Sophie Pov
Two years later I was the name men asked for when they walked through the door.
I was the reason some of them bought memberships.
I knew this because Gus told me in the same flat way he told me everything, without compliment, just information, the way you told someone their rent had gone up. He said it and I nodded and went back to the locker room and put my things away. I had stopped being surprised by any of it somewhere in the first year. The money was good, the hours were consistent, and I had an apartment with a lock on the door. That was enough. That had to be enough.
Tonight was a regular Thursday. Carmen was doing her makeup at the mirror beside mine when I came in.
"Gus is acting strange tonight," she said without looking away from her reflection.
"Gus is always acting strange," I said.
"No, different strange." She put down her eyeliner. "Someone is out front. He would not say who but he keeps touching the back of his collar."
"He does that when the ventilation is bad," I said.
"He does that when he is nervous," she said. "And Gus does not get nervous about ventilation." She looked at me in the mirror. "Just thought you should know before you go out."
I said nothing. I checked my hair and looked away from my reflection.
"You never react to anything," she said.
"I react," I said. "I just do it quietly."
She laughed and went back to her mascara.
Gus knocked twice on the locker room door. "Five minutes," he said through the wood.
"I heard you the first time," I said.
"You always say that and you are always late," he said.
I was never late. He did this to every girl every night, a nervous habit dressed up as management. I put on the last of my things and stood up.
I walked out to the stage and the room did its usual thing. The noise settled. The attention shifted.
Then I noticed the atmosphere was different.
The staff was moving differently. Two of the waitresses were walking faster than usual with their eyes down. Gus was standing near the bar with his arms at his sides, which he never did during a performance. He always had a clipboard. Tonight his hands were empty and he was watching the private tables near the back of the room with an expression I had not seen on him before.
I found the table with my eyes while I moved.
The man was already there. He sat by himself at the best table in the room, the one that was always reserved but rarely filled. Italian suit, dark, perfectly fitted. Short black hair. He was not looking around the way men usually did when they arrived somewhere new. He sat completely still with one hand resting on the table and his eyes on the stage.
On me.
I had had men stare at me for two years. I knew every kind of stare there was. The one that wanted to own something. The one that had already imagined the transaction. The one that was performing interest for whoever was sitting next to it.
This was not any of those.
He was watching me the way someone watched a problem they were working through. Focused. Still. Patient in a way that most men in that room were not. He did not look at my body the way the others did. He was looking at my face and then at my hands and then at something I could not identify and it made the back of my neck cold.
I kept moving. I did not let it show.
The set ran forty minutes. Every time I turned I checked the private table. He did not move. He did not put money on the stage. He did not wave me over. He did not pull out his phone the way half the men in the room did at some point during the set. He sat with the same stillness for forty straight minutes and watched me with those focused dark eyes.
When the set ended and I walked offstage Gus was waiting in the corridor.
"Private table," he said. He nodded toward the back of the club. "He asked for you specifically."
"What did he say exactly," I said.
"He said your name," Gus said. "He knew it already. He did not ask what your name was."
I looked at him. Gus had worked that floor for eleven years and was not a man who got impressed by anything. Tonight his face was carefully neutral in the specific way it went when he was managing something he did not fully understand.
"Did he say anything else," I said.
"He said to take your time," Gus said. "His words exactly."
I went to the locker room and changed into my dress. I took my time, not because the man had told me to but because I needed the minutes to think. Something about the situation was wrong in the specific way that things had been wrong before. The way the autopsy report had been wrong. The way my aunt Bernice's eyes had gone still when I asked my question.
I checked my reflection once. I schooled my face.
I walked out.
The club had emptied almost completely. The last few men were paying their tabs near the door. He was the only person still seated in the room besides the staff.
I stopped at the edge of his table. He looked up at me and took his time about it, looking at my face with those still dark eyes, and then he dropped his gaze to the card on the table and slid it toward me without a word.
I picked it up.
FRANKLYN KEMORE.
I looked at him. My hand tightened on the card without meaning to.
"Be my wife for three years," he said quietly. "I will compensate you handsomely."