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AS I MADE MY WAY UP the street and back towards my place, I glanced over my shoulder. I wanted to make sure nobody was following me, especially not Roger, after the scene he had caused in the club. I doubted he would try to catch up with me after everything that had happened. Hopefully, he had just slunk off after Andreas had given him the brush-off, but you never knew when it came to people like that.
Besides, I had more than just him to worry about this time around. The amount of money Andreas had handed me – I hadn’t been able to count it all yet, but I knew it was a lot – would have given anyone reason to follow me home in the hopes of getting their hands on some of it themselves. I couldn’t believe it when he pulled out that stack of cash and laid it in front of me for me to take, wondered if he was joking, but clearly, he had no intention of backing down. I had taken it before he’d had a chance to change his mind.
He knew he wasn’t meant to be paying me for any of this, right? He knew I was doing this to settle my father’s debt? Either way, I wasn’t about to let that kind of money go to waste, not when I could take advantage of it. Just from the weight of it in my bra, I knew it would be more than I had ever made in tips there, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why he had agreed to hand that over without so much as a complaint.
Maybe it had something to do with the show I had put on for him in his office. I wasn’t sure what had come over me, but it had just seemed like the right thing to do in that instant – get naked, show him there was nothing that I was keeping from him, even though he seemed so certain I was hiding something.
It had come so easily to me that it had caught me a little off-guard, to be honest. I had never thought of myself as the kind of girl who would be willing to get naked just like that, but as soon as he had doubted me, I knew I had to prove myself to him. I knew I had to keep proving to him that he could trust me, even though he seemed like he didn’t care for me one little bit.
I had never gotten that naked in front of someone before. Not really. Not under those circumstances, at least. I had promised myself a million times over that I would never let myself take my clothes off at that club, but I supposed these were exceptional circumstances – I had just been doing what I could to show him he could trust me.
Or at least, that’s what I had to keep telling myself. Because in all honesty, the other option – that I had just wanted to get naked in front of this random man – was too much for me to wrap my head around.
I could still feel the way his eyes had bored into me when he had been looking at me, as though he wanted to take a bite out of me or something. And, more than that, I could remember how much I liked it, how much I enjoyed his focus on my body, as though he was addicted to me and didn’t care who knew it.
Was that why he had intervened with Roger, instead of sending over security to do it for him? Honestly, none of it made much sense to me, but perhaps it wasn’t for me to make sense of – the best I could do was let go of any semblance of control, and admit that this was something I just had to roll with if I was going to make it through.
My father would have been furious. Which was exactly why he wasn’t going to find out. I was going to hide this money and stuff it in the till over the course of the next few weeks when he was out, to make him think we had a little more custom than normal. No way was I going to tell him I had stripped down to my underwear in front of my boss, and he had handed over a few hundred dollar bills as a result. He would lose his shit, and the last thing we needed was to make more trouble between the two of us. Like we didn’t have enough of that going in the first place.
I unlocked the door and crept upstairs, hoping my dad would be asleep already. I always felt like I was doing something wrong when I came up late like this, and the best I could hope for was that he just didn’t hear me and managed to forget what I was doing on these nights that I was away from the house. Now that he had actually been confronted by Andreas, I was sure it would have become all the more real to him, and I just had to hope the two of them never came into contact with each other again.
I took off my clothes and washed up quickly in the sink, hiding the money in my bedside table before I slipped under the covers. My dad’s room was right opposite mine, and I knew if I turned the lights on, he would wake up. He never slept deeply, not since we had lost Mom, and sometimes, I wondered if it was because he couldn’t properly rest without her there beside him.
I wanted to count the cash Andreas had given me, but I decided to leave it until tomorrow. All I needed to know was that it was a lot, a whole fucking lot of money, and that it would make a difference in the store for the next couple of weeks. I just had to sneak it into rotation so my father wouldn’t notice, and the two of us might actually catch a break for once.
Was he going to pay me every time I was in the club? I doubted it. That wasn’t what our agreement had been, after all, and I couldn’t see him going out of his way to be generous to me. So why tonight? Why had he chosen tonight...?
I knew the answer to that. I had taken my clothes off in front of him, the same way he had asked me to the first night we had met. I had refused him then, sure that I was too good for that, but now, I had proved that I would pretty much do anything he wanted me to. And he would get what he wanted from me, no matter how much I had pushed back against it before.
I couldn’t believe I had let that happen, I really couldn’t. My heart was pounding just thinking about it, thinking about how I had undone my dress and let it fall away. And then, I had been willing to go further, to get completely naked in front of him, but...
But he had stopped me. That was the part I wasn’t sure made sense. Why had he stopped me? Maybe he felt like he had seen enough, that he didn’t need to look at any more of me to know he had won in this game, but that didn’t seem like it made a lot of sense for the way he had been acting so far. Maybe... maybe he didn’t like what he saw, and he didn’t want to subject himself to having to look at any more of me.
Yeah, that would make more sense. I mean, a guy like him, he could have had any woman he wanted, and I doubted I was exactly high on his list, especially with the way the two of us had clashed heads over the last couple of weeks. Maybe it was just about proving he had control over me, and that was the end of it. I had no clue what to expect from him when I went in next time, but I knew I couldn’t undo stripping naked in front of him now that I had let it happen.
Anyway. That was behind us now. No matter what happened next, I was going to forget about it, and keep my clothes on the next time we were around each other. Though, if this was the kind of money I could make stripping...
Suddenly, a noise caught my attention, and I snapped out of the little reverie I had been in inside my head. I looked around – what had made that? My dad was still asleep, I could hear him snoring next door, so it couldn’t have been that.
I peered into the darkness of my small room. I didn’t have much stuff in here, so it was obvious nothing could have been moving around in the quiet of the apartment. I sat up in bed and looked around, trying to soothe myself.
There it was again – like, a tapping noise, almost? I furrowed my brow and tried to work out where it might have been coming from, but I had no damn idea.
I got to my feet and flicked the light on, trying to see into the shadows on my room and work out what was going on in there, but there was still nothing. I snuffed the light again quickly, not wanting to wake Dad up, and told myself I must just have been getting a little paranoid. It had been a crazy night, and it was natural that something was going to get inside my head and bother me. I was about to pull the covers up and over myself to try and get some sleep after this exhausting evening, but before I could, the noise came again.
Louder, this time, and unmistakable. It was over by the window. I glanced towards the glass – I didn’t normally bother with pulling my curtains over, because I was on the second story anyway so nobody could see inside, and I found the light of the streetlights beyond soothing as I tried to rest. But... but all at once, I felt exposed. Seen. Like there was someone out there who must have been able to see what was happening in here.
Which was impossible, of course, because I was so high up. Nobody could be out there, unless they were dangling from a wire from the top of the building or something. I was just paranoid. All the stress of the evening was getting to me, and I was letting it get under my skin in a way that I shouldn’t have.
I needed to get some sleep, and I would have forgotten about this all by tomorrow. I pulled the curtains closed for a change, and promised myself I was just going a little crazy because of everything that had happened. No need to start worrying now. I had too much else to think about.
Not least the way it had felt when Andreas’ eyes had been pinned to my body like he wanted to pull me into his arms, right there in his office. Maybe the chemistry I had noticed between us before hadn’t just been coming from my side, after all.
And maybe I would have to work even harder to make sure it didn’t get in the way of my new job.
