MURRY
“Goddess, I love a day when I don’t have to move,” I moaned, stretching until my t-shirt rode up and revealed my abs, which, of course, Raleigh decided to tickle until I was wiggling around, giggling so hard I nearly fell off the couch.
He saved me from banging my head on the coffee table and landing on the floor by hauling me close and clinging to me until I got my squirminess under control. One thing I never had to worry about was him letting anything bad happen to me, even when we were roughhousing and goofing around. He protected me even at his own expense, which sucked sometimes, because out of the two of us, I was the one who knew how to fight, while he was the one with the size, look, and attitude to come off like a badass.
For more than half of our lives we’d watched out for one another, almost from the very moment we’d met in the group home we were living in. Just two kids kicking around the system for reasons beyond our control. It sucked because the staff was always busy in places like that, which made it hard to feel like you mattered to anyone. For someone like me, who’d grown upin a loving, nurturing, laughter-filled home until my Gram had passed away, it was sheer misery.
It had been different for Raleigh and not something he liked to talk about. I hated that for him. Beneath the snark, leather, and ever-present resting bitch face lay the softest, sweetest soul I’d ever met. Someday, I hoped we’d be in a place where it was safe for him to show that side of himself whenever he wanted. For now, I got to enjoy having it all to myself in the safety of our apartment, where nothing and no one could touch us or wreck the soft vibes he put out when it was just us.
“Unfortunately, I do have to move, or things will get messy in a way neither of us will like,” he murmured, leaning to kiss me on the forehead before turning me loose so he could get up. “Want me to pull something out of the freezer to thaw, or would you prefer if we ordered in tonight?”
Groaning, I grabbed one of the couch cushions and pressed it to my face, because I didn’t know what I wanted, except to not have to move.
“I’ll grab the takeout menus on the way back from the bathroom,” he declared, chuckling as he left the room.
One of the many reasons I loved him was his ability to take decisions out of my hands when I wasn’t in the mood to make them. Sometimes I worried that I relied on him too much for things like that, but he was always the first to tell me that he didn’t mind choosing for both of us if it got us what we needed. Tonight, not having to do anything but shovel food in my mouth, and his, was the extent of the effort I wanted to put towards anything. He’d even chosenThe Fast and the Furiousfor us to binge, so all we had to do was lounge around and letthe streaming service move from one movie to the next until we were too tired to keep our eyes open.
Gods I loved days like this.
We were watching Fast & Furious, the fourth movie in the franchise, with a badass car race unfolding on the screen when Raleigh strode back into the room with the collection of menus we’d gathered from all our favorite places to eat.
“Finger foods will probably be our best bet,” he murmured, sorting them on the coffee table while I stretched my feet out across his lap. “But you’ll have to sit up, regardless, so no lying there thinking I’m going to pop a shrimp in your mouth.”
“Evil.”
“You won’t be saying that if you wind up choking because you’re trying to eat while lying down.”
“I won’t be saying anything because I’ll be choking,” I mused, though now that he’d mentioned shrimp, I actually had some thoughts to contribute towards our order.
“Can we get shrimp two ways with a side order of clam strips, calamari, fried scallops, and frog legs?” I asked, perking up a bit.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” he replied, paper rustling as he pawed through them until he found the menu forTaste of the Sea, the seafood place three blocks away.
We probably ordered from them more than anywhere else, outside of the sushi place up the block from where we worked. Talk about melt-in-your-mouth, picture-perfect sushi, scrumptious, oh holy shit, they were so good. The best part was that we’d been customers so long they had no problem delivering to whoever was manning the door of the club, whoalways put it in the mini-fridge below the bar, so it stayed fresh for us until we finished dancing.
If there was one good thing about having worked for the club as long as we had, it was that the rest of the long-term staff there felt like family. We had each other’s backs, lent an ear when one of us needed to talk, and celebrated each other’s birthdays and milestones, like when Benji got his associate’s degree in broadcast journalism, all without winding up with any student debt, since he’d paid for his classes with the money he’d made dancing.
People could say what they wanted to about us, but we weren’t sex workers; we didn’t earn our tips by giving clients extras when they came to the club; we were dancers who happened to end our performances wearing the least amount of clothing legally possible. The only thrills we promised were visual ones and the occasional brush of fingertips when someone stuffed a bill in our G-strings. Personally, I preferred when they just made it rain, especially the bachelor party set that showed up, showed out, and showered off with dollar bill guns loaded to the max. It was guys like the one we dealt with last night that made me hate what we did and the way other people saw us. Which made me think about the card Phoenix had handed back to me last night, which was currently resting in my wallet.
While I listened to Raleigh call in our order, I began to wonder if we didn’t need to make another call before our food arrived, just to see if this Dorian the designer had time in his schedule to meet with us sometime this week.
“Alright,” Raleigh said when he got off the phone, “They said it should be here in about twenty-five minutes.”
“Think that’s enough time to call the number on the card and see if we can set up a meeting with Mr. Dorian?” I asked.
When Raleigh sucked in a breath and then followed it up with a long sigh, I realized that he was still on the fence about the whole thing. So maybe we didn’t have enough time to slip that call in, but there was probably enough time to start getting to the root of why he was so hesitant about it.
“Alright, spill,” I declared, reluctantly sitting up and shifting around until I could lay my head on his shoulder. “What are your reservations about modeling for him?”
Another sigh. This one I recognized as his giveme a minute; I’m feeling self-conscious,one.He knew he didn’t have to feel that way with me, that I’d never judge him or his feelings. The problem with Raleigh was that he was his own harshest critic, and sometimes that meant that he talked himself out of doing things he wanted to do, simply because he didn’t think he’d fit in.
“I just—we don’t know fuck-all about modeling. What if we start screwing up right from the jump and he decides that we wouldn’t be a good fit to work with him? I’m just afraid of us getting our hopes up that this will be a chance to make some real changes in our lives. Like, I don’t want to still be stripping in five more years when we hit thirty. I don’t even want to be stripping in three more years because that will mean we’ve been doing this for a decade, which kind of means it’s turned into a career. Neither of us has any skills, so our bodies are the only way we’ve been able to make a comfortable living, but damn if it isn’t starting to get old to be groped and grabbed and talked to like we’re not people and don’t have feelings.”
I hugged him and nuzzled his neck, the feel of his heart thumping beneath my hand was a sure sign that he was starting to get anxious just discussing the possibilities.
“Then maybe it’s time for us to start taking chances, real ones, like giving this whole modeling thing a go,” I replied. “I doubt he’d have asked us if he was worried about whether or not we could handle it. What if modeling pet gear for him is our big break and we decide not to take it? We’ll never know what the possibilities were because we were too afraid.”
“Stuff like that doesn’t happen to people like us,” Raleigh muttered, covering the hand I held over his heart with his much larger one.
