Page 55 of Ruined
He cleared his throat. “Tell me about your mother,” he said. I raised an eyebrow at him. Like that topic was any better. “The happy memories.”
I sighed. Maybe I could get through that. I ate a bite while I thought it over. “She always wanted the best for us—me,” I said. I reassured myself that ‘us’ could have meant Mama and me. Could I trust him with the secret about my sister? “She didn’t have much growing up, which is why she went into debt to give me a better life. She had a huge heart; she just sucked at decision making. She was kind of an idiot in that department.”
“She loved you,” he said. I blinked up at him. That word on his tongue made me ache. He said it easily, like it was understandable how Mama could have gotten us into this situation. It made me feel sad. I was an ungrateful daughter. I had missed the love in her actions.
“Hey,” he said. “All I meant was we do anything for the people we love.”
Again with that word. The weighty way he looked down at me didn’t make it any better. I held my breath. Love. Did he actually care about me? About my past? Why was he asking about her? About my debt? I knew he meant something more to me, but was I also more than a server to him? It was hard to make sense of it all.
He put his coat on my shoulders as we walked outside. The air was cool; the night mist grazed us. “Thanks for everything again,” I said. “I’ll never forget it.” I knew this should be the last time, even if I didn’t want it to be.
“We’re not done,” he said, opening my car door.
“We’re not?”
“I’ve got a surprise.”
As we drove through Sage City, the downtown nightlife flashing around us, I wondered what it would be like to date Lucas. To really date him, as if we had met through a dating app or through work. Not through an entertainment club. I had never been on a real date before; this was the closest I had ever been.
But nothing could prepare me for where we ended up.
At the edge of the city, he pulled into the parking lot next to an industrial plant.The Theaterblinked in orange glowing lights, though there were no other markings on the building. The exterior was a faded red, pink in some spots, and the parking lot had divets in the asphalt to show that it wasn’t well kept.
“A theater?” I asked. It looked small for a theater. “You’re taking me to a show?”
“Something like that,” he said. He parked in the front, then took my hand and led me to the door. On it was a printed sign, tattered from being outside for a long time:The Theater, the number one Adult Entertainment Club in Sage City.
Wait. Was this—
He opened the doors to a narrow lobby. A young woman in a corset, her breasts smashed into her neck, sat behind a cash register.
“Welcome to the Theater,” she said.
I was too stunned to do anything. The woman asked for IDs, and after she verified our ages, she gave us drink tickets and motioned at the red curtain to the side. Lucas pulled it back, and my suspicions were confirmed. A woman on stage with purple streaks in her blond hair swaying her hips, using the pole at the end of the catwalk to keep her balance.
A strip club.
I stayed close to Lucas, clutching his arm. There were men lounging in chairs, some with wads of cash in their hands, and women wandering through the seats, dressed in various forms of lingerie. One was even wearing a spandex superhero costume. Some of the women sat in laps and laughed, others shook their asses in the men’s faces. It was hard not to gawk, but luckily, no one noticed me hiding behind Lucas.
He led us to a large couch with a plaque that saidReserved. A rope hung around the area, blocking it from others. He removed the rope and we both sat down. A waitress in the same black corset as the attendant out front, brought a bottle of champagne chilling in a cooler, and two flutes. She opened the bottle, poured our drinks, and handed them to us. Lucas tipped her and she disappeared.
The stage was at the bottom of a pit, with staggered tables and chairs in the front of it. From where we were sitting, we looked down at the stage. A woman collected her tips, and a new woman entered. She picked up a spray bottle and a cloth and used it to wipe the pole down, her ass bent towards the audience. Then she climbed up the pole, her arm and leg muscles amplified by the movement.
“A strip club?” I finally asked.
“I thought you might want to see what it’s actually like,” Lucas said. He gestured at the stage. “Entertainment. Performance.” The woman lifted her legs into a spread eagle, then released her grip on the metal to slide down. “Another apparatus.”
But it was a strip club. The kind where Mama had gotten mixed up with someone, who wanted even less to do with her than my father or Nora’s. The woman on the stage climbed up the pole again, but this time, at the top, with her legs clenched together, she fell backward, using her legs to hold on, her entire body upside down.
I admit that in some ways, it reminded me of aerial hoop. It wasn’t exactly the same, but by watching her dance, I could mostly figure out how she was doing each move. To add to that, the hoop and the pole were both metal apparatuses, and while I always kept my lingerie on while dancing, it wasn’t uncommon for the members to request partial or full nudity in the Terrariums. Like I had danced naked for Lucas.
“What up, Conway,” a female voice asked. The two of us turned to see a shorter woman in six-inch clear heels, her blond hair pulled back in a black headband. Her breasts spilled out of a pale blue bra that was too small for her. A Cheshire Cat was tattooed on her hip, peeking out from the straps of her bottoms.
“Haley, this is Alexandra,” Lucas said.
“Call me ‘Alice,’” she said. She winked, then grabbed my hand. “That’s my stage name. I like it better than ‘Alexandra.’ Hey, you got an extra glass?” The waitress who had helped us earlier saw us looking for one, and brought us another flute. Alice poured herself some champagne.
“Alice used to work at Conway Capital,” Lucas explained.
