LITMIR.BIZ

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I’d seen in those downstairs halls hadn’t been amateurs, as I’d feared when I’d received an instruction packet that indicated the show tonight was more than just me. The dancers and performers I’d met were reticent about their names and their current gigs, as was I, but we recognized each other just the same.

      Professionals, in one form or another. I could identify others in my line of work at a glance. It was how we stood. How we held ourselves. I knew the others I saw were just like me. Here to work, then play.

      It was the “play” part I was trying to get my head around now.

      I’d practiced my routine so many times that I’d expected my actual performance to flash by. Or maybe I’d hoped it would. Annabelle and I had laughed about what we’d both called my “snobby striptease” so many times that my emotional response while I was actually doing it in front of an audience took me completely by surprise.

      Alone onstage. Centered in the spotlight. Nothing but the pumping, seductive music.

      And me.

      Just me.

      I felt...walloped by it.

      I could never tell Annabelle this when I got back home, but there was something about the burlesque that got to me in a way I wasn’t sure I understood.

      Or maybe I did understand. Too well.

      Because there was something about the freedom. No one knew the steps except me, and that meant I could embroider upon them as I pleased. For the first time in as long as I could remember—maybe in my whole life—I could do whatever I wanted while dancing onstage.

      I felt powerful. It was thrilling.

      It was like a wave crashing over me, then carrying me out to sea—

      And then I saw him.

      That sensation intensified. Until I became the sea or it ate me alive, and either way I was still dancing.

      And somewhere in that hot, electric moment between one breath and the next, I forgot that I was on a stage at all and found myself dancing only for him.

      He sat in one of the closest booths to the stage they’d set up in what I’d been told was usually a library. I could see him perfectly over the stage lights, and he never took his eyes from me. I danced for the man in the perfectly cut suit, his gaze as brooding as it was bright, and the cut-crystal lines of his beautiful face.

      I danced as if we were alone. As if I was there for his pleasure and nothing more.

      Until that was all I felt.

      And then, afterward, he came to me as if we were magnetic halves, drawn together no matter what.

      I’d always secretly dreamed of handing myself over like this. Offering myself for purchase, and then surrendering to whoever bought me. Not the way I did, in one way or another, in my career. Surrendering to the demands of my ballet overlords...hurt. Always. The pain was an accepted part of life in the ballet.

      In my dreams, I could hand myself over, make myself nothing more than a possession and feel nothing but pleasure. The ultimate dance of pleasure and need. Everything the ballet promised but didn’t deliver. Surrender and greed, lust and longing, all made real. All available if I but dared.

      The taboo made me shiver. The fantasy made me hot.

      But I wasn’t Annabelle. I had never wanted my fantasies to become real, not in the real world. No yachts or monetized “dates” for me, because I knew I would never, ever feel safe enough to go through with it.

      Fantasies in my head were glorious when I was alone in my bed. But I knew a little something about making fantasies real in my actual life. There was always a price, and that price was often pain. I had never wanted to test the thing that made me hottest out there in Annabelle’s world of risky nights and reckless lovers, because I’d always known on some level that reality would ruin it.

      Until tonight.

      Because the beautiful blue-eyed man might be a stranger to me, but he was known to the club or he wouldn’t have been permitted in the audience. One of the numerous documents I had signed had made that clear. The club knew everything about everyone, including medical records and sexual preferences. Everyone was deemed safe for playtime or they weren’t allowed to partake. And no abuses would go unpunished, assuming they even occurred—which was, I was told, so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible.

      This wasn’t me in my bed at home taking myself on a little fantasy journey. But it wasn’t quite reality, either. That made it perfect.

      It felt like a dream, but I knew I was awake. Awake enough to feel myself jolt and shiver when he touched me, there beside the stage. Awake enough to make it clear I was for sale and extract a purchase agreement, a notion that made me...ache. Everywhere. And more than awake enough to follow him up the sweeping stairs to this suite.

      I wasn’t going to sleep through a single moment of this fantasy-made-real. Not now that I was stripped down to nothing but the sparkly bikini bottoms I’d worn onstage, though I didn’t feel exposed or naked. I felt completely dressed in this man’s hot, demanding gaze.

      And he wanted me to prove I wanted him. He wanted me to show him.

      I wasn’t sure my knees would hold me up as I imagined—in bright detail—how I could do that.

      “Haven’t I already proved it?” I asked. We both still stood in the marble foyer of the suite, my costume in heaps at our feet. “If I didn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

      “I prefer certainty to innuendo,” he said, a faintly sardonic note in his voice.

      It kicked through me. A megawatt jolt in my chest and a helpless shuddering below.

      My being present here tonight—on that stage and now here with him—should have been enough. There was no one here who hadn’t asserted their willingness in triplicate. That was part of what the club offered.

      But that wasn’t enough for this man.

      He wanted my explicit consent.

      It made me dizzy. It made me wet.

      And as that surge of molten heat left me slippery and achy, I felt the same wild wave that had taken me over on the stage nearly take me from my feet here, too.

      He didn’t know who I was. I was a woman he’d bought for the night, that was all. He didn’t know a single thing about me; he didn’t care and wouldn’t pretend to care as long as he was certain I wanted this, too, and that meant... I could be anyone.

      I could be as free as I’d felt on that stage, strutting around to steps of my own design, following my body instead of forcing my body to follow rigid protocols to suit someone else’s aesthetic.

      I was no longer an indistinguishable member of the corps. I was no longer the perennial understudy, condemned to the back of the stage and judged harshly should I in any way stand out from the crowd. Tonight I would not be judged, for once, on the position of my wrist or the turn of my ankle.

      Every lover I’d ever taken had known exactly who I was before we’d touched. And some men loved the idea of a ballerina. A little doll, they thought, who could spin around on command and show off her splits in bed. But what they expected from that little doll was her shyness. A docile willingness to please that tipped over into fragility. Tears, vulnerability and an eating disorder.

      I was many things, but meek wasn’t one of them.

      And if I was fragile, I never would have made it into the corps in the first place, much less maintained my place for a decade.

      But surely no call girl would be expected to be anything like meek.

      I smiled at this dark, mouthwatering man who wanted what he’d bought so much that his face looked tight with it. Hungry.

      The way he looked at me made me hungry, too.

      “I could have had

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