Turning Semi-Pro

This story is set in 1981, so there is no social media or mobile phones that take photographs. There is a few weeks' jump from the last story in this series. The last chapter set up three other stories, and I intend to tell those stories eventually. However, Amber is only a supporting character in two and a non-participant in the third. This series is about her and her road to becoming a semi-pro.

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Amber finished her bath, dried her hair, and changed into the little black dress and lingerie Gerald had provided. She had agreed to help him entertain his client tonight and was almost certain that it would include bringing her back to the flat and the bedroom.

A month ago, Amber discovered that her boyfriend, Alastair, besides "borrowing" her life savings, had forged her signature as a co-tenant to the lease of his London flat. He then got sacked from his job and disappeared off the face of the earth. Well, she didn't know where he was.

She had thought about refusing to pay the rent on the flat in London, but the agents had said that, as far as they and the landlord were concerned, she had signed the lease and was on the hook for the rent. They had hinted that if she reported Alastair to the police for forgery, then they would think again.

The problem was, as her landlord in the Midlands and friend (well, a bit more than that), Gerald had told her that doing this would be a juicy story for the tabloids about a love rat betraying his girlfriend. She didn't want to portray herself as a victim or admit to anyone she didn't have to how much of a mug she had been.

Besides, the forgery was a good one -- she knew she hadn't signed the lease, but she doubted she could prove it. She would definitely lose her job if she lost any court case, as she would have been found to be a liar on the balance of probabilities. Besides, she knew that this was the sort of story which stuck in people's minds and which she could never shake off. Maybe not quite the Mormon missionary who had been kidnapped by the woman who said she would ski down a mountain naked with a rose in her teeth for him. Fuck, she could even remember the woman's name.

Anyway, even if she could find Alastair to sue, he was enough of a bastard to reveal that she had been willing to have sex with Gerald to help Alastair's career.

In the end, the agents said that they would not sue her for the rent arrears provided that she paid the rent going forward and agreed that she could pay off the two months' arrears in instalments over the next nine months. The monthly rent was two and a half times more than the rent she paid to Gerald for the cottage. Alastair, when he had taken the lease, had been a well-paid, one-year qualified lawyer at a top city firm with excellent prospects and could afford it, but Amber, a teacher, could not.

It would have been easy to despair. She was now in a worse financial position than she had been as a student. At least back then, she and her friends had been in the same boat financially. Now, she could not afford to go out with friends and pay her way.

She did not want to take out a bank loan, as that would involve explaining why she needed to borrow the money and would be expensive. The story was so juicy that she refused to believe that it would not leak out despite the bank's duty of confidentiality. She remembered Jill telling her about the girl at her school whose mother had died in a car crash and bit off her lover's cock when the accident happened. All the teachers at the school knew about it. Most thought like mother like daughter.

Besides, once you were in debt, it was easy to get used to it being normal. Better to batten down the hatches now and start her life again when the lease was over.

She had been able to afford the payment this month because Gerald had let her off the rent on the cottage in exchange for spending time with Gerald's nephew John. Gerald's sister had been worried her son was suicidal after breaking up with his girlfriend and was stressed about his exams. Gerald's sister had undoubtedly been paranoid to believe that John was a suicide risk. It was clear to Amber and Gerald that John was glad the relationship was over. Still, Gerald was busy as the tax year was coming to an end so Amber had agreed to spend time with John in the evenings.

She said to herself that she had not been paid to have sex with John, and strictly that was true. The rent rebate had been for keeping John company and not for having sex with him. Gerald had also funded the evenings out. It had been a little like when she was a student doing holiday jobs and went on dates with men who paid for the food and drink. Still, she had known deep down inside that comforting a young man after a breakup with a long-term girlfriend was likely to involve sex. She winced -- deep down inside was an all too accurate description of where John had been within three hours of first meeting her.

The sex with John had been good for her and her ego. Teaching John how to make love tenderly as well as how to fuck her while ensuring she enjoyed it as well had been a pleasure. It had also distracted her from worrying about her finances. Fortunately, she had been able to avoid him falling in love with her. It suited her for him to think about her as an entertaining fling. One of the reasons she had initiated a threesome with him and his uncle was to put him off thinking about her as a girlfriend, but it had seemed to add to her appeal at first.

Luckily, she had been able to enlist the DP Team to help ensure that he had sex with other women. Bess (AKA Emma) had allowed him to seduce her at an engagement party and had been invited by John to attend the summer ball at his college. John was lucky Bess hadn't been trying to really ensnare him. She had played him like a fiddle without him spotting it. Hell, that had even been the sideshow. The main event was preventing the bride-to-be's oldest sister from making a scene by having Dom and Pete entertain her. She still didn't know how they had worked it, but by the next morning, all family conflicts had been resolved as though it was a Shakespearean comedy. Certainly, David had been very pleased with himself.

Dom and Pete had also helped John fuck a friend of hers the following weekend. Christ, that had been a wild night. She hoped that Jill would now admit to herself that she was a sexually active woman who liked the attention of muscular men. It was not sensible for her to be a prick teasing professional virgin 99% of the time and then to be gangbanged by strangers once every six months.

After John had gone back to Oxford, she had met Gerald for a full and frank discussion. Gerald had said that she deserved a bonus, and she now had five months rent-free at the cottage. She told herself that it wasn't for having had sex with John and Gerald but for successfully improving John's confidence and self-esteem and for having introduced the DP team into the picture. She also thought that Gerald liked her just enough to want to find an excuse for easing her financial position.

That still left the problem of how to pay the rent on the London flat for the next eight months. She had worked out that by selling a few things and having no social life for nine months, she might be able to afford the payments. It was, of course, possible that Alastair might do the decent thing, but she wasn't counting on it.

Gerald had also made it clear that he had no desire to promote her to be a permanent girlfriend. The deal was that she would continue to give him fortnightly blow jobs and occasionally visit, but she was not his girlfriend. Fine up to a point, but after a month of being pleasured by John (and sometimes Gerald as well) almost daily (not to mention being serviced twice by the DP Team), she needed a sexual outlet.

Gerald had suggested something the weekend before the end of term that could potentially help both of her problems.

He had said that he was meeting a client who was a theatre lover the Monday after the start of the holidays. That evening, Gerald had booked four tickets for the new play at the Royal Court, just a few minutes away. Beforehand, he had arranged for an early dinner at a nearby Michelin-starred restaurant. She and a female friend of his would be joining him and the client, Tim, for the dinner and the show,

He'd then laughed and said, "I won't lie to you. If he likes you, he will want to get to know you better. However, he is a gentleman and will take no for an answer. Actually, he'll only make a pass if he likes you as a person. He'll also live with so far and no further."

He paused, "Frankly, he'll probably settle for a kiss and a cuddle and then you getting on your knees. I may have told you before that you are exceptionally talented in that regard."

Well, she could hardly claim that she was offended. He and his nephew had double penetrated her, so any protestations of her innocence lacked credibility. Besides, she had had plenty of practice pleasuring men with her mouth full. Practice makes perfect.

Gerald sealed the deal by saying that he usually paid for a good hotel room for the women who joined him for dinner with his clients. First, they normally live out of London, so they needed a place to stay. Secondly, if the woman decided to continue the evening, she could take the man back to a comfortable room. Amber guessed that it also helped the willing suspension of disbelief for the men that this was a date that had ended well.

Gerald then said that as he was saving on the hotel room, it was only fair he would pay half a week's rent if she went for a meal and a play with him and his client. The payment was not conditional on her taking the man back to the flat. He told her that, in effect, it was a sum in lieu of expenses.

It only took her a minute to decide that she would give it a whirl. She wanted to see plays in London and Stratford, and it was preferable to see a play in the stalls rather than from the cheap seats at the back of the upper circle.

Besides, it wasn't as though she had never allowed a man to pay for a date and, as a quid pro quo, got her tits out, jerked him off or blew him. Well, sometimes, more.

When she went to university, her parents left the country and left her largely to her own devices. In her first year, they had not made up all of the maintenance grant shortfalls, and she had to take holiday jobs to survive as well as fund the extras.

She had taken as her inspiration a book she had read while doing her A levels called Charity Girls. It was set in 1920s New York and the central characters were a group of five young women without much money and not much chance of making it. Still, shopgirls and typists want to go out and enjoy themselves, and in practice, this meant being treated to meals and taken to dance halls, speakeasies, and cinemas by better-paid men. There was an understanding that in return for the man paying for the night out, the girl would be grateful if she wanted to be asked out again.

Normally, the more grateful a Charity Girl was known to be, the more often and lavishly she was likely to be treated by men. The better-looking and more vivacious ones could be invited out without having to provide much more than a kiss and a cuddle. Average-looking or quiet ones would have to put out or have no social life. The women themselves and most of the men did not regard this as prostitution because no money exchanged hands.

She had adopted this as a practice while working during the holidays and, as a result, never had to spend that much on food, drink or cinema tickets after the first week and could save most of her wages. Although she could typically get away with a kiss and a cuddle on the first date, men expected more on a second date. In the end, over the four years of holiday jobs, at least two hundred men had played with her tits, and she'd given over one hundred and fifty of them hand jobs. Perhaps eighty-five had been given blow jobs. About twenty had progressed to sex. These tended to be the older men who actually lived in the towns where she worked and had given her jewellery or other gifts in addition to providing dinner and drinks. She still had the digital clock radio and the small television which one of them had given her. She had never been paid in cash for having sex. At most, it was an exchange of gifts or favours. At least, that was what she had told herself then.

It made a difference. Prossies were like London taxis or criminal barristers- they were expected to take the fare, case, or john. If men treated Amber badly, took her for granted, or were just weird (or smelly), she told them to sling their hook.

Now as a teacher at a posh school who was good at her job, she had expected that those days were behind her. Still, her last two boyfriends had made her think that she had been better off being a Charity Girl. One had been obsessively jealous and had beaten her up, and the other one had, in retrospect, stolen her money and pimped her out to Gerald. She'd decided that she did not want another relationship until at least January 1982, but she did want some form of social life. Hell, she wouldn't mind having sex with pleasant men who knew what they were doing.

She knew that she was being manipulated and that Gerald probably had at least another two or three men lined up for her during the easter holidays. She also knew that he would make certain that the first man would be someone she could persuade herself deserved a little fun with a redhead.

She was also aware that she needed to keep Gerald on her side. The cottage suited her, and she could not afford to move. He might also still help her get her money back from Alastair.

Being blunt about it, she was expected to give a blow job or more to his clients in exchange for dinner, half a week's rent on the flat and a show. It wasn't compulsory, but she knew she couldn't be too selective. Still, he was asking nicely when he could have just told her that was what she had to do. To be honest, she didn't mind the sex so long as she could turn down the weird ones. After all, she wasn't being asked to prostitute herself for money, although she knew that she would be stepping close to the line.

Term had ended on Friday, and Amber had taken a train to London on Saturday. Gerald had said that if she was going to be paying rent on the flat near Sloane Square, she might as well use the place. She could see the force of that argument, and as Gerald paid for the rail ticket, she thought she might as well spend the easter holidays in London.

Gerald was already in London. It was now past the tax year end, and he was meeting clients and seeing Tax Counsel in preparation for the work that would fill his time and justify his status as an equity partner until the summer holidays. He had agreed to collect a set of keys from the agents and check that the flat was in good order before she got there.

When the train arrived at Euston, she had met Gerald near the ticket barrier. He kissed her on the cheek, took her case and led her towards the underground. They took the Victoria Line to Victoria and then changed to the District Line for Sloane Square. The journey was quick, and as they weren't travelling at rush hour, it was even quite pleasant. He explained that it was quicker than taking a taxi to go by tube.

The flat was only a five-minute walk from the station. It was Victorian on the outside, but when she entered the front door, she understood why Alastair had insisted that it was a good deal. It was beautifully decorated and had all the mod cons one could desire. As for the master bedroom, the bed was huge and comfortable--if there was an emperor-sized bed, this was it. If this was how the upper 5% live, she knew that she could easily get used to living like this.

She had been amused to find that Gerald had already stocked her wardrobe with a little black dress, some lingerie, and a negligee. He'd also supplied a cocktail tray with gin, vermouth, vodka, sherry, and other more esoteric drinks mixers. Perhaps some of those were left over from Alastair's stint here -- she didn't see Gerald as a Bailey's Irish Cream or a Malibu and Pineapple man.

On Monday, four bottles of champagne, a case of vintage wine, and a hamper from Fortnum & Mason arrived. She had thought about it and decided better safe than sorry, so she went out to buy some Durex. In Soho, she wasn't surprised to find that she could buy boxes of 20 and a selection of fruit-flavoured ones.

She checked her watch. Gerald had said that he would be there at five and that they had a table booked for five forty-five. Ok, let's treat this as a first date with a hot man. She speared out some of the light nibbles from Fortnum's and put out the glasses.

She then thought to herself. Before, when she had been a charity girl, she had wanted the things that money could buy and could not easily afford them herself. Now, what she needed was money -- why shouldn't she take cash? That middle-class girl, Bess, had no compunction about being paid cash for sex, but that was because she thought of herself as a character from a French novel without the need to pretend a moralistic ending. She looked around the flat -- this was not a place a streetwalker or a prossie used. It was a place a mistress was kept in or a high-class escort used.

She told herself the lies that no doubt many women had told themselves -- Gerald wouldn't introduce her to really nasty men (actually, she might be on safer ground than normal there, but what if his clients advertised her abilities to other men), she could always choose to say no (but how often would she when the liability to pay the rent on the flat existed), she could ringfence it from the rest of her life (well if she only put out in London, maybe yes, but there must be a risk she'd bump into someone she knew at the theatre or restaurant), it was only a temporary measure until the lease ran out (but what if she got used to the money and the flat?).

In the end, she convinced herself that she could do this for the easter holidays, two half terms, the occasional weekend and the summer holidays until Christmas without taking money for sex defining her. She'd make just enough to cover the rent on the flat and build up some savings. She would re-enter the dating market next January and look at this interlude as she had looked at her time as a charity girl. Part of life's rich pageant which she could scandalise her grandchildren with when she was seventy.

At 4.50, the bell from the street rang, and when she pressed the intercom. A woman announced herself as Alison and that Gerald had given her this address. She buzzed her in and knew the evening had started. She vaguely recognised Alison and could not identify why.

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As he opened the bottle of champagne, Gerald was confident that his ploy would work. Tonight's client, Tim, was a gentleman and a theatre enthusiast. Gerald's contacts at the theatre said that the production was worth seeing and that at least three of the younger actors were stars in waiting. A couple of others already were established or very much up and coming, but it was always best when you saw someone early in their career. Somehow, their success was yours as well.

The likelihood was that both Amber and Tim would enjoy the play and could share their enthusiasm. He hadn't totally fixed the deck of cards, but he had done his best to maximise the chances that they would fall the way he wanted them to.

He had, of course, located Alastair, who, like many generations of upper-middle-class cads, was being sent overseas to reduce the embarrassment to the family. He was marrying Fiona, the old girlfriend, who had fucked up her career almost as much as he had.

Luckily, the families had decided not to advertise the marriage in the Times, but Gerald was waiting for the right moment to hint to Alastair's father that Amber was threatening to turn up at the wedding and raise an objection unless she was compensated for her financial losses.