Richard had reservations. ‘Women can put punters off,’ he explained.
‘I guess that’s possible,’ I agreed. ‘But isn’t it also likely a woman behind the counter might help improve sales?’
I started arguing about how it might make the shop more accessible to female customers, opening his market to an untapped fifty per cent share of the population. I started trying to tell Richard that his core client base of male customers might be more interested in obtaining a female perspective on the suitability of their purchases. He silenced me with a wave of his hand and told me I was talking too much sales bullshit. He said I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But he said he’d trial me with a three-month probation.
He said then that there were lots of perks to working in a sex shop. But, before he could explain what those perks were, he went strangely solemn and said, ‘There’s just one rule while you’re working in the shop.’
He spoke in such a peculiar fashion that I fell silent. It sounded like the moment when Bluebeard tells his new wife that she must never try to open the locked door to the seventh room. I urged Richard to continue.
‘You must never have sex with a customer for money.’
I should have balked. I should have told Richard that I didn’t have sex with anyone for money, let alone his grubby little customers in his seedy little shop. What the hell did he think I was? Instead, because I needed the job, I simply told him I would obey that rule.
It never occurred to me that it would be a difficult rule to obey.
All of which is how I ended up spending my evenings surrounded by the town’s largest selection of vibrators and a world-class collection of pornographic magazines and DVDs. I sat behind the counter from noon until ten o’clock at night. I was trying to look efficient but approachable. And I smiled for the steady supply of male customers who scurried furtively through the shop desperate to make their quick and anonymous purchases.
To my surprise, I discovered it was quite an arousing atmosphere.
There were dirty films constantly being played in the background.
Erotic films.
Pornographic movies.
Because I was expected to pick the films that were played, the movies were always those that I wanted to see. In the first few weeks my choices were fairly vanilla. I picked up the Horny Housewife films and the Adventurous Amateur titles. This changed to a broader interest as I experimented with various genres of movie. In later months I found I was picking some of the most depraved titles from the stockroom and happily enjoying them again and again. Whipping Girl remains one of my favourite films. Watching the hero slash a strap across that woman’s backside and seeing her cheeks marked with red stripes …
But I digress.
It’s enough to say that there’s something highly arousing about the sound of fake orgasms being repeated through every working hour of the day. Hearing that soundtrack is definitely one of the perks. And, while it might sound like an arrogant claim, I believe my experience in the shop has allowed me to become enough of a connoisseur to differentiate between the sound of fake orgasms and the sound of real ones.
I could try to be coy and prim and proper and pretend that I was never really affected by the noise. But the truth is it got me warm and moist and horny.
And that was just the background noise.
The magazines were even more stimulating.
Part of my duties involved making sure the magazines were displayed neatly. The shocking cover images startled me at first. They showed strikingly attractive women impaled on impossibly huge erections. They showed scenes of anal sex and lesbian sex and group sex. They were graphically illustrated with hundreds of glossy images. Every picture showed a sexual act recreated in rich and glorious detail.
I borrowed a copy of Pussy Hungry from the shelves and took it back to the counter. Marvelling at the pictures of female mouths devouring female genitals, I worked my way through it from cover to cover. By the time I had finished I was sitting in a puddle of my own arousal. The muscles of my sex were a cramp-like pain of unsatisfied frustration and need.
Two weeks into the job and I was masturbating while I sat at the till.
There was no one in the shop.
Behind me I could hear the sounds of a high-pitched bottle-blonde bimbo screeching her way to a fake climax. This was one of the main stars from Naughty Neighbours XIII, one of those vanilla films I favoured during my first weeks in the shop. And I was reading my way through a filthy story about a woman being spit-roasted in a magazine entitled 3-Way.
I was so horny my pussy muscles were clenching and convulsing in pre-orgasmic spasms. My pants felt as though they had stuck to the wet lips of my labia. I could drink in the gamey scent of my arousal with every breath. And I was desperate to suffer the release of a climax. The need had come over me like a compulsion. I had a desperate yearning to exorcise the arousal from my body.
I was wearing jeans.
A part of me wanted to scrabble with the belt – unfasten that. Scrabble with the buttons – unfasten those. Scrabble with the zip – and then tug the jeans down to my hips so I had unfettered access to myself. But I didn’t have the time or the patience. The need within me was an urgent one and I had no desire to be sat with my jeans and panties wrenched down to my thighs while I frigged myself to an awkward and uncomfortable climax.
I parted my thighs and pushed my fist between my legs. I pressed it hard against the seat of the chair. The base of my thumb jutted towards me and I rubbed myself against it. It only took a roll of my hips, a roll as though I was riding against a broad and rigid cock, and the first tremors of a climax began to shiver through my body. As soon as I realised what I was doing, as soon as I privately acknowledged that I was wanking in the shop, the excitement grew even more intense.
It was behaviour as bold as exhibitionism or outdoor sex. It was behaviour as depraved as anything I had ever done in my life – and no one had ever called me a prude when it came to sex – and it was totally exhilarating.
I rocked my hips slowly back and forth.
The seam at the crotch of my jeans was a rock-hard ridge that pressed against my clitoris. The sensation dithered between an absolute agony and a furious, satisfying delight. Grinding harder and faster against my own wrist and the seam of the jeans, I rubbed myself to a slow and deliberate climax.
The explosion began in the tips of my toes. It was a tingle of pure pleasure that trembled through my legs and caused the muscles in my thighs to spasm. It travelled up to the centre of my sex and culminated in a warm wet eruption between my thighs. I stifled a groan of satisfaction and allowed the ripples of pleasure to eddy through my body.
I was still shivering when the shop’s bell rang and a customer walked in.
I blushed, as though he could have known what I’d been doing. My heart hammered. Each pounding beat made me feel as though I’d been caught in the act. I imagined that I looked dishevelled and ravaged, although the truth was that I probably had a little colour in my cheeks and no other obvious symptoms of satisfaction. Nevertheless, we studied one another until the customer rushed out of the shop without making a purchase.
And I told myself I would never do it again.
Jilling myself in the job had been too risky and I couldn’t face the embarrassment or the consequences of being caught doing something so depraved. And yet, while those arguments made sense, the next morning I dressed in a skirt rather than jeans.
I didn’t even realise why I’d made such a fashion choice until I was browsing through another of the magazines that I happened to have pulled from the shelves: Back Door Sluts.
This was a magazine about anal sex.