Dance For Me

Dance For Me

By Alice Dee

 
This novel is a complete work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or deceased, is entirely coincidental.

 
 
Dance For Me
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  Copyright © 2013 Alice Dee

All Rights Reserved

 1… Dominic

The day that changed everything for me and my girl forever? Ha, I’m not sure which day that happened exactly but I remember how it started and it started with HER. I don’t mean Tristan, I mean HER.  I’d been with Tristan for two years. We met while I was working as a bouncer at some “gentlemen’s” club out in Huntington Beach. Tristan was a stripper there. I know what you might be thinking… joke, right? No but the girl has heart. I fell for her and hit the concrete hard. When she made up her mind to move to Nevada with her dad and step mom, I uprooted and followed her to the desert. I was that in love. Distance wasn’t an option for me.

The first six months were clear skies. I got a job in construction, making that money. Labor doesn’t bother me; but sooner than later I want to own my own jujitsu center. I have an apartment in North Las Vegas; Tristan hadn’t moved in yet because for some odd reason, she claimed she felt her dad “needed” her. Well, the plan wasn’t for Tristan to live with me anyway, I guess. We never discussed it. Still, she divided her time between my place and her dad’s house. And, better yet, I could still have my privacy. 

Like Tristan, I make friends fast.  Weekends I spend my entire days fight training, some nights I hang out with friends, some nights I hang out with Tristan. Other times I just stay home. This was one of those times. It was Friday and I was tired as balls from working in the heat.  I was lounging on the couch, wondering what Tristan was up to. I texted her and waited a few minutes for her to text me back.

“sup baby, driving… I’ll call u wen I get home”

 Fifteen minutes later I received another text.

“Can’t hang out tonight.  Goin with my dad and Josephine to dinner”.

Lately, texts from here were like this so no surprise. I texted back “ok, call me wen u get home”. 

 So back to point…My trash was stinking up my apartment. It must have been the lasagna I dumped in the night before. I slid open a window because the apartment was disgustingly warm and airless. I twisted the trash bag at the top and lugged it outside and down the stairs. So as I cross the parking lot to the trash dumpster, I see her black Honda Civic pull up. 

 2… Hope

     I grabbed my bag off the passenger’s seat and held my door open with my foot. As I stepped out of my car I saw my neighbor from next door taking out his trash. Right as he lifted the bag to toss it into the dumpster, the bottom gave and all the garbage slipped through the bag and splattered at his feet. Something red like spaghetti sauce splashed his boots. His mouth dropped an inch or two; I glanced quick and hurried inside my apartment. 

I never paid much attention to him, though he was cute and had a nice build. But now wasn’t the time to be noticing people in that way. Let me just say that at this time in my life I had serious stuff going on. Understand I’m split in two. I’m shy, socially awkward Hope Flores by nature. I get painfully shy just talking to guys. I try to avoid it every time it comes up unless I like the guy and he pursues me. If he doesn’t, life goes on. I don’t fit the “Vegas party girl” mold. I don’t even like to party and scenes and large crowds aren’t my thing.  I’m just your average every day person.

But turn the page to find I am exactly that girl. By night I become the opposite of me. I’m a stranger to myself. I’m nighttime Hope. I’m the Hope that gets paid to party. Money, drugs, alcohol all flows through the scene and I’m swimming in it. Talking to guys comes natural for me in that environment. When I have on that makeup, that outfit, that smile, I’m fearless. But every following day I hate myself. How I got here is a story for another day. Today there’s threat of major change in my life-I’m not ready for this cycle to end. 

 I closed the door behind me and pressed my back to it for a few seconds. The apartment was stuffy and suffocating. I slid the window open a bit and turned on the AC, spilled the contents of my bag on the counter top. There were two boxes; one was cold & flu medicine, the other was a pregnancy test; A double whammy this week. Some luck, right?

I grabbed tissue, blew my nose and headed to the rest room to get this over with. I was nervous about the result but determined to get it out of the way. My heart was beating in my chest like it wanted to leap out of my throat. It wasn’t the apartment that was stuffy, I realized, it was my chest. Just breathe, Hope, just breathe.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited patiently, lime shadows of sun light and leaves dancing on my walls. My eyes were on the white stick on the counter top. Though I was stuffy head, my senses seemed heightened; I could hear the clock ticking from the living room. I took the rubber band from around my wrist and pulled my hair back, fanned myself with the empty pregnancy test box, tossed it aside and bit down on my thumb nail.

 If I’m pregnant and decide to keep the baby, I have to quit my job. Maybe I won’t have to quit right away, but eventually the time will come where my belly will protrude and I'll have to stay home. I have no clue how I will be able to take care of a baby or even myself, if I have to stop working. Is abortion an option? Is there another way?

  I told myself to stop thinking about that stuff and focus. Everything will be all right. I grabbed the plastic stick. Either my life will be forever altered, or everything will remain the same…. Well, little did I know it was going to change really soon, in ways I never saw coming.

 3… Tristan

   I was a slut until I met Dominic. Don’t get me wrong; I have standards and don’t settle for just anything, I just like variety.  A lot. The situation? My parents have been divorced for five years. My mom kept the house and my younger sister Julie stayed with her.  After their wedding in Tahiti last year, Daniel (my dad) and Josephine (my step mom) bought a house in Nevada. “Naturally” I wanted to be with my father and Julie wanted to stay with our mother in California to graduate with all of her friends.

At least Dominic thinks I came to Vegas to be closer to my dad. Actually I’ve heard so much about it that I had to come here. Young, attractive, need to make some real money? This is THE place. The Devil’s playground… Sin City…anyone? The epicenter of entertainment! It’s all so me. All I ever wanted was to make fast easy money doing what I like and be on my own. I came here on a mission and in due time everything will work out perfectly fine. 

Does Dominic like what I do? Not anymore. But he knows better than to try and get in the way because he knew exactly what he was getting when we got together. I gave him a lap dance on our first date and we did blow in a steakhouse restroom. He hasn’t touched the stuff since because it’s “not” for him. Anyway, as I was saying, Dominic met the slut in me on our second date and from then on he was what they call “smitten”…translation? Whipped.  What can I really say other than I know what guys like him want and I give him that? Am I afraid of some dumb ho trying to get between us? Please. This love is solid.

 4… That’s her

“You’re going to dinner with them again?”  Dominic let his head fall back and listened to his girlfriend try to talk her way out of going out with him yet again. She blabbed away all the reasons this dinner was so important to her.

 “Sometimes I think you forget you have a man.”

“Dominic, you’re trippin’.”

“All right, go with them. I’ll see you Monday I guess.”

“Baby?”

“What?”

“Come with us.”

He figured she might ask and said “no thanks”.

So Tristan persisted, adding to her pleas a promise of what was waiting at the end of the night. That’s all it took for Dominic to smile and agree, though he’d be regretting it at dinner. He opened the refrigerator door, contemplating the icy coronas on the top rack. They glowed like gold bars and looked so deliciously quenching. Dominic grabbed a beer and let the fridge door swing shut.

Tristan told him she loved him and hung up. Dominic popped off the bottle cap and killed his line. Great. He wanted to have a night out with his girlfriend, not her entire family. Now he’d be the fourth wheel. Well, you need a fourth wheel, right? He sat down on his couch and through the open blinds saw his neighbor coming up the stairs. 

He didn’t know her name. They crossed paths every now and then, usually when he was getting home from work but they never said more than “hi” to one another and it seemed to Dominic that she was forcing it. So Dominic never tried to initiate conversation because of his fear that she would be rude or ignore him, make him feel like an ass.

Dominic crept up to his window and peeked. She was wearing a black ankle length dress that bared her shoulders and arms, hemp sandals, a huge brown purse on her shoulder, and oversized sun glasses covering half of her face. Her waist length hair was swept over her left shoulder like a scarf of silk she was wearing. He only saw her for a few seconds till she disappeared from his view. He liked the way she dressed. She was always wearing those long dresses and if her hair wasn’t swept aside, she usually had it pulled back. Everyone and their grandfathers knew Tristan didn’t know the meaning of modest, but she was a bombshell in bed…

Dominic went back to the couch and his beer. Dinner with the parents. How lame was this going to be?

Tristan was knocking on Dominic’s door at 5:45. He was putting on his shirt as he dragged his feet to the door. When he opened it, Tristan was standing there in a bright pink dress that hugged her hips and pushed up her breasts, her dirty blonde hair resting over her shoulder in huge curls. She was wearing yellow plastic stars in her ears and Dominic could smell her floral perfume. When he leaned in to give her a kiss, the smell of her hairspray overwhelmed him.

 She backed up and looked him up and down. “Where are your shoes?”

“You’re early.”

Tristan closed the door behind her and followed Dominic to the couch where he sat down to put on his shoes. She snapped her gum and stared at the corona bottle on the coffee table, still full.

“I talked to you two hours ago. You had a lot of time to get ready.”

“I am ready. I’m just puttin’ on my shoes.”

 “I like the tee shirt and jeans look. Very casual.”

“Are you being sarcastic?”

 “No, it’s fine.”

“It’s just dinner. What is it, like a buffet?”

“No, it’s some Mexican restaurant. I heard it’s really good.”

He raised his brows and made a face like “Sure….”

The Pacifico was a tropical paradise themed restaurant and entertainment center located inside The Lucky Star Casino, just off the strip. Dominic heard The Lucky Star had a huge food court with fast food places, and several restaurants that offered authentic Mexican, South and Central American dishes. The foursome, Dominic, Tristan, Dan and Josephine walked through the royal blue, red, and teal carpeted casino first. Dan wanted to stop at one of the slot machines for a minute but Josephine tugged on his arm and whispered something in his ear, gave him a wifely look equivalent to the head shake meaning NO.

Dominic studied their closeness. He wondered if he and Tristan would ever be that close, or even together in twenty years. In the beginning he didn’t think things would get as serious as they did. His friends joked that a girl who did the type of freaky things Tristan did their first night together was far from marriage material. She wasn’t the type you even wanted to introduce to your family. But then he got to see past all that, to her core. She was a good person-she was a sponser to a little three year old boy in Honduras- that was good enough for him. Her freaky side was just a plus. She still had skanky ways, like dressing provocatively and being flirtatious in and out of the club. But he could be a flirt too.  

Dominic tried not to look at Josephine but it was hard not to notice how gorgeous she was. Though she was an older woman, she still had it going on; she was a natural. Though Dominic had no particular preference when it came to women, he did favor longer hair over shorter hair on them. Josephine’s hair was short, barely grazing her shoulders but she always wore it different like pinned back or at least half pinned up on the sides. Tonight she looked exceptional.

As usual, Josephine was wearing a bright color dress, tangerine orange. Her hair was a deep brown, almost black and she had the darkest eyes and eyebrows he’d ever seen. Her skin was flawless and she was so milky white Dominic figured she was a stranger to the sun. That would explain why it seemed her skin wasn’t aging. What a Spanish beauty.