Chapter Two #3
He looked to me.
“Yes.”
That answered part two.
But wait.
Whoa.
“Really?” I asked.
His mouth said nothing.
His face repeated, “Yes.”
“I’m not, you know. I can do what I want with my body,
including using it to make money,” I stated.
“True,” he muttered.
“And I’m a woman.” I jerked my head his way. “You are very
much not. So I think that’s my call to make.”
“Where does it go from there?” he asked.
“Where does what go from there?” I asked back.
“You take your clothes off for money. And then where does it
go from there?”
I felt my eyes get squinty. “Where do you think it goes?”
A shrug of his massive shoulders which I was pretty sure
wafted a breeze through the room.
I still got what he was saying.
“So me stripping means I’m in some way responsible for a
man’s bad behavior,” I translated the shoulder shrug verbally. “Because, you
know, me stripping means men can think of women on the whole as nothing but sex
objects, if they want them to or not, and further on from that, they can treat
them as sex objects, whether we want to be treated that way or not.”
Mo didn’t confirm.
His look did.
“That’s bullshit,” I told him.
He silently disagreed with me.
“And it’s manthink,” I informed
him.
This made him look amused.
And again I wanted to climb him like a tree.
Those silver eyes dancing and his mouth quirking an eighth
of an inch up at the ends?
Damn.
We totally had a problem here.
In fact, several of them.
But the one I wasn’t going to get into right then was me
thinking about how badly I wanted to treat him like a sex object.
“You know, men get drunk a lot,” I pointed out. “Women do
too. They get drunk alone, among only men, or only women, or mixed. It happens
millions of times every day and every night. And does every one of those
millions upon millions of men get drunk and then go out and perpetrate
a sexual assault on a woman?”
His amusement vanished.
“No,” I answered for him. “Because to do that, they have to
have the monster in them. Bottom line. You either have it in you to do that,
and thank God the vast majority don’t, or you don’t. It has not one thing to do
with booze. Or drugs. Or what a woman wears. Or what she doesn’t. Or how she
behaves. She has absolutely no responsibility at all for a man harming
her. A monster does that because he’s a monster. He just hides it when he’s
sober. But when he’s weakened, that monster comes out. And that’s it. The end.”
His big body shifted slightly, but he made no response.
Though I read in that it was his response.
He was with me.
“And the same with any kind of bad behavior a man commits,”
I continued. “If he harasses a woman. If he beats her. I’m sick and tired of
men, and women for that matter, blaming women for the bad behavior of men. That
said, there’s something that helps to make this never ending. You know what
perpetuates this kind of thing?”
He shook his head.
“Locker room talk and no man in that room having the balls
to say, ‘You know what, that shit does not make you sound cool. It makes you
sound like a loser who can’t get laid by a real woman. Knock it off,’” I told
him. “When men allow men to talk shit about women, that reduces women
to sex objects. It gives the impression all the men in that room are down with
reducing women, and with that validation, some men carry on with that, the
asshole ones, and they do things directly in an attempt to reduce women. And
since it’s men doing it, they have no clue what it’s really doing. Reducing them.”
Mo agreed with me.
He didn’t say it.
I saw it.
Considering he communicated his response (his way), and even
though I liked he had that response, I kept talking.
“Turn this around, what do you think of a woman who goes to
a Chippendales show? Thunder Down Under? Is that about skanky guys who are
probably addicted to drugs and have no other choice in how to make a living?” I
asked.
“Skanky, maybe. The rest, no,” he muttered.
I felt my lips twitch but kept at him.
“Though, women who go to those shows are thought of as randy
or out-of-control bachelorettes with their bridesmaids or desperate. Why the
contradiction?” I demanded.
“Men that watch strippers are considered randy or bachelor
party dickheads or desperate,” he returned.
Hmm…
“I do not let men objectify me, Mo. I don’t drag them to the
club to watch me dance. They come on their own. And you can look at it two
ways, just as you could look at a woman watching men dance while taking their
clothes off. I make a damn good living off a man who’s totally down with
appreciating the female body and he’s at one with the fact he enjoys it, or it
turns him on, and it ends right there. Or I make a damn good living off weak
men who are weak because they’re not strong enough to respect strong women,
even if those women are strong women taking their clothes off. And I’m okay
with both.”
“You’re you,” he grunted.
“And what does that mean?” I asked.
“You’re beautiful and together and confident and I hear
you’re talented. Most women who do what you do don’t do it because they’re
proud of it. They do it because they’re in a life where they don’t want to. But
they have to.”
There was a lot there.
Primarily the fact he thought I was beautiful, together and
confident.
Good job I didn’t trip when pivoting to show him the living
room.
But also, he had a point.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
His expression registered surprise.
“I don’t have an argument for that,” I told him. “Though I
will note that I didn’t ask about how you felt regarding the career of
stripping as a whole. Just me doing it.”
For a second, his face blanked.
Then he let out a roar of laughter.
I was relatively sure my toss pillows wobbled.
And I was transfixed.
Totally transfixed.
I’d heard one thing that was more beautiful.
The laughter of my nephews.
But this was a close second.
I stayed transfixed for only a beat.
And then I dedicated my life to making him laugh as often as
I could.
Thus I was smiling at him when he quit.
He didn’t look in my eyes then.
He stared at my mouth.
Now we were getting somewhere.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Are you going to tell me about your military service?” I
went on.
He shook his head.
“Are you going to tell me how your dad’s a dick?” I kept at
him.
He shook his head.
“We’ll get there,” I mumbled, beginning to head to the door,
still mumbling. “I’m hungry. Time for dinner.”
I walked out the door of my bedroom.
Kim Seamus “Mo” Morrison, my bodyguard and the most
fascinating man I’d ever met, followed me.