Escort Services

and the buzzer short-circuits like a mad trumpet in the wires, brrrrap-brrrrap-brrrrap, blast after blast ripping down the quiet hallway, salvo after salvo bursting into the black night outside, echoing off the peeling walls.

and she’s there, right on time, bang on the dot, and his gut twists with that old primal howl for love and want and flesh, and he’s racing to the door, feet slamming the floorboards, heart going like a bop drum.

wine and song.

now she’s talking freemasons, rolling it out like she’s got a seat at the big table, silent partner in the whole damn conspiracy of mankind, eyes shining with the secret glow — and he pours the red deep into the glasses, dark as blood, while she bends over the coffee table and cuts three perfect white lines on the cover of poetry weekly, that high-gloss rag with E.E. Cummings staring out from the front like a wild saint, lower-case god grinning at the madness.

laughing, snorting, surging —

eyes wide, noses burning, the rush hitting like a freight train out of the nowhere night, bodies electric, the room spinning slow and fast at once, wine spilling on the pages, the words dissolving into the powder, and everything alive, everything roaring, everything gone.

and she talks on — secret handshakes, men who run the world from back rooms — while the money’s already folded warm into her hand, one sweet hour bought and paid for, and he wonders, somewhere under the rush, whether she believes a word of it or whether it’s just the patter, the thing she gives instead of herself.

black fishnet stockings,
a cold, alabaster smile,
chasing the dragon.