No, that was not something you forgot, especially with the roar of motorcycles being the norm whenever I was in town. But I did my best to get on with things since the club, Hades and his demigod brethren were definitely trouble, and trouble was not what I needed. Trouble was the one thing I was staying away from.
It was supposed to be a fresh start, this town. Somewhere Sirius and I would be able to put down roots after years of drifting from state to state like a fucking tumbleweed. And I liked it here. Loved it. I adored my little house in the desert, liked the fact that Julian at the coffee shop already knew my name, my order and my weakness for almond croissants. And there was the fact he was Australian, so he knew how to make coffee that was “nothing like that dirty water you Yanks drink”. On top of that, it was the nectar of the gods and something similar to liquid cocaine. Since I hadn’t done cocaine or any other kind of drug in five years, I was glad to have something that almost measured up to it since I worked long hours and didn’t sleep often. Hence me having a slight cocaine problem five years ago. Well, it had started when one of the girls at the first club I’d worked at had given it to me when I started having a panic attack about going on stage.
It had helped.
A whole fucking lot.
It helped me take my clothes off in front of strangers and made the reality of what I was doing somewhat softer, less sordid, less humiliating. I was struggling with a lot of other crap then that made me uncomfortable in my own skin, made me clothed in self-hatred no matter whether I was dancing naked on a pole or not.
Now that I was clean—well, I still drank wine and tequila because I wasn’t that well-adjusted—and I had gone to a therapist to unpack all of my issues, I could get up on stage sober. I could dance, I could take my clothes off and I could give sleazebags lap dances while feeling okay about myself. Good even. Powerful. I knew that my job wasn’t what a lot of people in polite society thought to be acceptable, but a crap-ton of people from ‘polite society’ were also clients who needed an escape from the stifling confines of societal rules.
Two years ago, on a whim, I’d started a YouTube channel for no other reason than I wanted to share my experiences working as a stripper and because I wanted some kind of creative outlet. I hadn’t expected to make a cent from it, but I’d done it right because that’s just how I worked. I took an online course on filming, branding and editing. I spent a small fortune on a fancy camera and lighting then arranged an aesthetically pleasing background that suited my ‘brand’: a neon sign of a naked woman’s outline dancing on a pole, a bookcase full of steamy, feminist romance books and a rack of the outfits I wore on stage.
I filmed ten videos before uploading a single one. Then I created a schedule and truly started. I talked about my favorite makeup that lasted through the night. How to get the perfect bikini line shave. My favorite perfumes. How stripping on my period always got me the most tips, because despite what they said about the act of menstruation being dirty and forbidden, some carnal part of them loved the fucking smell of blood against expensive perfume.
The title of my channel was ‘Stripping Stripped.’
I had five thousand subscribers my first month, ten the month later. Now I was at almost half a million. I made good money off my videos. Uploading one every Wednesday, without fail, I earned thousands a month without any sponsorship. I talked a lot about sex, taking care of intimate parts of your body, how to be safe in the industry. I also did interviews with sex workers, cam girls and porn stars. So yeah, I was doing pretty fucking well.
I was proud of myself. I came from nothing, wasn’t educated enough to go to college and I was full of emotional holes, so I used what I had. Now I earned more in a year than most fucking doctors. My car was paid off, and I bought my house with a fifty percent deposit. I invested in cryptocurrency because I knew that my body would inevitably start to sag, then I wouldn’t be able to strip any longer. Or before that happened I wouldn’t want to strip any longer. And eventually, I wouldn’t be hot anymore, my subscribers would get bored with me or I’d get tired of doing videos around the same time my body started to sag.