Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 77160 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77160 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
“Right. Right. Gotta give you time to get gorgeous. Not that you need it.”
I wanted to get up, to yank the door open for him. But if I got up, it gave him a chance to reach for me.
Whenever possible, I stayed seated or as far away from him as possible.
Thankfully, he finally opened the door and stepped into the opening.
“Break a leg, Monroe.”
I waited for the door to close, then for the sound of his shoes to trail down the hall. Only then did I get to my feet and rush to the door.
The dressing room had no lock. For obvious reasons when the owner was such a vile human being.
So I did what I always did when I was about to get naked—I wedged my vanity chair under the door, then took my garment bag to dress behind the door in case the chair didn’t do its job.
Was there a chance that Frank had some peephole or hidden camera in the room? Yep. Which was why I got dressed facing the damn wall. If he was looking, all he would see was a little ass cheek. Nothing more than he’d see if I were in a bathing suit on the beach.
I shimmied into the tight dress, adjusted my boobs into the built-in bra, then pulled the chair back to sit down and slide the pantyhose up my legs to clip into the garters.
Finished, I stepped in front of the mirror once again to take it in.
My dresses for lounge singing were much like my outfits for beauty pageants and, later, my modeling get-ups. They were a uniform. They put a wall between who I was and who I projected. They allowed me to detach a bit from my body.
Whether that was good or healthy, well, that was up to the professionals. It was how I got by a life of being objectified and, yes, objectifying myself.
“What do you think, Grandma?” I asked, running my hands down my belly and hips.
I had her to thank for my figure. Well, her and my mother, who instilled the importance of healthy eating and exercise in me from a very tender age.
But all three of us lucked out to have an hourglass frame with full hips and busts but narrow waists. It always made me look like I was about to spill out of my dress, even if it wasn’t that tight or low-cut.
I could hear my mom’s voice in my ear as I reached to grab a cough drop out of my makeup case.
“Why would you waste your time singing on stage when you could be making so much more modeling? God, you’d make more stripping.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“You will only have so many years looking this good,” she added.
She wasn’t wrong about that either.
I was painfully aware that my looks would, if not fade, then change. I was already hit on a lot less than when I was a teenager. I probably only had ten good years left to use my sex appeal to make money.
Which was why I was trying to use my talent—my voice—to make money, not my body or face.
Though if things got worse with Frank, I might have to consider becoming a midnight ballerina. Put a few years of cardio pole dancing classes to good use.
A year or two of that and I’d probably be able to buy a house. I knew several girls at the casino who did shifts in gentlemen’s clubs, and they cleared their student loans with that money.
“What would you think of that, Gram?” I asked the picture.
I knew the answer.
She would tell me to go for it.
She was a firm believer that life was too short to live hard. So anything you could do to make life easier was worth it. She was also of the mind that if a man was dumb enough to pay for your attention that you were dumb if you didn’t take him for every cent he had on hand.
I suspected that my grandmother had an even more colorful youth than she let on. And what I knew was already bold swaths of rainbow shades.
My mother would probably have a thing to say about stripping. But, well, my mother had a lot to say about everything. None of it was particularly positive or even constructive.
Besides, if it came to that, it wasn’t like she would ever know. She’d married her fourth husband—a man twenty years her senior—and moved to his fancy estate in Florida.
I unwrapped the throat lozenge, stuck it between my cherry lips, slipped my feet into my heels, and turned to make my way out of the dressing room.
There was nothing glamorous about the staging space at the back of the casino. The lighting was dim, the walls lined with garment racks, boxes, and cleaning supplies. And it always smelled faintly of cloying perfume and the lingering scent of fish from whatever monster brought it in for their lunch to reheat in the microwave.