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“Who was it?” Riccardo asks after a few moments of silence. “When did this happen?”
I hesitate to tell him that it was a stripper from the club last night. He’s going to laugh at me and say that it was just lust. It wasn’t the thunderbolt, it was the intense desire to nail a gorgeous woman. “Some girl from Mustangs.” I admit it regardless. My brother might make fun of me for a few minutes, but he’s still my brother. Once he realizes that what I’m feeling is real, he’ll sober up and help me.
But Riccardo never laughs or asks if I’m being serious; he just nods his head as if he understands. “And you’re asking because you’resureyou were hit, or because you think it might be lust?”
I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. “It was the thunderbolt.” When I got home last night, I didn’t just jerk off because I saw a pretty girl, I jerked off thinking about walking around barefoot and pregnant. I jerked off imagining our lives together. That’s some sick, twisted shit. The kind of fucked up shit that only happens to a man that falls in love at first sight.
“Alright,” Riccardo says decisively. “Let’s figure out who she is. What was her name?”
“Sterling.” I know that’s not her real name, but it’s a starting point.
My hungover brother asks me for his phone and it takes us a few minutes to find it. His cell is in his pants pocket and those are nowhere to be found. We have to log on to his Apple ID to locate the phone and it’s in my office.
“Ric, I swear to God.” He’s wrapped in a blanket, but he nearly drops it when he walks into my office to see his underwear hanging from my desk lamp. “What the fuck were you even doing in here last night?”
He’s laughing too hard to respond and frankly, he doesn’t know. He was drunk. The last thing he remembers is some woman’s tits in his face, and then the rest of the night was a blur.
But as he pulls himself together, Riccardo makes some calls. In thirty minutes or less, he has her name: Havana Camden. In an hour, we’ve pulled every webpage with her name on it and have a guy doing a background check. When the Riva brothers get together, we get shit done.
4
HAVANA
PRESENT DAY
It’s not nerves, I tell myself.I just don’t know what I’m going to do for two hours.That’s it. It isn’t anxiety; it’s a lack of content.
When I walk up, Lorenzo is doling out hundred-dollar bills to the security guard. “Don’t let anyone in,” he says sternly. I don’t catch the first half of the conversation, but I don’t have to. “Cara Mia,” he smiles as I walk up. “Our room awaits.” He ushers me into the Diamond room.
The security guard perched outside the Diamond room is supposed to keep us safe from handsy and aggressive clients. The Diamond room is a quiet alternative to the main floor. While music still pumps over the speakers, the volume has been lowered so that dancers and customers have a chance to chat. The Diamond room isn’t just for dancing; it’s for turning men into regulars.
Individual seating areas are spaced out every ten feet against the back wall. Large, circular couches allow customers the opportunity to sprawl out and wait for their preferred dancer to grind and shimmy on their lap.
“Right here.” Lorenzo decides on the seating area in the center of the room. “All eyes on us.” The way he says it sends terror to the center of my belly. I’m not afraid of Lorenzo; I’m afraid of what I’ll allow him to do.
He takes a seat and pats the cushion beside him. “Havana,” he says sternly, “I won’t bite.” But then he pauses for a second and smiles, “Unless you want me to.”
Shake it off,the little voice in my head says.You’ll probably make enough from the next two hours to cover a couple of weeks’ worth of treatment.If my father were here, he’d be upset by what he saw. But instead, he’s at home on his deathbed with stage two testicular cancer. He can be as mad as he wants, but I’m the one that’s going to save his life.
I sit beside Lorenzo, and the nerves disappear the longer we talk. It’s as if we fall into an old pattern. Lorenzo asks me how the night is going and if I’m doing well. I tell him about Hattie and her reminder that he’s off limits. I probably shouldn’t trust Lorenzo with the information about my father, but he’s never used it against me before. Even when he could offer me enough money to cover a year’s worth of pills, appointments, and cancer treatments, he’s been gracious enough not to treat me like a charity case.
“What about you?” I ask after the first fifteen minutes has passed and I’m tired of talking. “Last week, you said you had an important meeting coming up. Did that happen? Did it go well?”
If it wasn’t for working this closely with men for the last year, I might have missed the flicker of frustration that followed my question. But because of my experience reading body language and tonal inflection, I catch a glimpse of anger, and it puts me on edge.
“It happened, but I wouldn’t say it went well, per se.” Lorenzo’s eyes trail from my face for a few seconds. I imagine that they linger on my chest, but I don’t follow his gaze to find out. His dark eyes return a moment later with renewed vigor and excitement. “Have you ever wanted something so bad that you were willing to burn the world down to get it?”
His question catches me off guard. He has to know after all of our months of conversation that I’d do anything to ensure my father got better. He’s been fighting cancer for years. He was in remission for a while, but a year ago, it returned with a vengeance. His oncologist said we were lucky to catch it when we did because it could have been a lot worse. “Yes,” I respond uncertainly, “I’d go through hell and back for my father.”
His smile tightens almost painfully. “I mean something for yourself, Havana. What do you want to do with your life? If you left Mustangs today and there was nothing stopping you, if money wasn’t an option and your father’s health problems could be fixed with the snap of your fingers, what would you want to do?”
My stomach feels like it jumps off the high dive and starts doing backflips. With only seconds before it splashes into the water, my nerves are at an all-time high. “I don’t know,” I start to say, but Lorenzo stops me before I finish.
“Close your eyes,” he insists. His charming demeanor convinces me to follow his orders. “Pretend you’re someone else. Someone with unlimited funds and the ability to go wherever you want and do whatever you want.” Lorenzo pauses momentarily, and I swear I feel his thumb graze my bottom lip. “What would you do?”
I see it clear as day in my mind’s eye. I’m sitting behind a desk with paperwork sprawling before me. My blonde hair is pulled into a tight bun, and the suit jacket I was wearing earlier lies across the back of my chair. A fan is blowing somewhere in the distance, the slightest breeze twirling a few stray strands of hair around my face. I push them away as someone knocks at the door. They go unanswered as I dive deeper into my paperwork. “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer,” I admit.
I was the little girl that watched Legally Blonde and said I wanted to be Elle Woods when I grew up. I studied for every test like I was trying to get a 175 on the LSATs. I deprived myself of high school parties and dating boys so that I could prepare for AP classes and get the best score on my ACTs.
