STRONGER (11 page)

“Strip,” he said simply. “Then lie face down on the bed.”

Simple and to the point. I liked that better than men who thought they had to woo me when we were in the room together. If we were in the room, I was already theirs. They didn’t have to kiss me or whisper sweet nothings into my ear.

I left my lingerie on—a red satin set that the Don had gifted me with early on—and did what Tracy asked.

He joined me on the bed, rubbing his hands down both of my arms before looping something around my wrists. I looked and was surprised to see him belting me to the headboard.

I began shaking uncontrollably. Customers asked me for kinky favors sometimes, but I’d never been tied up since I started working at Mama’s nightclub.

I hadn’t been tied up since Jack.

I tried to stay calm as Tracy secured my ankles to the footboards with what I could only assume were also belts. Where had he been hiding these?

“I usually like giving my birthday spankings to someone else,” he said, his voice audibly excited. “And I just turned 60.”

“I love spankings,” I said, turning my head and trying to look at him. “I wish you were turning one hundred.”

He jerked the panties down my thighs, a rush of cold air hitting my bare ass.

I couldn’t see Tracy from where he was standing, so I yelped in more surprise than pain when he brought a leather strap down on my ass.

“One,” he said almost gleefully.

I hadn’t realized I was in trouble until that point. Fifty-nine more of those might kill me.

By the twentieth blow, I was screaming in earnest.

“I love the way you scream,” Tracy groaned, bringing the strap down harder.

Sixty blows saw me weeping, my back and ass wet with agony.

“Now you’re going to give me my birthday present,” he said.

Through my tears, I heard him unzip his pants. The pain from the blows of his whip was nothing compared to what came next. I tensed up when he parted my sore cheeks with his hands, then howled when he plunged into my rectum without warning.

The pain was horrific, worse than anything I’d experienced. Mama’s girls had told tales of clients asking for anal sex with varying degrees of success, and most of them had seemed not to like it. Cocoa herself had said it wasn’t too bad with the right client and the right amount of lube.

I didn’t have either of those to help me.

The misery eased when a wetness helped smooth Tracy’s onslaught, but I wasn’t comforted. It was probably blood.

“I bet I’m the first one in this tight hole,” Tracy grunted.

I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of confirmation. I bit my tongue until blood filled my mouth, as well.

He gave a long, low moan that I hoped meant he was finished. Tracy unfastened my legs and turned me around, wrenching my back painfully. I shrieked at the popping in my spine, my throat sore from screaming. As soon as he’d re-secured my feet, he let my hands go, allowing my body to continue the twist to lay on my back.

I should’ve fought him, should have tried to scratch his eyes out. But I was so far in that I didn’t see a way out except on the other side, when he gave me my money and I could get the hell out of here.

I tried not to look at his blood-covered cock as he rammed it into my pussy. At least it was lubricated. Tracy squeezed my throat until I croaked out a “please.” That seemed to encourage him. As he thrust into me, he slapped me on my face.

“Tell me you like it,” he panted. “I know you fucking do, slut.”

“I like it,” I sobbed through my swollen lips. Anything for the money. Anything for escape. No one had called me slut since Jack, but I tried not to think about it. I was doing this for my future.

Time faded away. I became a body of pain, absorbing the punishment for God only knows how long. By the time Tracy climaxed for a second time, I couldn’t see in one eye.

He pulled out and lit a cigar, looking at his handiwork as he puffed it. The acrid smoke made me cough as he blew it my way.

“Costa told me you liked some twisted shit, but I had no idea,” Tracy remarked. “You’re going to love this next thing.”

He put the lit end of the cigar against my skin, blistering what hadn’t already been beaten. I didn’t think I could scream anymore, but I found my voice with this. The cigar cherry was ten times worse than Jack’s cigarettes. Each time he put the fire against me, I screamed even louder.

How could the Don have done this to me, inflicting Tracy? He offered to make Jack disappear when he’d seen the burn marks on my breasts. Had he told Tracy that I’d actually let someone mar me like that?

“Help me!” I shrieked. “Somebody help me! Please help me! Mama! Mommy!”

The door flew open. Cocoa, Mama, and Don Costa all burst into the room. Mama’s eyes were two flames as she grabbed Tracy by the neck and threw him across the room with considerable force. Cocoa untied me and then held me to her body as I wept.

“Oh my God,” my roommate kept repeating, looking over my injuries. “Oh my God. Mama, she needs a hospital. She needs to go get help.”

Mama looked at me, her expression unchanged. “This is what you get for trying to double cross me, girl,” she said, every word dripping with venom. “I tried to protect you, but you just had to go and try to make money behind my back.”

“Please, Mama,” Cocoa said. “She’s hurt real bad. Let me take her to a hospital.”

“There can’t be a hospital, sugar,” Mama said, talking to Cocoa and not taking her eyes off me. “They’d want to know who messed her up this bad, and I can’t have that kind of heat come down on my nightclub.”

Tracy groaned from the floor and Mama kicked him.

“And you,” she snarled, looking over at Don Costa. “I told you not to bring your psycho friend here again.”

The Don simply shrugged. “You can’t blame a man for trying to throw a good birthday party for his buddy.”

“Get that trash out of here,” Mama said, pointing at Tracy. “The back way.”

The Don took hold of Tracy and dragged him out. Mama looked back at me.

“You’re going to have to stay here until the club closes,” she said. “Wash yourself up in the bathroom. You can’t have customers seeing you like that. I’ll send Cocoa for you when it’s time.”

“Please, Mama, let me stay with her,” my roommate said. “She doesn’t need to be alone like this.” I loved her for that, then. Cocoa truly cared about me.

“No,” Mama said, striding for the door. “Don’t neglect your customers.”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Cocoa said, looking deflated. “Just hang in there.”

When the door closed, the tears came. How many did I have stored up in me? It seemed I would run out sometime, but they just kept falling. How had I gotten to this place of desperation?

I looked down at my body, frightened that it had taken so much punishment. There was blood coating the sheets. I even noticed some spatter on the wallpaper.

I staggered into the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. It ran pink when I got in, stinging my skin. Couldn’t I just wash my life off of myself while I was at it? When were things going to get better?

Shattered, I wrapped myself in a towel. I couldn’t bear to stay in this room any longer. I painfully pulled on my work uniform over my wounds. It wouldn’t be enough for the winter outside, but I didn’t care. I would rather freeze to death than remain one of Mama’s girls for one more second.

I put on my shoes and left the room. There was no one in the hallway, but I could hear the sounds of coupling from behind other closed doors. I wondered what people in the hallway had heard while Tracy was exacting his birthday presents from my body.

I headed in the opposite direction of the staircase that led back down to the nightclub and found myself in front of a door labeled “emergency exit only.” I knew this had to be the “back way” Mama had told the Don about.

The cold air outside took my breath away, my wet hair freezing into icicles. Without a penny to my name and with only the wretched clothes on my back, I stumbled into the night.

Chapter Four

I didn’t know how long I walked. My shoes weren’t made for walking, and my uniform was too flimsy to withstand the chill of New York streets in the winter.

When I saw the shelter, the lights warming the sidewalk in front of it, I almost passed it by. I didn’t want to be like one of the zombies I saw in there during my first time on the streets. I told myself that I had too much pride for that. I could survive on my own.

So much had changed. If I stayed out on the streets tonight, I was afraid I was going to die.

I pushed the door open, swallowing my pride, and the blast of warm air felt like heaven.

“I’m sorry, we’re closing up here for the night,” a man said from behind a table without looking up.

“Please,” I said, my voice shattered and hoarse. “I need help.”

He looked up and his eyes widened. “Brenda!” he called. “Put the soup back on!”

“We’re closing, Jeff!” a woman called crossly from behind a closed door. “It’s past midnight.”

“It’s an emergency!”

I stood for as long as I could, watching Jeff retrieve a box from a cabinet on the wall, then collapsed, my legs unable to support me any longer.

Jeff rushed over to me just as another door opened.

“Oh my God,” Brenda said. “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

“No, please,” I said weakly. “I can’t go to the hospital. No ambulance.”

“It looks like she’s been beaten very badly,” Jeff said, dabbing antiseptic on the cuts on my face.

“Are you in some sort of trouble?” Brenda asked. “Is that why you can’t go?”

“I’m not in trouble anymore,” I said, wincing at the medicine’s sting. “I escaped.”

Jeff and Brenda exchanged a look.

“I’m not going to put the soup back on,” Brenda said.

“You’re not going to help this poor soul?” Jeff asked, peering at her.

“Yes, but at home,” Brenda said. She looked at me, her brown eyes deadly serious. “Do you swear that you’re not in trouble? Is anyone coming after you?”

“I swear,” I said. “No one is coming.”

“I’m asking because I think we should take you into our home,” Brenda said. “God brought you here. We were just getting ready to leave, but he directed you to our doorstep. That has to mean something.”

“Are you an addict?” Jeff asked me. “You can’t bring anything dangerous into our home. We have two daughters.”

“I don’t use,” I said. “I never have.”

“Our home is a place for healing and love,” Brenda said. “You have to leave whatever life you had before this at the door.”

“That’s all I want to do,” I said, tears running down my face. “That’s all I want, to leave my life, to start new.”

“Then I think we have a place for you,” Jeff said. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Jasmine.”

I fell asleep in the car on the road, thinking about Cocoa. That was one thing I regretted about leaving Mama’s nightclub like that. Cocoa was going to go into that horrible room after the club closed and find it empty. My roommate had always been kind to me.

“We’re here,” Jeff announced.

I opened my eyes to see a quaint two-story home in a well-lit neighborhood. It looked like what I’d always imagined a home should.

Jeff helped me from the back seat, my injuries inhibiting my ability to move on my own.

Brenda opened the door and was met by a girl who looked to be about my age.

“Thanks for staying so late, Hailey,” Brenda said, handing the girl some money. “See you next week.”

“That’s the babysitter,” Jeff explained, letting me lean heavily on him as we walked up the sidewalk.

Hailey passed us, but not before giving me a horrified look. I knew my face was frightful, but that wasn’t even the worst of my wounds.

The inside of the house was clean and homey. There were toys and dolls everywhere, children’s crayon scribbles framed on the walls like fine art. The couch in the sitting room sagged in the middle, the television was dusty. People actually lived in this house, something that warmed my soul. Jack’s house had been soulless, a clean place to display pristine collections of furniture.

Brenda approached us from a back hallway.

“The girls are fast asleep,” she said. “Come sit down in the kitchen. I can fix you up something to eat and we can talk about what’s going to happen.”

I eased painfully into a kitchen chair that Jeff pulled out for me as Brenda turned on the stove and threw several ingredients into a pan.

“How does stir fry sound?” she asked over her shoulder.

After my ordeal tonight, I didn’t think I’d have an appetite. But something about freedom and renewed hope in my future made me ravenous.

“That sounds amazing,” I said. “Thank you.”

Jeff set the coffeemaker and it started percolating, filling the kitchen with a delicious smell. He set a glass of orange juice in front of me for the meantime.

“What happened to you?” he asked, sitting at the table and resting his chin on his fist.

I shook my head. If they knew what I was, what I had been, they’d toss me out on the street.

“I can’t talk about it,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m just not comfortable.”

“I understand,” Jeff said. He was quiet for a moment. “Are you seriously injured? There’s a clinic, not far from here, that won’t ask you very many questions. They definitely won’t call the police. Should I take you right now? They’re open all night.”

I shook my head again. I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened to me.

“I’ll heal now, I know I will,” I said. “I just needed to be away from that situation.”

“Was someone abusing you?” Brenda asked from the stove.

Someone? Tracy caused these wounds, Don Costa arranged it, Mama pimped me out to dozens of men, Jack nearly killed me, and my mother abandoned me in favor of the bottle. I couldn’t count how many abusers I’d had.

“It’s over now,” I said finally. “I don’t want you all to think less of me by knowing what happened.”

“We would never,” Jeff said. “You’re a victim here.”

Brenda served up the stir fry on three plates as Jeff got some coffee. We fell into the meal. The vegetables mixed in with the rice were crisp and delicious. Eating this food made me feel clean, like everything was going to be better now. Jeff and Brenda could never harm me like I’d been hurt at Mama’s.

“I want you to feel free to stay here as long as you want,” Brenda said after we’d cleaned our plates. “Use this opportunity to heal, to recover, to get back on your feet.”

I wasn’t sure that I had ever been “on my feet.”

“Thank you,” I said anyway. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t found you.”

“It’s the strangest thing,” Jeff remarked. “We only volunteer at that shelter once a week. It’s our way of keeping our life in perspective. We had a big spill in the kitchen that took longer than usual to clean up, so that’s why we were there late tonight. Otherwise, it would’ve been already closed by the time you found it.”

“It was divine intervention,” Brenda added. “I think God made me drop that entire pot of soup.”

“It went everywhere,” Jeff said, laughing. “The Johnsons work tomorrow. I bet the floor will still be sticky.

“Vegetable soup,” Brenda explained. “I’m sure we didn’t find all of it.”

The coffee was delicious, warming my soul, but it didn’t do anything for my utter exhaustion. I tried to follow Jeff and Brenda’s conversation, but my head kept dipping down, my eyes closing of their own volition.

“Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping,” Jeff said. “I’m sure you’re tired.”

He helped me down the hallway. “This is the girls’ room,” he explained, pointing at a closed door, “and this is mine and Brenda’s room. You’re in here, the guest room.”

He flicked on the light and I could’ve wept. The room was simple, but clean and comfortable. Everything was decorated in a shade of pale blue, and a basket of seashells brightened the top of a chest of drawers.

“You have your own bathroom in here,” he said, helping me sit on the bed. “You can find towels and toiletries in there.”

“We keep clean clothes in the drawers,” Brenda said, popping her head in the room. “We’ve had a few people stay here before you. There are plenty of different sizes of things—you should be able to find something that will fit.”

“I really appreciate this,” I said. “You don’t know how much. You’ve saved my life.”

“God saved your life,” Brenda said. “He only used us as tools to help.”

As they left and shut the door behind me, I slowly removed my nightclub uniform. Shuffling to the bathroom, I stuffed it in the trash. Goodbye, Jazz. I never wanted to think about that period of my life again.

I opened the chest of drawers and was able to find a tank top and some cotton shorts that didn’t swallow me whole.

I sat on the bed to rest for a moment—each movement took a special amount of effort—and I fell asleep before even realizing it.

* * * *

For a long time, I couldn’t get out of the bed. Brenda told me that I slept for a solid 36 hours at first. When I woke up, all I felt was hunger.

Brenda and Jeff understood, they told me. My body—and spirit—needed rest to heal.

Brenda brought me my meals on a tray. I always ate as much as I could before setting it on the bedside table. If I awoke, it was always gone.

A week went by like this. I slipped in and out of slumber, leaving the bed only to shower and use the bathroom. Gradually, my body began to loosen up again. The bloody wounds stitched themselves together, adding to my collection of scars. The cigar burns took the longest to heal. I could only hope that the blemishes would someday fade.

One day, I decided to try to leave the room. I felt stronger than I had been, and every step didn’t hurt like it used to.

The hallway was empty, the bedroom doors closed, so I followed the sounds coming from the kitchen. Brenda and Jeff were seated at the kitchen table having breakfast with two girls with blonde hair that spread around their heads like halos.

“Look who’s up and about,” Jeff exclaimed, beaming at me. He started clapping with no trace of sarcasm. I laughed as Brenda and the girls joined in.

“How are you feeling?” Brenda asked.

“So much better,” I said, “thank you.”

Brenda hopped up and got my plate from the microwave, setting it down at the table.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said, smiling.

The little girls watched as I sat down and started eating.

“You were asleep for a long time,” the oldest one said soberly.

“You’re right,” I said, after I swallowed a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “I was very sleepy.”

“Were you very sick?” the younger girl asked.

I nodded. “Yes, very sick. But I’m much better now.”