Some Girls: My Life in a Harem by Jillian Lauren Read Free Book Online Page B

stood awkwardly in front of him while he looked at me for a brief moment with no notable reaction and then began fiddling in the drawer of his nightstand. It was one thing to be naked and half drunk on stage with music and rosy lights and a rowdy audience. It was another entirely to stand under track lighting in silence in a stranger’s bedroom. My arms felt long and awkward. I didn’t know where to put my hands. I opted for my hips, with my feet in beauty-contest position. It seemed a bit stagy, but it was the best I could come up with.
    “Have you ever done Rush?” he asked. He found what he was looking for. It was a bottle of poppers.
    “I’m not in the mood, but you go ahead.”
    I would have juggled chain saws for another drink right then, but I didn’t want to be passing out on the job. It was the first time I had seen amyl nitrate outside the dance floor of a gay club. Maybe this guy was gay? I had learned enough from fantasies revealed to me by customers at the club to know that there are many shades of gay.
    The radio host slithered out of his silk ensemble and matter-of-factly asked me to get on my hands and knees on the bed, facing the wall of mirrored closets. Until then, he had only touched my leg once and grabbed my hand a couple of times, but it became clear that he had an aversion to further skin-on-skin contact. This was so different from guys at the club, who always wanted to hold my hand like it was some kind of date. Sometimes they asked me to the movies. Not this guy. He knelt on the bed behind me, straddling the back of my legs, not touching me at all.
    “Just put your ass up in the air for me so I can look at it.”
    I did what he asked, but he didn’t even really look at my ass or anything else about me. Instead he looked at himself in the mirror while he jerked off. He ran his other hand through his feathered hair and flexed his pec muscles.
    “Lick your lips for me. Push your tits together,” he said, looking straight into his own eyes the whole time.
    Just as he was about to come, he grabbed the Rush off the nightstand, inhaled deeply until his eyes rolled back, and then collapsed sideways in a heap. I only had to shift subtly so that he came on the bedspread and not on my back. I disentangled myself from his legs and took the precariously tilting bottle out of his hand, placing it on the nightstand so the toxic liquid inside wouldn’t spill. He quickly regained consciousness and smiled as he wiped the drool from his chin.
    “Beautiful. That was great.”
    He even gave me a nice tip on my way out the door. To help out with tuition.
    I walked out past the doorman and found the sky swirling with an unusually early snow flurry that stirred something in my chest. I love the first few hours of snow in New York, before the days of winter wear on and the streets turn to a gray, sludgy mess. A New York winter’s first snowstorm is a magical thing, in which for a moment the whole city is blanketed in quiet and clean.

chapter 5
     
     
     
     
    A month later, Taylor and I walked into the lobby of the Ritz the way we always did—confident, conservative, purposeful. We were both exactly five feet nine in three-inch heels. Taylor wore a tan, tailored skirt suit hemmed extra short with a white camisole underneath and, as always, a pearl choker she got on her twelfth birthday as a gift from her grandmother. Her signature look was very little makeup and a bouncy, strawberry blond, blow-dried bob. I was her photonegative, with my black suit jacket nipped at the waist, shoulder-length, chestnut hair, and red lipstick. Red lipstick because above all there is no kissing. Yes, the Pretty Woman thing is true. The no-kissing part, at least; the rest is an insulting crock.
    I had perfected the art of not looking anyone in the eye as we walked toward the elevators. It could trip me up sometimes, how people looked at me, the barb of disapproval followed by the self-satisfied smirk—always so impressed with