Chapter 9 – Mariah
“I just don’t understand why you have to be gone for so long, Sasha!”
“It’s no big deal. Sometimes clients want you to go with them somewhere. I’ve been seeing Lawrence since I got here, and the price is right. I’m going to be on a huge boat for the next couple of weeks, and when I’m done, Elie says I won’t have to work for a week or two. It’s worth it to me.”
I didn’t know whether this was normal. I couldn’t imagine going off with any of the guys that I saw. Well, maybe one, but I still wasn’t sure I would want to see what they were really like. At the club, the men got to be whoever they wanted to be, and we were whoever they wanted us to be, but in real life, I didn’t know if I could do it. There were too many games played for me to want to do it twenty-four seven. It would be exhausting, I was sure of it.
“I know, I’m just going to miss you. Kimmie is gone all of the time, and anyway I can’t talk to her about a lot of the stuff that goes on at the club. She just wouldn’t understand.”
“She understands more than you think she does, Mariah. Kimmie has done her own dirt as well. Now she’s doing something else, but she has done something like this too.”
I hadn’t known that, but it didn’t really surprise me. All four of us were a little freaky. Kallie was just as bad as Sasha. Thinking of her made me ask if Sasha had heard from her. Those two had always been a little closer to each other because of how similar they were.
“Have you seen or heard from Kallie?”
“She called me the other day and told me that as soon as she gets rid of Tommy, the guy she’s seeing, she’s going to come stay here for a while. It’s going to be cramped…”
“Are you kidding me? I haven’t seen her in so long! I’ll share a room with her if you want. That’s never a problem. Remember that time we all went to camp and stayed in that tiny cabin together? We could barely move around in there. Here will feel like a fancy hotel compared to that.”
Sasha smiled with the memory, not to mention the fact that even as tight as those quarters were, we still ended up inviting boys over as well. The cabin was trashed by the end of our stay, and if it wasn’t for Kallie’s parents paying for the damage, we would have all been taken to court over it. Those were the days that I missed so much.
“I just miss us all together, Sasha. It’s been so long, and I feel like we’ve all grown apart.”
Sasha shrugged and told me that that was the way it was sometimes.
“Not for us, though. We’ve known each other too long to let life get in the way. When Kallie gets here, I think we should all take a week off and go do something.”
She laughed at me and asked me what we would do.
“I don’t know, but something without men.”
“Yeah, I think I can agree to that as well.”
“Are you getting sick of the club yet? It gets easier, but it also can get mundane after a while.”
“I’m not to the mundane part yet. I look forward to it most of the time. I don’t really like new clients all that much, but I’ve got a couple that I see every week, one I see a few times a week.”
“I heard about Scott. That’s a good thing. If you could talk him into going exclusive, you could really get to a place that you didn’t even need to go into the club at all.”
I thought of what Elie had said when we’d talked about it a little bit. He told me that it would have to be arranged so he still got money for it. He still wanted his percentage as a finder’s fee, whether I was actually in the club or not. Anything that I did with a client I met at the Fetish Club was part of my earnings that he got a chunk of. At first I hadn’t minded the percentage that he wanted. It hadnt seemed like it was too bad, but the more I made, the more I started to realize the error of my ways.
“Well, Elie will still get his twenty percent, so there’s really nothing that I can do. Even if I did go exclusive with someone, there isn’t any point going somewhere else. If he’s going to take my money, I might as well make him work for it. That’s what I think, anyway.”
I’d burst all of that out before I remembered that she was going out with him. I didn’t want to offend her, and I didn’t want it to cause tension between us, but I couldn’t stand Elie. He was a pervert, that’s all there was to it, and I tried to stay away from him. Not only was he not my type, but Sasha cared for him, and that made me feel bad about the ‘training’ session.
“Sorry, Sasha, I didn’t mean to complain. You two have been great in helping me…”
She waved me off and smiled. “Girl, he gets on my nerves too. Last week I asked him where he was and he just blew up. That’s why when I got the offer to go, I took it. I knew he didn’t want me to, not really, but I have to remember that we’re not really together. Not like that, anyway.”
“It must be hard with him owning that place.” I thought about the training that he’d given me in the beginning. I knew that I would never want someone I was with to do that with anyone, let alone everyone I worked with. It was all just too intimate, and I knew I wasn’t enough of a grownup to do something like that, even if I’d wanted to.
“You’ve got no idea. There are so many secrets, and I know that I don’t really even want to know everything. He has been good to me in some ways, but it’s not like this is love. This is something else. None of these guys can really ever love you.”
“I had someone ask me to go exclusive. Well, two people actually.”
“Don’t do it, Mariah, you’re just going to be setting yourself up for failure. What you have to get is that these guys want to own you, not love you. They’ll expect your undying love and affection, obedience, but you’ll never get what you need out of it. So if you’re going to go exclusive, make sure that you have fun with him and that he’s worth leaving the club for financially.”
“You sound like you know from experience.”
“Yes, you know how I like to learn the hard way. You do as well, but just don’t this time. I know that it’s tempting, but they’re fickle and dominant. That can be fun for an hour or two, but it gets old.”
“So then why are you going on the boat?”
Sasha shrugged and sat on her suitcase to get it to close. She’d brought too much, but I already knew that she would bring another bag if her stuff wouldn’t fit in this one. This was her third bag, after all. It felt like she was going away forever the way she was packing.
“It’s really good money. They’re paying the same rate that they would in the club. We’ll be able to move after this job.”
I started to do the math in my head. I didn’t know her going rate, but I had an idea of the threshold. She would make enough to do just that. But was it worth it?
“Do you like the guy?”
My friend stopped and fiddled with her long braids a little bit. “I do, actually. He’s sweet. I don’t know if that’s all going to change, but I’m looking forward to this a little bit. I’ve never been on that kind of a boat before. I don’t even know how to swim, but he says that doesn’t matter.”
I tried to envision what it would be like to do something like that. Sasha had built up a wall between herself and her job. I needed to do that before I started to think that they really cared about me. It was the way to do this kind of work long term. If not, I would get my heart broken over and over again, trying to make it something that it never was. I still had a lot to learn from her.
After another hour of folding and packing way too many clothes, I drove Sasha down to the airport and gave her a hug. I don’t know why it felt so strange to see her go. We’d all spent over a year apart. This time felt different, even though it was only going to be for two weeks. I had a feeling that something was going to happen, and I tried to push it away as I watched her meet up with a tall, dashing man I thought I’d seen in the club before. If Sasha was going to be stuck on a boat with a complete stranger, I think she could have done worse.
It was still so warm as I was driving back home. I thought of it as home, too. That was why I hadn’t really looked for anything else. I could afford it now, so could Kimmie, but it was nice to have all of us together again. We’d met in a program for troubled youth when we were all fifteen, and years later, it still felt more comfortable being together. Back then it was a survival thing in a place that had long since been shut down because of what went on there.
I was feeling nostalgic, so I called Kimmie to see what time she was going to get off work. It was the first time in a long time that I was there alone, and all of the old memories of the past were coming back full tilt. This was one of the times that I wished that there was a full house and lots of noise to drown it all out.