Page 69 of Lie With Me
“I work at Désirer because it’s what I know. It’s what I’m good at. Carmela found me in a dingy stripclub when I first moved to the city. She saved me. Helped me find a place to live and gave me a job at the restaurant. Eventually, she trusted me enough to tell me about the club and asked if I wanted to work there instead.”
When she looks at me, I know there are tears in my eyes. I can’t fathom a mother doing that to her child. Whatever I thought Valentina was going to admit to me, it wasn’tthis.
“You’re so much more than what you can do with your body, Valentina.” My words are tight and watery as I attempt to calm the emotions coursing through me.
She shrugs. “When you’re told something enough, you begin to believe it, especially at that age.”
“What happened? How did you get out?” Hastily, I wipe my eyes. I don’t want her to think I pity her. Ihurtfor her. My chest aches at the mere thought of what she had to endure.
She starts picking at her fingernails, one of her nervous traits. “One of the guys began to offer me cash on the side. We stopped going through Momma and made our own deal. Eventually, I stashed away enough to leave.”
Things are starting to make sense. How she’s so unsure the closer we become. The comments she keeps making about being paid to make men feel special. The push and pull of her emotions—because it’s so crystal clear to me that she wants to be together but she’s holding herself back.
Because all she knows is men hurting her and letting her down.
All she’s ever experienced is pain.
She’s had to live with her guard up for so long, she doesn’t know how to let it down.
“Fuck, Valentina…I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry you went through that.” I pull her other hand into mine and kiss her knuckles before cradling them between us. “Is this why you’re so hesitant to date me? If you thought it would change my mind about you, it doesn’t.”
She doesn’t answer me, eyes lowering to her stomach absentmindedly, where her scar is.
Pain pierces my heart like a needle has been jammed into it like a fucking voodoo doll. “Did you get that scar from one of those men?”
I’ll fucking kill whoever did this to her.
“One of them really liked to cause pain. I didn’t mind it so much at first. I learned to disassociate early on whenever it was happening. But, one night, there was a bottle.” Her voice grows soft, her eyes turning glassy like she’s reliving the memory. “He broke it, and all I can remember is screaming out for Momma. The memories are hazy, but she killed him for it. She saved me.”
Hearing her talk about her mother like she’s some kind of hero for killing the man who she let rape her daughter is sickening. It’s taking everything I have to keep down the bile that’s clawing at my throat while she tells her story.
“Still, they took her to jail. Then, she was inprison for only a short time, under two years. They didn’t have the resources to keep drug abusers locked up, and under the circumstances, killing that man fell under self-defense. As soon as she was released, as much as I hated myself for feeling sorry for her, I was there to pick her up and get her the help she needed.”
“Fuck…Valentina…” Her eyes well up again, causing mine to do the same, and I tighten my fingers around hers as she continues.
“She was like my sun, you know? She hurt me when I got too close, but I couldn’t stay away. I needed her to live. And I kept thinking that one day she’d be proud of me, of what I was doing for her. I used to dream of the day she’d wrap me in her arms and tell me it was all over, and I could stop. That I’d done such a good job for her. How messed up is that?”
Unable to control myself, I pull her back into my lap and bury my face in her neck as I cry for her. She holds me back, arms tightening around me as we both shake in our grief. Her, for her lost childhood, and me, for the unimaginable pain she had to go through.
“It’s why I like being told I’m a good girl. I like the praise. At the club, though, it’s usually me who is doing the praising. That’s why I like it so much when you say it,” she whispers.
Suddenly, even though she’s admitting she likes it, I’m unsure of how to handle our sexual relationship. I want her to know that she means more to methan just sex, but it’s such a big part of her life I wonder if it would do more harm than good to cut her off from it completely.
“Do you talk to anyone? A therapist?” I finally ask.
She shakes her head against my shoulder. “As you can see, I’m not exactly able to afford it.”
“That’s fucking ridiculous. Apparently, I need to have words with Jackson about how much money Angels make.” With as much as a membership costs, and for what the Angels have to do, they should all be rich as fuck. Yet, she lives in a shoebox the size of my bedroom.
She snorts and burrows deeper into my arms as I lay us back and stretch out. “I make great money. It just goes to Momma’s rehab. Drugs got snuck into the prison all the time, so she never fully got clean. And she was involved in a fight with the guards where she got beat pretty badly. She struggled a lot when they released her. She’s been in and out of numerous facilities, and her mental health is terrible, but at least she’s clean. It’s why I freaked out about the photo in the paper, though. Even though I talked about New York a lot when I was growing up, she doesn’t know where I am, and I don’t want to be found. Photos in the paper could lead her right to me.”
That explains why she freaked out about the article.
A question sits on the tip of my tongue, one that could potentially bring up more bad memories. “Ifyou don’t mind me asking. What about your father? What happened to him?”
She freezes in a way that makes me think there’s something connecting my question to the locks on her door. Her voice turns hard as she declares, “That’s an entirely different fucked up story. One I don’t ever want to tell.”
Minutes pass by in silence, and I stroke her hair while holding her in my arms, replaying everything she’s just told me. “Viv?”