Author: Akiko

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“Come home with me,” I said. “Tonight. After. Forget the money.”

Jade stopped moving.

She didn’t get off my lap straight away. She just stopped, and looked down at me, and something in her face closed like a door.

“Ah,” she said.

“I didn’t mean it like…”

“You did, though. You all do, eventually.” She lifted my hands off her waist and put them back on the couch. “I’m not a girlfriend, Owen. I’m not an escort. I’m a dancer. I dance, you pay, we both have a nice time, and then I go home alone to my cat and my telly. That’s the deal.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just don’t ruin it.” She climbed off and reached for her top. “You were doing so well.”

“Can we finish the dance?”

She considered it. Then she shook her head, kindly enough. “Not tonight. The mood’s gone, babe. Happens.”

She didn’t refund me. I didn’t ask her to.

She walked me back to the bar, kissed my cheek for appearance’s sake, and went straight to a group of lads on a stag do by the stage. Within a minute she was laughing at something one of them said, head thrown back.

I finished my whisky alone.

On the drive home I kept replaying it. Her warm skin under my palms. That one moment where she’d looked genuinely turned on. And then my mouth opening and ruining everything.

Ending 19 of 25: Not For Sale. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I reached into my pocket, peeled off a hundred and tucked it into the gold chain at her waist.

“Good tipper,” she breathed. “Good boy.”

She let me keep my hands on her. She guided one up to her breast and I cupped it, warm and heavy, her nipple stiff against my palm. She gasped and rolled her hips harder.

She wasn’t dancing anymore. She was riding me. Her knees dug into the couch, her hands gripped my shoulders, and she ground her pussy along my cock in long, deep strokes, the sequins rasping against my jeans. Her face was flushed. Her mouth was open.

“Fuck,” she said, surprised. “Fuck, that’s the spot.”

I squeezed her tit and she moaned, a real, ragged sound. She went faster, chasing it, her clit rubbing right over the head of my trapped cock on every pass. I felt her thighs start to tremble.

“Don’t you dare stop me,” she whispered.

She came. Right there, shaking in my lap, her forehead pressed to mine, biting her lip to stay quiet. The feel of her twitching against me pushed me over and I came too, helpless, in my jeans, gripping her waist.

We sat there panting.

“That doesn’t happen,” she said finally. “I want you to know that. That doesn’t happen to me in here.”

The buzzer went. She climbed off on shaky legs, pulled her top back on and blew out a breath.

“Same time next Friday,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Then she went back to work, and I sat at the bar trying to stop grinning.

→ I come back next Friday, as ordered

→ I find her at the bar later and ask her out on a proper date

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“I can’t afford this,” I said. “I lost my job on Monday. I should have said before you ordered. I’m sorry.”

Jade stopped mid-strap. She looked at me for a long time.

Then she sat down next to me on the couch, still topless, and sighed through her nose.

“You’re serious.”

“Deadly.”

“God.” She took the folder off my lap and looked at the total herself, and winced. “Okay. Look. I get commission on that. I can’t just tear it up.” She chewed her lip. “But I can tell them the bottle was corked and we sent it back. Happens all the time. You pay for one glass.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because you’re the first man in seven years who’s told me the truth in this room.” She laughed, a little embarrassed, and pulled her top on. “Also because you didn’t touch me once, even when you wanted to. I could tell you wanted to.”

“I really wanted to.”

“I know. I was sitting on it.”

She grabbed a cocktail napkin and an eyeliner pencil off the table, scribbled on the napkin and folded it into my shirt pocket.

“That’s my actual number. My name’s Priya. I’m twenty-nine, I’m off on Tuesdays, and I’m not dancing for you next time. You’re buying me dinner. A cheap one.”

She kissed me. Just once, soft, on the mouth.

Then the buzzer went, and she was gone.

→ I ring her on Monday and book dinner for Tuesday

→ I play it cool and wait a week before calling

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I paid it. Four hundred and twenty quid for a bottle of fizz I’d had one glass of.

The barman ran my card without blinking. Jade watched from the end of the bar, gave me a little wave and a kiss blown off her palm, and then went straight back to work on a man in a pinstripe suit.

I sat on my stool in a kind of daze.

I replayed the last half hour in my head. Her arse pressed into my lap. Her tits slick with champagne. Her breath in my ear, telling me what she would do if only the rules were different. She’d made me so hard I could barely walk. She hadn’t let me touch her once. And I’d paid six hundred and twenty quid, in total, for the privilege.

The worst part was that I’d loved it.

I watched her for another hour. Watched her do almost exactly the same routine for the man in the suit, right down to the champagne trickling between her tits. “Oops.” He bought a bottle too. I felt a strange sort of kinship with him.

At midnight I got up to leave. My legs were stiff. My balls ached in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager.

On the way out, Dez the bouncer held the door for me.

“Jade’s champagne?” he asked.

“Jade’s champagne.”

He nodded, almost sympathetically. “She does that to everyone, mate. Every single Friday.”

I drove home, wanked twice in the shower, and went to bed broke and smiling. By Thursday I knew I was going back. The only question was how.

→ Next Friday, I sit at the bar and just talk to her

→ Next Friday, I order the champagne again

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“I’ll meet you at the diner,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes,” she said, and squeezed my hand.

I walked there. It was cold and I wanted to clear my head. The diner was a strip-lit little place with red vinyl booths and a cook who looked like he hadn’t slept since 2019. I took a booth by the window, ordered two coffees and waited.

Ten minutes. Twenty. Half an hour.

At ten to three, a car pulled up outside. Not a battered little hatchback. A big black pickup with tinted windows. Scarlett climbed out of the passenger side, in her hoodie, laughing, and a man climbed out of the driver’s side and kissed her against the door.

He was thirty-one, she told me later, and about six foot four. Tattoos up to his jaw. He kept his hand on the back of her neck the whole way into the diner.

Scarlett saw me. Her face went through about four different expressions in a second.

“Owen! Hi! This is Kai. My boyfriend. He picked me up.” She said it too brightly. “I told him about you. The man with the kettle.”

Kai nodded at me. Not unfriendly. Just very, very large.

“Nice to meet you, mate,” he said. “Thanks for looking after her tonight.”

They sat in the booth behind mine and shared a plate of chips.

I finished both coffees, left a tip I couldn’t afford, and walked home in the rain thinking that this was, without doubt, the most on-brand thing that had happened all week.

Ending 12 of 25: The Boyfriend. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“The lift,” I said. “If you’re sure.”

Her car was a battered little Fiesta, parked behind the bins. The heater roared and nothing happened. She drove with her hood up and one hand on the wheel and the other, after about a mile, on my knee.

When we pulled up outside my building she didn’t turn the engine off.

“So,” she said.

“So.”

She leaned across the handbrake and kissed me. It started soft, and then it absolutely wasn’t. Her tongue in my mouth, her hand sliding up my thigh, finding my cock and squeezing it through my jeans.

“Five hours,” she murmured. “I’ve been watching you get hard for five hours.”

She popped my button and zip with one hand, very practised, and pulled me out. Her palm was cool. She spat into it and started stroking, slow and firm, twisting over the head, while she kissed my neck.

“I can’t come up,” she whispered. “I’ve got an exam in the morning. But I can do this.”

I came in about ninety seconds, all over her hand and the gearstick, groaning into her hair. She laughed and wiped her hand on a napkin from the glovebox.

“Bryony,” she said. “That’s my real name.”

“Can I see you again?”

“You can see me Friday.” She kissed me once more. “And pay for a dance like everybody else.”

The Fiesta pulled away. I stood on the pavement, zipped up wrong, grinning like an idiot. She had an exam in the morning. I had nothing to do all weekend.

→ I come back on Friday and pay for a dance like everybody else

→ I turn up at the university in the morning with coffee and flowers

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I handed Jade my credit card with a flourish I immediately regretted.

“Back in a sec,” she said, and sashayed off to the bar with it held up between two fingers like a cigarette.

Scarlett settled into my lap while we waited, kissing my neck, playing with the buttons of my shirt. “You won’t regret this,” she murmured. “She does this thing with her tongue…”

Jade came back. She was not smiling.

“Declined,” she said, and handed me the card.

“Try it again?”

“They tried it twice.” She folded her arms. “Babe.”

I stared at the card. Of course. The final salary payment didn’t go in until the twenty-eighth. I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten because I’d spent all week not thinking about anything.

“I’ve got cash,” I said. “Three hundred. Nearly.”

“It’s four hundred,” Jade said. “For both of us.”

“I’ll take one then. Either of you.”

Scarlett slid off my lap. Gently, kindly, but very definitely off. “Sweetheart, it doesn’t work like that once you’ve asked for two. Bad form.”

Jade was already looking over my shoulder at a man in a suit by the bar. She touched my cheek once, almost sympathetically. “Sort your life out and come back on payday.”

Then they were gone. Both of them, arm in arm, laughing, toward the suit.

I sat alone in the chair with a folded hundred quid of tip money gone, a dead credit card and a hard-on that knew it had been robbed.

Ending 9 of 25: Card Declined. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I emptied my wallet into Jade’s hand. Three hundred and ten quid. “That’s everything.”

“That’s plenty,” Scarlett said, and took one arm while Jade took the other.

The VIP booth barely fit the three of us. They sat me in the middle of the couch and stood in front of me, and then they started on each other.

Jade unhooked Scarlett’s bra. Scarlett tugged Jade’s sequinned top up over her head. They kissed, slow and open-mouthed, their tits pressing together, pale against olive, hands sliding down each other’s backs. I sat there gripping the velvet so hard I nearly tore it.

“Rules still apply,” Jade said over her shoulder. “To you.”

Then they both came for me.

Scarlett straddled my left thigh. Jade straddled my right. They ground on me in sync, two warm pussies rubbing my legs through their knickers, two pairs of tits in my face, their mouths taking turns on my neck. Jade palmed my cock through my jeans and squeezed. Scarlett laughed and put her hand on top of Jade’s.

“Twenty-seven and twenty-nine,” Scarlett whispered in my ear. “Fifty-six years of experience between us. You’re done for.”

I was. I came in my jeans with both their hands on me, bucking and groaning, while they kissed each other across my chest.

“Aww,” said Jade. “He lasted four minutes.”

They finished the half hour anyway, dancing for each other while I sat there, wrecked and broke and happier than I’d been all week. When the buzzer went, I realised I still had one question left.

→ I ask what the two of them are doing after close

→ I thank them, button my jacket and head for the door

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She turned around, arse first, and sank down into my lap. And I put my hands on her hips again. Firmer this time. Pulling her down onto me.

For about two seconds it was heaven.

Then she was off my lap and across the booth so fast I didn’t see her move. She snatched her bra off the couch and held it against her chest.

“Dez,” she said. Not loud. She didn’t need to be loud.

The curtain swept back. Dez filled the doorway completely. Up close he was about forty-five, bald as an egg, and built like a vending machine.

“Problem?”

“Touched me twice,” Scarlett said. “After the warning.”

“Mate,” I said. “Honestly, it was…”

“Up.” Dez didn’t raise his voice either. Nobody in this place raised their voice. He put one enormous hand on my shoulder and steered me out of the booth, down the corridor, across the main floor, past every man and every dancer in the building. Jade watched me go with her eyebrows up. Somebody at the bar actually clapped.

The fire door banged open. Cold air. Wet pavement. Bins.

“You’re barred,” Dez said. “Six months. Don’t come back before then, and when you do, keep your hands in your pockets.”

The door slammed. I stood in the alley with two hundred quid gone, a raging hard-on and the lingering smell of vanilla on my hands.

It started to rain. Of course it did. It had been that kind of week.

Ending 6 of 25: Shown the Door. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I kept my hands on the couch. “I’m sorry. Genuinely. It won’t happen again.”

“I know it won’t,” Scarlett said, and her smile was perfectly friendly and perfectly empty.

She finished the half hour. She did everything she’d been doing before. Her tits in my face, her arse in my lap, her hair sliding across my chest. She ground on my cock until I was aching and leaking into my boxers, and she let out little breathy sounds in all the right places.

None of it was for me anymore.

I could feel the difference. Before, she’d been laughing, enjoying herself, pressing in close because she wanted to. Now every move was timed to the beat and every look was aimed at a point just past my left ear. It was a performance. A very, very good one.

The buzzer went. She stood up, hooked her bra back on, and checked her lipstick in the little mirror on the wall.

“Thanks, babe. Hope your week gets better.”

“Scarlett, can I…”

“I’m booked for the rest of the night,” she said, already holding the curtain. “Jade’s free, though, if you’re still in the mood.”

I wasn’t. I sat at the bar for twenty minutes, nursing a whisky I couldn’t afford, watching her laugh in another man’s lap. She never looked my way once.

I drove home with a hard-on that wouldn’t quit and the distinct feeling I’d paid two hundred quid to learn something about myself.

Ending 5 of 25: Cold Shoulder. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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