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TARA
“I’m getting tired of this,” I said, but there was nobody around to hear me in the dressing room of the Red Rose Club. Mandy, the closest thing to a friend I’d had when I first started to work at the club, had married her knight in shining armor and left the club. Jessie was gone too, living in sin and loving life with her man out in California. That left me lonely and friendless, nothing new to a girl that had once been addicted to pain pills.
I added a last swipe of black eyeshadow to my eyelids and took a step back. I wouldn’t be climbing the pole tonight, my back hurt too much from the old injury I’d sustained in a car accident as a teenager. Tonight, I’d be doing a chair dance in a short imitation of a cheerleading uniform. With only the barest hint of panties and no bra at all to impede my audience’s view of all I had to offer.
I wasn’t making the kind of money the girls on TikTok bragged about so often in their videos and I’d thought long and hard about how to change that. I had an idea, but it was a very…daring idea. One I’d have to run by Ginger, the owner of the club, before I acted on it because it went well beyond anything I’d seen anyone else at the club do.
For now, I was simply trying to fight off the loneliness and depression that threatened to end my sobriety. At the age of twenty, I was in recovery from an addiction that started with an accident that still haunted me. I was walking home from a jog around the block where I lived one late night, thinking about what my sixteenth birthday, only a few days away, might bring. A sudden burst of rain brought my attention back to my surroundings, even if my hearing was muted by the headphones I wore, blasting out my favorite classical music compilation.
I was almost home, ten more feet and I’d be finished, when the world turned into a burst of sensations, pain and fear mingled into terror and…confusion. A man on a motorcycle started to skid and hadn’t noticed when he swerved to avoid an oncoming car that he was about to mow down a teenager. I had sustained a multitude of injuries, but luckily, none that threatened my life. One of those injuries had changed my life forever, though.
Three of the discs in my spine had blown, leaving me with pain that would never go away. The spinal specialist I’d seen had recommended surgery, but I refused it after some research online. I’d decided to try physical therapy and to live with it, until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Of course, the first thing that I’d been offered was drugs. Drugs that were far too powerful for a teenager.
I’d been glad for the pills in the first few weeks and months after the accident. They numbed my pain, muted the nightmares, and when I took a little more than I should have, when I found new ways of taking the medicine that seemed to work faster, I found out that life could be much worse.
Every birthday since was a blur, because I’d taken the money from the insurance company and snorted most of it up my nose. I’d quit school, lost contact with my family and old friends back home, and found myself alone, penniless, and without many prospects in Chicago. When I first got sober, it was out of necessity. There’d been no money left for drugs.
I’d met Ginger a couple of weeks after I’d been turned out of my apartment and the woman had offered me a job at her club. That had been a strange day, the day I met Ginger. The night was cold, and I’d been looking for a place to sleep. The city was scary and dangerous at night, and I ended up in tears, on a bench, certain that I was going to freeze to death right there in front of all the people walking by me on the bench.
I hadn’t known it then, but I’d parked myself near to Ginger’s club. When Ginger saw me sitting there, she’d come over to speak to me with kindness and empathy. She’d offered me a room at her club for a few nights and I had accepted. I’d stayed at the club for a few days when I decided that I was clean now, I might as well stay that way.
Ginger would come and talk with me every day and on the day that I was supposed to leave, Ginger offered me a job. I accepted that, and the renewed offer for the room, hoping to get back on my feet. I knew I could probably call my parents, probably should do just that, but my parents were better off without me in this state. Yeah, I was sober and getting back to healthy weight, but who knew if I’d stay sober? It was early days for me and staying sober took will power.
I didn’t believe I had that much will power back then. I’d proved myself wrong, however and now, six months after Ginger took me in, I was healthier than I’d been in a long time. I wanted to keep it that way, but lately, depression was an enemy I had a hard time fighting off.
“You have an apartment of your own now, you’re making decent money, and you’re sober, Tara, stop beating yourself up,” was the response Ginger gave me earlier in the day, when I asked the older woman what I was doing wrong at the club. I wanted to make the piles of cash that other dancers seemed to always make, not to buy drugs with, but to stash away for the future and to get a car of my own.
“I know, but I want to be better than I am now,” I’d replied, trusting the woman to tell me the truth. “I’m not certain I’m cut out for this. I haven’t given anyone a rose, and I think that’s part of the problem. Everyone thinks I’m a snob and frigid.”
“No, nobody thinks that,” Ginger had replied, her eyes narrowed on me. “We all see how you come alive up on that stage. No, nobody thinks you’re frigid or a snob. Hard to get to know? Definitely, but not a snob, honey.”
Well, if Ginger agreed to my plan to tempt the audience into parting with more of their cash, nobody would think I was frigid ever again, either. A real smile tugged at my lips for the first time that day as I heard my song playing over the club’s speaker system. Time to get out on that stage and take in the brightest part of my day, that moment when my eyes landed on Johnny Baker.
He was exactly the kind of man I should be avoiding right now, but my eyes always sought him out, too hungry not to look away. As I’d learned a long time ago, you could tell your body to do whatever you wanted to, it would always do what it liked, unless you exerted control over yourself. And Johnny Baker made me lose all control, especially when his eyes followed me. Damn, that man could be hard to get off my mind.
