She is a person. She is a hooker. She has found someone who sees her, understands her, possibly, he could fall in love with her. This, she thinks, is finally a way out. A new and better life. She can feel it, but she has been faking her feelings for so long so can she trust them now?
Written by Rebecca Milton
Published by AmorBooks
“Hello, My name is Meredith and I’m a hooker.”
“Hello, Meredith.”
Her Friday night regular.
He sits in the corner, in the ugly mustard colored wing back chair, under the floor lamp with the faded red shade with fringe dangling down, most of it missing, the rest of it frayed like her nerves when she’s coming down off whatever she had been given, bought, smoked, shot, drank. He matched a cigarette, blew it out and flicked it toward the open window where it disappears into the dark, into the night, into the sounds of the city. Some Friday nights, with this regular, she envies the spent, charcoal tipped match. It has gotten out of the room, out of this sad, sick, film that replays every Friday night just around ten in the evening.
In her mind he is the professor. Not because he teaches at school. He doesn’t. He’s a clerk at a shipping and receiving company down on the pier. She calls him the professor, in her mind, because he reminds her of the professors she had in school. The ones who were bitter about their colleagues going further, getting more attention and so, they took out their academic rage on the students who had trouble. Who struggled. Who were not as quick as the honor students. The professors who made her feel like educating her was a burden for them, a gift for her, and she needed to be constantly reminded of that.
“Tell me,” the professor says, letting smoke slowly curl out between his lips and from his nostrils. She always got chills from smokers who exhaled out their nostrils. They looked like dragons, devils, spirits not to be messed with. …“do two dollar whores dream of being high priced call girls?” He laughed at his cleverness, coughed, doubled over and spit toward the window. Most of the green lung scum splatted on the sill, the rest crawled out and away from him. He sat back, smoked and watched her. This is what he paid for. This is why he came. There would be…
