She was quiet for a minute, and then blew out a long sigh. “Zeke owned a tattoo parlor and gave me a job. I answered the phones, kept the place clean. It wasn’t much, but at least I had a little money coming in, and I didn’t feel like I was mooching off him.”
“Is that how you got the piercings and the tattoos?” I loved her tattoos: the snake that wrapped around her right leg starting at her ankle and ended about half way up her thigh; the Celtic knots on each wrist; the little humming bird on her left shoulder blade; the crossed lightning bolts on the back of her neck. But I really liked the little she devil on her right pubic bone, all red and sexy.
“Zeke had an apprentice. No one would let him work on them until they could see what he could do. I was his masterpiece.” She gave me a little smirk that lit up her chocolate eyes. “I made him pay me, of course.”
I grinned. “Of course.”
“Zeke kept me out of trouble. Helped me get my GED so that I could get a better job. But I was busting my ass at two different jobs and still not able to keep my head above water.” Her eyes turned stormy, troubled. “Zeke fell in love with some guy from Miami and moved away…and I found myself stripping.”
That surprised me. I hadn’t expected that at all, but it didn’t matter to me. So what if she had been a stripper? It wasn’t like she was whoring herself out. “How did that go?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It went really well. I was able to pay my bills and keep food in my fridge. I saved up enough and bought my Corolla. Life wasn’t easy, but it was getting better.”
I nodded, understanding what she meant. “When did Lana and Lucy come onto the scene?”
“Two years ago. Social services called me out of the blue and asked me if I was willing to take in my two sisters, since our mother had been killed in a car accident. At first I thought she had the wrong number. When I left, it was only Lana…I tried to keep in touch with her, but our mother wouldn’t let me, so Lucy came as a complete surprise to me.”
“It must have been hard, working and taking on the girls like that.”
“Not really. As soon as I knew they needed me, I told the social worker that I wanted them. But I couldn’t keep them if I was stripping. One of my regulars at the club told me if I ever needed a job he would hire me…so I took him up on the offer. Stan, he owns Perfectly Clean, helped me out. I got a respectable job, and the girls.”
I think I might have fallen a little more in love with her as she told me about her life. Not just how she came to be the surrogate mother of her two younger sisters, but how she had come to be the person she was today. Layla had spirit. Tenacity. She was full of life, even though life had tried to beat her down more than a few times. Her courage, diligence, and determination were all in her eyes, and I liked seeing them there.
She reminded me of Emmie.
It wasn’t a bad thing. In fact I think I had secretly been looking for someone like her my whole life. Someone who could deal with me without giving up on me. Someone who would love me even when I was a completely unlovable bastard. I could be a real asshole at times, especially when I thought about life before we had hit it big, or the years before we had gotten Emmie back.
We talked until the sun came up and she fell asleep in my arms. When I finally gave into sleep, I did so with a content smile on my face…
The buzzing of a phone woke me. Groaning I untangled myself from around Layla and searched for my jeans. By the time I found them, the phone had stopped ringing, but I knew that if it was Emmie it would start ringing again soon. I pulled my phone from my pocket and saw that it was after two in the afternoon. Muttering a curse I saw that I had six missed calls, all of them from Emmie in the last hour.
Worry for her made my fingers shake as I hit redial on the last number and waited for her to pick up. “Are you okay?” she demanded as soon as she answered.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I told her, running a hand over the small stubble on my head.
She sighed. “I’m fine. I was just worried about you. Lana came over asking if I had heard from you or Layla. She’s worried about her sister and can’t get her to answer her phone. Where are you, Jesse?”
“We crashed at Tom’s,” I told her and heard her sigh again. “It isn’t like that.”
“Sure it isn’t. Shane never takes his one-nighters there.” She sounded disappointed in me and I hated that. “Tell Layla to call her sister.”
“Em!” I pressed the phone closer to my ear. “I swear to you that this isn’t like that. Layla means more to me than that.”