I caught sight of something on her arms – red marks. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. There were tracks marks on her arms, faint, but there. Was Jessa into drugs? Or was she a cutter like me? Colt had made it perfectly clear there were no drugs allowed in the club, and yet this girl seemed like she was advertising that might not be the case.
Jessa saw me looking, but instead of trying to cover her arms or move them out of my line of sight like I would have, she gave me a smirk, almost like she was enjoying the fact that I was staring at her.
She reached over and grabbed a hair tie out of the glass jar that was sitting on the counter, moving slowly, making sure I got a good view of her arms.
I averted my eyes as she gathered her long hair up into a ponytail and slid the tie around it.
A second later, the lights in the room dimmed, and a slow, sexy song started, its beat pulsing through the club. “Showtime,” Jessa said, and grinned.
Three hours later, I was so exhausted I thought I was going to drop right there in the middle of the club.
I’d been running back and forth to the bar, fetching drinks and filling orders all night. Besides the fact that it was exhausting, it actually hadn’t been that bad. The men definitely didn’t try to hide the fact that they were ogling my body, but with what was going on up the main stage, none of them spent too much time looking at me. Sure, their eyes lingered on my tits and ass as I walked by in my short little skirt, but it was only for a quick beat. While I might have been dressed provocatively, it was all relative. And in this place, I was practically wearing a snowsuit.
Up on stage, beautiful women, much more beautiful than I, danced and gyrated, removing their tops and showing off their gorgeous bodies. They flipped around a pole, showing off their toned legs and abs, their asses jiggling, causing the men to go crazy with appreciation.
I was serving a round of beers to a group of men in business suits when it happened. One of them looked at me and said, “Nice ass, sweetheart. How come you’re not up there, dancing?”
“Jesus, Neal,” one of the other guys at the table said. He shook his head and looked at me. “I’m sorry about Neal. He’s been drinking since lunch, and he’s obviously not in his right mind.”
Neal shrugged, then turned his back to me and started talking to the guy on the other side of him.
“No harm, no foul,” I said to his friend, shrugging. I’d made a pact with myself that I wasn’t going to get worked up over every dumb comment some drunk guy made. There were men drinking here, men celebrating, men getting horny and worked up without any kind of release. You could practically smell the testosterone pumping through the room.
“No, he’s…” The man motioned me closer, like he wanted to tell me something in confidence. “He’s not my friend. I just work with him.” He smiled at me. “Sorry, is it weird that I felt the need to point that out? I just didn’t want you to think I’d hang out with a guy like that.”
“No problem,” I said. “If we were all assumed to be friends with our co-workers, we’d all have a lot of explaining to do.” The words had just come out of me, my default whenever someone said something to me about friends or family. I tended to just agree with them, mostly because I had no friends or family, and so going along with whatever people said made me feel less awkward.
He held out a twenty-dollar bill to me. “Here,” he said, looking kind of sheepish. “You know, to make up for it.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. “I mean, it’s not your fault.” It wasn’t necessary, but I was hoping he was going to insist. I wasn’t doing this job for the money – if Colt was going to help me find Declan, if he did find Declan, that would be worth more than all the money in the world. But the thought of making twenty dollars just for walking some beers over from the bar was kind of blowing my mind, especially when I currently had eight dollars to my name.
“Go ahead, take it,” the guy said, pushing the bill into my hand. “It’ll make me feel better.”
“Thanks.” I took the money and slid it into the tip cup that was sitting on my tray.
“What’s your name?” the guy asked.
“Olivia,” I replied, before realizing it probably wasn’t a good idea to use your real name when you worked at a strip club. Wasn’t that why all the girls here used names like Diamond and Kat?