process of becoming a soft, freshly groomed whore. In the end, I still look like a woodsy nature whore who didn't just spend hours getting ready, but I guess it's because I start from so far behind.
First my skin has to marinate. For a while. But before I start marinating, before anything, I unpack my shower bag. Exfoliate-y thingies, shave-y thingies, soapy thingies. I line them up. I untangle my hair and brush avocado oil into it. Then I take a book into the tub. After marinating, shaving, and soaping, I start scraping off layers of dead skin. There are many tools for this. The best ever was a lava rock that I lost, so now it's pumice and stuff. There is a lot of skin to rub and scrape off, and it's kind of exhausting. I can see why rich people go to spas and pay someone to do this for them, and I wonder if I could do that, too.
After an appropriate amount of scrubbing, I drain the tub, turn the shower on, finger douche, and sniff my secretions. This is something I wonder about – I know the white stretchy stuff indicates fertility, but what about the clear stretchy stuff, or the white stuff that's not stretchy? I dump vinegar over my hair. Then I trim my cuticles, paint my nails, and smother all my skin in coconut oil. Then what? The first client is a new guy. I don't know anything about him, except that he's more literate than my average client. It's pathetic when following instructions and providing all the required information in the first email is a shining point of literacy, but...well, I have doctors, lawyers, teachers, and preachers that can't seem to manage it.
It's daytime though, plus my marketing is all woodswhore, and that must count for something. So I just do the eye liner and lip gloss thing, and pull on that black teddy that I found in pile of trash in a hotel hallway in Canada the morning after Valentine's Day. It's still the best outfit I have, and today I add fishnet thigh highs to cover the big purple knot on my leg where I fell on my ass in the mud and slipped into the boat.
He calls from the parking lot, right on schedule. Joe Brown or Mike Jones or some crap. I can't keep them straight when they screen with references. I give him the room number, and there is that last minute panic. What if he's a cop? I wait in front of the peephole so I can watch him come around the corner and see if he does anything a cop would obviously do, but then I remember that I forgot to turn the clock so I could see it from the bed without looking like one of those stingy clock watching bitches clients bitch about on the review boards. He knocks while I'm turning the clock.
He's the same height as me. Thin. The bones in his head are too big for the rest of him. I'm pretty confident that this dude couldn't ever make it through cop training. I let him in and hug him after the hellos. He pushes his tongue into my mouth aggressively, but then he just leaves it there, a confused blob of tongue. Interesting. I pull back and kiss his neck. This is my secret weapon for yucky kissers: kiss elsewhere. He pulls away and shoves his tongue in my mouth again. It's just aggressive enough to make me wonder if I really want to see him, and just strange enough to sort of intrigue me.
“Come in,” I tell him. I run through the bathroom and spit his spit into a towel. “Take your clothes off,” I announce.
He nods and undresses. This is a common screening technique used by people who don't know any better. The superstition is that a cop won't take their clothes off first, won't touch you first, won't touch your breasts first, or maybe it's only your cunt. The truth is that cops fuck women and then arrest them all the time. He pulls his clothes off, efficient and silent, and places three hundred dollar bills on the counter next to his clothes.
I smile and start to pull my top down, but he dives between my