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“He isn’t a stalker.”
“Oh, right, my bad, must’ve been mistaken.” Mack rubs a sore spot on his shoulder. “A guy you don’t know tracks you down from an online cam site, flies all the way here, and gets a private hotel room for the sole purpose of spending time with you … Yeah, right, silly me. Not a stalker at all. What was I thinking?”
“It’s deeper than that, Mack. He was never just ‘some guy I don’t know’. And I went and ditched him after he basically bared his soul to me all night. Who does that?”
“A stripper who knows when some old man’s well is about to run dry.” He shakes his head as he hops his ass onto the counter and faces me. “Dude, the moment you get personal with a moneybag and give him what he wants, you’re basically through.”
I roll my eyes and scavenge for a bottle of oil in the pile of unorganized crap on the counter. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s stripper 101, man. Why are you acting so dumb about this? It’s all about the cock-tease. The chase. The forbidden fruit.” He snorts. “If you ask me, you got out just in time. Leave that old horny man thirsty. Promise, you won’t see another dime the moment he gets what he wants.”
Despite Mack’s crudeness, I can’t exactly blame him for what he’s saying. In my whole time being what I am, doing what I do, that’s been the law: always leave your customer begging for more. It’s all about that first sweet drop of delicious honey that leads them into your evil trap. You keep them salivating. Use their own fantasies against them to bait them. Note what gets them hard, then half-ass it until they’re insane, frustrated, and practically in blissful tears, begging to be satisfied.
But they will never truly be satisfied. That’s the worst yet most effective poison of any performer: to make it a dance of desire that never ends.
“Dude, where’d my thing go?” Mack huffs as he goes on his own hunt through the crap on the counter, shoving in front of me to do so. “Dude, Zak, have you seen my lucky Poké Ball charm?”
“Nah,” I reply distractedly, still thinking about Captain—and how unlike any of my “customers” he is. Maybe that’s why I feel so wrong about it all. It’s almost like …
It’s almost like Captain isn’t a customer at all.
But just a friend in need of … another friend.
Like he said.
I’m out of time to think about it. “C’mon, boys, get your asses out there,” calls Larry, strutting into the room in his leather vest—the buttons of which strain to contain his belly. “It’s time.”
After a few more whiny remarks from Mack, the four of us—me, Mack, Gianni, and Eros—head to the stage. I hear our names announced over the speaker to the room full of cheering people as we take our places in the dark.
Then the stage lights strike us one at a time like four great pale swords—boom, boom, boom, and boom. The music kicks on, thumping and trancelike, and the roar of the crowd takes me over.
I’m not really me when I strip. A kind of dual out-of-body yet still very much in-my-body feeling consumes me, like I become a voyeur of someone else’s life, watching through his eyes as desperately horny gentlemen and drunkenly riotous women paw at me from their tables. It’s barely a conscious choice when I crouch down to let someone tuck a dollar into my waistband. I let instinct guide me. I put myself in their heads—each and every one of them—and while the crowd thinks all I care about is hitting all the right moves, I’m actually analyzing faces, studying body postures, and watching whose eyes are on me.
Every performance is a social experiment of attention span, emotional vulnerability, and desire.
I’m a fucking scientist on this stage.
That guy, right there in the front. He plays it cool. He doesn’t cheer with his friends, because he doesn’t want me to think he’s like everyone else—hungry for attention.
But I know that’s exactly what he is, and that’s why I take a special moment to squat right in front of him and give him one of my signature moves—a sexier cousin to a simple twerk—then strike a pose by the pole, staring down at him hard, like I’m his long-lost lover he’s waited for, and my every ounce of attention is all his. No one else exists.
That’s all it takes to unravel his too-cool-for-school attitude. The man’s eyes are alight, and he’s smiling at me, ready for more.
And more is what he gets.
Science.
Another dark-eyed man at the end of the stage also doesn’t make a fuss. He smirks at us dancers with mild amusement, like nothing we can do will impress him. The truth is, he’s resentful. It’s a fact he’s hoping I don’t figure out. Every minute of the day, from his tedious day job to his irritating social life to the pitiful dating scene in his nook of the city, this man has been overlooked. Who will ever convince him that all men don’t suck? Who can possibly heal the bitterness in his heart? Who can pull him out of that pessimistic funk?
