Casually Compromised - Book 1

Be Stupid

I foolishly thought confirmation was the next step, I needed to confirm what I thought had happened nights before.

Vera and I had a VIP and it was nice. The usual conversation each of peeling back the layers, talking and enjoying each others company.

I enjoyed testing her.

Giving her subtle games to play in our time together, testing her reach of how far would she go maintaining character or breaking into the girl she was in real life.

I recall the fun of playing "force field" out of the movie Stripes with Bill Murray and Harold Ramis, one of the comedy classics of all time.

In the movie there's a scene where Bill and Harold get it on with some female police officers. Harold the geek of the pair presents a game he calls "forcefield", by which you attempt to get as close as you can to someone without breaking their forcefield, touching him, breaking that personal space barrier.

The female police officer in the movie plays the game and breaks his forcefield, breaking into his personal space, touching him- losing the game.

I recreated this with Vera curious on two fronts- would she play along with the insanity of it, or would she back away or change subject. She played it well, allowing me to break the forcefield first.

Another game we'd play was Mercy, which she was good at.

Who plays Mercy with a stripper I wondered one night. I did. I played Mercy with a stripper. I would fight hard and she'd always beat me, her upper body strength working the pole was fierce.

She even beat me at thumb war, she had crazy long thumbs. No fair I would think on many occasions.

We had a lot in common. She was studying film, I had worked in film. She was into art, I collected art. She was whimsically funny, I was hilarious.

Was anything true? I wanted to think so. We had talked candidly often, and I wanted to think we knew each other in some aspect in the real. She would insist our moments were real. Real as any friend could be. My defense mechanisms wanted to remind me this place can't be trusted but I wanted to believe Vera.

I wanted to think she would be someone I could of met and gotten to know without the circumstances of this place.

A delusion?

What wasn't an illusion though, was the other night, and how forward she was and in the middle of VIP, kissing me. It completely caught me off guard. Never expected it. I had never been kissed like that. Let alone in a place like this. Thinking about it sent my brain into overdrive. Adding to the complexity of situation, the potential betrayal I had committed to Ally, and the spiral I had revealed.

Yet my mind reminded me the kiss could of been engineered- false, another tactic to extend a VIP into multiple cash burning sessions. This made total sense to me. But it could of been something in-between.

She would expose some in-between state. One real, and she'd fight for the realness of who she was how she felt and the lie, the truth of the state of being in this place. One hell of rubric's cube I would think to myself. Her programming exposed, perhaps corrupted, by design.

I convinced myself confirmation logical. Vera however would give me the subtle reminder that most things in the path of serendipity are best left unquestioned. The logic in me felt disarmed and woefully obvious.

I had returned to the club.

It was dead.

An near empty strip club is a terrifying sight. The girls go from dancers to lurkers hanging on every possible chance for a dollar or embracing the enviable- no cash tonight. As a customer in this setting you go from being another average joe to tonights main event, you're a huge piece of bacon.