His obsession, his muse.

"Everyone get ready, everybody's waiting, we go quick, quick, quick please." Dave hollered from somewhere behind the curtain, his voice carrying the crazy panic of a man whose money was directly tied to our punctuality because it sure was. I moved to my station and worked efficiently. Dress off. Blond wig from the case, shaken out, placed and adjusted until the hairline sat exactly right. Makeup next, the kind built for distance and heat, dramatic enough to read from the back row without looking clownish up close. I was excited. I always got excited on nights that felt charged before they even started. Something in the air was different tonight and I couldn't name it yet. "Move it girls, move it." Dave again, louder. "Can I borrow your lip liner babes?" Talen appeared behind me, already half dressed, eyes wide. I grabbed my makeup purse and shoved it directly into her face without turning around. "It's in there. Fix yourself." She caught it laughing and I returned to the mirror. Dave ran Keystar the way crazy men ran their entire lives, on controlled chaos and very high standards. Punctuality was religion here. One wrong move and your pay disappeared without ceremony or conversation. Which brought me, naturally, to the part where I explain myself before anyone else tries to. Spoiler. "I'm a w***e. A very filthy, dirty whore." Before, I didn't regard myself as one, the word felt too sharp, too crude for what I understood myself to be. But the numerous men that gathered at Keystar to watch me flaunt my fat ass and grab uselessly at the air in front of my chest thought otherwise, and eventually their conviction became mine. I'm a stripper. I do it because it pays my bills and puts food in front of my son and keeps the lights on in an apartment that would swallow us both in darkness otherwise. That is the primary reason and I will not dress it up. And yeah you might say, “ you're married, Zara, act like it.” I know I'm married but my husband is a drunk and I feed him so yeah mind your single ass business. But if I am being completely honest, and tonight I am, I also do it because I like it. The cold metal of the pole, warming slowly under my palms. My body, finding its rhythm like it was born knowing. The way an entire room full of people stops being able to think straight because of something I am doing deliberately and precisely. Sometimes I think I do it for the validation more than anything else, these men, single men, married men, women who came with their partners and ended up watching only me, all of them with their eyes on my oiled body rolling down the pole, my waxed p***y on full display, dollar notes tucked into my thong, their gazes landing on me like hands. There are worse addictions. "Zara what's keeping you, hurry up girl." Dave materialised at my station, looked me over the way he always did, assessing, unsentimental, professional in his completely unhinged way. I was nearly ready. Wig settled, makeup done, boobs bare, n*****s covered with the tape I ordered custom: *taste* on the left, *me* on the right. Lacy thong sitting exactly where it was supposed to. He grabbed my left breast, squeezed once, then brought his palm down hard on my right. The slap cracked sharp and clean in the air between us. "You dirty little slut," he said low, right against my hairline, and something in me unclenched the way it only did in this building. "When do I go, Dave?" I asked, keeping my voice at the register I reserved for this place. Lower. Slower. A voice that knew what it was doing and wasn't in a hurry about it. My pulse was already climbing. He stepped back and looked at me properly. "You go last. Stand at the back of the queue." Then, without transition, his voice shifting into something almost gentle: "How's your son doing by the way?" It always got me when he did that. "He's good. Thank you." "Get on there girl." He laughed, loud and completely unself-conscious, and walked off. That was Dave entirely, crude and surprisingly tender, sometimes in the same breath. The other girls danced. I stood in the wings and listened to the crowd move through its cycles, cheering, settling, peaking, settling again. Then Dave appeared at my elbow and tilted his head toward the stage. I walked out. The lights hit differently from the centre of the stage than anywhere else in the room. I circled my legs around the pole, felt the familiar cold of the metal begin its slow surrender to my body heat, and dropped into my introductory split, ass cheeks landing and jiggling with the impact, shameless and completely deliberate. The crowd responded immediately and loudly. I held the split just long enough to let them understand what kind of night this was going to be, then rose. Then I did what I always did. I found one person. I never performed at the room as a whole. That was amateur thinking, scatter your attention and you dilute everything. I picked one face, one person who had not entirely prepared themselves for what was happening, and I pointed everything I had directly at them. Tonight it was the person in the middle row. The person in the middle roll was a man, a brooding man that looked so relaxed. He was the kind of dark that felt intentional. Not just complexion, something in the way he occupied his seat, jacket pushed back, one arm resting along the back of the empty chair beside him like the space owed him something. Sharp-jawed, heavy-browed, the kind of face that looked like it had decided long ago that smiling was optional. Handsome in a way that had an edge to it, like something you wanted to touch while being faintly aware that touching it might not end well for you. He sat completely still while everyone around him shifted and leaned and hollered. Still in the way of something that doesn't need to move to be dangerous. When my eyes found his he didn't flinch. Didn't look away. Didn't perform surprise the way most men did when I picked them. He just looked back, calm, measured, almost clinical and raised one eyebrow exactly a quarter of an inch. Like I was something interesting he had just noticed rather than a half-naked woman circling a pole six feet in front of him. I was the one captivated and I was annoyed. That steadiness did something to me immediately and against my better judgment. I winked. Squeezed both breasts slowly, tongue out, legs tightening around the pole. The crowd around him lost their minds. He watched. I had never needed to be taught to pole dance. My body simply knew it, some deep muscular intelligence that predated instruction. The crowd registered this ,there was a difference between appreciation for technical skill and the slightly unravelled quality of an audience that had lost the plot entirely, and I could hear both happening simultaneously. The men in the front row had abandoned all pretence, bulges straining, mouths open. I didn't look at them. I kept my eyes on the dark man in the middle row. Dollar notes came from every direction. The lights strobed and dipped, the shadow effect turning the pole and my body into something that belonged in a painting. I tucked bills into my ass crack and slid others beneath my breast tape without breaking rhythm, without breaking eye contact. His jaw shifted slightly. Almost nothing. The closest thing to a reaction he had offered and it moved through me like a current. Then, so slowly it was almost insulting, one corner of his mouth lifted. A smirk. Half a smirk. Barely anything. My whole body shivered and I was furious at myself for it. My sets never ran more than ten minutes. Business decision, non-negotiable, you did not let an audience settle into comfort. You left before they were ready. The scarcity was the entire mechanism. People paid extraordinary amounts to watch me perform for ten minutes specifically because they knew I would walk off that stage and not be persuaded back, and every one of those minutes felt urgent because of it. I walked off. The crowd surged, security moved, the usual controlled chaos of my exit closed behind me. Two minutes later Dave appeared in the wings looking something close to emotional, which on his face was genuinely alarming. "You killed it girl, you always do." He grabbed my face in both hands and planted a loud wet kiss on my cheek. "I love youuuu." Then he was gone, swallowed back into the noise. I stood in the wings and pressed the back of my hand against my cheek and thought about a man who had watched me for ten minutes without blinking and responded with half a smirk. I was going to do something stupid tonight. I could feel it already.