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I make a good living, there’s no doubt about that. I work three nights a week and two days. During the day shifts, we learn new dances and go over upcoming changes to the club. My work weeks require little more than thirty hours from me and I walk out most nights with a handful of hundreds in my pocket. I have no reason to complain.
But I do. Because sometimes I wonder what comes next. When I hang up my G-strip for good and stop being Rooster, what’s next for Robert Ferguson? He’ll have a hundred good stories to tell at dinner parties and share with his friends, but what about a girlfriend? Or a family?
I wonder if any of the other guys think about this.
CHASTITY
“Ido not feel comfortable.” I tug at the hemline of the little black dress and try to stretch it out, but the fabric is high quality and pops back into place. “I should put something else on. Maybe something longer.”
My best friend and maid of honor, Blake, scoffs at me like a disappointed mother. “Chastity, I swear to God,” she says with a shake of her head, “if you don’t wear that dress.”
It’s an empty threat, but it does what it’s supposed to. I stop playing with the ruffle hemline and let it swish against my thighs. “Fine, fine,” I sigh, “but I feel naked. And Jason wouldnotapprove of this dress.”
Blake turns her back to me and I know she’s rolling her eyes. “You’re going to be lucky if Jason fucks you on your wedding night, Chas. You could stand before him in a nun’s habit and he would disapprove of how scantily clad you were.”
There is some truth to that. Jason Rigsby went to Bible college and studied to be a minister. Even though he works with kids right now, he is ceaseless in his endeavor to get me to change my look. Sweet, comfortable sundresses bare too much skin. High heels invite attention. Curling my hair is a sign of vanity. Everything about the way I look and dress is a sin in Jason’s eyes.
But our relationship is deeper than our arguments over the shorts I wear. Jason found me when I was at my lowest point. I had just graduated from college to a flooded job market. After six months of searching, I was living with my parents and wondering why I’d ever majored in Art History. There were very few museums looking for curators and directors and those that were wanted someone who had more experience than me.
Jason found me at a coffee shop. I was sitting outside with a paper cup in hand, staring into the distance. I was contemplating my future. I’d gotten a job working at a boutique clothing store downtown and though I wasn’t paying rent, all of my money was going toward student loans. I could barely afford my cup of coffee, let alone an apartment, utilities, furniture, and food.
“Miss, you okay?” He sat down at my table and offered me half of his blueberry muffin. For the next hour, he listened to me complain about the choices I’d made and how I felt like I was never going to survive the next sixty years.
Jason did not preach to me even though that’s what he’d gone to school for. He took my hand in the least intimate way and told me that he had some contacts at his church. They were looking for someone to run their office. “It isn’t a job in art history,” he obliged, “but it pays more than what you’re currently doing.”
That was five years ago. After getting me the job at the church office, we’d casually started seeing one another. The more serious it progressed, the more I realized that I’d found my soulmate.
Jason was perfect. He wasn’t tall, dark, and handsome. He was just a couple of inches taller than me, very fair-haired and light skinned, and he was cute as a button. Jason was the perennial nice guy and that made me and all the kids he mentored in the church youth group trust him.
But where things fell apart for us was in the bedroom. In fact, we had never even made it to the bedroom.
As a student of God and a figurehead in the church, Jason told me on our first date that he was waiting until marriage to have sex. At the time, I was a twenty-three-year-old virgin who’d only dated assholes and jerks that couldn’t wait until the end of the first date to try groping me. It felt refreshing to be with a man whose interest in me wasn’t purely sexual.
The months wore on and our relationship deepened. And the more I wanted him, the more he pushed me away. Jason wouldn’t propose until we’d been together for three years, but he also wouldn’t bend on my physical needs. I never asked him to break his covenant with God, I just wanted him to make out with me more often. I was willing to wait if he’d simply kiss me a little more. But Jason said that led to dangerous thoughts and desires and he wouldn’t lead us both into sin.
Blake wanted me to leave him. On a dozen occasions, she tried to set me up with someone else. “He’s a prude, Chas. Find yourself a man who’s going to treat you right.”
But Jasondidtreat me right, that was the problem. He treated me like a queen and he helped me figure out what I was doing with my life. The only thing he wouldn’t do was share himself with me physically. Even holding hands with me was too much some days.
I respected his beliefs, I even became a Christian to become closer to him, but the respect didn’t go both ways. When I asked Jason to hold me, it came with strings. He would do so only for a few minutes, but then we had to pray. We had to ask God to keep our thoughts pure.
I would have left him if it wasn’t for the engagement. On my twenty-sixth birthday, he proposed. It suddenly felt like intimacy was within reach. In a few short months, maybe even a year, I’d finally get to be with the man I loved in the capacity that I’d been fantasizing about for years now.
Jason dragged our engagement out though. The marriage was important to him, so he required that we spend a year in premarital counseling with the pastor of the church we both attended. Then after that had finished, he was finally willing to set a date.
We were now five years into our relationship and the wedding was in two weeks. I could barely look at him without squealing with excitement. All that I dreamt about was having sex with the man I loved.
We still argued about the way I dressed and how our finances would work after we were married. It angered him that I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom when we had kids. And he still refused to talk to me about sex. But the wedding was in two weeks and that would change everything.
Which was why he absolutely couldn’t find out about the bachelorette party. If Jason knew that Blake had gotten me dressed down in the sexiest little black dress she could find and took me to a strip club, there was a chance he’d call off the engagement.
“Earth to Chastity,” Blake waves her hand in front of my face. “What’s going through your head?”
I smooth out the fabric across my stomach which only causes the deep V-cut of the neckline to dip lower. “I wish I could wear this for Jason,” I tell her with a sigh. “But if he saw me in this, he’d lose it. If he knew what we were doing.”
Blake cuts me off with a shush. She comes up behind me and wraps her arms around my waist, placing her head gently on my shoulder. “Chas, I love you and I can’t wait for you to have the fairytale ending of your dreams, but are yousure, are youpositiveit’s with Jason?”
I lean my head against hers and sigh. I’ve asked myself that question a million times. I keep telling myself that asking doesn’t mean this isn’t right. “I love him, Blake. Isn’t marriage about looking past someone’s flaws and loving them in spite of the things that you don’t like?”
