I think I was more nervous about being the “Best Woman” for Glen’s wedding than Glen was about getting married.

Which made some sort of sense, I guess. All Glen had to do that week was show up and marry the love of his life.

I, on the other hand, had to put together a perfect sendoff for my best friend’s bachelorhood, while explaining to everyone I interacted with along the way what a “Best Woman” was, and how the bride could possibly be okay with one existing.

Apart from appointing me to this role, Glen made it clear that he wanted a pretty traditional event. Strippers, too much drinking, questionable decisions we’d talk about in coded, haunted whispers for the rest of our lives, the whole bit.

The bride, for her part, didn’t mind at all. Gemma was probably the most fun-loving, least insecure person I’d ever met, and she’d jumped on the excuse to track down some male performers to treat her and her bridesmaids to a roughly similar experience.

And if Gemma didn’t mind, who was I to argue?

So, I threw myself into it. All the way. I spent months on research and planning. I made a list of every club within a twenty-mile radius of Portland and combed through reviews, which ranged from intriguing to gross to obviously fabricated by the competition.

I made dozens of calls verifying which ones served drinks (a surprising number didn’t), what their “private party” specials actually involved (the descriptions were frustratingly yet promisingly vague), and which ones would even let me in the front door (almost all of them, to my pleasant surprise).

I researched the etiquette too, for my own reference, and in anticipation of playing referee to Glen’s three groomsmen. I wasn’t planning a once-in-a-lifetime night of debauchery just for us to get kicked out in the first half hour.

The groomsmen made no end of jokes about this. They called me “den mother” a lot, and jokingly solicited my approval on their outfits, their colognes, their dollar bill-throwing technique. It was in good fun, mostly.

As usual, Tom pushed it about fifteen percent too far, which prompted Evan to ask Glen why we kept taking Tom out in public. The answer, as always, was a half-joking, “I dunno, habit?”

The five of us had all known each other since elementary school. The guys were awkward, airheaded, way too in love with how edgy they all thought they were, and it was no wonder at all that Glen was the only one of the bunch to pair off so far. But they were generally harmless.

Still, when we got to the lobby of the Angel Room club, I took a little pleasure in realizing that I wasn’t the only one who was nervous about the whole thing. Tom kept wiping his palms on his suit pants, and Mark looked like he was expecting to spend the rest of his life in a secret prison when the security guard found a metal ballpoint pen in his pocket.

Finally, we were past the door and inside the dim, windowless, surprisingly mellow-feeling club. The walls and ceiling were all painted sky blue with clouds. Imitation candles bobbed their little plastic flames on every table.

The main stage was low enough to be surrounded by a tight ring of armchairs and a convenient surface for resting drinks. There were only a couple of men already settled there, quietly watching a beautiful, willowy woman in purple lingerie spin dizzyingly fast around one of the poles, holding on with her thighs.

I’d imagined having to elbow our way in, just to find somewhere to stand where we could see the main stage, based on the few times we’d gone to watch live entertainers in bars.

We all glanced at each other, a few eyebrows pricked up with excitement, and the five of us jumped in to claim all of the chairs along one of the short sides of the stage. Glen was smack in the middle, on my right.

The blaring dance music reached a break, and the DJ’s voice cut in over the speakers, quick as an overcaffeinated auctioneer.

“Once again, that’s Violet on the main stage, Violet on the main stage! New song starting now, for all you lovely souls enjoying your three minutes, seven minutes, or more in heaven!”

The next song began with a heavy beat. Violet spread her legs into an upside-down split in the air, and then flipped herself down into a crouch on the stage. She walked her hands up the pole until she was in a standing position, leaned against it, and teased the edges of her bikini top with her fingers.

On the perfect dramatic beat, she pulled the bikini cups aside and pushed herself off of the pole. Crossing each foot slowly in front of the other, she sauntered across the stage, bouncing her small, completely exposed breasts in her hands.

I didn’t know how anyone could possibly be so confident walking in those ten-inch heels after how fast we’d just seen her spinning, let alone doing it partly naked in front of a crowd. Her inner ears had to be more finely tuned than a jeweler’s laser.

Just watching her from the comfort of my chair, I had an off-balance, unsettled sensation through my whole body.

A year ago, back before I realized I was bi, I would have converted that sensation into blistering jealousy faster than you could blink.

Thankfully, I’d found I was much more comfortable looking at beautiful women (and talented women, and effortlessly cool women, and all-of-the-above women) now that I understood why I reacted to them so strongly. I could admire Violet with the awe she deserved, without giving a second thought to how her awesomeness reflected on me. I let my eyes follow her, soaking in everything about her, from her rhythm and balance, to her powerfully muscular arms, to the way she smacked her pleasantly rounded ass against the pole as if she had no fear whatsoever of her own jiggly softness.

Watching her was easy, liberating, even relaxing, until she turned her head, and started watching me right back.

She swished those impossibly long heels back and forth, carrying her right toward me. Without giving me a moment’s break from her eyes, she knelt down on the edge of the stage, picked my hand up off the drink counter, and pressed it right to her breast.

All the guys erupted with laughter, whoops, and wolf-whistles.

I could feel all the blood rushing up to my face, and down to other places. Part of me wanted to sink through the floor, but I was smiling too, so widely that it hurt, and I couldn’t stop.

We hadn’t been sitting here two minutes, and already I’d broken what I’d thought was the most essential rule of strip club attendance, the one I’d drilled into all the guys accordingly: we were here to look and maybe be touched, not to do the touching.

But I supposed that was up to the dancers, when to make exceptions.

I wondered how often they did this, how often she did this. Was this a scripted move aimed at whoever happened to be sitting in this seat at this particular moment of the evening? Or was it just what Violet liked to do when she caught an abjectly slack-jawed sapphic woman staring up at her, from among all the playing-it-cool men? How often did that happen? How much did she already know about me just from recognizing a type?

Could she tell that hers was the first breast I’d ever touched that wasn’t my own?

More importantly, what did I do now?

I really wanted to move my fingers, to explore more of the enticing springiness of her breast — so different from the you-could-literally-suffocate-someone-with-them weight of mine — but I didn’t know how far this implicit permission she was giving me stretched.

Reading my uncertainty, she guided my thumb back and forth, right over her nipple. My own nipples tingled, like a sympathetic vibration, as I felt the firmness of hers.

“First time?” she asked, effortlessly dialing in her volume to be intimate yet audible over the pounding base.

I opened my mouth, but couldn’t force sound out of it.

“It’s just that I haven’t seen you around before,” Violet prodded gently.

“Oh. Yeah,” I managed to say. That was the kind of first time she was talking about.

“What’s the occasion?” she asked.

“It’s, uh… he’s the… it’s his party,” I mumbled, pointing at Glen’s tuxedo T-shirt with the word “GROOM” printed across the chest.

“Oh my god, congratulations!” Violet exclaimed, turning to look at Glen and caressing his cheek with her free hand. “I’m so glad you decided to celebrate here! I want to see lots of you tonight.”

Glen leaned into her touch, with the faintly guilty enjoyment I was expecting to see on his face for the rest of the night.

“And lots of you too,” she said, looking back at me.

I don’t remember exactly when or how my hand left her breast, or when I was able to breathe again afterward. I just remember Glen clapping me on the shoulder and shouting, “I like this place already!” over both the music and the ringing in my ears.

Then Violet was on her hands and knees facing away from us, untying her little purple thong, and Glen was very carefully showering singles over her rhythmically flexing ass.

She grabbed his hand next, and guided him through spanking her lightly with each new dollar bill.

“Oh, hell yeah!” said Glen. “If you insist, babe.”

Violet arched her back, far enough that we could see her pussy, just… being there, right out in the open, like that was an everyday thing, which, for her, I guess it was.

Looking over her shoulder at me, she licked her middle finger and reached between her legs to touch herself, while Glen went on slapping her ass, with a fresh dollar in his palm each time.

Fanning through the carefully prepared stack of cash I’d arranged in my purse for the day, I put a couple of fives on the stage next to her. Just being in such unbelievably close proximity with what I was seeing, that felt like it was worth… well, a lot more, actually. But I had to pace myself.

Eventually, Violet moved on to work the rest of the stage, though she didn’t get quite as up close and personal with anyone else.

“That was Violet on the main stage!” the DJ reminded us as the song came to a close, and Violet gathered up her tips and discarded lingerie. “Violet’s available for three, seven, fourteen or twenty minutes in heaven! Coming next to the main stage, Wicked! For now, here’s a brand-new song for all you lucky souls back there in the clouds.”

The stage remained empty as the song started up, and in seconds, a woman in a little white toga, halo headband, and feathered wings came up behind Glen and me. She leaned her head low between us, showing off even more cleavage than I could have.

“Are you Briony?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered, clicking back into business mode, prepared to explain my presence as many times as it took to get Glen the experience he wanted.

“I’m Seraph, we spoke on the phone,” she said simply, and turned her head. “And you must be Glen! It’s so good to meet you in person.”

Seraph administered a slow, lingering kiss to the back of Glen’s neck, while somehow at the same time performing a head count with her eyes, matching our party to the one in her notes.

“Feel free to enjoy the main stage as much as you like,” she said. “But whenever you’re ready, we’ve got your private party cloud waiting for you.”

“Oh, I’m very ready for that,” said Glen, getting up.

I tapped the others on the shoulders and gathered them together to follow.

“We’ll be sending in a steady rotation of angels to keep you company,” Seraph explained as she led us up an aisle between more rows of armchairs. She had that same zigzagging saunter, and made it look impossibly natural. “No need to keep track of the number of dances, it’s all included in your package price as far as the house is concerned, just tip your angels when they make you happy.”

She smiled sweetly and pulled back a hanging blue curtain to let us into the “cloud.”

It was an irregularly shaped room with rounded corners and artificial golden light streaming in at diagonal angles. Cushioned benches swooped outward from the walls, full of billowy, swirling cloud shapes that managed to include plenty of comfortable spots for two or three or even more people to cuddle comfortably together.

Another set of blue curtains sectioned off a space at the end, smaller than an office cubical, with a gold sign on it that read, “Little Heaven.”

“Only one guest and one angel in the Little Heaven at a time,” said Seraph, with the very slight firmness her sweet voice allowed. “But, if any of you get the urge for even more privacy, just let us know, and any of the angels can talk you through your add-on options. You’ll also get regular complimentary cocktail service right to your cloud. What can I get you started with?”

“Water for me,” I said. “Driving.”

“Champagne!” Glen answered so shamelessly that no one even paid attention to Tom when he made his usual show of requesting a whiskey sour — the perfectly masculine combination of high alcohol content, unpleasant taste, and a name that made you feel like a creepy, safari-going English gentleman from the nineteenth century when you ordered it.

Evan and Mark stuck to the same rum and Coke they’d been drinking since we were fifteen.

When Seraph left for the bar with all our orders, there was a moment of awkward silence, as we figured out how far apart from each other we should sit on the benches.

If the guys hadn’t figured this kind of thing out in the course of sharing locker rooms and bathrooms all our lives, how was I supposed to?

I just sat, and pretended I knew it was right.

“So…” Evan broke the silence. “Does anyone else still feel like we’re about to get in big trouble just for being here?”

I snorted and put my hand up. My hand that had just been on the breast of another woman, in front of a roomful of people, and I didn’t even know her real name.

Mark and Evan followed suit, then Glen. Tom was the last holdout, but eventually, he sighed and joined in.

“Good!” said Glen, vibrating with enthusiasm. “That’s the point! It’s all about the thrill of doing something that feels wrong and dangerous, but really isn’t. It’s about breaking those old hangups while we can, before we’re too busy passing them on to kids of our own or whatnot. We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re all adults here, respectfully purchasing the services of some adult businesswomen. Nobody’s cheating, or lying—”

“Oh, I’m definitely lying to my mom next week,” said Mark. “When she asks what the party was like.”

“Moms don’t count,” said Tom.

“Can you imagine Pastor Martin’s face, if he ever found out?” I asked, before I could properly consider whether that was a party-benefitting thing to say.

The guys winced in unison.

“Just what I wanted to be thinking about tonight,” said Tom. “Our youth pastor’s bald, wrinkly face. Thanks, Bri.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

I was not in the habit of apologizing to Tom. It tended to encourage him too much. But this time, he had a point.

“Okay, Pastor Martin was a dick, though,” said Glen. “I mean, we’re old enough to not mince words about that, right? He was a straight-up dick.”

“Oh yeah,” Mark agreed, then broke into an eerily accurate impression of Pastor Martin’s reedy voice. “The girl you’re holding hands with is someone’s future wife! Now, how do you think your brother in Christ would feel about that?”

Tom joined in with a less precise but still substantially accurate, “Every lustful act robs four people of God’s marital gifts!”

“Oh my god, oh my god,” Evan sighed, putting his head in his hands. “Did you all get the same speech about nocturnal emissions? I mean, probably not you, Briony, but…. Oh.”

The awkward silence returned, this time distinctly focused on me. It felt as if I were taking up an awful lot of space, what with the distractingly large breasts and hips I’d always had a hard time hiding to the adults’ satisfaction, even in middle school, and now the rainbow highlights I’d given myself when I’d declared myself one of those people, who were the monsters in about half of Pastor Martin’s sermons.

My parents had barely spoken to me since.

I could have told the others stories. But now wasn’t the time for stories that might not be able to generate their own laugh tracks.

I let the silence stretch to just the right devastating length before casually cutting through it.

“No, please, I’d love to hear more about how traumatic Saturday night fellowships were for you.”

I gave them all a good-sport grin, and they laughed, more from relief than anything else.

“Seriously, though, the stuff he said to you guys was messed up too,” I said. “It’s okay to say so.”

“It was, right?” Evan exclaimed.

“Yay, sex positivity!” Glen cheered, patting me on the back and raising an imaginary glass over his head, just in time for Seraph to return and replace it with a real flute of champagne. “Oh, sweet!” he said, bringing it down to his lips. “Like magic.”

“Do you need another minute to yourselves?” Seraph asked, visibly assessing the vibe of the room, reverse engineering the seriousness that had just threatened it. “Or are you ready for company?”

Glen drummed his hand excitedly on his knee. “Company. Definitely company.”

#

The first angel to visit our cloud was a tiny woman, probably less than five feet without her heels.

Blonde pigtails, gummy bear earrings, pink dress with a tulle skirt in the back and no skirt at all in the front. She entered with a twirl.

“Hey, I’m Lolly. Are ya ready to play with me?” she asked in a crisp Australian accent.

I cheered — it seemed like the thing to do — and Glen joined me. The others nodded with grave seriousness.

The DJ on the loudspeaker announced that a new song was starting, and I planted my hands firmly on the bench on either side of me, preparing myself not to move them unless Lolly specifically told me to.

Like Violet, Lolly started with me.

“Wow,” she said, straddling my lap and running fingers through my hair. “We don’t get a lot of women, especially not at bachelor parties. You two must be really close.”

“Like siblings,” Glen gave his usual answer. “All of us, really.”

“Aww, that’s so cool.” Lolly ran a hand down my neck, over my breasts, and down to the gap in the front of her tulle skirt. “Not too much like siblings, though, I hope,” she said, rubbing her pink lace thong. “Not the kind of siblings who would have to cover their eyes if they accidentally saw this.”

She turned her hand around, fit it between my legs, and stroked me through the yoga pants I’d specifically bought for the occasion.

All the advice articles had said to wear soft materials, to avoid chafing or scratching the dancers’ skin. No one had mentioned the benefit of how much you could feel through those materials.

I gasped out loud. Tom whooped.

My head tilted back, nearly knocking over the glass of water Seraph had left on the flat section of “cloud” behind me. Lolly kissed the exposed skin of my throat. I moved reflexively back up and toward her, and she met my face with her chest, surrounding me on both sides with her perky, barely lace-covered breasts, knocking them back and forth against my cheeks.

Her hand kept on rubbing, and holy shit, holy shit, this was so much more than what I’d ever imagined a lap dance would involve. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Lolly knew exactly where to find my nerve endings. She presumably had them in the same places. But I’d never been touched so precisely, so effectively, by someone I hadn’t had to teach how.

“I bet you’re a sweet girl, just like me,” said Lolly. “You try to be all sour and grown up, but you still get so excited you can’t sit still, every time you see what the world is really made of. Sweetness. Sunshine.” She fluttered my hair with her fingers. “Rainbows.”

I was excited all right, and sitting still was a major challenge. I kept my hands firmly to myself, digging my fingers into the bench until my knuckles turned white, but my hips were beginning to move on their own.

I prayed that wouldn’t offend her.

Lolly giggled, riding my rising and falling knees, and didn’t seem bothered at all.

Jesus, the sensation was building so fast. My friends were all watching this happen in riveted silence. Were they actually going to end up seeing me—

Lolly giggled again and rolled over onto Evan’s lap beside me.

“What about you?” she asked him. “Do you still remember that life is supposed to be fun?”

“I, uh…” he choked up as hard as I had. “I’m not sure I ever really knew that….”

“Oh, that’s so sad!” said Lolly, walking her fingers down his chest to his skinny abs. “I’d better help teach you.”

She found a very firm surface for her fingers to walk on when she reached the crotch of his suit slacks. It was probably for the best that none of the guys had joined me in yoga pants.

Lolly climbed down onto the floor between Evan’s legs, nudged his erection upright through the folds of his clothes, and mimed licking it from bottom to top, her tongue barely a millimeter from the fabric.

She smacked her lips like it was the best popsicle she’d ever tasted, and then ran her thumb quite firmly over the same path her tongue had less than skimmed.

Evan would know better than I, but it sure looked like she knew her way around a penis just as well as a vulva.

“Oh, wow, uh… hello there,” said Evan.

I wanted to laugh, just a little, because I had almost said the exact same thing when she’d started touching me like that. But I couldn’t make a sound.

Now I was the one watching in riveted silence, buzzing all over and resisting the urge to grind against the bench like an embarrassingly ill-trained pet.

Lolly made her way around to each of us, stopping for a little personal attention in every lap, though not for quite as long as she’d spent on me.

She saved Glen for last.

“Your fiancée was very, very generous to share you one last time,” Lolly said, unzipping her lace and tulle dress and dropping it on the floor.

She had nothing under it but that minimalist pink G-string.

“She’s one in a billion,” Glen agreed.

Lolly straddled one of his legs and put her hands on his chest.

“I love knowing what it means when I do this,” she said, grinding slowly against his thigh, bringing her hand down to stroke him through his pants too. “It’s like you’re a limited-edition toy, on loan from a collector. Too bad I can’t take you out of the packaging.”

She toyed with his waistband and gave him a quizzical look, probably checking to see if he’d tell her she actually could.

He didn’t.

“The difference…” he gasped with each stroke of her hand, “is that I’m…limited edition for love… not for… profit through manufactured scarcity.”

“Oh my god, you are just the sweetest thing!” Lolly said without a trace of disappointment. “That’s okay. There’s plenty I can do with the packaging on.”

She sure could.

We didn’t need to pay attention to the DJ’s announcements of new songs, according to Seraph, but we could still hear them from our cloud. A song and a half went by while Lolly worked on Glen, rubbing and grinding and moaning until she reached a climax that was either real or a world-class performance, complete with squeaks and muscle tremors.

Then she kissed him on the cheek, whispered, “Thanks for making me a part of your big day,” and pulled her dress back on.

She thanked us all for our tips and skipped, skipped, in ten-inch heels, back out to the main room, waving back at us for as long as she could see us.

#

Next came Wicked, the one we’d missed seeing next on the main stage. She was actually about my size, which is to say almost twice as big as Lolly, and she made it look amazing in a strappy black dress with an underbust corset. Her headband had devil horns, and her false nails were pointed at the tips and painted with exquisitely detailed flames.

She stepped up onto the benches and walked right across them between all our legs, getting her red stiletto heels unnervingly close, but never quite too close, to each crotch she passed. Every so often, she’d slide one stocking-clad foot out of its shoe and give one of us a high-pressure rub with it.

I’d never really understood the appeal of feet, but I had to admit, she had nice ones for a dancer, and with plenty of fabric safely in between, I got to relax my semi-germophobic side and enjoy her talented toes.

Walking the bench also put her at the perfect height to shake her ass right in front of most of our faces. She could get some serious speed with that shake, exercising precise control over muscles I hadn’t even known existed.

#

It didn’t take me long to lose count, but at some point, there was Sativa, who carried the distinct musk of her name and stretched out across three of our laps, guiding an incredibly casual conversation about our favorite breakfast cereals. It felt just like hanging out with a good friend we hadn’t seen in a while, except for the part where she was unhurriedly touching herself the whole time.

There was Sky, who brought out some of the classic lap dance moves I’d been expecting, rubbing her ass right against our laps while smiling coyly over her shoulder at us. I understood why it was a classic. It was a hands-free way to put the friction right on the guys’ readily available erections. I wouldn’t have thought I’d get anything out of it other than a nice show, but Sky was so skinny and so strong that she could rub my clit quite forcefully with nothing but the back edge of her hip bone.

There was Nirvana, who did some incredible contortion work. She could arch her back far enough to sixty-nine someone backward.

By that, I mean, she could start, facing you, with her head upright between your legs, put her hands on the bench, and hoist her lower body up into a handstand. Her legs would drape over your shoulders, putting her pussy right in front of your face, while her own face was still right where it started.

She still had her lingerie on when she did it, but even the possibility was amazing. And I could feel the wetness of her breath through my pants when she nuzzled me with her chin.

#

Then there was Piety, who spent a whole song stripping out of a full-length nun’s habit, to reveal nipples pierced with thick bars, and a pair of full tattoo sleeves that extended onto her chest in a tangle of spiked chains.

When she was on my lap, she rubbed those piercing bars right against my own nipples, and then up to my face.

I didn’t make presumptions. I was so careful not to.

But after several seconds of her rubbing one of those bars against my lips, it seemed clear enough that she wanted me to suck.

I did. I kissed the heavenly textures of cool steel and warm, silky, hardening skin, for as long as she let me.

#

Even sipping on nothing but water, it was hard to call myself sober at any point during the party.

The whole experience was intoxicating. The angels’ visits were almost like the dreams that used to leak through the shell of faux-straightness I’d built around my brain, except that they were more varied, not bound by my one paltry imagination.

I was fully aware that the angels were performers, like those you’d interact with in a living museum, but that faint sheen of polished unreality did nothing to drain the heat from their presence.

The word artistry kept coming to mind, in contexts where I would never have expected it.

On top of the sheer awe I was feeling, there was a heavy chemical effect to being touched, affectionately, intimately, over and over again, with none of the expected pacing or resolution of sex.

Staying there in that limbo was so much more pleasant than I would have imagined. There were occasional moments of frustration when a dance ended, or a dancer moved on, but those feelings faded away almost instantly into the hazy background euphoria of wanting — and getting — forbidden extremes of a beautiful stranger’s attention.

At least, that was what it was like for me.

In one of the gaps between angels, Tom asked, badgered, and finally begged Evan to switch seats with him, so that he could be next to me, on the other side from Glen.

Evan eventually relented.

“You know,” Tom said, when he plunked down onto the bench next to me, “I was a little bit skeptical when Glen told me, but I’m glad you’re with us tonight.”

“Probably not as glad as I am,” I laughed, too giddy to be offended.

“No, seriously,” said Tom. He was at least four whiskey sours deep by then. “I was thinking, is it going to be weird objectifying women in front of a woman we know? But it’s like bringing a puppy along as your wingman. You being here gives us all this, like, nonthreatening person legitimacy. It’s great.”

“Oh, Tom, what would you need with a puppy wingman?” I asked dryly.

“I know, right?” Tom said without sarcasm, taking another sip. “I’m like the most nonthreatening person ever!”

#

Tom’s general awareness might not have been the greatest, but he was on the money about the seating arrangement.

Every angel handled things differently, a couple even avoided me completely, like they didn’t know quite what to make of me, but on average, they definitely paid me more attention than anyone else except for Glen, and there was a certain spillover effect that got plenty of them right into Tom’s lap after mine.

I swear I wasn’t trying to spite Tom when I decided to take a break from the cloud. It was just that having him poised next to me, like a dog begging at the table, made me extra aware of how much my presence was throwing the dynamic off-balance.

“Everything okay?” Glen asked when I stood up.

“Totally,” I said.

It was basically true. Me feeling guilty about having too good a time was not a problem Glen needed to be bothered with at this daring bacchanal.

Glen raised an unconvinced eyebrow.

“Seriously,” I said, squeezing his arm. “I just want to stretch my legs. I dare you to take someone into the little heaven before I get back.”

He glanced at the still unused cubical of curtains and blushed a little. “Well, if it’s a dare.” He grinned. “It’s not like I’m going to do anything different in there than I would out here, though.”

“Sure, but maybe it’ll feel different when we can’t see you,” I suggested. “Give it a try.”

I got his sheepish promise before I stepped back out onto the main floor of the club.

#

Yes, I get that I was being ridiculous. I was overthinking things and causing the exact problem I was trying to prevent: reduced fun for Glen.

I get that maybe Pastor Martin did more to stunt my capacity for pleasure than I ever gave him credit for.

Thankfully, a strip club isn’t an easy place to hole up inside your own head. That’s kind of the design.

I found myself an out-of-the-way armchair, with a clear but distant view of the stage, and within a matter of a song, a dancer dropped into the chair beside me.

In spite of everything I’d taken part in since arriving here, my stomach did a flip when I looked over and saw Violet, fixing me with that same unshakable gaze she’d used on me from the stage.

“Buy me a drink?” she asked, as if asking a stranger for a fifteen-dollar cocktail were absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about.

Drinks were only free in the prepaid party clouds.

I didn’t want her to be embarrassed, though. On the contrary, I would have spent every dollar I had left in my purse showering her with overpriced booze, if it meant that whatever magic had allowed her to ask in the first place might rub off on me.

I nodded, and she flagged down Seraph to ask for a cabernet.

Violet didn’t look away from me once during the time it took Seraph to bring her the glass of deep red-purple wine, and she continued eyeing me over the rim as she took her first sip.

“So, what happened?” she asked, finally.

“Who says something happened?” I asked.

“This little squiggle, right here,” Violet answered, smoothing her thumb over the bridge of my nose and up my forehead.

My skin tingled under her hand, even there.

“It’s stupid,” I said.

“It’s not,” Violet argued back without a second’s pause.

“It’s not even a thing that happened,” I said.

“All right,” said Violet. “What didn’t happen, then?”

“It’s not a thing that didn’t happen, either. It’s….” I sighed. We were doing this, apparently. “Do you ever feel like you’re in danger of ruining everything by being too… yourself?”

This was where Violet’s stock answers, or stock questions, ended. Having successfully pried me open, she sat for several seconds, carefully mulling over what had come out.

Then she said, “Well, I pay my mom’s medical bills with a job she’d disown me for having, so… yes.”

Jesus, my seriousness was getting contagious. Lolly was a lot of fun, but she was wrong about me. Finding the sour side of things took no effort on my part.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Violet shrugged it off, all her focus back on me.

“Were you not all the way out to your friends before you got here?” she guessed, dubiously.

“No, I was,” I said. “For almost a year, now. I thought that feeling would go away once I stopped hiding. And it did get better, but it’s still….” I let the rest of my lungful of air out through my lips, lost for words to use it on.

Violet waited patiently.

I took another breath, and tried again.

“It’s all so big, still,” I said. “Everything. All the things I never talked about. Big enough to fill the room and crush everything in it. I mean, back in the cloud, I got so excited. Like, in what universe do I get to be in a place like this, and get treated like I belong? That’s like… like a fairytale you tell yourself about what you’ll get to do if the world stops sucking someday, and I got to do it today. I almost lost myself in it.”

“So?” asked Violet.

“So…” I shrugged. “So, I think maybe I missed my chance to be ‘girl-crazy’ when I was supposed to, back in middle school, with adults around me to make sure I still ate and slept and did homework, and showed up when people were counting on me. If I’d gotten some of it out of my system back then, maybe I’d be able to enjoy looking at a beautiful woman now, and still be enough of a grownup to control myself and say, ‘No thanks, none for me today, please take care of my friend instead.’ Maybe I wouldn’t be in danger of letting my best friend’s bachelor party turn into the coming-out party I never had.”

“Maybe you’d be more like our usual clientele?” Violet suggested.

“Sure, I guess.”

Violet nodded. “Makes sense. I mean, guys who have that experience of openly liking girls their whole lives, it totally turns them into pillars of selfless dignity around us.”

She lifted her eyes to watch something over my shoulder.

I turned to watch with her, as Tom stumbled drunkenly out of the private cloud.

“Bri?” he shouted. “Come on, Bri, seriously, I need bating bait!”

Deftly, Violet got up, grabbed her drink, and my hand, and pulled me toward one of the less conspicuous alcove benches.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

Violet cracked a smile too, and I could swear it was real.

“The standards we hold ourselves to, huh?” she mused.

We sat in silence for a while, watching Tom make a circuit of the club floor.

“What’s it like,” Violet asked, in a voice strangely empty of learned sultriness or customer service, “being friends with men?”

I took a long breath, deciding where to start. “It’s like… being friends,” I said, shrugging. “You hang out. You make in-jokes. You argue about movies. Sometimes you swap notes on how your parents screwed up, and you cry. Most of the time, it’s the same with men as it is with women.”

I didn’t tell her how few women friends I’d actually had to compare it to.

“And the rest of the time?” Violet asked.

We both watched as Tom coaxed one of the angels into dancing with him, not a lap dance, but a clumsy middle school shuffle in one of the aisles, with flailing clasped hands.

“What’s it like,” I asked back, “approaching men you’ve never met, and just assuming they’ll be attracted to you? Like that’s the default?”

“Well, firstly, I get rejected all the time,” Violet answered.

“Seriously?” I asked, trying not to sound happy about it.

“People have their types,” said Violet. “Lots of guys only come in to see one or two of us. Which is fine. There are other ones who come in just for the chance to be mean to someone.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Violet shrugged. “You get used to it. And secondly, you’re fucking gorgeous. Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.”

I smiled, in spite of my business mode rearing back up inside me. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

Violet’s mouth twitched, and she didn’t deny it. “That doesn’t make it any less true.”

“What’s it like,” I asked, “flirting and flattering so much that no one believes you when you mean it?”

She took a long sip of her drink without looking away from me. 

“Lonely,” she answered, finally.

I let out a breath, just short of a laugh.

So did she.

She gave me an appraising look, up and down. Or, more like a reappraising look.

“Do you care about being attractive to men?”

“Oh yeah,” I answered. “I mean, not all of them, but yeah. I’m blessed with the joy of striking out on all fronts.”

It was a joke, a bad one, and Violet met it with dead seriousness.

“Like the Glen front?” she asked.

“No.” I shook my head. “Not that one. We really are just friends. Always have been.”

Violet raised a politely skeptical eyebrow.

“Why do people always believe me when I say that about a woman, but never about a man?” I sighed. “They’re equally likely to be true with me.”

“Sorry,” said Violet. “That’s fair. I guess I’d know that if I had men friends,” she chuckled.

The song reached a transition, and the DJ’s voice started up.

“Coming up next on the main stage, Eden! New song starting for all of you counting in heaven, and— Sir, get down from there, please. Sir, get down!”

I braced myself before looking up, hoping to see a stranger making an ass of himself, but sure enough, it was Tom, stumbling drunkenly across the low stage to swing himself around one of the poles.

Apparently, he wasn’t expecting it to be free-spinning. He lurched a full circle around it, trying to catch up with his own weight, like someone who’d just unknowingly stepped off a curb.

“Speaking of the rest of the time…” I said, but Violet probably didn’t hear all of it, because by the time I trailed off, I’d left our nook and marched most of the way to the stage. “Tom!”

The dancer, Eden, made her way up the steps on schedule and paused to look at him for a moment, adjusting her corset of cloth fig leaves.

“Tom, get down here, right now!” I shouted.

I wasn’t used to shouting, but there was a lot about this night that I wasn’t used to, and Tom-wrangling was the part of it that I’d most clear-headedly signed up for.

“Bri! There you are! Come try this,” he said. “I bet you’d be great at it.”

By this point, Eden seemed to have decided to get on with her act, and she was twirling languidly around the stage’s other pole, with a lot more grace than Tom.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked, stepping onto one of the armchairs, then the drink rest, and then the stage proper to reach him.

“I just want my turn!” Tom moaned, swinging himself out of my reach and toward the other pole, where Eden was now spinning around horizontally, holding it between her legs. “It’s not fair. I wish I were a dy—”

Thankfully, I didn’t have to hear the end of Tom’s sentence, because right as he was getting to it, things happened very quickly.

I grabbed for his arm.

He dodged away and stumbled toward Eden, arms outstretched for her. I don’t know if he was planning to pull her off the pole, or join her on it, or cop a feel as she went by, or what, but at that same moment, Eden changed positions.

She transitioned into a vertical flip, and one of her snakeskin high heels clocked Tom square in the face.

I can’t be sure, but by the way she landed on her feet, brought her shoes together with a forceful clack, and moved right on to twerking for a man who’d stayed politely in his seat on the opposite side of the stage, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an accident.

No judgment.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing Tom by the hand.

Tom only responded with a long, guttural groan. He sort of tried to get up, but his eyes kept slipping out of focus. He looked even more concussed now than he was drunk.

That was when one of the bouncers finally reached us. He was a huge guy, at least three hundred pounds of mostly muscle, and he slung Tom over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift in one easy motion.

“You two are with that bachelor party?” he barked at me, jerking his head toward our cloud.

“We… I….”

I just put my hands up, helpless, and made my way down to ground level.

Eden never stopped dancing.

#

When we made it back to the cloud, with Tom still semi-conscious over the bouncer’s shoulder, Mark and Evan were watching the fluttering curtain around the little heaven and pinching each other on the arms to quiet their chuckles each time a heavy swat sound came from behind it.

The bouncer gave the briefest courtesy of a knock and then pulled the curtain back.

Glen was bent over Wicked’s lap, with his pants pulled down to his thighs, and his ass almost as red as the shoe she was spanking him with.

Adjusting on the fly almost as quickly as Eden had, Wicked grabbed Glen by the collar, sat him up, and put her shoe back on.

“Good boy.” She patted him on the shoulder.

Glen had the most beautiful sheepish grin on his face to start with, but it shifted quickly to concerned resignation when he looked up at Tom.

“What did he do?” Glen counted off his questions on his fingers, “What did you have to do? Will he be okay, is everyone else okay, and do we have to go?”

#

Ultimately, the answers to those last three questions were yes, yes, and no, but Tom’s evening is over.

Apparently, there were enough angels vouching for the rest of our behavior, including Violet and Eden verifying that I’d tried to stop him.

Still, since we’d all come in the same car, and we weren’t about to ditch someone alone in a strange part of town with a head injury, Tom getting kicked out added up to almost the same thing as all of us getting kicked out.

Or, so I would have thought.

Evan applied a disposable ice pack to the bruise on Tom’s face, and Mark held a towel under his mouth to protect the bouncer’s suit on the way out, both items brought by the dancers from their locker room. The shape of the pack was better designed for a knee or a shoulder, but it served the purpose.

As everyone else began the process of hoisting Tom out, Glen held me back.

“Hey. I’m getting you twenty minutes in heaven with Violet before we go, and I don’t want to argue about it,” he said. “Unless there’s another dancer you liked even more, then you can argue about that part.”

My insides went rigid. “Oh, God, Glen, I couldn’t. It’s your—”

“Yeah, I know, it’s my party,” Glen stopped me. “And this is what I want to do.”

“If anyone gets extra private time, it should be you,” I argued.

“I’m getting married,” said Glen. “I’m in a relationship serious enough to get married about. And in spite of what a lot of comedies would have us believe, there’s not really that much difference between what’s okay for me to do today and what’s okay tomorrow. No matter how chill Gemma is.”

The rigidity in my stomach grew more painful.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position. I thought you wanted—”

“I did! I do,” Glen assured me. “Tonight has been perfect. It’s everything I hoped it would be. Mostly, getting to do something wild and crazy with you guys. I’m just saying, there are limits for me. Not so much for you.”

“Still, I don’t need to push the limits,” I said. “Not when I could be hanging out with you.”

“Please,” he said. “There wouldn’t have been a party at all without you. Consider it your attendant gift.”

He really meant this. I knew him well enough to know that. It wasn’t politeness or obligation. He’d be disappointed if I turned this down. So why couldn’t I stop being so… so damn polite myself, and just nod my head?

“Do it for the look on Tom’s face when he sobers up,” said Glen, “and we get to tell him you spent twenty minutes in heaven and he didn’t get to watch.”

I laughed, and the stony weight inside me crumbled.

The standards we hold ourselves to, huh?

I did it. I moved my head, up and down, just a little.

Glen nodded back, harder, and grinned. “We’ll be in the car,” he said.

#

“Are you nervous?” Violet asked me, setting a tiny purse on top of the tiny drink table inside our heaven, and sitting on the couch beside me.

Glen had splurged for a door instead of a curtain, so the heaven was practically a closet, like from the juvenile party version of this game, just a little more spacious.

“Very,” I answered her question.

“That’s okay,” said Violet. “Is there anything extra special you want to do with me? Any particular fetishes?”

She asked it so straightforwardly, like no possible answer could be wrong. But I couldn’t think of a single thing I could bear asking for.

“Maybe I could just follow your lead?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Violet, reaching for the clasp of her bra. “Go ahead and take off your clothes. All of them, if you’re comfortable.”

I did, hyper-aware through every fumble that I was not someone professionally skilled at taking off clothes in an erotic way.

“I love those,” she said, pointing to my rainbow-striped bra and panties set as I removed them.

I’d only worn them as a secret self-congratulations for having come this far. Sure, I’d imagined wearing and revealing them in front of another woman someday, but I’d never thought it would be today.

“Is it okay if I touch you?” Violet asked, hovering her hands over my naked body.

I nodded, and she ran her fingers lightly up and down my torso.

“Let me know if you want it harder, softer, faster, slower,” she said. “While you’re in here, feel free to touch yourself, and me, as much as you want unless I tell you to stop.”

Tentatively, I mirrored her, exploring her skin without her direct guidance, from her neck, to her springy breasts, around to her back, and down to her similarly springy ass and muscular thighs.

Every inch of her felt impossibly smooth, and I found myself wondering about her skincare routine, and then internally berating myself for thinking about skincare while this stunning woman was trailing her hand down to my naked pussy.

She brushed my clit without obstruction or pretense.

I did the same to her, more for my own benefit than hers, at first. I just wanted to feel her, to be able to tell myself that that was something I’d done with another woman.

I still had just enough of my wits about me to remember that this was all an elaborate, highly interactive show, so I was shocked when I felt the throb of her clit actually hardening against my hand, and the rush of moisture dripping down onto my fingertips, where I’d let them wander to just under her opening.

We continued this way, I wasn’t sure for how long, with Violet alternating between kissing my breasts and bringing hers to my lips.

After a while, she sat up, creating a little space between us, and asked, “Have you ever used a dental dam before?”

“I don’t even know what that is,” I admitted. “Is it some kind of mouthguard?”

Violet shook her head, and did not make fun of me. “It’s basically just a flavored sheet of latex you put over your pussy to make everything safe. It works like a condom. In fact, you can make one by cutting a condom open along one side, if you need to.”

“Safe…” I repeated, trying for a moment to wrap my head around what could be unsafe about the bare touching we were doing, and how it could be made safer by adding a layer of protection now. “…Flavored?” I picked up on the key word in what she had just said.

“Would you like to try?” she asked.

I still wasn’t used to being asked if I wanted awesome things. Once again, I had to pry myself out of a freeze just to nod.

Violet knelt down on the floor, unzipped that tiny purse she’d brought in with her, and pulled out two little packages.

She opened one, shook out the sheer folded sheet, and nudged my legs farther apart so she could spread it into place over me.

The smell of cherries filled the room.

Violet leaned down slowly, wiggled her tongue playfully in the air for a moment, and then licked me, right on the button, through the latex dam.

It was so thin, I could swear I could feel the moisture of her tongue as well as its warmth.

“You like it?” she asked, clearly already able to tell the answer.

“I like you,” I said. “And anything that makes this possible.”

She returned to licking me.

“Just a little softer?” I forced myself to ask, and she adjusted instantly.

By rights, she should have been able to finish me off in a matter of seconds, between her skill, how excited I was to be here, and how many rounds of buildup I’d already been through this evening.

But in spite of how incredible it felt, I couldn’t quite seem to get back to that edge.

“Still nervous now?” Violet asked between licks.

“I mean, how could someone not be?” I answered.

Violet sat back on her heels, with her hands on my knees, eyes firmly fixed on me again. “You don’t have much experience being a bad girl, do you?”

“You mean, like, in a fetishy way…?” I tried to keep up, wanting more of her tongue, but also more of her gaze.

Violet shook her head. “No, I mean actually, in real life, doing things someone might disapprove of.”

“Well, I came out,” I said. “And I’m here.”

“Other than that,” Violet pressed on.

“No,” I admitted. “Almost none.”

“I think you should practice,” said Violet. “It’s really hot when you get the hang of it.”

“How?” I asked.

“You can start by saying it out loud,” she suggested, with a glint in those intense eyes. “Say, ‘I’m such a bad girl, I went to a strip club today.’ Say it like you’re bragging.”

“I’m…” my voice cracked. “I’m such a… a bad girl, that I went to a strip club today.”

It ended in a mumble, but Violet wasn’t discouraged.

“Say, ‘I’m such a bad girl, I had a stripper suck on my tits today.’”

“I’m such a bad girl…” I mumbled my way through that one too.

Violet kept prompting. “Say, ‘I’m such a bad girl, I had sex with a stripper today.’”

I almost made it through that one, only my voice wobbled on sex. I tried to blame it on the fact that Violet chose that moment to lick my clit through the dam again. But truthfully, even without that paralyzing flash of pleasure, I might have wobbled anyway. Just from calling this what it was.

“Say, ‘I’m such a bad girl, that I might eat her pussy later.’”

I said it. I said it all the way through.

“‘And I’m such a bad girl,’” Violet prompted, “‘That I might not, even though she ate mine.’”

I laughed. “I’m not sure that’s the kind of bad girl I want to be,” I said.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Violet. “We could all get sent outside for a fire drill before you get the chance.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, and repeated the line.

“‘I’m such a bad girl,’” Violet went on, licking me every few words, “‘That I might be about to cum in her mouth, while all those poor men grinding through their clothes right now have to hold it in and not make a mess.’”

My clit throbbed hard at that one, both when Violet said it and when I said it back. I might have missed a few words, but I got the gist right.

“‘And, I’m such a bad girl,’” Violet went on, still licking steadily in between, “‘that I also might not cum, even though my best friend is expecting me to.’”

I loved that. I loved saying it back to her, as dirty as it felt. I hoped it wasn’t true, but I loved the way Violet could make every outcome equally naughty, and equally okay. It took off so much of the pressure of this special upcharge room and the time limit attached to it.

Finally, I could feel that intense, steady buildup coming on, the way it had come so easily in the cloud when there’d been no expectation to complete it.

“‘I’m such a bad girl,’” said Violet, “‘that I skipped playing nursemaid to my dumbass friend, and got laid instead.’”

I didn’t get through the whole sentence before my body curled up into a shuddering orgasm. I clamped my hands over my mouth, aware that I was yelping louder than even this door-equipped heaven was built to contain.

Violet kept the pressure on, gently, firmly, wetly, warmly, until my tensing muscles released. Then she climbed back up onto the couch with me, resting her head on my chest.

“There we go,” she said proudly, patting my shoulder. “Take your time. Remember, it’s your time. We can wrap up, we can cuddle—”

“No,” I said blearily. “I’d like to try. If you’d like me to try. Please?”

Violet didn’t ask me if I was sure. She just believed me.

The second dental dam released a scent of mangos when she opened it and spread it out over herself.

I sank down to my very wobbly knees, caressed her inner thighs, and took a taste.

She hadn’t skimped on the quality of the dams. Not that I specifically knew what a cheap one tasted like, but the flavoring was sweet without being cloying, and covered the latex well.

I licked my way up her slit, adhering the thin layer to her and working the trapped air out of the way. When I reached her clit, I tried to imitate with my tongue what had seemed so effective with my fingers.

“Mmm,” she sighed, shifting her pelvis farther forward on the couch.

“Please,” I said, “if you can help it… don’t humor me.”

Violet smiled. “All right then, faster.”

I lapped at her quicker, darting my tongue in and out.

She moaned, and I didn’t think she’d planned the sound before making it.

The knock at the door came and went, with a shout of, “We’re fine, almost done!” from Violet.

Then she reached down to touch my hair.

“You don’t have to stay,” she said softly between gasps, “not if you get tired. Not if you’d rather get back to your friends.”

I stayed, until she was writhing and crying out under my mouth.

#

When we cleaned up and got dressed, I tipped Violet with all the rest of the cash I’d budgeted for the evening, and she passed me a business card.

None of the others had done that.

I didn’t fully examine it until I was out in the parking lot, making my way over to where Tom was vomiting into the bushes with the other three holding him up.

The name “Violet” was written and crossed out in ballpoint pen, and the name “Dara” written after it, followed by a phone number.

***

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