Ringside (4 page)

Sloane

Once I finished
ballet ad got out of the showers, I tore open my bag in the change room and
pored over the flyer I’d grabbed outside the library.

The top of it said
‘Earn Money from Home!!!’, but the rest of it was very different from all of
the other scams I’d seen.

There was a
picture of a woman taken from behind her. Her shirt and bra were off, and she
was sitting at in front of her laptop.

‘Be a Cam Girl!’
was written underneath her in big letters, along with a web address.

I folded the flyer
back up grabbed my stuff before heading out, my head full of conflict.

I had a little bit
of an understanding about what those girls did on their webcams for men, but I
told myself over and over that it was worth a look. After all, it wasn’t
stripping.

Right?

The train ride
home went by faster than any I’d had before. All I could think of was getting
back into my shitty apartment and turning on the laptop, and once I got in the
door I did exactly that.

Research. That’s
what I needed.

And what I got was
an eyeful. There were women on there from all over the world, sitting on their
bed in sunshine or darkness depending on their location. Most of them were
naked, and the ones that weren’t wore
very
revealing outfits that I felt certain were going to end up on their bedroom
floor before too long.

As far as signing
up to watch, it looked like it was free. Guys, and presumably girls too, could
put in their credit card number if they wanted to, which they used to buy
‘tokens’. The tokens got given to the web cam models as payment, complete with
a loud little
ka-ching!
noise that
prompted the women to thank their tipper, often by plunging the viewers into a
show that went even further than they’d been going a second ago.

And the things
they did! Vibrators, whips, dildos, massage oil, candle wax… I saw more in the
two hours of clicking models’ pictures and entering ‘performances’ than I had
in a lifetime.

Up until today,
I’d have said I was fairly well-versed sex stuff. I didn’t particularly look
forward to any future encounters, of course, but I thought I
knew
what was out there to be had.

Well, it turns out
I was wrong. By the time I logged of, my hands were shaking and my breath was
fast and shallow. I was absolutely naive when it came to that sort of thing.
Hell, I only had a vibrator because one of my idiot friends had given it to me
as a gag gift, something to help ‘warm my bed since I hated men’.

But those women
online. They were shameless! In so many ways it was worse than stripping. At
least when you were grinding on a pole for a bunch of drunks, you stopped once
you were naked. On that sight, naked was were you
started
…

Still, I found
that I couldn’t let myself dismiss the idea so easily. Yes, the things they
were doing was intense, but even I could see just by the amount of tokens being
tipped that they were making good money. The most successful woman I’d watched
had made almost a hundred and fifty bucks over the course of half an hour!

And that was money
I could use, there was no doubt about that…

There was one more
thing that made it appeal to me. More than the money, more than the fact that I
could make the web cam thing fit in around my crazy schedule, it was the
anonymity.

You could see the
girls’ faces, which was an issue. But at least she couldn’t see the men as they
inevitably touched themselves. She couldn’t see their leers, or their
erections, or the way their eyes would demand more and more and more. It looked
like the performer could even turn off the chat, giving her even more of a wall
between her and the faceless paying customers.

I closed the lid
of the laptop and drummed my fingers along the top. I didn’t necessarily have a
problem with my body being on display, so long as I couldn’t see the guys. I
didn’t want to be recognized though, just in case somebody saw me on the street
or my dancing took off. That would be the worst, now that I thought about it,
to have some guy who’d recorded my ‘show’ try and ruin my future career with a
‘sex tape’, or something.

But there were
ways around that, right?

I looked around,
suddenly struck by inspiration. Last year we’d done Pulcinella, and I still had
the glittery mask that I’d worn throughout the performance. Because we needed
our hands free for the dance, it had straps to hold it snugly in place.

“Perfect,” I said
out loud, suddenly all too aware that I’d need my hands free for this new
career, too…

Angel

“Let me hear what
you’ve got,” I told Cole when I caught up with him over a beer. It was around
eleven at night, and I was finding it hard to make my mind not drift back to
last night, when I’d first met Sloane.

“You didn’t really
give me much to go on, you know,” he said.

I shrugged. Cole
knew computers. He and I went way back, and this morning I’d emailed him all of
the information I had on Sloane and asked him to see if he could somehow track
her down for me.

“Well,” he said,
taking a swig of beer before setting it aside, “she’s a dancer. All sorts of
types or styles or disciplines or whatever, though she got in to NYU on a
ballet scholarship. I don’t know much about ballet, but she’s fucking amazing,
bro.”

“I don’t doubt
it,” I said.

Cole nodded. “I’ve
emailed you a bunch of YouTube clips of her routines. She’s been in enough performances
lately that it isn’t that hard to find them.”

I shrugged. “For
you, maybe. What else?”

“That’s the bulk
of it. Her scholarship gives her a full ride, though it looks like the schedule
she’s got to keep is pretty crazy. No wonder she was working at a bar. A real
job wouldn’t give her enough time to keep up with everything else they make her
do to keep the scholarship.”

“Makes sense.”

“She’s from the
south side of Chicago. Twenty fourish or so, judging by when she graduated high
school.”

I nodded. That was
about the age I’d pegged her at, too. All of this was good stuff, but it was
hardly the dirt I’d expected a guy like Cole to be able to dig up, given an
afternoon and the extent of his contacts.

“Cole?”

“Yeah?”

“Spill it.”

“Huh?” He did his
best to look confused, but we both knew what I was getting at.

“I know you. I
know what you can do. There’s no way you would have called me and had me meet
you here if all you had were a couple YouTube videos and her hometown.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Let me hear it,”
I told him.

“Okay,” Cole said
at last, “but just remember, I’m only the messenger.”

“Got it.”

Cole took a deep
breath and let it out. “I know how you feel about strippers and stuff, after
the way things went with a couple of your exes. Well, I got in a back door and
attached an alert to her bank account. It’s way more technical than this, but
basically I set it to let me know whenever a payment went in or came out.”

“And?”

“And a couple of
hours ago she had a test payment from a website for Cam girls. A test payment
is when they pay you a penny to make sure the account is legitimate. They only
do that for people that have signed up to be, umm, on show…”

I held up my hand
so he’d shut up. I needed a second to let this sink in. “Are you saying that
there’s every possibility that right this second the girl of my dreams is
sitting in some dive apartment in front of a webcam, doing God knows what for
God knows who just to make a buck?”

Whatever he heard
in my voice and saw in my eyes made him wary, no matter how much history we’d
shared. I looked down at the table and saw that my hands were folded in to
fists. It took a force of will, but I opened them up and placed my hands flat
against the wood.

Cole swallowed
hard. “Umm… Maybe?”

That was all I
needed to hear. “I’m gone,” I said, standing up and tossing five hundred bucks
on to the table, a little for the beers and the rest for his services. “Thanks
for all your work on this.”

“No problem,
Angel.” He hesitated, then picked up the money. “You’re not mad?”

“Not yet. Text me
the address of the web cam site, yeah? Like, now.”

He nodded. “Are
you going home to have a look?”

“Damn straight.”

A wicked grin
crept on to his face, and it was all I could do not to hit him. “Might be a good
way to test drive what you’re thinking of sinking in to, if you know what I
mean.”

“Fuck that,” I
growled. “That girl doesn’t need to spread her legs on the internet for a bunch
of strangers to make a buck. Not now and not ever.”

He didn’t know
what to say, so I just left him sitting there.

“Hurry up and text
me that site,” I said over my shoulder as I pushed through the crowd and left.

Sloane

That night, I
dragged out the few sexy outfits I had. The selection wasn’t great, but maybe
I’d make enough in my first few shows to improve my options.

As it stood, I had
the choice between a ‘naughty’ nurse and a silky little number that I’d bought
to sleep in during our last heatwave on a whim.

I went with that
one, stepping into the black teddy and sliding the slender straps up my arms.
Whatever magic spell these things had in them worked on me. It was funny,
really. Every time I saw lingerie I couldn’t help but think how ridiculous it’d
look on me; but when I put it on I felt instantly sexy.

Even desirable.

It was easy to
create an account. All they needed was my bank details, a little blurb about me
and a name and I’d be good to go.

The first part was
easy. I had to keep such a tight rein on my finances that I knew the numbers by
heart, and there was so little money in their that I knew I didn’t have to
worry about the site scamming me. Besides, I’d read enough online reviews of
the service today to believe that they were for real.

The blurb was a
little bit harder, at least until I decided it didn’t have to be a true,
exactly-as-written autobiography. After all, the whole thing was about fantasy,
right? So why not give the paying customers what they were after?

I’m a dancer,
I wrote. At least that much was true.
Very new to all of this,
I put next,
just in case that sounded sexy. And finally,
Come and play with me?

Good enough, I
figured.

Now, to decide on
a name. Sloane was out, of course. It was
way
too noticeable.

Stuck for
inspiration, I looked around the room, trying desperately to think of something
that sounded seductive enough to catch the eye without being lost in the see of
Ambers and Kellys I’d seen on the site all afternoon.

I shrugged and
typed
Little Miss Ballerina
in the
Name field. Good enough. One of the things the site had made clear was that you
could change your name as often as you wanted, though they warned that doing so
would make it impossible for your ‘followers’ to find you.

I tried to imagine
that, being good enough or sexy enough or successfully enough at this to
actually have
followers
. Would I be
okay with that?

I didn’t know. I
told myself that I was only going to try this silliness for a night or two. I
was prepared to fail.

Hell, I expected
it.

With that fact
squarely in my mind I got up and turned around to study my bedroom with a
discerning eye. It was the most comfortable room in the house, the only one
where I’d splurged a little. It had been forever since I’d had friends over,
and I’d never invited a guy to share the space, so I didn’t think I had to
worry about someone recognizing it.

Still, it needed a
little splash of something. I got some colorful silk scarves out of my closet
and draped one of them over the lamp, hanging the rest from the backs of chairs
or the mirror on the dresser to soften the space.

Good enough.

Makeup? Check.
Sexy lingerie? Check. It was warm in the room. I had a bottle of water. Earlier
I’d found the vibrator in the bottom of a linen closet, taken it out of the
plastic and put batteries in it.

It was a pink
thing with ‘rabbit ears’, according to the packaging, and I tossed it next to
the pillow.

I put on the mask
last, and once it was in place it was as if I’d flicked a switch. Most of my
worry fell away, and I dared to think that this may just work.

“Here goes
nothing,” I said out loud, grabbing the laptop and setting up on the bed before
pushing the ‘Make a Room!’ button.

My heart was
pounding.

How long would it
take before I had my first visitor? Would I get a warning before they appeared
in my room, or did I have to sprawl out sexily all the time, hoping for
interest?

I figured that was
it. Earlier when I’d been on the sight, you could hover your mouse over any of
the cam girls’ pictures and get a live preview of what was happening in their
room.

I frowned, then
caught myself. Nobody wanted to watch a moody bitch on these things, did they?

“It’s just like
dancing,” I said. Ballet
hurt
. It was
a grueling, physically overwhelming activity that was only beautiful because
the true art of the dancer was to make it look effortless.

The mask covered
most of my face and some of my hair, but revealed my mouth.

So I smiled as if
I were on the biggest stage of my life.

And maybe I was…