Excerpt of Tainted Rose by Abby Weeks

Rose Meadows was a stripper. She didn’t want to be a
stripper, she had never intended to be one, but that was the
way things were and there was nothing she could do about it.
If there was one thing life had taught her in the ten long
years since her father’s brutal death, it was that you
couldn’t always control what happened in your life. There
were other forces at play, dark forces, and they often had
the last word over your destiny.

Rose had never spoken to anyone about what had happened to
her. She didn’t tell people how she’d ended up in this place
and how it made her feel, she didn’t talk about the
nightmares that would keep her up in the middle of the night
in a blind panic. Who would she have spoken to? She had no
one. She was as isolated and alone as a young girl could be.

But if she had been able to talk to someone about it she
would have said that along with the humiliation and the
embarrassment of being forced to strip every day, there was
also a feeling of power to it. There was an intense thrill
to being up on the stage in front of all those men. There
was a lustful sort of pleasure to being the center of their
attention, to having all those hungry eyes feasting on the
exquisite details of her body, lusting after her beauty,
desiring to touch her, to be touched by her. She had learned
that as with so many other things, there was a tainted
pleasure to the pain.

When the lights came on and the music started there was
nowhere else in the world that could give her that thrill,
that sense of being wanted and adored, as the stage of the
strip club. Despite everything that had happened to her, the
terrible chain of events that had led her life to this
desolate place, dancing gave her a rush of adrenaline like
nothing she’d ever experienced. And while she deeply hated
the men who had taken her to this place, who had reduced her
to near slavery, she never transferred that hatred onto her
customers. She bore no ill feeling toward the men who came
in to watch her dance. In this place, this isolated,
desolate bar at the very ends of the earth, the customers
were the only friends she had.

If there was someone to talk to, and if she was being
completely honest, she would have said that sometimes she
even liked dancing. She didn’t know if that was something
she should have been ashamed of, she was being forced to
dance in the sleaziest, most sordid bar imaginable, under
the very worst conditions, but that was the truth. She kind
of liked it. And after all she’d been through, all the
horrible things that still happened to her on a near daily
basis, she needed something that gave her pleasure. If it
wasn’t for the dancing, she would not have survived.

She knew it would come as a shock to most people. They’d be
surprised to learn that a stripper could actually enjoy her
job. Most people thought of dancers as the very lowest of
the low, the very bottom of the social order. They thought
of dancers as the poor, desperate and naive girls that they
so often were. And they thought of them as whores.