Episode 7
Chapter Four Continued
The next time he opened his eyes, the glowing numbers on the bedside clock told him that it was early afternoon. He had a slight hangover and attempted to rub the dry grit from his eyes. Failing, he slipped out of bed and made his way across the dark room to the bathroom, where he rinsed his face at the sink with cold water. He drenched a washcloth in cold water to rinse and cool his toasty-warm body. When he finished, he dried off with a towel and returned to the darkness of the bedroom, feeling somewhat refreshed.
When he slipped between the sheets, his legs touched the warmth of another person’s smooth legs, and that was when he discovered he wasn’t alone. Shit! That erotic dream had been real. The hooker was in his bed. The musky scent of sex had been theirs. He turned on a dim nightlight and rolled over to stare into her sleeping face.
She must have closed the blinds, which explained why the room was so dark. He usually slept with the blinds open.
Asleep, her features were filled with the innocence that must have been part of her before her life led her to Teddy and prostitution. Asleep and out of that sexy gown, she looked much younger than the age on her ID. If that ID was fake, it was a good one, because the face he was looking at didn’t belong to a legal woman.
She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“It would be nice to know your name,” he said.
“You got a crooked dick,” she said.
“Your name.”
“They call me Cut.”
“Cut?”
“When I was born, my momma said my color was like fine, dark crystal, but she didn’t want to name me Crystal, so she called me Cut.”
She was Cut candy then, he thought. She squirmed under his gaze as he explored her high cheekbones; narrow, delicate chin; and wide, oval eyes that stared back at him.
“My momma was a whore, too, but she was also a crackhead. That’s why I had so much trouble learnin’ in school. I was born a crack baby. They put me in a special class, but it didn’t do no good.”
“Tell me more about your momma,” he said.
“She dead. By the time I was ten, I was in foster homes till my momma’s younger sister came and took me to Chicago, where I turned thirteen.” At the mention of Chicago, the innocence fled from her face and tears filled her eyes.
“What happened in Chicago?” Don asked in a tone of voice that said they were sharing intimate secrets that no one else in the world would ever know.
A pearl of a tear slid out of the corner of one eye and down an ebony cheek to drop on the pillowcase. “At night, my aunt worked as an exotic dancer in a strip joint. That’s when her boyfriend came to my bed …” She started to cry, and Don pulled her into his arms to comfort her. He wondered how long this abuse had gone on.
Her muffled voice continued from the space between his shoulder and neck. “By the time I was seventeen, I’d had enough, so I left. I hitched rides across the country with truckers, and those rides didn’t come free, but they made the next step easy. In Los Angeles, I worked the streets, and, after a few months, a Mexican pimp made me one of his girls. He worked us hard—sometimes five to ten tricks a night for each of us. He carried this photo album around and used it to sell us to mechanics and truck drivers for a fifty-dollar blow job or one hundred to go all the way. Before I turned 19, Teddy found me after one of the tricks beat me and one of my eyes swelled shut. The Mexican said I was damaged goods and sent me back to the streets, but Teddy said he saw somethin’ special in me that would make us both a lot of money from his wealthy clients. He promised me that none of the men I would be with would hit me again. He didn’t say he’d do the hittin’. Teddy started to beat the gutter out of me. He said I wouldn’t be any good for his clients until I had class.”
“And tonight, when he asked you to give someone a blow job—”
“That was goin’ to be my first trick workin’ with Teddy. He lied about it being a gift for a good client. The man told Teddy he’d pay two hundred for a blow job from me, and Teddy told me to crawl under the table and suck it.”
“You don’t have to be a hooker if you don’t want to,” Don said.
“Am I goin’ to be your woman now?”
“That would be against my rules.”
Worry invaded her eyes, as if someone were trying to steal her dreams. “You married or somethin’?”
Don shook his head. “What I am is like a drug addict or alcoholic around women. Until you slipped into my bed, I’d been sexually sober for six months.”
This thinking was a game Don played, just like Giacomo’s off-again, on-again desire to be part of the Catholic Church. In the back of Don’s head, there was this idea that maybe he could purify himself and wash away his perceived sins by being sexually sober and helping abused women.
Cut stared at Don with eyes like pure mountain pools with a look in them that maybe she had met someone she had never met before—a good and kind man—and, knowing this, Don felt like a fraud, because he wanted to touch her, and once his hands found her silky skin, there would be no stopping them.
He sighed. “You may be too young to understand this, but we are products of the world our parents raised us in—a world we had little or no control over.” He reached out to touch her nose with the tip of his index finger, and then stopped an inch away. His hand, as if it had a mind of its own, jerked back, circled, moved closer and then pulled back again— indecisive, tempted.
Don rolled away from her, turned over and sat on the side of the bed. “I’ll cook us something to eat,” he said, and, not bothering to dress, left the bedroom. On the way to the kitchen, he stopped at the thermostat and turned the heat on.
A few minutes later, when he was mixing eggs in a bowl for a mushroom, asparagus and avocado omelet, Cut joined him, also naked. She stood beside him, and, since she was at least a foot shorter than him, rested her head against his shoulder and slipped her right arm around his waist. Right away, he realized he’d made a mistake not putting on at least a pair of shorts, because her touch aroused him. There was no way he could hide it.
“Here,” he said, and handed her the wire whisk. “Keep mixing the eggs. I’m going to put some clothes on and find something for you to wear.”
She looked down, and, before he took the first step, Cut reached out with her free hand and took hold of him. Shit, he thought. I’m a goner. He felt helpless when she led him back to the bedroom.
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