I’d been thinking about it for the last two days: while I rode the subway, while I served customers, even while I slept. Mr. Sutton kept invading my dreams. I couldn’t lie down at night without him appearing behind my closed eyelids. He looked at me with those blue eyes and that fierce gaze that told me he’d like to see me naked. Well, I wanted to see him naked, so turnabout was fair play.
How bad could it be, anyway? Sassy and Scarlet would probably be there again, and nobody would look at me twice when the two of them were buck naked and writhing all over the place. Tits were nothing compared to bare, shaved pussy. It wasn’t like my breasts were much to look at, anyway: small and brown, with brown nipples—nothing like the expanses of creamy flesh that Sassy and Scarlet had to display.
“Well? How much?” Sadie asked again, pulling me out of my thoughts.
“Five thousand,” I said. The amount still sounded obscene to me. It was like Monopoly money: too much to be real.
“Holy shit,” Sadie said, too loudly, and the sales lady glared at us for real that time.
I let go of the skirt I was touching and said, “Why don’t we go somewhere else?”
Sadie rolled her eyes. “Fine. Coming to Barney’s was a stupid idea anyway.”
It hadn’t been my idea, but I wasn’t about to say that. Grateful that Sadie wasn’t going to put up more of a fuss, I led the way out of the store and into the cold November evening. I’d taken the night off, and Sadie agreed to meet me after she got off work to help me shop for some new clothes. I’d been wearing the one outfit she loaned me, washing the one blouse in my kitchen sink every night and letting it air-dry while I slept. I had cash, now: the thousand dollars Mr. Sutton had promised me, plus the extra thousand he’d given me as a tip. It was time to upgrade.
We walked down Madison Avenue and found some less ridiculously snooty places to shop. I lost count of how many stores we went in. I was still reluctant to spend much money on clothing—too many years of skirting the edge of poverty—but Sadie eventually bullied me into purchasing two wool pencil skirts, three silk blouses, and a slinky, retro-style black wiggle dress. The silk especially was expensive, but I was willing to shell out for natural fabrics because I thought they would make me look higher-class than anything synthetic. Plus, I had two thousand dollars of Mr. Sutton’s money burning a hole in my pocket.
“You look good, girl,” Sadie told me when I tried on the dress. “If you don’t buy that I’m going to beat you with my purse. Get that shit and let’s go eat some dinner. I’m starving.”
We ended up at some terrible Irish pub, sitting at the bar with my shopping bags on the floor at our feet, eating greasy appetizers and drinking beer. I felt like I hadn’t seen Sadie in about a million years, so it was really nice to have a chance to catch up.
She told me about her latest work drama and about her boyfriend’s idiot roommate’s new plan to grow weed in their bathroom. I laughed in all the right places and asked appropriate questions, but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Sutton, and about whether I should say yes to his proposal.
I brought it up, finally, after Sadie’s stories petered out. “Do you think I should, you know. Do the serving thing?”
“Um, yes,” Sadie said. “Are you kidding me? Hot, rich fancy dude wants you to walk around shirtless so he can ogle you, and he’s going to pay you money to do it? I would be all over that in a hot second.”
I hadn’t told Sadie Mr. Sutton’s name, or anything about him other than that he was a client. She already knew where I was working, and what sort of club it was, so I didn’t think I was violating the non-disclosure agreement; but I still felt like I probably shouldn’t be talking about it with her. But I had to talk about it with someone. Having a billionaire offer to pay me money to show my boobs was just too insane for me to keep to myself. If I didn’t talk about it, I would go crazy.
I said, “Don’t you think it’s a little, you know. Slutty?”
“Sluttiness is a concept that men invented to oppress women’s sexuality,” Sadie said, and banged her pint glass down on the bar. “Don’t let the patriarchy get you down!”
I sighed. I agreed with her, but once she got started, she was basically impossible to stop. “Sadie...”
“Right, okay,” she said. “Not the time or the place, got it. So are you going to do it?”
I shrugged. “I guess so? It’s a lot money, but...”
“But what?” Sadie asked.