Chapter One – Jack
Chapter One
Jack
While your teenaged fantasies oftentimes involve bumping into teachers, former babysitters, and/or high-school head cheerleaders at the strip club, none of them—no matter how detailed—can prepare you for when it happens in real life.
Which is why I was staring slack-jawed at Dorothy—Thea—as Bruce punched me in the arm.
“Jesus, when’s the last time you saw a naked girl, Jack?”
I waved him away and kept staring. The runway was a long thing, phallically shaped, and we were at the tip of it while she was stage center near the pole, far enough away that it both could-and-couldn’t be her simultaneously, like some Schrodingerian dream.
Bruce grabbed my head and yanked it near so he wouldn’t have to shout over the music the club pumped in. “You’re embarrassing yourself—and me.”
She walked around the pole, looking out into likely darkness since all the lights were aimed at her, making all the sequins on her white bikini glint—it was like she was blindingly beautiful, too pretty to even see properly.
Then she lunged forward and in, lifting herself up, long legs pointed in a dramatically suggestive V, ending in two glittering red platform heels, all the better to walk down a pornographic yellow brick road.
I turned toward him without taking my eyes off her. “I know her.”
“The fuck you do.”
But I did. I had a sudden flash of smoke and damage, a crinkle of red metal peeled up like wrapping paper on both sides of a tree and me running down to rescue her from the passenger side of a BMW, as quarterback Duncan Beamm staggered out on the driver side to puke, from a likely BAL of 0. 3 and a head contusion.
Everything afterward…
“We’re in Vegas. Bet me,” I told Bruce, as she began a slow turn.
“A hundred.”
“Done,” I said. “Go hit the ATM.”
He snorted and didn’t move. Thea spun, the muscles of her arms, her stomach, the swing of her legs, making her swirl like a slow carousel.
What was it like being up there with everyone watching?
Rowdier groups of men waved fistfuls of cash, shouting lewd suggestions, and she ignored them, intent on her own internal metronome, letting the music move her.
When it came time for her to take off her top it seemed natural and she swung down dramatically, one leg curving up to brace against the pole, the pink perfection of her nipples on display, swaying with the music like twin poppies.
How many times in high school had I desperately wanted to see those breasts—to touch them? The closest I’d ever come was that day in the rain, holding her to my chest, blood streaming out of a small cut on her cheek.
“Thea? Thea? Are you okay?”
I was the first on the scene—they’d slalomed past me in the rain for no reason, and fishtailed over the edge of the road. I’d called it in on my way down the hill, leaving my truck parked on the shoulder up above for the ambulance to see.
I heard the sound of another puke on Duncan’s side as Thea’s eyelids fluttered. She sat up and took everything in then looked up at me.
“He has scholarships,” she said, having done a mental calculation at the speed of light, far faster than I would’ve been able to.
“So?”
“Say I was driving.”
“You weren’t. He was, and he’s an asshole.” There were beer cans on the floor of her car, I could see them through the open door, beneath the fluttering tatters of airbags.
“Babe!” Duncan bellowed on the far side. “Babe, where’d you go?”
Thea wriggled free and stood with me close behind. “I’m here, baby, hang on—" she shouted, then turned to me. “Please, Jack.”
We’d been in a few classes together, on and off, a group project here or there, but we both knew where we belonged.
I was with the kids the other kids hated, the ones that listened to the wrong music and couldn’t afford nice clothes, whereas Thea was some sort of angel, so light the rest of the cheerleading team picked her up to make her fly.
“Fuck his scholarships, Thea—he almost killed you.”
She put her hands on my chest. “I know, okay? But it was an accident—and my dad’s gonna kill me over this already—there’s no reason to ruin his life too.”
I had no love for Duncan or anyone else on the football team.
But for Thea? I’d spent four years watching her in the halls, loving the way her skirts grazed the edges of the dress code, the way the Texas sun brought out tank tops that sometimes slipped to reveal brightly colored bras.
I knew all of her classes after lunch and could identify her laugh at a hundred paces.
And while I knew I could never be with her—I knew how high school worked, and those of us on the outside of it had a very clear view of the inside—there was no way I could deny her now.
“Babe!” Duncan shouted, finally standing higher than the hood, holding one hand to his head, reaching out to her with the other. “Come here, get away from that loser—"
“Shut up Duncan!” she shouted back, looking at me with tears welling in her eyes. We heard a siren in the distance and I stepped away from her.
“Only because you’re asking.” I jerked my chin at Duncan. “Fuck him.”
“Fuck you,” Duncan bellowed, charging two steps forward before toppling over.
She ran to his side, kneeling down, and then looked up at me. “Thank you,” she whispered. I shrugged my shoulder like it didn’t matter. The second the cops got there, I told them my story and drove off.
The next two weeks of school held a strange kind of magic for me.
I’d see her in the halls, and she wouldn’t look away.
She gave me shy smiles, finally, at long last, noticing me—and making me feel that it was okay for me to notice her.
She even came over and spoke to me at my locker, asking how I was doing, and we talked for long enough that one of my fellow ‘losers’ noticed and interrogated me afterwards.
But the week after that, a mere month before graduation, Duncan started a rumor that I’d driven them off the road—all the better excuse for half the football team to viciously beat me.
I didn’t dare go back to school, much less graduate—I left high school and that fucking small town and I never looked back.
The tempo of the music changed as Thea took another turn.
I didn’t know how to feel, watching her.
My blood was rushing south but my mind was confused.
We’d never talked again after I’d quit school—I heard she’d left town to go try to make it in LA.
I never really knew if she’d egged Duncan on or if she’d told him the truth.
When the song was finished she let herself down gracefully, one long leg after the next and stalked the perimeter of the stage, still topless.
Unlike the girls who crawled up and down it, flapping their asses for cash, she didn’t seem to care if you paid her—she stared down shadowed men, daring them to have watched her without offering up money, like a goddess expecting tribute.
And when she reached the end of the stage and us—I leaned forward into the light, holding a twenty. Seeing me, she jerked back in surprise as her face lit up with recognition. “Jack?”
“Hey—" I began, wanting to call her by her real name, but I stopped myself in time because I didn’t know if that was cool.
She shook her head at my twenty, refusing it, then kept walking down the line, slightly faster.
“That was Ruby! Let’s give Ruby a round of applause!”
Applause smattered and then the cranking rhythm of the next dancer’s song overwhelmed it.
“See?” I told Bruce, watching her walk away.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, grunting as he pushed himself away from his spot to get my hundred.
He’d give me shit for it later but he was a man of his word.
That’s why I worked for him, back in Dallas, in a small tattoo shop near Deep Ellum.
We were in Las Vegas this week to mostly be in Vegas, vaguely attending a tattoo convention as an excuse to write off our vacation.
This was our third night in town. We only had two left and I hadn’t really wanted to come here but Bruce had and now—Thea.
I watched the place she’d walked off stage like a cat watched a mouse hole, willing her to return.
If she did though, what would I say? Hey, remember that time I lied for you and then got three broken ribs for it?
Did her parents know she was here? What about the rest of our classmates?
We were only five years out of high school, but as big as Texas was, gossip still travelled fast.
I was still staring at the stage door when a shy hand tapped my shoulder. “Jack?”
I turned and there she was. Her blonde hair cascaded in waves past her shoulders and black eye-liner winged out over each of her blue eyes.
She was wearing a shiny white coat that matched the bikini underneath, and her lips looked like she’d kissed red glitter.
“Thea—wow. I would’ve never guessed I’d run into you here. ”
She laughed coyly, ducking her hair down to twirl a lock of it. “I know, right? Small world.”
“Definitely.”
She looked me up and down from underneath impossibly long eyelashes. “You’ve filled out.”
I’d been a scrawny punk in high school—but time at the gym and a late hit from puberty had fixed that.
“Yeah, and you got taller,” I teased, since her shoes added six inches to her, easy.
She laughed—and I couldn’t stop looking at her.
So much of her was on display, and the memory of her half-naked spinning, merging into all my other high school fantasies…
. “You’re just as gorgeous as I remembered. ”
Under the fake red light above I thought I saw a deeper flush. “Aw, thanks Jack.”
“How did you get here? Last I heard you were moving to LA—can I get you a drink?” I knew strippers worked on some sort of drink system—I didn’t want my curiosity to cost her.
“You’re not…mad at me?”
She looked so fragile in that moment and whether it was for real or for show, I answered honestly. “No. Not anymore.”