Belle - Lesley Pearse [90]
Then all at once it was done. The man let out a kind of frenzied roar and then he was still, reaching up to cup Betty’s face tenderly.
Betty wasn’t sharp with the man but she wasted no time in slipping off him, washing his penis and handing him his underpants and trousers. As he was putting on his shoes, she was washing herself, and by the time he was ready to leave, she was at the door waiting to stand on tiptoe to kiss his cheek to say goodbye.
‘Bye, sugar,’ she said. ‘You come back to me real quick now.’
There had been no kissing at all until that one brief goodbye, and as Betty closed the door on her man, Belle came out from behind the screen rather sheepishly.
‘See, there ain’t nothin’ to it,’ Betty laughed. ‘You gets ’em all excited even before you gets to the bed and they is a marshmallow in your hands. You know I’d do it with that young man for free, he’s nice and I reckon he’d pleasure me all night if I asked him to.’
Belle helped Betty back into her dress and fastened up the hooks and eyes. ‘Why didn’t you kiss him?’ she asked.
‘ ’Cos that’s what sweethearts do, honey,’ Betty said. ‘Kissin’ gets you goin’, but it’s for making love, not turning a trick. You save that for the man you love. You understand?’
Belle did understand, far better than she’d expected to. She couldn’t claim that she was eager to take her place as one of the girls, but she was far less reluctant now, and she even thought if she got a young man like that one, it wouldn’t be too bad at all.
During the next week Belle watched each of the girls with a client, and one evening she watched Anna-Maria and Polly with just one man.
‘I make ’em pay a great deal more for this,’ Martha explained. ‘It’s usually the old, rich ones that want it, but you’ll see the girls don’t mind it at all; the hardest thing for them is not to laugh.’
Belle had already found that laughter was a plentiful commodity in Martha’s house. During the afternoons the girls loved to sit out in the small shady back yard sipping iced tea or lemonade and discussing the previous night’s highlights. They held little back, descriptions were vivid and graphic, and mostly very funny, especially those given by Betty and Suzanne. Sometimes the girls laughed so much they complained of getting a stitch.
At first Belle just sat back and listened, but gradually she had been coerced into telling the girls about her experiences in Paris. Yet those nightmare scenes which she had tried so hard to forget became almost comedy when she relayed them to her new friends. She found herself exaggerating the fatness of one man or the great age of another, that way it hurt less. Maybe her voice did crack and her eyes fill with tears on occasions, but the girls would take her hand and squeeze it, and make some comment that not only showed they understood what she’d been through, but often turned her tears to laughter.
‘If you can laugh about the pathetic old devils who can only get it up with someone young and frightened, then you’ve scored over them,’ Suzanne said, with a touch of bitterness that suggested she knew what she was talking about. ‘Don’t you let them ruin your life, Belle. One day you’ll meet a man who will show you sex can be beautiful. But while you’re here we’ll show you it can be fun, and very profitable.’
Suzanne’s words proved true when Belle watched the girls performing with the client. Both of them, raven-haired Anna-Maria and blonde Polly, were completely naked, their young, firm bodies and lovely faces in strong contrast to the big, boastful Texan with the ruddy face and huge, flabby belly. His penis was very small, but when Anna-Maria knelt with her knees either side of his neck and let him watch her at close quarters as she stroked herself, it leapt to attention. Polly jumped on