Page 9 of Logan

“Rise and shine, Angel.”

It was an old memory that I usually kept tucked away in the back of my mind where I could pretend it didn’t exist. I’d been trafficked from the age of fourteen to eighteen. There had been many bad days during that time, but the first day had been the worst.

I shook my head and dug my nails into my leg. The spark of pain helped ground me in the present and chased away the flashback. I focused my eyes once again on the man in the car who had called out to me. He was obviously upset from my lack of reaction, and I could see anger building in him. If I agreed to go with him now, I would probably be in for a rough night.

“Fuck off. I can smell that cheap cologne from here. You couldn’t afford me.”

I’d learned a long time ago that men like this did not accept a gentle rejection. A firm telling off and a harsh attitude was the only answer they would respect.

The man in the car scoffed, but his anger was already fizzling out as he turned his attention to the next available body on the street.

A man so young he could still be called a boy. That one was about the same age as I was when I was kicked out of the trafficking ring for being “too old”.

It was a constant paradox. Everyone standing on this street with me was simultaneously too young and too old at the same time.

Eventually, the man in the car drove away with his new purchase sitting in the passenger seat. Hopefully, the boy would manage better than I did with my first few clients on my own.

My shoulder twinged with a memory of pain. Only a week after I arrived in San Francisco, a client had twisted my arm so far behind my back that my shoulder popped out of its socket. That was when I learned the importance of choosing my own clients carefully.

Suffering through two painful flashbacks so close together had left me feeling floaty inside my head. Like I was disconnected from my body, and I imagined I was looking down on the scene and watching myself the same way I watched characters in a movie.

My character of Blue Steele shifted back into a sultry, come-hither pose and it only took him a few minutes to catch another potential client’s attention. This new client had no obvious red flags—other than the fact that he was soliciting a back-alley prostitute in the first place—so Blue agreed to go with him.

I watched, completely detached from what was happening as Blue climbed into the man’s car. For these few precious moments, I was no longer Clay Dahler. I was no one. Just a passive observer with no emotional attachment to what was happening.

I called this detached headspace the Midnight Zone, because I’d loved the Twilight Zone as a kid. It was my safe place outside of reality, and it had gotten me through the hardest years of my past.

Blue and the client only drove for a few minutes before they pulled into a cheap motel. The staff at the motel were used to people bringing prostitutes there, and barely gave them a second glance. There was less than five minutes between pulling into the motel parking lot and opening the door to one of the rooms.

The decor inside was as old and tacky as every cheap motel ever made, and the bed was barely better than a block of wood as Blue was shoved down onto the mattress.

If this was a movie, I would have turned it off at this point. I couldn’t turn off my life, but I could at least stop paying attention.

So, I did.

CHAPTER 6

Clay

Two hours later,with cash in hand and my most recent client snoring on the motel bed, I slipped into the bathroom to steal a shower. The water pressure was shit, and the provided shampoo was barely better than soap, but at least the temperature was decent.

I turned the shower to its hottest setting, letting the bathroom fill with steam until the walls were barely visible and the mirror was clouded over with moisture.

I didn’t need to watch myself as I cleaned away the reminder of my latest job.

My skin was pink by the time I stepped out of the shower, and I quickly dried off before slipping back into my clothes. My blond hair was nearly long enough to touch the nape of my neck and took a while to dry. I didn’t even bother to try and after ringing out as much water as possible I just tied it into a messy ponytail.

After double checking once again that the money was in my pocket, I slipped out the door without waking the man on the bed.

It was still too early for the first buses to run in this area, so I was forced to walk. I was wearing sturdy shoes, and the motel was in an area I knew so there was no chance of getting lost, but several miles was still a long distance to travel on foot when I was already tired. It had been a long night, and I just wanted to sleep, but the moth-eaten, lumpy mattress waiting for me back at my apartment wasn’t exactly enticing.

The first light of dawn was just starting to show in the sky, so the shadows between streetlights didn’t look so dark. It would be easy to fall into a false sense of security and think that the approaching light meant safety, but that wasn’t true. In this area of the city, I would be just as likely to be mugged during the day as at night, especially since I’d just come from a job and had a few hundred dollars of cash sitting in my pocket.

I kept my eye on my surroundings, my head on a swivel, ready to run if anyone even tried to approach me. I wouldn’t feel safe until I had a locked door between me and the rest of the world.

Well,safer. True safety was impossible.

The sun had fully risen by the time I reached my apartment, and I was once again cursing my decision to live in a place with so many steep hills.

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