Chapter 7 – Rule #4 It’s not a relationship. It’s a transaction. He’s not your boyfriend.
CHAPTER SEVEN
KAITLIN
My hands are a mess, a riot of smeared bold acrylics in pastel hues.
I’m supposed to “get my hands dirty” making this painting; that’s the assignment.
Using the pads of my fingers to drag the vivid pigments across the canvas looks great, but my grimy paws are a different story.
Painting is such a joy for me, I can’t help but smile.
My phone starts vibrating. Using the clean back of one knuckle to accept the call, I manage to keep the screen clean. I had the foresight to put my earbuds in while my hands were clean. It’s Hunter, wanting to send me a request call. It’s my day off, but I don’t mind chatting while I work.
“Hot Tub Randy? Cool.” She connects us and hangs up. “Randy, how are you? It’s been a minute.”
“I’m great,” he says, and I strain to hear if the hot tub is whirring in the background. “Got the hot tub working again.”
“Your hot tub’s working again?”
“I fixed it myself. Couldn’t take the chance that they’d send an invoice to the house with the exact nature of the problem,” he says with a laugh.
“My wife would be most displeased.” We chat, catching up until he makes a soft, gloopy splash, sliding into the hot tub.
“She knows I have a thing for quicksand. She’s fine with that, but would not be nearly so fine about the repair bill. ”
“And you remembered to turn the jets off before adding the oatmeal this time?” I ask.
“I sure did. I’m not making that mistake again,” Randy replies, excited like a kid waiting to open birthday presents.
“My wife left for a girls’ weekend this morning, and I turned up the temp on the hot tub and went straight to the Costco and bought twenty-five of the family-sized bags of oatmeal, ten pounds each.
I told the nosy lady at the register I was buying it for a daycare.
I’m ordering online next time. I also got a bunch of cornstarch. It really helps with consistency.”
“And what have you learned?” Why do I persist in asking questions to which I do not want to know the answer?
“Forty or fifty bags would be perfect, but twenty-five is close enough without making cleanup a nightmare. I wonder what it’ll be like tomorrow after it sits.”
Gross, Randy. It’ll be fucking gross with more protein in it.
“Where are you?” I know exactly where he is, but he loves saying it. I mean, he really loves saying it.
“I’m in my hot… Oh my god, I’m sinking.” A guttural moan. “Oh no, it’s quicksand! I’ve stepped in quicksand, and I can’t get out. I’m sinking!”
You cannot make this shit up.
“Stop moving, or you’ll go under!” Teehee.
He sounds panicky, hamming it up. “I’m sinking in, oh god… quicksand!” He moans every time he says “quicksand.” “Kait, help me.” Randy won’t be getting an Oscar. Shameful levels of overacting are happening. The Actors Studio would not approve.
“When you start panicking, you go deeper into that life-threatening quicksand. Calm down, or you’ll sink. You’re in danger! You are in life-threatening peril!” I say “danger” and “life-threatening” a lot on our calls because it gets him going.
My palette is set up with white, a nice bright yellow, and multiple shades of electric pink, fuchsia, black, and lime green.
The assignment is to paint a traditional scene with a heavy emphasis on nontraditional colors, like a fruit bowl but with black and white paint.
I decided on a sailing ship with lots of black, fuchsia, and lime green.
The brown wood of the hull, cream sails, blue ocean, and white clouds will be traded for vivid tones.
Randy squeals, “Throw me a rope or a branch or something!”
“I’ll take that under advisement. I like how panicked you sound. I’m enjoying this soooo much.” I’m tormenting him and blending pigments.
We go back and forth like this for a while, him begging and me refusing. The slosh-slop grows louder. “Kait, help me!”
“No.” I sketch in the schooner with all of its sails unfurled. When I do this for myself, the work is colorful. I rarely use traditional colors. This is me being assigned to create in my personal style and getting a grade for it. #winningatlife
“Kait, what do you mean, no? Don’t let me die here.”
“What’s in it for me, Randy?” Shit. The tip of my braid touched my palette. Good thing acrylic is easy to get out of hair when it’s wet.
“What do you mean? I’m in quicksand. I could die.” He’s getting worked up, his voice pitchy as he flails.
“Watching you squirm and sink deeper and deeper is…” I let out a long moan. “Hot. It turns me on to see you helpless.” Faking ecstasy, I pant and moan.
“I’ll do anything.”
“Oh? I was going to help you, but my beautiful patent leather thigh-high boots with red soles are getting dirty.” If I’m wearing imaginary shoes, I’m wearing the expensive ones.
“But it’s up to my waist. I’m in so deep!”
I tease him for an eternity, telling him inch by inch what part of his body has submerged and threatening to leave him alone to sink until he’s feral, and the gloop gloop gloop sounds are getting faster and louder.
When he’s down to the last few minutes on his call package, I use my sexiest bossy voice.
“Randy, you’re my helpless quicksand bitch! ” Predictably, he comes his brains out.
“Oh my god, ohmygod, oh my god, I’m coming.” He moans. “In quicksand!” So melodramatic. So freaking loud.
I let his breathing slow before speaking. “Tell me your neighbors aren’t like five feet away.” That makes him laugh.
“I’m a few football fields and lots of trees away from my neighbors, thank god. Holy shit, that was good.” He sighs, content. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure. We’ll do it again tomorrow. It’ll be cooler, like real quicksand.” Thanks to him, I know a lot about quicksand: where to find it, how to get out of it, the recipe to fake it. Weird life skills, for sure.
“Tomorrow? Will you be around?”
“Yes.” My smile grows three sizes, shades of the Grinch stealing presents, when I say, “Miss Hunter will be too.”
“Miss Hunter.” He groans, as though he’s tasting her name. “She’ll make me lick her boots clean.”
I paint the rest of the afternoon away, taking overflow and request calls. I’m pleased with the ocean schooner. It looks like Key West and a pirate ship had a baby. I put the canvas aside to dry, and I’m getting ready to head into the office when the phone rings.
“Kaitlin? It’s Ana. How are you?” She must be helping answer the phones today.
“Great! I feel like I haven’t seen you in weeks. How goes the baby baking? How are my favorite honorary nephews?”
“We should meet them by Thanksgiving, which may explain why I feel like a turducken.” Her happiness is contagious, charming me into a grin as I imagine her patting her belly with affection. “I’m officially Punxatawny Phil. Six more weeks!”
“I can’t wait for your baby shower. I already placed an order for my favorite cookies,” I say with a laugh. She loves macarons as much as I do.
“It may be the first phone sex baby shower in history,” she laughs.
I thought it best to keep the phone sex women away from Ana’s very uptight family, who do not know what kind of business we’re in.
She’s heavily pregnant, her hand welded to the small of her back when she moves around the office.
Last week, she was lamenting that her vintage corduroy pants no longer fit.
It makes me sad too. Sometimes she runs around the office to make the swishing sound.
She’s a nut. We adore her. Even though she’s past morning sickness, she’s continued to start her workday later, and we’ve been seeing her more during the first hour or two of our shifts.
“I have a request for you. Would you be willing to take another call?”
“For you, I can take a call,” I say. “No rest for the wicked.”
“Okay, I’ll get back to you in a couple of minutes.”
When Jessica, Ana, and I started this madness, Jessica and I did calls, and Ana did the financial bits.
She tried doing calls, but she didn’t have the, errrr, tolerance for the nonsense, which is a nice way of saying it totally creeped her out.
We were the entire company back then. Now there are twelve—sometimes more—women on a busy shift.
Everything has changed. We celebrated surviving the first six months in business with a pizza because that was all we could afford.
“Kaitlin, his name is Henry Sterling. He can talk as long as he wants,” Ana says. “Have you thought about getting a private phone for him? It looks like he averages a solid four or five hours a week.”
A private line. A boundary breach with a pretty bow on it.
A “private line” is a garden-variety cell phone, but only he gets the number—direct access for the big spender.
It’s a perk for him. For me, it’s the crumbling of defenses. I like to keep my walls nice and high, me on this side, callers way the fuck over there on their side.
I’ve been resisting because I’m in that weird crush state where you’re totally enamored and preoccupied by someone.
It’s the opposite of she’s not that into you; it’s she’s freaking obsessed and can’t stop pondering the minutiae of you, and none of that is a good thing.
He’s a caller. Crushes don’t get you fired. Blurry boundaries do.
“Well,” I say, hedging. “I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Okay, no pressure. I know you like to keep things separate. He’s ready to go if you are?”
As a sex worker, I’m a toy you play with when no one is looking.
You stick me in the back of the closet so your friends don’t see me when they come over.
The private line is the opposite of the closet—it’s me walking into his real life with muddy shoes.
What if he prefers me at arm’s length while I’m doing everything I can to resist him?
“Kaitlin?” Ana interrupts my thoughts. “Kaitlin, can I connect you?”
“Sure, put him through.”