I was grateful she had the courtesy to tell me where she was, when you live with someone in the same business of selling sex, communication could mean the difference between life and death. Sybil and I promised one another that we’d keep each other safe. But I’d be damned if I was gonna call Crystal and suddenly have her become my problem. I knew everyone needed someone in this fucked up business. I got that; but pullin’ that girl under my wing right now was more of a hassle than anything else. What the hell did Sybil want me to do? Go over there and make sure she didn’t cry herself to sleep?
This is a gnarly business with gnarly, disgusting, sick fucks who wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about you and whether you were gang raped in a back alley or lying in the gutter bleeding to death. There will always be some other girl ready to take your place.
I buried the twist in my stomach and moved the fuck on, call it self-preservation.
The hot water pummeled my flesh annihilating any desire I had to go back to bed. I’d be damned when flashes of Crystal’s savior flooded my mind. The way Laundry Man looked at me in the alley replayed in my head over and over again. His eyes, pierced mine, the tone of his voice as he told me to get into the pub. How he had become frozen when he had seen that the prick was gone. An urge swirled through my stomach, exactly what I didn’t have time to get all caught up in when I thought about him. My life was too busy. Soap up, rinse off and get the hell out, but stay just long enough to wake up.
I hated to do business in the late afternoon. The only dates who showed up on the stroll were cheap ass motherfuckers looking for an early bird special. I end up wasting half of my afternoon getting these stingy bastards to cough up three-quarters of my going rate . . . no discounts, no exceptions. I should actually charge them double because the risk of being pinched was so much higher.
I had my time and price per service mathematically down and memorized. So when the cheap bastards came out for an afternoon delight I could work the numbers to my advantage. Dip and lips ran the gamut, from the young stud construction guy needing to get his rocks off on his lunch break, to the senior citizen that wanted to pop before he hit the early bird dinner special and went to bed. Both were always hot for pussy and for the most part I could talk them in circles before they unzipped and end up more than happy to pay my evening rate.
It was the uptight-businessman who wanted something for almost nothing. Broken by the wits of these middle-aged pricks, it was rare that I could get them to unzip for my evening rate. Big fucking briefcases with small cocks and if I had a dollar for every time they told me they’d never done this before, I’d be rolling up in a Benz dipped in gold. They were the stingiest fucks around and yet pulled up to the curb in eighty thousand dollar Porsches, walked around saturated in Armani and Christian Dior, with Rolex watches strapped to their wrists and twenty-four karat gold rings wedged on their short pudgy fingers. The only positive, they would be so wound up, they’d blow their wads after a couple of dips. Sixty bucks for a three-minute fuck wasn’t so bad.
I hopped out of the shower and collected what I was gonna wear for the entire time. I slipped into my black stretchy tennis miniskirt. The same skirt that if I bent over everyone would get a peek at my merchandise. I pulled on a tight shimmery pink halter top that made my tits look unbelievable and rummaged through the pile of heels next to my bed and found the most comfortable pair of stilettos I could wear without having to take them off every half hour.
I blew out my hair, helping the natural wave curve around my face before I dragged the sparkling peach lip gloss across the swell of my mouth and the earthy green shadow across my eyelids. I used to think there’d be a time, where the life that sparked behind my eyes would return. Come to find it was wishful thinking, dreams of a little girl who thought the world cared. It was a mistake I’d never let happen again.
I grabbed a variety of rubbers from the lead crystal bowl on my dresser. Two strips of ribbed, three or four Magnums and a handful of assorted flavors; I hated the cherry ones, but if it was the difference between choking down a Robitussin flavored cock for a quick three minutes or losing forty bucks, I’d live with the taste of cherry cough syrup. I tossed a half-smoked joint and a handful of airplane mini bottles of tequila in my purse before I snatched my keys from the bookcase, straightened the seams of my miniskirt, as I double-checked my bulging cleavage in the full length mirror behind the front door. There, now it was time to make some money. I strolled past the threshold and didn’t look back. No use in turning around when I wouldn’t be meandering back this way before four AM, I never looked back anyway.
I pulled into the parking lot of an office building a half block down from Preacher’s Square, an oxymoron at its best. I had always parked my ‘92 Le Baron far enough away so nobody would see me drive up. It was a car older than dirt and smelled just as bad when I had ran the heater. Two years older than me, it’d been around the block as much as a middle-aged hooker.