Comfort zone.

CASSANDRA…

(Take your time to devour the emotions in this chapter.)

“If you think about it, this is just like Hooters only even better because you don’t have to worry about bills and sh*t like that,” Mia said, sitting across the room from me with a cigarette perched between her lips and a flame dancing in front of it.

“Seems an awful lot like prostitution,” I muttered.

“If you ask me, it’s a hell of a business agreement.” She shrugged and took a long drag of her cigarette.

“It’s just…” I looked around, searching for a believable story and for something that I could say that wouldn’t come out the wrong way. “More than I bargained for.”

“I heard that.” She muttered and took another drag of her cigarette, “I felt that way too at first…”

It seemed doubtful, she seemed to have at least known she was entering a s*x kingdom when she entered. I had no f*ck*ng clue what I was getting into. At this point, I almost didn’t want to report it. Almost.

She was legitimately trying to help me, and I knew that. My encounter with Marco had shaken me up a bit, and she, as my ‘big sister’ was supposed to help me through all of this stuff. She couldn’t do a lot during work hours when she was in one place, and I was in the ‘VIP’ lounge.

“It gets easier.” She assured me, “I only have another year left and to be honest, I’m thinking of asking to stay longer.” She laughed.

“That’s insane,” I said without thinking.

“I would have thought that too when I started. You’ll see. You get taken care of down here.” She almost sounded… pale.

“I’ll bet,” I muttered with an eye roll and fell backward on the plain white bed. The worst part of all of this was I didn’t have anything to change until after I was done ‘working’. God knows what had happened to the clothes I had worn down here.

Mia, on the other hand, seemed to have no shame in stripping and crawling between her sheets.

“I’m going up tomorrow,” she whispered after we turned the light out.

“Going up?”

“Mhm, I’m going to see the Statue of Liberty. I had always wanted to visit, but I grew up in Florida and was t financially settled for a long trip.”

I had so many questions, but when I started rambling then off, I was interrupted by the sound of her light snoring. I sighed heavily and rolled onto my back to stare at the ceiling. Admittedly, I was used to sleeping with a fan on and had a heck of a time getting to sleep down here without one. The sound of her snoring was helpful. If Christiano hadn’t shot my phone, I had i fan app that would have resolved this problem.

I was exhausted from working so much; my feet were blistered from the constant heels and the bags under my eyes were starting to get difficult to cover with makeup alone. But all the physical trials of this was nothing compared to the emotional toil it was taking.

I thought I was a journalist, a hardcore journalist, I would do anything to get the story of a lifetime. Or so I thought. Laying here now, thinking about how much it would be to soak my feet in salt water and wrap myself in a fuzzy robe, I came to a very startling realization. I was no longer a journalist. If I had been, I would have been living all this. I was like an undercover cop, I was getting the story of the year, maybe even the millennium! And I would have gladly given it up just to go home.

I needed to get out of this place before I lost even more of myself. That would be my new focus— How to get out. The story could wait. My life could wait. Sooner or later, Christiano would catch on. What would he do to me then?

~*~

Some days you just wake up, and you know. Today will be the day I’ll have a complete and utter breakdown. You have no clue why, you certainly don’t wake up that way, you just know it’s coming. Real hard. This was just too much, I was starting to wonder what could be worse, dying, or staying here.

Granted, my poor feet appeared to be getting used to the heels, even the skimpy wardrobe was bothering me far less than before as I’d pretty much gotten used to them at this point. Even my roommate, you know, the one I was grossed out by her blatant admittance of sleeping with the guys down here, was a total sweetheart. Some faces down here were actually friendly, girls and boys alike. But I couldn’t do it anymore.

I missed my family, annoying and dysfunctional, I wanted to go home. The longer I was here, the more I missed them, the more I wanted to go home, and the less sh*t I gave about my flat-lined career. I was tired, tired of working every day and getting nothing for it, tired of being looked at, tired of being touched inappropriately, tired of pretending to be happy and well put together to avoid being shot.

More than anything, I was tired of Christiano. His cold gaze followed me curiously around the room all the time. When I screwed up he would roll his eyes with this smug smirk on his face, it was like he’d be waiting for my mistakes which of course, he never had to wait long.

Every single day my will was worn out just a smidgen more than the day before, and finally, on this, the last day of the third week, I knew I had reached my breaking point. Knowing Mia was an incredibly heavy sleeper, I moved light-footed to the private bathroom connected to our room. I shut the door behind me, left the lights on, crawled into the bathtub, and just let myself be an emotional disaster. A basket case. Something Christiano would have laughed hard about. I didn’t care. Places like these closed-in shelters, alone, and preferably in the dark, were my comfort zone. Closets and bathtubs, under the bed, these were the places where I would let myself break.

As I always did when I was done being a basket case, I got out of the bed tub and carried on my day as if nothing had ever happened. I showered, stalked down the hall to pick an outfit with only a towel protecting me from wandering eyes, and then I went to work the way I did every other day.