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I always get the read. It's my job.

But I can't read this one.

5

AGGIE

“Evening, boys."

I've said it a bunch of times, but tonight is the first time I mean it at somebody.

Somewhere across the city, three men I make photocopies for are settling in behind three laptop screens, logged into CamALot, and not one of them knows that the camgirl in the nine-dollar slip spent her entire workday watching them and wondering how much they’d spend tonight. HouseMoney is Beck. NoComment is Elias. KindRegards is Theo. I know their names, their calendars, and the way they take their coffee. And starting right now, tonight, I'm going to use every last bit of it.

For two weeks, I ran this room half afraid and terminally grateful, taking whatever money anyone threw my way like I was a lucky bitch whose time was running out. Tonight, I'm balls-out, and it turns out, that's a different gig altogether.

I start with Beck, because Beck is easy. HouseMoney comes in like a tornado, the way he always does, all caps, throwing crowns, and telling the room to make way for the grown-ups. In any other setting, I might think he’s an insufferable douche.

Only two weeks ago, the man rattled me. Tonight, I know exactly what he’s doing. It's the same thing he does in every conference room I've ever booked for him, sucking all the air out of the room before anyone else does so he comes out on top. So I don't give him the room. I hand it to somebody else, on purpose, right in front of him.

Like stealing candy from a baby.

"One at a time, boys," I tell the chat, sweet as pie. "Everybody gets a turn tonight. I can do that with only three of you, you know."

And I watch Beck spend more to buy his turn back. By the third round, he's tipping like it’s his job, and God help me, I like that it is.

Theo's next, my KindRegards, protective as ever. you doing okay up there? did you eat today? Two weeks ago, I thought he was a sweetheart. He is a sweetheart. He's also the man who slides an oat-milk coffee onto my desk every morning and looks at me the way you'd look at a nice houseplant, and there is a small, mean corner of me that would very much like to watch the sweetheart squirm. So I call him sweet. I already know what it does to him, he told Diablo so himself, back when I still thought Diablo had strangers for customers. You're going to get me in trouble, he types. Buddy, you have no idea.

And then there's NoComment. Elias. The one who never says a word.

For fourteen months, this man has looked straight through me, like the front desk comes with a chair and the chair comes with a woman and neither one is worth a glance. Fourteen months of this is wrong, clause four, dropped on my desk like I'm a mail slot. And every single night for two weeks, that exact same man has sat silent at the top of my CamALot dashboard and paid more than anyone alive to watch me bump and grind.

So tonight, I go looking for him.

I slow everything down. I make them wait while I look dead into the camera, straight at the one account that never enters the chat, and I go for the jugular.

There’s no response. Nothing. Of course, nothing. He doesn't type, he never types. The account just glows there at the top of my little kingdom with crown tokens spilling over the page.

But I know that man. I have watched Elias Thorne not-react to things for months, and I would bet money, his money, that four hundred-dollars' worth of a silent whale called NoComment is holding his breath in a dark room somewhere across town in a fancy-pants apartment with a killer view.

And that is when it happens, the thing I did not plan for, the thing that is going to be a genuine problem.

I get turned on.

Not the way I've gotten used to being turned on. No, this is different. It’s not the clean, powerful, look-what-I-can-do-to-a-whole-room feeling I've been riding for two weeks. This one is dirtier, and it has faces on it. I'm kneeling here, picturing Elias Thorne going rigid at his desk, Beck flustered for once in his gilded life, Theo pink to the tips of his ears, and I want them. Not their crowns. Them. The actual men. Their dirty minds. Their tongues and hands and hard dicks. I want that from the three men who can't pick me out of an empty lobby.

I want the cold one to crack. I want the loud one to fumble his words. I want the kind one to quit being kind and say something filthy. I want, specifically and in humiliating detail, three men who wouldn't know my last name without the tag pinned to my chest.

This is, to be clear, fucking insane.

So I do the thing I do. I tell myself this is just the game getting good, that a woman would have to be carved out of stone not to feel something with three rich men on their knees for her.

I finish the night the way a professional finishes a night. I take their money, every celebratory crown of it. I blow the camera a kiss. And when I sign off, the screen goes black and it's just me and the lamp and the chihuahua-named silence of my apartment. I sit there with my heart slowing and one deeply unhelpful thought haunting me that I have to get rid of or I’ll never sleep.

I have to look all three of them in the eye in the morning.

Turns out, you can play three men like fiddles at midnight and still have to bring them coffee at nine.

I don't sleep much. I show up early anyway, because Agnes is nothing if not punctual, and I sit behind the front desk in my oatmeal cardigan feeling like I'm wearing a sign. Last night, I knelt on my bed and told these men, in so many words, exactly what I wanted to do to them. This morning, I have to sign for their dry cleaning.