Not my business was what it was.

“Fine,” he said with a wan smile. “And thank you.”

“Right,” Joan muttered, “her he thanks. Let’s go, Florence Nightingale,” she said, nearly dragging me away.

Once we were outside and on the other side of her trailer, she turned.

“What the hell did I say to you?” she asked. “Stay away from the old man, Annie!”

“What were you doing bringing him a hundred dollars in cold medicine?” I asked.

“A hundred and fifty—that sinus stuff is expensive. He wakes up at six in the morning hacking away like he’s going to cough up a lung. I get home at three, I can’t fucking take it.”

“Right. Kevin asked me to look in on him,” I lied.

Joan heaved a big sigh. “Fine…just, honestly, Annie. Don’t get friendly.”

I wondered if Joan knew about the fire. The girl asleep upstairs. Probably, I decided. Joan seemed to know plenty.

“I gotta get to work,” Joan said, checking her watch. “I’ll see you later.”

Oh God, she would. She would see me later at The Velvet Touch. Or rather, maybe I would see her.

A lot of her.

—

What does one wear to a strip club?

It wasn’t like I had a whole lot of choices. In the end I picked my nicest shorts—which meant they didn’t have any holes. They were black and shorter than my other ones, which I thought made them sort of sexy. And I wore my maroon tank-top camisole, which I usually slept in.

I used two of the conditioner packets on my hair and it was actually soft and lying at least a little bit flat against my head, instead of sticking up like a haystack.

With my tan and a little lip gloss and mascara…it wasn’t half bad, I thought.

I spent the evening re-reading my favorite parts of Fifty Shades of Grey and I didn’t touch myself once, so I would be too worked up to chicken out. And truthfully, it would have been nice to have a bucket-o-something to get my courage up.

But at eleven o’clock I put down the book, grabbed my keys, and crossed the point of no return.

The Velvet Touch was three exits back on the highway. It was a dark, cement-bunker-type building sitting in a vast sea of parking, with a billboard so big and so pink it could probably be seen in space.

The parking lot was half full of pickup trucks and big rigs, and there were a half dozen motorcycles lined up near the entrance. The chrome reflected the lights and the black silhouettes of naked women on the billboard.

My courage was flagging, so I pulled out my phone and called Dylan.

“Hey, baby,” he said. “You okay?”

“I’m sitting in the parking lot of the strip club.”

The sound he made low in his throat was sexy. “Having second thoughts?”

“No. I mean…I’m nervous.”

“Nervous is okay. Nervous is exciting. This is naughty, baby. And you like naughty.”

“Yeah, but…what do I do?”

“You’re going to walk in those doors, order a drink, find a dark corner, and you and me, we’re going to talk about what you’re seeing. How it makes you feel.”

“What if it doesn’t make me feel anything?”

“Slip your fingers down your pants, baby.”

“Dylan…”

“Do it.”

Rolling my eyes despite the fact he couldn’t see, I sucked in my belly and shoved my fingers down my pants past the thin elastic of my underwear.

I gasped when my fingers brushed my clit and then again when I felt how wet I was. In my nerves I hadn’t noticed.

“What did you find?” he asked, like he knew. But of course he knew. Somehow he knew everything about this.

“I’m wet,” I whispered.

“Tell me.”

“I’m so slippery,” I moaned low in my throat, giving in to the feeling.

“Don’t come,” he said, his voice sharp, like he knew what I was doing.

“I’m so close,” I protested.

“Go inside. Call me when you get there.”

He hung up, and reluctantly I pulled my hand out of my pants.

I didn’t give myself a second to doubt what I was doing. It was just like getting out of my car in front of the grocery store.

Here goes nothing, I thought and started to pull open the big outer door, but just as I pulled, someone pushed and I nearly fell back on my ass.

“Whoa there,” a man said, reaching out to grab me before I fell. He was big, with a round belly and a long beard.

“Knocking women over again?” asked another guy coming out behind him. They both wore black leather vests over their shirts. A third man came out, younger than the other two, and taller. Bigger seeming, though he was actually kind of thin. He had dark hair and his eyes, when they ran over me, made me wish I had on a bunch more clothes. Like a snowsuit.

Bad news. That’s what my gut said. That man was the worst kind of news.

“Let’s go,” he said, dismissing me the moment after he saw me.

“You all right?” the bearded guy asked and I nodded, and the men got on three of the bikes and roared away.

Shit, I thought. This was ridiculous. I would tell Dylan that he had to come up with something else. Something less…extreme. I could go skinny-dipping again. Or watch some porn—I’m not sure where, the library? Could I do that at the library?

Anything would be easier than this.

But you want this, I thought. And you like that it’s hard.

“You coming in?” a giant black man standing on the other side of the open door asked me. “It’s Ladies’ Night.”

“Ladies’ Night?” I stammered.

“You get in free and drinks are half off.”

“Are there…other women in there?”

The man’s face broke into a smile. “Yeah. You ain’t alone, you little perv.”

He said it with such easygoing affection that I laughed.

Oh Lord, I thought, stepping into the club. If my mother could see me now.

—

The music was loud.

So loud that it actually kind of emptied my head of some of the noise I was producing. Some of the fear. The rug under my feet was threadbare and shabby and the lights were low. Some of them fluorescent.

Nice big chairs were gathered around small round tables and most of them were full. The stage was lined with men watching the act and girls walked in and around the tables, flirting and smiling, selling drinks. Selling sex.

I don’t know what I expected. Something shabby, and yes, it was shabby. Lewd, too.

I totally expected something degrading. I expected women with soul-dead eyes to be pawed at by men with cigars clamped between their teeth and a kind of awful shaming lust in their eyes.

And maybe the women dancing and walking around in G-strings and sitting on men’s laps and leading them into dark and shadowy corners, maybe they felt degraded, but they were hiding it really well. Lying about it.

And the whole place was in on the lie.

I was in on the lie. I needed to believe these women were all right. So…I just did.

One thing was for sure: they had amazing bodies. Like truly…lush and feminine, but strong, too. The woman onstage did some kind of crazy maneuver where she grabbed the pole and somehow turned herself upside down and then, from the top of the pole, using only her legs, slid down in slow circles.

Her breasts—they had to be fake—didn’t even twitch.

And I wondered what I would do if I had a body like that. If I could do that. Would I choose to shovel disgusting torn-up dirty diapers out of a bed of garbage and weeds, gagging the whole time, making far less than minimum wage? Or would I do something like this?

A man in the front row, a young man in a backwards cap sitting with some of his friends, held out a twenty-dollar bill, and the girl crawled over on her hands and knees and took it from him with her teeth.

Her eyes and her smile were inviting and flirty. Sexy.

Layla would have done something like this. For sure.

The thought of Layla, the persona of her, slipped over me, and the screaming of my raw nerves and terrible misgivings became muted. There, but in the background. Something I would worry about tomorrow, maybe.