Night Shift

by Joanna Angel

  NIGHT SHIFT

  Copyright © 2018 by Joanna Angel.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Cleis Press, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 101 Hudson Street, Thirty-Seventh Floor, Suite 3705, Jersey City, NJ 07302.

  Printed in the United States.

  Cover design: Zak Kaplan

  Cover photograph: Vecteezy.com

  Text design: Frank Wiedemann

  First Edition.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Trade paper ISBN: 978-1-62778-288-3

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62778-253-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  For Asa Akira

  (This couldn’t have happened without you.)

  I’m at a coffee shop getting my usual toaster oven delicacy—an egg white and turkey bacon English muffin, with a blonde veranda blend coffee and three espresso shots to wash it down. Yes, I get the weakest coffee and I un-weaken it with the molly of Arabica beans. I’m tired. I’m waiting for the caffeine to kick in so I can start my day, even though it’s 7:00 P.M .

  I’m still getting the hang of this nocturnal lifestyle. My friend Jimmy told me it gets easier. “After a while, you’ll find it in yourself to wake up early, so you can at least get a little sunlight,” he laughed, “But you’ll learn to love the dark. Good things happen in the dark.”

  That’s easy for a famous DJ to say; his dark nights are filled with people fawning over him, throwing him alcohol, praise, and promises of whatever sex he wants in exchange for his musical stylings. It’s still weird to think of him like that, the dorky acquaintance from high school who always talked a big game. He actually made it. I see his name and photo on billboards all over town, accompanied by phone numbers to call for “very important” tables and bottle service. And if it wasn’t enough that he’s famous and adored, he makes bank for these promotions! He spent more than what I make in a month on an array of furry hand cuffs, sparkly dildos, and colorful panties.

  How do I know this? Well, because I was the one who rang him up.

  “That will be three thousand four hundred sixty-two dollars and twenty-nine cents.”

  Sparkly butt plugs of various sizes, rainbow thigh-high socks, and lime green penis lollipops line my counter, and the pile is still growing, the entourage of Tinkerbells still not done with their horny shopping spree. This had to be the most colorful pile of debauchery I had ever seen. But then again, I’ve only been working here for a week. It’s my sixth “day” working as a cashier at Dreamz, an adult video and novelty shop located inside of a strip mall on Highway 19 in Pasco County, Florida. A scenic road known for its unusually high number of pedestrian deaths . . . and porn stores. I was hesitant about accepting the job here for a lot of reasons—one of them being the oncoming traffic. Another was that I was worried someone I knew would run into me here. It’s not that I have any aversion to dildos, adult DVDs, and little booths to masturbate in, but I don’t exactly have an all-consuming passion for it either. I’m not a virgin, but I can count the times I’ve had sex on one hand. A self-imposed friendless and sexless life, combined with a cum laude English degree from a state university, was supposed to lead to a dream job in academia. Yet, here I stand, behind a register, ringing up lube at the crack of dawn thanks to a shitty economy and an influx of girls who loved Jane Austen in middle school and also decided to pursue English teaching degrees. However, Dreamz does have about seventy different kinds of lube. I had no idea there was seventy different ways to moisten up your genitals. That’s just not something you learn while deconstructing The Canterbury Tales.

  My first week at the store had actually been pretty bland until Jimmy walked in on my first Friday night. He recognized me immediately, which isn’t so surprising because I’d barely changed anything about myself other than being a few pounds heavier than I used to be. Jimmy looked completely different. He used to sport a long, greasy ponytail, which was now a very well-manicured, bleached faux-hawk. He was also now covered in tattoos (one of which is a portrait of his very own face) and was wearing excessive, giant pieces of jewelry, things Joan Rivers would have called “statement pieces.” A giant dollar sign necklace certainly says a statement to me, and that statement is I can pay my rent and bills, and have lots of money left over for anything I could ever want.

  Jimmy entered the store with a group of incredibly attractive female disciples. It was 5:30 A.M. I presume the sun was rising, but there aren’t any windows in the store so I wouldn’t know. The girls looked like mini-me versions of Jimmy, also with multi-colored hair and tattoos, wearing various neon colored tutus, slap bracelets (Where did they even find those? Weren’t they outlawed in, like, 1986?), fuzzy leg warmers, and platform sneakers. Their eyes were large and bloodshot; I imagine they were on some kind of designer drugs only famous people have access to. This motley crew of rainbow-bright puke skipped around the store, and swooped up anything shiny they could penetrate or vibrate themselves with; they plopped the objects on the checkout counter with glee, while Jimmy watched from the front of the store, nodding in approval. Once they were done, Jimmy strutted over to me, his focus trained on preparing his wallet for the transaction, but he immediately did a double take when he looked up.

  “Taryn?!” he asked, surprised.

  “Yeah! Hey!” I replied. I wasn’t quite sure how to play this off because he had been in the store for at least 30 minutes, I just didn’t want to say hi to him unless he said hi to me first.

  “Damn! I haven’t seen you in a minute.”

  It had actually been about six years. But I suppose when your life is a constant drug-and-sex rush, time has a different meaning.

  “Yeah! Well . . . I see posters of you all over the place. So I’ve been seeing you. Congrats on everything. I guess when you told everyone you were dropping out of high school to be a famous DJ, you were really on to something.” A short skinny girl dressed like Betty Boop from the wrong side of the tracks interrupted this awkward reunion by plopping down a tiny, precious Swarovski crystal butt plug on the counter.

  “I want this, too,” she said, batting her eyes at Jimmy.

  I was still new there and not entirely sure how to converse with the customers. Was I supposed to act as though I was ringing up laundry detergent at Walgreens, totally nonchalant? Or was being a slight amount of sleazy the professional thing to do? I received about forty-five minutes’ worth of training for this job from the owner of the store, who happened to be drunk on her own batch of moonshine at the time. Half the items Jimmy and his minions wanted weren’t tagged properly so I made up prices based on how expensive things kind of looked. So uh, $249.99 seemed about right for this butt plug. The amount of money I made in a week, going straight into an asshole.

  “This looks like quite the adventure!” I said, in a very grandma tone.

  “Hell yeah! We’re all celebrating, ‘cus I dropped a new single tonight,” Jimmy said.

  “Well, I hope someone picked it up for you!” I nervously replied. God damn it. Fortunately, I don’t think he heard my horribly lame joke. Either that or he heard it and ignored it, which was a completely appropriate thing to do.

  “That will be three thousand, four hundred and sixty-two dollars and twenty-nine cents.” I said. This didn’t faze him at all. He handed me a credit card. Just one credit card, without a blink of an eye. Damn. My college books were about $3,000 and I used to always spread that among three different card
s along with a handful of cash.

  “Oh yeah—and an hour in room four, please,” he said, just before I finished ringing everything up.

  In my entire week-long employment here, no one had asked for one of the rooms before. Oh wait. I mean “ROOMZ.” That’s what they’re called here. The letter “z” apparently exudes a sexiness which I don’t understand. They never taught me that in college.

  Dreamz is supposed to be a store where your wildest fantasies come true. People are encouraged to purchase whatever they want in the store, and then use their purchase in one of the rooms (z). There are televisions screening adult films, giant vats of lube you can access with a pump, and plenty of tissues. On my first day, I mistakenly thought the lube was hand sanitizer, a mistake I’ve made sure not to repeat, since it left my hands incredibly slippery without any purpose of penetration all day.

  I’m supposed to say, “Would you like to make your dreams come true?” after each purchase, as an up-sell to get people to purchase time in one of the rooms, but I haven’t been. I figured if someone wanted one they would ask. Clearly, this was not Jimmy’s first time back there, considering he already knew what room number he wanted. At $49.99 an hour, room four was the biggest and most expensive room the store had to offer. In addition to the Kleenex and the television sets that looped random pornographic films, it had a leopard-print ottoman, and mirrors on the ceilings. It seemed perfect for the extreme types of people who came to this store. The narcissistic nymphomaniacs, sneaking spouses, self-hating, sexually deprived folks who just can’t get laid elsewhere, or anyone else who has money and wants to do it in a semi-public space . Like they say—dreams do come true!

  I opened the register and grabbed the key for room number four. It was a tiger-striped key, which appropriately complemented the ottoman. There was only one key per room. Not a master key or anything as far as I knew, so whoever held the key held the power to control who and what were allowed in the den of debauchery.

  To give the key to Jimmy, Click Here.

  To give the key to one of the girls, Click Here.

  I handed the gaudy key over to Jimmy. He and his five groupies entered the room. I didn’t know their names, we weren’t formally introduced; I’m honestly not sure if Jimmy did either. Two of them had angel wings on and sparkly dresses, and the angel wings weren’t quite holding up so well. One girl had a quadrant of feathers missing from one of her wings, and wires were poking out of the side. My OCD was high, worried that this might be a safety hazard in an orgy. I don’t know if wings stayed on or off in a late-night raver orgy. Was it ok to break character and admit that you’re just a girl in store-bought wings? Or is part of the fetish continuing to be a fairy regardless of the amount of existing wing? I wouldn’t know. Aside from the fairies, there was a girl resembling a unicorn, and one very conventionally attractive ethnic-looking girl in a plain, beige short dress and heels, who resembled a hybrid between a less attractive Kardashian and one of the more attractive cast member of The Jersey Shore. The power of Jimmy’s penis (and his credit card) brought together different shapes, sizes, colors, and even species.

  There’s a surveillance camera in these sex ROOMZ, and a monitor near my register that shows me what’s going on in each room (the customers can’t see it, since it faces me when I’m behind the counter). Whenever someone is in one of these rooms, I’m supposed to keep my eyes on the monitor and be on a look-out for anything that could get the store into trouble . . . however I’m honestly not sure what I’m supposed to look out for, since apparently anything goes here. Sandy, the owner of the store, explained to me that their old lease grandfathered them into some kind of privilege that allowed them to have full-on nudity and penetration in the store. The only thing Sandy told me is specifically not allowed is any kind of escorting. Or any exchange of money for sexual services (except the buying of the room). Only happy and horny willing participants can get penetrated here. A four-thousand-dollar butt plug tab that leads to sex is not paying for sex! It's just paying for sex toys.

  I had never seen so many people preparing for a night of sex together. How would they make this work? I thought to myself. Do they take turns on Jimmy? Does he sit and watch? Are all of these girls lesbians? With no actual proof and a reliance on stereotypes, I guessed that the Jersey Shore girl was not at all a lesbian and would only partake in penis activities. The unicorns and the fairies were the ones who dominated the shopping spree while she did adorable little bumps of whatever drug they were doing out of a pen cap with her back turned to me. But she still followed Jimmy into the room, seeming just as eager as the other girls to get on with whatever the evening had in store. She and the other girls started to unpack some of the purchased toys, and Jimmy removed his coat.

  The unicorn girl fussed with the TV remote. Apparently she was assigned to pick which porn they were going to watch, but I don’t think she realized that this was not a multiple choice option. There was only one porn cued up to play—the remote’s only purpose was for volume and turning the TV on and off—but the unicorn kept flipping through the nonexistent channels. I could see her getting frustrated. She was far too drunk to be deemed the IT department of the orgy.

  It’s part of my job to choose what DVD gets put in there—at the beginning of the evening I picked a four-hour compilation that seemed to have a variety of sex acts on it, from what I could tell on the back of the DVD. If unicorn girl could just find it in herself to push the fast forward button with the arrow on it, it could definitely solve the problem at hand. Jimmy and the Jersey Shore girl were making out in the corner while the fairies danced in the corner, waving their arms around in geometric shapes, using their butt plugs as glow sticks. Entrancing as they were, I couldn’t help but notice that Jersey girl whipped out Jimmy’s cock. It was semi hard, and seemed rather large for his half-aroused state.

  The attractive ethnic girl pulled her dress up to reveal a beautifully plump, tanned ass and twerked it against Jimmy’s cock as he jerked off. The two fairies had sparkly magic bullet vibrators against their clits as they watched and kissed each other, though unfortunately the unicorn was still messing with the TV. Sensing that the frustration would just continue, one of the fairies signaled to the unicorn, beckoning her over to them. It’s nice to know that all the members of the raver animal kingdom got along so well!

  Jimmy was beginning to look a little flustered. The girl in front of him just kept twerking, shaking her beautiful ass up, down, and around; it was hypnotic, you couldn’t help but follow it wherever it moved. How did she get so good at this? His cock was now rock hard but she just kept twerking. What a tease! Jimmy’s cock had a defined curve to it, and I could see that it had reached its true erect size. The head of his penis was also abnormally large, like a big mushroom head. This was certainly a penis with some character, which suited his personality quite well. His cock was throbbing and he was beginning to jerk it faster and faster, but the girls were simply not paying attention; the other girls were focused on their own corner of lesbian eroticism. I really enjoyed the show of masturbating and giggling and pulling on the glow-in-the-dark barbells hanging off each other’s nipples. This orgy had split into two. I think Jimmy’s penis was the only thing that could bring them together.

  Finally the twerker turned around and got on her knees. She wasted no time at all, and immediately started licking Jimmy’s penis up and down, taking periodic breaks to flip her hair around. She had beautiful big brown eyes and stared into Jimmy’s with such conviction. Was she in love with him? Was she going to murder him?

  Suddenly, the unicorn reached a very large and very noticeable climax from the little vibrating bullet that sat on her clit. Her hips and legs started shaking, and her eyes rolled into the back of her head. I will have to remember these effects the next time a customer asks which bullet is the best. I made a mental note that this one works pretty damn well. Somehow her unicorn hoodie thing stayed on! This must mean she was actually a unicorn, not just a girl in a unicor
n hat. There is no way I could keep a hood on so gracefully through an orgasmic earthquake.

  That initial orgasm changed the mood of the room. The two fairies grabbed a pink, sparkly, double-sided dildo and began sliding back and forth on it, and the tan girl with the psychotic eyes started giving an actual proper blow job instead of a half-assed hand job. The unicorn crawled over and fed Jimmy’s cock into the tan girl’s mouth. Like Santa's little unicorn cock helper. She tried to stick her tongue in and get a lick of Jimmy's shaft, but she was subtly pushed away by the other girl. She moved her face around to the other side of his cock and tried to get a tongue in through a different entrance, but she was blocked again. Then the Jersey Shore girl, with an expression similar to an angry mother scolding her child, pointed at the TV remote with very obvious disappointment. I couldn’t hear any sounds on my monitor, but I could see expressions. And this expression said, “Bitch stay away from the dick and change the channel.”

  I’m not sure if Jimmy realized what was happening here. His eyes were closed—and I had no idea why. If I ever in my lifetime get the opportunity to have sex with more than one person at a time—or hell, more than one person in a week—I would for sure keep my eyes open and savor every last moment, and I would try to get enough stimulation to try to put some away on reserve in that part of my brain that I use when I am alone with my shower head.

  “HEY.”

  I was stuck in a trance behind the register. Half of me was simply asleep standing up and the other half was fantasizing about the prospect of having more than one sexual partner at a time sometime in my lifetime. I gasped. The unicorn stood right in front of me, naked and sweating.

  “Uh, hi. Can I help you with something?”

  “Can you fix the TV, I think it’s broken,” she said. She looked as though she was going to cry. Poor imaginary creature. They probably didn’t have television sets in the magical forest she spawned from.