by Pat Powers
"Mom!" Cindy exclaimed, somehow still the girl at times when she dealt with her mother, "I TOLD you -- I am going to become an actress. I need every bit of competitive edge I can get as an actress. And beauty is just key, mom, it's just key. I'm going to need every BIT of beauty I can manage to be a successful actress in the movies."
"Darlin' I know you have your hopes set on Hollywood, but you are a smart gal and you must know things go badly for most folks who go out there," Cindy's mom said. "Lotta gals who try to get by on looks, well, looks is all they wind up with, and they don't last."
"That's true," said Cindy. "But I don't intend to get by just on looks. You know as well as I do that I've been studying and getting roles in plays. I'm not a party girl, mom, you know that, too. I've discovered I really enjoy putting on plays, and I plan to take my shot at being a star, but you know what? Even if I don't make it as a star, I'll do something else having to do with making movies, or putting on plays, and I'll enjoy it, too. That's what tells me I'll be OK. I enjoy the work, it's not just that I want to be rich and famous -- though I wouldn't turn that down."
"Well, one thing I do know about you is that if you really want something, you really go after it, and most of the time you get it," said Cindy's mom. "In fact, all of the time you really get it. So I guess you can go. But you just have to promise me one thing, baby. Promise me that no matter how bad you want to succeed, you won't treat anybody like crap in order to do it, and that you won't let anybody treat you like crap, either."
"Well, sure mom, no problem," Cindy replied.
"Good," said Cindy's mom, "because I think that's how a lot of people get screwed up when they get ambitious. At some point they just decide they can do this rotten thing to person X, or that they can let person Y do that rotten thing to them, and it changes them. Over time they just lose whatever it was that made them good people. I couldn't stand to see that happen to you."
"It won't, mom," Cindy said. "You did a better job of raising me than that."
"I kinda believe it won't," said Cindy's mom. "But I've been around longer than you. I've seen a lot of people who grew up intending to live their lives one way, wind up living them altogether another way. It happens to people. It could happen to you. I hope it won't, and I don't really think it will, but I would feel so much better if I thought you were taking the possibility of it happening seriously."
"I do, mom," said Cindy. "I'll be careful how I live my life. It's important to me, too.'
"All right, then," said Cindy's mom, in a voice that was neither hopeful nor resigned, just one that had gotten its message across and knew it could do no more.
The next day, Cindy went to the Golden Booty on the south side of Tampa and auditioned as a dancer. She was a great success. She knew from talking with the other girls that the manager had an insanely jealous Latina girlfriend who would kill him if she saw him looking at another woman, so she wouldn't have to sleep with him or suck his cock or anything. It all went very professionally, and when Cindy stripped off her clothes and showed off the collection of moves she'd developed in the privacy of her bedroom under the guise of practicing for ethnic dance class, he just nodded and said, "You start next Tuesday. Go see Malinas, she'll tell you the house rules."
The house rules were, no drugs, no sleeping with the customers, however wealthy or handsome, and no touching of the customers' genitals with hands or mouth. These were rules Cindy felt she could live with.
Cindy soon realized that she was not like most of the women who danced at the club with her, any more than she was like the men who watched them. She asked the other dancers what they planned to do with all the money they were making and they either stared at her blankly, as if she'd asked what planet they were REALLY from, or they said they were planning to buy a farm somewhere an raise horses or get into modeling or acting -- but they never seemed to have much in the way of plans beyond that.
Basically, Cindy realized, they were dancing, making as much money as they could, spending it all on clothes and cars and nice things, and waiting for some mythical golden opportunity to arrive and offer itself to them. They did not realize that being able to make as much money as they did just by dancing naked constituted their golden opportunity. They said they were trying to be open to all that life had to offer, but what they really meant was that they couldn't be bothered to think about what they were doing.
Only two or three of them had anything firm enough to be called a goal. There were a couple of other women like Cindy working at the Booty, women who clearly had goals. But they kept quiet about them and did their jobs and took their money. It occurred to Cindy that she would be wise to profit from their examples. So she kept quiet about her plans, too, other than to say that she planned to go to L.A. eventually and be an actress, but offering nothing more concrete than that, which naturally led others to assume she was as feckless as them.
One of the surprising things that Cindy discovered after dancing for awhile was how much she liked men, generally. Even when they were liquored up and horny as hell, a pretty common condition among the men at the Booty, they were a nice bunch overall. There were a few assholes of course. Men who tried to grab you or make you feel small while you danced for them. Or men who took obvious pleasure in turning you down for a lap dance.
But there were bouncers for the grabby ones, and Cindy was never so desperate for a buck that she wouldn't have the bouncers throw a guy out if her got grabby. The ones who tried to make her feel bad she avoided.
Most men played by the rules, placing their ones and fives in her garter belt when she danced on the stage, and placing their tens and twenties in her garter when she gave them lap dances, keeping their hands at their sides while she ground her thonged butt into their crotches.
She could feel their cocks. She had not counted on that. She could feel their cocks when she ground her butt against them, hard bits poking up from the general softness of their laps.
She had steeled herself to being naked and in intimate contact with some pretty repulsive men, but she was surprised to find that most guys who came in to the Golden Booty were pretty normal-looking and some were downright handsome. There were a few really ugly guys, but as a general rule they compensated by being extra nice, and often had "favorites" who sought them out when they came into the club.
Of course, many of the men who came into the club were older than her, sometimes by four or five decades. And while she was able to get used to giving lap dances to men who were her father's age, she never did quite get used to giving lap dances to men who were her grandfather's age. Even so, she was able to mask her feelings, hide behind a painted-on smile and a cheery sensuality she didn't really feel. But it made her realize -- all men were horny, period. Some hid it better than others.
The worst were the Basic Plus types who came in packs, typically the self-employed or the rare few the corporations employed. She'd rather do a drunk, acne'd grandfather than a bizpack, as the girls called them. Still, they were great tippers -- they had the money, and to them it was play money, and when they were at play, they spent it like play money.
They also tended to be grabby and disrespectful. Management, the bouncers and a lot of the strippers gave them a lot of leeway because they brought so much money into the clubs. Some of the dancers would let the guys bend them over a table and do them, if they had enough money in their garter, and if management let them, but of course, management wouldn't let them do that because that took a bordello license, and bordello licenses were hard to get in Florida.
Still, you could get tied into a bizpak and go from lap to lap to lap, each guy in turn stuffing ten bucks into your garter, and spend a couple of hours doing it, maybe getting a little extra from one guy and then the other guys had to ante up and pretty soon you were bringing home more than a thousand dollars in a single night.
Cindy still avoided the bizpaks. She didn't need them. She was very, very popular with the men who came to the club. They stuffed bills in her ga
rter constantly when she danced onstage, and after a stage dance she always found herself in demand for lap dances.
In six weeks' time, instead of the six months she had planned on, she had $10,000 above Basic accumulated toward a move to L.A. And she was pretty sure she would be able to get a job dancing there. And so she moved to L.A.
Inside a week she was dancing at the Lotus Land Lounge. L.A. was a very different place than Florida. It wasn't just the accents or the culture -- it was the simple fact that many, many women had done exactly as she had done and moved to L.A. They had taken acting classes. They had gotten themselves made over with plastic surgery. They had dieted. They had exercised. They had studied dance. And, like Cindy, they were willing and able to do whatever was necessary to make their dreams come true, including suck the cocks of a lot of unappetizing men.
The surrender that she gave to Jack in the sexual arena seemed somehow to complement the drive and determination that had brought her to Hollywood and made her a success. It wasn't a failure of will, it was an expression of herself, just as everything else she did was an expression of herself.
It was hard for her to understand herself. She was a feminist and an adventuress. She was not one who needed anyone to tell her what to do -- she knew what she wanted to do.
But there had been this time. In the Golden Booty, about three weeks after she'd first started dancing. Three weeks is long enough to get used to dancing in a club, if you do it six nights a week for six hours. as she did. After awhile you just got used to the fact that you were naked and the men were clothed.
(Besides, in an important way, the men who came their were naked and the women were clothed. It was the men who came to the strip clubs whose desire was exposed. The women might be physically naked, but their mental and emotional state was hidden. It was not the sort of thing most men would notice.)
Anyway, one of her customers had a necktie, as many of them did, and during the dance Cindy played with it a bit, untying it and rubbing it against her breasts.
"Pay you double on the next dance if you let me tie your hands behind your back with my necktie," the customer whispered while she sat facing away from him and grinding her butt against his lap.
Cindy thought about that for a long moment. She was already naked for this fully clothed guy, now he wanted her bound. It didn't seem fair, somehow. And there was something faintly daunting about letting a customer tie her hands behind her back.
However, there were the bouncers if the guy got out of line, and he was offering to pay double for something that really didn't bother her.
"Sure," Cindy whispered back. The rules had never mentioned "no bondage." In fact some girls incorporated it into their dances, and she recalled seeing them dancing with their hands tied a time or two, now that she thought about it.
At the beginning of the next song, she stood with her hands held side by side behind her. It did not occur to her to place her hands in front of her to be bound.
"Cross your wrists," said the guy, a bearded, handsome biz type in his 30s, "it'll put less strain on your arms."
Cindy crossed her wrists and let them be bound, then started her dance. It was hard at first, and limited her dance. She was accustomed to using her arms as a counterbalance when she did her belly moves at the start of a dance, and of course hand and finger movements were important parts of the dance, to her at least. Not so much to guys.
But there was something intensely exciting about standing there naked with her hands tied behind her back, her feet planted apart, sending waves of muscle rippling down from her sternum to her pubes. And sitting on the guy's lap rubbing her crotch into him was even more exciting. It was so exciting that it made her come. And come. She didn't notice when the guy came, she was too busy milking his cock with her butt for her own pleasure. He did come, though, because he didn't offer her another dance, just untied her hands, gave her a twenty and said, "Thanks, baby."
"No, thank YOU," Cindy said, smiling, and she meant it.
She then went back to the dressing room to clean up.
"I came all over a guy," Cindy said to the half dozen other dancers who were in the dressing room, too. Sometimes you had to get out of sight of the customers for awhile, for this reason or that. "I gotta change my thong."
"Don't do that," advised Dawn, one of the dancers who'd been at it for a couple of years. "You'll get more dances and bigger tips if you have a little woman musk on you."
"What?" Cindy asked.
"Sure," said Dawn. "Guys smell it and it turns them on, even if they don't know that they're smelling it. One of the oldest tricks in the book. Some gals bring themselves off in the stall once they're in costume, just for that reason."
"No!" Cindy laughed.
"And some of us," said Mystique, another dancer who'd been around for a while, "just go out there and deliberately use our first customers for masturbatory purposes. Treating them like they treat us, only we get paid beside."
Cindy paused for a moment to think. This was a highly competitive business. Some girls were rumored to pull nasty tricks like putting ground glass into a rival's shoes to get her off the dance floor and keep competition down. Telling her a whopper that might keep her from doing well on the dance floor was well within the limits of what they might do.
On the other hand, the dancers were often generous with one another. This might be a valuable tip. She'd have to figure it out for herself. Well, she knew that pheromones were an important element in sexual attractiveness, and although she didn't know for sure, it seemed logical that the juices she produced when she came would be full of such pheromones, and that they could attract men without them knowing why.
"OK, that makes sense, I've heard of pheromones," Cindy said. "But I feel like I smell pretty funky right now. I mean, maybe the pheromones work, but I think there's an awful lot of ordinary funk in there with those pheromones."
"Well, honey, c'mon over here and let me smell your butt," said Dawn.
"What?" Cindy asked.
"Let me smell your butt," said Dawn. "I'll tell you if it's funky or not."
"Go ahead," said Mystique. "It's illegal in most states, of course, but we do it anyway."
Cindy walked over to dawn, faced away and bent over at the waist.
"It's your nose," she said.
Dawn grabbed Cindy's hips and took a whiff.
"Smells great," she reported. "You've got nothing to worry about. In fact, I'll give you twenty dollars for a lap dance myself."
"This is what comes of sniffing other women's butts," said Cindy.
"Maybe so," said Dawn, "but I know what to do with it." She rose and stretched luxuriously. "I'm going to go out there and cream all over a few guys myself and make me some money." And she strode out the door, her butt doing a slow, sensuous waggle.
"Maybe we should ALL sniff your butt," said Mystiique, watching Dawn depart. "I believe you got Dawn all charged up."
"Maybe I should charge you to sniff my butt," said Cindy thoughtfully.
"Have you never heard of professional courtesy?" asked Mystique, giggling.
When Cindy returned to the floor a few minutes later, her thong still soaked with love juices, her body still trailing a cloud of pheromones and God knows what else, she found that the dancers were right. The men were a lot more eager for dances from her, a lot more forthcoming with tips and requests for extra dance time.
She tried getting off by rubbing herself against the guys, but the reason she'd never come that way before was that she didn't find the work all that arousing. It was work, being sexy because the customers wanted you to, and not because you felt that way yourself.
But she certainly had gotten aroused when the guy tied her up. Really, really aroused. And what did that mean? ...
As she reminisced on the floor in their living room, the waiting had its effect on Cindy. It aroused her, and made her feel her submissiveness more intensely. Her reveries about her past faded away into more current remembrances about
the way she and Jack played together, the way he almost seemed to be able to read her mind sometimes, the way he surprised her erotically sometimes and she's go from not thinking about sex at all to hot, wet and all but panting. Her exposed vagina, she knew, was moistening, as her body had a pretty good idea what was about to happen, and was preparing for it.
When Jack returned to the room and tied her wrists together, she felt a wave of desire so intense it was almost like a fever. She moaned as Jack tied the knots, she couldn't help it. She had learned to associate being bound with extreme sexual pleasure.
"How elastic is that fabric in your thong?" Jack asked.
"Very elastic," Cindy responded. "It's basically a one-size fits all product for women from a size 2 to a size 16."
"That would be a wide range of sizes?" Jack said as he fastened a leather belt around Cindy's waist, a belt festooned with metal rings that sent cool spangs dancing across her skin. This, too created a wave of intense desire. She could be fastened to things by it. Things could be fastened to her. Either way, it tended to be fun.
At the same time, Cindy reflected that Jack was an intelligent man, but still a man. He could not figure out a simple thing like dress sizes.
"Yes, a very wide range," said Cindy.
"Good," said Jack as he tied Cindy's ankles to a spreader bar. Now she could not pull her legs together, even if she wanted to. Which she didn't at the moment.
He then pulled Cindy's thong up so that the sex cache was pulled down over her crotch, and place the tip of a vibrating dildo against it, and very slowly and carefully shoved the dildo straight up her pussy, pushing the thong fabric inside her as well.
