That’s right:a box. With a little spigot. Like wine.
We were sitting at a large table, a pitcher of bright green Grinch Punch between us, and several plates of appetizers being passed around. Kallum sat in the chair next to me, and I swore I could feel the warmth radiating from him in this chilly room. (“It’s to keep the nipples hard,” Jack had said knowingly when I’d first mentioned how cold it was.) But Kallum was like a furnace, and even though we were touching, the side of my body that faced him rippled with warmth, awareness, electricity.
Gretchen sat with an arm draped along the back of Pearl’s chair while Pearl was giving a soliloquy about finding poetic inspiration in sticky floors and bright yellow cheese, and Luca and Jack were fighting about the institution of marriage while Jack watched MissCrumpets snoring on his hotel bed via a nanny cam app on his phone.
“I can’t believe you’re buying into this white-picket-fence bullshit,” Jack said, eyes still on his phone. “Marriage is a sham. He’ll dump you and then try to give your dog a new father and then all you’ll be is a bitter divorcé.”
“Joke’s on you,” Luca said with a sniff. “Bitter divorcé is the brand I’ve been cultivating for years.”
“You doing okay?” Kallum asked me. “You’ve barely touched your loaded potato skin.”
I nodded and took a bite of the potato skin, my eyes returning to the dancer on the stage. Vixen was pale and blond and wide-hipped, with a vibrating tongue piercing that she would come press against your neck for a five-dollar bill. While we ate cheese-drenched food, she flashed us her vulva to an Aly & AJ Christmas song. She had a piercing down there too.
Okay, I was maybe not doing so okay. I was overwhelmed—and maybe not just by the ambient sex or how casual everyone seemed around it all, but by how much I liked it.
We came here like this place was an X-rated Topgolf, a place just to hang out and have fun, but right now, I was having a little more than a good Topgolf-y kind of night. By the time Comet took the stage and began giving us teasing little glimpses of herself, I was wet enough to slide right off my chair.
And while I’d slowly, shyly, been wondering over the last two years if the reason I’d always called myself straight was because I was given no other option growing up, it was disorienting to realizeOh I really do want eeeeveryone to have sex with mehere in a sticky room filled with Santa blow molds and congealed nacho cheese. And even more than that, it was disorienting to be so brutally turned on while everyone around me was laughing and chatting and playfully spanking the dancers whenever they presented their very spankable backsides. Couldn’t they see my flushed cheeks, my hard-and-not-just-from-the-cold nipples, my fast breathing?
Oh God. This was embarrassing. We were here for grown-up fun, and I wasn’t mature enough, I was actually getting wildlyhorny from all of it, and I swore my clit was now pulsing in time to the music, and I had to get out of here, I had to find somewhere to get my body under control.
Mumbling a frantic excuse, I left our table and hurried down the long hallway to the side, lined with ATMs, condom machines, and flyers for local concerts, and ducked into the first door I found. The room beyond was dimly lit, with padded benches lining the walls, a throne-looking armchair in the middle, and a tall trifold mirror standing at one end.
It was a private room.
I pressed my face in my hands, grateful for the chance to catch my breath.Lust isn’t actually a sin, I reminded myself.
The door swung open, and I jumped back, like I’d been caught doing something naughty.
“It’s just me,” Kallum said cheerfully, stepping inside and shutting the door behind him. “Thought I’d give you the nickel tour.”
I hugged myself, hoping he couldn’t see the hard tips of my breasts poking through my thin boatneck shirt. “Have you been here before then?”
He laughed. “Actually no, but all private rooms are the same. Chair, mirrors. Maybe some black lights to get a glow-in-the-dark effect.”
An absurd twist of jealousy took root inside my chest. And then curiosity too. “You’ve been in private rooms at strip clubs?”
“Oh yeah,” Kallum said, strolling over to the mirror and giving it an approving once-over. “Nolan basically had a strip club punch card at one point. And it was impossible to avoid a private session anywhere we went, since every dancer wanted tosay they had an INK boy in their private room. Even if it was only Kallum Lieberman.”
I didn’t like the way he saidonly Kallum Lieberman, like he wasn’t as fascinating or sexy as Nolan Shaw or Isaac Kelly, but he spoke again before I could ask him about it.
“And you want to know my favorite thing about a private room?”
“Yes,” I said. My voice had gone quiet. Distantly, I could hear the music from the rest of the club, and a lone horn from a truck somewhere on the highway.
“Attention,” he said softly. “No other patrons, no other friends. Just you. The sole focus of someone’s attention.”
His words dragged over me like slow, wet kisses, and I was trembling. “And what does attention look like? In a private room?”
He turned to face me, and even though it was nearly dark in here, I could see the wicked grin spreading across his face. “Are you asking me to show you, Winnie Baker?”
Brave Little Toaster.
“Yes,” I whispered with a slow smile of my own.
“Well, then. Have a seat.”
I sat in the chair, clearing my throat. I wasn’t sure what to do, what to say, when someone was about to give me a lap dance, but I remembered watching Pearl get one earlier, and she’d basically sat back and let the dancer do all the work. So I relaxed into the chair, eyeing Kallum with my tongue pressed to the roof of my mouth.
