Turn Me On

“It doesn’t bother you to be on stage naked with a room full of men watching you?” The question wasn’t part of the script, but Sabrina followed her instincts.

Cherry’s laugh was husky and confident. “When I’m up on that stage, I own the room. Every man with a pulse wants me. I’m the one in control.” She blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling and glanced appraisingly at Stef. “Being able to get a man hot is the most powerful feeling in the world.”

“So teach us how it’s done,” Sabrina suggested, resisting the sudden urge to grind her teeth.

Cherry stood and eased her robe off one shoulder. “It’ll be my pleasure.”

The red and gold living room was crowded with the six couples who’d come for her class, as well as the film crew. “Okay, each couple, pull up a chair. Guys, take a seat. Ladies, stand nearby,” she said, setting a straight-backed chair in the center of the living room to demonstrate.

Sabrina moved over by Stef. “Aren’t you going to move in with the handheld to get footage on some of these people?” She kept her voice low.

“In good time.”

“How much time do you think we have?” she asked.

“Look, if we move around too much now, we’re going to draw their attention. Right now, we stay in one place, they’ll start relaxing and you can get some good candid footage. Just calm down and let me direct, all right?”

Sabrina stared at him a moment, then subsided, turning her attention back to Cherry.

“My usual assistant isn’t here,” Cherry said, “which means I don’t have anyone to demonstrate on. I could use a spare red-blooded male.” She rested a hand on the chair back and glanced around the room; then her eyes brightened. “You, big boy,” she crooked her finger at Stef, who stood next to his cameraman, Kev. “Have a seat.”

“Sorry, I’m busy,” he said tersely.

“Ooh, I just love masterful men,” she cooed, walking up to him to curl her fingers into his shirtfront. “Just give me a few minutes of your time. You don’t even have to do anything but sit.” She turned, still holding on to his shirt and started to tug him across the room.

Emotions chased through Sabrina in rapid succession—confusion, shock, dismay, and a surprising spurt of jealousy. “He can’t do it,” she bit out. “Pick someone else.”

Cherry looked back curiously at Sabrina. Her eyes flickered to Stef and then her gaze sharpened. “Ah.” Slowly, the corners of Cherry’s mouth drew up into a smile.

“He can’t appear in the footage. He’s the director,” Sabrina persisted.

Cherry gave her a glance. “Don’t worry, sugar pie, I’ll make sure I stay between him and the camera.”

With a glance to make sure Stef was seated, she sashayed over to punch the Play button on the CD player. Rock music filled the room, not the slow bluesy number Sabrina had expected, but something a little faster, with a beat that thudded into her brain. There was something familiar about that beat, she thought. Not too fast, not too slow, it had the beat of…

It had the beat of sex.

Cherry turned back to her class. “You’ve got to have music you can move to. There is no right or wrong, so long as it’s sexy to you and your partner, it works.” Around the room, here and there, people nodded to the beat. One of the men, who looked like a junior high school principal, reached up and ran a hand down his partner’s hip; she leaned back against him with a smile of promise.

“Thanks, Paul, you just handed me the perfect lead-in,” Cherry said to him. “I’m sure you all know the basic idea of a lap dance—the dancer is allowed to touch the client, but he’s not allowed to touch her. Or him,” she added looking around at the men in the room. “Don’t think that your job is just to sit there, fellas. We’ll have you doing the dances by the end of the lesson.” There was a bit of uncomfortable laughter. “By holding back, by not allowing the client to touch you, you turn touching you into the only thing he can think about. That’s where the tease comes in.”

Suddenly, she began to move to the beat, the sway of hip and flow of shoulders all the more riveting for the lack of introduction. She shrugged her shoulders and the robe slipped down her arms to a crimson pool at her feet. “The tease and the promise are everything.” She ran a hand through Stef’s hair as she straddled his lap. “Of course, everyone in the room here is lucky—you’ll actually get your dancer to come through on that promise, won’t you,” she said, looking into Stef’s taut face.

Sabrina could cheerfully have scratched the woman’s eyes out. It shouldn’t bother her, she told herself, watching Cherry slide around on Stef while a roomful of people eyed them avidly. It didn’t matter to her what he did. She was over him.

She had to be.

Eventually, Cherry finished and Sabrina’s jaw loosened. The stripper threw Sabrina a grin and then addressed her class. “All right, ladies, listen to the music. Now just stand in front of your man and touch yourself. Run your hands down your hips, up your arms, or anywhere else you’d like to,” she said, demonstrating. “Get yourself turned on and get him thinking about touching you—because he can’t, and you want him to want it more than he’s ever wanted anything. You want to blow the top of his head off.”

Sabrina looked around the room as Stef rose to return to directing.

“Did you have fun?” she asked, just a bit of bite in her voice.

“Did I have a choice?” he returned. “You’re running this shoot, why didn’t you pull her off?”

“Weren’t you the one who always said you never did anything you didn’t choose to?”

“You want to last in this business, you learn to cooperate.”

A woman could drown in those black eyes, she thought. But not her. “Great. Then how about if you start by getting some footage with a handheld?”

“Not now.”

“Oh, really. If not now, when?”

“When they stop looking around at one another. You go with how it feels.” He shrugged. “Maybe in a little while. Maybe never.”

“Thanks for being so precise.”

“Maybe when you stop drawing attention to us by talking.”

“It’s not like they don’t know we’re here,” Kev murmured from behind Stef. “Let’s see if we can blend in. Sabrina, maybe if you move around the room and let them start talking to you, it’ll get things going.”

With his jeans, T-shirt and untidily cropped hair, Kev looked like someone’s kid brother, but there was a casual efficiency to his motions that spoke of long experience. He might have a point, Sabrina acknowledged. She wondered if it said something about her character that it was easier to take suggestions from him than from Stef.

She began to wander slowly through the room, watching the students. It was just like life. Some of the couples were earnest and focused on doing the exercise properly, as though they were going to be graded. Some were self-conscious, looking miserably aware of being in public and on camera. Most of them, though, looked like they were just getting turned on—not just by the lesson, but by watching their fellow students.

So maybe the tidy Glendale neighborhoods weren’t just about coffee klatches and the PTA, she thought with a smile. Maybe they had their share of swingers, too. She’d intended this segment as a tool to draw the average viewer into a world where sexual rules went out the window. Each segment of the doc would take them further, bit by bit, so they wouldn’t really notice it. But maybe she’d miscalculated. Maybe, just maybe, Middle America had come further than she realized.

“What a cool thing,” she murmured, starting when she realized that she’d spoken aloud.

“We just wanted to spice things up a little bit,” said a thin brunette named Miranda, casually flipping her silk robe to cover her bare breast. “You’ve got to be open to new things.”

Miranda’s partner George, who looked like he might work at the local lube shop, just nodded. Sabrina suspected he’d be all in favor of anything leading to quality sheet time.

“We tried a tantric sex class, but I wanted something with more action,” Miranda said. “Of course, sitting in the middle of a roomful of people having sex isn’t so bad,” she giggled, and began to move on George’s lap again.

Sabrina moved over to the school principal and his partner. He was stripped down to a silk G-string and giving his partner a surprisingly good lap dance. He rubbed his green silk-clad crotch against the blonde, letting her feel his hard-on while he traced his fingers down over her breasts. “Yeah, you like that, don’t you,” he whispered, staring into her eyes.

Now this was a motivated man, Sabrina thought. This was a group of people who knew how to make it fun, how to make it sexy, how to make it about them.

Cherry crossed over to where Sabrina stood with Kev and Stef. “So, are you enjoying yourselves?”

“It’s been educational,” Sabrina said. “You always get a crowd like this?”

“Sometimes more. You should come out on a weekend night. People really let their hair down then,” she said with a sidelong glance at Stef. “I think you’d like it.”

“Well, it looks like we’ve got everything we need,” Sabrina said thinly.