NOTE:
this is a story in which a lesbian with cash-flow problems has sex with a man, and maybe kinda likes it. Please do not read on if that's not for you.
* * *
Highway signs slashed through the blue midday sky.
"Can we hit that rest stop?" Millie ventured, feeling the miles weighing on her bladder.
"Sure."
From the driver's seat, Leon flicked an impish glance her way.
"How about you leave your bra behind?" he said, angling towards the off-ramp.
She shrugged, then realized that was an unhelpful form of communication when his eyes were on the road.
"Pay up," she said in her flattest tone. She didn't want to encourage him in this perverse little game, but she did need every little bit of money she could squeeze out of this weekend.
They settled into a parking space. Leon tapped on his phone, and there was an answering buzz from Millie's purse.
Payment from
Leon
for:
π½
Millie briefly considered attempting to wriggle out of her bra without taking off her shirt, just to spite him. But she hadn't tried that trick in a long time, and there was a risk of getting helplessly tangled.
Instead, she pulled off her tank top as matter-of-factly as she could, then shucked her bra and slipped back into the shirt. He watched her moment of nudity with appreciative interest. She ignored him and climbed out into the parking lot.
I'm doing this for Carolyn
, Millie thought. Really, she was doing it for a whole host of reasons, but she fixed her wonderful, sexy, funny girlfriend as her lodestar.
Carolyn would certainly appreciate seeing Millie bouncing around in a not-so-opaque shirt with no bra. She tried to push that thought aside. Carolyn wasn't here.
Don't think of her soft lips teasing a hard nipple through a thin layer of cotton
, Millie thought. This wasn't horny fun time, it was a simple arrangment.
Think of the way the weight fell off Carolyn's shoulders, when you told her you would be able to pay off those crippling student loans in one check.
Carolyn had seemed so happy, so free, that Millie hadn't had the heart to take it away from her when the money fell through.
Millie had been flying high on her first real sale -- a real painting, to a real collector. At art world prices, not art student prices. She'd rushed to write a fat check to the loan house, and had made Carolyn a corny hand-drawn birthday card to announce it.
The check had bounced. The buyer had been a scammer.
What's worse, by the time Millie found out, Carolyn -- flush with newfound financial security -- had already booked a pricy, non-refundable weekend trip to Vegas for her best friend's bachelorette party. The one she'd been agonizing about how to politely turn down because they just couldn't afford it.
Then Millie had gotten a little drunk about it at board game night -- okay, a lot drunk -- and somehow Leon had talked her into being his girlfriend-for-pay at the upcoming gaming expo.
He was staring openly at her chest as they crossed the parking lot. Enjoying the added jiggle, no doubt, and the effect of the cool evening on her nipples. He probably had a tent in his pants, but she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of looking down.
"You seem to me like what a straight girl would consider reasonably attractive," she said as they pushed through the rest-stop vestibule doors. "Shaved, showered. Fun hang at game night. Can't you find feminine companionship without having to pay a lesbian for it?"
"You're the one who came to
me
with a damn sob story," he shot back. "I was just trying to think of some way to help."
He paused to scan for a restroom sign.
"And," he finished, "I think with my dick."
"You
could
have just bought one of my paintings, asshole."
"I'm not really a painting kind of guy," he shrugged. "Think of it as a performance art commission."
She flipped him off.
He was angling off towards the men's room, but he grinned back at her over his shoulder.
* * *
Payment from
Leon
for:
π€²
The rest stop was old-school enough to have a non-chain diner.
Now, ensconced in as secluded a booth as she could find, Millie allowed Leon to snuggle up to her for some well-compensated fondling.
"You like this public shit, huh?" she said, paging through the menu. His right hand played lightly across her belly, while his left hung over her shoulder and tugged lightly at her nipple, where it embossed the thin fabric.
Millie suppressed the urge to struggle out of his grip. She didn't have to
like
this. She just had to give Leon his money's worth, at least to the point that she and Carolyn could cover all their bills this month.
"I'm a brain-poisoned child of the internet, baybeee!" he sang. She snorted. "My sex-ed degree is from the school of big-titty anime girls, and I've got kinks coming out of my ears."
"I mean...same," Millie admitted.
Reddening, she shoved Leon's hand away with a start as the waiter approached. When they had ordered and sent the man on his way again, she felt questing fingertips slip back down her shoulder and under her shirt, skin on skin against her breast, plucking and caressing.
His other hand was on her hip, and his lips brushed her ear.
"No kissing," she hissed softly. "Or, anyway, not for free."
She did
not
respond to his touch in any way, dammit.
Millie's phone buzzed, but this time it was Carolyn, reporting her safe touchdown in Vegas.
Millie texted back:
π€ππ
Carolyn knew that she was crashing at a friend's hotel room for the board game expo. She very much did not know the full details of the arrangement, and Millie wasn't sure if she wanted to tell her.
They had an open relationship, albeit usually more in theory than in practice -- who had the time to be constantly dating randos?
If Millie were crashing with a
female
friend, Carolyn might enjoy hearing details later about what use they'd made of the hotel room.
Would Carolyn feel betrayed if she knew that Millie was getting felt up by a dude?
Carolyn and Leon knew each other from their friends' weekly board game night, although Carolyn wasn't much of a gamer and didn't always come with Millie. She was a bit too competitive, having a tendency to want to flip the table when she was losing.
Carolyn had never put any restrictions on who Millie slept with on her own time, as long as she played it safe about STIs.
Millie and Leon had taken care of that last with a discreet visit to the clinic -- and after a bit of negotiation, she had agreed to take one of those three-month birth control shots. She'd given Leon a hard time about not wanting to use a condom, but she supposed it was a good precaution regardless.
Would Carolyn feel betrayed if she knew that Millie was doing all this in a desperate scramble to cover up for her naΓ―vetΓ© in getting scammed -- compounded by her foolish, premature fiscal promises?
Come up with the money, and let the rest take care of itself
, she thought.
He asked her about what games she wanted to try at the expo. It was a welcome distraction from his hands, rubbing, massaging, tweaking, teasing her. She'd been worried that he'd be all rough and grabby. This was worse. If it hadn't been a man, it would have been...
nice
.
What the heck. She could get a little enjoyment out of all this.
"Itch?" she asked. His hand was under her shirt, and she leaned gratefully into his touch as he scritched her back.
She didn't actually know what Leon did for money himself, she realized, and so she quizzed him about the life of an engineer.
Engineering certainly, Millie thought glumly, made more economic sense than Millie and Carolyn's wishy-washy careers as, respectively, a dog-walker-
slash
-starving-artist, and a barista-
slash
-art-history-grad-student. At least Leon had the grace not to rub it in.
He's too busy rubbing...something else
, Millie thought, stabbing her pancake viciously as his hand gently caressed her thigh.
No, he didn't need to make fun of her life choices. She could do that herself.
Payment from
Leon
for:
ππβ€
Millie stripped and lay back on the hotel bed.
It had been almost a totally normal afternoon, playing games with her friend, attending panels, gawking at the booths promoting various new and upcoming titles.
Except that her 'friend' had been gawking at her tits. Well, he'd paid for the right to stare, Millie supposed.
They'd met up with Ivan -- a small-time game designer who'd commissioned her to draw the art for his game. It had turned out to be way, way too much work for how much she'd charged him.
She'd played the game before, but now Ivan had a finished prototype, and the three of them played it together. It was nice to see her illustrations actually printed, and her name in small type on the box cover.
More money would have been even nicer.
It was time to get this over with.
"Put it in whenever you're ready, I guess," she said as neutrally as she could manage.
"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Leon laughed. "You're gay. But I feel like a
little
participation was implicit in the bargain."
"Would
you
do something like this?" she deflected.
"What, like, let a gay guy bang me?" he said, his lips quirking.
"That does seem like the rough equivalent."
"Maybe. I usually think of myself as straight, but I've wondered what it would be like -- even fantasized about it."
"Then what makes you think you're straight?" she asked seriously.