Nicola was on her belly, pressed against a platform stage under low blue-purple lights--her strawberry blonde hair around her face, long legs stitched tight together with the chrome pole snug between the milky white of her inner thighs. She hadn't planned to visit the club this evening. She never really did. Arriving at Talulah always felt like something that happened to her rather than a place she decided to visit. Ben had introduced her to this place, and even though the breakup was six months old, stabbing pangs of love-loss still snuck up on her. The smell of a rental car. A flat rock--the kind he liked to skip across water. Christmas lights. She wasn't sure if she was drawn to Talulah because it was a piece of him or because it helped her feel alive and connected to her erotic self, the way he used to. Dancing at the club was physically arousing, to be sure. But it was also an emotional indulgence, agonizingly pleasurable.¬
It was like that--her hips rising and falling, slowly rubbing the V of her legs against the cool, smooth surface of the pole that she first saw him. Her freckled cheek was pressed flat against the stage, and he emerged sideways through a haze of hair and swirling lights. He stood out from among a small cluster of boring men seated in folding chairs in front of the platform stage, watching. His appearance was the first thing she noticed--his café au lait skin, the tidy, elegant wrap on his head, the delicate silver bands around each of his wrists in tender, almost comical contrast with his muscular arms. She arched her back to rise up to her knees as she took him in.
It wasn't just his clothes that made him different. It was his countenance. The men who sit in those chairs most nights have two ways about them: 1) Naughty schoolboys jerking off to a dirty magazine in the bathroom stall. Like they're doing something wrong and afraid to get caught. Shame all over them. Or 2) Slobbering dogs after a bitch in heat, slaves to their own urges. Disconnected from their humanity. Nicola hated them, which was part of fun of torturing them so. One of her favorite outfits to wear to Talulah was an oversized, cropped tee that flowed when she spun on the pole--the bold text across the chest read "NOT YOURS".