“But I’m also falling asleep,” they admit.
I think then about us holding each other like this in bed. Could we sleep like this, locked in a warm embrace? Would they even want to? I open my mouth to ask but they speak again.
“You need to sleep, Maeve, and I need to not have your incredibly beautiful and warm and smooth and all the adjectives-kind of body pressed up against mine.”
Right.
Because then they’ll get a boner.
Because… sex.
Yet again, it all boils down to sex.
I start to push back but feel Loncey press me against their chest a little firmer for a few seconds and I almost sink back into their hold, telling myself it’s stupid to give a flying fuck abouterections or sex or anything but how warm and safe I feel in their arms. Almost. Because then they release me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Loncey
The applause is deafening and when a handful of people stand up and start cheering, I join them.
She nailed it. She absolutely fucking nailed it. When I wasn’t watching Maeve stand in front of a crowded conference room that held easily close to three hundred people – standing tall with her shoulders pulled back, her hair golden and wavy down her back, her green eyes sparkling – I was looking around me at her audience. All eyes were on Maeve. Sure, a certain percentage of that will have been because Maeve looks… like Maeve, and she picked the most perfect outfit of tight black jeans, red stilettos and an oversized black blazer over an olive-green silk blouse, open in a V at her neck, and the rich color of it made her eyes pop even from where I was sitting a few rows from the back.
But even if eyes had only landed on her because of her looks, they stayed on her because of what she was saying. It was almost exactly what we practiced yesterday, a little personal and very informed and informative. And witty. Maeve cracked jokes left, right and center, and they weren’t the same jokes she had for me last night when we practiced. And so I was laughing with the rest of the crowd, and when I wasn’t laughing or learning something new about Maeve’s life as an asexual woman, I was watching her and smiling.
Smiling so hard my cheeks started to hurt.
I can still feel the ache in my face as I stand and continue clapping.
With the many bodies standing in front of me, I can no longer see Maeve and so the first thing I do when they all start to sit down again is look for her. I want to rush up and congratulate her. I want to high-five her, to fist-bump her or maybe, maybe hug her.
My body hasn’t come close to forgetting how it felt to hug her last night.
But I can’t see her. There’s a thrum of people and activity now where she was standing and while I can see flashes of golden blonde hair and black material, I can’t be sure it’s her. I’m about to step forward and make my way over there to congratulate her but I feel a firm hand on my shoulder and I turn back.
“Hey,” Miko says. I pull my head back in surprise at seeing him, but then blink in shock when I see Harley standing behind him.
“Hey! Hey, both of you,” I say, smiling at them. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to be out of our hotel room,” Miko says. “Sorry,yourhotel room.”
“Yeah, I’m really sorry about that,” Harley says and she leans on Miko’s arm, his hand firmly gripped by hers.
“Don’t sweat it.”
“But we kicked you out of your room. For like, two nights. All because I was having a mental breakdown.”
“For good reason.” I reach my hand out and stroke her arm. It’s good to see her smiling. “How are you?”
She shrugs. “I’m okay. I mean, I’m still scared to death by what… by what they said. And that photo,” she shudders. “But that’s what they want, isn’t it?” She pulls in a deep breath and straightens her spine. “They want me to be terrified into not living my life, which is why I’m here.”
“We figured there wasn’t a safer place we could be right now than surrounded by hundreds of other sex workers, many of whom have probably had exactly the same kind of messages land in their inboxes time and time again,” Miko explains.
Above Miko and Harley’s heads, I look around the room and see a lot of… flesh. A lot of barely dressed people with their stomachs, their legs, their arms, their chests and even a few asses on display. I see tattoos and piercings and curves and rolls and bones pushing up against taut skin. I see a wheelchair, a guide dog, and Casey-Rose, a wickedly sexy pansexual woman with dwarfism who I worked with last year. I see all kinds of bodies, and all colors of bodies.
“We are a safe place,” I say, feeling a warm rush of love for our community.
“This is also hopefully a money-making space.” Miko bobs his eyebrows. He pulls a folded piece of paper out of the back of his jeans pocket and waves it between us. “We made a list of all the brands we want to talk to today. You going to come with us?”
