Her 9:15

Warning: occasional swearword, prostitution

He whispered tender things in her ear, including how much he enjoyed their date-nights, and nibbled her lobes, until she felt fluttering sensations in her toes, stretched out on her red, satiny bed sheets. He’d told her his name several times during the fifteen times he’d paid visits to her, but she refused to remember. This evening, he was her 9:15; another man in a line of customers who paid for her services; one of her gentler regulars, perhaps attractive in a broken tooth, crooked shy smile kind of way.

He poured out his soul into her ear, but she surmised his heart was with another, and she pictured a mean bitch with platinum blond hair, hard blue eyes, and a take-no-prisoner’s body, belittling and punishing him. The men who were tender with her, inevitably loved tyrants, and the men who were rough with her, loved frail women, anaemic in face and in the bedroom.

9:15 had never called out a woman’s name, but she sensed her presence in the timbre of his voice and in the tenor of his touch on her body, and knew he didn’t want to bring her into their midst, but he couldn’t help it.

He curved his body around her own, pressing into her, his chest against her thin, bony spine, and this was all he did, and he’d ever done with her, as if she were a frail, lost bird, he was keeping alive with his warmth. When he squeezed his arms around her, her spine contracted and wrested out of contact with his skin 

Derrick, her last boyfriend, used to cuddle her in such a way, after a good fuck, when he’d whisper in her ear, ‘Honey, you’re so hot.’

9:15 didn’t move to reestablish skin contact; he never did in those moments, and all the love lost and gained in her life seeped out through the space between their bodies. Cold air rumbled from the air conditioner, she’d neglected to turn off before his appointment. An occupational comfort measure, not yet needed with him. She shivered and reached down behind her and pulled at the black feathery bed spread gathered at the bottom of the bed and pulled it up over herself and parts of him. She didn’t need to wonder why he’d never tried to fuck her; it didn’t matter, as long as he paid for her time.

If she felt like talking to him, she’d ask about his woman; but she’d never ask him why he came to her. 

His breath exhaled soft and moist against the back of her neck, against the small baby hairs growing up beneath the line of her dark black hair angled high on her neck. Her own breath lurched and held, precarious as a baby crow balancing on a thin branch, intuiting rather than comprehending the sway of the wind.

Derrick had kissed her there, and the memory lurched against her as a brace of wind, toppling her into a hurtling dive, head over beak, over claws; wings only awakening in a splay of defence in the last moment. 

She twisted away so that 9:15’s breath wasted down over her collarbone and dissipated across her chest.

“Did you pick out that print?” He spoke in a low tenor with a gentle cadence, like a man on his best behaviour at a candlelight dinner.

She knew the one he was talking about, but hearing him speak, felt like an actor on television turning and facing you and asking if you’d remembered to defrost the frozen lasagne. She wasn’t the one, his girlfriend, to attend to him in such a way. She was merely an avatar; he’d flick off when he left her place.

In the 19th Century coloured lithographs Derrick had chosen, a naked curvaceous woman with a flushed face and tresses of dark hair falling over her shoulders reclined on a red chaise lounge, legs open, while a skinny priest in black with an enormous erection leered over her. There were more similar ones in a tidy line on the wall. She remembered helping Derrick hang them.

“Yes, do you like it?” she said. 

“In a museum, I’d like it, but not here, not with you.”

Harsh laughter caught in her throat. “Aren’t you here to fuck me…eventually.”

“No, I’m not.” His voice measured, and she thinks of his shy smile and the way he ducks his head, as if he’s bashful to look at her when he comes into her room.

“You need a girlfriend.” She has never spoken so many words to a client.

“I have one,” he said, folding his arms gently around her, and this time she tucks into him.

“What’s her name?”

“Laura Lee.”

“Sounds like a cake mix.”

He kissed her spine slowly from the back of her neck and down, vertebrae by vertebrae, and then stopped before the end. She wanted him to go further. Instead, he shifted and his warm breath caressed the skin between her shoulder blades.

“I’ve been with you fifteen times. This is the first time you’ve said more than ten words to me,” he said.

“Just fuck and get this over with,” she said, turning to him.

‘Just fuck and get it over with,’ Derrick had encouraged her, when he’d talked her into letting men screw her to pay for his gambling debts. ‘You’re so hot, baby. Think of me, and it will be over before you know it.’ 

Derrick had let one of his friends fuck her at a reduced rate. That was when she’d kicked him out. She could run her own business without him.

Her 9:15 rolled away from her, and stood up, and went into the bathroom. She heard the sounds and dropped her head into her pillow with a groan.

When he returned, he sat on the side of the bed, his back to her. She turned and rested her head on her hand and watched the sinewy movements in his shoulders and glutes as he picked up each article of clothing from the dark wooden chair beside the bed. First, he pulled on his paisley undershorts and then his jeans, and then his tee-shirt, and finally his socks. Strip tease in reverse. She wanted to stop the procession and pull him back into bed with her.

He placed the cash on the dresser at the foot of the bed, as he always did. Tipping his head forward, he smiled, his crooked tooth jutting shyly against his lip. 

She stood and shoved the bills into his front jean’s pocket. “You’re the first one I’ve wanted,” she said, thinking with him, she could let go of Derrick. 

“You’re my Date-Night, Laura Lee,” he said, and leaned in to kiss her on her lips. She had yet to tell him her name.