“No, I don’t know. I also don’t care. Bi-monthly massages, Angelica? Lunch with your girls? I don’t even want to think about how much cash you accepted from me, because honest to God, if I did, I’d rip your goddamn hair out. Cash I made fucking stripping.”
She took a step back and said, “Come off it, Ryn. Smithie’s is a huge hotspot. I know you make crazy-good dough there.”
“Yeah,” I bit out and slapped the photographs to my chest. “I do. I dance for money. I straddle creepy assholes’ laps for a fifty and a tip. How in the fuck have you twisted it in your head any of it should go to you?”
“Your brother fucked me over,” she spat.
“Is that what you call him giving you two thousand this month? Fucking you over?”
“Ohmigod!” she yelled. “How do you even know that?”
“Who cares!” I yelled back. “The pity party is over, Angelica. Taking your woes out on everyone around you is over. And if you don’t pull your head outta your ass, Mom sees these.” I waved the photos at her again. “And Brenda sees these,” I threatened her with her mom too.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
Oh yeah.
Brenda clearly spoiled her girl rotten.
But Brenda was good people.
She was also saving for retirement, a little house in a mature-persons’ development in Arizona. She even had the place picked out and was mentioning finding a job down there, selling her house here and going early, she was so sick of snow, and maybe, having a second family her daughter gave her to raise in her fifties.
So even Brenda would balk at Angelica being a straight-up grifter.
“Get your shit together. Get a job,” I demanded. “Pick up this house. Vacuum. Look after your children. Trust me, I know how much it sucks to have to grow up too fast to take on the role of an absent parent. Portia is facing that, times two. And one of her parents is camped out on the couch. Seriously, Ang, sort yourself out.”
“God, you know, it’s rich, you’re a fucking stripper, and you think you can stand in my house and act like you’re better than me?” she sneered.
“I don’t have to act, Ang. I showed up. I got your kids to school. They aren’t even mine, and I helped them pack lunches and cleaned up their breakfast dishes and took them to school while you snoozed. So yeah, I don’t have a real hard time feeling I’m better than you.”
“I had a migraine.”
“You’re a goddamn liar.”
Her spine straightened and her voice was cold when she declared, “I think we’re done.”
“You think?” I asked and made a move to get out of there.
“Ryn,” she called.
I stopped at the door.
And I braced at the catty look on her face.
“Forget seeing my kids again,” she said.
My stomach plummeted.
“Ang—”
“I don’t think it’s appropriate, them hanging around an aunt who strips for a living.”
Two could hit below the goddamned belt.
“You know,” I said quietly, “a mystery is unraveling. Suddenly, with this new, awesome you that you’re showing me, I’m finding it not so difficult to believe my brother preferred to spend time at the bottom of a bottle.”
“Fuck you, Ryn,” she snapped.
“You’ve already fucked me, Angelica. Ongoing for five years. But if you don’t allow me to see those kids, knowing what they mean to me, what I mean to them, after all I’ve done for them, for you, you’ll be killing me. More, if you care, you’ll be taking something crucial from them. Think about that, if you can tear yourself away from thinking about nothing but you.”
So, apparently, Boone wasn’t the only one who could deliver an awesome parting shot.
Because with that, I turned and walked right out.
* * *“Hey, Rinz, you okay?”
I looked to the side, at Hattie, my friend and fellow stripper, who was sitting three makeup stations down from mine.
Her attention on me.
I knew why she was asking.
One, I was not a girl who hid her mood.
I wasn’t bitchy or impolite, I just kept to myself.
But don’t get up in my face when I wasn’t feeling you, or my lock on those two things went out the window.
Two, I was putting on a thick coat of red lipstick rather than taking it off.
And Hattie noticed.
Our shift was over at Smithie’s. Last call was done and gone, and the bouncers were clearing the place out while the girls were in our dressing room, showering or wiping down and changing in order to go home.
I usually showered. I didn’t like getting oil all over my civvies.
Also, I endeavored total makeup removal with hydration at the end of a shift, because I was no raving beauty, but I wasn’t tough to look at and I wanted my skin to serve me well…and for a long time.
But I was not preparing to go home and crash.