfway between three and four, and push down that little lever. Up pops perfect toast.
Getting to work can be trickier. Sometimes I have to make snap decisions because of traffic. I work just off the Strip here in Vegas, so traffic is something I can’t really avoid. But I can plan for it by learning all the secret access roads around the casinos.
Taking off your clothes on stage is definitely a process and if you do it right, it’s just like toast and nothing at all like getting to work. You gotta do that tease first, right? Shake the money-makers a little. One strap here, another there. Make those guys work for the big reveal. You gotta do that little ass wiggle as you drop one bra strap, then the next, and then… ta-da!
Easy.
Money, that is.
Which is why I do it. Why else would I? It’s not my first choice. It’s not even my thirtieth choice. But it’s the one that I’ve got in front of me. And I need it. Money. To, y’know, live and everything. Hell, quick, easy money is why everyone does it. Pretty much the only girl I know who actually thinks of stripping in Vegas as a career is—
“You’re late, Scarlett.”
Her.
Raven. Bitchy boss extraordinaire and the oldest stripper down here at Pete’s. She’s thirty-seven, so not really old. But…whatever. If I’m still getting naked for money at thirty-seven… well, I just won’t be. That’s all.
Which is why doing things the right way is such a good idea and why I’m sticking to my plan, no matter how much money I go home with each night. There’s no way I’ll end up managing a strip bar in Vegas ten years from now. Of course, if you had asked me when I was eighteen what I’d be doing when I was twenty-five, I might’ve said a lot of things, but pretty sure none of them would be this. So best not to get overconfident.
“That’s the third time this month.”
I glance at the clock as I walk towards the dressing room. Five minutes is technically late, so I don’t argue. Just drop my bag on the chair next to Raquel and get busy.
“Hey, sweetie,” Raquel says as she glues her eyelashes on. “Big crowd tonight.”
“Good,” I say, rummaging through my bag to find my outfit. It took me a while to get used to being called sweetie and honey and baby by other women, but I’m a go-with-the-flow kinda girl, so I caught on quick enough.
“You got any regulars coming in tonight?” Raquel asks. She’s just trying to make conversation, but I’m not really here for conversation.
“I don’t believe in regulars,” I say. It’s my standard answer.
“I just don’t understand that,” Jasmine says, catching up on the conversation as she comes in from the stage clutching her bra and panties. “They pay good. It’s almost like a regular paycheck if you work them right.”
I don’t want to work them right. And I won’t be here long enough to care about a regular paycheck.
“Plus…” Raquel says in her sing-song voice. “Sometimes they take you home and…” She does a wink-wink with the one eye that already has the fake lashes glued on.
“I don’t believe in that, either,” I say, finding my outfit and stripping bare. I adjust my girls in the cups and then get busy on my garter and stockings. Three minutes later I’m slipping on the stilettos.
“Why do you wear that?” Jasmine says. “It’s not what they want, honey.”
I shrug. “I think it’s sweet. Very girl-next-door, ya know?”
Jasmine makes a face. “The girl who lived next door to me growing up was a crack whore. Not a good comparison.”
“Fair,” I say. “Well, I lived next to—” But I stop. Because I realize I’m about to divulge something personal about myself. That’s not part of my process. “To a church,” I say, recovering. “And this is probably something they’d wear.”
“Ha.” Raquel laughs. “Baby, no church girl is climbing into bed with her boring church boy wearing that.”
True. But I’m done with this conversation, so I let it drop. My typical outfit is what you’d call… virgin wedding night. It’s usually white, or pink, or sometimes pale blue. But it’s always made of cotton, has a little ruffle somewhere, and a little satin bow between my tits.
“I like it,” Otis says from the door. He’s the dressing room guard. More like a peeping Tom, but whatever. “Makes you look… wholesome.”
“Thank you, Otis. That’s exactly what I’m going for.”
Because I’m trying to hold on to some part of the life I used to have. Even here.
I wrap my long, auburn hair up into a bun, pin it high on my head, and slip the blonde wig on.
It comes with pig tails.
“You look like jailbait,” Raven says, pulling up her black stockings. “Not girl-next-door.”
“Maybe,” I say, unwrapping a pink sucker and giving it a lick. It’s my only stage prop. “But don’t knock the power of youth. I’m pretty sure that’s why I take home four figures on a good Saturday night and you take home three.”
Bitch.
The rest of the girls erupt in laughter, but I’m already leaving, so I don’t catch whatever comeback Raven throws at me. She’s sensitive about her age.
I’m not only good at devising the perfect process for every possible scenario, I know how to find a person’s weakness and use it against them. I developed it as a way to deflect. To protect myself. And eventually it just became a part of me.
It’s kind of what I do out on stage. I analyze. I critique. I process shit and make predictions. I’m here to make money. I have very specific reasons for taking my clothes off in front of strangers and none of them include finding regulars or letting one of these people take me home for a night of extracurricular sexual favors.
As soon as the stage lights hit me in the eyes I morph into someone else.
This girl.
As opposed to that girl.
This girl is carefree and innocent. Blind to the cruel ways of the world. Sheltered and pure. At least that’s what I want these men to think.
They want that, right? The pure ones.
As long as that virtue doesn’t prohibit them from sucking a cock, that is.
I stifle a laugh as my hand automatically grabs the pole in the middle of the stage. I swing lazily around it as I enjoy the bubblegum sucker in my mouth. I don’t do gymnastics upside down with my thighs wrapped so tight around the brass pole, they make squeaking sounds. I just saunter around. Lick my candy seductively, flash my eyes at them all innocent and shy.
I tease them. And I don’t even have to do much either. Just let them look at me. Take off my top, wiggle around, and pretend I’m having the time of my life. That these men are my secret fantasy. That they might be the one to take that innocence away tonight…
Blah, blah, blah.
My point is—I don’t really give them much out here. I don’t want these guys to think, Hey, this bitch has talent. She was born to fuck that pole. I don’t want them thinking about anything except how many bills they need to stuff into the strings of my panties in order to get my attention for a few more seconds.
I don’t need them to think. I just need them to forget who they are, why they’re here, and what happens when they leave. I need them to see the character I’m portraying, not the woman I am.
And it works.
They always make a few lewd comments when I come out dressed up like—as Raven put it—jailbait. There’s the usual jabs about looking like someone’s little sister—mostly to get the older brother in the group riled up. And of course, they have to go one step further. “I’ll be your daddy, little girl.”
Gross.
But very predictable. And I like predictable, so I don’t even mind it. Because in my experience, surprises are very rarely a good thing. Predictable is safe. Predictable has rules. It makes sense.
For instance… I’m predicting that this room is filled with about three hundred men with money in their pockets. Pete’s isn’t the classiest strip joint, but it’s not a dive, either. And there’s a cover charge to get in. These guys aren’t here to wallow in self-pity at the bar over some bad week at work. They’re here to get a hard-on, maybe a lap dance so they can come in their jeans, and then go back satisfied to whatever girl they’re avoiding at home in bed.
Or maybe they don’t even have a girl. Maybe this is just the way they like it. Romance from afar, paid for in single bills, one stage act at a time. No commitment, no expectations, no reality.
That’s how I like it, so there’s those guys here too.
I bend low, opening my legs to give the group of guys in front of me a nice panty shot. They beckon me with dollars. One holds up a twenty so I ignore his cheap friends and stare him straight in the eyes as I wiggle, licking my sucker, twirling my pigtail between my fingertips, my ass so close to the floor I start to worry about getting the little t-back ruffle dirty.
So three hundred men, give or take a dozen or two. Once my act is over I’ll go out on the floor to see if anyone wants some special attention. I’ll do a dozen or so private lap dances—hands off only, I follow the rules and make no exceptions—and then I’ll do one final act towards the end of the night for people who came in late and missed the first one.
Then… voilà. Night over. Scarlett counts her money, changes her clothes, turns back into Maddie, and goes home.
Money Bags gives me a wink, so I stick to him for a little longer. Getting close and bending over so he can tuck that twenty into the back of my panties. I can’t afford to give him all my attention. That would piss the other guys off. But he pulls back the string near my hip and tucks twenty bucks worth of attention next to my skin, so I turn, slip a strap over my shoulder, and give him first look at one of my girls.
He smiles. Coyly. He’s kinda cute, I realize. But then I let that thought wander away as quick as it appeared. I would never—ever—date a guy who came here and saw me dance. Ever.
“Logan,” he yells over the music. Like I care what his name is. But then he takes a fifty out of the wad of bills he’s holding in his hand and waves it in front of me, capturing my attention with a come-closer gesture with his finger.
I look at his friends, at a few other guys sitting up in the front, and give them a little attention too. They tuck bills into the panty strings at my hips. Raven will chew me out if I pick a favorite while on stage. “That shit is for later,” she’ll snap.
But eventually, because I want that fucking fifty—and only after I’ve taken off the babydoll nightie and thrown it off to the side of the stage where I exit (just to make it easy to collect when I’m done)—I go back to him.
I bend down, legs open, ass wiggling close to the floor. And smile. “Scarlett,” I say over the music.
“Ah,” he says. And then he leans forward and says, just loud enough for me to hear and no one else, “You don’t look like a Scarlett.”
I recoil a little. But just a little. Patrons don’t get to rattle me. “What does a Scarlett look like?” I ask, my tone teasing.
“Like you,” he says. “But without that stupid wig covering your blazing red hair.”
This time I more than recoil. I stand up, thinking way too hard about that little offhanded comment. Because that’s what it was, right? I mean, all these dumb men have to know I’m wearing a wig. It’s what strippers do.
“Good guess,” I say, lowering back down in front of him, shaking my tits a little more. Getting my Scarlett on. “But wrong. I’m blonde under the wig as well.”
His eyes dart down between my legs and he nods his head. “Prove it.”
I laugh as I coo, “Pay me.”
He holds the fifty out, but not very far. Not far enough so he can reach me to tuck it into my t-back. “Crawl over here and take it with your teeth,” he says.
I smile and stand back up. Move on to another group of men across the stage.
Fuck him.
I repeat my staged seduction with them, but they only offer up singles. I move on to another group and get the same. My act is almost over, so I gotta make a better impression. Mr. Money Bags might’ve just ruined my take-home by showering me with bad luck.
So I work harder. I stand up, begin to ease my panties down over my hips. Turn, stick my ass out, and wiggle them down the curve of my ass before pulling them back up and letting the elastic snap against my skin.
That gets them all going and the bills start flowing again. I glance down, see a few fives tucked in with the ones, but that’s it.
My gaze involuntarily wanders back to Money Bags. He’s casually holding the fifty between his index and middle finger, like he’s waiting for me.
I take my attention back to the men I’m dancing for now, mentally telling him to fuck off.
My song begins to wind down, just a few more moments to collect. So I strut back over to the asshole with the fifty, sucking on my sucker in a way that makes every man in the room think their cocks are my candy, and drop right in front of him—legs open. I debate with myself, hard, for less than a second, then I decide to hell with it and pull my panties aside quickly to give him what he wanted.
“No fair.” He laughs. “You’re bare.”
I shrug, then snatch the fifty from his fingers and say, “I gave you exactly what you paid for.”
But he grabs my wrist as I try to pull away. He leans in, close, and then he growls, “Carlos didn’t get what he paid for. And he’s out of patience, Madison.”
He lets go before I can even properly freak out. Stands up, turns his back, and walks off. My song ends and the lights go out, leaving me in the dark to grab my nightie as I make my exit and remind myself why I’m here.
“Good set,” Raquel says as she brushes past me to make her way out on stage.
“Thanks,” I hear myself mumble, almost stumbling into the dressing room. I stuff my money in my backpack and take a seat in front of the mirrored vanity Raquel just vacated.
And look at myself. Take a good, long look at myself.
I pull off the wig, still staring at the reflection.
There’s not one thing I like in that mirror. Not my green eyes. Not my high cheekbones. Not my small nose or even the deep cupid’s bow of my lips.
I hate all of it.
“Hey,” Raven says behind me.
My eyes meet hers in the mirror.
“Cleo called in sick, so one of us will have to do an extra act tonight.”
“Not me,” I say.
“I wouldn’t waste the opportunity on you.” She snorts. “I’m giving it to Jasmine.”
“Really?” Jasmine says next to me. She pauses her application of red lipstick. “Thanks, Rave. I appreciate it. My kid’s daycare bill went up this month and I’m strapped. I need all the attention I can get.”
“Well, if Cleo calls in again,” Raven says, “she’s out of here. And you can pick up all her acts until I find someone new.” Raven smirks at me as she says it. She knows a girl like me—single, no kids, college-educated—would not be here if I had any other options. So she thinks she’s getting even with me for making that crack about her age.
I do need the money. And after Cleo, Jasmine makes more money than all of us. She goes for the slutty look, which, as she pointed out earlier when she turned her nose up at my outfit, these men like a lot more than the girl-next-door look.
I have a few moments of regret for not following her lead.
My phone buzzes in my backpack.
“And turn that fucking phone off when you come into work, Scarlett,” Raven says. “It’s been vibrating since you went out on stage.”
My heart skips a beat. This cannot be good. First that asshole who works for Carlos shows up out there in the club, now someone’s been calling me the whole time?
I suck in a breath of air as I reach for it. But the anxiety eases as I see the name on the screen.
“Hey,” I say, after tabbing accept. “What’s up?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Annie says. “My night just went from bad to fucking bad in the span of twenty minutes.”
“What happened?” My heart is beating fast again. Did Carlos get to her? Is he going after my friends now?
“My fucking date!” Annie wails. “He left me at the motel!”
“Motel?” I ask, confused. But she sounds like she might start crying. So I go into crisis-management mode. “Shit, can’t you grab a cab?”
“He took my fucking purse! I got no money! He got my cards too!”
“Jesus,” I say, trying to picture all that shit happening so early in the night.
“I’m stuck here, Maddie. Can you come get me?”
“Where’s here?” I ask, getting a very bad feeling about this. Because I’m totally confused. Annie isn’t a stripper, she’s a call girl. A very high-class one. She’s the one who suggested I take this job, against my better judgment, to make some quick cash. She usually works out of five-star hotels. The Aria, or the Bellagio, or the Four Seasons.
“Some cheap-ass fucking place out on the north end of town. Just standing on this disgusting carpet is making me itch!”
“What the fuck are you doing out there?” I ask. Seriously. Nothing she’s saying makes sense right now.
“I have no clue. I met him at Planet Hollywood and then he said, ‘Come with me.’ And we ended up out here. My gun was in my purse too!” she says, on the verge of hysterics.
“Shit,” I say.
“Shit is right,” she says. “I’m so fucking tired of this shit!”
“I’ll come get you. Just stay put.”
“You’re not leaving,” Raven says, listening in on my convo. “I’m already short tonight.”
“Fuck,” I mumble into my phone. “Can you call Diane? Or Caroline?”
“No,” she says. “They’re working the whole night. Their phones are off. My calls didn’t even ring through.”
The four of us share a house out in the desert. They’re all call girls. I actually went to college with them, then lost track, but ran into Annie about three months back—just when this Carlos shit was starting to go sideways. They had an empty room in their house, so I signed on to be roommate number four. I didn’t know they were call girls at the time. I found that out after. Four girls went to college together, three of them became hookers and one is a stripper. Probably not a great ad campaign for UNLV.
But I figured it couldn’t hurt to disappear from my usual surroundings for a little bit while I decided what to do about this Carlos business, right?
Good while it lasted, I guess. Because obviously Carlos has found me again.
But back to Annie. “Can you hold tight until after my shift?” I ask.
Annie gulps on the other end of the connection. “Oh, my God. I just want to go home, Maddie.”
“I get it,” I say, cutting her off. Raven is still standing behind me, tapping her fucking stiletto on the floor with her arms crossed across her tits. Like I’m on her last nerve. I don’t want this job—but I do need this job. “Text me the address and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I quickly change outfits and head back to the floor, constantly scanning for the henchman sent to warn me of my outstanding obligations. But he’s gone. Or he’s hiding in some corner, waiting to spring on me. Snatch me away, take me out to the desert and kill me.
I have to laugh at that. I mean, this is a serious situation. But I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my fault I owe Carlos Castillo a hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars. It’s his stupid daughter’s fault.
I decide I’m overreacting. Carlos sent the guy to rattle me into delivering what I owe him. Even though I don’t owe him. I was planning his daughter’s wedding. He gave me two hundred grand for the event. What did he expect me to do with that money? I spent it on wedding shit. Catering, and the church, and the reception hall. All but fifteen grand, which was all I was able to return to him after his daughter called off the wedding and Carlos decided he deserved a refund.
You don’t get a refund on a wedding because your stupid daughter was pregnant with another man’s child and her fiancé called it off. It’s not even reasonable.
But Carlos Castillo isn’t exactly a reasonable man. He’s some Mexican tequila mogul, but I’m pretty sure that’s mostly a front for his drug-running empire.
How was I supposed to know he was some kingpin? I mean, really? I don’t run in those circles. And what kind of drug lord books a wedding planner online without even meeting her?
Well… maybe that should’ve been my first clue.
I just can’t win. I really thought I could make a go at the whole wedding planner gig. I mean, I fucking majored in business at UNLV. I’m capable. I’m smart. I have ideas. Good ideas. No. Great ideas. It should’ve worked.
But then again… I did have that pet bakery business, and the whole multi-level marketing make-up business, and the information research business. Not to mention the cleaning business.
All of which failed. Miserably.
And now I’m in debt up to my fucking eyeballs. Every credit card I have is maxed out. And my parents have already loaned me more than twenty thousand dollars for the first two businesses. I owe them too. They’re too nice to ask for it back, thank God. Because I don’t have it. I don’t have shit.
My newest venture—aside from stripping to pay back Carlos money I don’t owe him so he doesn’t start imagining me better off dead than alive—is an aerial photography business. I already have ten realtors on my books looking for video of their multi-million-dollar property listings.
This one is a winner. I can feel it. I know it. I’ve tried and lost too many times not to catch a lucky break soon. I even have a cool drone to take the photos and shit. It set me back almost two months of stripper pay… money I should’ve been paying Carlos. But it was worth it.
And fate seems to agree. Because tonight I make more than three thousand dollars in lap dances before closing time. I have so many customers, I don’t pick Annie up from the dumpy motel on the north edge of town until well past three AM.
She’s too tired to complain, so she slips wordlessly into the passenger seat of my car and doesn’t speak again until forty-five minutes later when we enter the living room of our modest four-bedroom ranch house.
“I quit,” she says, flopping down on the couch and kicking her shoes off so hard, they go flying into the wall.
“What?” I ask, sinking into the cushions next to her.
“I’ve had it, Maddie. What the fuck are we doing?” She looks up at me with sad brown eyes. “We’re educated women. Why the hell do we have to sell ourselves just to make a living?”
I start to say, “I don’t sell myself, we’re not the same,” but then I decide that right now isn’t about me and try to be a good friend instead. I shrug. “Bad luck,” I say. “That’s all.”
“It’s not bad luck,” she says. “It’s… it’s something else. It’s bad planning, or bad decisions, or bad whatever. I don’t know. But it feels like fate.”
“Fate?” I laugh. No. That’s not what this is. It can’t be. I can’t believe that this is what fate has planned. “We’re not fated to be losers, Annie. We’re just stuck, that’s all.”
“Men,” she says, growling out the word. “You don’t owe Carlos shit. And no matter how much I make, I can’t seem to get ahead. Fucking student loans, and credit cards, and that damn car. I want to burn it. And Kimberly. Why the fuck do I give her fifty percent of my take when she only fixes me up with guys like this all the time?”
“All the time?” I ask, completely confused. Annie’s clients are high-end. Aren’t they? “Since when?”
Annie looks away. Sighs. “We… we might’ve… embellished our status a little.”
“Embellished how?” And then I get it. “You don’t get guys like this all the time, do you? Assholes who leave you stranded in shady neighborhoods? Low-class jerks in town for what… a convention? Trying out the old ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ thing?”
Her guilty, embarrassed silence is the only answer I need.
Wow. She’s not raking in the money. She’s not some high-class call girl. She’s nothing but a fucking prostitute.
Not that I’m judging. I mean, come on. I’m a stripper. I have no room for self-righteous judgment.
But it makes me sad. For her and for me. I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier. Why live out here, in the goddamned desert, sharing a house with two other women in the same profession and a damn stripper, if you didn’t have to?
“I want to go home,” Annie says, sniffling. “I want to go back to Iowa, find my high-school boyfriend, and pretend I didn’t fuck up my whole life with one bad decision after another starting when I got out here for school. I just wanna be eighteen again and start over.”
I just stare at her for a second. Imagining this other life she lived before she knew me. And then thinking about the other life I lived before I knew her. And how she made bad decisions starting at eighteen and how at eighteen bad things, one after another, just kept delivering themselves to me, and now, seven years later, here we both sit. It makes me want to cry. Or scream. Or run away. Or all three. But I can’t. It’s not who I am. I can’t quit, I can’t lose it and give in to weakness. I have to just knuckle down and keep going. Sometimes… sometimes I wish I was a quitter. It would be easier.
“I’m tired, Maddie.” She curls her legs up onto the couch, placing her head in my lap. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to fuck strangers for money. I don’t want to drive that car. I don’t want to live in Vegas. I want this to be over. I want to go home right now.”
I play with her long, dark hair as she gives in to sleep. Silent. And introspective. And wishing I had such an easy way out.
It’s not the money I owe Carlos, either.
It’s everything else.
This is home. This is all I have.
There’s no going back to something else. Something easier. Some more innocent time when things were good.
Those days are gone. Forever.
All I can do is pull myself back up to ground zero.