I was half-asleep in front of the cracked and fluorescent-lit reflection in my and Candy’s so-called “vanity” mirror. Fuzzy and distorted as it was, it was impossible to deny the subject wavering in its not-really-silver frame was, in fact, myself. I had mixed feelings about that. If I’d been looking at somebody else—staring, for example, through a window instead—then I’d have to pause and appreciate the image of sensuality cosmically set before me.

“Gee whiz!” I’d say in such a fanciful scenario (though, no, not really), She sure is a pretty girl!

Of course, in any situation where one starts a statement with the words “Gee whiz,” I’d have to imagine I’d be dolled-up to look like Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors” and inflecting the words “sure” and “girl” so they sounded like “shoo-ah” and “gal.”

I’d still probably be using about a gallon of hairspray, though.

Maybe that was why I was feeling so—

“DAMMIT, MIA! HURRY YOUR TIGHT, PINK KIESTER UP!” Candy screamed through the bathroom door, giving it a few hearty THUMPS for good measure. Her voice and the violent knocks accompanying it were enough to cut through my aerosol-induced haze and wake me up…

A little, at least.

If I could wear a watch on the job, I’d likely have given it a not-really-checking-the-time glance to punctuate my otherwise entirely internal flare of panic. Instead, I muttered “Shit!” under my breath and, using my forearm to sweep my makeup off the counter and into my waiting bag, forced myself to turn away from the cracked and fluorescent-lit subject staring out at me through the not-a-window. If it were a window, I’d have been able to appreciate her for how beautiful—dare I go so far as to say “sexy”—she looked.

But it’s not a window.

And that meant I was staring at myself: the whore.

Tough to appreciate your own “outer beauty” when it was nothing more than an ad campaign. As I stumbled for the door I could almost see the starter kit in the back of my mind:

“INSTANT CASH! JUST ADD FISHNETS AND CORNY PICKUP LINES!” it’d say.

But it’d be a useless starter kit without a box of tissues for wiping up tears and a bottle of Scope to wash away the taste of latex, I thought bitterly as I yanked the knob and threw the door open.

An immaculately manicured and perfectly tanned forearm hung inches from my face, a fist that was, for lack of a better word, perfect and handjob-ready poised to start banging on the door again. Candy nearly wound up delivering a few of those aggressive knocks directly into my forehead. I figured I would have had it coming for hogging the bathroom for so long.

Candy didn’t hit me, though; she only smiled a perfect, pearly-white smile and tossed a bundle of curled red hair over her shoulder before saying, “From now on, I go first.”

I rolled my eyes at her, moving to step aside so that she could pass. “Like you even need it,” I countered. “Look at you! You’re perfect!”

“Perfect is who’s talking, girl,” she said, gliding into the bathroom like good sex—the sort of sex we’d likely see none of that night. “This mug represents about an hour’s worth of hard labor in my room,” she went on, “but if I don’t powder my pussy before hitting the streets then I wind up walking like a bad Western hero for a few days.”

I stared after her, speechless, as she opened the cabinet under the sink and retrieved the baby powder. Then, without a hint of shyness, she swung one of her stilettoed feet up onto the counter, yanked her panties to one side, and squeezed a healthy cloud of the stuff between her thighs. Still unabashed, she worked the dusting around until all trace of the whiteness was but a memory. Then, humming with satisfaction, she set her panties back into place, thought better of it, and pulled the fragile-looking band up enough to bury the material between folds of flesh.

“There,” she mused, though she seemed to be talking more to the subject behind her own not-a-window than back to me, “That’ll work!”

I tried to speak, found my throat dry, and forced myself to clear it. This, Candy mistook as a call for attention, and she glanced back at me with a beautifully tweezed eyebrow curved inquisitively.

“Hmm?” she asked.

“I… uh,” I caught myself stealing a glance at the baby powder, still sitting on the counter, “Why did you do that?”

Candy let out a half-scoff, half-hum. “Nearly four weeks living and working with me,” she scolded in her suddenly maternal tone, “and you’re still sashaying the streets like a pretty girl at prom. It’s a job, girl! Men got hardhats and gloves and aspirin for their tough gigs; we got our own tools for the trade. Now,” she began as she held up the powder and gave it a shake for emphasis, “plenty—PLENTY!—of girls go out and sell tail, but most don’t have clue-one about how to do it. Shit, most wouldn’t even own up to selling in the first place. But, make no mistake, Mia, any girl you see in a tight little number and wagging what her momma blessed her with in a club or bar is most certainly a saleswoman in her own right.”

I stifled the urge to giggle at that—I still hadn’t gotten used to Candy’s preference for calling those in our line of work “saleswomen.”

“Sure, sure,” she went on, “they’re not always down to get down, but they’re putting on the same show—same exact song-and-dance—as us when we’re on the corner. Only difference is they’re working for drinks and free rides in fancy cars and we’re cutting straight to the nitty-gritty: cold… hard… cash.”

“So you’re saying all women are either whores or gold diggers?” I challenged.

Candy shrugged and checked her eyeliner in the mirror. “Not all,” she admitted. “Some are in convents.”

I groaned and said, “Now you’re just being crass.”

“Says the college girl ready to join my fine ass on the corner,” she countered.

“I’m not exactly doing this by choice,” I reminded her.

“And what would you be doing if you weren’t?” she asked before answering on my behalf: “Throwing on a sexy little red dress, doing up your hair, and going out so you can gyrate on a dance floor to remixed European music in the hopes that some ponytail-wearing stud with a thick wallet will throw down for a bright, sweet-as-candy drink?”

My sneer at the idea started deep, deep in my gut and found its way soon after to my face. “Ew! God, no! Ew!” I repeated, still shaking my head as I said, “I’d probably be staying in, watching bad 90’s reruns on Hulu and eating a pizza.”

Candy regarded me as though I’d just landed a giant saucer in the middle of her bathroom and emerged amidst a cloud of dense fog as a green-skinned being from the Foreskin Nebula. “And what about a man?” she demanded, as if being reminded of the existence of men might totally obliterate the fantasy I’d just described.

I shrugged. “If one happened to be present then I guess he’d better have had the foresight to order his own pizza.”

Candy’s stare shifted just enough to change the quality of my alien-esque persona as one from the Foreskin Nebula from one straight out of the galaxy of garlic-farts—confusion moving over just enough to include space for disgust. Seeming to accept that maybe—MAYBE!—her hypothesis regarding the nature of other women wasn’t entirely accurate, she gave a passive shrug and leaned against the counter.

“Anyway!” she stretched the word, sounding indignant for the digression, “While some other girls might casually go out onto town and flaunt the goods, those doing it professionally—and, by that, I mean those like me and you—know that all that walking, wagging, and… well, all that has a nasty way of chafing the thighs and coochie.”

I considered this for a moment, remembering a few of the busier nights where I had, indeed, gotten back with a fair amount of irritation between my legs.

“But what about… hmm, you know, dryness?” I asked.

Candy gave another dismissive shrug. “That’s what the Vaseline’s for,” she answered.

“Baby powder and Vaseline…” I said with an embarrassed chuckle.

“I know, right?” giggled Candy. “I’m like a dirty pharmacy!”

“I was more thinking that it’d be a good inclusion in a starter kit,” I suggested.

Candy barked out a heavy laugh at that. “A whore starter kit, huh? Better include mouthwash!”

It was my turn to laugh, and I thought, Funny you should say that.

Then, deciding that she had a point, I stepped back into the bathroom and retrieved the baby powder.

“At’ta girl,” Candy sang, patting my shoulder and starting for the door. “Don’t take long.”

“Come on. Come on! COME ON!” Candy chanted, the intensity of her words growing with each new repetition. “We’re gonna miss the bus!”

Part of me wanted to once again drag up the point that the matter of strict schedules weren’t something to be adhered to in this line of work. Like stuffy dress codes, lengthy PR meetings, and personal hygiene—No, scratch that, I thought, nobody likes a smelly hooker!—the idea of not having to worry about time seemed to be among the few things making prostitution appealing in comparison to other jobs. This, however, was a subject that we’d talked at great lengths about already, and one that I’d been proven wrong on time and time again.

“Maybe some whores got it good and don’t gotta worry about stuff like that,” Candy had said. “But not these whores. No sir-ree, girl; no sir!”

And it was all because of T-Built and his “professional” policies.

Because anybody considering picking up a prostitute is taking things like professionalism into consideration, right? I thought.

That thought, however, was never one of the points that I ever brought up in the past conversations with Candy. I’d known T-Built for a whole forty-five minutes before I even knew that there was a career change in my immediate future, and in that time I learned that he wasn’t the sort of boss you went around challenging. In fact, if any of his girls knew what was good for them, they would do well to keep any sort of comment—anything that wasn’t “yes, sir,” and “here’s the money”—to themselves. One minute I was Mia Chobavich, hopeful college grad and proud applicant to one of the city’s premiere advertising agencies, and the next I was in the service of a man who sounded like a made-for-TV superhero movie’s villain. It was just enough time to teach me a few valuable lessons, lessons that put what my diploma represented to the test:

Don’t ask questions.

Don’t argue.

Don’t talk.

Let it never be said that T-Built wasn’t a charmer…

Provided one was talking about snake charmers and it was clear that, when dealing with him, you might as well be tip-toeing through a pitch-black room filled with P-Oed cobras.

And so, because T-Built said that we had to be on the corner no later than nine every night, it stood to reason that, come nine o’clock, either your ass was at the corner or your ass was fired.

“Fired,” in my case, being a bullet that T-Built would personally fire into my ass (along with most of my major organs).

Like I said: a charmer.

So while a part of me wanted to be bitchy and argue that prostitutes shouldn’t have to worry about keeping a strict schedule, another part of me—the part that liked the idea of staying alive—thought better of it.

This part, as it turned out, was surprisingly good at running in high heels.

We made the bus.

Barely.

And, in my aggravation and through labored breaths, I might have said some unpleasant things about T-Built.

“The man might be as pleasant as a vinegar-and-razorblade enema,” Candy said, giving me a stern, “I shouldn’t have to tell you this”-look, “but you’d do well to keep your thoughts about him to yourself. You never know who’s listening, and the Carrion Crew’s got lots of members who’d just love to spill the beans about some mouthy whores talking bad about one of their higher-ups just for a chance to earn a pat on the head from him.”

“You talk about the Carrions like they’re some sort of global conglomerate,” I groaned, shaking my head. “They’re just a gang! It’s not like they’re all-powerful!”

“Girl, get your brain working!” Candy hissed, lowering her own voice and elbowing me to do the same. “Gang or not, they got power, whether it’s ‘all’ or just some makes no nevermind to you—it’s way more power than you or I got. And theirs is the kind of power that can get you dead, you got that?”

I flinched at her words, more out of the painful awareness of the truth they held than the shock of being told. I nodded.

“Good,” she said, but her hushed voice had taken on a tone of sadness as she did.

Taking her advice and keeping my thoughts to myself, I thought, God damn you, Mack; God damn you straight to Hell!

The bus caught a flat two blocks from our corner at ten-minutes-to-nine, and Candy and I had to run the rest of the way. As we shuffled off the bus—pushing and shoving past other grumbling passengers—Candy informed the driver that, should we be made late (and dead) by this inconvenience, she would be certain to haunt him in the worst way possible.

Those, however, were not her exact words. While most of what she’d said was lost amidst the cries and curses of those we were knocking past, I did catch “—float my ethereal form so far up your shit-chute that I’ll be wearing you like a—”

I was torn between utter disgust and absolute hilarity by this, but before I could decide between gagging or laughing her hand had me by the wrist and we were running.

Thomas was already standing at the corner where Lyle Avenue and Church Street convene. To anybody else—which was to say anybody who didn’t know any better—the twig of a man in the acid-wash cutoffs and a leather vest studying his cell phone’s screen was nothing more than another grunger. That his vest had a Carrion Crew patch on its left shoulder or that he was staring intently at the digital clock on his phone’s lock screen likely never occurred to any of those potential “anybody else”s. This, however, only served to reinforce my theory that the only people paying attention to the world beyond their own personal screen anymore were hookers, artists, and criminals. Then again, as a firm believer that all good artists were also prostitutes and a “saleswoman” in a country where prostitution was a crime, I had a hard time convincing myself that all three could be condensed into one lumped filum all their own.

And what a poor, dwindling lot we were…

Candy and I—panting and sweating and looking… well, like a pair of prostitutes who’d just run two blocks—nearly stumbled at Thomas’ feet as we crossed an imaginary finish line to our destination. The man, one of T-Built’s lackeys (who preferred to call himself a “PA”), regarded us like one might regard a bundle of spilled garbage that nearly spilled on their lap, and studied his phone with what could only be described as more drama than necessary.

Like it takes this long to read the time! I thought with irritation, trying to steal a glance at the screen. And it’s even DIGITAL!

Though he pulled the phone away before I could get a decent view, I made out an upside-down and backward eight and five. In the blur that robbed the time from me, I couldn’t be sure if what I was seeing was a six or a nine, but I knew from the glance alone that Candy and I had made it and that Thomas was just being a prick.

Scowling and studying the screen a moment longer—seeming to almost be challenging the digital readout—he offered a disappointed sigh and turned away, muttering that he’d report that we’d made it there on time.

I couldn’t help but feel like he somehow felt like he was doing us a favor.

Once he was gone, I finally allowed myself to take in the sharp, full, and admittedly loud inhale that my lungs had been screaming for. “Jeez!” I whined between gasping breaths, “T-Built’s PA is a real jerk, huh?”

“Girl, the only ‘PA’ that occupies this here corner are me and you: two fine-as-hell ‘Pieces of Ass,’” she countered with a laugh, seeming totally unphased by the Olympic-level run we’d just completed.

I sighed, finally getting control of my breathing again, and started to lean against a nearby light post. Then, remembering seeing a homeless man who was either very drunk or very indifferent to the ongoings around him relieving himself on that very light post several nights earlier, I thought better of it and opted to stand. Reliving the shuddering, grunting scene, I shivered and took a few extra steps away from the site.

Candy, either not noticing or not questioning my actions, began primping. Working from bottom-to-top, she pulled up her fishnets, pulled down her skirt, and then pulled up the sides of her thong—offering more leg and midriff while relieving onlookers of the burden of trying to guess what color her underwear was. Then, smirking proudly to herself, she undid the bottom half of the buttons on her otherwise modest shirt and tied it off in a fashion that she’d previously called her “slutty Daisy Duke,” which was finished off with her removing her arms from either sleeve and having me tie these behind her back to create a forced and overly revealing tube-top that was more of a dangly bra than an actual shirt.

While she did this, I shrugged out of my own coat, which might, at one time long ago, been considered a professional-looking blazer. Beneath this, feeling less and less like a “too revealing”-move and more and more like a “you’re a genius”-one, was a bikini top that I’d decided on in the last minute after hearing about the heatwave that was hitting the city. Though I’d been dreading the “moment of reveal,” as Candy would have called it, I startled myself by immediately deciding that anything more than this would have been unbearable.

“Starting to wish I’d done the same,” Candy groaned, nodding towards my scantily-clad chest.

“Almost enough to make you wish you were wearing a bra, huh?” I said, figuring I wasn’t crossing any lines in saying so. “Then you could just wear that, instead.”

“Nuts to that!” Candy groaned, shaking her head. “Damn things are uncomfortable, not to mention bad for you—make your tits sag and all. Plus I heard they increase your chances for cancer.”

I wanted to point out that a prostitute working for a murderous pimp was hardly in a position to worry about the subject of healthcare, but it occurred to me that any sort of self-preservation in this line of work was better than none.

“Yeah, well…” I gave a shrug and ignored a shrill whistle that echoed from across the street, “When carrying these monsters”—I nodded down towards my breasts—“stops being such a pain in the back, shoulders, neck, and just about every other part of me, maybe then I’ll decide to go braless.”

“Gotta use muscle to build muscle, girl,” Candy pointed out, throwing a wink to the whistler across the street. “It’s, like, a catch twenty-two or whatever: won’t go braless ‘cause it hurts, but it hurts ‘cause you won’t go braless. Me? I can do jumping jacks with my tig ol’ bitties hanging out all happy and free and they know to behave. It’s all about training the beasts.”

I hummed in response, but looked away as I pulled out my own phone. I’d been “reprimanded”—T-Built’s word for backhanding, as it turned out—for bringing a book with me to the corner on the first night. Apparently a hooker who reads is frowned upon. I still wasn’t sure why that was—who cared if they read so long as their orifices still functioned, right?—but, not wanting any further “reprimanding,” I’d since left my books at home. Lucky for me, staring at a phone wasn’t as much of a turn-off for potential seekers of “a good time,” and, luckier still, the Kindle app was free. I still wasn’t sure whether or not T-Built even knew about eBooks, but neither he nor his (cronies) PAs ever seemed to catch on. A few swipes with the pad of my thumb later and I was immersing myself in sweet, distracting fiction.

Candy sighed, forcing it out as an audible, disgruntled groan, and said, “I take it I’m on lookout then?”

I pouted over my screen at her, working my best “puppy-dog eyes”—as she called them—and quivering my lip.

“Girl,” she hissed, but a grin betrayed her, “you are a manipulative and terrible bitch of a woman. Remind me of my goddam mother, I swear to Christ! Fine! Get your read on, but that shit better be gone quick if somebody starts showing interest, you hear?”

I gave her a wide smile and a salute with two fingers from my free hand.

“Oh! Bitch is a Boy Scout all of a sudden?” she jabbed, but turned away to keep an eye on the streets as she did.

Though our relationship was still young, Candy and I had hit it off surprisingly well. Once T-Built had made it clear that I was going to be working for him—and, by extension, working for a new crime syndicate that called itself the Carrion Crew—he explained that room, board, and whatever money I made after he took the Carrion’s cut would be provided to me. Room and board, as it turned out, was a dank, two-bedroom apartment that shared a second floor with three other dank, two-bedroom apartments. Best as I could tell, these other apartments were all rented by the Carrions, two of which I knew were “home” to another four of T-Built’s hookers. The fourth apartment, as far as I knew, was empty—I’d never seen anybody coming or going from it before, but a few times, on our way back to our place after I long night I thought I smelled something—not sure what—coming from inside. I’d thought about asking Candy about it, but it had been one of those “I’m too sore to talk”-nights for her and I hadn’t felt like bothering her. Chances were it was better that way, and I was certain I’d either be disappointed by the answer or, worse yet, come to find that I was better off not knowing.

Since moving in, Candy, who T-Built assured me would take me under her wing, had become my mentor, my sister, and my best friend all in a single liquor-filled night of conversation that had started off innocent and spiraled into her nearly choking herself while trying to illustrate the finer points of fellatio on a Schnapps bottle. She’d been on the streets long enough to pick up all the typical mannerisms I would have expected, but, as I quickly found out, there was a depth and wisdom to her that quickly put her on the short-yet-impressive list of the smartest people I’d ever met. Since then, however, she’d only gone on to climb that list until I was certain that, despite being a high school dropout, she would have managed to stump even the most stubborn of college professors. And, only serving to add to her bizarre charm, she either refused to wave her intelligence over others’ heads or she actually didn’t realize how smart she was.

And if I was actually making any sort of money from working for T-Built and the Carrion Crew, I might’ve been willing to part with some of it to bet that Candy was too smart to think she was dumb.

On that first night, suddenly breaking away from her drunken ramblings and illustrating a sobering moment of clarity, she’d said, “You can tell a lot about a John by the way they talk; whether they’re good tippers, the schmoozing sort, or if they’re the sort to short-change you and spit on you once you’re done with them. Everyone acts like it’s impossible to read a John at a glance, but it can be the easiest thing in the world if you know to look past the promise of a dollar and consider the value of who’s holding the wallet.”

Though it had been sound advice for my new job, the depth of it had since proved itself just as effective even when I wasn’t hooking. It was then that I’d decided not to allow myself to lump Candy into some simple and ugly classification. It was also the moment I’d come to realize that I might not come out of the whole mess hating myself.

But then I had to look at my reflection in the mirror each night and hate myself for looking sexy…

And—oh!—how I envied Candy for managing to take it all in stride in that matter. She had the looks, knew she had the looks, and showed no shame or remorse for knowing exactly how to sell the looks. It was embarrassing for me to admit that, while I’d been the one to study advertising and marketing in college, Candy would’ve easily overqualified for any of the jobs that I’d have killed to get. Even her name—title?—was a cleverly constructed layer of her ingenious profile:

“Because ‘of course’-Candy!” she’d said with a bark of laughter after confessing that her real name was Nancy. “What else would I call myself in this line of work? Peppermint? Because I’m sweet at first but then leave ‘em cold! HA!”

And, as if to prove herself even further, she never had a problem with my reading. Sure, I’d be in for a lecture if I let it distract me from the job—the sort of thing that would motivate T-Built to “reprimand” both of us, me for the distraction and her for letting it happen—but, though I’d never seen her read anything that wasn’t instructions on how to cook something, she seemed to appreciate the value of a good book to an avid reader.

“What’chu reading, anyway?” her voice rose up again after a little while. “Must be pretty good to keep you going back to it night-after-night.”

I looked up from my screen, considering how best to answer her question. Though I wanted nothing more than to get into a deep and meaningful conversation about it, I knew that Candy, a “keep it in the here-and-now”-sort of person and an all-around “business”-focused woman, was only asking to be nice. As “social” as the job was, it left one craving genuine company; it was the sort of job that would make a pair of complete strangers eager to talk at great lengths about the joys to be had chewing on ice chips.

The silence between us stretched on a moment longer, and we both jumped as a big, blue motorcycle adorned with a realistic flaming paintjob and sporting a long, jutting front tire roared by. The rider, a serious looking man, seemed to glance our way without actually seeing us—if I didn’t know any better I’d almost say that it looked like he was avoiding any prolonged glances at the road ahead of him; his face sweeping here-and-there as he wove between cars and banked a turn at our corner.

Not even wearing a helmet, I caught myself thinking as I watched him pass. Then, considering this, I wondered if he was maybe one of T-Built’s (cronies) PAs driving by to check on us.

But something in that didn’t seem right.

Then, remembering myself, the corner, and, finally, Candy and her polite-yet-insincere question, I offered a shrug and said, “Just a vampire novel.”

She clucked her tongue at that and gave a knowing chuckle. “Like them Twilight books, you mean?” she asked.

I smirked at the question, secretly expecting it, and shook my head. “No, this one’s more scary than romantic, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was romance, too.” Then, considering what I’d read so far, I added, “Not just scary, though; it’s sad, too. It might have vampires and werewolves and all that stuff, but there’s all this real stuff—ugly stuff like abuse and pain and struggles with suicide and such—that make it feel like… I don’t know, like something more.”

“So why read it if it’s so sad?” Candy asked, seeming upset at the idea of me upsetting myself.

I smiled at that, more at her genuine concern than the challenging tone of the question. “Same reason you care enough to ask me that,” I explained. “There’s something about connecting with a person’s pain, making it your own—caring about them and their journey—and seeing them come out of it okay that makes you feel better to have been a part of it.”

“So everyone comes out of it okay in the end?” she asked.

I thought about some of the characters I felt like I’d personally watched die already and caught myself in mid-cringe. “Not all of them, no,” I admitted before scrolling back to show her the book’s cover, which featured crimson-eyed young man embracing a pained-looking, raven-haired beauty. Pointing towards the pair, I said, “But I’m hoping these two come out of it, at least.”

Candy studied the cover, squinting to take it in through the brightness of my phone’s screen against the otherwise dim world around us. Finally, she hummed to herself and shrugged. “Chick sorta looks like a whore,” she mused aloud. “One of them whores with a goth gimmick, sure, but a whore just the same.”

“That’s not very nice,” I whined, turning the phone away from her.

“Why not?” she asked, genuinely surprised by my words. “Them goth whores got a good thing going. That schtick sells pussy like crazy, I’ll have you know. Something to consider if you’re ever feeling up to a change.”

“I’ll take that into consideration,” I said, sighing heavily and moving my finger across the screen in a cheap pantomime motion to turn the not-really-a-page.

“What is that?” the man who momentarily got to call me his asked, gesturing to a patch of black-and-white ink on my left calf. “That a monster tatt or something?”

“It’s Dracula,” I corrected half-heartedly, not interested in talking about my only tattoo. The man had paid for a blowjob, put cash in my hand upfront to get it, and I wanted nothing more than to get the rubber on him so that I could get started on finishing him.

While their differences weren’t always blaring or obvious, every John was unique. Some were chatty while others were quiet; some needed a bit of coaxing while others came loaded for bear; and some were all about getting to the action while others wanted to act like it was a first date. The ones that were first comers—no pun intended—were typically nervous, and these nerves typically were responsible for the chatting, the coaxing, or the feigned romance. It was for these reasons that I assumed that the man remarking on my tattoo was a first comer. The fact that he was softer than an abandoned ice cream cone on a day like today only served to prove this.

“Something wrong, baby?” I asked in a trained voice that was both sultry and motherly, a voice that said “I care, but I also really wanna gobble this cock; this cock, which is bigger and better than any cock I’ve seen and is surely packing nothing but future presidents and rock stars.”

It was a voice that Candy had worked long and hard to teach me.

It was also a voice that never failed to make me feel dirty and cheap.

“I just… it’s just…” the man sighed, obviously nervous and uncomfortable. Men in those circumstances often lost control of everything except their pride, and that was why I wasn’t surprised when he said, “I don’t understand why you’d have a Dracula tattoo.”

Right, I thought, suppressing the urge to roll my eyes, you can’t get it up because the whore’s got a little ink. There’s no way you’re thinking of all the guys who’d bust your balls for paying for it, or the things your mom might say if she found out, or even how I somehow remind you of an old girlfriend or, better yet, your cousin or even maybe your sister and it’s putting a bit of a stutter in your rudder, right? No, sir; it’s the whore’s Dracula tattoo that’s to blame for the dead worm in your shorts.

What I said, however, was, “Because I’m a creature of the night with an oral fixation, baby. Now why don’t you let me help you?”

“Help.”

Why that word seemed to work better than others in this line of work never failed to amaze me. Like they were paying me to find their keys or organize their closets instead of fighting to not wretch on their manhood. It wasn’t helping. I hated thinking of it that way, let alone wording it that way. But, hate it or not, it had a way of moving things along. As if to prove the point—or maybe just to prove me wrong for hating it—the word managed to slip past the man’s ears, wriggle into his brain, take a peek at the scene before it, and start a slow-yet-direct journey down to his midsection. No sooner had I said the word—that stupid, stupid word—than the dead worm decided that life was worth living.

This was usually the part where I was supposed to play the role of the startled and giddy lover. Cooing and cheering, maybe even gasping as one might when faced with an unexpected surprise. It was the sort of acting that Candy taught me to sugarcoat the otherwise awkward bridge that existed between the stages of “just give me a minute” and “let’s go!”

If I’d have known early on in my life how fragile men and their egos really were I wouldn’t have let Casey McMiller talk me into losing my virginity at sixteen. How quickly I could’ve ended the night if I’d just replaced my nervous stammer of “Will it fit?” to a more confident “Where’s the rest of it?” Casey would’ve driven me home, crying over the steering wheel of his dad’s truck, and I’d have had a more rewarding first time in college with Brandon Tulser, who was admittedly smaller than Casey but an all-around better guy.

I should have been sugarcoating the awkward moment, I knew, but the man was a first-timer who wouldn’t know any better and my mind was a million miles away. While he was still only half-hard, I slipped the condom onto him—a skill I wasn’t proud to have acquired with such swiftness and dexterity—and went to work “ice creaming” the glans like Candy had taught me on a Tootsie Roll Pop. It, like the word “help,” was stupid, but it got things moving.

The man moaned and said something, but it wasn’t my job to care. If he was expecting an answer then he’d obviously forgotten what it was he was paying me for.

I only got one mouth, and I’m not using it to talk.

Still distracted, my senses told me when things were at least awake enough to benefit from the “help,” and I went to work. Eager, throbbing life crammed into soulless latex filled my mouth and earned a stifled gag before I refocused my breathing through my nose. Then it was all a matter of rhythm and waiting.

I knew that moments like this likely meant something to the men. Even the seasoned patrons who’d done this a million times were there to achieve something, no matter how brief and insubstantial that achievement was. Whether they’d go on to remember the event or not, it meant something to them. When I’d first started, I worried that each time would mean something to me, as well; that every encounter would somehow feel either like an assault or, worse yet, like the start of something. I never really believed I’d fall for one of the men paying for my services—“Johns” as I came to know them—but I’d been to college, I’d had my crazy moments, and, yeah, the few casual blowjobs I’d given in those few dorm rooms had, in some way or another, felt like maybe they were the start of something more. In those moments, drunk or high from whatever party I’d been attending and working my sloppy routine, I’d catch myself wondering if the guy I was going down on would call me the next day, if maybe this lewd encounter might be the catalyst to something greater. I might have been naïve, but it wasn’t too farfetched to believe a random blowjob might, in some weird way, blossom into something more. And it was exactly that juvenile, college-born romanticism that had me so nervous about the job I was being forced to do.

Come to find that being a prostitute felt more like being a line operator at some sort of damp, sweaty factory. I could have just as easily been pulling a lever or snapping together pieces on an assembly line.

Up, down, twist, repeat.

Up, down, twist, repeat.

Quota’s not being filled? Crank up the speed on this baby! Show the boys down in scheduling what we can really do! Now, double-time:

Up, down, twist, repeat!

Up, down, twist, repeat!

Don’t forget your hardhats, boys; there’s dangers out there on the work floor!

Except when you let your mind wander in a factory you were at risk of losing a part of yourself to a hungry machine or letting a product slip by with an imperfection. Going down on a guy? You could lose yourself to the repetitive movements and the worst thing that’d happen is you didn’t realize they’d finished until they started squirming and grunting like idiots. Worst thing to come from that is the guy thinks you genuinely enjoyed “helping” them and they either pay extra or make sure to come back.

And so, getting to work—up, down, twist, repeat—I let my mind wander with reckless abandon.

I thought of how much I hated my big brother, Mack.

I thought of how much I envied Candy for any number of reasons.

I thought of how much I wanted to get back to my book and see how things turned out for the two vampire lovers.

And, strangely enough, I thought of a big, blue motorcycle adorned with a realistic flaming paintjob and sporting a long, jutting front tire and a rider who seemed to be avoiding any prolonged glances at the road ahead of him.

On a hot night, hating myself for looking so sexy and working hard to focus on anything except what I was doing, I felt like I could relate…