Which begs the question—what placeisthere for me? The one my best friend from high school ended up in? Teenaged, pregnant, forced to marry her creepy baby daddy?
No thanks. I don’t even need to ask because I know that was exactly the world my mother and everyone else in our church community thinks is idealfor a nice girl like me.
“Mom, I gotta go—”
“Sweetheart, if you’re going to be a cleaning woman, at least come home and do it here. I am sure Pastor Sandy can give you work down at the church. In fact, he was asking about you just the other day. How about when you come home for the weekend, we have him over for a nice family barbecue?”
Ugh. Sandy Rollins. He’d been a few years ahead of me in school. Always a simpering little tattletale, prone to crying at the smallest slight. But he’d earned some sort of theology degree from a fly-by-night college, which was good enough for the local parish, which then hired him as a ‘youth pastor.’
He took the church’s pre-teens and teens on camping trips, organized basketball tournaments, and preached the benefits of keeping one’s soul clean.
Even while grabbing my ass every chance he could get.
I knew the type. Jerked off to the nastiest porn he could find, then dropped to his knees to ask God for forgiveness. Later, smug in the knowledge that his soul was clean, he’d just go out and do it again.
That’s the worst kind of sinner, if you ask me. The hypocrisy is crushing. I mean, I see some crazy stuff in the club, but at least those people aren’t pretending to be holy rollers. They might be sinners—who am I to judge?—but they don’t spend their days and nights telling young girls to wear longer skirts and boys to keep their hands off their uncontrollable erections.
So a barbecue with that creep? Hell to the no. But I have to tread lightly. “I don’t know about that, Mom. You know I’m not a big fan.”
She sucks in a sharp breath, her ‘godly’ way of letting me know she’s ‘disappointed’ in me. “Well. I’ll let you get to work now. Have a blessed day, Lucinda,” she says curtly.
Click.
There was a time when her hanging up in my ear, like she just had, would have caused me no end of anxiety, borne out of the guilt of not being a perfect daughter. But now, it just relieves me. It buys me some time before the next Mom intervention. And yes, there’ll be another one. There always is.
I wait across the street from the club to catch my breath before going in, still abundantly early thanks to my obsession with timeliness. As I do, I watch a man enter. I’ve seen him before, but only from a distance. He moves with such confidence and authority, I wonder exactly who he is. In fact, just looking at him makes me shake even though I’m hiding out in the street corner shadow, hastily disguised with my hair tucked down the back of my hoodie and the drawstring pulled tight around my face. He doesn’t see me. None of these people do. But I see them. I watch them. I can’t help it.
He’s handsome. Of course. It seems like a requirement of the club that members be generally good-looking, although I’ve seen exceptions to that rule if one has enough money. I don’t know how something like that is even legal, but heck, the stuff they do here, if it’s not against the law, is surely immoral on some level.
Naturally, Mom has no idea about that part. Nor does my father, nor the creep Sandy. And they never will. All they know is that I am the cleaning woman for a private club. They have no clue I pick up after people who do all manner of intimate, adult,sexualthings in the privacy of the club’s rooms. And there are a lot of rooms. So many that I am busy from the moment my shift starts to the moment I clock out. Which is just as well. I don’t really want to think too hard about what I am doing.
The man disappears into the club, the imposing security door seemingly having sucked him inside. I take my time crossing the street, regardless, in order to let him get where he’s going. If my path crosses his, I might be obligated to say hello. I don’t want that. I don’t want him to see me, acknowledge me, or even know that I am alive. I am part of the behind-the-scenes nobodies who keep the club up to its exquisite standards, which then keeps memberships elusive and expensive. The three E’s, as my boss likes to remind me.
I shouldn’t want to know his name. I shouldn’t want to know where he lives. I shouldn’t want to know what he does for a living, nor why he comes to the club.
Except that I do.
I’m curious. Nosy, some might say. It’s true. When I hear the cries, moans, laughter, and screams escaping the club rooms, my heart rate picks up. Sometimes I even get a little breathless. For a moment, I’m not thinking about what I’ll have to clean up after the people are done but what they are doing until that time. All thoseimmoralthings.
And of course, I feel somethingdown there.
It’s a funny feeling, one I’ve not experienced much, but the strange pressure that builds, a combination of having to pee and something else I don’t have words for, electrifies me. I can’t deny it. Once, I even ducked into the storage closet for a moment to myself. I started to slip my hand down my panties, the tidy white cotton ones my mom’s been buying me all my life, but I stopped.
I would wait. For what, I wasn’t sure. But I’d know when the time was right.
Does that make me as bad as the people at the club?
I hope so.
* * *
CHAPTERTWO
LUCI
“How’s it going, Luci?”
Wow. She must be in a good mood. More often than not, my boss, Gwen, is on the warpath and it’s peons like me who have to take her guff. But the times I’ve seen her slip into one or another of the club rooms for a while with someone for some ‘private time,’ which I think she’s not supposed to, she emerges pretty darn happy. And her good mood lasts all day. Maybe today is one of those days.