8 Mile

After more than three years on the street, I was ready to belong somewhere and to someone.

Thinking of that someone motivated me to go out and watch him to see if he needed any help. I threw on my religious panties... I called them that because they were so holey. I didn't own a bra, but I really didn't need one that much. My breasts weren't big enough to hang. Sure they were fairly large-sized swellings. It made them look bigger, but there really wasn't much there.

I usually wore two or three tight t-shirts to flatten them out and keep my nipples from showing. I layered two thin jackets over them and my heavy jacket over that.

But I decided to forgo all of the layers that morning. I put on the t-shirts only and then zipped up the parka he had offered me the night before.

The fur-lined jacket was immediately warmer than all of my layers. As soon as I saw how bad the weather was outside, I realized that someone or something was looking out for me. There was a lot of snow on the ground already, and it was still snowing.

My upper body was toasty-warm in the parka, but my legs and feet were freezing. He had cleared his driveway and was working on the sidewalk in front of the house where the old lady who'd waved at me lived.

I waved at him. He turned off his snowblower and came over to me immediately. "Get your ass back in the house," he spat. The expression on his face was angrier than I'd seen him that far.

Reality hit me like a fist. He probably didn't want his neighbors to know that he had a bag lady in his house. They'd probably figure out what was going on between us and embarrass him.

My anger flared then. I knew exactly how to reply to him. I was just about to say, So... You weren't too embarrassed to stick your dick in me last night when it was dark, but you don't want to be seen with me in the daylight, huh? But he started talking again and ruined my chance.

"It's freezing out here," he continued. "You don't have any boots, or gloves and your pants are too thin for this weather. I don't want you to get sick."

It was spontaneous. I burst into tears. It had been so long since anyone actually gave a fuck about me that I didn't know how to react. He scooped me up into his arms and carried me back inside of his house.

"Stay here," he said. He went into the kitchen. It suddenly got quiet. "Holy Fuck!" he said loudly. I jumped up from the sofa and went after him.

He was just standing there smiling. Then he looked over at me, and the smile got bigger. He grabbed me and hugged me. As he held me to his body, mine came alive. My nipples sprouted, and my holey panties got moist.

"Sorry," he said suddenly. He let go of me as quickly as he'd grabbed me. I was surprised that he let go of me and a little pissed. I was wondering what the hell he had to be sorry about.

"I didn't mean to do that," he continued. "I was just so happy to see the kitchen clean. I promise it won't happen again."

I was confused... And even more pissed. Why the hell wouldn't he hug me again? And if he wouldn't even hug me, how the hell was I supposed to con him into letting me stay another night?

"Thank you so much... Uhm...?" he said with his voice trailing off.

I saw my opening then. Life on the street makes you tougher. It also makes you more aggressive. Sometimes needlessly so. It makes you prey on those weaker than you and take advantage of every situation that can gain you anything.

"Typical..." I spat. It was the setup.

"Huh?" he said. He had taken the bait, so I reeled him in... Or thought I had.

"After what you did to me last night... You don't even know my name," I said.

I was smiling as I said it. My smile was meant to be playful and seductive. I was trying to remind him of what we'd done the night before. Couples, whether married or not, often engage in very playful and sexy banter. It heightens their shared experiences and binds them together by touching on secrets between them.

A wife might pretend to be sore and tell her husband, "You should be ashamed of yourself for what you did to me last night." But what she really means is that it was good, and he should do it again.

His face told me that I had fucked up again. I fucked up on two very important fronts. The first was that he had no idea that I was trying to be seductive. We didn't have any shared history to draw on so he had no idea that i was playing with him.

Secondly and even worse, he was a much better man than any I had ever known. He actually felt really bad about the previous night. He was carrying so much guilt because of my claim that he had raped me, that he'd been doing everything he could to try to make up for it. Then I went and reminded him of it. I deserved to have my ass sent back into the cold.

He plopped down into one of the chairs and his head dropped to the table. I was speechless. He was actually feeling bad. I couldn't figure it out.

The guys who actually had raped me didn't feel bad about it. They were high-fiving each other and bragging about it for about five minutes before they came up with the brilliant idea to pimp me out and make money off of me.

I felt like I had clubbed a baby seal. I had to distract him from what he was feeling or I'd be sleeping in an abandoned house very soon.

"My name is Betty," I said. "Alan, we should have a talk. Why don't you go and finish doing the snow? If you let me, I'll make you a nice lunch, and we can talk then. Or you can do the snow and then drop me wherever you want to, and we can talk while we drive."

"Lunch sounds good, Betty," he said. I should have realized then that I was in trouble. I felt even warmer than the jacket had made me feel, when he smiled at me.

"I probably should have watched TV or something. But I opened the drapes and watched him instead. He did the sidewalk for the old lady next door and then did her driveway. There was a lot of snow. I later found out that we'd had fourteen inches of snow falling on us. It stopped that afternoon.

We were due to have a dry day and then another big snowfall. The weather was supposed to get much colder on the day between snowstorms. That was why Alan was in such a hurry to get the snow handled.

I knocked on the window until he heard me and came inside. "I have no idea what you like," I said. "Well, that's not really true. I suppose you like everything here... I just don't know how you like it prepared."

He picked up the sandwich I'd made him and then looked around. "Where's yours?" he asked.

He'd done it again. He cut his sandwich in half and gave it to me. He pushed the soup towards me too.

"We need to eat quickly," he said. "There's something I want to show you before I drop you off."

My heart sank. He was clearly done with me. He couldn't wait to get rid of me.

I rolled up my jackets and picked up the parka. "Do I get to keep this?" I asked.

"I guess..." he said. "If you still want it."

I couldn't figure him out. One moment he was the kindest man I had ever met, the next moment he was giving me the bum's rush.

A few moments later, he was gingerly picking our way over tall drifts of snow. "I love four wheel drive," he said.

"So Alan ..." I said. "I never told you..."

"Betty, we have a lot to do," he said. "We'll talk later."

He grabbed my hand and pulled me into a Meijer store. Because of the snow, the store was nearly deserted. I couldn't believe he wanted to do his shopping then. But I guess the homeless woman's life was less important than refilling his food stocks.

Shit, I hope he wasn't buying ice cream. He'd have even less time to find a place for me before it melted. He was probably going to drop my ass off on the Detroit side of Eight Mile and get the fuck out of Dodge.

We walked through the store after grabbing a cart. I tried to walk as slowly as I could. I needed time to figure out a way to stay with him.

We went past the food and kept walking. The next thing I knew we were in the ladies department. He found jeans and looked at me. He found a pair that looked like painter's pants. They weren't very sexy. I'd thought that men liked to see women in super tight jeans.

These fit loose and had lots of pockets. They were also very thick and had a lining inside of them. It suddenly dawned on me. This was him protecting me again.

I had been the one who said we could talk when he dropped me off. I was the one who kept bringing up the subject of me going back to where I ended up.

He picked out a couple of thick sweaters, heavy gloves and some boots that were very warm, but also comfortable. He also got me a hat with a full face that I could fold down if it got really cold.

The last place we went was to the lingerie department. He bought me all new underwear and bras. "I guess you want me to model these panties for you, huh?" I asked.

"Actually, I have some other things to look at while you try them on," he said.

So much for my chance to seduce him into letting me stay another night.

When he came back he had a backpack. It wasn't one of those small ones either. It looked like the kind hikers carry. On the way back to the car he was really excited. He showed me all kinds of things I had never considered.

He had a way for me to make fires and a small chemical heater. There were all kinds of camping gadgets that would make my survival more comfortable.

One question remained. Why the hell was he doing all of this? I suddenly understood it all. And I saw my way out. I looked at all of the price tags and started to smile.

I looked in a pocket in the backpack and found another hundred dollars in small bills.

I was silent as the clerk rang up all of the stuff. I pretended not to notice how much it all cost. My heart clutched in my chest no one had ever spent that much money on me. It was over a thousand dollars. Back when I was married, my husband didn't spend that on my wedding ring.

"How much did you spend on all of this?" I asked as if I didn't know, once we were back inside of his SUV.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "After what you... After what I did to you... It's the least I could do."

"What did you do to me?" I asked. "Alan you didn't rape me. We DID have a deal. I was just feeling bad about it afterwards. No woman wants to feel like she isn't in control of a situation. And like you said. I had something that you wanted, and you had something I wanted."

His mouth relaxed, and he exhaled. He really felt better. I could see the tension melting off of his face.

"But now we have a real problem," I said.

"How," he asked.

"Just because I'm homeless doesn't mean that I have no pride," I said. "How the hell am I supposed to pay you back for all of this stuff? I like to pay my own way. I'm not a charity case."

"It's a gift," he said. "I just wanted to do something nice for you, just like you doing all of those dishes for me."

"I didn't do the dishes to be nice," I said. "I did the dishes to pay you back for the fifty you slipped into my jeans. Technically, I still owe you for that. Dishwashers don't make fifty bucks an hour."

He looked flummoxed. "So what do we do?" he asked.

"I guess I'll have to pay you off over time," I said.

"That's a lot of dishes," he said.

"Maybe I could pay you off faster if there was something else you wanted," I said.

"That's a good idea," he said. "You could cook too."

"Yep, maids get a couple of hundred dollars a week," I said. "At that rate, it'll only take me month or so to pay you back. I could come over every morning and cook and clean for you until we were even."

"Why couldn't you stay in the house?" he asked. "I have plenty of room."

"Because then you'd be giving me room and board for free," I said. "At that rate, it would take forever. You have a really nice house, Alan. Staying there would be worth at least two hundred dollars a week."

"So what's the answer?" he asked. We looked at each other and looking into his eyes I could see that he truly wasn't getting the idea. Maybe I should have waited. I mean I had what I needed. I was going to get to go home with him, but I pushed the envelope anyway.

"Maybe you could have more of what you got last night," I hinted.

"No way," he said immediately.

"Why not," I shot back. "You seemed to like it at the time." I was getting angry.

"I loved it at the time," he said. "Betty it was the best sex I've ever had. Shit how would I know. I'm not a sex god. I'm just a normal guy. Before you, I had only been with one woman. And you feel MUCH better than she ever did."

"Then what's the problem?" I asked.

"Betty, you don't really want it," he said. "Last night when I looked down at you and saw the look on your face, I felt like shit."

Even as he said it, I could tell by the look on his face that he was telling me the truth.

"I promise; I will never hurt you again," he said. "Betty, my wife left me. It's been over two years. I guess I kept waiting and hoping she'd come back. And when she didn't, I convinced myself that I hated her.

I just wish I knew what I did wrong. I really thought we were happy. Maybe I'm just reacting out of confusion or something. You're the first woman I've been attracted to since she left. It felt so good that I just lost control. And you're so beautiful that..."

"Me ..?" I asked. "Alan do you wear glasses? I'm almost fifty. I have red hair, freckles, and barely any boobs. Oh they'll fill out and get bigger after a few weeks of eating well. But even then they're barely average. I am not beautiful."

"Like I said. I have no intention of hurting you again. And forcing you to do something you don't want to do because of position, authority or leverage is at least sexual harassment, if not rape," he said.

"Alan you didn't rape me," I said again.

"What's the difference between me holding a gun to your head, and me threatening to send you back out into the storm?" he asked. "Either way you had to do something you didn't want to do in order to stay safe."

I was shocked.

"Thanks for trying to let me off of the hook," he said. "But I'm not stupid. I know what I did was wrong."

I knew I was in trouble then. I also knew that it was all my own fault. I had spun a web of lies and got caught up in it. Alan had never once lied to me.

The deception had all been on my part. He thought I was pretty. He wanted me. There was nothing dishonest about that, men all wanted sex. It could have been so simple if I had just been honest. But I had to try to run a con game on him. "I don't suppose there's ANY way I could stay here?" I'd asked him.

Even the way I had phrased it had put the idea in his head. I had baited him, and he jumped on it. I had to con him into being the one to ask. I should have just been a real woman and offered.

Then I practically humiliated him when I acted as if I was offended. As soon as I turned him down or seemed to... He was sorry. I then made an even bigger fool of myself while he tried to make up for it. He was still willing to drive me anywhere. I wanted to go.

And now that I think of it, I'm pretty God damned sure that he never would have just sent me out into that weather. But I had to end up going back to him and telling him I'd do it.

Even as we did it. I was running a game. I pretended I didn't enjoy it. And afterwards. I tried to go back on what I'd agreed to. But it was the way I'd been conditioned by living on the streets.

I needed leverage over a man who had done everything he could to help me so I made him think that I thought he had done something so foul to me that he was still feeling guilty about it.

Why the fuck did I have to keep telling lie after lie? I wondered if it was too late to tell him the truth. If I did he would never trust me again.

But if I didn't...

We had just pulled into his driveway and there was another vehicle in it. "We can finish this conversation when I come into the house," he said.

He handed me the keys to the house and started walking towards the house across the street. Before I got to the porch, the porch light of the house next door came on. The old lady who lived there came out on the porch and gestured for me to come to her.

Walking along the sidewalk was a piece of cake since Alan had cleared our side with his snowblower.

"I thought so," she said looking at me. "Had ta get my glasses on ta be sure."

She had to be at least seventy, and she kept smiling at me. "You're the real deal," she smiled.

"I am?" I asked.

She reached up to me and snapped the rubber band that held my hair in its pony tail. She fluffed my hair out and nodded.

"You're a redhead alright," she said. "Keep that hair out dummy. It's your best asset."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked. Her eyes opened wider, and something clicked.

"Listen bitch," she said. Her eyes returned to normal suddenly, and she calmed down. "Sorry," she said. "I thought I had that temper under control, but you know how redheads are. Any way you need ta get your ass across the street and get your man before that whore finally gets her claws into him."

"But he's not ..." I sputtered.

"Look girly, I saw all I needed to see earlier today," she said. "You came out on the porch ta watch him. You had the kind of smile on your face that only comes when you like somebody.

As soon as he saw you, he dragged your ass back in the house so you wouldn't get sick. You're a redhead, but you not only let him drag you off; you didn't fight it. And you got that same dumb assed look on your face as soon as he touched you."

"Did not," I said. She just shook her head.

"I wish I had my iPhone, so I could take a picture of that dumb assed grin," she said. "Ya got it again. Anyway, that whore across the street has been trying to get with him ever since the other whore left.

We don't have time to talk about this now; she's already trying to titsnotize him."

"Trying to what," I asked.

"Titsnotize ..." she said. "You know how whores mesmerize or hypnotize men with their titties? She's probably in their right now jiggling in front of him while telling him that she just HAD to park in his driveway because she's not strong enough to shovel hers.

Then he'll do the man thing and volunteer to clear her walk. And she'll giggle and pretend to be so happy that she just bounces. The bitch'll do anything she can ta make her boobs jiggle. She'll offer to make him dinner and the next thing you know they'll be fuckin' and you'll be out of the picture. Get your ass over there and get him... NOW!"

"Okay," I said.

"Bat those pretty green eyes a lot and flip your hair," she said. "Ya gotta block them giant titties with something."

I turned to leave. "Wait," she said. "This might help." She handed me a business card. I looked at it and laughed.

I ran across the street and knocked on the door. After a few minutes, it was answered by a woman. I got pissed as soon as I saw her. I almost laughed when I saw what she was wearing.

I didn't know they made t-shirts with a deep V-neck. It allowed her to show off her cleavage AND her nipples. She must shop at Whores R Us.

She clearly didn't recognize me, but I knew her instantly. The last time I'd seen her the bitch was telling me to pick up the change she threw at me.

"Where's Alan," I yelled. She looked at me with an amused look on her face until Alan, like a good puppy came at the sound of his name.

"Betty," he said.

"Come on we're leaving," I said.

"He's going to do my snow, and then I'm making dinner," she said.

"Dream on," I spat. "He has a prior commitment. Come on Alan, let's go home," I said. As he came towards me, I handed her the card from the snow removal service.

"Call these guys," I said. "You have something in common with them."