He shrugged. “After a while, she’ll trust you, too. Just do a good job.”
My mind was still reeling. “You really do this. For real. For real?”
“It pays well,” he said blandly, matter-of-factly collecting his stuff so he could lock up. “The women have fun, and so what if I happen to get half naked to make a pile of money.”
“More like 95 percent naked,” I argued, picking at the string. Women wear these willingly? I felt like this was a form of torture.
$700 a week for two nights, I reminded myself. I decided to learn to deal with the ass flossing.
I quickly changed back into my own clothes and we left, Liam obviously comfortable with the building and the neighborhood.
“Need a ride?” He pointed to his car, parked in a spot reserved for the building.
Never turn down a free ride at five in the morning. “Hell yes. Trevor and Joe’s.”
“I know where you live.” He rolled his eyes and started to say something, then finally did. “You and Amy...?”
“Me and Amy what?”
“You guys hook up?”
“Yep.”
A funny look, like nostalgia and regret mixed with happiness and relief, crossed his face. “Good.”
“Your approval means so much to me.”
“Fuck off. You were such a douche to her.”
“No shit.” Like I needed that thrown in my face after the night I’d just experienced.
“I know you know, but I don’t think you really understand what you did to her.” Liam’s voice was tight and his knuckles were white against the steering wheel. What the fuck was this about?
“Why are you butting in on this?” I asked. A simmer was starting in me and I didn’t like it.
“Because she has been my friend since, like, forever. Since we were little kids.”
And then I remembered. His dad lived next to Amy. Liam had gone to my school but spent a lot of time with his dad. My turn to get tense. “She talked about me with you?”
He cleared his throat. “Something like that.”
What did that mean?
The car came to a halt at the intersection near Joe and Trevor’s. Our friendliness had shifted into a guarded tension I didn’t like. I grabbed the costume and got out.
“Thanks,” I said, bending down and waving through the closed window.
“No prob,” he said without making eye contact. The twin red glowing eyes of his rear lights stayed in my eyesight like a visual echo, long after he was gone.
The walk to the apartment felt like I carried blocks of concrete in my knees.
Even though I scored the job, I still needed to make some money over the next few weeks before the first paycheck would come in. Tips would help, sure, but right now, I needed cash in hand. A few days earlier, before I’d imagined I’d be interviewed and hired like this, I’d found a labor gig on Craigslist. You could go on there and find just about anything that would pay you on the spot. I stayed away from the illegal and the illicit, although the irony that I’d just secured a stable job as a stripper wasn’t beyond me. If you had strong arms and weren’t afraid to take a few risks, you could go on Craigslist and find somebody who needed a couple of guys and a truck, and would pay you twenty, fifty, one-hundred bucks on the spot. Plus lunch, if I was lucky.
I didn’t have a truck, but I had strong arms. More importantly, I had a cell phone bill to pay, and this pesky little thing called hunger. The phone buzzed in my pocket and I patted it, pulled it out, hoping it was Amy. It was Darla, though, texting me, You with Amy?
I texted back, No, why?
Amy left her tablet at the bar last night. Can I give it to you to give to her?
I wouldn’t be done with this job for hours. A full day. I can’t give it to her ‘til tomorrow I replied.
K, Darla sent back quickly. What’s her number? I’ll call her.
I entered the number, but added, It’s 6AM, too early, don’t call her.
K. I’ll drop it in her mailbox on my way to work. What’s the address?
I texted it back, and then added, if you do see her, tell her I said hi.
You tell her, was all Darla wrote back, with a little smiley face.
I stuffed the phone back in my pocket and resumed my wait for the dude with the truck to show up, so I could spend the next eight hours helping someone move from the Back Bay out to Weston, one of the tonier suburbs of Boston. At the end of the day I’d walk home with about a hundred and twenty bucks, and that was the kind of security I needed. That and money for coffee. And food.
This $120 hauling boxes and furniture would save my ass until my first paycheck. I really needed stripping with Liam to work out, so I could hope this was the last Craigslist gig I’d ever need.
I didn’t want Amy to know just how on the edge I lived. It was shameful, a shame I needed to hide.
As a big, white box truck pulled up, and two guys named Jose and Paolo shook my hand and smiled, I climbed in, ready to go off and make my own security. To make myself worthy.
Amy
The first thin ribbon of ultra-bright morning sunshine had aimed itself straight for my left eye to torture me. Turning over helped, but then I found myself staring at the back of the door, remembering Sam leaving last night, how his jeans cupped his ass as he turned the corner, the way his hands had—
And there is was.
The female equivalent of a hard on.
Oh, we get them. It’s a gentle throbbing and wet warmth that tells us we’re ready for orgasm. Now, please.
And please, sir, may I have another?
You think blue balls are bad?
Try blue clit.
Wait. That sounds like some kind of STD. Nevermind.
The only surefire way to handle the throbbing is to rub one off. Masturbate. Self-pleasure. Pick your term, but it all boils down to taking arousal and translating it into an orgasm, followed by ice cream and a lengthy stretch of time choosing not to worry about the possible pathology of having seventeen sex toys to choose from.
Which collection was now in my closet, among the other still-packed boxes. The boxes were four across, three deep, and six high. A giant block of crap I’d probably never really need, but carried through life with me because it contained keys to my identity.
Except the small white file box labeled “Philosophy Papers” as camouflage. Anyone looking in there would think I was a professional tester for Adam and Eve. Which should definitely be a real job. Because maybe Library Science wasn’t going to cut it....
Opening the closet, I search the first layer of boxes. Nope.
Unloading every box seemed ridiculous, and would take too long, besides—She Who Rhymes With Delores was screaming for some attention and dreams about Sam’s tongue on her. That was the problem with real-life sex: it never sated her.
It just whetted her appetite.
And now that she’d had the Holy Grail of encounters with a tongue, she was desperate for more.
I couldn’t give her more of that, but I could give her my pink Rabbit. Its little feelers might calm her down. But....nope. No visual on my Philosophy Papers box.
At some point in the move, had I misplaced my sex toys? A panic threatened to creep in. What if I’d left them at home with my mother? Scrambling to check, I began unloading boxes.
Throb.
Three boxes.
Scream.
Seven boxes.
I will not be ignored!
Shit. A few more boxes and my apartment would be impassable. Plus my angry clit would be boiling a bunny in a pot at this rate.
Then I remembered my smartphone.
I’d downloaded a vibrator app a few weeks ago, just for fun and because—seriously? How cool is it that some techie decided to invest the time to write the code for THAT instead of yet another tipping or weight loss app.
The $9 seemed sooooo worth it.
But I hadn’t used it.
Yet.
Time to pop my vibrator app cherry?
Yesssssss, my clit whispered. My precious.......
“You’re not getting a clit ring,” I argued back. “It’s just a vibrating phone.”
I was arguing with my genitals the way people talk to their cats.
That’s how desperate I was.
I found my phone and checked the lock on my front door. Doesn’t every woman do that? No one wants to be walked in on while masturbating. That would be worse than being caught reading dinosaur porn.
Or admitting you wrote some.
Getting comfortable is totally different when you masturbate with a sex toy, because there really is no prelude. It’s pretty much bzzzzzz and ahhhhhhhh. There’s no foreplay, no kisses, no hairpulling with a vibrator.
It’s a business transaction.
The phone was warm in my hand and I found my way to the app, which had a dizzying array of choices. Pulse. Speed of pulse. Patterns. Pre-programmed patterns. Control of vibrator app by another user.
Good grief. I wanted an orgasm, not an orgy. I set the app to a steady buzz and lowered the corner of my phone to my clit.
Ohhhhh mmmmyyyy.
Wet within seconds, my body responded to the touch, mind instantly flooded with thoughts of Sam. How his head had been between my legs, his tongue on me, mouth making love the way I knew his body wanted to.
Sam Sam Sam.
The pulse of my clit met the vibrations of the warm metal and I stroked up and down, moving the slick of my juices up to my clit, loving the feel. A growing, full-body flush told me I was close, and as always, I craved something in me—the vibrator, so my wet vaginal muscles could clamp down, making the combination of muscles create a more powerful orgasm.
As the frenzy of an extremely fast climax built in me, catching me breathless, my mind flooded with thoughts of Sam’s touch, his mouth, his body, his everything, and I moved the phone down, pushing it into me just a little, my body wanting more, more, more, to imagine it was Sam entering me, the tantalizing touch of the vibrations and the pressure of the slim phone giving me the deep touch I so wanted. There is this one spot, about an inch inside and up to the top, off at an angle that is so exquisite, so perfect when touched, and if I could only—
And then—an exploding, thrashing orgasm that made one arm reach up to my pillow to muffle my screams, my hip twisting sideways, the hand holding the phone slipping on my juices and then—
Oh, no.
No no no no no no NO.
My phone was IN me.
Buzzing away.
I sat up and nearly screamed. Impossible. Impossible!
INCONCEIVABLE.
Who loses their smartphone in their vagina? Not me.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzz.
I stood and squatted, reaching my fingers in. It was at a weird angle, pressing under my pubic bone. My fingers were too slippery, so I wiped them on the bedspread and tried again, bearing down.
Nope.
Among my other undiscovered sexual frontiers, I had never, in fact, put an entire smartphone inside myself. I’m sure I’m not alone in that regard. That damn vibrator app was used by millions of women, many of them highly intelligent and analytical, and perfectly reasonable, rational human beings, who were simply trying to use a device that was manufactured to advance the cause of women’s pleasure, just like me.
I would say every single fucking one of them, except for me, had managed to use that app appropriately and not get their fucking smartphone trapped in their vagina.
If I had any doubt whether an entire fist can really fit inside a woman’s vagina (other than in those cable television birthing shows where the midwife shoved her arm in all the way to the elbow), I now knew the answer is YES.
