18

Cadence

I let him buy me the dress.
It was only fair since I paid for his clothes, but it was tough. It’s been a long time since a man bought me a present and usually it came with expectations.
I love the dress, even though I don’t tell him how much. It’s pale green with leaves and pink flowers, and made of a gauzy fabric that skims my curves and ties at the neck leaving my shoulders bare while dipping down between my breasts.
“That one,” Max says as soon as I stepped out of the cubicle.
I like the way he looks at me when I’m wearing it.
I like the way he looks at me, period.
Which is why I gave him a peek.
It took me years to drop the skin-tight cleavage-showing outfits and stop dressing like I get paid for an hour of pleasure.
Sixteen months. I was an escort for all of sixteen months, and that is still how I define myself.
Max has done a great job of ensuring I know there are no expectations about this weekend. I don’t have to have sex with him in return for him covering for me with the police.
Instead, I’m doing him a favour. A friendly one. We’re going to the wedding as friends.
New friends, but just friends.
Unless, of course, I may be interested in being more than a friend, and Max has done a very good job of making sure I know he’d be very interested.
Basically, he’s making it my choice. He’s giving me a choice, and that means more to me than he can imagine.
After three years of stripping and giving lap dances and hand jobs in the back room, I was making close to a thousand dollars a night.
Paolo, the owner of the Spider’s Den, took forty percent of anything I made at the club, and he encouraged such behaviour. He wanted us to make the customers happy.
I saved everything I could, but it was never enough. My stepfather was out of work and drinking heavily. Noelle and Christian, my half-siblings, were in grade one and needed new clothes, backpacks, shoes, and someone to pick them up and watch them after school. Even running on a few hours of sleep, I managed the morning shift—getting them dressed and fed and dropped off at school. But my shifts started at three and Bruce couldn’t be trusted to pull himself from a bottle to see that his own children got home from school.
I paid for Winnie, a grandmother who lived a few streets away, to pick up the twins from school every day. She watched them on the weekends when Bruce was too drunk to keep them from hurting themselves.
So when one of my regulars asked me how much to meet him for an hour, I refused because I wasn’t giving Paolo money for that.
But then I went back to him and gave him a price, and told him no one at the club could know or the price would double. Selling myself was my decision, but I never felt like I had a real choice.

The money helped with the shame, but there was always that voice in my head reminding me how, if my mother was alive, she would be so disappointed in me.
I shut up the voice by telling it that none of this would be happening if my mother could have stayed alive.
But even though Max is being pretty great, I still refuse his offer for lunch. Instead, he drops me at my house with strict instructions to pack as many bikinis as I can and to be ready in an hour.
I can’t believe I’m going away with him.

The house is locked but security has been disengaged so I know Tatiana and Travis are there.
Novi insisted that I buy the house. It had been when I was still dancing, and working on the side, but moving things along with the website. I owned three clubs by then, also on Novi’s advice, but had been living in an apartment, in a sketchy building in a not-great area.
“This is not safe,” Novi tells me during one of our dinners. “I want you safe.”
The next day, a real estate agent contacted me, and showed me four houses. I couldn’t afford any of them, but Novi lent me the money and persuaded me to choose this one.
I love the house—four bedrooms, five baths, with a fully finished basement that I made into my office—but I spent a very lonely year hiding from the neighbours so they wouldn’t find out that I worked as an escort when I wasn’t stripping.
And then I met Malcolm, and it got better.
I’d love to run across the yard to talk to him, but he’s away for a few days with his new girlfriend, Nia. I’m happy for him, but it’s a change that I haven’t gotten used to yet.
Now that Nia is in the picture, I no longer have free access to Malcolm’s life. I would let myself into his house after a tough day and make him dinner. Sometimes I’d stay the night.
Malcolm is the only person I really can be myself with. He’s still in my life but Nia is there, too, and Malcolm will pick her every time. It’s not the sleep-overs that I miss, but having someone always on my side.
“Cadence?” Tatiana’s voice drifts up the stairs as I kick off my shoes. Tatiana is always on my side, but I pay her to be.
“I’m back, but not for long,” I call down.
“What’s going—?” She halts at the top of the staircase, gaping at me. “You went shopping? You never go shopping.”
Tatiana started working as my assistant the year I quit stripping. I had been twenty-four, focused on making money. She had been a single mother of three kids and needed something that got her home at a decent hour to make sure they did their homework.
Eight years later, I’ve helped send two of the three to university and Tatiana is indispensable to me.
I also introduced her to her husband, Travis, so she owes me.
I set the bags by the door. “It’s a long story.”
“One that you better get telling me.” She comes toward me. “Hon, you look exhausted.”
“It’s been a day,” I tell her, rubbing my eyes. “And it’s only begun. How are things here?”
Instead of giving her usual succinct report, Tatiana hugs me—throws her arms around me without warning. And even though I stiffen, it doesn’t take long to sink into her embrace.
“I’m sorry about Novi,” she says into my hair. “How are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, pulling away even though I want nothing more than to stay right where I am. I don’t get hugged very often, but Tatiana gives good ones. “It’s…” I shake my head to clear the worry and confusion. And the uncertainty. “I don’t know.”
Tonic, one of my two cats, pads down the stairs. I pick him up.
“And Tate’s kids contacted you?” Moment over. Tatiana is back to all business.
My phone is already in my hand and I scroll through the series of texts to show her.
“There’s not much we can do about this.” She hands it back. “Tell me how things went with Maximilian Stonee?”
I jerk my head at the shopping bag. “He bought me a dress.”