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Me too. Everything okay?

Yeah. I’ve just been busy with work, and getting ready for the Harvest Festival on Friday.

Casper

Maybe we can hang out Thursday?

I stare at his message for a long moment. My chest clenches when I think about dancing around in skimpy costumes for men who aren’t Casper. I sigh. Ten weeks.

Can’t. I’ve got dance on Thursday.

It’s not technically a lie.

She ditched another fucking tracker. After work on Wednesday, I spend the evening driving my ass all over this fucking city trying to locate her. Again. I circled every block of her grocery store, nearby cafés, and all the local recovery meeting spots I could find. There’s no sign of her car anywhere. I grip the steering wheel harder than necessary as I park a couple blocks away from her apartment.

Anna is not a spontaneous person. She runs on routines and familiarity. She didn’t go to NA on Tuesday. She’s not home tonight. She says she has dance class tomorrow, and I suspect that if I were to show up at the studio, there’d be no sign of her. Then there’s the phone calls that made it sound like she was cold-calling for a new job?

She’s going off script, which means something is up.

The familiar hall behind her apartment greets me with the same old wood smell. I sit in the chair and kick my feet up on the wall, waiting for her to come home. Wonder how difficult it would be to get a recliner back here? I stuff my hands in my jacket pocket, rolling the small smooth tracker between my fingers. I had to buy a box of them because I can’t keep stealing them from work, not when she’s smashing them every chance she gets. It’s amazing, you can hide surveillance devices the size of a quarter and they’ll never notice—unless, apparently, they’re Anna.

I leave the device in my pocket and pull out my phone, opening our text thread. She’s been texting me more over the last few days, and I’ve been giving her the benefit of the doubt, but her behavior is off. Her schedule is a mess. She disappears at random hours. For someone like me, who enjoys knowing where she is at all times, this is fucking torture.

What are you up to tonight?

In the quiet behind the wall, I can hear the faint tick of the alarm clock at her bedside. Ten minutes pass. Fifteen. An hour.

My brain runs through every possible explanation again. What if she met someone else? I scrub a hand down my face and groan. My pocket buzzes and I whip it out as if this is the Wild West and I’m in a gunfight.

Anna

Working late. You?

Bullshit. I can see her laptop from here. Now my hackles are all the way up. I tap out another message.

You’ve been working a lot lately.

Anna

It’s a busy time of year for me.

My jaw tics. That’s what I like to call a polite deflection. I don’t text back, but I continue waiting for her to return home. If she even returns at all.

I wake from a dead sleep when I hear the jingling of keys; my eyes shoot open and I hear Anna’s front door unlock. Her steps cross the floor. I startle, my foot losing its place on the wall, and my leg falls to the floor with a loud thunk. Her footsteps halt and I can picture her standing near the kitchen trying to decipher what the ghost haunting her apartment wants—he wants to know where the fuck she’s been. I check my phone; it’s almost eleven p.m.

Eventually she continues her strides, appearing in the bedroom with a duffle bag over her shoulder. Any anger fizzling in me disappears when I see her tired gaze.

“I’m fucking starving,” she groans. She tromps into the closet; it sounds like she’s putting clothes into the washer. Immediately after that she steps into the shower. Finally!

As soon as she’s been in the bathroom for a couple minutes, I crawl through the panel and locate her purse. No more car trackers. I make a small hole in the lining with my pocketknife and slip the disc in between the leather and the interior fabric of her purse. There.

Her shower is short, and I get my ass out of there just in the nick of time to see her trudge out of the bathroom, the faint smell of soap and shampoo drifting through the hole behind the mirror. My brow furrows when she marches straight to bed, collapsing onto the pile of pillows, not bothering to get under the covers—not even changing into pajamas. Within a minute she falls asleep, with dripping hair and a damp towel wrapped around her tired body.

I get to Starlight as soon as I can on Thursday. The sky is still holding on to the last bit of daylight. If I arrive before six p.m., then I only have to pay forty dollars to the house instead of fifty-five dollars at the end of the night. Fifteen dollars makes a big difference when you’re earning every dollar in a dump like this.

I park and get out of my car, double-checking the lock. A car stereo rattles a block away, and I hug my coat against me as I walk through the back door. The dressing room is occupied with women getting ready. It’s not a buzzing excitement, though; every last one of them is going through the motions. There are no smiles in the dressing room; those are reserved for the floor.

The hiss of hair spray, spritz of perfume, and snap of makeup palettes saturate the room with sound as dancers get dolled up in front of the mirrors. One of the women takes a bump and I glance away. Last night I outearned the other dancers, and I spent the drive home wondering why. I may know a few pole tricks, but the real money is in the private dances, and I’m not the strongest when it comes to grinding on someone’s lap. It’s not that I’m prettier than them, because I’m not . . . I made more money last night because this shithole club eats these women alive. Out on that dance floor, I make money because I’m the only one with color in my cheeks and a shine in my eyes.