The Explorer's Apprentice

47:Inhale....Exhale....

Abby Bronte

She’s greeted by darkness, rugged, eager breathing, and the frigid disgusting fingers of a man whose face she doesn’t even know.

“I thought you’d never make it,” the man says, his voice slimy.  Third customer of the day. Two more to go. His hands crawl down from her shoulder, taking the fabric with it as it goes.

Abby feels like she’s going to vomit.  It takes everything she has not to punch this man in the nose with every last bit of self-defense that she knows.  Wrong, wrong, wrong her head screams loudly, like ambulance sirens blaring.

But she knows resisting will only be harder, so she takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and let’s Charlotte take over.

                        “Now where shall I begin?” her new found voice says.  It’s sultry, sexy in a way Abby can’t even imagine her voice being.  Abby finds it filthy, but that doesn’t matter.  She’s Charlotte now, and Charlotte doesn’t call it filthy; she calls it her job.

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Charlotte feels filthy.  Not only is her hair greasy, her olive skin shining with sweat, her body giving off an odor similar to that of a drunken man, but she feels immoral inside.  She finds herself refusing to touch the interior, as if the grimy feeling she has is contagious.  Even if it is third class, the bright white walls of the Titanic aren’t something that deserves to be soiled by a dirty soul.  It’s not as if this is anything new.  Charlotte has been with fourteen different men, each several times.  Only one of them was vaguely acceptable, as the people her father associates himself with aren’t generally the most respected ones.

                        She knows that he hasn’t always been like this, though.  Her father isn’t a bad man.  He just made some wrong choices, and dealt with them the wrong way.  She knows, through stories of friends and family that he used to be a perfectly decent man.  “Your father, he used to be as handsome as anyone.  Tall dark and handsome, with a respectable aura around him,” her mother had told her one night.  “He stayed around for you, Charlotte.  For that you should always respect and love him.  That’s how we can tell that he loves us; he stuck around even when it would’ve been best if he left.” Charlotte remembers the tears welled in her mother’s eyes, and she knew she was hurting.  She remembers other times, times when she began to doubt that he loved her.  He had yelled at her, and screamed bitter words, screamed that she was a rotten mistake, and that she was lucky that they didn’t shove her in an orphanage.  Charlotte knows that he’s right, and that when she complains she’s being a selfish daughter.