Good Girl(39)

Jesus. Christ.

I need to get away from her. I toss the covers off, intent on hitting the hotel gym until I've blown off enough steam to keep myself from rutting into Lydia like an animal. I'm dressed, out the door, and on a treadmill in the gym in fewer than seven minutes, one of the benefits of living in a hotel. The gym is empty when I arrive. It'll likely stay empty since the hotel hasn't opened yet and there are fewer than twenty employees living on site—and I'm not expecting to see any of them in the hotel gym this early on a Sunday.

I pick a treadmill and run until I'm covered in sweat, increasing the incline and the speed in an attempt to clear my mind by exhausting my body. Thirty days. When's the last time I fucked the same woman for a month? It's a rhetorical thought because I know exactly when the last time was—and I know it's not been recent. I know my sex life has become a conveyer belt of variety. I know I've been able to fuck nearly any woman I've wanted—and I've wanted.

Lydia assumed she should leave last night. I've not had a single woman stay overnight since I moved to Vegas, so her assumption that I'd want her to get the hell out was correct. It also irritated the shit out of me because I didn't want her to leave—which only served to irritate me further.

I run half a mile, doing nothing but watch each tenth of a mile update on the treadmill's smart screen while running through the upcoming week in my head. Mentally checking my to-do list and searching for something I might have missed. Zoning, permits, staffing, entertainment, food, liquor. Electricity. I had to sit through a meeting about the fucking electric last week because I had to be updated on the contingency plans in the event of an outage. In the event that two separate backup systems failed, did we have a plan, and did I have a rudimentary understanding of the fucking plan should it ever need to be implemented?

I do now.

I watch another half mile go by in tenth-of-a-mile increments.

I'm the one in charge here, I remind myself. It's not as if I have to keep her for the entire thirty days. I could be done today if I wanted—I cut that thought off as soon as it begins. As if I'm not going to fuck her again? Please. I'll fuck her again today, several times likely. But I can see her as much or as little as I want over the next month, is the point. I'm the customer. I'm the one who paid. I'm the one in control here. I'll send her home today. Later today. When I want her again I'll ask her to meet me in my suite after work—and I shouldn't feel a fucking thought over that because I paid her for the use of her time and her body on my schedule.

I run another two miles until I've bought myself enough exhaustion to not think about fucking Lydia again—at least before lunch—then towel my face off as I walk back to my suite. When I walk in she's dressed and sitting on the sofa twiddling her thumbs. Legit twiddling, sitting and twisting her fingers around in her lap. No cell phone. No television. Just sitting there. Her bag is next to her on the sofa, zipped close and waiting as if she's ready to go. It's all fucking weird.

"What are you doing?" I've got a kitchen in this unit. A mostly unused kitchen, but fully equipped, the fridge loaded with mostly beverages. It's open to the living area so I walk in and grab a cold water from the fridge then lean against the countertop and watch her while I down half the bottle in one gulp.

She unclasps her hands and smooths them over her knees before speaking. "I wasn't sure if it was okay for me to leave or not."

Of course she wasn't. Because I paid her to be here. And also because I'm such a dick I didn't leave a note before going to the gym.

"Have you been waiting long?"

"Um, a little bit." She bounces her knee before speaking again. Is she nervous? Do I make her nervous or is it just the situation? "My phone died and I don't have the charger. And I couldn't figure out how to work your TV. It was stuck on some basketball game and I couldn't figure out how to change it so I was just waiting," she finishes with another bounce of her knees and another smoothing of her palms against the denim.

"What do you normally do on Sundays?" I ask, suddenly curious. Curious about what she'd be doing right now if I wasn't a dick and she wasn't sitting in my apartment bored out of her mind waiting on me.

"Oh." She blinks, seeming surprised by the question. "Normal stuff. Laundry or lying by the pool. I'd get an iced coffee from Del Taco or go to the Goodwill."

"What's the Goodwill?"

"A store."

"Okay. I'll take a shower and then we'll go," I say nonchalantly while tossing the empty bottle into the kitchen recycling bin. Maybe if I can learn more about her, learn what she spends money on, I can figure her out. Maybe she has a Goodwill store card with a huge balance. Maybe I can figure out why I care so much, why I'm so fucking curious when it comes to her. "We need to go pick up your stuff anyway," I add, because I've just had an even better idea.

"What stuff?" Her knees stop bouncing and her fingertips freeze over her kneecaps.

"Your stuff. Clothes and shit? Whatever you're going to need."

"Need for what? Today?" Her eyebrows have drawn together in concern or confusion or both.

"For the month. You're staying here."

"What?" She looks a bit aghast at the idea of living with me for an entire month and I can't help but feel a bit offended. I could name at least twenty strippers who'd happily stay here for a month. I'm weighing that thought when she speaks again. "Like staying staying? Like living here? No one said anything about—"