[Lost] Slapped

[frothy-bunny.livejournal.com]

Altair had said the words and they had landed like a slap across my consciousness, sharp, sudden and unexpectedly painful.  No one seems to realise that the good stuff comes with a price too.

I was a playmate, a playmate bunny. I didn't go out of my way to become a playmate.  It was a set of circumstances that led me to it, but it had its downsides. The worst one is the one that makes me feel stained. The one that other people seem to think gives them the right to judge me.

2 hours later as I perch on the arm of a chair and lean over to light a cigar I feel the dirt, that stain. It's marked in hand prints where they touch me and I fake a smile or in the notes that they slide into my underwear for an hour of my time, or a dance. It's never anything more than that, but sometimes I wonder if it would make me feel any dirtier if it was.

I shower after one job and try to make myself feel cleaner with heat and soap.  At the hospital the comments even come there.  Working in A+E or in the intensive care unit, men there who should never have been allowed children for the abuses they put them through, or the drunks.  Today I feel fragile as they make comments, today I already had that armour stripped away.  I go to the main ward, visiting hours are over and the kids call me Dr Rabbit and I feel cleaner for it, though at times it feels like a lie.  When the children are asleep and I sit and work on my paperwork I feel like I should be better and I realise that my self esteem took another blow.

I think back to Tabitha asking for advice and wonder if she had thought I had some magic wisdom, or was it just a veiled insult that I missed.  I remember Robyn's indignant rage and I feel slapped again.  I look at my Phone and wonder about phoning Gehenna, Orville, hell even Chalkwell and then realise its 4 am and I am the only one crazy enough to be awake at that time, even if I am working.

8am rolls around soon enough, and 2 workplaces and 1 emergency surgery later I am tired and feeling worse than before.  I slide into my car and drive back to the farm.  As I pull up I want to be cleaner, I want to be pure and unsullied.  He’ll already be working and I close my eyes to listen.  I hear him and know that I should leave him to working as I go in and find the shower turning it on and up as hot as I can.  It scalds and I scrub at my skin.  I want to be clean.  I don’t even think I realised I was crying till I felt the hand on my shoulder as the other hand turns the heat down.  Somewhere in that touch, in the fire of his eyes I feel cleaner, pure.  In a moment's touch, a glance into the fires in his eyes, more has been scrubbed away than I managed with the water and the soap. It’s why I wanted to call at 4 am.  

I know that they make me feel cleaner, purer.  They don’t see me as a stripper, they see me as a dancer; They don’t see an escort, they see a girl that men would pay to spend time with and they don’t see those things beyond a woman who would do what ever it would take to make sure that she can fulfil her dreams.