Four months later.
The brick was hot against my mostly bare back. In fact, it burned, and the texture was rubbing my sweaty skin raw but I didn’t move. I’d spent a long time perfecting The Lean and I finally had it down. One foot, encased in kickass super tall espadrilles that I kept hidden beneath my floorboards, was wedged up against the wall while the other was straight and long, showcasing the long length of my yoga toned leg beneath the beyond short shorts I wore. My arms were crossed loose enough to be look casual but tight enough to press my boobs together, to ride the hem of my white crop top up even higher on my tummy. My chin was tipped down, pale hair perfectly mussed, unlit joint hanging between my lips.
In short, I was rockin’ The Lean and I was absolutely not going to fuck it up by wiggling like a moron.
The sun was practically set but it could get hot in Entrance and it had been a record breaking October. I had the deep brown tan to prove it, tiny tan lines and only around my hips, over my crotch and cut through the cheeks of my ass because I sunned in a thong every chance I could get to slip off to the little knoll in the forest behind my house. I only owned a few and I had to keep them hidden under my floorboards but the effort was worth it to be brown all over.
If Mum or Dad ever caught me, they would’ve killed me but I’d stopped worrying about that a long time ago. They were always telling me not to waste my brain, that I was too smart not to use it. So, I did, just in ways they didn’t like.
To be fair to me though, I always did my homework, got straight As, sat in the front pew of church every freaking Sunday at what felt like the butt crack of dawn, volunteered at the Autism Centre every weekend and never, ever, did anything to disrespect the Lafayette name.
At least, not when I was Louise Lafayette.
As Loulou Fox, I did everything my family stood against.
I gambled, partied, smoked, lied, cheated and generally disrespected all authority, every government given rule.
I was a seventeen-year-old teenage dirt bag and I fucking loved it.
Which was why I was doing The Lean against The Wet Lotus, Entrance’s one and only strip club.
It was a sleazy place with poor lighting, sticky everything and a female owner who was beyond bitter and disillusioned and hated the club even though it was the only one in town and made her a crap ton of money.
She didn’t know who I was or, more specifically, who my father was, or she wouldn’t have let me anywhere near her place.
Loulou Fox, though, she loved.
I was underage but even if she knew it, and Debra Bandera was a wily one, I had the generous curves and the fake ID to pull off nineteen.
Besides, Debra liked me. She liked me because when I’d taken to hanging out after dropping Ruby off and picking her up again at the end of the night, I’d started to help out around the bar and who doesn’t like free labor? Four months later and I was Debra’s unofficial assistant.
I did a bunch of the ordering, everything from nipple tassels to cocktail napkins. I sewed the girl’s minuscule costumes, learned to mix drinks, flirt with men without promising them anything more, mop and sweep the floors, wax and shine the poles and take care of the twelve very high-maintenance dancers. I wasn’t there every night but I was there three times a week on the nights I pretended to go to the support group and it had become, in a way, more of a home than my actual home was.
No one knew Loulou Fox had cancer because none of the bikers, scoundrels, dancers, bartenders or regulars that hung out at the Lotus read the local newspaper or the parish newsletter. I’d be surprised if most of them even knew either publication existed. They probably knew of Louise Lafayette, the Goody Two-Shoes daughter of Benjamin and Phillipa Lafayette. It would just never cross their minds to associate the Loulou they knew—fun loving, brazen and ballsy—with the staid, boring girl they had heard about in passing.
I laughed as I leaned, as I always did when I thought about Louise vs. Loulou, good vs. bad, my very own naughty and nice combination split down the middle into two very separate people.
I much preferred Loulou.
And three nights a week, I could be her without impunity.
“I’ll never get used to seein’ you like that,” the woman who was largely responsible for my new two-sided nature said as she pushed open the emergency door and stepped into the alley beside me.
Ruby Jewel was her honest-to-God given name. Her mother had been a prostitute that found a decent John who married her and provided for her and their two kids. They weren’t a poor family. Ruby wasn’t abused as a kid, she didn’t need the money and she was pretty well adjusted as far as twenty-one-year-old girls went. She just loved to dance, she loved expensive shoes and she loved The Lotus.
We’d actually met at the one and only Youth Cancer Support Group I’d gone to in Vancouver. Ruby had been diagnosed as a kid with brain cancer. She’d battled it for four years before finally going into remission. She’d succumbed to the disease again when she was seventeen, this time in her bile ducts. After a year of intense treatment and three surgeries, she’d beaten that too. Ruby Jewel was a fighter. I’d known it the second I had seen her sitting in the depressingly empty classroom on a plastic chair waiting for group to begin. She was wearing a tiny dress held together with silver safety pins and her hair was out to there. Somehow, even rocking all that, she didn’t look like a whore. She just looked super cool, someone who had grown to love themselves and was comfortable not only in their own skin but in their own personality, flaws and all.
I’d sat beside her and left two hours later with a new best friend.
“Is it the joint?” I asked mildly, as she pushed her dark red bangs back from her sweaty forehead and waved a hand to cool herself.
She was wearing blue, red and white spandex short shorts and nipple coverings shaped like miniature American flags. It was one of my favourite outfits she wore.
“Nah, it’s the complete ease you got goin’ on out here. I’ve seen you, from afar obviously, livin’ the classy life. You go to a church every Sunday and to a school where you wear uniforms for Christ’s sake. And yet here you are, Louise Lafayette leaning against the wall of a fucking strip club as if you were born an’ raised here.”
She shook her head but it was with awe and warmth that she turned to me to say, “You’re incredible. Weird as shit, but also incredible.”
“Back at you, babe,” I said.
We smiled at each other before hers broke off and her eyes darkened.
“How’re ya feeling?”
“Why?” I snapped.
I didn’t like to talk about the cancer, about Louise and her life when I was at the bar. Ruby knew that and, normally, she respected it.
She bit her scarlet painted lip and shifted on her heels. “Just that something weird is going on tonight and I don’t know if you should be here or not.”
I straightened instantly, my foot jarring against the pavement as I stood up. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Dunno really. Debra told us girls that tonight had to be the best show we put on in our lives.”
A little shiver scuttled down my back. I knew Debra was frustrated with The Lotus. It was a lot of work and she was tired, not just of the club but of hard living. Her third husband had left her five months ago for a newer model and she hadn’t recovered.
I’d had a feeling for a while that she wanted to sell but the thought of her doing so slayed me. I’d found a little oasis of crazy calamity in my perfectly ordered life. It was what got me through the hours spent hooked up to poison that was supposed to cure, it was what pulled me through the teeth aching monotony of my day-to-day existence.
“Shit,” I swore.
It was a bit excessive but I’d found out that I liked cursing. There was some kind of release attached to the words that always made me feel better.
It didn’t then, not with the thought of losing The Lotus weighing on my mind.
“The new owner might not want to change things up,” Ruby offered. “I mean, they’ll definitely keep on the dancers but probably the serving staff too.”
“What use will they have for me though? I’m an underage, unpaid hang around.”
“Yeah, but you’re super cute so let’s hope that the buyer is a man with good taste,” Ruby said with a smirk.
I snorted but her attempt at easing me fell short. There was anxiety like arsenic in my blood.
“Cool it, Lou, everything will be golden,” Ruby said.
I chuckled darkly and dropped my joint to the ground to crush it beneath my high heel. “Nothing in my life is golden, Rue.”
“Your bush is,” she quipped which startled a laugh out of me. “If you had any that is.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Come on, let’s go see what’s going on.”
We linked arms as we headed inside, laughing about something Molly, a sweet but dumb dancer, had done the night before. I was mid-laugh when I noticed Debra heading into her office behind a few shadowy shapes. She caught my eye and looked uneasy. I raised an eyebrow at her in question but she only bit her lip and shook her head slightly, like she was sorry.
A shiver of trepidation shot up my spine.
“Deb,” I called out to her.
“Behave tonight,” was her response in a voice that brooked no argument.
Ruby and I shared a look after she’d closed the door.
“Shit,” we both cursed at the same time, then broke down into giggles.
He’d been watching me all night.
I’d felt his eyes for hours but not in the way I was used to the men in a strip club looking at a woman. That was the feeble falling to sin and temptation, hoping to prey on the assumed weaker sex. Those eyes left hot greasy marks against my flesh, disgusting but easily washed off, easily ignored.
These eyes were not. They tracked me across the room, embedded under my skin like some clever device, not losing track of me even when I left and entered again, even amid the glittering mass of mostly naked women and excitable men, between the high backed semiprivate booths and the tall, mirrored bar.
I hadn’t looked his way, positioned with his back against the wall to one side of the main stage, his position open to the entirety of the club. It had taken more determination than I wanted to admit, I was curious about a man like him, a man who watched someone the way a computer might, or a camera, without bias or emotion. Only stone-cold calculation.
I wanted to meet him because I wanted to learn that.
I wanted to never meet him because it was dangerous that he watched me like that.
I had secrets, big ones, though none so scary as to threaten my life.
Something about the way those eyes watched me though, warned me that he could become that threat to my life and more that he wanted to.
The hair on the back of my neck had been on end all night and a little voice at the back of my head told me one peek wouldn’t hurt.
The rest of me knew better.
So, I avoided the watchman and continued my Wednesday night as if he didn’t exist. I helped Ruby tuck her curves into a tiny sequined costume, sewed the buttons onto half a dozen more just like it, served drinks because Margie had called in sick and mopped up the puke in the bathroom after the bachelor party went awry thanks to too many tequila shooters.
I was mindful of the women, dancers and customers alike, who gravitated toward him as the night carried on. They were beautiful women who had no qualms about displaying their wares and their interest but the man seemed to have no qualms about rebuffing them, sometimes brutally if their sour mouths and thunderous brows were anything to go by.
Still, he watched me.
It was quarter to two in the morning and things were winding down at The Lotus. The bachelor party had long since departed, the couples looking to heat up their love life had found their ignition and left back to their beds and it was only the devout that remained. It was my favourite time of night at the club because the men who lingered were regular enough to have made friends with the crew, including me.
“Been watching you all night, girl,” Harlow told me as I handed him a frosty new pint.
I wiped my hands on the dishtowel tucked into the back of my shorts and shrugged as if I didn’t care, as if I hadn’t been aware of that gaze the entire night. As if it and the man behind it weren’t driving me crazy.
“Nothing new,” I said, because it wasn’t.
I was pretty and men seemed to have a sixth sense that I was young, too young. It made them unusually hard for me.
“You noticed ’im too.”
I shot Harlow Barton a look over my shoulder as I wiped down the counter. He had once been a large man, fit and virile due to his years in the navy, and though age had softened his figure, not much slipped by the old coot’s sharp eyes.
“No shame in admiring a pretty face,” Tinsley quipped as she skipped up to the bar, her doctor-given breasts bouncing becomingly in her brief white crop top. “I’ve been staring at him all night. He’s been holding court to dangerous looking men all night and half of them weren’t bad-looking, either.”
“You stare at all the pretty men,” Reno interjected, leaning back in his chair to gesture to himself. “That’s why I always catch you looking at me.”
Tinsley rolled her pretty brown eyes. “This guy isn’t just pretty, he’s, like, magnetic or something. The only woman in here who hasn’t hit on him yet is Loulou and you know how she is.”
“Yeah, stuck up,” Reno muttered, but the sides of his slim mouth crooked up so I would know he was joking.
I shrugged. “I’ve got high standards.”
“You’ve got that Reece Ross,” Tinsley said, her face taking on a dreamy quality as I handed her the drinks for her last table. “Anyone with the good luck of landing that kid wouldn’t look elsewhere.”
I didn’t fully agree with her but I couldn’t argue that Reece was an awesome guy. Ever since the night he’d corrupted me, his words not mine, we’d been pretty much inseparable. We partied, both with drugs at friends’ houses and with tea at church luncheons. He occupied both of my worlds and took pride in the fact that he’d introduced me to the dark side of Entrance. He liked Louise and Loulou but I had the feeling he thought I was having a gag, that Loulou was this fun alter-ego pastime I had going so that I could forget about the problems that faced Louise.
He was right and he was wrong.
He was right because Loulou had cancer but it didn’t define her so, it wasn’t a problem for her.
He was wrong because in every way that mattered, Loulou was the woman I wanted to be. She was the dark heart of me brought to life, unbound from the scripture and familial guilt of my youth. It was the section of my soul that found violence a necessary tool of retribution. That felt passion like a thunderclap and hatred like a burning thing in my gut that needed to be acted upon. Loulou was base, instinct and brimstone. She had so many flaws so beautifully accepted, that they became honed weapons and gleaming treasures.
She was unashamed and free.
If anything was a phase, it was Louise. And she was fading fast to give way for Lou.
Zeus’s Lou.
The girl who had recognized Zeus Garro as a kindred soul from across the church parking lot and run toward him as bullets flew all around.
I couldn’t have him. I knew that and felt it like the echo of the bullet wound in my chest.
But I could be the woman he’d created, the one he gave me the confidence to be.
So I liked Reece. I liked kissing him because kissing was fun, and I liked talking to him because he had things to say unlike most of the friends I’d had all my life. But I didn’t love him, and I never would.
“Look at her gone all gaga over the boy,” Reno cackled as he slammed down his warm mug of beer. “He’s a lucky feller, I’m sayin’ it right now.”
“Damn but if I was ten years younger,” Harlow said with a sigh.
Tinsley giggled. “More like forty.”
Reno laughed too but I reached over to pat Harlow’s hand and give him a little wink. “Ten’s more like it, Harlow baby. I like my men older.”
The old man’s creased face creased even more with warmth. “You’re a good girl, Loulou. Too good for the likes of Zeus Garro anyways.”
I froze.
“What?” I whispered, my lips barely moving because for some reason, I was afraid to move.
“Zeus Garro, Prez of The Fallen MC and a meaner motherfucker there never was,” Harlow explained.
“I know who he is. Why did you bring him up?”
He frowned, his eyes skittering over to Reno and Tinsley who both watched me with concerned confusion.
“Babe,” Tinsley was the one to say, stepping backward to open up my line of sight to the man who had been sitting in the booth all night watching me. “Zeus Garro’s the man who just bought The Lotus from Debra.”
My eyes burned with the need to look over, tears building from the tension of holding back the impulse.
“Tinsley, don’t fuck with me,” I whispered and somehow there were tears in my throat too.
“Honey, I’m not. Look,” she urged gently, no doubt wondering if I was a crazy person.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t care about anything in the world in that moment except for the fact that Zeus Garro was in my space.
Did he know I was there?
Yes, of course he did. He’d been watching me all night.
What the fuck was he doing here?
A muscle below my left eye ticked.
I had to look.
My heart beat thrummed like thunder in my ears and sharp thrills of anxiety and excitement zipped across my skin like fingers of lightning as I swiveled my head to look over at the booth, to take in the man I’d been in love with for what seemed like forever.
And then I saw him.
Gorgeous, more gorgeous somehow than ever before. His enormous frame took up the entire back of the red velvet booth and his mess of curling brown hair caught in the light like it was dipped in gold. He looked powerful and dark. A god in his den of iniquity.
And his eyes were on me. Even across the room as I was, I could see the glint of silver, feel the intensity of his intent.
His eyes were on me, but his arms were around Jade, locked tight around her topless body as she ground her latex-covered sex against his leg and licked a long line up his neck to his bearded chin.
Then, as he’d done when I was a little girl, he winked at me, and turned his head just enough to take Jade’s seeking lips with his own. And all the while, his eyes still hooked mine.
My heart seized and not for the first time in my life, I felt like I was dying.
