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“You fucking asshole,” I mutter as I pull myself away from the counter and stumble towards the bathroom,needinga shower, needing to get the feeling of Matvei’s hands off of me. He hadn’t come inside of me, not the way he’d made it sound to Finn—I’d never have let him fuck me without a condom. If he’d tried, I’d have immediately used my safeword, and if he hadn’t listened to that, I’d have been calling for Finn.
He’d just wanted to piss Finn off.Maybe I should have told Finn that it wasn’t true,I think as I strip off my clothes, leaving them in a pile as I step under the hot water. I’d seen how furious it had made him, the look on his face when Matvei had said that. I’d been too focused on getting out of there to say differently, and then once we’d gotten to the garage, too focused on making sure Finn understood that I didn’t want to be followed home.
You’re worrying too much about him,I tell myself as I stand there in the shower, letting the hot spray beat down against the tense muscles of my shoulders as I press my forehead against the cool tile of the shower wall. Finn can handle himself—the less we talk about all of this, the better. I need to put space between us, to keep things as professional as possible, as distant as I can. Anything else will only lead to trouble.
Trouble that I’m all too familiar with.
Most nights, I can avoid thinking about it. Most nights, I can keep myself from remembering that awful night seven—almost eight—years ago now. But tonight, with all my defenses already lowered from the evening with Matvei and the ache for Finn thrumming through me, I have more than one reason to let the tears flow as I stand in the warm cubicle of my small apartment shower.
Finn’s protectiveness is touching. The way he looks at me—makes my heart ache, every time. But I once knew someone else like that. I let someone else like that in—it broke me apart in a way that I’m not sure I can ever stand to feel again.
Jamie. I feel a fresh wave of tears, remembering dark curls and long-fingered hands and an easy laugh, a man too sweet for the world he’d found himself a part of. A man who wasn’t hard enough or rough enough to withstand the kind of people that inhabit a world I’ve never fully been able to get out of since, even if I’ve kept myself on the fringes of it.
If I let myself remember him, even for a moment, it all comes flooding back. Neon lights in a St. Louis strip club, me barely eighteen and dancing for men twice my age, stuffing dollar bills into a Victoria’s Secret g-string as I spun around a pole to whatever top forty hit the DJ had decided to play that night. Nothing like what I do now, none of the sophistication and elegance of the Ashen Rose, none of the exclusivity that I’ve earned while working for Nikolai. Just me and the rebelliousness of youth, running away from the last of a string of bad foster homes—then a boy only three years older than me at the time, dragged into the club by his biker buddies for his twenty-first birthday.
He’d been brash and stupid enough to follow me out back to where I was smoking a cigarette—a terrible habit that I’d dropped a few years later. He’d introduced himself as Jamie, and I’d given him my stage name at the time—Garnet—a name that ended up changing many times over the years until I finally landed on Asha. He told me I looked beautiful, and I laughed—I’d been wearing a short denim miniskirt and a ribbed cotton crop top, my hair tossed up into a messy bun with pieces of it still sticking to my neck with sweat from the stage.
It’s strange,I think as I stand there in the shower, tears still dripping down my face,how little I remember of some of the years after that, and how clearly I remember that first night. Down to what I was wearing, the motorcycles in the parking lot, the empty liquor bottle I nearly tripped over when he kissed me.
There had been an innocence to him that had kept me from telling him to fuck off and go back inside, the way I would have done with any other man that had the gall to follow me out back. Any other man would have come off as a creep, but I could tell that Jamie didn’t realize he was breaking an unspoken rule. He just wanted to talk to me, and I was good enough, even back then, at reading people to know that he wasn’t going to hurt me. If I told him to go back inside, he’d go—probably like a kicked puppy, but he’d go. And I found, as I contemplated it, that I didn’t want him to.
“I don’t ever come to places like this.” He’d blurted it out, like he was confessing something to me. I’d snorted, dropping my cigarette and crushing it under the toe of my high-heeled sandal.
“I’m a stripper, not a priest. I don’t care if you do or not.” I’d crossed my arms under my breasts, waiting for the moment his eyes dropped to look at them, staring into my cleavage like every other man on earth. But they didn’t.Hedidn’t. He kept looking at my face like I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and it made me wonder. “Why did you come here, anyway, then? Your buddies bully you into it?”
His cheeks had flushed, and he’d stubbed the toe of one of his heavy motorcycle boots against the concrete. “It’s my birthday,” he said finally. “Twenty-one. They said comin’ out to a strip club was mandatory. Big birthdays and bachelor parties, according to them.”
I laughed. “Nothing ismandatory,” I told him, rolling my eyes. “But as long as you’re having a good time—”
“I wasn’t, really, until I saw you.” His flush had deepened, and he stepped a little closer, but it seemed less like he meant to and more like he was drawn towards me, like a moth to a flame that he’s afraid might burn him but can’t avoid. “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Beautiful, or pretty?” I teased him, reminding him of his comment just a few moments before.
“Both.” He was blushing redder than any man I’d ever seen, and I decided to take pity on him. He’d tipped me well earlier, and he was still looking at my face and not my breasts, which was more than I could say for literally any other man who had ever walked through the doors of the club.
“What if I said you could have a birthday kiss?” I don’t know what prompted me to offerthat. Most men would have wanted to squeeze a tit or get a feel up my skirt, but somehow I thought that this man—Jamie—would want a kiss over anything so crude. He looked so innocent, standing there blushing in the harsh glow of the streetlights, and I suddenlywantedhim to kiss me. He was so out of place here, and I wanted some of that. I hated, sometimes, how well I fit in.
“I—” His eyes widened, and I noticed for the first time how full his mouth was, soft-looking in his deeply tanned face, that riot of black curls somehow even messier as he ran a hand through it.
I stepped back, leaning against the brick wall, as I raised my eyebrows at him. “You’ll have to come get it if you want it, birthday boy.” I winked at him, and as my gaze met his, I had a sudden, strange feeling that what he chose would change something. If he stammered and ran off, that would be it. But if he found the nerve—
It was clear that it took some doing for him to find that nerve. He swallowed hard, throat bobbing visibly as he looked at me leaning back against the wall—and then, as if he were afraid he would change his mind if he thought about it too long, he crossed the distance between us in three quick strides, his hand in my hair as he kissed me like a man who wanted his lips on mine more than he wanted to breathe.
I’d never been kissed like that. It shouldn’t have been romantic, standing out back of a strip club in one of the dingier parts of town, an empty Absolut bottle nudging against the toe of my sandals and a dumpster within arm’s reach. It should have felt filthy and tawdry and wrong—but the way he kissed me, it didn’t matter if we were there or on a tropical beach, it would have felt the same.
“Tell me your name,” he whispered against my lips, but it wasn’t a demand. It was a plea, a prayer, a whispered desire that flooded through me and made me forget everything except how much I wanted him suddenly, when a few minutes ago, I hadn’t even known who he was.
I never told anyone at the club my real name. My boss knew it because of paperwork, but he knew better than to use it. No one else—not the bouncers or the other dancers or my best work friend who tended the bar, knew my real name. I was Garnet, and that was all.
But as his fingers threaded through my hair and I found my hands gripping the black leather vest he was wearing, pulling him closer as his lips ghosted over mine again, I found myself whispering it against his mouth.
I took him home with me. Birthday sex, I teased him, when we stumbled into the shabby apartment that I shared with a girl I’d found on an online listing, but it was more than that. I knew it from the moment he helped me out of my clothes, hands and mouth working their way over me like he was worshipping me, and when I rolled him onto his back and returned the favor, the sounds he made were like nothing I’d ever heard from a man before. It was all pleasure, raw, and with nothing held back from either of us, and I wasn’t sure what he’d done to me. I told him as much when we were finished, his cheeks blushing all over again when he came back to himself and realized exactly how wild it had gotten.
I’d almost thought he might have been a virgin, and I asked him. I was blunt to a fault with him, almost as if I were hoping I could run him off, scare him away, because the sweetness of it all and what he made me feel terrified him. He didn’t seem to belong with the crowd he was running with, didn’t seem to belong in the grimy world that I and his friends occupied at all, and it made me suspicious. There was something more to it, I was sure.
Jamie had assured me that he hadn’t been a virgin, though he admitted he hadn’t been with many women before me. It was a Saturday night when he ended up in my bed; I had the next three days free, and he didn’t leave my apartment until Wednesday morning. By then, I knew how he’d ended up with the biker gang he ran with—it was courtesy of his brother, who had raised Jamie and dragged him into the gang by proxy. Jamie didn’t seem to like it much; he didn’t enjoy violence and found himself disliking a lot of the tactics the gang used on others. Still, he liked working on cars and motorcycles, and leaving wasn’t really an option.
I know it wasn’t, because, in time, I tried.
