Stripped

A/N: For those of you who have been waiting for an update to this story, I apologize for the delay. I know I left you hanging. The thing is, I've been trying to write it, and it just wasn't flowing. Sometimes I think it's better to just shut up and let the characters say what they want. This is not the chapter that I had in mind, but I can't imagine it any other way, now that it's finished. I know I'm babbling like a freak, so I'll stop. Thanks for the reviews - you guys have been truly awesome! You know I don't own John - Olivia, Brandon, Melinda, and Jack are figments of my own imagination, though. Enjoy!

"Thanks for coming, Mom," Brandon's voice was hushed, as if trying to hide his affection for his mother from the rest of his friends, who had already tumbled out of the car in front of Jack's house.

Turning in her seat, Olivia shot a sweet smile at the only boy she could truly say she had ever loved with her whole heart. "You know I wouldn't have missed it for the world, Kid," she reached out and put a hand on his.

With a soft smile, he turned his head, just before the mood got too heavy. Offering his hand to John, the two men shared a manly shake and John nodded toward him. "I'll get a copy of that game for ya," John promised.

Brandon's eyes lit up again and he returned the nod. "Awesome. I'll call you in a couple days, Mom," he said brightly before jumping out of the car and running toward his friends.

In a matter of only a couple of months, her troubled pre-teen had reverted back to the smiling little boy she had missed. Melinda had been right – time with his father had been good for him, as much as Olivia hated to admit it. Or maybe it was just time away from her that had been what he needed. Maybe she was the bad influence after all.

The air in the car was filled with a suffocating tension as John maneuvered the rental back to the hotel they would be sharing for the night. Six hours ago, she had been sure that this night would be as good, if not better, than the one before. Now she would be surprised if he didn't leave her on the next flight out of Jacksonville, and her life, forever. And she knew she would have no right to ask him to stay.

They spent the entire drive to the hotel in silence. Mostly because he had no idea where to start or what to ask, John found himself waiting for Olivia to speak. Her unwillingness to let their relationship go kept her from opening her mouth. So they checked in, rode the elevator to their floor, and settled into their room without so much as a word to one another.

As John sank into the chair beside the bed and stared at the ceiling, he fought a thousand simple urges. The easy thing to do would be turn the television on and block everything else out until he drifted to sleep. Talking would be easy, too – saying something to fill the vacuum between them. The easy thing would be to brush it all under the rug and pretend he hadn't even met Jack.

But he wasn't interested in the easy thing anymore. All he wanted was to hear her out, to have her explain everything Jack had said, to assure him that she was the same beautiful, warm, wonderful woman he was falling in love with.

Finally, after fifteen minutes of deafening silence, Olivia sank to the middle of the bed. "You know how there are some guys you get into the ring with and you know you can beat them? You know you're better, that you have the ability to hand them their ass on a platter?"

The sound of her voice had startled him a bit, but John turned and watched her with a careful nod. "Sure."

"How does it make you feel when booking says you have to lose to them? When you know you could win, but the script says you have to job out?"

He sighed heavily. Something told him she was avoiding the real subject. Normally, he didn't mind her stories, her metaphors and analogies, but tonight he just wanted to hear the truth. "Olivia, can we just get to the point?"

Pulling her knees up to her chest, she hugged herself tightly and thought about how to start. "When I was growing up, all I ever wanted was to get out of that place. And I thought, for some twisted reason, that being smart was the answer. I thought that studying was going to be my ticket out.

"Until I realized that everything is scripted, the deck is always stacked. It doesn't matter how good you are, how much talent you have, how smart you are – the successful are always predetermined. Some of us are born champions," she looked at John for the first time. "And some of us are just born jobbers. It took me getting pregnant to realize that, but I see it now.

"You can judge my decisions all you want. Question my motives for doing what I did," she sighed and relaxed her legs, running her fingers through her hair.

And that's when John scooted forward in his seat and turned his head to consider her. "Stop it." She looked surprised. "I don't care why you took the money and ran eleven years ago. I don't care why you dropped out of high school, and I don't care why you didn't marry Jack." He made no attempt to move any closer to her, but gave her an intense look from the edge of his chair. "I wanna know why you dance."

"Because I have a son to take care of," she spewed the line that she had become so accustomed to spitting over the last decade.

But John wasn't buying it anymore. With a sad shake of his head, he sank back in his chair. "Brandon's not the reason, Olivia. There are plenty of jobs for a woman with your brain – jobs that pay as much, or more, than the one you have now. And ones that won't embarrass your kid," he whispered, afraid that she would unleash on him.

As much as Olivia wanted to scream, she knew John was right. She knew that he was only stating the obvious. She had known it since the first time Brandon had gotten suspended from school. He had punched a kid who told a group of boys on the playground that his dad had seen Brandon's mom naked, that lots of guys saw her naked. The young boy was starting to realize the differences between boys and girls, and fully grasping what his mother did for a living was more than the ten-year-old could wrap his naive mind around.

Of course, knowing it hadn't stopped her. She justified and excused her line of work. She kicked against anyone who said it was immoral or unethical. It became her personal crusade. Debating with Christian protesters outside the club made her feel like the political strategist she had always dreamed of being. Sometimes, when she was stating her case to a man with a picket sign, she could almost imagine herself testifying before Congress, or presenting an issue to the Supreme Court.

John watched as a plethora of emotions clouded Olivia's perfect face. There was something deeper than anything she was willing to tell him, but he felt like he had to push, that if he didn't, he would never know her. "It's okay if you like the attention," he stated.

Looking up, Olivia's shocked eyes began to fill with tears. "It's not that," she started, but then stopped. Something in his crystal gaze said that it was time to stop lying, running, and hiding. It was time to tell someone the truth – to let someone in.

But it wouldn't be easy. "I thought you didn't mind me dancing," she chuckled glibly.

Sliding off of his chair, John sat next to her on the bed. "I don't mind. I just wanna know if you do it because you want to, or because you have to." She raised an eyebrow. "If you do it because it's your choice, then I have no problem with it, Liv. But if you feel like you have to, like you need it for validation, I don't know if I can take a back seat to your addiction."

She sighed and looked him over skeptically. "The first time he said it, I didn't think anything about it. I mean, daddies are supposed to tell their little girls that they're pretty, right?" Her gaze caught him off-guard. She looked so young, so vulnerable. "After awhile, it was nothing for him to pat my ass when I walked by, or to put a hand on my chest when he was telling me to clean my room."

When the weight of her words sunk in, John felt his anger rising. Her father had molested her! Son of a bitch! Suddenly, it didn't matter why she did anything she did. All that mattered was finding him and killing the perverted bastard. "Olivia," he started.

But she grabbed his wrist and shook her head. "He never did anything, John," she assured her angry boyfriend. "He made advances, I shot them down. Eventually, he just started telling me that no one was ever gonna want me for anything more than my body anyway, so I should just get used to giving it up.

"He never actually did it, but he used to threaten to rape me in my sleep. Said that I needed to learn how to please a man, because none of them were ever gonna care if I got an A on a Science test. They just wanted to know what my pussy tasted like and how my ass looked while they were fucking me from behind.

"My mom used to laugh when he said shit like that. I used to sit in my room and think about how great it would be if she would stand up to him – tell him to treat me with some respect. When I got over that fairy-tale thought, I just started to think nobody would ever love me, that I would just have to get used to taking shit." She stopped talking and pushed her hair out of her face again, a nagging voice telling her to stop boring him with her sob-story.

John didn't know how to respond. He wasn't entirely sure where she was going with this, how it applied to her current life, but Olivia had a way of bringing it back around in the end. So he just squeezed her hand and encouraged her go on. "Jack loved you," he started.

But she scoffed and shook her head. "Jack didn't know what love was any more than I did. I didn't even know his name until after we had fucked in a closet at a party. My first time was in fucking closet with a guy I had never met," her face twisted for a moment and then her expression hardened.

It was as if John could see the wall visibly erecting around her emotions, and he refused to take a leap back after the baby step they were making toward progress. "So what happened then?" he asked finally.

She shrugged and picked at something on the bed spread. "I don't know. I got confused. I thought he loved me – he said he did – he sure as hell loved seeing me naked." With a disgusted grunt, she shook her head. "When I left him, I planned on going back to school and doing something with myself. I planned on turning it around, on being good for me, and for Brandon.

"I worked at a grocery store for two months after he was born, and it didn't come close to paying our bills. He was always crying, always hungry cause I couldn't afford food, and he was starting to get sick a lot." Thoughts of her baby squirming in pain and starvation choked her up again. "I didn't know what to do – I mean, I was in Atlanta, Georgia, I didn't know anybody, and I was sixteen years old.

"Melinda came in the grocery store a lot back then, and she used to tell me I had a face that men could love, and a body they would pay for." Sighing, Olivia finally looked into John's eyes, expecting judgmental confusion. Instead, she found an understanding compassion that broke her exterior once more.

"But you were only sixteen," he stated. It was an obvious statement, and probably the furthest thing from something intelligent could have said. He just wasn't sure his heart had ever felt so heavy for someone. Sure, his family had seen their share of money problems over the years. But suddenly, his temper tantrums over sale-priced Nike's seemed like the most ridiculous thing in the world.

Collecting herself again, she stood from the bed and began pacing the front of the room. "Every day that Melinda would come in, she would tell me how much money I could bring at the club – about how much men would want me. She thought I was eighteen, I told her I was." She smiled slightly. "And then I would come home, and Brandon would scream until he had no voice left. I felt guilty for being a horrible mother, and for wishing that I had someone to help take all this burden away."

He was watching her pace, marveling at how she had morphed into a vulnerable sixteen-year-old right before his eyes once again. She was rubbing her shoulders, biting back tears, and shaking. But when she turned her emerald orbs to him and released a biting laugh, it turned his blood cold.

"Guess when I prayed that I would be worth something to someone someday, I should have been more specific, huh?"

There were a million cheesy things he could have said to her in that moment. For what seemed like an eternity, he processed her words and debated which corny line to throw out. She said all she wanted was to get out of her old life, to escape the town she had grown up in, and somehow escape the life that had been handed to her there.

But in the end, John realized, all she wanted was to feel like she meant something. She wanted to feel important, like she was worth something. All she really wanted was the same thing every person on Planet Earth wanted – to be loved unconditionally.

Olivia was pondering how long it would take her to get from the hotel to the airport on foot when she felt two huge hands enveloping her tiny shoulders. Looking up into John's blue eyes, she felt all the air in her body escape. And as he pulled her into his chest and kissed the top of her head, she let her tears go for the first time, allowed herself to rest safely in his embrace.

He didn't say a word that night, but the expression Olivia saw in his eyes spoke volumes. It said she was worth more than all the folded one dollar bills in the world.