Pulling my phone from my purse, I did everything short of crossing my fingers and toes, in the hope that Shane had texted me. Needing any type of confirmation that he was okay or surviving without our laundry and lunch days, I looked at my phone, he still hadn’t texted me . . . not once in the six days. Maybe he was done with me. If I had to guess, I was just too complicated for him.
It was probably better that Shane never called me, it made it a little easier to move on from our friendship. Obviously, he didn’t have a problem letting go of whatever we had. Yeah, it was better. Besides, I really didn’t need to deal with the extra pressure.
There were several conferences that had come to San Francisco over the weekend. When I had to pull extra tricks on my six squares, knowing Shane didn’t want anything to do with me made it an easier pill to swallow, so to speak.
Sybil and I had worked it systematically and raked in some good money with a handful of extra suck and plucks from the Chinese Plastics and Paints Conference on Friday and Saturday and the politicians from the Clean Energy Summit on Sunday and Monday. We had four busy nights and it gave us a nice little stack of cash we hid under our mattresses.
Okay, so what if I had used the fact that Shane didn’t call me as motivation to make as much money as possible. I just took all my feelings for him and stuffed them into the emotional vault I had buried deep in my body. It was the same space where I hid every other fucked up situation that shaped who I was. I’d been trained by circumstances to be the girl that looked like she didn’t give a fuck. I’d been down that road so many times . . . I knew where every crack, bump and pothole was and the damage each one did when I didn’t steer clear.
The problem was, even though I threw myself into my work over the weekend, it really didn’t help as much as I thought it would have. Like they say, appearances can be deceiving, and boy did I deceive everyone when it came to Shane, especially myself.
Ever since Shane and I had begun spending so much time together it had become harder and harder to do my job. I used to take on anyone without a second thought, I’d strip my mind of any emotion and work the dates into doing whatever the hell I wanted them to do. I could fuck and play into their kinky fetishes because I was damn good at turning the whole thing into a game in my mind.
But now the minute these fucks went to town doing their business, my mind collapsed into the images of Shane shaking his head. His eyes burned through my skin and left scars of shame for being with men who didn’t love me. Guilt flooded my body, yeah the one emotion I’d always kept an arm’s length away. But, now, trick after trick, all I could think about was Shane. I wished it was his hands that touched me and his lips which kissed me and his tongue that traced perfectly scrumptious lines on my body.
Without a doubt, love would kill this profession for a girl. The worst thing any prostitute could ever do was fall in love. It didn’t matter if you got tons of money for your pussy or pennies on the dollar; love was like a poison that slowly seeped into your veins and hijacked your heart, eventually, it killed any ability you thought you had to spread your legs for anyone but him.
Thursday, the day Shane and I usually did our laundry, together. Different thoughts rolled through my head. Should I just go into the laundromat and tell him I was sorry I was so complicated? Fuck it . . . maybe I’d just drop the bomb on him that I was a prostitute. Why not risk losing him for good? At least it would’ve been done and over.
Six days, and he still hadn’t called. This routine was familiar, the pain that stabbed at my heart, and the breaths I wasn’t able to catch when I thought about him. Never wanting six days of space, I didn’t sign up to fall in love with him. Sybil warned me; she told me to walk away. Why didn’t I listen? I just needed to move on.
THE PROBLEM WITH trying to move on, was the moment you decided to do it . . . it became the only thing you could focus on. All I’d done was think about Shane. If I wasn’t wondering what he was doing, I wanted to know if he missed me and our conversations. Every flower stand I passed made me think of him. Every time I threw my dirty clothes into the hamper . . . I thought about him. Even brushing my teeth, somehow he’d enter my thoughts. I had lost any handle I had on controlling how much I thought about him and it had become fucking annoying. It seemed like everything I did was born from the thought of Shane.