The stage to the right featured four or five nude and semi-nude women. They writhed together so closely that it was hard to tell exactly how many there were, where one of them ended, and where another began. My face got hot as I realized what they were doing to each other. It was probably illegal in private; it was definitely illegal in public. Watching them reminded me of the time I had almost tripped over a snake ball when picking peas back on the farm. The mass of entangled, mating, wet-looking reptiles had simultaneously been both obscenely fascinating and disgusting. The mound of women was like that snake ball, only without a ball in sight. There were strap-ons, though. One out of three pieces of masculinity wasn’t bad.
To the left of the stages was a closed doorway with a lit-up sign reading “Private Dances” above it. In front of the two stages stood dozens of men, with more in front of the stage on the right than on the left. They looked almost transfixed, like television junkies watching their favorite show. From time to time they flung bills onto the stages. The stages’ floors looked like they were carpeted with giant green and white confetti.
Scattered around the room were several smaller, circular stages. They rose out of the club’s floor like stalagmites. Each had a brass pole extending from its center to the ceiling. There were strippers on each of these stages in various stages of undress. These smaller stages were also surrounded by men who looked up at the women hungrily. The looks on their faces reminded me of how a pack of dogs looked up at you when they were about to be fed. The large woman featured on the small stage closest to me had climbed to the top of the pole high above, and hung upside down with the pole gripped between one leg’s calf and thigh. My first thought was that I hoped she didn’t fall and break her neck; my second thought was that her oversized breasts and ample derriere would likely cushion the impact.
In addition to the women on stage, scantily clad women were scattered throughout the club. Tray-laden waitresses, all topless and wearing only silver-colored thong bikini bottoms, flitted among the throng of men, serving drinks and being ogled. The woman mixing drinks behind the bar we stood near was, like the waitresses, topless. Unlike them, she was very obviously pregnant. Her pendulous, veiny breasts hung down, resting on the swell of her pregnant belly. Several men were clustered around the bar, eying the pregnant woman hungrily, which struck me as being like wanting to eat a piece of cake that had already been chewed and swallowed by someone else.
Some of the strippers had on more clothes than the waitresses did. The ones who weren’t dancing on one of the stages sat next to or in the laps of men, flirting so aggressively that I wondered if the guys who were the subjects of the flirtation would need to take a cold shower afterwards. I felt like I needed one, and those women where nowhere near me. From time to time one of those women would stand, pulling a guy behind her as she walked toward the private dance doorway. The men always looked eager; the strippers, once their faces were out of view of the men they had in tow, always looked either bored or disgusted, even though they had looked like cats in heat moments before. The strippers who weren’t flirting with the customers waited for the women on the stages and poles to finish so they could take their place.
Looking around, the number of women I’d seen naked in my life went from one to dozens of all ethnicities, colors, sizes, and body types in the span of just a few seconds. As I was enthusiastically heterosexual, the sight was more than just a little overwhelming. It was like being a starving man who had just walked into the world’s biggest all-you-can-eat buffet. But, as someone who had been raised Catholic and taught that sexuality was something sacred and not something to be crass and vulgar to be commercialized, watching these women shimmy, shake, and objectify themselves was as morally repulsive as it was viscerally exciting. The half-naked pregnant bartender was particularly shocking.
Like a decaying fish on the shore glittering with reflected moonlight, this place was at once both rotten and beautiful. My heart raced. My mouth was dry. It was difficult to get air in. I was torn between bolting back outside and grabbing the closest strippers and taking them to the private area.
“First time in a strip club?”
Startled, I realized it was Truman who had spoken, and not for the first time. I had been too transfixed with all the flesh on display to notice before. He looked at me with amusement. I flushed, this time with embarrassment instead of arousal mixed with repulsion. Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded in answer to his question.
“Can I interest you gentlemen in a private dance?” came a voice from my right, startling me again. I turned to see a young woman with vampire white skin and long, golden blonde hair standing next to me. She wore toweringly high heels that were made of clear plastic, bringing her almost up to eye level with me. There was a large tattoo of a red apple with a bite taken out of it on the side of her neck. Her dark red lipstick matched the color of the apple. Her electric blue dress looked like it had been painted on. Though it covered her from the bottom of her neck to right above her knees, it was so tight it revealed more than it concealed. It made her look more indecent than if she hadn’t been wearing anything at all.
“No thanks,” Truman said. “If you try to dance in that outfit you’re liable to cut off your blood flow. I won’t have your death on my hands. Or my lap.”
If the woman heard any of that other than the word “no,” she gave no indication. She leaned toward me. I got a glimpse of milky-white cleavage. “How about you, big boy? My name’s Lilith. I’ll show you a good time.” Her voice was low, breathy, and slightly slurred. Her perfume, strong and cheap, hit me like a hammer. The cheeks of her otherwise white face were almost as red as her lips and tattoo. It wasn’t the flush of health or even rouge. It was an unhealthy, mottled red. The pupils of her eyes were unfocused and unnaturally huge; her irises were but narrow blue halos around them. I wondered what drugs she was on to make her sound and look like this. All of them, maybe.
Lilith’s braless chest pressed against my arm. Her body radiated heat like an oven. I opened my mouth to respond. Nothing came out. I had been struck dumb by her body’s proximity and blatant sexuality. She wasn’t my usual type, but it had been so long since I’d been touched by a woman that anyone with a vagina would have been my type at that moment. My body responded strongly to her. Lilith looked down, smiled hazily, and reached down and grabbed my crotch. My throat tightened, like I was having an allergic response to something. In my wildest dreams, I never would have predicted that the second person ever to touch me there and the first person since Neha would be a stripper. Part of me wanted to pull the woman’s hand off me. The rest of me called that other part a killjoy and didn’t move. Not that I could have, anyway. I was frozen in place, like a mouse transfixed by an approaching snake.
“What’s the matter, baby? Cat got your tongue?” she purred. She stroked and tugged on me through my pants. Primal need tugged at me even more insistently. My blood pounded in my ears like a jungle drum.
“Yeah, a pussy cat,” Truman said. If I could do more than struggle to breathe, I likely would have used my powers to fling him across the room. Him speaking, though, just feet from where this stranger fondled me, was enough to snap me out of my paralysis.
“I’m not interested either,” I croaked.
“Your mouth says no, but this says yes,” Lilith said, giving me another squeeze. It almost made me moan. Her lips brushed against my ear, sending chills up and down my spine. “If you pay a little extra, I’ll do more than just dance for you.”
I shocked myself by being tempted. It had been so long since I had touched and been touched. Cassandra could wait. If I had put off dealing with Mechano this long, surely he could wait an hour or so more. Lillith’s breasts pressed harder against me. Sexual need bubbled up inside of me, like a volcano about to explode. Oh, who was I kidding? Cassandra and Mechano wouldn’t be put off for an hour. My carnal desires had been pent up for too long. It would be a few minutes at the most. If that long.
My sudde
n ache for this woman was so strong it was almost painful. Even Lilith’s apple tattoo seemed alluringly sexy, though I normally was not a fan of tattoos on women. I wanted to take a bite of that apple. Temptation, an apple, and a blue dress . . . maybe that classic song I had often heard the Old Man play, Devil With A Blue Dress, was based on this woman.
I had grown up believing what this woman proposed was wrong. But, if there was one thing Astor City had taught me, it was that small-town values weren’t always compatible with the big city. Besides, people paid for massages all the time, and I never saw priests and nuns picketing massage parlors. If paying a woman to rub you during a massage was morally fine, what was so different about paying her to rub you where the sun didn’t shine?
I looked at Lilith hungrily, teetering toward saying yes. Even with the dramatic dilation of her pupils, I saw eagerness in her eyes. It made me hesitate. It was not the same eagerness I felt, the eagerness of a man for a woman. Hers was a mercenary eagerness, the eagerness of a fisherman who had hooked a fish and was reeling him in, or a con artist who had found a naive mark.
Disgust twisted in my stomach where there had only been naked lust before. I didn’t want to be touched by someone I paid to do it. I was reminded of the Hero hags, who only had their erotic fantasies about me and people like me because of the power we represented. I wanted to be touched by someone because she wanted to do it, because she liked and wanted me, not because she liked my cape or wanted my money.
I grabbed Lilith’s wrist and pulled her hand off me. “I said that I’m not interested,” I said, more firmly then before. It would have sounded more convincing had my body not been visibly disputing me.
Lilith pouted sexily. “Are you sure? It’ll feel real good. For both of us. You’re awfully cute.”
“I’m tempted, but I have to say no. The truth of the matter is that I don’t have any money.” The first part was true enough. I was lying about that last part; I was trying to spare her feelings.
The sex kitten look on the woman’s face slid off as if it had been a mask. “Then what you doin’ in here, you broke ass mutherfucka?” Her voice, before alluring, was now harsh and ghetto. It was as if I was looking at a completely different person than the one who had her hand on my private parts seconds before.
“Studying your elocution,” Truman said.
Lilith said, “Ain’t nobody touchin’ my elocution unless you got money. You gotta pay to play.” She gave me a hard look, and then a snort of disgust. She flounced off. Her perfume lingered behind like a ghost. Moments later, she was across the room with her arms wrapped around a middle-aged guy who sported dad jeans and a comb-over. The seductive look she had beguiled me with before was back on her face. The man said something to her. She threw back her head and laughed, as if whatever he had said was the wittiest thing she had ever heard. The man’s hand slid down to her butt and stayed there. I felt a hot irrational surge of jealousy.
Truman said, “Though the strippers get tipped when they dance out here, they make their real money in the private area. That’s why that woman came onto you so aggressively.” Truman’s voice went up a few octaves and became breathy. “That, and the fact you are so dreaaaaamy,” he added, stretching out the last word in a bad imitation of Lilith’s voice. He smirked, then looked back over at Lilith. She was now touching the middle-aged man as aggressively and intimately as she had me. The smirk faded from Truman’s face, replaced by a touch of sadness.
“I feel sorry for people like that,” he said.
“Why? He seems to be having a good enough time,” I said as I mentally chided myself for being jealous. When a stripper paid attention to you, it wasn’t as though she was yours—it was just your turn. In a sudden flash of what I hoped was cynicism and not insight, I wondered if the same was true with all romantic relationships.
“Not him. He’s just an idiot who’s liable to get the contents of his wallet sucked out through the contents of his pants. I feel sorry for her. Hers is no kind of life to be living, even if she’s too blinded by youth and drugs to realize it just yet. Nobody ever became a stripper because her daddy loved her too much or because she got tired of being a rocket scientist. If you work here, it’s because your life took a wrong turn somewhere. There aren’t a bunch of little girls whose ambition in life is to grow up and take their clothes off for a living. Or prostitute themselves. A lot more than just dancing goes on in those private rooms, after all. As your new friend implied, she would’ve let you do just about anything to her if you had paid her enough.”
With Lilith no longer pressed against me, the fever she had triggered within me was subsiding. How quickly her true nature had been revealed when I told her I didn’t have any money cast a different light on all the gyrating bodies around me. Though I won’t lie and say I didn’t still find the women arousing, they no longer transfixed me. It was like a high fever breaking. Yes, I was still hot and bothered, but it was no longer mesmerizing to the point of paralysis. I now saw the women’s dancing for what it was: advertisement for a product I did not need.
I said to Truman, “I’m glad to hear you think strip clubs are wrong, too. I was beginning to think my upbringing had made me into a prude.”
“Oh, I don’t think they’re morally wrong. I don’t think prostitution is wrong, either. If two consenting adults agree to get naked or swap bodily fluids in exchange for money, what business is it of mine? The fact that it’s not my business doesn’t mean I must like it, though. The stories of women like the ones in here usually don’t end well. If I could, I’d wave my magic wand and create a different life for every woman in here.” For a moment, Truman looked sad and tired. “Unfortunately, my wand is in the shop for repairs. Besides, nobody here asked me to save them, and would likely spit in my face if I suggested they needed saving. I love a naked woman as much as the next guy, but standing here makes me feel dirty. I wanna go home and take a hot bath.” The tired look on Truman’s face faded as quickly as it had appeared. He looked his old jocular self again. He pointed down at the part of me that I was mortified to see pointed back at him. “Whereas you need to go home and take a cold shower. Your magic wand seems to be working just fine.”
As it turned out, you cannot die of embarrassment. If you could, I would have done so right then and there. Where was a fig leaf when you needed one?
“So where’s Cassandra?” I asked, as much to change the subject as to move things along. Now that the spell these women had cast over me was broken, I wanted to get out of here as soon as possible. All this jiggling flesh made me uncomfortable.
“I have no idea. You can always use your divining rod to find her. Though it’s currently pointing at me, I can assure you that I’m not her.”
I tried to ignore both my so-called divining rod and Truman’s remark about it. I could’ve taken a page out of the book of every almost every woman I had ever known since they had been ignoring my divining rod all my life. “What do you mean, you have no idea?” I demanded. “You said she worked here.”
“I did and she does. Doesn’t mean I know where she is. She assumes a different form after every time she answers someone’s question. Figuring out who she is is the first step in getting her to answer your question. ‘It cuts down on the riffraff and the unserious,’ she had said when I asked her why she makes people jump through that hoop. She said otherwise she’d be overrun with people asking her questions, which would be great for her bank balance, but terrible for her free time.”
“Have you asked her a question before?”
“I have.”
“Good, then you can tell me how to find her.”
“Nope. It doesn’t work that way. If I help you find her, her powers won’t work on you. Besides, I don’t even know if how I found her before would work more than once.”
“What question did you ask her?” The dark cloud returned to Truman’s face.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but I asked if it’s possible to resurrect a young Meta w
ho died while under my protection.”
“And is it?”
“I’m working on it,” Truman snapped. I clearly had hit a touchy subject. “Look, quit stalling. Are you going to start looking for Cassandra or are we going to continue to play this rousing game of Nosy Questions?” It was hard to remember that Truman worked for me instead of vice versa. I wondered if Henry Ford’s employees had been this mouthy.
Truman was right, though. I was stalling. I didn’t know where to begin. I had no idea how to go about finding Cassandra. Then again, just a few short years ago, I had no idea how to do all the Hero-related stuff I now did without a second thought.
I stood up straighter. I was a licensed Hero. I had been to other dimensions, other planets, fought off supervillains, and survived more deadly scrapes than I wanted to remember. After all that, how hard could finding a woman be? Yeah, maybe my people-finding track record had been less than exemplary lately, but surely finding a Metahuman stripper was easier than finding a Metahuman murderer. At least it promised to be easier on the eyes.
My pep talk seemed a lot less peppy when I turned my attention away from Truman back to the strippers. There were dozens of them, each different, yet somehow luridly still the same. Finding a stripper in a building chock-full of them when you didn’t have any idea who you were looking for was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It was looking for a needle in a needlestack. In light of how drugged up Lilith had been, I suspected finding a needle in this place would be easier than finding Cassandra.
The thumping music coming from the loudspeakers made it hard to think. The secondhand marijuana smoke I breathed in did not help. What was it they called getting high from someone else’s weed smoke? Hotboxing? The word had a double-meaning when all this female flesh surrounded you.
With effort, I forced myself to concentrate. I cast my eyes over the people in the room. No one stood out. Well, that’s not true. The employees definitely stood out from the patrons in that the former were the ones with the breasts and in various stages of undress. The women on the stage on the right stood out due to the perverted things they did to one another. The stripper dancing on the small stage a few feet away stood out in that she looked like she was smuggling two hams in the bottom half of her tight dress. The waitress who just walked past me had nipples that jutted out like miniature Star Towers.
Sentinels: The Omega Superhero Book Three (Omega Superhero Series 3) Page 15