Page 160

Inside, the lobby is bright and clean. We walk almost immediately into a bay of elevators. Emiliano pushes up, and we wait. My foot taps nervously on the tile as I watch the numbers above the doors race to the bottom.

“Just dancing,” I say again, more a reassurance than a question at this point.

“Si, Papacito,” Emiliano replies, less amused with me than the last three times I’ve said it. He turns, puts a hand on my arm. “Look man, if we get up there and it feels weird, you just go. I will go with you if you ask me.”

The elevator dings, and the door slides open.

“Okay,” I say, stepping in beside him. “But I’m not going to ask you.”

Emiliano huffs a laugh. “Good, ’cause I need the money, Papa.”

At the top floor, the view is stupidly beautiful. The ocean is a dark sheet below, broken by lights from boats and buildings. The city climbs and spills in every direction. Candles glow on low tables. A pool reflects the string lights overhead.

Men in loose shirts and expensive sandals stand in clusters with drinks in hand. No rowdy guys looking to impress. No shouts or spills or stumbles that could turn into emergencies.

“See?” Emiliano says. “Easy.”

It does look easy. Just a rooftop full of men turning as Emiliano leads me in. One of them near the hot tub lifts his glass as we walk by, his cheeks red and his eyes all over my everything. I smile back because that is what Papacito does.

Emiliano claps a hand lightly against my shoulder. “Come on. We change over there.”

He points toward a half-open door near the back.

The place they give us to change is not strictly a dressing room. There’s a washer, a dryer, a shelf of folded towels, and three hooks on the wall already holding somebody’s shirt and a pair of tiny black briefs that look more expensive than my actual clothes.

Emiliano tosses his bag onto the dryer.

“Fancy, right?”

“Not the first time I’ve changed next to a mop bucket.”

“See? You’re a natural already.”

He grins and pulls his shirt over his head. I do the same, but slower.

The laundry room door doesn’t latch all the way. Voices drift in from the rooftop more clearly than our hallway at the bar. I pull the neon g-string from my back pocket and stare at it. Ridiculous little thing. Sweaty and twisted. Barely there.

Emiliano clocks my pause. “You good?”

“Yeah.”

He diverts his eyes while I shove out of my shorts and underwear. I step into the g-string, and the fabric snaps against my hip.

“Come,” he says. “Stay close if that helps.”

I give him a smirk, but maybe I’ll keep him in sight.

The rooftop turns toward us again in stages. A glance from the hot tub. A smile from a chair. Two men pausing mid-conversation. Attention moving over me slowly.

I follow Emiliano toward the open space near the pool. He starts easy, letting the music work his hips, laughing at something a man says as if this is a friend’s party and not a job paid in folded bills and suggestive looks.

I try to match him, but I’m not a true dancer. I know how to pose and work angles, but my body never catches the music.

Chin up. Smile easy. Give them Papacito. Or HotnReddy. Not Clint, who is too nervous for this shit.

A man in a linen shirt steps close and tucks a bill into the side of my g-string.

“Guapo,” he says in an American accent at least as terrible as my own.