The Regular
The bass in The Cage wasn’t something you heard; it was something you felt in your teeth. It thrummed through the reinforced floorboards, rattled the brass pole under my palm, and vibrated right up the spine until your pulse had no choice but to sync with the track.
I swung off the steel platform, letting gravity take the weight before snapping my hips back into the purple-lit haze. The crowd cheered, a wall of warm, beer-soaked noise that hit my chest and bounced off.
Give them the tilt of the head. Give them the slide of the hand down the calf. Keep the knee bent. Don’t break eye contact.
I knew the arithmetic of this room down to the decimal. Five seconds of direct eye contact with a guy in a tailored suit equaled a twenty in the waistband. A playful, low-sweeping roll across the floor equaled a shower of tens from the college kids lined up at the edge of the stage. It wasn’t art; it was mechanics. It was muscle memory and baby oil, wrapped in magenta neon and sold by the twenty-minute set.
My body belonged to the music for three songs at a time. The rest of me—the part that worried about the rent, the part that dreaded checking the lock on my phone in the dressing room—stayed buried deep enough that no one out there could touch it.
The track faded into a low, metallic transition, and I landed smoothly on both feet, throwing back my head to let the sweat drip down my neck. The applause rose, hungry and loose. I flashed the practiced, smoky grin that didn’t reach my eyes, picked up my towel from the amplifier, and slung it over my shoulder.
“Work it out, Castellanos,” Deshawn muttered, passing me on his way up to the platform, his body already moving to the fresh synth line. “You’re burning the stage up tonight.”
“Gotta earn the salt,” I said low, wiping the back of my neck as I stepped off the raised lip of the main floor.
I moved through the crowd like water, ducking under outstretched arms, dodging a drunken hand trying to grab at the waistband of my shorts with a fluid sidestep that looked like part of the show. People touched because they paid to look, but off the wood, I was ghosting.
I made my way toward the back bar to grab a bottle of water, my eyes automatically scanning the room out of habit.
The VIP booths ran along the east wall, half-drowned in bruised purple shadow. Booth 1 had a bachelor party making a mess of cheap tequila. Booth 2 was empty.
Booth 3 had him.
I slowed my stride, resting an elbow against the cool laminate of the bar top.
He was there again. Third time this week. Monday, Wednesday, and now Friday.
He sat in the corner booth near the emergency exit, where the neon barely reached. He didn’t fit the room’s profile. Most of our regulars fell into two categories: the loud ones who wanted everyone to see how much money they were throwing, or the twitchy ones who kept checking over their shoulder like their wives were about to walk through the velvet curtains.
This guy was neither.
He was broad-shouldered, built like someone who lifted heavy things for a living rather than for a mirror. He wore a faded canvas jacket over a dark Henley, the sleeves pushed up to reveal thick, forearms dusted with dark hair. Silver streaks caught the dim light at his temples. He wasn’t drinking alcohol—just a glass of club soda with a bruised lime wedge sitting untouched on the dark wood in front of him.
And he was watching me.
Not the way the others watched. He wasn’t tracking my hips or looking for a flash of skin. His eyes—steady, dark, unhurried—were fixed on my face. When I caught him looking, he didn’t dart his gaze away, and he didn’t flash a greasy, knowing smirk either. He just sat there, grounded, like a stone in a fast river.
I reached for the water bottle the bartender slid across the zinc counter, popping the cap with my thumb.
“Who’s the canvas jacket?” I asked, nodding subtly toward Booth 3 before taking a long pull of cold water.
The bartender, a burly guy named Sam with a bearded smile, glanced over and shrugged. “Name on his tab’s Reyes. Dario, I think. Quiet guy. Comes in around eleven, stays for an hour, drinks two seltzers, leaves a fifty on the table when he goes.”
“Does he book private?”
“Haven’t seen him ask,” Sam said, wiping down a spill with a rag. “Just sits there. Drops money in the jar on his way past the stage, too. Why? He bothering you?”
“No,” I said, my gaze drifting back to the shadows of Booth 3. “He’s not touching anything. That’s what’s weird.”
In The Cage, men who didn’t take were usually the ones planning how to grab later. Patterns were safe. Patterns meant I knew when to duck, when to smile, and when to call Yoyo from the back office. An anomaly was just a threat that hadn’t declared itself yet.
As if feeling the weight of my attention, Dario Reyes shifted in his seat. He reached into his jacket, pulled out a crisp, folded bill, and set it neatly under the coaster on his table. Then he stood up.
He was tall—at least six-two—moving with a slow, deliberate grace that looked strange under the flashing strobe lights. He adjusted his collar, took one last look toward the bar—toward me—and gave a single, quiet nod. Not a proposition. Just an acknowledgment.
Then he turned and walked out the exit, the heavy steel door shutting behind him with a dull thud that got swallowed instantly by the bass.
I stood there for a second, the cold water bottle condensation dripping onto my knuckles, staring at the empty booth.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket—a sharp, double-vibration that meant a text from Marcus. The real world crashing back in through the neon.
I pulled it out.
Rio. Need 500 by midnight or they’re coming to the house. Please.
I swallowed hard, the taste of baby oil and cheap cologne turning sour in my throat. I stuffed the phone back into my pocket, wiped my forehead with the back of my forearm, and turned back toward the dressing room to change for my next set.
I had money to make. But as I pushed through the black curtain, the image of those steady, unhurried dark eyes in Booth 3 stayed stuck behind my eyelids, refusing to wash out.
