Chapter Text
Daryl Dixon had ended up in a lot of places he didn’t want to be in his life, but a strip club with Merle might headline the whole sorry list.
As soon as he walked in the door, he got a flash of bare tits from the stage and nearly tripped over his own feet, he looked away so fast.
“Easy there, baby brother.” Merle chuckled. “Don’t tell me this is your virgin ride, place like this?”
“Nah.” Daryl nearly spat on the floor, caught himself just in time. “Just don’t normally go to get an eye full with my kin, that’s all.”
This was not precisely true. He’d been in a strip club a grand total of one time before, and that was with kin. It’d been their idiot cousin Wicket, the last time, to drag him on outta there because the bouncer had threatened to call the cops if Wicket didn’t stop sneaking into the ladies dressing rooms. Whole experience had made Daryl’s skin crawl, and not just because Wicket had somehow ended up with crabs from the whole thing.
This place looked cleaner, at least, with a gleaming stage off to the left, a long sweep of bar to the right, and round tables filling the space in between. On the far wall was a whole mysterious area set off by long, velvet curtains, with an extra bouncer posted out front.
“Well, I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” Merle said, rubbing his hands together. “Won’t even know I’m here.” That gave Daryl the closest thing he’d had to a laugh all day, and it came snorting out his nose like humph. “I’m just here to bankroll you a good time, baby brother.” He clapped him on the back and Daryl jumped from the unexpected contact, jittering away before he realized it wasn’t one of Merle’s attack noogies or headlocks or—god help them both since they were in their fuckin’ forties—wedgies. “Let’s get us a table right up front. This money ain’t gonna spend itself!”
Merle offered the too-bright manic-tinged smile he got when he was trying to be charming, and Daryl’s chest twinged tight, like he’d smoked too many cigarettes in a row. It was the only reason he’d agreed to come tonight. Because Merle was trying to apologize.
He couldn’t stand it when Merle tried to be sweet. Make him all twitchy inside his skin like he needed to disappear. His brother was a whole hell of a lot easier to take when he was loud and irritating. Easy to dismiss. Easier to imagine Daryl might be able to take off on him someday, live a life of his own that didn’t have him on a first-name basis with Patty down at the Budget Bail Bonds office. Didn’t have him in a new apartment every few months that always got tinged with that metallic lightbulb smell of a crackpipe.
When Merle tried to make something up to Daryl, it reminded him too much of when they were both hiding scared in the basement from their dad on a tear. Knowing it was too loud to come out even to go to school, so staying there all night and all the next day until Dad passed out and they could sneak up and gobble some peanut butter out of the jar, and Slim Jims scavenged from his pickup glove box.
Merle chose a table and pulled out a chair for him with a flourish. Daryl winced. This table was so close to the dancing ladies he could see the razor burn just outside the line of their panties. “Maybe a little further back?” he attempted. Further into the shadows where it’d be easier to pretend that he wasn’t really here.
Merle gave him an odd look. “You can’t tip ‘em from back there, baby bro.”
Daryl winced. He didn’t mean to come off looking like a cheapskate. Of course the women deserved to be tipped if they were going to be doing all that dancing. Shit, now he was coming off like a hick preteen who had never really been to a strip club.
“Right, yeah.” He jerked a chair out and sat, only to notice the tiny spasm of hurt rocket across Merle’s face when Daryl didn’t take the chair he’d pulled out.
“Besides,” Merle said, taking the chair himself a beat too late. “They don’t let you touch less’n you’re tucking a dollar in.”
Daryl choked. For fuck’s sake. That’s why his brother cared enough to tip? He ran a hand over his face and stared at the ceiling for a second. He needed out. Of this life, this goddamn toxic matched set him and Merle had somehow ended up being.
Because in this life, nothing ever fucking changed.
Merle pulled a fat wad of dollar bills out of his pocket and slid it across the table, leaving it conspicuously in front of his brother. Like he knew Daryl wouldn’t turn his nose up at cash the way he’d done to the chair. It just sat there, Daryl’s throat itchily tight as he fought with himself. Because that stack of bills wasn’t near fat enough to pay for the truck Merle had wrapped around a tree, silver Coors Lite tallboys jingling all around his feet. They’d all still been there when Daryl showed up to the impound yard to check out the damage to the truck he hadn’t even known Merle had borrowed. No, fuck Merle and fuck his half-assed apology.
Daryl scowled, ignoring the bills.
They just sat there. The way candy bars used to do in front of his bedroom door when Daryl caught it especially hard from his dad and Merle wasn’t able to stop him. He wasn’t sure why they’d never talked about what happened on those days. Why it was always silent candy bars instead. But to this day, he just about couldn’t eat chocolate without getting that twisted, half-sick feeling in his stomach and wanting to check in on his brother, just to see if he was okay.
Daryl took a bill, when he couldn’t stand it anymore. Reached over and dropped it on the stage. Merle’s whole face lit up, the wrinkles in his cheeks all lifting with new energy.
“See? You getting into the spirit of things now!” Merle thumped the table, all but dancing in his seat as he waved an arm to flag down the waitress.
The dancer, who’d been working the other side of the stage, looked oddly at his one dollar bill abandoned on the floor. She turned and strutted over, bending deep to give him a smile. But her tits were out and it just felt wrong to look, like she was changing clothes or something. Daryl’s head ducked before he could catch himself, and she snatched up the dollar and moved on, looking peeved like he’d thumbs-downed her merchandise or something.
Fuck.
His knee started to jiggle under the table. It was going to be a long night.
He sat, arms crossed and not touching the beer Merle ordered him, through three acts with so much bass thumping that he was probably going to still be feeling it in his fillings when he tried to sleep tonight. How the hell could those girls even walk in those shoes, much less dance in ‘em? Made his toes hurt just thinking about it.
Merle was restless, making too many jokes and ordering too many beers, and glancing over at Daryl every couple of seconds to see if he was having fun. Which made Daryl feel weird because he wanted Merle to feel like he’d done his “making up” so he’d stop trying and they could go. He didn’t want to look like a pussy who hated naked girls or whatever, but also the idea of trying to plaster a smile on his face to pretend to have fun just made him more peevish. Since it was his goddamn truck in the scrap yard and his goddamn blistered feet from walking the three miles to work every morning and night and his embarrassed ass who had to ride bitch on Merle’s bike the mornings his brother actually got his ass up to give him a ride.
Just like with everything with Merle, it seemed like all Daryl’s options came up lose-lose.
Then the music changed. Hoots and whoops rang out from around the room, like the regulars knew something good was coming. The lights dimmed and red spotlights started to whirl. A pang of relief echoed through Daryl, like it was nice to be able to hide for just a second and not feel so goddamn conspicuous.
Then she walked out onstage.
In a leather bikini draped with random bright sweeps of silk. The edges glittering when the spotlights caught them. In shoes as high as all the rest of the girls, but with three times as much poise. When the music stopped, so did she.
Daryl forgot to breathe, and he would bet every dollar sitting unnoticed on his table that not a scrap of oxygen was had in the whole room in that long beat before the song picked up, faster this time.
She started to dance, but it wasn’t like anything else he’d seen tonight. The other girls were all club dancing and booty-popping. Shaking the most popular bits and not doing much else. This woman truly danced. Like her body melted liquid to match the beat. Slithering between one pole and the next, her shoes barely kissing the stage. She fell back against the pole and Daryl gasped, coming half to his feet like he could catch her. But she knew exactly where she was on the stage, and that pole fetched up right between her shoulder blades and supported her.
She reached over her head and flipped UP, muscles in her slender arms rippling as she ended effortlessly upside down, her legs in a wide straddle to each side of the pole, toes pointed. Not even breathing hard, like she did this every day.
Even Merle hooted at that move. “Hot damn, little brother, you see that?”
But Daryl couldn’t answer, because she’d just locked her legs around that pole and he could feel it straight into his pants, like her taut thighs squeezing woke something up in him that had been limp and dead since he entered the doorway of this strange-smelling place.
She linked her legs around the pole and LET GO and he swore, his abs jerking in sympathy-panic as he waited to see her fall straight down on her pretty head. But instead she stayed locked in place just by her legs, her arms circling beautifully, trailing through the air with an easy flourish. To look at her, you’d think she could stay up there all day.
Merle moaned. “Lord have mercy! Them legs, eh?” He reached over and stole some bills off the top of Daryl’s stack, hucking them onto the stage. Daryl slapped his hand down over the bills, wanting to save some in case she came over this way.
She gripped the pole over her head and flipped down, easy as anything. Then she was running, skipping, twirling as the music reached its crescendo and his head started get light with how long it’d been since he last breathed.
The other girls seemed so self-conscious up there, like they were grinning and vamping and playing to the watching men, but this woman seemed like she drifted in a bubble apart from all of them. Just dancing like she’d never wanted to do anything else. Above it all. Daryl felt like his hand would splinter apart into pure light if he even tried to touch something like her.
She didn’t do the usual gyrating round close to the front line of tables, but bills rained up on the stage anyway. Daryl cracked and threw some of his up, just so she’d know how much he liked the act, even though he was still hoping she might come over.
She didn’t. She slipped back behind the curtain and disappeared like a dream he’d had once. He hardly even noticed when one of the bouncers came around, sweeping up her tips for her in an honest-to-god sack of money.
“Oh ho ho!” Merle chortled. “So you ain’t made of stone and saints after all, little brother! See something you like, didya?”
Daryl snatched up his beer, taking a long, flat swallow. It was still cold but his throat was so dry he half-expected it to turn to steam.
“Do they--” He almost stopped himself, because he was going to catch half a raft of shit from Merle for this, but then he couldn’t help himself. “Do they come out twice? The girls? They ever dance twice in one night?” He had to work in the morning but fucked if he was going to unbolt himself from this chair before closing time at two, if there was a chance he could see that ever again in his whole life.
“Course they do, little brother, you think they got a whole circus troupe of ladies back there? They just look different ‘cause they swap out the costumes, wigs sometimes.” Merle leaned back, more comfortable now in his knowledgeable big brother role than he had been in his unaccustomed penitent persona. “Probably ain’t got no more’n six girls back there. Mebbe ten. You cool your heels, let me buy ya another brewski, you’ll see your sweetheart again.”
He glanced over, took a long look at whatever Daryl’s face was doing, then tapped the table twice.
“You know what? I know just what you need. Wait here, little brother, Imma get you fixed up real good.”
“Wait, Merle!” Daryl came halfway out of his chair, because his brother swearing to “fix things” had never landed them anywhere good. Georgia state lock up, three times. Matched set of black eyes, twice. Cuffed in the basement of an angry taxidermist for twenty-seven hours, a very memorable once.
But he got up too slow, because Merle was already gone. Daryl sank down into his seat, swearing. He threw a look toward where the beautiful woman had disappeared, then drank every bit of alcohol left in his beer.
What the hell was Merle going to do this time?
#
The irony was, this job was supposed to be a punishment.
Carol tied on the tiny apron that matched her French maid costume and stepped out onto the club floor, expertly balancing a tray on one hand. She’d lost her lucrative job serving at a high-end steakhouse due to showing up with a black eye. Ed had been furious about the hit to their income, and she didn’t have the health insurance coverage to risk pointing out to him that it had been his fault, not hers. The eye hadn’t blacked itself, after all.
He’d dragged her down to this two-bit strip club and hurled her at the door. “You’re a slut,” he’d seethed. “Go make up the money you lost us with a slut’s job.”
She’d barely been able to choke back her sobs when she walked in the door, which might have actually been why she got the job. The manager, Eddie, was a soft touch for a girl in a tough spot, as it ended up. He made her tea and soup on his rusty little hot plate, and rubbed her back, and gave her a job that paid the best she’d ever had. She’d had to pinch the thin skin of her belly to get the tears to come back before she could walk to the car and meet Ed, so she’d look down-trodden enough about her new prospects.
Carol circled the club floor, taking care of the second part of her job responsibilities. The guys loved when they came out to serve drinks, the performers rubbing elbows up close and personal with them. The beers on the table right up front of the stage were looking low, but she deliberately didn’t look that way.
The handsome one was over there. Shaggy hair, black leather vest across shoulders so wide they strained the seams of his shirt. She almost never noticed the audience when she was dancing, but she’d noticed him. He looked almost…shy.
It set her off her game, between the odd pang of sympathy like she wished she could rescue him from what was obviously a very awkward night out on the town. And the heat under her skin that said he was very handsome. So much so that she almost had to work not to stare when she was supposed to be performing.
Now, her eyes were drifting his way before she could stop herself, and her feet faltered when she saw what had been hidden on the back of that sexy black vest—white angel wings, spreading wide across those shoulders. Something about the image tickled at her like a thought that wouldn’t quite come. She paused, reaching mentally for…what? She wasn’t sure. Instead, she blinked, kicking herself back into gear. She just needed to do a round of her regulars; that would set her back in the groove so her tongue wouldn’t be panting out of her fool head when she had to wait on that angels-and-leather table up front.
“Hey Foxy!” Tobin whistled as she approached his table. “Looking good up there today!”
One of the other guys half-fell, half-slid out of his chair, dropping to both knees in front of her. “Queen Foxy,” Ezekiel cried out. “When will you release me from my anguish and torment and agree to marry me?”
She swatted at him. “Quiet, you bunch of assholes or I’m going to revoke these beers.”
This got her a chorus of moans of feigned pain and fat tips tucked into her apron. She fought back a smile. The men at the strip club loved when she busted their balls. It was one of the most fun parts of her job. Carol’d had a decent amount of sass back in high school, but she hadn’t gotten to use much of it in the last few years, since Ed lost his job at the factory and picked up an early-retirement hobby of making twelve-packs disappear. It energized her, coming to work and getting to talk back to any man in sight, no matter how big. Hell, most of them tipped her more because of it and the few fragile egos that didn’t care for it, well…she was backed up by a pair of bouncers whose affection she kept well-lubricated with homemade peanut butter cookies.
She finished with their table and stopped by a guy who preferred to sit at the bar but be served by the dancers. “You been working out more than me,” Abraham complained when she brought him his skinny vodka tonic with double lime. “I know the kind of core it takes to do a kick-up inversion like that!”
“Not hard, for those of us who aren’t a lazy gummy worm like yourself,” she teased as she poked the personal trainer in one ham-sized bicep. He rolled his eyes in feigned ecstasy.
“You shoulda been a dominatrix, Foxy. You’d have a beach house in the Keys by now.”
“Who says I don’t?” Her tables were all served, except the one she was avoiding, so she propped one hip against the bar and settled in for a bit of bullshitting with her favorite Scotsman. “Maybe this is just a little moonlighting so I get a chance to shake my booty a bit in between spanking theirs.”
“And what a booty it is.” He toasted her, then signaled the bartender. “Let me buy you a drink, darlin’.”
“Only if you don’t think one drink’s gonna make me sweet on you.”
“I would never dare.” He clapped one huge hand over his chest.
The bartender, a sharp-eyed, high-ponytailed girl named Rosita, brought Carol her shot glass of clear liquid.
“My usual?”
“You betcha,” Rosita said, nodding toward the till.
That meant Carol was getting water, and also collecting the full price of the shot in cash at the end of her shift. If she drank all the shots the boys bought her, she’d have a liver with more holes in it than Ed’s old yellowed tank tops. And the profits only went up from there, because they bought more drinks when she did shots with them, so she could double or triple their bar tab—and thus her tips—by playing along. She did half-enjoy the reputation this side-scam had gotten her for being a badass who could drink any man under the table. Rosita even switched up her water for iced tea sometimes, so she could let them think it was whiskey.
“Heya there, pretty lady.” A hand snaked under her skirt and cupped the bottom curve of her bottom. Carol rolled her eyes and took a twirling step to the side in her practiced move that ended the unwanted touch without having to make it a whole thing.
Strike One, she thought, as the turn brought her face-to-face with a redneck half the size of Mount Rushmore. His skin was just as craggy, too, speaking of a life spent out in the sun and the cheap beer of the southern Alabama summertime. Crooked tattoos and breath like a dragon. She turned a wince into a smile just as Abraham came bellowingly off the bar stool.
“Hey, watch your fucking hands, you fucking barbarian. Touching the dancers ain’t included!”
“Easy there, Braveheart.” Rosita chuckled, reaching across the bar and touching him with the short billy club that had materialized in her hands. Rosita didn’t bother signaling for the bouncers. She liked to handle trouble up at the bar herself. Carol privately thought she could break a few less bottles letting the bouncers lend a hand, but who was she to deny another woman her fun?
Carol herself was having her fun right now, wagging a finger back and forth in Redneck’s face. “Now now. Be nice and I won’t let my personal trainer friend here use your spleen for a stress ball.” Strike One was spinning away from the touch. Strike Two was saying whatever the fuck she wanted to these guy’s faces. If they still gave her trouble after that, well, the first one was free and the second strike got them introduced to her close friends the bouncers for their punishment.
If the second strike felt like it fed her soul more than Vitamin D ever had? Well. It was Ed’s own fault for making her get a job somewhere where she got to dance as much as she wanted, and talk back to her heart’s sweet content, with absolutely no consequences.
This job was the gift she never saw coming. Ed hadn’t let her dance in years, hadn’t allowed her to buy so much as a lipstick since Sophia was born. When she walked out on that stage her first night and men looked up at her like she was something valuable, something to desire and yearn for? She walked back to the dressing room after that first dance and bawled her eyes out.
One of the girls had stroked her back and handed her a tissue. “Oh honey, it gets easier.”
“No,” Carol had said with a little catch to her voice. “It’s not that.”
It was the way they looked at her, like she was beautiful. Not old and used up, like Ed always said. It was the perfect scenario. She’d even laughed about it with one of the other performers once. “It’s the best use of men there is. They make you feel pretty and you don’t ever have to blow them.”
“And they pay your rent,” Lily had chimed in.
Plus, Carol used to love to dance, back in high school. Jazz, modern, ballet, cheer squad…it didn’t matter. And now she got to. She stayed up late with YouTube, choreographing her routines, took classes to learn real tricks on the pole so she wasn't just humping it. She even brought back home a little extra of her tips the first couple weeks after she did it, so Ed wouldn’t complain about the expense of the classes.
Which was the other reason she freaking loved her “punishment job.” All the tips were paid in cash. Big, erratic amounts of cash. She’d been saving some back since her first week on the payroll, to put in a safety deposit box downtown that she also paid for in cash. That had been her first mistake with the steakhouse—Ed knew how much to expect, so she couldn’t skim once she decided to leave him, to build up the buffer she needed to start a new life with Sophia. He got all of her paychecks, because they went straight into the account with only his name on it. But the tips…she smiled, thinking of how gobsmacked he would be if he knew exactly how much other men were paying to look at his topless wife each night.
The redneck thought she was smiling at him. “Buzz off, ya sheep-fucker,” he said to Abraham. “I’s talking to the lady.”
Carol actually laughed out loud. “And what can I do for you?” she asked. “Other than possibly running interference between you and my friend here who has the kind of muscles GNC puts in their commercials. I’m not sure yet if your ass is worth saving.”
He thrust a couple of twenties at her. “You ever do those private dances? In the side room?”
Her heart sank. Private dances were her least favorite part of the job. They were so…close. It was hard to forget the man was there and just dance the way she did the rest of the time. On the other hand, they sure did add up a lot faster than singles in your G-string.
Plus, they were private. The room all curtained off from prying eyes. So the bouncer only intervened if you called out. You had to be careful when to yell, because it broke the mood and got the guys all pouty and you really only wanted to do it when the dance was a full loss. For that reason, they all ended up putting up with a little too much touching in the private dances, to salvage a good tip. A lot of the girls really liked them—the sweat, the intensity of the desire you could call up out of a guy. The flirtation of it all. Carol was not one of that type.
Also, the redneck looked a little familiar, and she was starting to think he might have been sitting at the table with Cute Vest Guy. Wasn’t it just her luck that if one of the two of them wanted to shell out for a dance, it wouldn’t be the hot, shy one?
“Foxy gets fifty for private dances,” Rosita said from behind the bar. Carol raised an eyebrow at her, because that wasn’t actually policy. Rosita shrugged, unapologetic for her hustling. “Supply and demand.”
Redneck dug deep in his pocket and came up with another ten, passed it over.
If Ed hadn’t broken a kitchen window last week, she might have passed on this guy. He looked like trouble, and smelled just as bad, too. But things had gotten a little rougher around the house since she took this job. Ed couldn’t leave a mark on her, since her clothes didn’t cover much at this new job. Which meant he took out most of his aggressions on their furniture, and they were starting to have not enough of it left. She really would like to have a kitchen window that wasn’t made out of duct tape and a flattened Amazon box.
Carol plucked the bills from his fingers and nodded toward the curtained-off private “rooms.” “See you in five minutes.”