Striptease

Shut Out

[Everleigh]

Ping!

Ping!

Ping!

I groaned with annoyance as I lifted the semi fluffy white bed pillow that my head was currently resting on up before smashing it down on my face, muffling my sighs of irritation at the quiet buzzing sound of the phone notifications going off repeatedly.

Why couldn't I just have a broken phone or something? Why did everybody have to be texting me right now?

Couldn't they all just leave me alone without me having to say anything?

I huffed and puffed loudly like a disobedient child who wasn't getting their way before the annoying buzzing sound became too much for my ears to bear the grating noise and so, without lifting the pillow from where my face was currently making a permanent indent in the center, I was quick to grab my phone and press down on the power button to shut the device off temporarily.

I knew I wouldn't turn it off permanently, Kayla would throw an absolute shit fit if she wasn't able to get ahold of me soon enough, but it was a small gesture of relief that I could grant myself given the twisted circumstances I've been put through.

And by twisted circumstances, I meant the fact that I was out of a future baking job since my asshole of a boss fired me and once I returned back to the strip club, you wanna know what happened next?

I was demoted from the stage level to the ground level.

Now on top of my dreams being shattered and squished behind my shoes like a pestering swarm of insects that would just not die quite yet, I now had to handle serving half drunk idiots as a sort of waitress while shaking my ass and tits in their faces.

Lovely.

When I heard about the demotion, that was basically the straw that broke my camel's back and I barely made it back into the dressing room before I lost it.

I couldn't even explain to Mikayla why I was bawling my eyes out and trying to hide behind the lockers because that seemed to be the only safe place I could find to have a private moment to myself.

When my best friend found me curled up into a ball in a corner trying to muffle my tears and harsh sobbing with a piece of cheap cloth from one of the many outfits used for our sets, it goes without saying that she had more than a million and two questions as to why I was having a mental breakdown in the backroom of the strip club.

Though she didn't ask me any of them, she just hugged me and told me that everything was going to be alright.

Even though I knew that it wasn't or there was a slim possibility that she was being honest with me, Mikayla was trying to give me hope about the future and isn't that what all of us wanted anyways?

To have hope that we're not all just going to fade away into dust when our inevitable deaths come around?

That we will be remembered even after we're long gone?

Maybe I was being unrealistic but I didn't think it was that crazy to dream of becoming a professional baker or at least, it didn't seem unrealistic until that stupid, faux French motherfucker cut my future job out from underneath me like the sneaky little bitch that he was....

Soft pitter pattering of feet moving down the hallway interrupted my angered, internal monologue and the pattering stopped right by my head as it rested on the sunken in armrest of the couch, not wanting to move even though I knew that Esa was standing right beside me now and wanting my attention on her actions.