Posted by The Bastard at 63.227.217.44 on September 21, 2003 at 12:20:54:
excerpt of what may become a short story, long story, part of a novel...
His hands seemed to be all knuckles and thumbs as he fumbled at her secret place, like an inept burglar unable to open the world's first safe. But he was young, and this is what she was paid for, the carnal education of the inexperienced. With a finger pressed lightly to his lips, although he hadn't spoken since asking her the price, she stopped his clumsy efforts. He was about to speak, she thought, perhaps ask what was wrong, or to ask her to show him what to do, but she spared him. She knew the shame he felt, couldn't she see it in his eyes, in all their eyes? She smiled in the flickering half-light cast by the candles and took his hand in both of hers, and trained it.
When it was over, he hadn't changed, but he looked as if he felt he had, as all the young ones did. He had the look in his eye that Alexander must have felt, before weeping at the expanse of his empire, the look of 007, sipping martinis and making inadequeates of his fans. But the shame was there too, perhaps as the young man thought of the fresh-faced girl he had pictured while the darkness hid their act, perhaps as he thought of what his mother would say. Yes, the shame was always there, and part of it was hers. Maybe she would never see him again, and his shame would fade and become an anecdote for his friends, a secret of his own to hide from all his future wives.
But maybe not. Maybe the simple economic exchange of wrinkled bills between man and Woman Of Night would seep into all his thoughts, corrupting him, making him unable to offer the non-monetary purchase price other women placed on themselves, be it dinners or lies or love. She had seen it before. There wasn't much she hadn't. Some of her johns, regulars or one timers, it didn't matter; she could smell it on them. The cheap perfume of her profession would be on their clothes, on their breath, in their sweat, and she would know just by looking at them that they had been customers--someone's, anyway--for years. It was in their shifty movements, mumbled requests for varied perversions, poor posture.
She hoped not, in this boy's case. He filled her with a longing for a time she hadn't even been alive for, a time when girls in poodle skirts wore their steady fellow's rings and blushed, their undyed, unteased, unstreaked hair tied back in a pony tail by a simple ribbon. There was something about the boy's perfect white teeth and good manners, saying please and even thank you when they were done, that made her hope for him, hope that he would find in life a girl that was everything she herself was not.
He tipped well, and left. She smoked her powder, washed, blew out the tiny candles the boy had left behind, smiling as she did. She was done for the night, stoned, ready for bed. She smoked a long filtered cigarette in the empty hotel room, calculating how long sdhe wanted to sleep, what that would cost at the hourly rate. She would stay. She knew the owner, and while she knew she would have to pay him, he did not recquire cash. She knew a ten minute blowjob would square the bill, so she turned off the lights, propepd the room's one chair beneath the locked knob of the flimsy door, and slept…but not without a pearlhandled revolver under her pillow.