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usually do?”
    “We usually do whate’r a man wants us to do,” said the brunette. She moved over to Andrew and rubbed her breasts against his chest. Her hand trailed down his vest toward his trousers and playfully tapped the buttons of the fly. Andrew took a sharp breath, and in spite of the cold, sweat popped out on his brow. His cock stirred, instantly hard and tender with need. “You’s a man of means, clearly. You got a rich daddy? He know what you’re up to?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t worry,” the brunette continued. “We ain’t tellin’ your daddy or nobody else. We wanna make you happy. Want you to come back lookin’ for us next time you want a ride.”
    The blonde giggled and snatched up one of the thin pillows from the bed. She held it to her chest. Andrew hoped the pillow wasn’t filled with bugs, like the sheet, though he imagined it was.
    He had rented this room in a Lower East Side flophouse for a few hours. It was the most disgusting place he’d ever been. The walls were warped and water-stained. The gas light on the wall by the door sputtered, and the splintered transom hung open like a broken jaw. He didn’t even remember the name of this decrepit place. The Raven, maybe.Or the Crow, or Sparrow. Some kind of bird. Not that it mattered. He was newly eighteen, and this was his gift to himself. Sex with no strings, no demands, no expectations or judgments. It was his attempt at finding something that might make him smile and forget his life, if just for a short while.
    The hookers dropped down, side by side, on his coat. They struck awkward poses they must have thought were appealing and winked at him. He hesitated, and then shed his shirt, vest, suspenders, and trousers. They oohed and ahhed when he peeled off his union suit, leaving him standing as naked as they were in the cold room.
    “Now that’s what I wanted to see,” said the brunette. She reached over to cup his stiff organ with her hand. He instinctively pushed his hips in her direction. His jaw tightened. She cooed and kissed the tip. “Oh, yes, my love. You want me to use my mouth?”
    Andrew nodded, his breath locked, momentarily unable to speak. He noted the blonde watching, still holding the pillow, as several bedbugs crawled up her neck and she unceremoniously flicked them away. His gut turned over with desire and disgust.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do this, to take these hookers and take them good, to dive his anger and his lust home until he was emptied of them both. He’d planned this trip to the slums of Manhattan ever since his eighteenth birthday last month. He’d made love, of course, with several of the rich debutants who lived near him in Riverdale. But it was never right, never good enough, never complete enough. Those girls were giddy and prudish, agreeing at first then protesting when they were done, or nearly done, that they should not have been talked into doing such a thing, that they should save themselves for their husbands, a blatant hint that if he wanted it again then he best offer up a diamond and a proposal. At that point he would leave them in their perfumed silliness in the grasses behind the dovecotes or in the quiet corners of the stables. He’d return to his own home and his own third floor bedroom, where he would lie on the floor and wish he were dead.
    Andrew’s mother, the elegant Andrea Edmonds, fretted over her son’s melancholia, which had plagued him since earliest childhood. Married to Andrew’s stepfather, the steel baron Richard Edmonds, Andrea had hired the most expensive doctors throughout Manhattan to examine her son and prescribe various tonics, potions, and drugs to cure his malaise. Nothing worked. With rare exception he was lethargic and distant. Andrea pleaded him to tell her what was wrong. She bribed him with every thing a young man could want—an automobile, fine clothes, an expensive scoped German hunting rifle, a thoroughbred racehorse to compete at the Coney