Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
Clay
A generic looking black sedan pulled up to the side of the street. I could tell as soon as I laid eyes on it that it was a rental.
Someone didn’t want to be recognized. Which meant either they were important, or they were new to these kinds of ‘transactions’ and were paranoid. The latter option would be fine, but if it was the former...
Well, I’d had enough experience in my life servicing ‘important’ men to know not to get involved with them.
Not moving from my place leaning against the wall, I turned my attention away from the car to the rest of the back street.
I wasn’t the only hooker working this street. All the regulars were out tonight. Faces I’d seen on and off for five years since coming to San Francisco. Sometimes a face would disappear, or a new one would show up, but no one ever asked any questions. It was always the same story. We didn’t need to know the details.
One of the newer faces approached the car, and after talking to someone through the window for a moment, they got inside.
Hopefully they’d still be here tomorrow, but every time someone stepped into a strange car, there was always a chance that would be the last time we saw them.
The dangers of the job, and all that.
It was a slow night, and the weather wasn’t looking great. Clouds had rolled across the sky, barely distinguishable from the city smog that usually blocked out the stars, but there was an electric charge in the air that said a storm was approaching.
This wasn’t how I usually preferred to work. I had a better system set up with a middleman—who I refused to call my pimp—to set up appointments for me under an alias and then send me the details. The middleman got a cut, but it saved me from having to work the streets and hunt down my own jobs like this. Unfortunately, it had been a slow week, and not many jobs had come in for me. So, I’d taken to hunting down my own clients the old-fashioned way.
No matter what, I needed a client tonight. If I didn’t make any money soon, then I wouldn’t be able to pay my rent.
It wouldn’t be the first time I’d ended up homeless. Since coming to San Francisco, I’d been kicked out of three different apartments. I always found a way to survive, but having a roof over my head was still infinitely better than sleeping on the streets.
At least it was summer right now. Homelessness in the winter sucked, even in such a warm state, but summer wasn’t too bad so long as I could find shade during the day.
Tugging at my crop-top shirt, I shifted my posture on the wall to adopt a more intentional lean that showed off my figure, rather than the exhausted slump I’d been displaying before.
The work was simple. I’d done it a million times.
So why did it never get any easier?
Another car pulled onto the street. Nice, but not too nice, and not an obvious rental as the previous one had been. This one had promise. Especially when I saw that they’d disabled the light over their license plate to discreetly hide the number. This client knew what they were doing. That meant they were probably a repeat customer, and not as likely to turn out to be a serial killer.
Prostitutes talked. If street workers kept going missing after meeting with the same client, word would be spread immediately.
The car stopped closer to me, and the window rolled down. He was a portly man, but he seemed to have good hygiene at least.
Already counting the dollars in my head, I put on my best sultry look and kicked up one leg against the wall to make sure the exposed skin of my thighs was visible.
Just as I’d expected, the man called out to me.
“Hey, Angel. You free tonight?”
Angel.
The word echoed in my head, and suddenly I was no longer standing on a San Francisco street corner. I was fourteen, and I’d just woken up in a strange, locked room that would be my home for the next four years. A man I’d never seen before sat at the bottom of the bed I was lying on.
“Rise and shine, Angel.”
It was an old memory that I usually kept tucked away in the back of my mind where I could pretend it didn’t exist. I’d been trafficked from the age of fourteen to eighteen. There had been many bad days during that time, but the first day had been the worst.
I shook my head and dug my nails into my leg. The spark of pain helped ground me in the present and chased away the flashback. I focused my eyes once again on the man in the car who had called out to me. He was obviously upset from my lack of reaction, and I could see anger building in him. If I agreed to go with him now, I would probably be in for a rough night.
“Fuck off. I can smell that cheap cologne from here. You couldn’t afford me.”
I’d learned a long time ago that men like this did not accept a gentle rejection. A firm telling off and a harsh attitude was the only answer they would respect.
The man in the car scoffed, but his anger was already fizzling out as he turned his attention to the next available body on the street.
A man so young he could still be called a boy. That one was about the same age as I was when I was kicked out of the trafficking ring for being “too old”.
It was a constant paradox. Everyone standing on this street with me was simultaneously too young and too old at the same time.
Eventually, the man in the car drove away with his new purchase sitting in the passenger seat. Hopefully, the boy would manage better than I did with my first few clients on my own.
My shoulder twinged with a memory of pain. Only a week after I arrived in San Francisco, a client had twisted my arm so far behind my back that my shoulder popped out of its socket. That was when I learned the importance of choosing my own clients carefully.
Suffering through two painful flashbacks so close together had left me feeling floaty inside my head. Like I was disconnected from my body, and I imagined I was looking down on the scene and watching myself the same way I watched characters in a movie.
My character of Blue Steele shifted back into a sultry, come-hither pose and it only took him a few minutes to catch another potential client’s attention. This new client had no obvious red flags—other than the fact that he was soliciting a back-alley prostitute in the first place—so Blue agreed to go with him.
I watched, completely detached from what was happening as Blue climbed into the man’s car. For these few precious moments, I was no longer Clay Dahler. I was no one. Just a passive observer with no emotional attachment to what was happening.
I called this detached headspace the Midnight Zone, because I’d loved the Twilight Zone as a kid. It was my safe place outside of reality, and it had gotten me through the hardest years of my past.
Blue and the client only drove for a few minutes before they pulled into a cheap motel. The staff at the motel were used to people bringing prostitutes there, and barely gave them a second glance. There was less than five minutes between pulling into the motel parking lot and opening the door to one of the rooms.
The decor inside was as old and tacky as every cheap motel ever made, and the bed was barely better than a block of wood as Blue was shoved down onto the mattress.
If this was a movie, I would have turned it off at this point. I couldn’t turn off my life, but I could at least stop paying attention.
So, I did.