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The hour passed mercifully fast. The bar was working up to a fever pitch, so Lauren was kept busy hustling for drinks and food. The men were getting increasingly aggressive, too, so the gropes and slaps were becoming almost impossible to dodge. She tried to convince herself, with some success, that it was all a small price to pay for all the times she’d failed to give a man proper respect.
Despite her initial fears, Carl’s table seemed satisfied with their single round of drinks, although they did keep forcing her to sit on their laps when she stopped by to check on them. Surprisingly, they kept their hands relatively chaste when they did so, never sliding up past her upper thigh.
Still, she found it incredibly degrading. Whenever she walked up to check on the table, one of them would just slide his chair out and pat his lap and expect her to perch herself there while they talked for a few minutes. Certainly, none of them was the kind of guy she’d give any attention to if she had any choice in the matter. Plus, the time she spent with them was time she wasn’t earning tips from some of the other customers.
She sighed internally at the thought. She had to stop thinking along those lines. First of all, she needed to get over the idea that she had some kind of right to be choosy about men; they were her superiors, and she needed to treat them that way. Second of all, even though her ultimate goal was to win the contest, she needed to stop focusing on that; she was here to learn how to treat men properly—do that, she decided, and winning the contest would follow.
Amy took her by surprise when she came to relieve her. Lauren turned to the men at Carl’s table and said, “Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure to serve you. And, again, I’m sorry for our earlier . . . unpleasantness.”
Carl barely acknowledged her with a grunt. She hurried to the cashier’s cage-- $75, her best yet!—and then back to the changing room. There, she sat on one of the benches and leaned over to rub her calves. As she did so, she thought about the recent changes to her life.
Just a few months ago, she had been a confident young woman, a high-performer at work on the fast-track, practically guaranteed to make vice president by the time she was thirty. She made a more than comfortable living in a job that came easy to her.
She was still all of that, she supposed, though perhaps less confident than before. And wasn’t that justified? She was good—very good—at what she had chosen to do and that justified her confidence. But take away those choices, force her to make her own desires secondary to serving and entertaining men, and she became barely adequate. She was struggling to make ends meet tonight, and she certainly hadn’t been 100% obedient and respectful as she should have been. This was hard for her; she almost wandered if she should volunteer to do it again, not as punishment, but just because it was a damn good way to teach her respect and test her obedience—sink or swim, as it were.
No, she told herself fiercely. She liked her job, and she wasn’t going to set herself down a path to losing it. But how was she going to continue on the path she had been on? She didn’t even have control over how she trimmed her own pubic hair—how did she expect to operate as a vice president when the newest intern could order her around?
A tap on her shoulder interrupted her thoughts. It was Mr. Lopez. “Let’s go. It’s time for the interviews.”
She’d forgotten about this part. She wasn’t looking forward to it. “Oh . . . should I . . . should I put some clothes on?”
Mr. Lopez scowled. “Of course not. You do the interview naked.”
She got up in dismay and filed out with the other performers and onto the stage.
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