In honesty, I think worse of the men than I do these women. What do Tits, Pearl, Cindy and Eva get out of it? Nothing but heartbreak I’m sure. I really can’t understand Eva, who’s pretty, intelligent and has a good profession.
Alicia takes her eyes off me at last, and goes to sit next to Tits, offering to help with her task. Cindy hands her an extra peeler, and soon she gets down to her chore, something I would have problems getting her to help with.
“You sleep with the men in the club?” Alicia asks.
I swallow rapidly, wishing she’d kept quiet.
“Uh-huh.” Tits eyes come to me warily, cautious as to how much to share.
“Don’t you feel… used?” Alicia asks, her voice husky.
Tits puts a peeled potato aside, and her eyes steady on my daughter. “Oh, sweetie, no. We use the men as much as they use us. We have fun, they have fun. Nothing more than that.”
“This life wouldn’t suit everyone.” Eva too sits down at the table and links her hands together. “I’m not looking for a man, so that’s why I’m here. I love the MC atmosphere, it’s like being part of a family. The brothers are good to us.”
“What about you, Alicia? You got a boyfriend?” Cindy asks. My eyes widen, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut.
“I thought I had,” Alicia cries out, then cries for real, tears which had dried beginning to fall once again. Before I can get to her, Eva puts her arm around her. Her warning glance at the back of the woman at the stove goes unnoticed.
Cindy pauses cooking again and swings around fast. “What did he do? Dump you? Who do we have to kill?”
She looks so serious, I think she’d do it, even if the spatula she’s holding right now is her only weapon.
Patsy tugs at my arm. “What happened to Alicia is nothing for her to be ashamed of. She’s the victim, that’s the only way of looking at it. Keeping it a dirty secret will only make it worse. I’m not saying tell everyone, but the women here all have their own stories. Of anyone, they’ll understand.”
As her words sink in, I realise it’s true, Alicia has nothing to be ashamed of. She can mourn the loss of something that she’d thought she’d held precious and had given up to the right man, though in that, she was sorely mistaken. But to her there’s no blame, only that perhaps someone older would have seen through his lies. Though who would have expected to become the star of a porn show?
“Alicia?” Eva’s softly comforting hug has at least helped her get herself back into some semblance of control. When her eyes come to my face, I ask her permission. “Can I tell them?”
She glances at Tits who’s eyeing her with sympathy, having realised something’s seriously wrong.
“There’s nothing you can tell us that would shock us,” Pearl speaks from the other side of the room. “And before your story starts, we’re on your side, sweetie.”
At Alicia’s small nod, I begin with just the highlights. “Alicia met a man, he pretended to be twenty-one. Turns out he was twenty-four, and you can guess why he lied. He was a model, so again, you can imagine how he looks. They met on a modelling shoot.”
Tits pushes aside the potatoes and puts her full attention on me. Her eyes have narrowed as though she thinks she’s got an inkling about how this story ends. Cindy turns off the burner and moves the pan away from the heat.
I continue the story as they listen without interrupting. A few nod as they realise how Alicia was deceived. It’s when I add the part about it being filmed that their mouths drop open in shock.
Pearl is the first to speak. “So that explains why they’re all in church on a Saturday afternoon, and the ride out has been cancelled. Don’t worry, kid. They’ll get the film deleted and will be plotting that bastard’s slow and painful death. I promise you that. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t want him to die,” Alicia wails.
“Well, they’ll cut off his dick so he can never do anything like that again,” Tits offers in a way that presumably is supposed to be comforting.
Cindy walks over and places her hand on Alicia’s shoulder. “Apart from the filming, for which I agree that fucker needs to die, your first time sounds okay, huh? Unlike mine.”
“How was it?” Tits asks conversationally.
“Fumbling under the bleachers with the school jock. Pretty cliché. Put me off sex for a whole week.”
If hers was cliché, so was mine. It sounds almost identical. Perhaps I had something in common with her after all, though the lesson it had taught me lasted a much longer time.
“Mine was with a man who was older, experienced, and married, though he hadn’t admitted that at the time. At least he knew what he was doing. I thought it was going to be a happily ever after.” Tits stares dreamily into the distance, then shakes herself. “I suppose I was lucky he was unavailable. As it turns out, I never want to be tied down. What about you, Eva?”
“Virgin until I met my ex, and so was he. We were young, neither of us knew what we were doing. Oh, we had the mechanics right, we had to have done as we produced the kid. But I wondered what all the fuss was about. Took our divorce and my experimenting after to discover what sex should be. Then I found out… with a biker.” She fans her face dramatically, and the women all chuckle together. “The rest is history.”
As they’re talking, I’m watching Alicia. Her face turns to each as they’re speaking.
“Sex is a biological function,” Eva continues. “Society tells us the first time is something to be treasured. I’ve known many men,” she grins and then waves her hand at the snorts of
