Phoenyx: Flesh & Fire (2 page)

He turned back and looked at me expectantly. This, then, was it. The moment.

I swallowed a dry, hard lump of fear which I felt was just about to choke me. It looked as though he expected me to do all of that right here, right now. Not later tonight, or tomorrow, when I’d had time to figure it all out in my head. No.
Now
.

I pointed at the stage. “Do I...do you want, uh, me to...?”

“Well now, let’s say, I like what I see. Very much. But, you can’t just stand there looking pretty all night. We have our waitresses and barmaids for that.”

I could have asked him if I could come back later, work out a routine, build up some confidence, some courage, and some spunky attitude. But where exactly was I going to find all of
that
at short notice? Delaying would only give me so much more time to realize how ridiculously low my chances were. And if I hesitated, then some other more confident, courageous, spunkier chick would walk in right under my nose and grab my last hope of paid employment away from me.

The stakes could not have been higher, and I knew I had no time to waste. If I flunked out, then I would be selling Boris to the nearest pet shop and my ass on the next street corner – and that was not a future I was happy to contemplate. I had to give this everything I had.

Everything
.

And if I failed, then at least it wouldn’t be for the want of trying, merely because I wasn’t quite confident, brave or spunky enough.

I walked up to the stage, which arose to just below my waist. I sat down on the edge of it and kicked my legs up, spinning around on my ass until I faced the curtains. Oh, this wasn’t going to go well. I hadn’t been on a stage since I was ten years old, in a Christmas school play. I was an angel of the Lord back then and had no speaking part – I was only required to come on, look suitably magnificent in my white cotton robe and tinsel halo, and go off again, having changed the course of world history for ever with my silent annunciation.

I drew myself up slowly to my feet and suddenly my boots felt very clumsy, my legs like lead, and my brains like cabbage soup. I didn’t know anything any more. I was beyond fear. I was merely...numb.

I turned around with hands on my knees and found myself under a dozen spotlights, looking out at a huge and desolate bar, a dark and formidable wasteland of inverted chairs and stoic tables, still and silent witnesses to my impending failure. Only one man stood there, the friendly-sounding Bruno, but it might as well have been the entire population of the city, armed with stones, tar and feathers.

And now I needed the toilet, really badly.

“What’s your name?” he asked from what seemed an awful long way away, as though he was shouting at me from the other end of a railway tunnel; a tunnel, I fancied, through which the inner-city express train was thundering towards me at top speed, but I just hadn’t seen it yet. And I wouldn’t either until it was too late, and I was a crushed blob of gore left quivering on the stage, of no use to anyone, not even myself.

I looked down, shielding my eyes from the lights.

“Phoenyx,” I said. I’m not sure why. It just sounded right, and more exotic than my boring old real name which I’d always hated anyway. My voice almost cracked with the strain of squeezing those two syllables out of my throat.

“Phoenyx,” he repeated. “Fantastic. Hot and fiery, very appropriate. Well, in your own time then, Miss Phoenyx.”

He pressed a button on the music centre and after a short hiss, the bar was filled with terrifyingly familiar music. It was Blondie – the opening of
Heart of Glass
. One of my favorite records and the one I always used to dance to at home when my mother was out.

Suddenly, I felt different. I was back in my bedroom again, in front of the wardrobe mirror, shaking my hips in a way I hoped the young guys on my street might find interesting. They were moves I’d rehearsed a hundred times, and I snapped right back into that routine. The bar was filled with young guys now who all looked like Niki Lauda and Rutger Hauer, and I was moving for them, all of them, in the hope that just one would notice me, rescue me, seduce me.

They hadn’t yet, so I flicked open the top button of my cardigan. Then the next one, and the next one, until the sleeve dropped off my shoulder, showing a shiny black bra strap. I turned my back on the uninterested crowd and swung my ass at them while opening up the rest of the buttons, out of sight. No fumbling, no panic, no forgetting who I was or what I was doing any more – it was as simple and as automatic as breathing Although an awful lot more fun.

I spun around to face the front, whipping my cardigan fully open as I did so. My tits swung almost out of control but the shimmy quickly transferred to my hips as I slid the cardigan down my arms, slowly, pulling it down beneath my ass and then tight against my thighs. I worked one hand out of the sleeve and caught the cardigan between my legs, pulling it up tight until I felt it rub hard against me, tight into my crotch. And through the music and my heartbeat and the bursting pulse in my head, I could feel myself getting warm, and damp, against the leather lining.

I didn’t need the toilet any longer. I wanted more than that now.

The cardigan spun, flicked and flew aside. I shook my tits again, showing how keen they were to be released, and got to work on the bra. Slowly though – dropping one strap low, and then the other. Cradling my bulging assets before me, squeezing them up to form a long deep cleavage. I turned away again and fought with the clasp, hoping that my fingers could remember how they did that thing.

I struggled a bit at first. The clasps were being awkward, then I managed to get one free. The others followed and I spun around again, almost lost my balance on my heels and just managed to translate the motion by dropping down on one knee, my hands all that were holding the bra in place across my front. I squeezed and pushed them up, let them fall back and as I did so, spread my arms wide, threw my head back and let the whole lot spill out for those sexy guys to stare at. That had to have gotten at least someone’s attention.

My nipples had prickled and stiffened, and I loved how that felt. I teased them and tweaked them and made myself jump with the dirty little electric jabs which shot through me as I did so. Oh, how I wanted someone else’s hands there, and inside my leather pants.

Shaking my hair from side to side, I started on my jeans, pulling open one button after another. I had them all opened and my hands down the front, rubbing through my rough mat of hair when suddenly the music ended. I hadn’t even noticed the fade-out, and I found myself half-naked on an empty stage, staring out in panic at a strange man staring back up at me through a gently rising spiral of cigarette smoke.

Just how terrible had I been? I waited for him to burst out laughing. I didn’t know whether to cover my tits up again or fasten my leathers first. So I just knelt there and waited for something to happen, hoping I didn’t look too much like a rabbit in the headlights of a ten-ton truck. I tried to smile but the skin of my face felt like my mother’s old cracked chamois dusters, dry and tight.

Then another sound cut in over my throbbing heartbeat, a strange sound which took me some moments to recognize in my delirious state.

He was clapping.

“Phoenyx?” he said, and moved closer. He put his hands on the edge of the stage and moved his head with its thick black curly hair and sideburns into the light. Wide brown eyes looked up into mine.

“Hi,” I said, feeling very stupid. I brushed a long wave of hair back from my face and grabbed up my cardigan in front of me. The spell broken, the music gone and the sexy audience with it, I felt cold, shivery, alone and very vulnerable once more. Sweat poured out of me from places that I didn’t even know could exude perspiration. My throat was aching for a drink, my tongue melted to the roof of my mouth. This, then, would be the bit where he grabbed me and did all the things to me that my mother used to say all strange men (or ‘wolves’ as she called them) would do to me if I wasn’t careful and gave them half a chance.

But Bruno’s grin told me that I had no reason to feel like that. He was older than all those fantasy men I dreamed about, heavier and rather more streetwise than I preferred. Yet he seemed to have liked what he saw.

And I really, sorely, needed to dash to the toilet again.

“Hi to you too,” he said, and held out his hand again. “Do you want a job?”

I tried to keep the cardigan in place with one hand while I held out the other to touch his. Then I gave up, and flung the boring old garment (which my mother had knitted for me) to the other end of the stage. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my nipples had grown harder and more sensitive than I’d ever experienced in my life. Whatever it was I was doing, I was enjoying it on every level of my being.

“Really?” I squealed, almost deafening myself as my voice reverberated all around the big wide empty desert of the bar.

“Yes, really. That was the hottest thing I’ve seen all day.”

His hand grabbed mine and swung me off the stage and into his arms. He held me there for a moment, then put me back on my feet where I landed with a yelp and a jump of delight.

I was in the Kitty Klub. What the hell would my mother think of that? I laughed aloud at the very idea as Bruno went off to remove the chalkboard sign from outside. If it had been he who had written the advert on it, and drawn the willy and the tit instead of the ‘!’, then he and I were probably going to get along just fine.

All I had to do now was figure out where all of my clothes had gone.

As well as holding back the rising need to wet myself – until I saw the sign across the bar marked ‘Ladies’. I made a run for it, clattering across the mosaic floor like a herd of elephants, half-naked with my tits bouncing around madly in front of me. And laughing like a maniac as I went, so much so that I barely even noticed the warm, wet worm which wiggled its way down my inner thigh to the inside of my boot.
Oh God, this was going to be so exciting.

As it turned out, I had no idea just how exciting it would all prove to be.

Chapter Two

Gettin’ It On

My first few nights in the Klub were merely spent watching from the wings, seeing how the regular girls moved and responded, soaking up the atmosphere, and just getting used to the whole place. The performers shocked and amazed me with their wonderful moves, their beautiful figures and sensuality. I loved them all on sight and could easily have wished myself to be any one of them. Within mere days I’d become their new best friend, the new kid on the block who everyone wanted to protect and look after. I got drinks and dinners bought for me. I didn’t even have to think about money any more. I had landed on my feet like a cat, without any doubt, at the exact moment when my life was in dangerous free-fall.

By the end of the week, Bruno called us all together into the bar before opening, in one of what he described as his ‘Klub Hugs’: little meetings where everyone was expected to speak up about anything that bothered them, make suggestions, raise ideas or just swap news and gossip. The main point on the agenda at this one was, of course, me: the new girl.

“Meet our new lady,” as Bruno introduced me, to loud applause from the others. “You’ll know that I refer to all of you as ladies, Phoenyx.
Not
girls. That sounds immature, and condescending. I respect all of you totally, as I hope you all respect each other, as well as our customers. And, as I hope, you’ll respect our latest arrival.” He was so forward-thinking for his time. I got more applause for that and if my cheeks hadn’t been burning red before, they certainly were now.

“Sissi was a great performer, our very own Empress of the stage and a tough act to replace, but that’s not why Phoenyx is here. She’s not going to be the new Sissi, and she has her own style, her own moves. I don’t want to hear any of you ladies making comparisons. I’m investing time and energy in this wonderful young redhead because I can see her bringing something new and exciting to the roster.”

(My face must have flushed as red as my hair. I had always hated the way it did that. A curse of having such pale coloring, along with my silly freckles, which looked like someone had spattered my face with paint from the end of a brush. I’d inherited it from my mother, and was always depressed to know that, like her, I’d still be wearing those stupid freckles when I was forty.)

“Now, tomorrow’s Saturday and I want our newest member to hit the stage. But I don’t want her freezing up in the spotlight, so in order to warm her up, we’re going to partner her off with you, Olivia. You can figure out the routine between yourselves. As long as the new lady gets plenty of...exposure, and you both look like you’re having a good time. That’s all I ask.”

Olivia was a tall, willowy character who moved like a tree bending in the wind. She had very long expressive hands, which she constantly fluttered around her face and neck in girlish fashion. On stage, she moved like a delicate sapling, swishing her hair and limbs in graceful and near-balletic arcs. Her skin was pale and so thin-looking, and the veins in her arms often seemed to glow almost electric blue when she was in action. At times, frozen in the spotlights, she looked like a china doll – so delicate and exquisitely-constructed. Her cascade of fine blonde hair almost enveloped her when she moved in hypnotic fashion. I couldn’t think what on earth I would be able to do alongside her without showing her up. I moved so heavily, clumsily, that we would have looked ridiculous together.

Or maybe that was the point; secretly, we were going to be a comedy double-act, with Olivia as the straight man. She must have sensed my anxiety, for she closed a thin hand over mine and squeezed it reassuringly.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be just fine,” she told me. She sounded like my mother on my first day of school.

If only I believed her, although I gave her a big warm smile in reply. I liked her a lot, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, so I told myself to try my very best. If I did that then nobody could hold anything against me afterwards.