“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.”