Anahita Ch. 01: Price Tag

"I'll give you twenty for a blowjob." The insincerity of this tasteless joke was advertised by a huge grin that aimed for cheeky but fell short of the mark.

"I'm not that cheap," I returned, my intended scowl turning distractedly wistful. I was a poor student in dire straits, my next maintenance payment being days away and my cupboards increasingly bare. Hunger erodes inhibitions like nothing else. I may not have been willing to sell my body - even my mouth - for a twenty, but for the first time in my life I was giving it sincere consideration.

Richard peered curiously at me, as if sensing my irresolution, and I could feel my cheeks burning with shame. I looked away, trying to banish the thought that was in both our minds: me, on my knees, sucking.

Not that I hadn't done it before. "Wait till you're married, Anahita," my mother had told me often enough. "Don't bring shame on your family." More recently it had been, "Why do you want to leave home, Anahita? Who will look after you?" By which she meant not who would cook for me and do my laundry (although there was that too) but who would protect me from English men and other undesirables.

My mother was the daughter of Persian immigrants, and while she claimed to be proudly British, nevertheless she had her heart set on me marrying some rich doctor, perhaps even a plastic surgeon with a practice in Iran. The thought I might end up with someone who was neither a doctor nor Muslim nor rich nor - Allah forbid - male was enough to keep her awake at night.

It was as much to get away from my mother's matchmaking as the desire for independence that compelled me to abandon the nest. Even then, it was only the reassurance that I would be in all-girl shared accommodation that persuaded her. Not once did she suspect that I spent most of my nights that first year in the arms of a Lancashire lass who played rugby at the weekends.

My first sexual experience, however, had been at a nightclub during my first month at uni. Being an adult and unsupervised and decidedly rebellious, and more than a little intoxicated, not to mention profoundly curious about all that sex stuff I'd read about and heard about, I'd allowed an attractive young man to take advantage of me and teach me all about being a 'bad girl'.

It had been a whirlwind romance that had lasted all of six days, but did progress rapidly from kissing to sex via plenty of foreplay and oral sex - with me the one giving. Ultimately, he lacked the imagination to overcome his literal shortcomings. I tired of him quickly and nearly swore off men for good.

Richard, two years later, wasn't my boyfriend. I wasn't attracted to him at all. We were reluctant study partners, two science nerds without social lives. The main difference between us, apart from the obvious, was that Richard had a decent allowance and his own apartment.

Which is how I came to be alone with him, ostensibly studying but in reality whining about the impossibility of finding a part-time job to supplement my own too meagre income. My parents were not so wealthy they could afford both London accommodation costs and a comfortable allowance for me, and I had preferred the former.

There were times I regretted that choice, times when I was tempted to return home and admit to my parents that I couldn't make it on my own. I had a bedroom there, and my mother would make bademjan the way only she could, and she would find a rich doctor who would take me back to Iran with him...

Stubbornly, I endured. Until that very moment, I hadn't allowed myself to even think of doing what so many desperate students seem to end up doing: sex work. (I was a good girl. Good girls don't do sex work. Good girls spread their legs for rich doctors.)

But perhaps that was as much because I'd never really considered myself as sexy enough for sex work. I was skinny and awkward and got stage fright at the slightest hint of exposure. I lived in dread of lecturers singling me out with a question. "You there, in the back row, girl in the blue top. What is a complex conjugate?"

"Uh..." (Sex with an imaginary spouse?)

Not unattractive, but, well, unexceptional. Dark brown hair that resisted styling, brown eyes (behind glasses), on the short side, breasts at best petite. I was, certainly, good at going unnoticed, and by and large that suited me.

Richard was a posh boy from the south, somewhere near London, and could have been attractive if he hadn't been so intimidated by anything in a skirt, or indeed anyone at all. He was definitely happier with computers than people. For some reason (and I was never sure whether to take offence or not) he got on well with me.

Despite the occasional ill-judged joke or inappropriate remark, such as that fateful, "I'll give you twenty for a blowjob."

"I'm not that cheap," I said.

"How about forty?" he asked quietly, maybe a minute later.

My reply was even quieter. "Okay." My shame was so deep it was a wonder I didn't spontaneously combust.

After barely a moment's hesitation, Richard stood and shoved his trousers and Y-fronts down - pausing briefly mid-act to tug his wallet from his pocket. As I gaped in astonishment at a moderately sized cock that was already at eager attention, he fished out two twenties and held them out to me. "But you have to swallow, okay?"

It was almost the straw that broke the camel's back. Wrapping my lips about his shaft was a weird enough thought - I had been about to insist on a condom - but suddenly we were talking fluids and the absurdity of it all hit me like a hammer.

He thrust the twenties impatiently at me. I took them almost defensively - and once they were in my hand...

Hunger is a great motivator. There's also a limit to how many nights in a row you can eat pasta in tomato sauce. Suddenly there was cash in my hand, a hard cock zeroing in on me - and it would only be a blowjob. We weren't talking sex or anything.

I just sort-of let it happen. At first. I opened my mouth to accept that unfamiliar and unexpected intruder, my senses abruptly full of the unmistakable taste and texture of cock, that heady aroma of raw desire (sex; sweat). I would be lying if I said I felt no thrill of the forbidden, if I said I was not aroused despite my profound shame (or because of it), if I said I was a passive participant.

However shyly I began, I soon surrendered to a desire to perform, to give pleasure and not merely satisfaction. I knew what to do, but never before had I done it with such inexplicable passion, working him with teasing tongue and firm lips. Though Richard had not specified that I take him deep, this too I attempted (his length was no great challenge) and when in due course I felt his end approach, I encouraged it with murmured entreaties until cream pulsed into my mouth from his wildly jerking cock.

I swallowed what I could, but cum spilled down my chin, some dripping onto my T-shirt before I could catch it. I continued sucking on his softening shaft, licking it clean of cum, until it slipped out of reach as Richard pulled away, breathing heavily, eyes wide with mingled gratitude and astonishment...

... that gave way to an awkwardness on both our parts. Nothing in our relationship, such as it was, had prepared us for the aftermath of this transacted intimacy.

"We made a mistake," I said, my thoughts in a whirr.

"Um, yeah," Richard agreed.

"No." I shook my head at his dim-wittedness. "When we took the reciprocal, we forgot to change the inequality." He stared at me blankly.

It was so strange. On the one hand, I was appalled by what I had just done, performing a sexual favour for money. On the other, I was experiencing something of an epiphany, weeks of mathematical theorems and computational methods restructuring into a beautiful coherence.

I grabbed the sheets of paper we'd been scribbling on, crossed out whole sections and quickly corrected the solution we'd been working towards. "See?"

"I-I think so..." He frowned down at the equations that now seemed so obvious to me, following the logic with his fingers while darting oddly fearful looks towards me.

That distraction over, the memory of what we had just done reasserted itself. The memory of hot, hard flesh between my lips. The taste and smell of his cum, lingering still. My shirt wet where the drips, still visible, had fallen. My breasts, swollen, straining painfully against my bra, so much so that I popped the clasp at the back to relieve the pressure.

I stared down, baffled, at the magnified curves of my chest, and the sharp points of my nipples that betrayed my arousal, unsated from before. I couldn't process what I was seeing, or what I was feeling. The forty quid was still clutched in my left hand, crumpled within a tightly clenched fist, and almost seemed to burn against my skin.

My money. I had earned it. Abruptly I was sure that if Richard offered me more, I would willingly earn that too. "I have to go," I whispered, half in a panic.

Richard nodded mutely, and made no attempt to stop me.

*

My mind was hyperactive, restlessly analysing the houses and streets. For once, the shadows didn't seem so dark, or the night so silent, and the people I passed were not menacing unknowns but fragrant tapestries of food and alcohol and sex - the latter stirring the prowling hunger in my flesh.

Forty quid - forty fucking quid! - was all it had taken to turn me into a whore. That was how cheap I was.

I hesitated outside the shop that seemed so bright and alien, blazing with cold light. Spending the money would make it real - as if it wasn't already. But the thought of having food - real food - in my cupboards again was too much of a lure. I had a sudden craving for fish, and fresh vegetables, and forest fruit, and wine, and almost before I knew it my earnings were spent and my arms laden with heavy bags.

The cashier had hardly been able to keep his eyes from my breasts, straining as they were so unnaturally against the fabric of my shirt. My nipples were achingly sensitive, demanding of attention, unmissable, and I wondered if he had noticed too the just discernible streak of drying cum. Normally I would have died at the thought of being so visible, especially at the thought of being so visibly sluttish, but it was nothing compared to the shame of my earlier act.

Besides, being an object of desire was a new and not unwelcome experience. Maybe the inexplicable enlargement of my breasts was a positive outcome and not some perverse divine punishment that labelled me as a whore for all to see.

It wasn't just my breasts, either. At home at last, in the privacy of my room, I saw my new self properly for the first time. The other changes were more subtle - a change in posture, a wildness to my hair, more muscle - but the woman looking back at me from the mirror was a sharp-eyed predator and undeniably sexy.

Stripped of my jeans and soiled shirt - and my white lace panties that were soaked - I confronted my naked reflection in awe. I had the body of a goddess, lithe and seductive. I ran my hands over flawless skin, shivered ecstatically as I caressed my nipples, and moaned with urgent hunger as my fingers slipped between my thighs, into the wetness of my pussy, seeking out my engorged and aching clit.

I fell to my knees in front of the mirror as one hand tightened about each nipple in turn, and the other strummed rapidly across my clit, driving me determinedly to a much needed orgasm. I cried out in pleasure, and then too a little in shock as a gush of fluid burst past my fingers as never before, darkening the pale carpet beneath me.

*

It was as if the whole thing had been a dream. When I awoke late the following morning, having spent the night reading and correcting confused lecture notes and finishing all my outstanding coursework (after a midnight meal of salmon and tagliatelle washed down with most of the Pinot Grigiot), that stunning clarity of mind was gone, as was the divine perfection of my new body.

The transformation was undone as magically as it had been done. I was left, it is true, with a far better understanding of my course material, but what had been obvious only hours earlier now stretched my more normal intellect to the limit.

The mirror reflected the old me. Unremarkable. No echo of the voluptuous beauty who had knelt there in exquisite self-pleasure.

But it had been no dream. The carpet was still damp. There was food in my cupboard, and a cum-stained T-shirt on the floor of my bedroom. Something had happened, unquestionably. Something amazing. Something impossible.

There was a text from Richard: "R U OK?"

"Yes," I replied. The memory of his cock in my mouth was vivid. This boy who wasn't my boyfriend had paid me to swallow his cum.

Was that it? Was it Richard's cum that had transformed me? Would it happen again if I sucked him off again? How badly did I want to find out?

Not that badly.

Not yet.

*

By tacit agreement, we didn't mention what we'd done. Richard and I settled back into a routine of study and often awkward conversation, and if Richard seemed sometimes on the point of making a suggestion, the vivid burn of my cheeks in shameful memory dissuaded him from saying more.

I had had sex for money, and that changed everything. It was a worm of shame and fear coiling in my chest whenever I spoke to my parents. It was the knowledge that I wasn't a 'good girl'; I was the 'bad girl' I had always been warned about, an unrepentant sinner.

Every time I looked in the mirror, I looked for the evidence of what I had become. Every time I put on make-up, I worried that it would reveal the whore within. My hair, my clothes, my shoes. They were all suspect. I overcompensated, dressed conservatively, even more so than normal, while the rebellious part of me yearned to reject this false image. As much as I feared to see the whore in me, I longed to see again that divine other, that version me that exuded sex and confidence.

Inevitably, my funds ran short again, my kitchen cupboard reduced to rice and tinned tomatoes. Somehow it was worse that I knew I could remedy it by selling my body, as if having done it once it defined me forever. All I needed to do was go to Richard, and I'd have a mouthful of cum and forty quid. Easy as that. Depressing as that thought was, I couldn't help wondering if it would transform me again.

I resisted the urge for days. In truth, I could have held off until my next maintenance payment, I could even have gone home to my parents, but I was curious, and doing again what I'd done before did not seem so terrible. (It's said the heart of the unrepentant sinner turns black in time.) But how to broach the subject? It was one thing to accept money, quite something else to ask for it. I couldn't quite bring myself to say, "I'll blow you for forty quid," or whatever. I needed him to propose it.

It was absurd - I was absurd. On the one hand, denying my whorish nature. On the other, trying to provoke it. Persuading myself I needed the cash, that it wasn't a sluttish hunger for meaningless sex. That I could commit a sin and still be a moral person, a 'good girl' like my mother raised me to be.

Absurd. If I was going to be a whore, I might as well embrace it - if only for one night. I did what I never did. I dressed slutty with high heels and a short skirt, and made-up my face with bright lipstick and mascara. "What do you think?" I asked him, feeling more than a little ridiculous.

We were alone at his place again, an evening's study planned. "Um," he said. "Why?"

"Do I need a reason?" I unpacked my bag and sat beside him, reading course notes distractedly. I ignored the way he squirmed uncomfortably and tried to adjust his crotch. My small breasts may not have been the most enticing, but the absence of a bra meant my nipples made sharp points in my shirt.

We worked through a few tutorial examples of geometric algebra, but it was clear that neither of us was concentrating on it. "Can we do it again?" he asked suddenly.

I pretended innocence. "What?"

Blushing brightly, he said, "I'll give you forty quid for a blowjob."

I raised an eyebrow. "Do I look like a whore?"

For a moment he seemed to panic, but then he grinned slyly. "You do, actually."

I held out my hand, enjoying the role play despite the voice in my head telling me to stop, that I was a fool, a slut, a whore. "Payment first, honey."

Richard tossed a pair of twenties towards me and stripped from the waist down. His cock was hard and ready. I knelt in front of him, taking him into my mouth before I could change my mind.

It was no longer an unfamiliar cock. Indeed, I had thought about it often, not because it was in any physical way exceptional but because it was the only cock I had ever been paid to suck.

There was no denying it. I was a whore, selling myself a second time, and no doubt I would again. How long until I started selling more than my mouth? What price tag would I put on penetration? What lines would I cross on this voyage of amorality?

There was no denying, either, my enjoyment of it. I was no reluctant cock sucker. I was a pro, working the smooth shaft and bulbous head with enthusiasm, licking the sensitive underside, making a tight ring with my lips as my head bobbed rhythmically.

I thrilled at the salty taste of precum, my fingers finding their way beneath my skirt, beneath my soaked panties, teasing my clit. "You're so good at this," Richard sighed, and he held my head still and thrust deeper, into my throat, fucking my mouth with increasing urgency as I struggled to catch my breath. "I'm close," he warned. "I'm close..."

His seed spilled into my mouth, but this time he withdrew quickly and instead aimed the pulsing member at my face. I opened my mouth wide to catch it, but his cum splashed across one cheek, then the other, his aim deliberately wide of the mark.

I could feel his cum oozing down my cheeks and dripping from my chin as more spurted out at me in diminishing bursts, and I licked my lips before wrapping them about his wilting shaft and sucking gently at the last trickle.

Already I could feel myself changing, my body tightening and swelling, my sensory awareness expanding. "It's happening again," I marvelled.

I leapt to my feet and ran to the mirror, this time witnessing the transformation in progress. The sight of my cum-splashed face was a momentary shock, but I wiped it clean with my shirt as I tugged it off. "Do you see?"

"I thought I imagined it last time," he said, staring in open-eyed awe at my expanding breasts. "How are you doing that?"

"I don't know. I thought maybe it was you."

"Me?"

"It's happened only once before - after the last time we did this." I caressed my breasts wonderingly, teasing and pinching my nipples.

Richard's cock hardened swiftly despite his recent climax, and he pressed it against my back. "How much to fuck you?" he whispered.

How much? I really didn't know. I didn't know if I was ready to take that step. Except of course I was. "Hundred," I said. "With a condom." Not that I particularly wanted him to use one, but I was trying to remain sensible.

Richard winced and checked his wallet. "Okay, but only if I can come on your tits after."

I shrugged and held my hand out for the cash. I was beginning to understand how women could get addicted to sex work. Secretly I wished he'd hurry up and get to work, because I wanted his cock in me. Never in my life had I felt so in need of a long, hard fuck. Whether Richard could satisfy that need, I didn't think so, but he was there in front of me.

Cash - check! Condom - check! Cock - check!

I was a whore. A wanton, horny slut. And yet, as Richard lay me on the floor and I guided his sheathed cock into my devouring cunt, part of my mind was elsewhere, manipulating multidimensional basis vectors in tangent spaces.