Seattle Girl (12 page)

“Lay it on me,” Steve said in that ‘I am hanging on every word you say, because you are a very important person’ way of his.

I tried to gather my thoughts together so I wouldn’t sound like a complete idiot. “First off, the money and the hours are great. But the thing is a couple of the chicks I work with are saving for law school or working towards their PhD’s.” Taking a sip of my iced tea I held up a hand to stave off his rebuttal. “Granted, I will agree that there are plenty of grungy, no-future, cracked out losers, but don’t be surprised if the woman serving you your Coors Light has got twenty IQ points on you.”

“Ten maybe,” he teased. “Twenty is pushing it.”

I laughed. “Trust me, the waitresses know exactly what they’re doing when they let a guy cop a feel between rounds. As long as the tips keep getting bigger, what do we care?”

Steve smiled at me, seemingly pleased by my soliloquy. “So you’re a pretty mercenary bunch, are you?”

I considered his words for a moment. “I guess so. A girl has to go for what she wants, and if it means walking around practically naked sometimes, so be it.” I paused for a sip of iced tea. “Weeds out the weak, I guess.”

I was hoping I sounded like I knew what I was talking about, because once I jumped into the “practically naked” territory, I had definitely entered virgin territory.

No pun intended.

Steve looked at me consideringly. “You’re certainly not weak, are you?
 
You’d tear a nice guy like me to shreds, I’ll bet.”

I liked the sound of that. Georgia Fulton, the man-eating she-beast leaving a trail of male carcasses in her wake.

Screw virgin territory. This was a hell of a lot more fun than talking to some jock at a frat party had ever been. I was full on owning my new tough chick, been around the block, persona, thank you very much.

“Well maybe,” I said, giving Steve my most ferocious, devouring look. “How about I’ll call you when I get off of work Friday?”

He scooted his chair back from the table, held out a hand to pull me up, and as we walked out of the restaurant, he put his hand on my lower back and leaned down close to my ear and said, “I can hardly wait.”

Right then and there, as shivers ran up and down my spine, I decided I was going to lose my virginity with Steve Jacobs.

* * *

When I walked in the door of our apartment at midnight, Diane was laying on the couch reading a romance novel,
Love Conquers All
. I lifted up her legs and plopped underneath them on the couch.

“Guess what?”

She finished the last sentence she was reading and looked up. “Hey. What?
 
You look excited.”

I grinned. “I am. You are looking at the most wanted woman in Harborside!”

She put her book down. “No shit?”

“Yup. Steve, the hot DJ I was telling you about, asked me out for this weekend.”

“Oh my god. What did he say?”

I tried to imitate his smooth, low voice. “Hey baby. Wanna go dancing on Friday night?” I giggled at how ridiculous I sounded as a male-impersonator.

Diane cried out, “It’s not fair! I want to work at a radio station too!”

I smiled serenely, feeling infinitely mature. After all, there I was, out in the real world, seriously kicking butt.

* * *

Bill dropped by the station to check it out and take me to lunch the next day.

“Damn, I’m jealous,” he said. “You’re actually working at a real, commercial radio station. How is it?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek, thinking about my response. Finally I said, “It’s fabulous and awful all at the same time.”

“Start with awful,” he prodded.

“Well, Lola is a major bitch, to start.”

“No way.”

“She’s such a phony, I swear to God. Sometimes I’m listening to her do her show and she’s so nurturing and understanding to her callers that I make the mistake of forgetting what she’s really like.”

Bill’s face was a mask of disbelief.

“And then she’ll turn to me during a commercial and say something like, ‘Where are my notes, fatso?’”

“You’re kidding me?”

“I wish, but no. She’s a barracuda.”

Narrowing his eyes, he said, “What about Steve Jacobs? Is he a jerk off the air, too?”

I couldn’t help it, I started blushing at the mention of Steve’s name. “No,” I said, trying to tamp down on my sure to be too big smile, “he’s actually really nice.”

Something odd flashed in Bill’s eyes. “That’s it? He’s a nice guy?”

I knew it was awful, but I was dying to brag about my upcoming date. “We’re going dancing this weekend,” I blurted, blind to anything but my own happiness.

“Oh,” Bill replied in a flat voice.

But I was on a roll already, so I kept on about Steve, saying, “I couldn’t believe it when he asked me because he’s just so damn good, you know, and I was so flattered, and now I’m worried that I’m going to fuck it up.”

Especially the part where I planned on losing my virginity, but I wasn’t stupid enough to say that to Bill.

Bill smiled, but there was no gladness behind it. “I’m sure you’ll have a great time, Georgia.”

I nodded absently, my mind already having skipped ahead to my date with Steve.

* * *

For the rest of the week at work Steve and I acted pretty cool with each other. When he didn’t think I could see him he would stare at me with a really goofy look on his face.

Mostly he was staring at my chest, but it still made me feel beautiful to be the object of his lustful attention. I started to play into it, wearing more and more revealing tops each day. I even ‘forgot’ to wear my bra one day just to see what he would do.

One didn’t have to look very hard to see the outlines of my areolas through the white cotton tank top I was wearing. This reminds me how back in high school one of the kids in my history class was named Jose Areola. I always wondered if he knew that his last name was a bad word.

Anyway, when I was walking around the office that day, I kept my long hair in front of my breasts. But every time I walked in front of Steve, I would swing my hair back and let it rest on my back, giving him a perfect shot of my breasts. From nine until noon that day, as I came and went from the control room assisting Steve with his show, whenever I turned to face him he took a small gasp of air.

Like I said, the whole thing was really gratifying. I never realized that being a girl could be so powerful.

Of course, Lola was still around, every afternoon, to make my life hell. I couldn’t figure her out. How could anyone be so nice on the air and so awful off of it?

Diane and Seth had started to listen to the station out of sheer curiosity and they had formed their own opinions of the situation. Diane thought Lola was secretly lusting after Steve and once she saw my hot bod she was afraid of the competition. Seth thought she was an in-the-closet lesbian and she was being bitchy as a defense mechanism, so that she wouldn’t starting licking me.

I wasn’t sure if either theory was quite right, but there was definitely something strange going on. And I wasn’t going to stop poking around until I found out what it was.

* * *

By the time I had closed out my last customers at the bar on Friday night, I was exhausted. Even with all the excitement and potential romance in the air, all I wanted to do was go home to wash the smell of burgers and beer from my hair. Unfortunately, all I had time for was a little clean-up in the bathroom of the casino. I had packed a sort spaghetti strap dress with high-heeled sandals into my duffel bag, which I now changed into. Once I finished brushing my hair and putting on a little mascara and lipstick, I walked out onto the casino floor to the pay phone and dialed Steve’s number.

He picked up on the second ring. “Hello. Steve here.”

Suddenly I felt self-conscious. What if he didn’t want to see me anymore?
  

Finally I spoke up. “Hi Steve. It’s Georgia. I’m, uh, finished up at the bar now.” I paused and waited for him to take it from there.

If he canceled on me at the last minute I was not going to be bummed. I was going to be calm and mature about it. I might pee in his coffee on Monday morning, but other than that I was going to take rejection really well.

“Just the girl I’ve been waiting to hear from. Are you ready to get down?”

I laughed, relieved, even as I was wondering if he knew that the phrase “get down” had gone out with the leather fringe vest.

“Of course I am. I was just getting changed after work.”

“Nothing too hard to get off, I hope.”

I wasn’t sure how he had managed it again, but while lines like that should have sounded smarmy, they just didn’t coming from him. It was no wonder that he was so good on the radio, I thought. He could say just about anything and it sounded great.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” I looked approvingly at my little red dress. “Do you want to meet in front of the casino in fifteen minutes?”

“Sounds great, baby. I can’t wait.”

By the time I walked around to the entrance of the casino, he was already outside waiting for me. He looked a little bit nervous. It was really endearing. I guess I wasn’t the only one who was a little nervous.

I walked over to Steve and he reached an arm out to me as I got closer. I put my left hand into his right hand and thought again what fabulous hands he had. They really were erotic. They were big and rough and it looked like he did manual labor with them. He obviously put his hands to good use when he wasn’t on the air. I wanted to ask him what he did with them, but it suddenly seemed like much too intimate a question to ask some guy you worked with when you were standing out in front of a casino together.

He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek as he said hello and then moved us inside the revolving doors. Inside the casino it smelled like smoke and sweat. When I first started working at the Casino I found it funny that so many people would travel such a long way just to lose their hard-earned money. But as I saw people leave night after night, broke and haggard, I stopped thinking it was so funny. I knew that I would never be able to gamble after working in a casino. Too much sadness was attached to it.

As we walked past the slot machines, one of them came up a winner. The red buzzer sounded, and the player screamed and jumped for joy. But all I could see were the jealous faces of the people at the other slot machines, all wondering, “Why not me?”

My dad would tell them, “Life’s not fair.” And my mom would lecture them about the evils of gambling. Her older brother was a professional gambler in Hong Kong. Eventually he fell into such debt that after borrowing as much money as he could from his relatives he hid himself away in the mountains for nearly a decade. Last she heard he was dead.

We reached the ticket line for the dance club and Steve turned to look at me. “Are you okay? You look kind of upset.”

“Sorry,” I said as he paid for our tickets. The ticket guy stamped our wrists and I said, “Something about gamblers is just so not right, you know?”

He pulled me out onto the dance floor. “It’s time to stop thinking, baby. Get ready to shake your booty!”

I couldn’t help but wonder, for a moment, if he had just finished watching
Saturday Night Fever
. At least that would explain his incredibly outdated vocabulary.

We danced like we were on fire. I had never had so much fun without Diane or Seth around. Periodically we would leave the dance floor so that Steve could do a couple of shots at the bar. I didn’t want to forget anything about our date, so I stopped at one.

Steve, on the other hand, was downing them fast and furious. He didn’t get all wobbly or anything, so I figured he was just good at holding his liquor. Plus, there was a bonus to all of his drinking: Steve started doing his shots off me.

He would put a lime between my teeth, sprinkle salt onto my neck, lick it off and then pull the shot, finishing up by sucking the juice from the lime slice in my mouth. I was totally into it and totally into him.

All of the shots, the bright lights, and the gyrating bodies must have made me fearless because when they announced the dance contest a couple of hours later, I got in line to do my thing.

Taking my place in the middle of the dance floor, I scoped out the judges. There were two men and one woman. Sure, the men would be easy to win over, but it occurred to me as the music started pounding, and the lights began to whirr in a crazy pattern over my head, all of the other girls had played up to the male judges. Maybe, just maybe, if I put on some lesbo moves, I might be able to walk off stage with the competition in my back pocket. Not to mention the fact that Steve would probably get really turned on by watching me bump and grind with a woman, and since I had big plans for the culmination of the evening, I wanted to get him as hot as I possibly could.

As a Lady Gaga mash-up pumped through the room, I slithered across the dance floor, first paying a visit to each of the male judges, who were sitting in their folding chairs by the end rail with looks on their faces that said,
Go ahead, impress us
. Some of the other contestants had done little strip-teases, but I wasn’t going to resort to showing skin to win this one.

After shaking my booty in the general vicinity of the men, I focused all of my attention on the female judge. Keeping eye contact with her, I made it perfectly clear to everyone in the dance club that I wanted to make love to her. More than that, I wanted to rip off her clothes and lick every single inch of her body. By the time I slowly came to be sitting on her lap, both of the male judges, and every man in the dance club was squirming to hide their erection.

Gently whipping my long hair across the face and breasts of the female judge, who was a really good sport, to my infinite relief, the song finally ended and I got up and left the dance floor.

Guess who won the contest that night?
 
Me, thank you very much. I was a very proud girl. I had never done anything so blatantly naughty before. I felt my unwanted innocence dripping off me in sheets.

I felt as if I was undergoing a transformation from the good Georgia Fulton to the bad Georgia Fulton.