Chapter 33 Stripping His Way through Head School
Stripping His Way Through Head School
“I cannot believe you two agreed to this,” I mumbled, sinking down deeper into my seat.
Addie furrowed her brow. “She’s Clara Mason. How the hell do you say no to her?”
“Besides, she thinks this is for science,” Leelah pointed out. “If we turned her down, she would’ve wanted to know why, and neither of us wanted to blow your cover.”
The atmosphere in this club was nothing like the movies.
Its refined finishes and inset lighting made it look more like the strip club on a spaceship for high-end sex fiends, and the whisper-core horny playlist would probably be as dated and cringey in twenty years as the sax solo in “Careless Whisper” is today.
The dancers moved around a central, W-shaped catwalk, with the VIP tables positioned at each of the five points of it. Clara had apparently called ahead for us, so obviously we were at the central apex—the I-est of VIPs.
The dancers paid us special attention, each of them giving us the best angles, the sluttiest of teases, the most brazen of removals. But every time one approached, I suddenly found the ice in my old fashioned very, very interesting.
“Scout, you’re supposed to look at the dancers, you know,” Addie said as a particularly flexible blond lady pranced away at the conclusion of her number.
“She’s right. Being here is a good thing, really.
Not for whatever Clara thought we were doing, but good for the purposes of your experiment, I mean.
We already have your baseline reading.” Leelah leaned across to me, displaying her phone screen.
The application showed a readout of my brain, and with a simple slider on the bottom, she could control whether we looked at past readings or current ones.
First, she showed me one from half an hour ago, when we were in the car on the way over and I was blissfully unaware of our destination.
“Here at the club, you’ll experience lust, which we can then compare to your readings when you see Hudson.
If the same parts of your brain light up when you see him, you’ll know it’s nothing more than an infatuation.
If this part here lights up, though, it’s clear that it’s not just his pants you want to get into. ”
“It’s his heart.”
“Yeah, I got that, Addie, thanks.”
“Might as well enjoy it,” Leelah said, pocketing the phone. “Relax. Have another drink. It’s on Clara’s card. I, for one, am going to have a good time tonight.”
Oh, and enjoy themselves they did.
“Can you believe how hot these people are?” Addie cackled. “It’s way better than the dancers at Funky Bananas. These guys even have all their teeth.”
The cocktails flowed. Many, many cocktails flowed. There were many whoops and hollers. And as the night wore on, my companions only got rowdier and more ridiculous.
I, on the other hand, had a difficult time with my surroundings.
Between sets, several projectors played semi-pornographic videos erratically spliced together to music against the gossamer curtains. They reminded me of Hudson.
Hell, everything reminded me of Hudson. I considered asking Leelah to let me look at my brain scan, to see what areas lit up on the EEG just by thinking about him, but I tried to discipline my thoughts.
I needed to think about random hotties. Not Hudson. It was for science, dammit. How the hell could I be expected to know if I loved him or not without a clean brain scan?
A losing battle. I needed a breather. I rose from my overstuffed silver chair.
“I’m going to run to the restroom.”
“Try to find a single fun bone in your body while you’re there,” teased Leelah, scanning the menu for her next martini selection.
Then, noticing the particularly impressive package on the dancer taking the stage, Addie cackled. “Or you could just borrow his!”
Ignoring them both, I beat out a hasty retreat.
In the privacy of the black-and-gold, low-lit bathroom, I wrangled my breathing.
It felt wrong to be here without Hudson. When he’d texted me about meeting up tonight, I’d told him I had “work stuff” and left it at that. But now, in an evening surrounded by nude people with the express intent of testing my brain’s sexual responses, I couldn’t help but feel dirty.
I knew that I wasn’t. Looking at other people wasn’t cheating, and even if it was, Hudson and I were not dating. We’d never promised exclusivity.
But that was the problem with opening your heart to someone else. You start to carve out bigger and bigger places for them to fit. And when they’re not there, even for a few hours, their absence hollows you.
The worst part was, I couldn’t even talk to him about it. If I rang him up and tried, I’d have to tell him about my experiment. About my scientific pursuit of the truth regarding our love.
No. Too embarrassing. I’d just have to bear the weight of this academic pursuit myself. I stared myself down in the mirror, put on a fresh coat of lipstick, and steeled myself for what was to come.
I would make myself horny at this strip club. Then I would find Hudson, check my neural activity, figure out if the data suggested I love him, then fuck his brains out and/or declare my feelings.
You know. Normal relationship stuff.
What was not normal? Returning to my party on the floor to find Leelah and Addie practically bouncing in their seats.
We’d fully reached folie à deux territory with these two, them feeding off each other’s boundless energies.
The empty shot glasses—ordered, consumed, and abandoned all in the span of my absence—only confirmed that diagnosis.
“Guess what?” Addie spluttered.
“What?”
“We bought you a private dance!”
As it turned out, Leelah was a giggly drunk. Any compunctions she’d had about this experiment of ours dissolved in the bubbles of her champagne, heightening her already bright personality.
“Clara bought you a dance,” Addie amended through rum hiccups. “We just came up with the idea. Unfortunately, this club has not activated your horny brain. The scans aren’t giving us anything. You need a more targeted approach if we want the EEG to register your sexual arousal.”
Scientific principle pretty firmly holds the possibility for infinite parallel realities, each slightly different than this one. In any other version of myself and this moment, I would have run screaming (and possibly crying) from the threat of a stripper thrusting their crotch in my face.
Living in this universe, though, I sat my ass down in the chair and waited for my dance.
I needed to know the truth about what was going on in my brain—the irrefutable, data-confirmed truth. This was the best way I knew how to uncover it.
“What, Scout?” Leelah asked after my pause. “You’re going to turn us down?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just preparing.”
“We can always cancel it,” Addie said. “If you’re scared about what your brain scan might show.”
“Is that it?” Leelah turned on me. “Did you ask me to read your brain and now you’re finally scared of what you might see?”
Fuck that.
“No, I’m not scared.”
Except I was. At least when I looked up to see two of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen exit the Platinum Room, the special, cordoned-off space for the private dances.
The first was a short, stacked blonde with all-natural, all-perk breasts and the body of an Olympic gymnast. The second was a Celtic king with unruly red curls and a promising package hidden beneath his tight black clothes.
Double trouble. I didn’t even want to know what Clara’s credit card statement would look like after this.
“Is that them?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm,” Leelah said. “Clara told us to get only the best for you.”
My nerves turned to fire. Which then turned into a raging inferno when I just happened to look up and see someone come through the club’s front door.
Hudson Fuckin’ Bailey.
My vision tunneled around him.
Of all the strip joints in all the world, he had to walk into mine.
My first thought was: This is the worst coincidence of all time.
My second thought was: We’re dating and he went to a strip club without me?
My third thought was: You’re not dating, you have no right to be jealous.
And my fourth thought was: There’s no such thing as coincidences.
Not when you’ve got meddling friends around.
I turned on them both, hissing low. “What the hell did you two do?”
Leelah winced. “I may have called him.”
“No way!” Addie nearly spit out her drink. “You too?”
“What?”
Leelah’s speech slurred slightly as she bristled. “I thought it would be instructive. That you could compare your two options—sexy strangers and Hudson—and see the results more quickly than running the two tests separately. But…I can now see from your expression that it wasn’t such a good idea.”
“You think?”
Addie was much less apologetic. “And I just thought it would be funny.”
“What, exactly, did you tell him?”
“He texted me and asked if I knew where you were. He’s been trying to get in touch with you and couldn’t. He was worried. So I told him.”
Leelah nodded. “Same.”
With friends like this…
“You both are on my shit list.”
Shrugging, Addie sipped her cocktail again. “We’ll live.”
A response boiled to the tip of my tongue. She didn’t care, waving and raising her voice over the music. “Hudson! Hudson, we’re over here! Pull up a seat! We’re getting bottle service.”
The contents of my nearly empty drink were now incredibly interesting. I’m not sure I was ashamed that Hudson had found me here, and I wasn’t embarrassed, exactly.
What was I talking about? Of course I was embarrassed.
I was wearing an electrode headband and taunting myself with other sexy bodies so I could delve into my subconscious electrical impulses to determine if I’d really fallen for him.
A normal person would have just known. I, on the other hand, put more stock in data than myself.
How was I going to explain this?
“Sorry to interrupt the party,” I heard him say from somewhere over my shoulder.
“Not at all,” Leelah said. “We’re just getting started.”
“I didn’t realize this was a girls-night activity. I couldn’t get ahold of you, Scout, and, uh, so I asked around and…You know what? I’ll just head out.”
That seemed perfectly reasonable to me.
“No way, dude,” Addie said. “Pull up a chair! Tonight’s on Clara—and you’ve earned a little R&R. Isn’t that right, Scout?”
He deserves all the R&R in the world, but he doesn’t deserve to be stuck here, peer-pressured into watching me get a lap dance from two strangers.
I was about to say as much. But apparently my vote didn’t count, because no sooner had Addie gestured to a scantily clad waitress for another chair than my two strippers materialized.
I didn’t even want to imagine what my brain scan looked like now.