14. Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

Gianna

This wasn't exactly what I had imagined when Dom had said that he would find a safe place for me to stay while he figured some things out.

I press a hand into my aching lower back and lean against the wall for a moment to rest. Stocking shelves and cleaning at the apartments where his hired dancers live is easy enough, but it's also really boring. And I have to wear an ugly uniform like some kind of cleaning woman, which is scratchy and itchy.

At least the girls who live here are really nice, and we've actually had a lot of fun watching movies late at night and gossiping about boys.

They know me as "Georgie", which was one of my college nicknames. I figured I wouldn't slip up and give away my real name if I used a nickname that I was used to hearing.

Most of the girls are around my age, and many of them have had pretty tough lives. Bad childhoods seem to go hand-in-hand with working as a dancer, but I was surprised to find that many of them really actually love dancing for a living.

They also all rave about how well Dom treats them, which makes me feel proud. I knew that he had a big heart despite what he did for a living.

Apparently being asked to turn tricks at the same time as dancing is very common in their line of work, and most of the girls told me that they won't consider working anywhere else than Dom's club because he doesn't expect that of them.

Every time I talk with them about their jobs, I realize just how sheltered I have always been. I can't think of a single woman in my mother's circle of friends who works. I don't know any women my own age who work.

It never occurred to me that so many women in the world are being asked to do jobs that they hate, for horrible pay.

I often feel pretty stupid and na?ve when the girls include me in these discussions. They just assume that I understand. After all, I'm here working as a live-in cleaning lady and room mom.

They must think that I have a similar tough past that I just don't like to talk about. I've tried to push the shock and worry to the back of my mind and learn from them.

There's so much that I don't know and I feel like I owe it to my child to become much wiser to the ways of the world. I need better street smarts, at least, if I'm going to be with Dom.

I haven't been willing to consider the possibility that Dom will eventually stash me somewhere out of the way for my own safety and then come back to Chicago to work. It's a very real possibility, but the idea of it breaks my heart.

I've had to admit to myself that I'm falling in love with him, and the baby that we share is making it even harder for me to face the idea that he might not feel the same way.

I trust him to think about my safety and to try to do the right thing by me, but love is a completely different animal.

I decide that I can worry about whether or not Dom loves me another day. I have other chores to take care of before the girls wake up for the day.

Most of them end their nights around three in the morning, so they often don't get out of bed until ten or eleven at the earliest. I try to get a lot of the cleaning done before they are up for the day so that we aren't bumping into one another while I work.

I've gotten especially close with a girl named Diva. She won't tell me her real name, and I haven't pressed her for that information. I know all too well that names have power and that keeping your name to yourself is often essential.

Diva is a sweet girl with dark skin, big, beautiful eyes, and slim, graceful hands. She said she did gymnastics when she was growing up, and her tumbling skills have made her one of the most successful dancers at Dom's club.

She has been trying to teach me to do the splits and some of her other moves with limited success. I figure I can learn how to be even sexier for Dom while I'm in hiding, if nothing else.

I want so much to tell Diva that I'm pregnant.

The secret feels larger than my entire life at this point. It's getting harder and harder not to tell Dom about the baby, but I just can't distract him right now.

He's been trying to find out what is going on with my parent's business so that he can "take care of the problem". I'm pretty sure that I know what that means, and I don't dwell on it. At this point, I just want to be safe and be able to go back to living with Dom and working at the club.

Surprisingly, I miss doing secretarial work for the business. I had discovered in the week that I was working in Dom's office upstairs at the club, that I have a good head for numbers and figures.

I had also noticed some areas where the company could save money and had helped to create a better way of managing the dancer's shifts and work calendar.

Working at Dom's business made me feel useful and smart, and I missed it.

Being unable to share anything about my life with the girls that I'm living with has made me feel isolated all over again. I'm trying not to slip into a depression again, like before I met Dom. I need to be stronger than that for the baby and for him.

"Girl, why do you look so sad today?" Diva asks me as I join her on the floor of the common room in the middle of the four-room apartment complex. The design of the apartment reminds me of the quads they had on my school campus.

I start stretching, trying to get deeper into the movements like Diva does. I look at her sweet face, with her big, kind eyes, and decide to say something about the baby for the first time. "I'm worried about my baby," I admit, and then instantly start crying.

"Baby?" she says, her brow furrowed in confusion. "You have a child that's not living with us?"

I shake my head and press my hand to my belly to indicate what I mean. I'm crying too hard to speak.

"Oh!" Diva says with understanding. She gets gracefully up out of her stretching position, and comes to hunker beside me on the floor.

She wraps her strong arms around me and rocks me a little as I cry. Its feels good to say something to someone about the pregnancy, even if I know it's a risk I shouldn't expose myself to. "Does the daddy know?" she asks.

I shake my head.

"Do you still talk to the daddy?" she asks me next, still rocking me.

I nod. "Y…yes."

She's quiet for a moment. "Well, girl, that's one step ahead of most of us in this life."

We both laugh a little at that, and she sits back. She hands me a box of tissues from the coffee table, and I blow my nose.

"You going to keep it?" she wants to know.

I nod again. "Oh, yes."

She nods back. "You're brave," she says with a shake of her head. "But I can tell that about you. You're tough."

I blink at her. I don't think of myself that way at all. After all, I was raised to be soft and pretty, ornamental. My mother had groomed me to get a rich husband and do volunteer work all my life.

I wasn't raised to be competent. I didn't even know how to get a job, and Dom had to offer me one.

I don't think of myself as strong, but the fact that Diva, who said she spent multiple years of her life on the streets, thinks I'm strong speaks volumes about how much I don't know about myself.

"I guess I don't see myself that way," I say with a loud sniff.

She smiles at me. "Us girls have to look out for one another," she says. "You need anything at all, you and the baby, you tell Diva, okay? I'm here for you, boo."

"Thank you," I say to her, and I mean it. I think about my silly, rich friends and I realize that none of those girls actually ever cared about me.

They didn't even know me. All they knew was that I was from a wealthy family and that I liked to drink. That was all that we ever had in common.

Diva, who my mother would have turned her nose up at, is the first real friend that I think I have ever had.

It doesn't matter that I don't know her real name or that she was homeless before she started dancing for Dom's club. She's a real, genuine, caring person who I can trust.

"Are you taking your vitamins?" she asks me next. She wags a finger at me. "Babies need those prenatals. Most of us girls take them to keep our hair and nails pretty, so they're in the cupboard up there by the sink if you need some."

I blink. It didn't occur to me that I might need to take vitamins. I feel stupid as I nod and say, "I better start taking them."

"You can start now," Diva says. She does a tumbling roll to rise to her feet and goes into the kitchen. She gets down a little pack of vitamins for me and a glass of water. As she passes them to me, she squeezes my hand. "We all look out for each other here, boo. Remember that."

A sudden thought occurs to me. "Diva," I say carefully. "Can you keep this a secret for now?"

She frowns a little. "You don't want the other girls to know?"

I shake my head. "It's just that I'm afraid of losing my job, you know?" I say.

Her expression clears and she nods sagely. "Oh, yeah. Damn the man and all those rules about employing pregnant ladies. Although, I can't imagine Dom firing you over that," she reassures me.

If only she knew. But I just don't want the girls to say something to Dom about the fact that I'm pregnant. It would be a terrible way for him to find out about the baby. "I guess not," I say. I make myself look downtrodden. "It's just…I just can't afford to run into any trouble, you know?"

Diva laughs. "Oh, baby, don't I know! All of us understand being careful about who knows our biz, so I get it. You can trust me to keep your secret safe."

"Thank you," I say to her with a watery smile before taking my vitamins. Thankfully, I seem to have graduated from the worst of the morning sickness routine, and the vitamins go down and stay down.

"Come on," Diva says to me briskly, getting back into her favorite stretching routine. "You can still limber up with me. Might make delivering that special little package a lot easier when the time comes."

I chuckle and go back to trying to stretch like Diva.

It feels good to have told someone about the baby, even if it was a risk.

Now, if I can just figure out when and how to tell the father, that would be great.