“Pretty much. I knew my situation was better than most. I have a lot of freedom compared to others. I don’t have anyone forcing me into sex work except myself. I can stand up for myself, too. For some reason, I never thought about what I was doing. There are some sick fucks out there in the world. It’s hard to avoid them in this line of work. But I brought them out, spoiled them with the ability to live out their sickest fantasies, and now they’ve gotten brave.”
“Brave enough to take a chance on other guys.”
I nodded. “Guys who don’t have the choice I do. Give out enough money, sell enough drugs, make enough demands, and whoever’s in charge will let you do anything to them. Anything just shy of killing them.”
Price let out a long, shaky breath. “Fuck, I hate people.”
“You and me both.” I picked at my jacket sleeve, remembering how, less than an hour ago I had been ready to punish myself. Now, I had more of a reason to once Price left. “I was so naive. I don’t talk to anyone else, don’t make friends, or idle chit-chat. I knew that would piss a lot of people off. But I didn’t think about how my positive reinforcement of violence would hurt them. I fucked up, Price. I deserved this.”
The knife Price was holding clattered against the cutting board as he whirled around. “No,” he urged, his voice firm. “You don’t deserve to get beaten up for something completely out of your control. Whether you agree or not, you didn’tmakethose sick excuses for humans do all that shit.”
I tried and failed to hide the shock on my face. He was being serious, desperately trying to defend me when there wasn’t a reason to. When Iopened my mouth to protest, or perhaps beg him to stop rationalizing something irrational, he cut me off.
“Don’t start, Crew. The other sex workers need an outlet to deal with their daily lives, and they chose you. They don’t know you. They don’t understand you. They can’t blame someone else because they’re wrapped up in a circle with them, so they chose to blame you instead.”
I planted my face into my palms, struggling to believe what he was saying. “Their lives are shittier than mine. I don’t belong in their world; I just exist in it. They’re protecting their territory, which I infringed on and utterly screwed up.”
A full-body flinch wracked me when Price placed a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t want to look at him, afraid he’d see the vulnerability in my eyes.
Fortunately, or maybeunfortunately, he took the decision away from me. He carefully pried my hands away from my face and grabbed my chin, tilting it until I was looking directly at him. “You don’t simply just exist anywhere, Pretty Boy. You aren’t supposed to fight for space in the world you live in.”
His words and the sincerity I saw in his eyes when he said them slammed into my chest without mercy. Something warm and unfamiliar encased my heart, pulsing in time with its beats, encouraging it to continue. How long had it been since I’d wanted the life that flowed in my veins?
Price released me, turning around to busy himself with the meal he was making like nothing happened, as if he hadn’t just rocked my world with something as simple as a sentence.
We sat in equal silence, Price cooking up a storm while I watched. I hadn’t seen him fully immerse himself like this before. Everything he did was practiced, his movements on autopilot as muscle memory led him. I couldn’t deny my attraction when I caught glimpses of his side profile. His face was etched with concentration, a lightness to his features I’d never seen before.
Working with him was easy enough. Since I had taken over a small percentage of his usual workload, he was able to focus on the staff more. It was rare that we were alone together.
Price spoke up again after a while, his hands focused on cutting thedough he’d prepared into thin, uniform strips. I still wasn’t sure what he was making. “Did you go there to work?”
“What?”
“Were you going to sell your body tonight, Crew?”
I blinked a few times, willing my temper to stay down. My immediate reaction was to fight and argue and ask him why he had such little faith in me. I pushed it all away, though, when I thought about how it might’ve looked from his point of view.
“No,” I answered plainly.
He never stopped slicing, his attention solely on the dough. “Why were you there, then?”
Defensiveness was an ugly thing. It crawled up my throat, burning on its way out of my mouth. “You wanna keep me in check? Make sure I stick to our deal? Be my guest. But you better be prepared to answer the same question because you were there, too.”
He slowly added the strips of dough—noodles, from what I could tell—into a pot of boiling water. A curt nod was his only response for a beat, the sound of simmering food from a separate pan filling the silence.
“You’re right,” he began. “I was there, too. Thank fuck I was. I wasn’t there to pick anyone up, though. I just wanted it to stop, and I had wrongly hoped driving around my usual places would help.”
I tilted my head, watching the back of his as he worked. “Wanted what to stop?”
Price’s shoulders tensed slightly before dropping lower than before. He rolled his long sleeves up, revealing beautifully tanned skin covered with ink I admired from afar. “My head.” A long, defeated sigh left him as he stirred the pot on the stove. “My head is a mess, Crew. I don’t want to admit that, but I will.”
“Oh.” I shrank inside of myself, wanting to hide from my earlier miscalculation.
“Yeah.”
The silence that followed felt awkward. I made it that way. I didn’t answer Price’s question, unsure of how to respond without telling him I was the same. No one knew just how fucked up my head was, not even Willow.
Price’s confession shocked me, as I was sure he could tell. He alwaysseemed so put together and stubborn. Price was a man who stuck to his guns more often than not, seemingly unmovable even during the shittiest windstorm. I’d seen him stressed out because of work, yet he always figured it out. Everyone seemed to count on Price to find a solution, so to hear him sound dejected and admit to weakness was startling.
