Chapter Nineteen
There’s that song that goes ‘money makes the world go around’. I don’t believe that. I think sex does. Sex is everywhere. It doesn’t help now, with technology the way it is, that sex is literally a click away. You have easy access to porn, dating sites aimed to getting a shag within the day, and escorts who – let’s be honest – are, in most cases, just a nice name for a prostitute. Ok, that’s possibly not completely true, but prostitution does still go on today. Problem is, people don’t even need them any more.
So many girls these days use their bodies to get what they want. You can’t go to a club without seeing gorgeous girls with flesh on show everywhere, flirting with a guy three times their age so he will buy them drinks. Beautiful models married to doddery old men with bank accounts more stuffed than their fake tits.
Maybe they are the perfect pair. Money and sex, sex and money. The world isn’t changing, people’s perception of it is. People just know more than they ever did. Once upon a time, it was easy to turn a blind eye. Whores hid in dark alleyways or in sectioned parts of the city. The seedy, secret side of civilised society. Now, all you have to do is flick to the back of the local free paper, or do a quick internet search, and there they are! The longest running profession.
They have TV shows on late at night talking about how to improve your sex life. Blow job techniques, how to give the best hand jobs. Other programmes dedicated to all things sex, presented by blokes with dodgy accents, surrounded by half naked, big breasted women. We learn about the artist that paints with naked people rolling on huge canvasses, and the porn stars that have bedded thousands of women. There are sex party cruises, where they spend a whole weekend naked on a ship, shagging every person that takes their fancy.
There are TV dramas based in brothels, or following the weekly antics of an escort. These men – and women, of course – pay for anything from straightforward missionary position to full-blown bondage. Did you know that some fully-grown men actually pay women to dress them and treat them as babies? They sleep in giant cots and wear nappies. I used to think these people were weird. Freaks. Perverts. These programmes showed the person behind the fetish. Hard-working businessmen with the weight of the world on their shoulders, knowing that one little slip-up would be disastrous, and wanting a way to escape from the stresses of it all for just a few hours in their ‘mummy’s’ arms, with a bot-bot and a blankie.
Being an adult is hard sometimes; I can’t really blame them. I still don’t fully get it, but who am I to judge? Sex is no longer taboo. Sex and the City had six series and two films, with thousands of followers; Fifty Shades of Grey had women and men of all ages cramming into the cinema, vanilla couples getting a peak into the sordid world of S and M. We read sex. We watch sex. We talk sex.
I love to talk about sex. It’s never bothered me. No subject is off-limits. The problem is, I would answer a question about sex in exactly the same way I would answer a question about how I like my tea. Milk? Sugar? Missionary? Doggy? Sex fascinates me. So, when anybody asks me anything, I just answer the question.
What I didn’t factor into the equation was that when Danny asked me what my favourite position was, or if I liked it when a guy went down on me, I answered in a matter of fact way. But he’s a man. As a man, hearing a woman say that she loves loads of different positions and telling him why she loved them, he automatically imagined I was describing what I’d like to do with him. What to me was just an ordinary conversation about my favourite subject, was like a long line of dirty conversations to him. All I needed to do was add the odd ‘oooh’ and ‘aahh’.
So, as we went on, his questions got dirtier and it was only then I started to realise what he was up to. The more he asked, the more detailed description I gave. I began to realise he was really enjoying it. I started to enjoy it, too. Knowing that I could turn Danny on without being anywhere near him, started turning me on, and our exchange of words escalated to an exchange of pictures and videos. Ok, I knew then I had really overstepped the line, but I started to crave him.
I’d watch my phone for a sign that he was online, or wake up late checking for my usual good morning greeting. I was hooked. Sometimes, though, we would be mid-chat, things were getting interesting… and suddenly he was gone. Deep down, I knew these were the times that Erica was home. She had probably walked in, thrown her bags down in the hallway, and demanded he carried her to bed and ravaged her. I preferred to believe he’d just lost internet or something.
I would think about how I would have felt if it was Max sitting up late at night talking to women. The idea that maybe he had. Our relationship had been really strong for years, but then maybe Erica felt the same way about hers. When things got bad and Max and I became distant, I would go to bed first. After my third miscarriage that resulted in my surgery, I hardly ever got out of bed. Maybe, just maybe, Max had found somebody to talk to during that time. And I wouldn’t have blamed him. I wasn’t the girl he had fallen in love with any more; well, not at the time.
We had been strangers sharing a house. We didn’t even share a room for a long time. What if he had cheated on me in this way months, or even years, before we actually split up? He could have had this whole other life I knew nothing about. How would I feel if I was in Erica’s shoes? So many times, I considered ignoring Danny’s messages. So many times, I wanted to tell him I couldn’t do this, but when it came down to it I couldn’t give him up.
Erica had treated me as the enemy from day one, at least now I was giving her a reason to hate me. I have said before that I wasn’t a bad person, but I think we all have a little bad in us. Danny brought that person out of me, and I liked it.
Kat and I had gone out for drinks with Katherine from her work. We were having a laugh, and the drinks were flowing.
‘So, Casey, I don’t think I’ve really seen you since just after you and Max split. How long’s it been?’
I stirred my drink. ‘Two years.’
‘Two years! Blimey. Where the fuck has that time gone?’
‘I know,’ I laughed. ‘Crazy.’
‘Yep, fucking crazy.’
Katherine had four kids. and was one of the funniest women I had ever met. As much as she watched her words when her children were around. the second she put on her make-up and heels and got the hell out of her house, she swore every few words. I found it so funny; it was like she suddenly had freedom.
‘So, who’ve you been seeing?’ she questioned.
‘Erm, well, nobody really.’
‘What the fuck do you mean nobody? Kat, have you heard this shit?’
She was just coming back from the bar, and I started to feel myself blush. Sex I can talk about; my singleness I can’t.
‘Sorry, they are out of house, so I got you Smirnoff, and that guy there got us Jaegers. What were you guys talking about?’
‘Casey has had no fucking guys since Max!’
‘Shhh, keep your voice down. I don’t need the whole pub to know,’ I jumped in.
‘Sure, she has,’ Kat started. ‘What about… Oh no, that was Kim… erm, I’m sure, maybe, but wait that means it’s been… Oh my God!’
‘Yep,’ continued Katherine, ‘two fucking years.’
‘Sorry. Katherine. do you wanna speak up? There’s a guy in the pub down the road didn’t quite hear that,’ I snapped. ‘It’s not that big a deal, it’s only sex.’
‘Only sex!’ Kat laughed. ‘Never thought I would hear you say that. I always put you down as one of those addicts. You love sex.’
‘Kat! I love Breaking Bad, too, but you don’t see me going out trying to make crystal meth, do you?’ I was starting to wish I hadn’t come out.
Katherine had started looking round the bar. I asked her what she was doing.
‘Trying to find you some bootay! Help get you back on that bicycle you were pushed off.’
‘Oh God, no, I couldn’t.’
Katherine’s head snapped towards me. ‘And why the hell not?’
‘So,’ Katherine said, ‘I’m thirty-five. Nothing wrong with that.’
‘Yes, hun, but you’ve had the same husband since you were seventeen. He’s seen your body almost every day for eighteen years.’
‘So, what’s your point?’ Kat sucked on her straw.
‘The point is, the last person that saw me naked was Max. He watched my body age and change for all those years, and it’s changed for another five years since. I’ve put on weight, I have my scar and stretchmarks and, well, my boobs aren’t awful but the last time I got naked with someone new for the first time, I was only nineteen. Everything pointed in the right direction.’
‘Ahhh, poor little Casey.’ Kat tilted her head to the side mockingly. ‘Can’t find love with her old, saggy, lady bits.’
I threw a beer mat at her
‘You’re thinking about it far too much,’ said Katherine. ‘You’ve made it into a thing. An issue. As you said, it’s just sex. Rather than working yourself into a frenzy worrying about how long it’s been, just do it. Embrace change. Rip off the bandage. Look around, pick a guy at random, close your eyes, and open your legs.’
‘What, here?’ Kat asked, as I gave Katherine an exasperated look.
A burst of noise came over from the other side of the bar. A gaggle of girls clapping and wooing as a young woman was led to a single chair by a man in a police uniform.
‘Oh my God!’ squealed Katherine. ‘Is that a stripper?’
I think it was obvious by the way he ripped open his shirt that he wasn’t a real policeman. Watching half naked men get drizzled in baby oil is pretty much every woman’s guilty pleasure, so we – along with a few of the other females in the room – wandered over to get a closer look.
‘Oooh, choose him,’ Kat said, biting her lip.
I laughed and nudged her to shut up. It was only then that I looked at the stripper’s face and realised I actually knew him! Steve Easton had been in my year at school. The last time I had heard anything about him, he was studying mechanics at college.
I suddenly wasn’t sure what to do. Should I look away? Why is it ok to watch a complete stranger strip down to his birthday suit, but when it’s someone you know you feel like a bit of a pervert? He was quite good, though, as far as strippers go. Some have nothing to them; they just rip off their clothes, do a little wiggle, and run off with a shit-load of money for doing nothing.
Steve actually had a talent. If I pretended he wasn’t stripping, I could watch his dance moves all day. He threw a tiny pair of shorts in our direction, and Katherine caught them and started jumping about with them in the air as if she had just won the World Cup. Her husband was her polar opposite. Quiet and reserved. Katherine was a bloody nutter. They loved each other, though; it was obvious when you saw them together.
Kat was clapping away, screaming ‘Off, off, off!’ I guessed she didn’t remember Steve from school. If she had, she would probably have been screaming something a lot different at him.
Steve’s toned torso used to look a lot different in his younger years. As he finished his act and kissed the birthday girl on the cheek, the other girls – including Katherine – ran over with their mobiles, trying to take selfies. Kat ordered me to get his card so I could book him for her hen night, and pushed me in his direction. His physique had definitely changed since school, but what about the rest of him? He wasn’t really a person I had spent a lot of time with at school, and that was by choice.
He had been a horrible boy. Mean and nasty. He thought being horrible made him look cool. He had always been bad enough when the boys were there, but the things he used to do to look good in front of the girls had been simply idiotic. He loved making fun of my name and pulling my hair – not hard, but it used to drive me crazy. I remember once he thought it would be really funny to lift up my skirt and show the whole class my bare arse. What? Thongs were really in at the time. There was even a song about them.
I ran out of class and hid crying in the toilets for the rest of the lesson. He called me knicker-less for the rest of the school year, which soon caught on with all his flock of brainless morons. It would be an insult to the animal to call them sheep.
Towards the end of that year, he had decided to ask me out. Of course, I said no without hesitation. The next day, I said yes to Neil Camson. On the way to maths, Steve slammed Neil’s arm in the door and broke it. Poor Neil. I felt so bad for him at the time. Not bad enough, apparently, as a week later I dumped him – with the help of my friend Lizzie – for Jackson Thomas. His cast lasted a hell of a lot longer than we did.
Now Steve posed and pouted for his fan club, then made his apologies and broke away to finish picking up the discarded items.
‘I put you down as more of a streaker than a stripper.’ The night of our leavers’ prom flashed through my head, Steve and his cronies running through the ballroom of the Hydro hotel stark bollock naked. It was the first time I’d seen a real penis. Put me off, if I’m honest.
‘Well, well, well, Casey Turner. Long time no see. A streaker?’
‘Your stunt at the Hydro.’
Steve chuckled to himself. ‘I was such a dick at school.’
‘Oh, so you actually know? That’s lucky. I thought I was going to have to break it to you.’
‘Yeah.’ Steve shuffled a little awkwardly. ‘You didn’t like me much, did you?’ I shook my head. ‘I was kind of a jerk, I know. I had a lot of shit going on back then and wasn’t sure how to process it. My mum used to, well, look, there’s no excuse.’
I felt a bit bad. I picked up the shirt that was by my feet and passed it to him.
‘Why don’t you let me go get dressed, then I can buy you a drink and prove to you I’m not the same guy you knew back then?’
I thought about it for a minute then nodded an agreement. I’ve always believed in second chances.
Chapter Twenty
Staring at my empty glass, I started to think he might have done a runner out the back door. Kat and Katherine got all excited when I told them what he had said. They hatched a plan to move onto the next bar and, if I had any doubts or didn’t like him, I could leave and head straight to join them. I agreed, and as they left Katherine grabbed my hand and said, ‘We’ll be just next door, kid, but I sure to God hope I don’t see you again tonight. Give him one from me.’
Finally, he emerged from the back room, swinging his gym bag over his shoulder. He had certainly been worth the wait. This man knew how to dress. From his Gucci shoes to his Armani shirt, this guy oozed style. I giggled slightly at the reverse order of this evening. First, I had seen him naked, then fully clothed. As nice as the first was, the latter was so much better.
Max had never cared too much about how he looked. Scruffy t-shirts and low-slung jeans. I never minded. I actually quite liked the way he dressed, and borrowing his tees to slob around the house in was a bonus. But there was something very sexy about a well-dressed man. It would be a shame to ruin it. What if this evening did end up getting naked and dirty? I wouldn’t want to undress him. Like when you get a beautifully wrapped present at Christmas. You can’t wait to see what’s inside, but you want to keep the parcel intact. In this case, I had already seen what was inside.
‘That’s a very big bag for a very small costume,’ I joked.
‘I actually did come straight from the gym. This isn’t my usual job, stripping. The birthday girl is a friend of my sister. I was doing her a favour. Be right back.’ And he headed to the bar. ‘Hey, Trina, pint for me and same again for the beautiful lady.’
How sweet, I thought, but also hoped the barwoman wouldn’t have confused my earlier vodka and coke for Katherine’s ouzo. He appeared back at the table, bragging that he’d managed to get free drinks for the week and a
huge pile of ironing done, just for helping Izzy out.
‘So, what is your actual job?’
‘I keep people company.’
‘What, like one of those personal helpers, for disabled people or the elderly?’
‘Not exactly. I keep people company at parties and functions.’
‘What, like a date?’
He leant back, stretched his legs out in front of him and had a smug look on his face whilst he kind of shrugged. I tilted my head slightly and focused on his face. He bit his lip and looked away.
‘You’re an escort!’ I accused.
He laughed, but didn’t agree or deny. ‘What does it matter what I do?’
‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘So what if I am. I’m good at it.’ I couldn’t disagree with that. We had only been sitting with him a few minutes and I could see he was charming. I could imagine he would be great at the small talk and chit chat. I could see he could give compliments, check. I could see he was handsome; check. He had to look good; check. Worked out; check.
Blimey, I had chosen to let my guard down and have drinks with a guy who was paid to fuck women.
‘Let me put you straight on that,’ he jumped to his own defence. ‘I am not a gigolo. I am not paid for sex. What I do is completely legal and above board. Women pay for my time.’
I crossed my arms and leant back in my chair. ‘So, you don’t actually have sex with your clients?’
He stared me in the face for a while, completely straight-faced, before cracking a smile. ‘Well, what I choose to do in that time is my business.’
We both burst out laughing, whilst I threw a bar mat at him and called him a pig.
‘So, how did you go from trainee mechanic to escort?’ I was genuinely curious.
Turns out, Steve did really well with his mechanics course and had a full-time job lined up in his dad’s friend’s garage for when he left college. He did that for a few months, but the business wasn’t doing too well. As last in, technically Steve should have been first out if it got to the point they needed to fire people, but he knew his boss would never fire his friend’s son.
Another Woman's Man Page 8
