by D. L. King
But Susie isn’t working tonight. Before you can scowl again at the cocktail server’s back, Tracy’s voice cuts through your clouded thoughts: “Hey, Trix, don’t you know her?”
You follow Tracy’s gaze to the woman laughing as she rises from a table across the room. You didn’t hear the name the K-jay called, but it’s true: you remember meeting the woman at a house party not long ago. “Yeah. I think that’s Stella. We met her at Jay’s house.”
Jean-Marie settles back into her seat, rearranging the slips of paper on the table again. “She’s kinda cute,” she says, nodding at Stella as she steps up onto the little stage at the front of the room.
You smile, agreeing with Jean-Marie: Stella is attractive, chin-length dark curls framing high cheekbones and big, dark eyes. She’s dressed to show off her lush curves tonight in a low-cut silk blouse over leggings with a red and orange scarf that lends warmth to her sandy-dark cheeks. But it’s not her outfit, or the sparkle in Stella’s eyes as she takes the mike from the K-jay that sends a wave of cheers through the bar. It’s the quick half grind she does against the mike-stand as the song’s opening bass beat drops, a low thrum overlain with a synthed-up deep voice that starts repeating: “Yeah…yeah…yeah…”
And then Stella rips into the song, lyrics about looking for a partner who knows how to ride. Recognition ripples through the bar as more and more people note the hip-hop tune, turned on its head as Stella digs into its classic grind. Her voice is incredible as she half growls, half coos in a honeyed alto that takes the already sexy hip-hop lyrics and makes them into a come-on that settles immediately into your cunt. You’re wet so fast that the shock of it sends a tremor across the surface of the icy vodka as you hold the glass, drink forgotten when Stella began to sing.
“Holy shit,” Jean-Marie says as she dances in her seat next to you, shoulders and hips picking up the beat. “That girl can sing!” You all three watch as Stella teases the tables closest to the stage with a glimpse of her cleavage.
Tracy’s “Yay-ah” on your other side is hungry, and when you glance at her, she’s nodding her head in time to the beat, a wide grin rounding her cheeks.
You put your drink down, not trusting yourself with the stemmed glass, as Stella flips her curls back and brings the mike closer to red lips, beckoning to the crowd with two curled fingers as she sings about finding someone horny enough to ride her pony. A piece of paper flies through the air to land on the edge of the stage. You’re positive it contains a phone number.
It’s a brash song, every note woven through with sex, with the glitter and sweat of the thousand strip clubs where it’s played since it hit the radio a decade ago. Stella, though, as she throws the lyrics over the crowded bar, has made it into a command: you will listen to her. And you will want her—not because she’s shimmying as she sings, and not because your mouth has gone dry as you follow her eyes as they slide down to her swaying cleavage for a second before she turns them, glowing, back on the crowd, but because she’s telling you that yeah, tonight she wants you to want her. And you do. You want Stella right now, want that voice in your cunt, want its slickness in yours, rich sound fucking you, filling you.
Sweat breaks out on the back of your neck as the song continues. The bar has gone crazy for Stella. Everyone is dancing or singing along, from the table of thirty-year regulars in scruffy sport coats and crumpled fedoras to the gaggle of stilettoed girls who just ordered a round of shots. Jean-Marie’s breasts bounce as she’s moving next to you, hands up as her hips swivel against the vinyl seat, dark eyes picking up Stella’s heat. Even Tracy breaks her reserve, arm dropping from the back of the booth to rest against the upper curve of your ass, fingers tapping against you in time with the song’s beat. You feel another bead of sweat spring up between your breasts and drip slowly down.
Gravity shifts with Stella as she draws the song up through her pelvis, voice making it every bit as clear as her hips’ purl that she’d make good on the song’s promises if given the chance. She uses her palm to trace her own curves, the inch of air between her hand and her body suddenly the place everyone in the bar wants to be as she sings about sending chills down your spine.
You close your eyes, trying to ignore the insistent buzz the song has stirred up in your cunt, but when you open them, you’re suddenly trembling up there on the little stage with Stella, cheap spotlight filling your eyes with white fuzz as she pushes you down on a bar table. The song continues, synth bass and lyrics about riding my pony looping over and over. Stella’s pushing your thighs open, your little black dress gone just as magically as the table appeared under you. She’s naked, too, down to her red patent-leather pumps, bronze skin shimmering under the spotlight. Stella bends over, generous breasts skimming the insides of your thighs as she puts her red lips on your cunt. She’s still singing, the lyrics dissolving into rich sound as her tongue slicks over your folds. Her voice wraps around your clit, honey and strip-club grind making your hips thrust to meet her song.
You blink in the fizzy white light and suddenly, Jean-Marie’s there, too, dark brown breasts skimming bare over your ribs as she leans to lick the thin line of sweat from your cleavage. She lifts a hand to wrap around your throat as you tip your head back against the table, her mouth on your nipple and Stella’s voice in your cunt creating twin whirlpools. The song rides on, saddle waiting, as Jean-Marie lets you lift your head just enough to glimpse Stella’s bare ass swaying under the stage lights. It’s only waiting for a second, though, and then the light crackles again and Tracy’s there, her strap-on buckles glinting silver under the harsh light as she steps up behind Stella. Tracy’s cock—it’s the big cock, the one that leaves you bruised if she rams it into you as hard as you like—is ready as Stella thrusts herself back against it, rich sounds of her pleasure mixing with the song as her tongue reaches deep into your cunt. Your head falls back against the bar table’s edge, vision blurring as you lose yourself in tongues, hands and bared flesh under the bright lights.
It seems to last forever, this perfect moment on the bar stage: Tracy’s pink cheeks as she fucks Stella while Stella is bent over, voice buried in your cunt, and Jean-Marie sucking your nipple as she holds you down on the table, fucking herself with her free hand. You know you’re moaning wildly as Stella’s big breasts push into your thighs, her tongue digging deeper into your cunt, curling impossibly tight against your G-spot as the lyric drives into your clit, over and over again. Jean-Marie has her hand clapped tight over your mouth, keeping your screams from interrupting the song’s backbeat. You can feel Stella’s orgasm building as she cries into your cunt, Tracy’s cock thrusting relentlessly into her, and Jean-Marie shaking against you as her own pleasure starts to peak.
It’s a chain reaction, more like nuclear fusion than dominos falling: you can’t tell if your gushing orgasm tips Stella over the edge, or if her long, low cry, as her cunt clutches Tracy’s cock, kicks off a tidal wave. Or if Tracy’s growl happens before or after Jean-Marie bites your breast, hard, as she comes. But come you all do, in sloppy, sweaty, shared orgasms that make the little bar table creak dangerously as it struggles to hold you up under cascading groans and sighs. You close your eyes against the white fuzz and slip under the backbeat, pony’s hooves pounding, for what seems like forever.
You’re dimly aware of wild applause around you, and even more dimly aware that your fingers hurt from gripping the edge of the table.
“You okay, babe?” Tracy’s voice at your ear draws you the rest of the way back into your seat.
“Uh-huh.” You can’t make words, and you certainly can’t begin to explain the lightning-hard orgasm that just ripped through you. Stella kicks a heel up in a playful “Who, me?” half curtsy as the bar continues to applaud. Condensation trickles down the sides of your martini glass as you feel sweat dripping down your back, under your black dress. Jean-Marie laughs and cheers as Stella moves through the crowd, collecting high fives.
“Beatrice! Come on up!” The K-jay’s voice cuts t
hrough the crowd. You wave her off weakly, shaking your head so that she knows to call someone else up. You know you should force yourself to sing as you always do, but until you can slip off to the bathroom to mop up your sopping cunt, there’s no way you’re going up on that stage.
A COOKING EGG
Roxy Katt
Finally, the external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that in work he does not belong to himself but to another person.
—Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor”
(from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)
Staring out the rain-spattered window, she looked as if she had spent her life staring out of rain-spattered windows.
The window was one of many on the second floor of a country seat that might have been straight out of Brideshead Revisited. Before the building was the grandiose driveway that made a circle before the mansion and then receded in a straight line way down a rolling hill through gardens and pollarded trees to the distant gates.
Look at me, the face behind the window seemed to say: this forty-something secretary with big, round glasses and voluminous black hair. But no one was looking.
Down below on the great circle of the driveway was Alexis the maid, talking to the new chauffeuse.
Brandy was her name. She was risking a cigarette in the waning precipitation just as the sun was threatening, but not quite daring, to come out. She leaned back with her tightly leather-panted ass on the wing-like fender of the ancient Silver Ghost. Even her grandmother would have been born after that car was made.
Odile’s phone rang on her desk by her elbow and she answered it impatiently, still staring at the cow-skinned angel with the short burgundy hair. “Yes, yes. That’s fine. Yes, that’s it. No, it’s all being outsourced to the East.” She hung up.
Irrelevant interruptions.
Brandy was lean and firm and encased head to foot in rich, deep-brown leather: short, tightly buttoned jacket and high-waisted breeches. She had a thigh gap to die for, and the pants that showed it off so well were exquisite. For while they closed at the back with a zipper, and at the front there was a kind of square sailor flap, closed with buttons along the top. Along each side ran a thick, vertical zipper.
She was not particularly tall, but taller than the staring Odile: Odile with her dark eyes and her hunger.
Brandy was as fresh as the rain.
On one end of Odile’s desk was a hot plate and a pot of simmering water with an egg in it. The egg would soon be rattling when the water boiled, and this made Odile’s office seem cozy somehow. Just as Odile was about to turn away from the window, Brandy turned her eyes up and looked straight at her as if she had known all along Odile had been watching. She gave the older woman a dark and knowing smile that almost made her gasp, threw the butt of her cigarette on the driveway and ground it out.
Odile’s lips parted slightly and she put a hand lightly to her throat.
Smiling, pulling her leather gloves back on, Brandy turned toward the car door.
“This is Odile, my personal secretary,” the formidable Mrs. Demaine had said just a few days earlier, introducing Odile to Brandy. Brandy’s attitude toward Mrs. Demaine, Odile, and everything around her in the mansion had been one of respectful attention. But when Mrs. Demaine had left them alone together, Brandy gave Odile the quickest once-over. A cat-that-swallowed-the-canary expression crossed her face, and was gone.
Odile reached out her hand then, and so did Brandy.
“So you’ve worked here a long time?” said Brandy, raising an eyebrow ever so slightly.
Mrs. Demaine had said nothing about how long Odile had worked there.
Odile was left to show Brandy around the place. It was huge and airy with giant windows everywhere, kitted sparsely but very expensively with the finest furnishings and art, of course. Brandy said nothing, but nodded from time to time as Odile showed her about.
Then, suddenly: “So, tell me something. The uniforms around here—including mine—pretty hot, eh?” She put her hands on her hips, twisting to the right and left, comically imitating the gesture some 1950s model would make and winking. “She’s not expecting to bang us all, is she? Does she design them herself?”
People did not usually talk this way about Mrs. Demaine, even behind her back. “She does indeed,” said Odile, looking downward, “and no she does not.”
Brandy raised her eyebrows at Odile, who seemed suddenly to realize the unintentionally comic ambiguity of her own answer. She corrected herself. “That is, she does design the uniforms, with the help of an outfitter, and no, she most definitely does not intend to ‘bang’ anyone, as you said.”
Brandy laughed. She turned around, winked over her shoulder, and sashayed off, the line of her bum zipper twitching back and forth provocatively.
Then, a day later, Odile had entered the front hall of the mansion with a bundle of files held close to her chest to find Mrs. Demaine there. Brandy was standing before her, receiving her instructions for the day. When she stood to attention like that her ass jutted back just a wee bit more than seemed necessary.
Was it because she knew Odile was behind her?
Mrs. Demaine finished and left, and Brandy turned. “Oh,” she said, seeming to be surprised by Odile’s presence, “it’s you. I like your skirt.” She gave Odile a proprietary smile, as if confident the skirt had been worn for herself.
Odile’s voice was cool. “Thank you.” It was one of her best skirts: long and tight, made of thick, dark green leather, buttoning up the side.
Brandy smiled a little more. “I think we both look good in leather, don’t you? But wearing a whole suit of it can be uncomfortable. It can be so hot and sticky inside.” Brandy looked down at Odile’s skirt. “I always prefer wearing pants. But I like a girl in skirts. It makes me feel in control. You know?” She stepped forward and put her leather-gloved hand ever so lightly on Odile’s hip, just where the large buttons held her skirt tightly closed. Odile clutched the files to her chest more tightly and glanced down at Brandy’s pants, trying not to stare at the flap.
It bulged just a little. Brandy was lean, but her lower tummy was not perfectly so. Ah, that bit of a strain on the pants always took Odile’s breath away. The flap clearly had no functional purpose, even though it obviously worked. What could Mrs. Demaine have been thinking? Odile knew her to be above suspicion when it came to matters of sexual interference with the servants. But was there some suppressed fantasy here, some subterranean and voyeuristic fetish of the subordinates rutting away…
“I don’t know what she expects me to do with this flap,” said Brandy, as if reading Odile’s mind. “It doesn’t really make any sense unless one has a dick, does it? Not that there’d be any room in here for that. You know, a girl, while waiting idly at the wheel in a parking lot could…” her hand moved slightly in that direction and a sly smile played about her lips.
Odile looked sideways out the window and interrupted with a sudden, forced brightness: “So. Are all your instructions for the day clear to you?”
“Yeah,” said Brandy slowly, eyeing Odile in a knowing manner. “I know what to do.”
“Well then,” Odile said, bustling about with the files, which had nearly slipped out of her grasp, “I guess you should do it?” She hurried away, and was not sure, but thought she could just hear Brandy faintly laughing to herself.
Now Odile stared out the window, watching the retreating backside of the Silver Ghost as Brandy drove away. The egg came to a boil in the little pot. Odile turned the heat off and put the lid on.
Near the hot plate was an oversized, red plastic egg ticking away: a timer. Odile picked it up, wound and set it, and held it meditatively before her face. Along the circumference were marked the minutes.
The phone rang again and Odile answered it, staring into space. After a brief conversation, she hung up.
Taiwan: where Odile had helped Mrs. Demaine move some jobs out of Europe
—to a place that had no unions. To a place where labor was cheap and people even more desperate than they were here.
Market forces. Survival of the fittest.
“Reality.”
No, she thought, she doesn’t bang us. Not in the way Brandy thought, anyway.
She had always hoped for better for herself. How did she end up here doing what she did not believe in?
The plastic egg ticked on. Suddenly, it rang, vibrating with a violent intensity. The real egg was ready.
The next day. Brandy breezed through the open door of Odile’s office. She glanced down at the book on Odile’s desk. “Karl Marx? The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts?” She picked the book up, smiling. “Heavy stuff, Odile…”
It was the first time she had said Odile’s name.
Brandy flipped through the book and put it down.
“You’ve come about the receipts for those auto parts?” asked
Odile.
“Does she,” nodding in the general direction of Mrs. Demaine’s office, “know you read this stuff?”
“Probably not, but I don’t give a shit.”
“I’ll bet you’re smart enough not to let her see it, though.”
With one arm dangling casually from her side she stepped forward and seized Odile with the other arm around the waist. “Oh you rebel you,” Brandy said mockingly. She pressed her lips to Odile’s and bent her backward like a bow and kissed her, the leather of Brandy’s pants creaking as their bellies pressed together. Odile’s hands fluttered out in apparent confusion. One braced her by the edge of the desk and the other lit upon the younger woman’s shoulders and pressed back.