“I can’t be without you, even for a day.” His smile gained confidence with her silence and remained on his face as his grip loosened around the box. “Kate Giovanni, will you make me the happiest man on this earth and be my wife?”
She didn’t have to consider it. Her arms around his neck made him fall back, laughing.
* * * *
A dark-haired woman opened the door of Jeanne’s house and smiled at them. Kate felt Colin’s grip strengthen. Light flicked across the woman’s eyes and made Kate hold her breath, as if that sparkle had taken something off her. She thought, with the tightening of her husband’s fingers and the easy lolling tone of his “Hello,” that the woman was enjoying the effect she had on Colin, building energy like a bulb just plugged in.
The night turned out just as Kate had imagined it. She hated every minute. Only Kate and Colin and one other couple, Camilla and Ian, had been invited. Camilla knew Jeanne’s husband, Frederick, through working at the art gallery in town. She was an older, very sexy woman with dark curly hair, brown eyes and wide hips.
The men all got slightly drunk on whiskey as Kate and Camilla helped Jeanne with the food in the kitchen. “So how are you?” Jeanne had asked.
Kate nodded, unable to find her smile. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“I do hope so.”
Kate wished she had something to rebound this consideration back to Jeanne. She wanted to shatter the tough, annoying resolve of the woman it came from. When they finished setting the table and joined the men in the living room, Colin was sitting on the couch with his elbow on the armrest. He leaned forward and nodded at Kate before his eyes roamed up and down Camilla and his smile broadened. Kate felt her heart stop.
Her neighbors’ false sympathy and Colin’s lecherous looks kept Kate’s confidence at a low, though the next day, when her first client started to take off his clothes, she couldn’t help thinking of Jeanne’s hand on her back and her caring, plastic smile.
Chapter 3
Jade walked into the reception area with her satin slip clinging to her and smiled at the appreciation she saw in the client’s eyes. The small Italian man stood upon her entry. He had brown eyes, a scrunched-up face and thin red lips. Dark stubble made up for his receding hairline. She knew he would pick her when closing the door. She saw his eyes had not left her and he had not sat.
A few minutes later, she followed her first client into the dimly lit room, where music played on the intercom. He undressed and threw his clothes on the ground with a gesture of impatience that worried her. She took her time, slipping the straps off her shoulders. She had wanted to believe she would enter those dark rooms and become a different person, suddenly having the desire of Arlene, the confidence of Michele or the vixen-like ways of Nikki. She imagined the sensual music and the smell of sex would engulf her, releasing a new woman like a caterpillar from its cocoon. She would waltz out the door with the grace of a butterfly after holding a man’s penis and making him come.
It didn’t happen like that. The Kate side of her came out in full force, though at one stage Jade felt her curiosity spark. When her client made his request to touch her, there was hesitation. For a second, she imagined what it would be like to say yes.
The slip slid down her smooth body and revealed her breasts, small and pert. Her nipples were erect from nerves and the kiss of air. The light fabric went past her black lingerie to the high heels and she kicked it off. Then she removed her final defense: her g-string. She left her high heels on. Jade was naked before a stranger, wondering how this could possibly be safe.
What she was told the day she went to the hotel for the interview now meant nothing as she stood exposed and alone. “They cannot touch you,” Caroline, the interviewer, had insisted as she leaned forward. “You can only touch them. You are the one in control the whole time. You decide what happens.” She’d pushed the card across the table. “Call me when you’re ready.” The interviewer was smart; that promise of control wasn’t forgotten.
Three days later when the job was accepted, Caroline sounded like an old friend on the phone, but when Jade stood in that room, she had no idea where the woman was.
The client looked her over, and Jade considered running out and never coming back to this place. But where would she go? Home to her house on that horrible street?
Colin’s face kept her in the room as her client climbed onto the table and lay on his stomach, his hands straight by his sides. She stood over his body. The need to escape from her suburban life, where she no longer belonged, made her lift the massage oil.
She poured too much. Within seconds, the client’s body was covered in oil and she slid her hands up and down without direction. She stretched her arms so her body was too far for him to reach and all she kept thinking of was his penis. She would have to touch it. She didn’t know how she could.
Then he made his request. “I want to ask you something, please.”
She nodded. Her voice was gone, tied within the knot in her stomach.
“Can I lick you?”
“What?”
He turned around and sat up. “Will you lie down and let me lick you? I promise I won’t do anything else.”
She wanted to laugh and say, Oh, is that all? Okay, then. Instead, she shook her head. “It’s not allowed.”
“I won’t tell anyone. Just five minutes. It’ll feel good.”
“Why would you want to?” After two years without her husband’s touches, she couldn’t understand how a stranger would want to do that. She’d forgotten what it was like to get lost in the feel of a tongue.
“My wife won’t let me do it to her, and I miss it.”
Jade stiffened. Did his wife know her husband was here, being touched by another woman? She imagined lying down on the table and letting him move between her legs and the betrayal in it, and tried to hide her distaste under a shaky smile.
“She hasn’t let me touch her in a very long time. I wouldn’t have an affair and I don’t want sex with anyone else, but sometimes…” He faltered and she felt the tickle of his gaze between her legs. “I go to places like this because I want to be touched.”
Were his needs any different from hers? She was here because she was looking for something, if only appreciative glances and a feeling of being desired. He paid, and she took the money. She couldn’t hate him.
Jade imagined letting herself go with the pleasure of soft wetness caressing her and was shocked she even considered it. In her seconds of silence, he had attained an expression of hope. He touched his erect cock.
“I understand but still I can’t let you.”
He took a deep breath. “It was worth a try.” She wondered what else he would’ve tried and how much truth lay behind his story of an estranged wife.
Her deliberation was lost in the next second when he lay on his back and her eyes fell on his erection. She couldn’t breathe as she unceremoniously grabbed his penis and pulled.
The client jumped off the table. “What are you doing?” He moved his hand to where she had just touched. “Fuck!”
“I’m sorry. It’s my first time.”
“I want another girl.”
She nodded and tried not to cry.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouted.
Jade dressed quickly and ran to the office. She stumbled into Sasha, her body full of the tremors she tried to keep inside. “He wants another girl.”
“You were only in there ten minutes.”
She