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“I’m still here.” I reach up, touching his cheek. An old fear settles somewhere deep in my belly. “I can’t stop working for you, Lorenzo. I—” I swallow hard. “I work at a strip club. If you’re jealous of other men—you can’t be upset when I flirt with others. When I dance for others. Not unless you were willing to replace all of that with something else—some other way for me to pay my bills. And even then, I don’t know if I’d want to stop stripping. I don’t love it, but I can’t put all of my faith in one person. Even with?—”
“Don’t say it.” Lorenzo’s hand tightens against my face. “I don’t want to hear his name on your lips. I understand. But Mila, I can’t?—”
“I know.” I lean forward, impulsively laying my head against his shoulder. I feel him stiffen, just for a moment, and then his arm goes around me, bringing me closer to him. “You said you wanted me to feel safe with you,” I whisper. “I do, even if I know that maybe I shouldn’t. But this is complicated. And I’m not the only person I have to worry about. You know that now.”
“I know.” Lorenzo’s chin rests on the top of my head, his hand stroking down my loosened hair.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Neither do I. You selling for me—it’s a conflict of interest, Mila. If you’re working for me, and I’m sleeping with you?—”
“It’s that, or you take my offer. Or we stop.” I pull back, looking up at his handsome face. My chest tightens painfully at the thought of him never touching me again, of never feeling him kiss me, of this being the last time he’s ever inside of me. It makes my eyes burn, welling with unshed tears. “I can tell you which I’d pick.” My voice trembles, ever so slightly.
Lorenzo lets out a long breath. “Things can stay the way they are for now,” he says quietly. “We’ll take it one day at a time.”
“And us?” I feel my heart beat hard in my chest. “What about us?”
Lorenzo leans down, catching my chin in his fingers again as he presses a kiss to my lips. “That,” he says quietly, “we can talk about back at my apartment. If you’ll come home with me for the night, Miss Ilenya?”
I can’t stop the smile from spreading over my face. “Yes,” I whisper softly. “Yes, I’d like that very much.”
Mila
I’m torn between elation and guilt when I wake up the next morning. I didn’t stay at Lorenzo’s—I couldn’t. But even so, I got back in the very early hours of the morning, waking Darcy, who must have fallen asleep on the couch after I sent her the text letting her know that I’d be late.
It all still feels a little like a dream. Lorenzo had his driver waiting, and took us back to his place—not a penthouse, but a spacious apartment on an upper level of one of the city’s high-rises. I didn’t get to see very much of it, because he took me straight back to the bedroom.
It was different from what happened in my dressing room—more like the first night we spent together in my bed. He was slower, more careful, making sure that I wasn’t too sore to go for a second time. He went down on me, licking me to a slow orgasm that made my entire body feel as if I’d gone molten from the inside out, and then thrust into me, fucking me in long slow strokes that brought me to another climax before he pulled out and came on my stomach.
I thought, briefly, that I should have asked to use a condom. It would be safer. But having felt him hot and bare inside of me, I don’t want anything between us. Especially not when I don’t know how many more times we’ll get to do this.
There were no promises of what comes next. For now, we reaffirmed, everything else would stay the same. But I saw the look in his eyes, the possessive worry, the way his lips thinned when I told him that I had to work at the club tonight. I know this can’t last forever.
I’d showered in his huge bathroom, cleaning up and getting dressed again at three in the morning, beyond exhausted. It had been four before I’d gotten back to my place, trying to tiptoe past Darcy, but she’d woken up anyway.
“Niki loved the ballet,” she whispered, sending a fresh wave of guilt through me for not having come home immediately to see him and share in the excitement of the performance. Darcy saw the look on my face and shook her head. “It’s fine,” she promised me. “He was passed out before we even got home. You deserved to have a fun night out.”
She didn’t ask me where I’d been, and I was glad. I didn’t want to try to explain, or worse, to lie. She’d gone home despite how late—or early, depending on your point of view—it was, and I’d gone to bed, barely managing to get under the covers before I passed out.
Now, I shake cereal into two bowls for Niki and me, glancing over to see him beaming at me as he reaches for the milk. More than ever, I wish he still spoke—I want to hear him tell me what he thought. But the look on his face tells me how much fun he had, and when I glance over at the page he’s on in his coloring book, I see it’s a ballerina.
He frowns at me, down at the picture, and then reaches for a crayon. Slowly, he writes in large, looping letters, saved this one for you. Pretty.
Tears immediately spring to my eyes. “It is pretty,” I tell him, hearing my voice crack as I say it. Niki has managed his schoolwork better in the last few months, but any attempts to get him to communicate via writing instead of speech have come up against a dead end. But now—for the first time since the accident, he’s written a sentence.
“That’s good, Niki,” I manage. “It’s really good.”
I have today off from ballet, since yesterday was the showcase, which means I can spend the entire day with Niki until I have to go to work. I want to make the most of it, so I shake off the lingering tiredness and get him ready to go to the park after breakfast. We play Frisbee for an hour or so in the bright afternoon sun—while I try to ignore just how sore I am—and afterward, I use a little of the precious money I’ve squirreled away to take him to a burger place near the water and get ice cream after. I rarely eat anything as caloric as a burger—the demands of ballet—but I let myself indulge this once, telling myself that I deserve a treat. Anyway, between the performance yesterday and everything I did with Lorenzo after, I imagine I did more than enough cardio.
We walk back until the neighborhoods start to get a little rougher, and then get a bus back to the apartment. I turn on cartoons for Niki, dozing a little on the couch until I hear Darcy’s key in the door, groaning inwardly. That means it’s time to get ready for work, which I’m not at all mentally prepared for.
After last night, the last thing in the world that I want to do is go back to dancing for disgusting, groping men who see me as nothing more than an object to turn them on so they can get off. I’d told Lorenzo so stridently last night that I didn’t want to give up my job at the club, but the truth is that it has nothing to do with want, and everything to do with feeling as if I can’t.
If I were to put all my faith in Lorenzo, and he abandoned me, I’d be left starting from scratch again, exactly as I was after the accident, with only our mother’s savings and my small ballet salary to get us by until I figured something out—except this time, I wouldn’t have the savings.
I drag myself up off of the couch as Darcy plops down next to Niki, going to get in the shower. A half-hour later, I’ve thrown on black joggers and a stretchy black crop top, my lingerie and anything else I need for the night thrown in a tote bag, my hair atop my head. I’ll finish getting ready at the club, the way I usually do.
The beginning of the night is the same routine I’ve gotten used to. Jewel has been chilly to me since I refused to loop her in on the drug sales any longer, but she hasn’t told Dick, and that’s really all that matters. Cherry buys her usual pill, and I change into my lingerie for my stage dance, going through the same steps as I stride out to the pole as I do every night. The soreness from the showcase performance and Lorenzo’s thorough use of my body lingers, but I use it as a distraction, remembering the night with him instead of paying attention to the leering eyes sliding over me as I gyrate and grind on the pole.
