In Fidelity Ch. 08

"Look who's turned up to get screwed by her new job!"

Vivian shows up for her first day at work looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. The truth is I had wanted to give her another test run, which I'm sure I will still do; but after her announcement on stage in her last stripping gig, we've had that many enquires about when clients can fuck her that she's got a tightly booked schedule, which is great for us both.

"Didn't get to see much of you after your performance the other night," I try my best to comment loosely.

"Oh! I bumped into T-Bone! We have a long shared history together."

"So, you had a good time?"

"It was so great! He's a really nice guy."

I'm glad she's got a busy schedule again, as it means we won't have much free time together and I won't need to find things to say to her.

Even though we get a lot of people into Championship, only a small number have pre-booked, and a lineup for Vivian's free 15-minute windows is building. My favourite customers are the ones who come in and just have to have sex on a Saturday, and they've never prebooked and they look down the list of available girls and rooms then wait for them to shower and the timeslot to open. Even if there's no girls in the lineup who are jumping out at them, they'll feel uncomfortable unless they go home having emptied their body of a load or more of semen.

You can spot the sex addicts because after awhile they get over the concept of even choosing a girl based on looks, and will just start working down our roster alphabetically, seeing a girl for the first time when they enter the room with her. It's not uncommon that they leave feeling slightly sick with themselves if they didn't end up liking the girl as much as others they'd been with, as they'd have paid the full amount for sex, and due both their haste for sex and unwillingness to put too much planning into it, they've wasted their money paying for an experience they didn't fully appreciate. I know the feeling well (these are my people, and I understand them better than I understand anybody in the world): it is a prickly, clammy, regretful sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling. You walk much more quickly afterward, trying to recapture the part of the day that has escaped, and quite often you have the urge to read the international section of the newspaper, to go watch a documentary, to consume something solid and meaty which will lie on top of the cotton-candy worthlessness clogging up your head.

The other people I like are the ones who are being driven to find a specific sort of girl, a girl who looks like an image they have in their head of a goddess of beauty, the image they see when they close their eyes and masturbate, the girl who's image is painted to them in everything beautiful they see as it's in some way a reflection of her. Sometimes the clear image of this girl comes to them as if by magic, they read a line of Shakespeare or a billboard advertising cologne, and they suddenly have the perfect image of the girl of their fantasies. One day, I had a guy came in who's never even been to a brothel before, because he had dreamed of a girl, the whole thing, looks, age, name. When I found exactly who he had described was available with the room his dream had painted out (Emily Swann in the classroom where she was his teacher who was overcome with attraction for him and began sucking his dick whilst he was writing lines), the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a brothel, but a drug user or a musician, someone who's life is routinely transcendental.

I find I come into my own on Saturdays. I know the customers we have and have been each one of them at some stage in my life. Some require a gentler conversation and end up uncovering a fantasy they didn't know they had because there's a deeper cause than primordial sexual needs. I'll invite a specific girl out and they'll be handing over their credit card as if that's who they'd come in for in the first place. Other clients, I have to bulldoze them into submission before they pick a girl who'll be submissive to them. I'll rubbish them because they've never fucked a leggy-blonde up the ass, and they'll buy that, or never had a nurse suck their dick, and they'll book that the next day, or explode in disbelief when I find out they've never fucked a schoolyard crush lookalike in a classroom, and they'll book that for the next day. At around half past four most Saturday afternoons when I pour myself a scotch, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of the store, of the way that through my talents are perhaps small or particular, I can use them to my and my girls' and my customers' best advantage.

So when I come to leave for the night, to a booked out night that I feel I should put up a big flashing "No Vacancy" sign up outside so that pub walk-ins realise that they are no free spots left for them to fuck a girl here tonight. I'm feeling happy having had another few drinks in the commonroom talking with some girls who were fully dressed up or undressed, pre or post booking, and we'd built up a lot of goodwill and confidence having made 150% of required profit for the coming week in forward bookings alone over the weekend. We're talking about relaxing, and listing our top five drinks to unwind after a long week (I go for 'The Godfather', 'Single-malt Scotch', 'Old Fashioned', 'Rob Roy', and 'Black Russian', the difference of the last distracting at how scotch heavy the list before that was, offsetting rebuttal from the sisters. Sophia insisted that if you were really in the interests of relaxing and having some stress-free sex, Rohypnol would have to be a featured ingredient), and after all the stresses by so much happening over last week, it's good to just drink and unwind like this again.

But when I walk out of Championship, Lust is waiting there for me, leaning against the wall that separates us from the cafe next door, and I remember that it's not supposed to be a feel-good period of my life.