Page 14 of Slow Burn

Ming flicked her black-lacquered, needle-sharp fingernails in Velvet’s direction. Velvet shut her mouth with a snap.

“Cigarettes,” Ming said. Velvet shook her head.

Ming lapsed into silence, stared out at the blank brick wall. She tapped a cigarette out of a silver case and lit it, dragging the smoke deep, blowing a hot fog out against the windowpane. Velvet watched the glowing tip of the cigarette with complete fascination.

“I’m concerned, Velvet. Take some vacation,” Ming said. She turned and smiled. “Two weeks.”

Velvet’s lips saidyes ma’am, but she was watching the cigarette. The hair on the back of her neck crawled. The smell was all wrong, not burning tobacco, burning—melting—she swallowed a gag. The cigarette flared bright red as Ming sucked, went ash-gray with masochistic disappointment when she stopped.

It wasn’t at all like Ming to be concerned. Not at all. And “vacation” was a word most girls heard right before a “special” job. One that put them in the hospital on a respirator. If they were lucky.

“Don’t make trouble.”

“No ma’am.”

“And don’t talk to anybody.”

Ming drifted over, and Velvet looked hard at the floor. There was a tuft of red hair near her chair.

Ming’s hand felt as cold as ice on her cheek, long nails a sharp pressure near her ear. Velvet didn’t want to see her eyes.

“You know,” Ming said, very slowly, “I’m thinking of moving you up. No more hotel tricks. Very specialized stuff. What do you think of that?”

Velvet kept staring at the floor.

“That’d be great,” she said, and ignored the fluttery feeling in her stomach. “Really great.”

The smell of smoke was greasy in the back of her throat, like mucous.

“Now go with Paolo,” Ming said, and the icy hand left her face. “He needs a little company.”

Me too, Velvet thought, and tried not to think about Paolo too much. She’d never done Paolo; she wasn’t really in shape to be creative, either. But she’d fake it.

Like Ming always said: business was always a pleasure for somebody.

Paolo propped himself up with pillows on the king-sized bed of the guest room, and stared straight over her head while she went down on him. Her headache continued to throb, a steady backbeat rhythm. After three or four minutes of industrious licking and sucking, Velvet heard a click and looked up to see Paolo holding the TV remote. Behind her, canned laughter swelled out of the set.

Gilligan’s Island, she thought as she went back to work.That’s the difference between paying customers and freebies.

Paolo poured himself a glass of Johnny Walker Black Label from a bottle next to him on the night-stand. He drained it in slow controlled gulps, never looking at her. Except for the fact that he still had a rock-hard boner, she might not have even been there. She tried moaning louder, until his heavy face collapsed into a frown and she realized she was interfering with the TV. She felt like an X-rated mime.

The oily taste of the condom (plain peach-colored, nothing fancy for Paolo) reminded her unpleasantly of the time she’d sucked a balloon into her windpipe at the age of six. She shut her eyes and tried not to think about suffocating, but then she started thinking about burning, and the smell of smoke, and had a bad few seconds of panic while her mouth kept on mindlessly doing its lonely job.

Right about the time she was considering biting Paolo’s dick just to remind him she was there, he came. She only knew that because the reservoir tip of the condom filled up. She performed an obligatory moaning orgasm, mostly to keep in practice. He craned to look over her shoulder and turned the volume up.

She had performed solo before, but usually the guy was across the room, not in her mouth. It all seemed pretty damn disheartening. Still, she reminded herself as she sat up—it could have been worse. Burt—

The thought occurred to her (oh, bad timing for her still-rolling stomach) that Burt could have done his flaming marshmallow impersonation while she’d had his dick in her mouth. Suddenly, Paolo looked like a bargain. She peeled the condom off and wrapped it deftly in a tissue before tossing it—a three-pointer—into the corner wastebasket.

Paolo was completely engrossed in the program. She sat for a few minutes watching with him. Gilligan picked coconuts. The Professor talked about building a generator. The Skipper complained.

“Maryanne or Ginger?” she asked. It took a second for Paolo to distract himself from the intense drama on the screen enough to notice she’d spoken.

“What?”

“If you were on the island, would you go for Mary-anne or Ginger?”

Paolo considered for a full minute, staring at the flickering set with narrowed serious eyes.

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