Striptease

Club

[Everleigh]

"Welcome to my Wonderland. If you wanna play, then you should understand how I can do things that no one can. Oh, oh. Need you to be bigger than the highest highs and the tallest man. So take a sip because I know you can…."

The beautiful voice of Alice Chater, an underrated singer that this newer generation wouldn't be introduced to once they grew older and lost interest in any sort of good tunes created in the years before they came into this world, drifted through the halls of the backrooms belonging to the strip club as the sound of the back door banging shut from an abrupt opening and slamming of the metal door shook the cheap wood paneling alongside the walls.

And if I'm correct, which I think I usually am, I'm pretty sure, the paneling was almost as old as the floors were, the cracks in the cheap half wood/half tiled floors deepening with every day that passed.

There were regular roach infestations that happened in this place and the black mold that hid beneath the asbestos in the ceiling was no joke either.

And although many of the girls here left after a little while with no health problems whatsoever, the older workers were already starting to develop rapid, worsening symptoms such as coughing, coughing up blood, heart palpitations and what have you.

Rumor has it that some of the former workers had died after only being in the business for around a decade or so, that's what has been passed along to me through the grapevine of gossip.

But the younger women here never worried too much about the health conditions that they may face as they got older, in fact, some of the highschool dropouts told me, in confidence of course, that they sometimes liked to brag that they were these high-end strippers at the club.

I thought they were fucking dumb for bragging about showing their tits and asses to strange men but that's just my opinion, I didn't tell them that though, I'm not an idiot.

The strip club was nothing to brag about because, in all honesty, who would even want to mention that they worked here in the first place?

I, for one, wanted nothing to do with this job but it paid the bills while I was working on getting my baking business off the ground, with some help from Charlie, that is.

My jaw still ticked when I thought about how I wanted to offer my services to those who couldn't afford it as much as Charlie's clients would….And how my big mouth didn't open for the first time to bring it up to Charlie.

Maybe I should have brought it up to him though, 'cause then I wouldn't still be kicking myself to being so fucking timid and not bothering to ask my boyfriend if he thought that would be a good idea or not.

Even though it's been a few days now and we were in the clear, far from ever having a dispute, I was still weary of bringing the business idea up to him because I felt like it would rock the precarious boat we were in.

I wanted to stick to the right side of caution, not to error about and ruin everything that was starting to turn out good with my life, and if that meant keeping something like this from him, then so be it.

Believe me, I didn't like the thought of keeping this from him anymore then the next person but I wasn't about to ruin what a good thing we had going on between us.

And by between us, I meant the fact that I was slowly, and fully knowingly, falling head over heels for Charlie Wylder and that kinda scared the shit out of me.

Mainly because I had never loved someone like how I loved him.

Because loving my sister and my best friend were in very different ways as compared to loving him.