Supergirl: Don't Be Shy (Patreon)

The door closed resoundingly behind Kara. She jumped a little. It’d been a hell of a day. It promised to be a hell of a night. Even now, her mind hopelessly scrambled to make sense of it.

***

The eviction that morning, even though she’d only been a few days late. The insinuation from her landlord that there were other ways she could pay for her room… ironic, since here she was, doing that, but at the time, it’d seemed so important that he not be the one who…

She’d walked for hours, no place to go, no friends to stay with. How could there be, when she’d just moved to the city and everyone was so closed off, they seemed irritated by her trying to be friendly? It’d seemed like it’d taken an eternity for Kara to ruminate over what she could do for a little money… just enough to stay in her apartment until she found a new job, now that the one she’d moved out here for had proven to be vapor.

So that evening, though she had to change in a bus station bathroom—another eternity of debating with herself over a bus ticket home, about her parents seeing her defeated and being right about her and getting to be smug for the rest of their lives about her, because she couldn’t prove them wrong—she put on her nicest dress and her highest heels and a coat just to stay a little warm in the black-asphalt winter.

And she stood out there with the whores and the pushers and the needers and told herself she wasn’t like them. She just needed to make ends meet. It was just once and Kara promised herself she would only use her hands. Maybe show her body, but not let it be touched. And if they wanted pictures, she wouldn’t let them have her real name.

Maybe I could wear a mask… just be a pair of disembodied tits and bare buttocks, since that’s all anyone that looked at those kind of pictures could want to see… I’ll never let them have my name…

Kara wondered how far gone a person had to be when they had thoughts like that, equivocations, justifications. Did it make her special that she knew the twelfth-grade reading level words for those things? Or were all the other women on the sidewalk special too?

Was it bad luck that the first customer… the first john… who’d taken an interest in her, that he’d flashed a badge and told her to get into the backseat, and that if she didn’t cry he wouldn’t put handcuffs on? Or was it some of the other girls, old and worn out, seeing her fresh and ripe and not liking the competition?

Kara didn’t like to think another woman would do that to her. But then there were the pimps, the gangs, their turf. They had to be behind it, one way or the other, because the cop didn’t take her to any police station, he took her to what had to be a brothel.

It wasn’t Amsterdam, there weren’t girls behind glass windows or neon signs, but the atmosphere, the vibe… The rich red curtains and the plush purple carpets and even the houseplants seemed too verdant, too flowery, with creepers running up the pillars whose hollows they were built into. So the place seemed almost like a greenhouse, with all but a mist running along the ground, and the cigarette smoke that hazed the air did a good enough job of that.

Kara’s eyes stung. Her skin tingled, knowing it was in a place where she was a market item to be bought and sold. She knew she wasn’t meant for this. How had she come here? Which direction did she run to get back to normal. The decision she’d made to go through with this—to play the part of a whore, even before she went all the way—it couldn’t be so cataclysmic that there was no going back…

The madame was well-manicured more than pretty, with her wrinkled skin oiled to her sheen and her tired eyes behind chic glasses. She’d taken one dismissive look at Kara and then become intense. Scouring her closely. Badgering her with questions, even asking the cop if he’d ever seen her out on the street before.

Kara kept telling her that this was her first time doing this—eventually they decided she wasn’t a good enough liar for them not to believe her. Then the madame had taken a picture of her with her phone.

“Who are you sending that to?” Kara asked, now not sure she shouldn’t be wishing for the police station.

She would have to call her parents, she would have to make some excuse about how she hadn’t really been soliciting, but that was just embarrassing. Who knew what this was. Were they planning to sell her to some Saudi prince? To make a snuff movie with her? The vice cop looked strong, he could overpower her—who knew all the ways she might be trapped if they didn’t want her out of this house they so tightly controlled?

“A client,” the madame answered, as though it should be obvious. “Tell me something, girl—do you want to be a hooker or do you just want money?”

Kara’s mind was frazzled. This seemed like a trap, but how could she be trapped more than she already was? “To make money, of course.”

“With a minimum of labor. You don’t want to spend a whole night sucking cocks at fifty dollars a blow, do you?”

Kara blanched. Her face felt like it was having a blowtorch run over it. “No! God no! Of course not… I just need enough to make rent, please, that’s all…”

The madame waved off any further pleading. “This client is a special client. Very rich, very… well-connected. She has specific tastes.”

“She?”

The madame chortled. “Yes. A woman, even if she never quite admits it. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never—”

Her voice grew more acrid the more Kara protested her innocence: “You’ve never anything, apparently. But I doubt you’d be any more attracted to one of the johns you’d find on the street than to her. Why do you think men pay for it? Because they don’t like getting it for free?”

“I never really thought about it. The money’s the important thing, I suppose, but I didn’t want someone who was, someone that would…” Kara’s fists balled at her sides. “What does she want to do to me, exactly?”

“That’s between you and her.” The madame sounded like she was chiding her. “But I can tell you that she’s employed my girls before. They don’t come back scratched up, slapped around. Some of them say she doesn’t do anything with them. No chemistry. She’s comfortable enough with solitude that you have to really offer her something to part with it.”

It felt like a thick wad of paper had been shoved down Kara’s throat. “Then, if she and I don’t have chemistry—I’ve never had chemistry with another woman…”

“Worried you won’t get paid, even after you’ve done the hard part and swallowed your pride?”

Kara nodded her head.

“Well, yes and no, dearie. Our organization doesn’t like getting stiffed, not for any reason. But on the other hand, this is the kind of… ah, grande dame… that only pays when she wants to. Only she wouldn’t disrespect me like that. At a certain level, respect is a more valuable currency than money. And the more you give, the more you receive.”

Kara felt a bright flare of hope in her chest. “So I might, might make myself available to her, and nothing will happen, and I’ll still get paid?”

The madame shrugged. “Anything’s possible.”

“It’s at least a good gamble.”

“Gambles are for people with something to lose. All you’ve got to shed is the people you’ve pissed off by trying to turn a buck in this city without kicking a cut up to folks like me.”

“I didn’t mean any harm,” Kara whinged.

“Meaning is irrelevant. All that matters is desire and justifications. There are men who’d like to hurt women a lot more than they already do. You gave them an excuse to do so. Went into a junkyard with the dogs’ favorite cut of steak tied around your neck.” The madame reached out and touched her chin like she was polishing off one last imperfection before putting her artwork up on display. “You want this world? It’ll give you what you need. But never forget what you came here for. Give the client what she wants. Leave her satisfied. Take the money and run home. Let this be what happened to one night of your life, not what happened to you.”

Kara bit the inside of her cheek. It wasn’t like this was the 90s. She’d seen TV shows with lesbians, read books about them. She knew what she liked and she was pretty sure she could do those things to another woman. That was all there was to it, right?

And this woman, this client, if she were paying for it, she would tell Kara what she wanted. So all Kara would have to do was follow directions.

But a woman… it was strange, yes, but better than a man in some ways. Kara wouldn’t want a man who was old or smelly or anything that would make her not choose him back when she had a choice. The best case would be the Pretty Woman option—some handsome man who just needed a fling. But Kara knew that was a fantasy.

So… so a woman. Well, most girls experimented, didn’t they? She’d… thought about it in college. She’d looked. This was no different than what she’d already considered, only she would get paid for it. It would be good to be able to say she’d done it, had experienced it, and also she’d have rent money.

The madame could see her acquiescence. “I’ll let her hammer out the fine details with you. She always struck me as the type who likes to hear herself talk. Course, if I sounded like that, I’d probably like it too.”

“Then she’s… pretty?” Kara asked, not sure if it were better or worse that she be attracted to the client.

“She looks pretty, let’s put it that way. She looks pretty.”