Zoë
ZO?
“DON’T GO TO work,” whines Tate, rolling onto his side and trying to pull me back down into the bed.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
It’s nine o’clock at night, and I’m cranky after spending the entire day in bed with him, doing nothing but napping off and on—no sex, no affection, no talking.
Tate always wants to spend the day in bed, as if it’s the ultimate luxury, but I never have the time—or, to be honest, the interest. I caved this morning, though, and called in sick to the dance studio. Partly from guilt but partly hoping, too, that the intimacy of all that time together would help us find our way to a place where we could really talk.
Guilt over what happened in the VIP booth is eating me up inside. I know that trust is the most important thing in a relationship, and that’s why the only way forward is to be honest with Tate. I’m already keeping too many secrets as it is.
When we first met, I’d just started stripping as a lucrative way to pay for my dance classes while being a working dancer, of sorts. Tate had his reservations, and it took a lot of reassurance for him to make a tentative peace with it. But by the time I started doing lap dances, it was clear that having a stripper girlfriend was an embarrassment to him, so I dreaded telling him I was going that little bit further—not just dancing naked in front of a group of men, but taking them individually to a back room to dance privately for them. The fact is, the real money is in lap dances, but I knew he would lose it. I kept putting it off, hoping the right moment would come along… and it never did.
And now I’ve gone and done something so much worse.
Yet, somehow, even spending the whole day less than a foot away from each other, I could never get his attention long enough to have the conversation. He slept, or scrolled on his phone, grunting with dismissal when I tried to talk to him, and now my unresolved guilt has a crisp layer of anger over top of it.
It wouldn’t have happened if he ever acted like he wanted me, I catch myself thinking, and then immediately feel guilty for it.
There are no excuses for what I did. But the more it seems like he deliberately does not want to have any kind of serious conversation, the more I start to wonder if we really need to talk about it anyway. Maybe it’s better to put it behind me without upsetting him. Chalk it up to a learning experience. Something I’ll never do again. Put the past behind us and build a relationship on trust going forward.
“You work too hard,” he grumbles.
For someone who doesn’t want to have sex with me—or even a serious conversation—he certainly wants to keep me around a lot. In my darker moments, I wonder if he’s jealous of my busy life or my goals. If what he really wants is just to slow a woman down. And then I feel terrible for thinking that, too.
“You know I need to work,” I say, extricating myself from his grasp and standing up. I move to the full-length mirror and look myself over.
My hair is messy from sleep. I drag my fingers through it and then run my eyes down my naked body, turning to each side to see the back as well, looking for bruises or anything else that needs to be covered, tweezed, smoothed, or otherwise made stage-ready. A nasty bruise on my ass from a pirouette fall has just healed, and I’d had to hide it with pancake makeup for weeks.
Seeing nothing problematic, I pull a green bikini out of my bag, put it on, and then pull a neon green fishnet tube dress over it. I cast a glance over to Tate to see if he’s watching me, but he’s got his eyes closed, trying to fall back asleep already.
I know I’m not ugly—my whole job hinges on men finding me attractive. But Tate never comments on my appearance, never tells me I look good, and never wants to rip my clothes off. We’re young, we’re dating, and we shouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other. But Tate would almost always rather have his hands on a keyboard.
I push those thoughts out of my head as I pull jeans on over my outfit, reminding myself that I’m the one in the doghouse here and that while Tate can be distant, in all other regards, he seems completely invested in our relationship. He always picks me up from work, he calls and texts frequently, and he wants to be together all the time. Maybe my job has just overexposed me to a world of sex, and I’m out of touch with how much normal people actually do it.
“What if you didn’t need to work?” comes a sleepy voice from the bed.
Tate watches me with one open eye, smiling crookedly from the side of his face that isn’t smushed into the pillow. He’s undeniably cute, with his mussed-up brown hair and his baby-faced good looks. He hasn’t worked out a day in his life but still has a naturally brawny build. Even the circles under his eyes look good on him, aging him just enough to counteract the cherubic sweetness of his face.
“What if you moved in here?”
Moved in here?
The question catches me completely off guard. Tate wants to move in together?
It’s absurdly soon. Way too soon. We’ve only been dating for four months. This is the last thing I thought we’d end up talking about today.
And yet…
I’m unexpectedly flushed with pleasure at this suggestion. It means that Tate likes me, really likes me. That despite being distant sometimes, and our nonexistent sex life, he takes what we have seriously. He sees a future together.
If I’m being honest, it’s also really convenient for me. My house is on the border of the suburbs—far from Tate, far from the club, far from the gym, and far from my dance studio—and my roommates and I recently got notified that our landlord is terminating our lease and moving in. I’d been planning on crashing with Rachel for a while, but living here would solve that problem and make everything easier.
There’s his father, who lives upstairs, to consider. But as long as I’ve known Tate, I’ve never even seen his dad. He travels for work a lot, apparently. He might as well not be there at all.
All these thoughts go through my mind in a flash before I respond.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” He lifts his face off the pillow, bestowing me with a full, beaming smile, and he looks so irresistibly sweet and hopeful, like a little puppy. “Don’t you think it would be good? There’s so much space, and it’s way closer to everything. And that way, we can just, like, be together.”
We can just, like, be together.
That’s what I want, isn’t it?
I let my eyes dance over the flawless café-au-lait brown of his skin, the way he always looks perfectly tanned, even in the dead of winter. I catch myself wondering if our kids would have that same golden skin, mixed with my blonde hair and green eyes.
I’ve wanted a big love for so long. Not the unsatisfying hookups and dumb boys who play games or won’t commit that have defined my entire romantic life up until that point. And Tate…
Tate is different… right?
This is love… isn’t it?
“That would be amazing,” I finally say, surprisingly hesitant for someone at one of the joyful milestones of her life.
But it would be amazing.
And convenient.
I look around the space. Even though it’s strewn everywhere with Tate’s mess and chaos, even though it’s a basement in his father’s house, it’s a sophisticated space. The whole floor is open concept, spanning the entire footprint of the huge house above. Eight white columns provide structural support. And the back wall is all windows, looking out at the forest behind the house—beautiful, leafy, and private.
“Perfect.” He claps his hands together and then reaches out for me. “Now come back to bed.”
I resist for a moment and then roll my eyes as I let him drag me down onto the mattress beside him. He wraps a hand around my shoulder, pulling me into the space between his arm and his chest as if we’re going back to sleep.
“Hey,” I murmur, running a hand over his chest and then down his stomach. “I’m still going to work, you know.”
“No,” he laughs plaintively. “You don’t have to work anymore.”
“Tate.” I try to filter the exasperation out of my tone—too late, it comes across anyway. “I like my job.”
“You like your job?” he scoffs. “Babe, you’re a stripper.”
Every muscle in my body tenses up. “ Tate.”
“I know, I know. Sorry.” He sighs and props himself up on one elbow, giving me his full attention. It’s a small gesture, but I appreciate it. We’ve had this conversation before. “It’s like dancing, I get it. You just work so hard, and I want to make things easier for you. If you live here, you know, there’s no rent. You’ll save money. It might be nice to just… slow things down, you know?”
The anger that rose so quickly inside of me softens and releases. Tate says the wrong thing sometimes. He’s a guy. He thinks he’s being funny, and he doesn’t always know how things come across. I’m going to have to learn to be more patient with him if we’re going to live together.
“Everything’s riding on the audition for me right now,” I say more gently. It’s nice to look into his dark brown eyes, to speak vulnerably and not have him turn away or get distant. “It’s just a busy time. But I still need money for the studio, for the gym, for everything it takes to get by. I need to work in the meantime. Until I see how the audition goes.”
“Mm-hm.” He’s still watching me, but his attention already feels like it’s receding. “I know, babe.”
I want to pull him back to me. I want to feel that connection that was right there for us, so close to the surface. I skim my hand around his neck and tilt my head up to kiss him, and when he kisses me back, instead of pulling away, I melt with relief.
We’ll be okay .
We just need to find our rhythm, to make it through these next few months until my audition, and then we’ll have a better idea of where everything will land. I run a hand down his bare back, and to my surprise, he moves in tighter against me, his kiss becoming deeper.
My senses jump to a new awareness like an alarm bell has gone off.
Attention! We have arousal! The man is turned on!
I’m affected instantaneously. My heart skips, my breathing becomes heavier, and suddenly I’m pushing myself up and over him, straddling him. You’d think I’d never met a horny man before, which couldn’t be further from the truth for a woman in my line of work.
He grunts a laugh as I grind myself against him. “My girlfriend the stripper,” he says with a grim smile, lifting his hands and placing them behind his head.
I smile cutely, batting my eyelashes.
Guilty as charged.
Being a stripper is a professional education in being sexy. I wish that made Tate feel lucky. I know how to move to turn him on, how to act. Night after night, hundreds of men pay just to watch me, to fantasize about me, to dream of being with me the way Tate is.
Men like… Nick .
A flash of heat goes through me as the memory pops unbidden into my mind. How it felt to move against his body, how his hands felt against my skin. The raw sexual energy between us. It was wrong to feel that with someone else, but maybe I can correct it now by feeling that way with Tate. Maybe it’s not that I’m a bad, lascivious person, maybe it’s just that by hiding what turns me on, I’m keeping part of myself from him.
Because the truth is that I love giving lap dances. Moving suggestively while I have a man’s captivated attention, rocking my hips in a way that generates heat in my core. I’ve learned that being watched is a turn-on for me, that stripping down in front of a group of horny men doesn’t intimidate me or make me feel degraded—it makes me feel powerful.
I sit up and fan my hands across my waist, arching my back and lifting my chest. “Do you want me to strip for you?” I ask playfully.
Tate doesn’t answer, but a small smile pulls at one corner of his mouth—flirtatious and sexy.
I grind my crotch against him and feel the growing length of his erection through his sweatpants. Crossing my arms, I lift the bottom of my fishnet dress and pull it over my head, then reach back and unhook my bikini top, letting it fall away.
It takes every ounce of restraint I have not to rip Tate’s pants off and mount him immediately. We’ve had sex four times— Four! Times!— approximately once a month since we started dating, and for us to do it now would just seem like a good omen to start off this crazy idea of living together. It would show me that everything really is okay between us. That he does want me.
Flashes of dancing for Nick start splicing into my thoughts as I move seductively on Tate’s lap. The more I writhe and roll, the more turned on I get, the more memories of being in the booth with Nick overcome my senses. It’s wrong— it’s so wrong —but since I can’t stop it, I just let myself use it. I let myself drop back into the memory until suddenly I’m there in the booth again, and Tate is Nick, and this time, I’m going to go all the way, going to give myself over to him completely.
I lean down to kiss Tate again, only vaguely aware that all the passion is coming from me now, that his reserve is coming back, that when he kisses me, it’s not with the same heat he had a few seconds ago. I tease the fingers of my left hand across the bare skin of his chest, and with my right hand, I start undoing my jeans.
“Hold on,” he breathes against my mouth. His hand lifts to mine, circling my wrist. “Wait.”
I exhale like the wind has been knocked out of me.
“Hold on,” he says again and darts his eyes toward the door, listening. I let go of the button of my jeans with my free hand, feeling the temperature dropping between us. “I think my dad’s home,” he says.
“Okay.” I don’t know what to say. “Is he going to come downstairs?”
The idea of meeting Tate’s dad seems intimidating, partly because right now I feel like we’re teenagers fooling around in the basement, about to get caught. If I live here— when I live here—I’ll most certainly have to meet him. In fact, he’ll be a roommate of sorts.
But surely he’s not going to come downstairs? Tate is a grown-ass man, and he’s allowed to have sex. He’s entitled to privacy in his own part of the home.
“I don’t know,” he answers me. “I just don’t want him to hear anything.”
And there it is. We’re done. He lifts himself up onto his elbows, and I take the hint and roll off of him. I give a heavy sigh, disappointed and frustrated.
“Well, I should get to work anyway,” I say after a minute, and this time Tate seems relieved.
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Gimme a minute, and I’ll drive you.”
I stand up and get dressed again, throwing on a hoodie and grabbing my work bag, filled with makeup, toiletries, and other essentials, before following Tate upstairs through the grand house.
Evidence of Tate’s dad is parked outside in the driveway. A sleek black Tesla is stationed beside Tate’s Lexus. It’s almost ominous, a dark signifier of the mysterious man inside. What will he think about me moving in? What will he think of me?
I can only imagine what a man who owns a house like this is like . I picture a frowning grey-haired version of Tate, arms crossed, Tate’s baby cheeks gone jowly. Someone who probably wouldn’t approve of their only son dating a stripper.
But then I shake it off. I decided a long time ago not to let people judge me. I open the car door, sink into the Lexus’s soft leather seat, and look up at the house’s second-floor windows, as if I might see a shadowy apparition there, but only the light from the street lamps reflects back at me from the blank panes.