Fallen Angel (Club Burlesque) Read Free

fingers inside of her. She slowly eased out of her thong and felt the surge of adrenaline that always came with the knowledge that forty strangers were staring at her shaved pussy. She moved back to the chair, crouched with her bare ass to the audience, and rested her head as if in a guillotine.
    Stage to black.

2
    M allory made her exit as a striking blonde rushed to the stage: Violet Offender. She was Agnes’s latest discovery, a performer who put punk before pussy, with tattoos above her crotch and ass to prove it. The first time Mallory saw Violet take off her clothes to reveal the words inscribed below her navel and on her lower back, she couldn’t believe her eyes: on Violet’s front, the tattoo read Merci ; on the rear, a centimeter above her ass, it read No Mercy .
    Mallory tried to make a quick getaway. The sight of Violet killed her post-performance buzz.
    “Hey—that was very cool,” Violet said, grabbing Mallory’s arm. Mallory pulled back as if touched by something hot.
    “Thanks.”
    “You’re not still upset about last night, are you?”
    “I wasn’t upset. I was just tired.”
    “Okay, cool. Listen, I’ll do the tip jar tonight.”
    “Really?” Mallory waited for the catch. The tip jar was everyone’s least favorite job at the Angel. At the end of the show, someone had to stand at the door in all of her naked glory and hold a can to collect tips. Tonight was her turn.
    “Yes. Absolutely.”
    “Okay. Whatever.”
    Was this her way of apologizing for crashing Mallory’s night out with Alec? Alec insisted he mentioned offhand where they were going, that he had no idea she would show up. But Mallory couldn’t help but wonder if he was falling back to old bad habits.
    There was a time—a brief, chaotic time—when they had tested the boundaries of their relationship with the occasional three-way. It had started as Alec’s idea, and she had gone along with it. Alec would argue that she more than went along with it—that she had enjoyed it as much as he did. But the truth was, she had always had mixed feelings about it. Her girlfriends thought she was crazy, that she was asking for trouble. And then a few months ago, she and Alec had both agreed that the adventurousness of it wasn’t worth the tricky emotional terrain. But her best friend, Julie, had told her it wouldn’t be that simple.
    “It’s like what Chris Rock says in the HBO special. . . . Once something is ‘on the menu’ for a guy sexually, it’s impossible to take it off.”
    “It’s off,” Mallory had insisted. But last night, when Violet had showed up at their dinner date at the Stone Rose, she had to wonder.
    Alec was almost finished with his MC segue between acts, and Violet squeezed Mallory’s arm with a wink before slinking onstage.
    “Hey, Mal. Great costume,” said Poppy LaRue, her arms full of discarded clothes. Usually they had a designated “stage kitten” to clear the stage after each performance. It was the stage kitten’s job to clean up the stage after each act, to clear it for the next performer, while she waited for the day when she would get the nod from Agnes to take the stage herself. But this natural order had been disrupted when their stage kitten was poached by the rival club, the Slit. “I love Cinderella,” she said.
    “Cinderella? Oh—no, Poppy... It was Marie Antoinette.”
    Seeing no flicker of recognition, Mallory told her, “Never mind.”
    Her friendship with Poppy had come a long way. Poppy LaRue was a tall, pretty blonde straight from the cornfields of Arkansas who had started at the Blue Angel a year before Mallory. She had been so threatened by Mallory’s appearance on the scene and the attention Mallory got from Bette Noir—the object of Poppy’s excruciating crush—that Poppy tried to sabotage Mallory at the club and even, Mallory suspected, made a play for Alec. But Poppy had mellowed once she fell into a great relationship with Patricia Loomis, Mallory’s former boss