Now, here she stood, in a nylon pink miniskirt and a cut-off tee that Ciarra had coerced her into wearing. They had been standing there for less than half an hour before a man in a BMW pulled over to the side of the street. He had stopped for Ciarra, whose attempt at a plaid naughty-schoolgirl uniform had been attracting men like moths to a flame. Ciarra seductively leaned her arms on the frame of the lowered passenger window. Aria couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she knew that Ciarra was trying to sell the man on the idea of sleeping with her instead. Ciarra had promised to get her hooked up with a “john,” the depersonalizing word they used for a client, before leaving with one of her regular clients that her pimp had arranged for her that afternoon.
Ciarra’s regular john was sitting in his parked car a block further on from where they were standing. His engine was turned off. Aria could see him watching through the rear-view mirror. His name was Larry. He was a gentle ogre of a man who was missing most of his hair. He wore a “God Bless America” t-shirt over the bulk of his severely obese body. The way he was smiling while he waited for Ciarra made Aria pity him. He was so clearly unaware of the level of Ciarra’s deception.
Ciarra had been complaining about this regular of hers while they were on their way there. “I don’t know, he’s sweet but sometimes it’s like, what the fuck do you want to pay me for?” she said, laughing at how ridiculous it was to her that most of the time he just wanted to talk and take her out to dinner instead of to fuck. “I don’t know whether he’s lonely or what the fuck is goin’ on. Maybe he’s in love with me.” She winked at Aria when she said it.
As she explained to Aria, Larry was the kind of man who had so little sense of real wealth within the world that his stable salary and bonuses made him feel like a king, especially when compared to these women of the night. And, desperate for affection, he was committed to spoiling them with it. Really, he was buying the way they looked at him when instead of telling them to suck his cock, he took them on a shopping spree, or at the very least focused on trying to get them to orgasm instead. They would fake it every time, but he was too naive to know it. Instead, he deluded himself that they loved spending time with him and that he was the only man who had ever cared about them. It was a hero fantasy that Ciarra played straight into. “You gotta love the guy,” she said. And maybe some part of her did. Not in the way a woman loves a man, but in the way a girl loves a puppy or a kitten. His blatant naivety made her feel safe. And safety was a hard commodity to come by.
Aria shifted her attention back to the negotiation taking place between Ciarra and the man in the BMW. Ciarra’s flirtations ended. She pushed herself back from the ledge of the car window and turned in her tall boots toward Aria. For a minute, Aria expected the man to drive off. But instead, the car stayed parked by the curb. “Come on, bitch, hurry,” Ciarra yelled affectionately at Aria. She opened the car door, ushering Aria inside as fast as she could.
“Hey,” the man said. Aria said hi in response and smiled at him, trying to mimic Ciarra’s sexual flair, albeit unsuccessfully. He drove away from the curb, attempting to draw as little attention to himself as possible. Through the side mirror, Aria watched Ciarra strut toward Larry’s car and get into it before her own car turned the corner.
The car pulled into a parking spot just in front of the outermost motel room on the bottom level of a cheap, two-story, U-shaped motel. Inside, the carpet, left over from the 1970s, was stained, as if its putrid orange color weren’t off-putting enough already. Two beds took up the room. They were arranged against a wood-plank wall and covered with floor-length orange bedding. Above them were two cheap-looking reproduction paintings of a group of sailboats. The sharp fetor of chain-smoking hung so thick in the air you could taste it.
Aria didn’t want to know anything about this man. She didn’t even want to remember his face, so she didn’t focus on it. She intentionally tried to ignore everything about him. He put $150 in small bills on the bed stand, then sat on the bed as a ploy to get past the awkwardness between them. Ciarra had warned her to make sure he had the cash as well as the cock, and now the end was in sight, Aria took control of the situation, hoping that by doing so her feeling of susceptibility would subside. She got down on her knees in front of him and started unbuckling the belt holding up his pants.
She stroked the insides of his thighs, occasionally kissing them and letting her breath graze the bottom side of his erect penis, which smelled like fish and urine. He hadn’t even bothered to wash his cock first. He watched her unwrap and roll a condom to the base of his dick, not touching her at all at first, as a method of increasing the grip of his sexual tension. It took only moments for the tension to get so high that it eroded his calm. He grabbed Aria’s forearms and used them to twist her face-first onto the floor. The aggression with which he pulled her skirt up and pulled her underwear to the side left red marks on her skin. After struggling for a moment for lack of wetness, he impaled himself
