“It wasn’t anything special.” She said, clearing her throat and flipping her stringy brown hair behind her. “We knew each other in high school. We went out a couple times and one night his parents weren’t home and we did it in his bed.”
I looked at Velvet, tilting my head to the right and smirking at her. Squeezing her hand just a little I pulled her forward and whispered.
“You know I don’t believe you.”
Her eyes blinked and shifted nervously.
“It’s the truth.” She said defiantly.
“I don’t think you’d know the truth if it came up and slapped you upside the head.” My hand found its way to the side of her skull where I had to crack her a little forcefully. “Now, let’s try this again.”
I peeled off another twenty dollars and laid it on the floor on top of the other one. Velvet swallowed and began her tale of woe.
As I had guessed, she had been molested when she was ten or eleven by her mother’s boyfriend. He would slither into her room at night while the old lady was sleeping. This vile piece of shit got at her a couple times a week for a couple of years. She was over eighteen now.
“So, your dreams of becoming a lawyer or a doctor were pretty much blown.” I interrupted her tale.
“I didn’t want to be a doctor or a…”
“What did you want to be, when you were a kid? I don’t think you grew up wanting to be a strung out twenty-dollar hooker?” I said, chuckling just a little.
Her eyes began to water. She didn’t speak.
“Tell me. What would you do if you saw your mother’s boyfriend now? Now that you aren’t a little girl anymore?”
She shrugged her shoulders. I guess Velvet didn’t have much of an imagination. Some girls go crazy when I ask them what they’d do to the blokes who put them on this path. They scream and cry and talk about ripping balls off and watching them choke on their own gore and whew…enough to make a civilized boy like me blush.
Velvet was a little different.
“Did you love him?” I asked her. That was the million dollar question. The water works really started then. It was a riot.
“So, Velvet, tell me. How many men have you been with since you started this lucrative career in the world’s oldest profession.
“Dozens.” She whimpered. “Look. Is this all we are going to do because I’m tired of playing twenty questions. If you need your rocks off then let’s get started but I’m not…”
I peeled off another twenty and another and another. She stopped and just watched. How long had it been since she saw more than one twenty dollar bill in front of her? I really could wipe my own ass with these and never miss t
hem. Velvet, on the other hand would happy to take those shit covered bills.
“How many guys have you been with since you hit the streets?”
“Dozens?”
“Over a hundred?”
“Maybe.”
“And what did you do?”
Now this was interesting to watch. At first, Velvet shrugged her shoulders and looked at me as if she had never seen someone so dumb in their life.
“It really isn’t that hard to figure out, pal. You must be a trust fund baby because if you don’t know…”
I smiled. I had to admire her spunk. Normally, I would have slapped her silly for getting smart with me but I take the blame for the way I phrased the question. This one needed a little more instruction in order to give me what I wanted.
“No. Tell me what they did to you. The ones you remember the most. What did they do to you?”
There was no far off dreamy look in her eyes about a simple john who found her every Thursday on his way home from driving a big rig. And crazy as it may sound no millionaires paying her for a week of doing nothing but putting out. Shocking, I know.