Chapter 3: Backstage Desires
The cool night air had done little to clear Raj’s head. He stood in the alley behind The Velvet Rope, the ghost of Candy’s touch still electric on his skin, the taste of her and cheap whiskey clinging to his tongue. The silence of her apartment after the message had been a physical weight. She’d dressed quickly, her movements sharp, her eyes avoiding his. “I have to go back. Shift’s not really over. Something came up.” No explanation, just a tight, perfunctory kiss on his cheek that felt like a stamp of dismissal. He’d been ushered out, stumbling back into the night, the warmth of her sheets already a memory.
Now, driven by a confusion that curdled into a desperate, needy anger, he pushed through the club’s main door. The bass was a physical assault. Strobing lights fractured the crowd into grotesque, laughing fragments. He ignored AJ’s shout from a packed booth, shouldered past groping hands and sloshing drinks. His destination was a plain, unmarked door beside the restrooms, a door he’d seen her slip through earlier. A door marked ‘Performers Only’.
He shoved it open.
The cacophony of the club muted to a low thrum. Here, the air was thick with the cloying scent of hairspray, powdery perfume, and the sharp, animal tang of sweat. It was a long, narrow room lined with lighted mirrors, each reflecting a slice of private ritual. Women in various states of undress paused, their eyes—bored, curious, hostile—flicking to him. A cloud of dry ice from a dancer’s boots drifted across the stained carpet.
And there she was.
Candy sat at a vanity in the far corner, haloed by a single bright bulb. She was alone. She had already shed her street clothes. She wore only a black satin robe, untied and hanging open. In the mirror’s reflection, he watched her. Her face, cleaned of its stage makeup, looked younger, harder. She was staring at her phone, thumb scrolling, her expression unreadable.
Then, as if sensing his presence, her eyes lifted and locked onto his in the glass. No surprise. Just a slow, deliberate acknowledgment. She set the phone face down.
Without a word, she turned on the stool to face him. The robe fell open completely, revealing the full, pale curve of her breasts, the bird tattoo on her hip, the soft blonde hair between her legs. She leaned back, bracing her hands on the vanity behind her, and slowly, defiantly, spread her knees.
“Lost, sweetheart?” Her voice was the club persona, cool and syrup-sweet, but her eyes were the ones from her apartment—tired, real, and holding a challenge.
He couldn’t speak. His mouth was dry. He took a step, then another, the door swinging shut behind him, sealing him in this velvet-and-chrome purgatory.
She watched him come, her gaze dropping to the obvious bulge in his trousers. A faint, cruel smile touched her lips. “You followed me. Like a puppy. After you’d already had your fill.” She brought a hand down, her fingers sliding through her own folds with a casual, obscene familiarity. They came away glistening. “Or was that just an appetizer?”
“The message,” he finally managed, the words rasping. “Who was it?”
Her smile vanished. “None of your fucking business.” Her voice lost its candy-coated edge, turning flat and cold. “This is. You want more? You keep staring like you’ve never seen a cunt before.” She shifted forward on the stool, leaning over, presenting herself to him. With both hands, she hooked her thumbs into her own labia and pulled them apart, exposing the dark, glistening pink flesh within. The scent of her, musky and intimate, hit him from three feet away. “You want it? Then get on your knees and eat me like the good boy I know you can be. Earn it.”
The command, so filthy and direct in the harsh backstage light, broke the last of his restraint. The shame, the confusion, the dizzying high of the night—it all fused into a single, molten point of need. He dropped to his knees on the stained carpet, the coarse fibers scratching through his slacks.
He didn’t hesitate. He buried his face between her legs.
The taste was overwhelming—salt, sweat, her unique, heady essence, layered over the faint chemical taste of the club’s stringent cleansers. He groaned into her, his glasses digging into the bridge of his nose. He licked a broad, clumsy stripe from her perineum up to her clit.
Candy jerked, a sharp gasp escaping her. Her hands flew to his hair, not guiding, but gripping, fisting in the dark strands. “Yes. Oh fuck, yes. Just like that. Use your tongue. Get it deep.”
He obeyed, spearing his tongue inside her, fucking her with it. She was impossibly wet, hot, and tight. Her hips began a shallow, grinding rhythm against his mouth. The sounds she made were pure, guttural feedback—grunts and hissed curses that filled the small space around her vanity.
“You love this, don’t you?” she panted, looking down at the top of his head. “My little IT man. On his knees in a dirty dressing room, lapping at a stripper’s pussy. Your colleagues would die.” She shoved his face deeper. “Suck my clit. Hard. Pretend it’s a goddamn lifesaver.”
He focused on the hard little nub, sucking and flicking it with frantic desperation. Her legs clamped around his ears, muffling the world. Her thighs trembled. Her cursing became a continuous, breathless stream.
“Yes, right there, you bastard, just like that, make me come, make me fucking come on your stupid face…”
He felt her body tighten, a bowstring pulled to its limit. Her back arched violently, her head thrown back. A raw, shredded cry tore from her throat as she climaxed, her release flooding his mouth, her inner muscles pulsing against his probing tongue. He drank her in, swallowing every drop, his own cock aching painfully in his confinement.
She went limp, her grip in his hair slackening. For a moment, there was only the sound of her ragged breathing and the distant, persistent thump of bass. Slowly, she pushed his head back. He looked up, his mouth and chin soaked, his breathing harsh.
Her expression was complex—spent, victorious, and shadowed by something else. She slid off the stool, onto her knees with him. Her hands went to his belt, her movements swift and sure.
“My turn,” she whispered, and this time her voice was her own, husky and stripped bare.
She freed him, his cock springing out, flushed and painfully hard. She didn’t stroke it. She simply looked at it, then up at him. “I need you to fuck me now. I need to feel split open. No gentle shit. Can you do that?”
In answer, he grabbed her shoulders, turning her, pushing her forward so her chest was pressed against the cool, sticky surface of the vanity. The mirror rattled. Her reflection was a blur of blonde hair and wide eyes. He positioned himself behind her, the head of his cock nudging against her soaked, swollen entrance.
“Do it,” she growled, pushing back against him.
He drove into her in one brutal, bottoming thrust.
The cry she let out was one of pure, shocked relief. He held there, buried to the hilt, feeling her clench around him in aftershocks. Then he withdrew and slammed home again. And again.
This was nothing like her apartment, nothing like the private room. This was raw, percussive, and desperate. The vanity slammed against the wall with each pounding drive. Bottles of makeup rattled and tipped over. His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her hips, sure to leave bruises. Her pleas were filthy, fragmented.
“Fuck! Yes! Harder! Break me, you motherfucker, just break me!”
He fucked her with a mindless, driving rhythm, each impact a punctuation mark on his confusion, his yearning, his sudden, vicious ownership. The mirror showed him a crazed, red-faced stranger pistoning into a beautiful, wrecked woman. It was obscene. It was perfect.
“I’m gonna come,” he grunted, the pressure unbearable.
“Inside me,” she demanded, her voice a scrape. “Do it. Mark me.”
With a final, fractured groan, he obeyed, pumping his release deep into her convulsing core. He collapsed over her back, spent, his forehead against her shoulder blade. They stayed like that, joined, breathing in ragged unison, as the world slowly seeped back in.
The door to the main club creaked open. A dancer in full regalia—feathers and sequins—stopped short, took in the scene with a flat, uninterested glance, and moved to her own station without a word.
The normality of it was the coldest shock. Raj pulled out, the separation feeling violent. He fumbled with his clothes. Candy slowly straightened, wiping her thighs with a tissue from a box on the vanity. Her movements were weary, automatic.
She caught his eye in the mirror. “You should go. My next set is in ten.”
The finality in her voice was a door slamming shut. The phone on her vanity buzzed again, skittering a half-inch on the glass. She looked at it, and her face closed completely, the vulnerability he’d tasted, fucked, swallowed, now locked away tighter than any safe.
He had gotten what he came for, and less than nothing. He turned and walked out, leaving her in the garish light, the scent of their sex already being swallowed by the smell of perfume and despair. The club’ noise hit him like a wall, but he was already on the other side of it, moving through the crowd as if through deep water, alone in a way he now understood was permanent.
The cacophony was a solid thing, a pressure against his eardrums that made his teeth ache. Colored lights sliced through the cigarette haze, illuminating grinning mouths and glazed eyes that slid over him without seeing. He was a ghost in the machine, his body moving on some base instinct toward the exit, the neon promise of cold air.
A hand clamped onto his shoulder, fingers digging in. "Patel! The fuck, man? You disappeared!" AJ’s voice was a bark of jovial accusation, his breath hot and beery against Raj’s neck. He was pulled, spun around, faced with a grinning mask of camaraderie that felt obscene. "We've been waiting! Your turn to buy a round, you sly dog. You look like you got hit by a truck. A good truck."
Raj stared at him. The concern in AJ’s eyes was a quantitative calculation of fun, of tribal bonding. It had nothing to do with the emptiness cavernously opening inside Raj’s chest. He tried to form words, to say he was leaving, but his tongue was a slab of meat.
"C'mon." AJ’s grip tightened, steering him backward through the throng toward a sunken booth where two other men from the office waved, their faces blurred by drink and dim light. "You can't bail after that. Details are required. Debriefing. It's in the fucking contract."
He was pushed into the plush crescent of the booth. A fresh bottle of vodka, perspiring in its ice bucket, stood sentinel in the center. One of the men, Dave from Logistics, sloshed crystal clear liquid into a fresh glass. He shoved it across the table at Raj. The ice cubes clicked like knocking bones.
"Drink up, loverboy," Dave laughed. "You look parched. What was her name? Candy? Jesus. Bet she's a wild ride. Tell us everything. Leave nothing out."
The glass was cold in his hand. The vodka smelled like medicinal clean, like erasure. Their expectant faces loomed, predatory in their friendly curiosity. They wanted the story they could understand, the transaction, the score. They wanted to live it through him, to reduce the tempest in his soul to a dirty joke for Monday morning.
He lifted the glass. He did not think.
HE OBEYS IMMEDIATELY.
The vodka flooded his mouth, a shocking, sterile burn that seared his throat and pooled, hot and artificial, in his gut. It did not warm him. It was a chemical fire, an internal sanitizing. He set the empty glass down with a sharp crack.
"Well?" prompted the third man, leaning in. "Was it worth the fucking mortgage payment? Did she let you hit it raw?"
Raj’s eyes lifted, focusing past Dave’s shoulder, through the shifting bodies. On the central stage, under a new spotlight, Candy had appeared. The blonde wig was back, longer, sleeker. Her body, a landscape he had mapped with his mouth and hands an hour ago, was sheathed in iridescent latex. She moved with a fluid, mechanical grace, wrapping herself around the polished brass pole. Her smile was brilliant, vacant. A man in a suit tucked a bill into her garter, his fingers lingering. She bent low, letting her hair curtain his face.
A current, white and hot, jolted through Raj’s numbness. It was a pure, undiluted jealousy, so sharp it felt like hatred. That body, those sounds she’d made, the taste of her—it was all a script. He was just another paying audience member. The private room, her apartment, the dressing room floor—they were just increasingly expensive tiers of the same illusion.
"Earth to Raj!" AJ snapped his fingers. "You in there? Or did she suck your brains out through your dick?"
"I need air," Raj said, the words sandpaper on his throat. He stood, pushing out of the booth, ignoring their protests. He didn’t head for the exit. He moved with a new, grim purpose along the periphery of the dance floor, his gaze locked on the stage.
She descended, accepting a hand from the suited man, laughing at something he said. She led him, not toward the private rooms, but to a shadowy alcove with low couches. Raj followed, a phantom in the strobe light. He stopped at a column ten feet away, cloaked in darkness, and watched.
The man was already handsy, pawing at her latex-clad hip. Candy laughed, a tinkling sound that set Raj’s teeth on edge, and poured champagne from a bottle on the low table. She perched on the arm of the couch, one leg swinging, letting the man’s hand ride high on her thigh. His other hand fumbled with his wallet.
Raj couldn’t hear the words, but he saw the transaction. The man passed her a folded stack of bills. Candy tucked it away with a seamless motion, her smile never faltering. Then she shifted, sliding into the man’s lap, her back to his chest. She guided his thick, ringed hands up to squeeze her breasts through the latex. She arched, rubbing her ass against the crotch of his trousers.
A sound escaped Raj, a low growl trapped in his throat. This was the performance. This was her work. The knowledge was an ice pick to his sternum.
The man’s mouth was on her neck. One of his hands slid down from her breast, over the slick latex, diving between her legs from the front. Candy’s head lolled back onto his shoulder, her eyes closed, her mouth forming a perfect ‘O’ of feigned pleasure. Her hips ground against his intruding fingers.
Raj’s own hands clenched into fists. This was what he had paid for initially. This was the surface. He had seen, had touched, had been beneath it. The intimacy he’d felt, the connection he’d hallucinated in her bed, curdled into something vile and pathetic. He was a mark who’d overpaid, who’d mistaken a skilled performer’s depth for real feeling.
The man was now whispering in her ear, his free hand working at his belt. Candy nodded, still moving against his fingers. She stood, taking his hand, and led him toward the same hallway of private rooms.
Raj moved. He cut through a group of people, his body buzzing with the toxic cocktail of vodka, jealousy, and shattered illusion. He reached the mouth of the hallway just as the velvet curtain to a room swished closed behind them. A small, lit sign above the archway glowed: ‘Champagne Room Occupied.’
He stood there, breathing heavily. The bouncer at the hall entrance, a mountain of a man with a shaved head, watched him with detached interest. Raj’s mind was a riot of images: Candy beneath him in her quiet apartment, Candy bent over the vanity, Candy now in another room, with another man, repeating the same acts, making the same sounds.
He turned away, the momentum of his anger collapsing into a profound weariness. He was done. The club, the noise, the relentless, hollow commerce of flesh—it was a virus, and he was infected. He needed to purge it.
He shoved his way to the main entrance and stumbled out into the night. The city air was a damp slap. He walked without direction for blocks, the vodka churning in his stomach, each step echoing the finality he felt. He found himself on a quiet residential street, the brownstones looming like silent judges.
He stopped, leaning against a wrought-iron fence, and vomited into the gutter. It was mostly liquid, burning his sinuses. He spat, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Straightening up, he looked around, disoriented.
He recognized the faded peace sticker on the third-floor door. He was standing directly across the street from Candy’s apartment. A single light was on in the window, a soft yellow glow behind the philodendron.
He stared at that light. It was not the sterile, colored glare of The Velvet Rope. It was the light from her lamp, the one that had haloed her bare skin as she kissed him with what he had believed, for a few desperate hours, was real hunger.
From his pocket, his own phone buzzed. He pulled it out. A new message glowed on the screen, from an unknown number. His heart stalled, then began a frantic, foolish pounding.
The message contained only an address. It was not hers. It was somewhere in the warehouse district, down by the river. Below that, a single line of text:
If you want the truth, come now. The door will be open.