The room smelled like stale cigarette smoke and sweat. It was potent. There were hookers of every flavor in the room, waiting for their next sixty-minute romance. And all of them had a nose for fresh meat. A black woman with light brown skin and a pierced nose propositioned me. Then there was the Oriental woman with hot pink hair and no breasts. And the girl so translucent that her veins were visible. I had to pay an extra fifty for "Cassidy", a blond with small features and an All-American girl inside of tramp's clothing. She had a trio of guys eyeing her.
With the curl of her index finger, she led me out of the room, past a couple of sweating kids, and up the creaking stairs. The backs of her high heels were chafed and the straps had worn blisters on her feet. The fishnet stockings seemed like something out of a porno with awful disco music, but, she was never comfortable about her legs. A scrawny redhead was coming down the steps dressed in bright pink, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, a john behind her. Her smile was leering and cheap, as if her desire for cock had gone without reason.
Coughing, I turned my eyes back on the girl leading me up the stairs, seeing just the underside of her ass beneath her short black skirt. She had a nice ass once upon a time, before she was a whore. She didn't try to glamorize what she did. She gave up. She still had slender arms, but there were bruises behind her biceps that had turned yellow with age. She didn't care about that either. It wasn't the worst she'd ever been treated. Besides, she made an extra hundred off of him. Her blonde hair was gloomy, cloudy. There wasn't much life left in her body at all, truthfully.
Entering the room with a busted plastic "8" nailed to the door, the sound of a john fucking away on another whore in the room next door brought on a reality I hadn't counted on. My palms were sweating now and my stomach churning. She didn't even flinch. She just tossed her pack of cigarettes to the night stand and unzipped her corset top. Removing it, her hand massages under her arm, rubbing out the imprint of the hemline. I'd taken a stance over by the window, watching the green city below move back and forth to oblivion.
"What's your pleasure tonight, Honey?" She said it with a soft voice that sounded tired.
"I don't know. What are you in to?" I said, watching her reflection in the window.
"Doesn't matter what I'm in to. I'll do anything you want me to do. Did they tell you the prices downstairs?"
"Yeah. Yeah, they told me your prices."
"Not my prices. It's the man's prices. Believe me."
"How long have you been doing this?"
"Three years," she said, her voice a bit uneasy.
She moved in behind me, wrapping her lean arms around my chest, her breasts cramming against my back. She kept her face off of me, her breath warm and fast on my neck.
"I saw you," I told her, "in a coffee shop a couple of nights ago. You were with an older gentleman."
Releasing her grip on me, she takes a few steps back and takes her drink off of the table.
"I don't know no gentleman."
The ice rolled around in the glass when she sat it down, and I took a single step to the right, nearer to the corner, when she sat down in the window sill.
"So, you followed me here? Or what?"
Staring blankly at the yellow and red sign that reads Mingh's 24 Hour Laundry, I felt a warmth run through my chest and shoulders.
