Page 7 of Watch Me

Tate always wants to spend the day in bed, as if it’s the ultimate luxury, but I never have the time—or, to be honest, the interest. I caved this morning, though, and called in sick to the dance studio. Partly from guilt but partly hoping, too, that the intimacy of all that time together would help us find our way to a place where we could really talk.

Guilt over what happened in the VIP booth is eating me up inside. I know that trust is the most important thing in a relationship, and that’s why the only way forward is to be honest with Tate. I’m already keeping too many secrets as it is.

When we first met, I’d just started stripping as a lucrative way to pay for my dance classes while being a working dancer, of sorts. Tate had his reservations, and it took a lot of reassurance for him to make a tentative peace with it. But by the time I started doing lap dances, it was clear that having a stripper girlfriend was an embarrassment to him, so I dreaded telling him I was going that little bit further—not just dancing naked in front of a group of men, but taking them individually to a back room to dance privately for them. The fact is, the real money is in lap dances, but I knew he would lose it. I kept putting it off, hoping the right moment would come along… and it never did.

And now I’ve gone and done something so much worse.

Yet, somehow, even spending the whole day less than a foot away from each other, I could never get his attention long enough to have the conversation. He slept, or scrolled on his phone, grunting with dismissal when I tried to talk to him, and now my unresolved guilt has a crisp layer of anger over top of it.

It wouldn’t have happened if he ever acted like he wanted me, I catch myself thinking, and then immediately feel guilty for it.

There are no excuses for what I did. But the more it seems like he deliberately does not want to have any kind of serious conversation, the more I start to wonder if we really need to talk about it anyway. Maybe it’s better to put it behind me without upsetting him. Chalk it up to a learning experience. Something I’ll never do again. Put the past behind us and build a relationship on trust going forward.

“You work too hard,” he grumbles.

For someone who doesn’t want to have sex with me—or even a serious conversation—he certainly wants to keep me around a lot. In my darker moments, I wonder if he’s jealous of my busy life or my goals. If what he really wants is just to slow a woman down. And then I feel terrible for thinking that, too.

“You know I need to work,” I say, extricating myself from his grasp and standing up. I move to the full-length mirror and look myself over.

My hair is messy from sleep. I drag my fingers through it and then run my eyes down my naked body, turning to each side to see the back as well, looking for bruises or anything else that needs to be covered, tweezed, smoothed, or otherwise made stage-ready. A nasty bruise on my ass from a pirouette fall has just healed, and I’d had to hide it with pancake makeup for weeks.

Seeing nothing problematic, I pull a green bikini out of my bag, put it on, and then pull a neon green fishnet tube dress over it. I cast a glance over to Tate to see if he’s watching me, but he’s got his eyes closed, trying to fall back asleep already.

I know I’m not ugly—my whole job hinges on men finding me attractive. But Tate never comments on my appearance, never tells me I look good, and never wants to rip my clothes off. We’re young, we’re dating, and we shouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other. But Tate would almost always rather have his hands on a keyboard.

I push those thoughts out of my head as I pull jeans on over my outfit, reminding myself that I’m the one in the doghouse here and that while Tate can be distant, in all other regards, he seems completely invested in our relationship. He always picks me up from work, he calls and texts frequently, and he wants to be together all the time. Maybe my job has just overexposed me to a world of sex, and I’m out of touch with how much normal people actually do it.

“What if you didn’t need to work?” comes a sleepy voice from the bed.

Tate watches me with one open eye, smiling crookedly from the side of his face that isn’t smushed into the pillow. He’s undeniably cute, with his mussed-up brown hair and his baby-faced good looks. He hasn’t worked out a day in his life but still has a naturally brawny build. Even the circles under his eyes look good on him, aging him just enough to counteract the cherubic sweetness of his face.

“What if you moved in here?”

Moved in here?

The question catches me completely off guard. Tate wants to move in together?

It’s absurdly soon. Way too soon. We’ve only been dating for four months. This is the last thing I thought we’d end up talking about today.

And yet…

I’m unexpectedly flushed with pleasure at this suggestion. It means that Tate likes me, really likes me. That despite being distant sometimes, and our nonexistent sex life, he takes what we have seriously. He sees a future together.

If I’m being honest, it’s also really convenient for me. My house is on the border of the suburbs—far from Tate, far from the club, far from the gym, and far from my dance studio—and my roommates and I recently got notified that our landlord is terminating our lease and moving in. I’d been planning on crashing with Rachel for a while, but living here would solve that problem and make everything easier.

There’s his father, who lives upstairs, to consider. But as long as I’ve known Tate, I’ve never even seen his dad. He travels for work a lot, apparently. He might as well not be there at all.

All these thoughts go through my mind in a flash before I respond.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” He lifts his face off the pillow, bestowing me with a full, beaming smile, and he looks so irresistibly sweet and hopeful, like a little puppy. “Don’t you think it would be good? There’s so much space, and it’s way closer to everything. And that way, we can just, like, be together.”

We can just, like, be together.

That’s what I want, isn’t it?

I let my eyes dance over the flawless café-au-lait brown of his skin, the way he always looks perfectly tanned, even in the dead of winter. I catch myself wondering if our kids would have that same golden skin, mixed with my blonde hair and green eyes.

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