Broken Girl(33)

But now the minute these f*cks went to town doing their business, my mind collapsed into the images of Shane shaking his head. His eyes burned through my skin and left scars of shame for being with men who didn’t love me. Guilt flooded my body, yeah the one emotion I’d always kept an arm’s length away. But, now, trick after trick, all I could think about was Shane. I wished it was his hands that touched me and his lips which kissed me and his tongue that traced perfectly scrumptious lines on my body.

Without a doubt, love would kill this profession for a girl. The worst thing any prostitute could ever do was fall in love. It didn’t matter if you got tons of money for your * or pennies on the dollar; love was like a poison that slowly seeped into your veins and hijacked your heart, eventually, it killed any ability you thought you had to spread your legs for anyone but him.

Thursday, the day Shane and I usually did our laundry, together. Different thoughts rolled through my head. Should I just go into the laundromat and tell him I was sorry I was so complicated? Fuck it . . . maybe I’d just drop the bomb on him that I was a prostitute. Why not risk losing him for good? At least it would’ve been done and over.

Six days, and he still hadn’t called. This routine was familiar, the pain that stabbed at my heart, and the breaths I wasn’t able to catch when I thought about him. Never wanting six days of space, I didn’t sign up to fall in love with him. Sybil warned me; she told me to walk away. Why didn’t I listen? I just needed to move on.





THE PROBLEM WITH trying to move on, was the moment you decided to do it . . . it became the only thing you could focus on. All I’d done was think about Shane. If I wasn’t wondering what he was doing, I wanted to know if he missed me and our conversations. Every flower stand I passed made me think of him. Every time I threw my dirty clothes into the hamper . . . I thought about him. Even brushing my teeth, somehow he’d enter my thoughts. I had lost any handle I had on controlling how much I thought about him and it had become f*cking annoying. It seemed like everything I did was born from the thought of Shane.

I pulled at the refrigerator handle. I haven’t had much of an appetite lately, and I wasn’t too hungry, but it was a quarter to twelve and if I didn’t at least put something in my stomach, I was going to pay for it later. Cramping hunger pangs on the job suck, bad. I snagged a hardboiled egg that Sybil made a couple days ago. She’d been on this weird health kick with starting her mornings where she ate some type of protein and no carbohydrates. Usually, eggs just grossed me out, but when I needed the protein and I didn’t feel like cooking, it did the trick. Besides, Sybil had been gone since yesterday morning; she mentioned that she had a lengthy f*ck coming into town.

I took my hardboiled egg and snatched a slice of sourdough bread before I sat down on the couch and wrestled with the idea of just showing up at the Stop and Wash. It wouldn’t be too hard to act like nothing happened between us. I was really good at acting. I learned early on, a prostitute couldn’t sell her body without the ability to turn on the dramatics. There was something to be said about hooking up every couple of weeks with the same trick and making it seem new. It was my job to make them think what they did to me was the most mind-blowing sex I’d ever experienced and, well, I was pretty damn good at my job.

I had to be stronger than any simple desire to feel worthy of something beyond numb. I knew what was going to happen when I’d truly let him in; things were gonna get complicated, fast. Shuffling my feelings around in my mind for Shane was as f*cked up as being beaten simply because I was born. Nothing in this world had convinced me that if I slid that thin blade of emotion against my flesh I’d feel whole again. No love, no desire would ever be worthy of that searing pain.

I pulled my legs up under my ass and curled up on the couch. Tears I hadn’t let go of since I sold my heart to the loveless f*ck who took my soul and crushed it, fell fast and swirled from my chin before they soaked into the front of my camisole. I cried. My eyes burned with the sting of every time I thought about all the mindless, sick f*cks who stole pieces of my life and never returned them. My controlled aching whimpers turned into uncontrollable belly deep howls as my entire life busted from the vault in my heart.

I didn’t stop crying, not even when my voice was gone and my throat begged me to feel the burn of tequila. And even though I lived through the horrors of alcoholism with my parents, it didn’t keep me from knocking back the entire bottle of that golden poison. I welcomed the warm burn against the back of my throat as the scorching pressure pushed at my lungs and the tequila blazed down into my stomach in waves of gut rotting satisfaction, finally I felt something before I had become ragingly numb.



When I woke up I was lost . . . lost to what time it was or even where the f*ck I was. My phone was blowing up with messages from a couple of my regulars, ones who I had arranged dates with for Thursday night. I unfolded from the ball of mess I created, letting the empty Tequila bottle hit with an echoed clunk against the old worn wooden floor. My head was spinning still and the room was dark except for the faint glow of my phone and the digital clock from across the room.

I took a moment to gain my bearings before I looked at the time. I dreaded the glance I gave my clock. 3:30 Friday morning . . . I had drunk myself into an unconscious clusterf*ck of missed jobs, a night’s take of close to five hundred bucks. It was so f*cked up, I might as well have given all my clients to some other ho who had been willing to work through her demons and collect a fee along the way.