The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Our first show is at the world-famous Summers on the Beach, on the first Monday of Spring Break — though we have a teaser scheduled before that. It’s well-timed — to the bar’s mentality, it isn’t yet peak hours. To ours, however... we will be getting first pick of all the eager young collegiates fresh off their planes. We will pluck the exhibitionists, decadents and kinksters out of the crowd before they have a chance to drop their tops anywhere else, and be the venue and catalyst to their first public exposure.

Summers is a major nexus of the Spring Break phenomenon. It’s been seen in several Hollywood films (Spring Break, Can It Be Love and Spring Fever USA, among others), and produces its own line of tapes featuring the sexy contests that take place there. Summers and the Trips have shared filming and distribution rights for our shows. In exchange for this somewhat generous agreement, Livia has arranged some... latitude with Summers’ management in case the shows get a little (or a lot) more risqué than the baseline for Summers entertainment.

We are to be the hate sink, as usual, and with our secret impunity the role suits us well. Summers’ management will blame us after the fact in news interviews, but they won’t shut down the show just as things are getting interesting. And that’s important, because while bare, wet ta-tas are business as usual for Summers, some of what we have planned has the potential to jump outside their normal content levels.

Summers attracts consistent live performances from semi-famous bands, during Spring Break and at other times — Zebra, Sister Morphine, Fury, Rugged Edge, Soundgarden, Nazareth. Even some A-listers like Van Halen, Steppenwolf and Blue Oyster Cult have shown up on occasion. They have other claims to fame as well, such as “bear wrestling” with Victor the Rasslin’ Bear — an actual, muzzled, declawed grizzly bear that would wrestle any body-builders and frat jocks brave enough to try while the bar thumbs its nose at the animal rights activists parked outside shamelessly.

There’s also a belly-flop contest for the men which I understand is a substantial magnet for the women eager to hang with macho fitness types. But there’s no question that the core draw, at least during Spring Break, is the many types of exhibitionism in the sexy contests that Summers holds. Beyond the amateurs, some of the contests involve professionals — Summers’ management has a good relationship with Clubhouse, and Lascivious Livia will be far from the first Treat to grace the venerable establishment.

We visit Summers early on Saturday, getting there around 4 AM. The management lets us in, and either misses or turns a blind eye to what we do next. We set up cameras pointed at both the stage and the audience. We need footage of the audience on Saturday to run through the Sieve in advance of our Sunday show. By the time we’re done, crowds are gathering.

We stay at Summers all day Saturday, the first real day of Spring Break, as patrons rather than performers, to get a feel for the venue (and, let’s be honest, for some good clean voyeuristic thrills). They are a bar, but the main action is usually on their vast open-air patio with its own large swimming pool. Crowds of male spectators are packed shoulder to shoulder, with cordons blocking them off from the pool. A large crowd gathers around the bar, even spilling off Summers’ property. We all have VIP passes — a common courtesy for Clubhouse Treats and their guests, even if they aren’t due to be feature performers the next day. They’re running the latest, seventh iteration of their signature “Girls Games of Summer” — a few of which are deliciously lewd. We take our places in front row to watch.

There are two Clubhouse Treats in a booth acting as announcers — Lucy Langtry, a statuesque, buxom Brit and Gloria Sun, a more petite (yet strikingly beautiful) Vietnamese lady. Livia knows these two from her Clubhouse days, and we’ve had a joint show worked out with them before we even got to Lauderdale.

They are dressed in very officious formal clothes and would be quite respectable... if they were wearing shirts. As it happens, they’re wearing only business jackets over their bare chests (much like Moira had done after being on stage during the Virgo Escalation). As such, their breasts are normally barely concealed... until they move in a way that leads them to “accidentally” flash. Video from the booth is shown on two big, waterproofed rear-projection TVs at opposite sides of the pool.

First is a human ladder contest. Male patrons bid to get in the pool and form a line. They then pass female volunteers along the line with their hands, somewhat like crowd-surfing. Said female volunteers are quite pretty, and wear bikini bottoms with loose-fitting crop tops. Flashing is all but impossible to avoid given the attire — but that is far from the most kinky element of the game. Male hands inevitably end up touching all the parts of these shapely female forms; the game is structured for it to be impossible to avoid. It’s basically a consensual, public groping fest very thinly disguised as something more innocent — and it pushes several of Livia’s fetish buttons in a very big way.

When it becomes clear that pretty ladies in the audience can volunteer spontaneously, Livia eagerly expresses her desire to do so. Mimi points out rather archly that it’s just an excuse for drunk losers to grope the girls, and Livia gives her an absolutely withering look. “Well, duh. And I for one think it’s fucking hot and I want to play. All these impulses to protect the poor innocent girlies always assume we have brains like a chipmunk. Of course the guys grope the girls; that’s the point. It’s a little consensual hanky-panky in public, and I’m pretty sure everyone knows what they’re signing up for.”

Mimi seems more bothered than I am at the thought of Livia joining — she seems to have a protective streak — and points out that she’ll probably get stripped. “Oh, how terrible,” Livia deadpans. “I might never recover from the life-destroying trauma of fit young blokes getting access to my breasticles.”

Mimi’s frown deepens. “Uh, breasticles, Livia? Seriously?!”

“I’m sorry,” she replies. “I didn’t realize that offended you. Okay, I promise never to refer to my glorious, glutinous gajumblies as breasticles again.”

However, I can see a more rational argument — and a more serious point — in this discussion. “After the Noodle, we’re minor celebrities. People are watching. Maple-flavored wetlook, that panty stunt in Savannah and grade two underwear aside, you’ve never actually shown the audience the full goods yet. Are you sure you want it to be this... anti-climactic? And shouldn’t the first clear look be in service of your own show, not someone else’s?”

Livia winces. “Okay. Good point. You’re right, of course. The first time I get the puppies out for real, I want people to think it’s a big deal, not that I’m the mark for a show cheaper than my own. Still, we can stick around and watch the fun, right? I can imagine I’m the girl, you can imagine you’re whichever guy gets the best feel. As long as you don’t expose anything, I’d even be up for a little... how to say... real-time tactile re-enactment.”

So we do exactly that. Mimi and I cooperate to feel up Livia in some fairly lurid ways as we all watch the frat guys and bodybuilders do likewise to the cute, giggly models being passed over the pool. There are some fun flashes of nipple, and one girl’s shirt falls fully off, but the focus of the event is clearly on the tactile contact.

As the game goes on, Lucy Langtry gives some wonderfully salacious commentary about how much the guys are clearly enjoying themselves. Gloria Sun, conversely, puts on an exaggerated show of being offended, and feeling sympathy for the female participants, ranting about how humiliating it must be for a woman to be exposed like that — all while gesticulating wildly with her arms, “accidentally” flashing her petite Asian boobies to the audience in the process. The glimpses are quick, but their context within her faux-offended rant also makes them very hot. Lucy and Gloria will apparently also narrate our own show tomorrow, and I have to say I’m looking forward to that.

Then the bellyflop contest, which doesn’t interest any of us, so we just go on groping Livia while feigning interest. It’s nice that it’s there, mind you — it’s a brief, fleeting moment where fat guys with beer guts get to be popular and adored by the Babes of Spring Break™, and I approve of the fantasy on principle, even if it doesn’t work for anyone in our clique.

The next event is a donut race, with teams of men and women in tire-shaped hollow pool floats facing each other and racing across the pool. The man gets in the inner tube first, legs over the side, and then the lady sits in his lap facing him, legs over the opposite side. The have to pump and paddle with their arms to move the tubes, so it’s basically a lap dance and grinding contest disguised as something more superficially silly and innocent — as long as the guys don’t stand up afterward, at least.

One of the contestants glances at Livia, then over to me — and smiles. Her gaze really lingers on me. Well, like several of the fitter guys here, I am shirtless. I wink at her. She waves back cheerfully. Lucy Langtry announces her as Beckie, and paints her as a real midwestern farmer’s daughter type. That doesn’t quite ring true.

She’s a giggly, wide-eyed blonde gym bunny with a pink Scrunchie in her hair, pink lip gloss, a pink sun visor and a skimpy hot pink string bikini. She’s tall and thin, maybe five eleven, with a slender hourglass figure that makes her natural C-cups seem all the more prominent. Her hair is platinum blonde and incredibly curly, flowing down her back like a waterfall to almost reach her firm round ass.

She somehow manages to come off as both vacuous and haughty at the same time. She’s the hottest girl in the contest, and she makes the other girls realize that in all kinds of subtle ways — yet she really seems a bit dim as well. A pampered princess, perhaps. At first glance, you’d think she was early twenties — she certainly acts young — but if you look carefully I suspect she’s in her thirties. She’s constantly looking up at me specifically, giving me faux-innocent bedroom eyes. I cock finger guns back at her and wink playfully — and then Livia grabs my arm hard.

“Nail her.”

That was an order, not a request. Livia’s scary-obsessive side seems to be showing through again. “After the show, I can —”

“No, right now. Mommy wants. Do her like you did Whina. She’s suggestible. I mean, it sure seems like she is to me. I’m sure of it.”

I did explain to Livia that Whina was a special case, back in Surfer’s Paradise... but impressing Livia is always fun, and Beckie is really cute, and does seem to try to catch my gaze consistently. The contest is designed for intimate contact, which makes it a unique opportunity. If I can use a touch of Eyefucking to crank up the arousal factor in Beckie’s mind, well, the body-friction will already be there — so it’s at least theoretically possible to get her off.

“I’ll give it the old college try,” I whisper back to Livia with a wicked grin.

Beckie’s trading inane comments with Lucy Langtry. She’s doing a sexy baby voice, pretending not to know anything and be incredibly naïve — a real bimbo. She’s gorgeous, and I’d love to bang her — but I’ve got a feeling that, unlike Mimi, she’d get really annoying to hang around with for any more substantial length of time.

Her partner in the race is traditionally hunky — tall and muscular with a jaw that looks like someone implanted a cinderblock in it, but also a bit husky. Hey, Spring Break is for beer drinkers, you know? He’s got an incredible beard, though — long and curly like some ancient Babylonian king — and chest hair way thicker than mine. Of course, this dipstick wastes his tangible virility the same way so many similar guys do — by being more interested in competing with other guys than charming the babes.

Beckie’s getting right on top of him in the inner tube, groin to groin, and he’s making tough guy gestures at the other males in the contest, boasting that he got the barbie doll babe while barely even looking at her. That’s good, probably, because she’s constantly looking at me. The contest allows it — he’s got his back to me, while she’s directly facing me. I give her some Eyefucking. She squirms around on her partner’s groin, clearly imagining someone grabbing her ass. She doesn’t break eye contact, though. She giggles and blushes. She could look away any time she wants to. I just make sure she doesn’t want to.

I need to act quickly to really fix her attention, so I’m more forward than I usually would be. I move quickly through the subliminal gestures and poses that suggest hair-stroking, thigh-tracing and kissing before a truly evil idea occurs to me. What better use for the old finger gun than a bit of phantasmal fingering? Sure enough, I catch her gaze and make a finger gun, sliding it forward. She blushes and moans slightly, and pushes her crotch — covered only my a thin pink micro-bikini — forward slightly, clearly visualizing it going in, feeling it slide in.

The starter pistol goes off and the tube race starts. Beckie’s partner takes the contest with an asinine level of seriousness, puffing and paddling to try to get ahead. Beckie’s slender form gets jostled up and down with every thrust, and her breasts catch the eyes of every red-blooded male on my side of the audience (and a fair few girls, whether in jealousy or sapphic desire, as well). The contest was already built to be a jiggle-fest, but Beckie and her lunkhead take it to the next level.

She’s getting really flushed and breathing more deeply, grinding harder against her partner. He’s annoyed she’s not paddling effectively, but also unavoidably getting aroused himself. Lap dances tend to do that, even for a lunkhead like this. I thrust my finger forward more aggressively — I’m sure, at this point, that Beckie’s the kind of babe that loves it when her men get rough and rhythmic, as long as they take care to get her in the mood first. Her pink string bikini top is soaking wet, and showcases her rock-hard nipples spectacularly.

Thrust in, draw back, thrust in, draw back, thrust in, hold it there... and wiggle. I’d give her the G-spot tickler, but Beckie doesn’t seem like the kind of girl that knows what a G-spot is, let alone how a man’s fingers need to be positioned to tease one. I doubt Beckie even consciously knows exactly what she’s feeling right now — she’s really not the introspective type — but she sure knows that whatever it is, she’s enjoying it and wants more of it!

Absurdly, the Spider-Man cartoon song worms its way into my head at this point. Finger guns, finger guns! Beckie loves her some finger guns! With the power of my eyes, catching babes just like flies... here comes the finger fun!

I am such a dork.

I’m not alone. Livia’s grinning like a maniac, making the devil horns with one hand and banging her head in the air in exact time with my finger-thrusts like she’s a groupie at a metal concert. If anyone caught the two of us on film right now, we’d look both incredibly creepy and unforgivably buffoonish. Fortunately, no one does.

Beckie and her partner are only halfway to the other side of the pool when her float capsizes in a spectacular splash. Red streaks — pool detector chemicals — blossom around the bearded beefcake’s groin. Our regal Babylonian monarch apparently just blew a load in his swimming trunks, and Lucy and Gloria are on hand to crack predictably puerile jokes about it.

Beckie’s surfacing thankfully draws attention away from his humiliation, though. It’s not that shocking that her bikini top has slid around, exposing her nipples to hundreds of hungry male eyes — this contest seems designed to catalyze exactly that sort of naughty accident. But she’s also wildly flushed and breathing heavily, and she tries to wring out her impossibly long (and, when wet, pretty heavy) hair before realizing she’s exposed — thus giving everyone a fantastic eyeful.

“Just so you know,” a flushed Livia whispers quietly to me in a sultry voice, “that pool stud isn’t the only one who just popped off.”

I glance across at Mimi on the other side of Livia, and find she’s licking her fingers clean with a guilty-as-fuck, “hand in the cookie jar” expression — presumably because she did in fact have her hand in Livia’s cookie jar while everyone else (myself included) had their eyes on the race.

Beckie, finally noticing that she’s airing out the girls, yelps in panic and covers her chest protectively to get her bikini back in place. The rest of the race finishes, failing to draw any of our attention compared to what I just did to the lanky blonde stunner.

“Wowsers,” a flushed and panting Beckie says to Lucy Langtry as she helps her back up on stage after the race. “My heart is pounding! That contest turned out to be way more exciting than I was expecting it to be!”

Lucy glances from Beckie’s flushed face to her rampantly erect nipples and back. “You don’t say,” she finally says dryly.

At that, Livia bursts out cackling like a maniac, unable to contain it any more. There’s something a bit mean-spirited here — but I can’t judge too much. Humiliating Beckie and her partner wasn’t especially nice, but it was hot as fuck. Her being so totally oblivious to what actually happened just makes it kinkier.

Finally, there’s the wet t-shirt contest, that old staple everyone has been waiting for. It’s just a shame the current contestants are all going to struggle to compete with Beckie from the last contest. They come out one by one in tight Summers shirts and bikini bottoms.

I’ve seen Summers contests before, on VHS rental tapes. They tend to have the girls in tightly-tied white microtops, which always faintly disappoints me. Mimi and I have talked a bit about WAM at one point, and the appeal of wetlook as a fetish. I still have no interest in seeing women in wet, everyday street clothes — a big interest to a lot of fetishists, apparently — but if it turns transparent and shows naughty bits when wet, that interests me a lot.

And the full normal polo shirt look is better, in my eyes, than the cut-up microtop, both because it emphasizes actually seeing through the shirt and because it makes it look like the woman is dressed “decently” until her shirt happens to get wet and the audience gets to see stuff that the subtextual cues of said “decency” inform them they aren’t allowed to be seeing. The forbidden is fun!

I would add to this a perspective that draws simply from the male libido rather than any specific fetishes: busty women look just fantastic braless in a thin cotton polo top. (You remember Cindy Morgan in Caddyshack, right? That lady is a born shirt-stretcher. Go on, admit it — you were praying she’d lose her top the moment she walked on screen, and that made it all the sweeter when she finally did!) It’s one of the best tease looks. The tight shirt holds the breasts firm, but lacking a bra they still shift and jiggle when she moves. If her nipples get hard, you can see it. The stretchy fabric shows off the curves spectacularly.

I’m guessing Mimi may have talked to the Summers staff in the week before the contest, because the girls are dressed a lot more to our shared tastes — full short-sleeved polo shirts, thin, stretchy, a size too small to make them tight, tucked into tight short shorts. Of course, all this was emblazoned with the Summers logo directly below the breasts — one of the advantages of disallowing the cut-up crop tops is that it leaves a lot more room for branding, which I can only imagine Summers must be benefiting from.

The first girl to come out is a veritable amazon — six foot three with a trim figure, a deep rich tan, long curly black hair and a set of very firm D-cups that have to be store-bought. She wears mirrored black designer sunglasses with a neon purple frame, concealing her eyes from the audience. She’s gorgeous but also aloof, and struts about the stage with a macho swagger. It’s exciting, seeing the nebblish stagehand pour a jug of water on her shirt and reveal her assets. The shirts turn not just slightly see-through but very transparent when wet, and they also seem to have a slight suction effect, adhering to the curves almost like plastic wrap. The amazon is fantastic to look at, but her Aura is weak — she’s probably a professional model, and isn’t getting exceptionally turned on by her job.

“Now, that’s Amanda, and she’s a tall drink of water to cool you down on a hot Summers day,” Gloria Sun says from the announcer’s booth.

“Yeah,” Lucy Langtry agrees. “That’s a mountain I’d love to climb.”

That’s the well-rehearsed pattern of their commentary — Gloria tries to be respectable and respectful, and then mock-scandalized when the events stop being respectable. Lucy, conversely, makes all the salacious and suggestive comments.

Next, there’s a cute and very petite Japanese girl. She’s bubbly and enthusiastic (and honestly a bit spastic and awkward in her movements), but she’s also flat as a board. She gets a big cheer from the crowd by just being adorable, but I know she isn’t going to be among the final competitors. Lucy makes a rather tasteless joke about sushi — given that the Japanese girl is clearly an amateur, probably knows she isn’t really in the running and just wants to have fun, I find that a bit over the line.

Then we get Jeanne, a redhead with a bowl-cut, C-cups and stripper moves. She projects sultry quite well, and her Aura says she’s having some less-than-innocent fun with her work while not being overly wound-up.

After Jeanne comes Wendy — a tall, tanned surfer chick. She lacks the model-level good looks of the others, but is really stacked and proud, and has a kind of raw energy to her. She also has waist-length, dirty blonde curly hair that is pretty incredible, if a bit tangled and unkempt. She’s very everyday about this — not nervous about the exhibitionism because she doesn’t seem to have the taboos to transgress. Wendy, I’ll learn later, is a very uninhibited, no-boundaries kind of girl to the point of being weird. I will admit to holding my breath and staring as the water splashes over her taut shirt and advertises her ample goodies to the world. She seems pleased to be showing them off, and that makes it all the more erotic to watch her. Lucy makes some fairly suggestive comments, and she actually turns to the commentators and winks, blushing — she seems to like the attention.

The contestants are an even mix of professional models and fresh-faced amateurs. There isn’t a clear line between the two, either; some amateur models might be doing topless for the first time in the hopes of attention, and some professionals do the wet t-shirt circuit for fun as well as fame and profit. The next three contestants are fun to watch, but I don’t remember a lot about them. I do remember how Livia would whisper some rather lewd and explicit suggestions to both me and Mimi about what she’d like to do to each contestant with her fingers or her tongue or her large collection of exotic sex toys. Livia going full lech is always sexy, and her shameless crassness definitely makes the contest more arousing to watch for me.

And then... her. The announcer names her as Mary, though we will later be told her name is Jeri so for simplicity I’ll just call her that for now. She’s a slim black girl, about five-four, with pert C-cups, a diamond face, smooth mahogany skin and short but very neatly styled glossy black hair in a spiky pixie cut. She looks so glamorous, with full lips, elegantly-curved hips and deep-set hazel eyes framed by long eyelashes and dark, expressive eyebrows. She’s strikingly beautiful — she could be a model — but I don’t think she’s a professional. My fascination is immediate, and hard to put into words.

She has a charming, wide smile and eyes that flash with enthusiasm and traces of mischief. She moves like a dancer, and knows how to swivel her hips when she walks. But she’s clearly pretty nervous rather than jaded to this whole business; she has a vulnerability that enhances her appeal. Of course, the most memorable element of her strut is that under the tight white top, her nipples are rock hard and everyone can clearly see it. She has by far the best “dry pokies” of any girl on stage so far. That’s all most watchers in the crowd likely see, but it’s enough to get a big rowdy cheer.

To my eyes, there’s so much more. Her Aura is insane. She has a strong emotional investment in this contest — I suspect she waited a long time to do this. She probably came to Spring Break just to enter a contest like this. She has to be careful when she walks not to get herself too worked up. Her shorts feel tight in a rather... stimulating way. Her heart is hammering in her chest. She’s an exhibitionist — not in a trivial, neat-thing-to-try way, but as a deep-seated, raw need. She’s getting off on the contest wildly. She’s both terrified and aroused.

“Well, our next contestant is certainly... standing at attention,” Gloria says. It’s the most directly suggestive thing the “good girl” announcer has said so far. I wonder if some genuine prurient interest slipped into her patter there.

“Mary’s a fine drink of hot chocolate, and I’d love to feel her running down my lips,” Lucy agrees.

Jeri stops walking on stage. Her eyes are wide; she’s frozen. A few seconds pass.

“Hey, sweet chocolate treat,” the stagehand calls out, more irate and bossy than complementary. “Get your tiny little titties up here so we can get on with the contest.”

I am generally very aware of the importance of people’s livelihood. I don’t wish poverty or hardship on anyone — normally — and I know what a deep and serious thing it is to mess with anyone’s career. So you’ll know how exceptional it is for me, how cold my anger is in that moment, when I decide that I’m going to pull performer clout and get that stagehand fired from Summers — and, if possible, banned from the establishment forever.

Guys, let me explain wet t-shirt contests to you. For us, they’re a source of great fun — awesome, pervy entertainment. For the girls, well, each of them has one body. They don’t get to select a new body off a rack each morning and try it out. They trot out the body they were born with, and flaunt it, for our entertainment and their own thrills, but (excluding the professionals, obviously) it’s clearly not casual to them. The only body they will ever own is being displayed and judged, after all.

The stagehand should be able to read the contestants. He should know which ones are a bit shy. Making lewd comments at a wet t-shirt contest is appropriate and expected, but they ought to be lewd compliments. It’s an organizer’s prerogative to allow or not allow fat or ugly girls in any given contest (and, at the risk of sounding like a douchebag, I don’t mind a bit of quality control) but if they do get invited up on stage and make themselves vulnerable, every last one of them needs to feel like a sex symbol while she’s up there — not a punchline.

If the average cup size for a given venue is D (and for Summers, it clearly is), you don’t refer to a C-cup girl as “tiny” unless you’re clearly talking about how awesome and natural her tiny tits are. And, as if it needs to be said, do not drop crude ethnic nicknames on a clearly shy girl, or any girl for that matter, unless you know for sure she likes that!

The damage is done, though. Jeri never gets her shirt wet. She turns heel and bolts off the stage, her smoothly-rounded ass cheeks jiggling in her tight short shorts as she runs. The crowd boos and jeers.

After a second, Livia says, “You know, I’m not really feeling the racy comments any more. I think I’m just going to watch.”

But I have a far more urgent thought gradually bubbling it’s way up into my consciousness. “That girl, Mary, she’s a hardcore exhibitionist. She really wanted to do this, but broke. She was really nervous to begin with, at war with herself. She just needed some genuine encouragement and warmth, instead of that lout with the water jugs. She would have been absolutely wild, radiant.”

Mimi nods sympathetically. “It sucks, for her and for us. I wanted to see her show it off too.”

“No,” I say urgently. “You don’t understand. We have to find that girl. She’s got the potential!”

“Er,” Livia says. “What happened to her sucks, but I don’t see how it’s our responsibility to —”

“Don’t you get it? Have you forgotten you wanted a girl-appeal show by swimming in this ocean of flesh? She’s our next Cathy!”

We don’t find Jeri. We don’t even know her name yet, thinking it’s Mary — that doesn’t help. Finding her will turn out to be a bit of a quest, one we will not complete for another two days. We can’t devote too much time to that right now, however — we have a teaser tonight and a show tomorrow, and it’s a strong candidate to be an Escalation. (Livia doesn’t decide firmly that a show is one of her Twelve Escalations until the very end — if things don’t go right or the heat just isn’t there, something we hoped would be an Escalation becomes retroactively just another show.)

We ask around Summers about “Mary”, but no one knows her. We turn our attention back to the wet t-shirt contest just as it is wrapping up. The final two contestants are Claire, a buxom straight-haired brunette and Mindy Matthews, a professional bikini and fitness model. I suspect that Claire bluntly offered to throw the contest if she could get some “tongue action” from Mindy, who seems appropriately scandalized — it isn’t unheard-of for girls to make out at these contests at this time, but it also isn’t as ubiquitous as it will later become... and thus, it’s still pretty exciting.

Well, tongue action happens, and a bit of body-grinding and ass-cheek grabbing — Mindy probably wouldn’t do that kind of thing normally, as she has a furious blush by the end. She comes off as a detached pro type looking for a modeling career. Her Aura says she’s not into girls, but watching her predicament and wondering how low she’ll limbo is pretty kinky. Finally getting the taste she wanted, Claire then disqualifies herself from the contest in the most glorious way possible, tearing off her bottoms and tossing them into the crowd. Nice! Even in Fort Lauderdale, contests don’t usually get that dramatic of a climax.

We leave, and spend a bit asking around about “Mary”, but we have little time to spare. We have a booking for a teaser show at Swank, an upscale lounge in Fort Lauderdale, at 10 PM. It’s a magic show, and it has a fair bit of propwork and preparation involved. We will only get an hour or two to perform, along with an explicit restriction of no audience volunteers. Still, it’s valuable — rich, jaded people frequent Swank, and nobody would normally be allowed to advertise for a main event at Summers in Swank.

But we offer a risqué magic show, and we’ve built a solid reputation for having an actual show — not just using it as a pretext for unwelcome nudity. This intrigues the management enough for us to get an exception. Swank doesn’t do the kind of nudie contests that Fort Lauderdale is infamous for, and while alcohol flows freely anyone inebriated to the point of raucousness will be quickly ejected. This is good for us — there’s a limit to the actual magic one can do at Summers, as the crowd is too unruly and impatient for many routines.

Inside, the lounge is all hardwood floors, neon trim and leather seating. The lighting is dim, though we will have a spotlight on us during the show. The crowd is fully dressed, but still provocative — Swank is a pickup market and it seethes with sexual energy. It’s quiet, not the kind of place you shout loudly at — a nice change from other Lauderdale venues.

The second I step in, men whisper to each other — some in admiration, others with disdain. I have the impression near to a quarter of the male patrons are amateur pickup artists, and might thus have some familiarity with my books. The women often wear very tight, body-conformant dresses in styles ranging from the merely provocative to the blatantly exhibitionistic, while the trend for men seems to be leisure suits or the preppie standby of ascot and blazer. I do spot little splashes of Victoriana here and there — the influence of my own writing and style guides, I assume.

The bit we’ve prepared is actually one of my all-time favorite tease shows — no nudity, but a big dose of eroticism along with some good comedy. We call it the Risqué Rope Routine, which while it sounds pretty glamourous is a very naturalistic name. We started out with the plainly-named but still pretty sexy Rope Routine, developing it on the road trip from Newark to Lauderdale; the special climax we added at the end is only suitable for the more tolerant venues, however, so we call the modified form the Risqué Rope Routine. We’ve performed it at lounges in Washington, Myrtle Beach and Jacksonville. It’s always a big hit, and more importantly it’s our strongest “hook” — people see it, and they strongly want to see more of our show, making it just amazing for herding a desired audience from one locale to another.

We’re dressed in what appear to be swanky dress clothes — they are in fact complex props. Livia’s corset did not in fact survive the chocolate at the Noodle show, and we can’t do this bit with her in a bustier anyway. I’m in a navy silk dress shirt, suit jacket and grey slacks, while Livia wears a backless (but otherwise relatively modest) crimson cocktail dress. We both look very reserved and almost respectable. This is important: the energy of the routine, the naughtiness that will make it so compelling, depends on our embarrassment — on turning the high-power, suave dress-suit look into something that’s gradually more and more exposed.

Livia’s huge mane of curly, lustrous black hair is an institution unto itself, however — an unruly god-beast which must be placated with regular offerings of hairspray by the can. Her ‘do is, in short, not amenable to being strapped back into any kind of bun for the “prim secretary” or “strict boss” look — it just has too much volume. So Livia still looks like a glamour model, albeit one in very prim, proper formal wear. She’s adopted black-rimmed square-lensed glasses just for this routine. She does wear a very glossy brown lipstick emphasizing and sexualizing her full, plump lips, however.

I can’t say we look fully respectable, but we do look like fashion models or porn stars dressed up for a very classy venue, desperately failing to damp down our natural sexual energy. Think of a fully-dressed male and female model in a full-page magazine vodka ad that is clearly intended to be erotic, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the vibe we’re capturing at the start.

We have a big cardboard standup for this routine of Livia and I standing next to each other in formal dress, looking radiant and proper but blown up so we stand about nine feet tall. (She adjusted my height to be about equal to her own.) That is important for comedic contrast — as the routine goes on, we will get... less proper, and the cardboard images of ourselves will still be there as our backdrop, fully prim, larger than life, looking down on us. Kinky. We don’t get a proper stage — we’re by one wall, on a platform only about a foot off the ground, and there are guests sitting at tables within a yard or two of where we’ll be performing.

One couple stands out to me in particular — a stone-cold stunner with upswept, asymmetric curly blonde hair in a really avant-garde style and a sleek but stacked figure poured into a skin-tight, neon orange lycra minidress, paired with a desperately sleazy pickup wannabe in a purple leisure suit with spiked, gelled hair. She’s gorgeous, with wide, shining blue eyes, and she’s clearly not comfortable with her partner, who seems to be employing the “use suffocating emotional pressure and neediness to make her too uncomfortable to say no” school of pickup artistry. I doubt he’s getting anywhere with her, though; she seems confident and irritated, looking ready to blow him off at any moment. Why doesn’t she? I suspect the date is some kind of social obligation for her.

Mimi’s dressed the most overtly sexy of any of us, with a low-cut black uniform that may be superficially styled for a waitress or presenter but is clearly inspired by the French Maid look in its details. It has a sweepingly-low neckline. She’s not intended to look classy — the vibe of her persona for this routine is more “mouthy help” than debonair — Livia and I are the high-society power couple, and she’s the much put-upon (and, subtextually, much-sexually-exploited) hired help.

We open with some jokes. “You know,” Livia narrates crisply, “I hear Gary Hart found a reporter hiding in his nightstand last week. I mean, I know he invited them to stalk him, but that’s some Maxwell Smart-grade shit right there.”

We’re both very droll in our delivery here, to emphasize our dapper personas. Honestly, we sound a bit like newscasters. “Yes, Livia, I certainly agree. I think my big takeaway with this is that the Washington Post shouldn’t be using Get Smart as an instruction manual. They need someone able to at least match Max’s competence level, and they just don’t seem to have that on their roster.”

The crowd laughs at the subtle but brutal diss. “Don’t misunderstand,” Livia quickly interjects. “The Scandal Spectacular isn’t blasting Gary-baby for his sex life here. We’re right there with the swinging set. We’re just saying that if your sex life is literally your only redeeming quality, you may not be an ideal presidential candidate.”

After the patter, Livia starts with some stock routines. You’ve seen them before — she uses her trick top hat to get a man to touch her breasts, and gets a woman to pull out a Rabbit vibrator just like I did. The sleaze beside me seems to want to get her personal attention, but she ignores him. We don’t have long, though, before it’s on to the main show.

We’re doing an escape artist routine. Out comes the red rope — the same kind of thick rope used by the Japanese for shibari rope bondage. Volunteers are selected from the audience, including our ringer. We explain that they’re going to bind us together tightly.

The pickup wannabe gets aggressive, and on impulse I select him. I take off and fold my jacket, setting it on a nearby chair. Mimi spools out the rope and the volunteers examine it, working with Mimi to bind us both tightly. Mimi’s deep cleavage distracts the wannabe while Mimi and the ringer uses a subtle magician’s force to guide the binding to be exactly what we need it to be. The wannabe seems to be trying to bind me as tightly as possible, and Mimi lets him and the audience think he’s accomplishing this while handling him perfectly.

Everyone’s eyes are on Livia, however. She manages to look faintly nervous as she’s tightly bound. The kink is very strong, here — her persona is a confident and professional performer who is faintly nervous about how this difficult trick will turn out, and thus vulnerable. She projects raw sexuality and vulnerability perfectly as she’s gradually bound. Angles are chosen for ropes that pull down the top of her dress, slightly, exposing more cleavage; she looks believably abashed at this, as if we didn’t carefully plan it out exactly that way.

We move over into a large iron ring about two yards in diameter fixed to a crane-pole. Our legs are bound together, so we have to tip-toe. Livia almost loses her balance at one point, and Mimi catches her to prevent her from falling. It’s all planned, of course — her dress moves a tantalizing half-inch further down, and she now has a narrative excuse to blush and look a bit more vulnerable. The volunteers are sent back to their seats. Wannabe occasionally smirks at me, and I hear him whisper the word “poof” to the woman that is (in his mind at least) his girlfriend. However, he’s mostly fixated on devouring Livia with his eyes. Yeah, buddy — stare at her harder; I’m sure that will help you get lucky with your actual date!

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Livia says in her ringmaster voice, “The Sexy Scandal Spectacular is proud to present to you the most amazing escape artist act you’ve ever seen, that absolutely never goes wrong in any way!”

The crowd laughs. “We’ve let the audience inspect the rope we’re using! We’ve had volunteers tie the knots! You can see how firmly bound the two of us are. Our beautiful assistant Mimi, over here, will pull up this ring for just one short minute — that’s just sixty seconds, people — and when the counter runs down to zero, she’ll drop the curtain and you’ll see that we are miraculously free! Are you ready?”

“I don’t know, Livia,” I respond in a ‘pointed whisper’ that carries over the whole club. “Are you ready?”

“I hope so,” she whispers back, just loud enough that the uncertainly and faint desperation can be heard.

Mimi picks up the crane-pole and turns the crank on it — it’s built like a fishing pole — and the metal ring rises, drawing up with it a curtain on the floor. She pauses to wipe her brow in a theatrical way half-way through, but there’s no real exertion on her part — the prop is actually motorized, and the winch is just for theatrics. We learned our lesson with the bumper car!

The curtain is navy fabric with clashing, zig-zag areas of neon orange. It’s branded with the Sexy Scandal Spectacular logos and the big, visible words “Full Live Show at Summers, starting 3 PM Sunday!” Below it are the slightly smaller but still visible text intended to really pull the audience: “Warning — Absolutely Not For Children! Full Show May Contain Nudity and Adult Situations!”

The seemingly random, zig-zagging orange and navy pattern is a quite intentional eyesore. It’s what the United States Navy calls clashing camouflage — a kind of visual illusion designed to disorient the eye. As soon as the curtain is fully up, we are obscured from the audience. The clashing camouflage prevents them from getting any sign of what we’re doing inside.

One the curtain is fully up, Mimi starts a big digital timer mounted on the ceiling by the curtain. Along with the timer, loud music — Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer — starts up to obscure any sound we might make.

I’m not going to describe the full process of the routine, but some of it has been spilled elsewhere so I might as well divulge some details. Mimi and our ringer use magician’s force to ensure the audience only inspects specific parts of the rope we select. The rest is actually quite a clever trick — it looks like the half-inch-thick red rope used in classical shibari bondage, but it’s actually a hollow tube woven from the same kind of Asanawa fibers. At the time of the show, Livia had the tube-rope woven on special consignment from a distributor in Japan, but nowadays you can order it from commercial magic shops.

We thread through this tube-rope a specialized kind of clear elastic cord able to stretch to four times its loose length, yet far more resistant to snapping than a simple rubber band. The tube-rope is cut in places, so we can stretch it and, in practice, move nearly freely, and then the elastic pulls back and we (to all appearances) are tightly tied up again. The complex central knots are actually separate plastic props with rope glued on them in a knot-pattern; they have a little radio-controlled scissor and winch, and can be clasped over the rope like a hair clasp (which is fitting, since we used springs and various plastic bobs from different brands of hair clasps to make them).

Anyway, Mimi jiggles the curtain using the catch-pole quite vigorously (and thus, also, jiggles her lovely G-cups in her low-cut top) as we hurriedly maneuver inside. “And now, witness the miraculous liberation of the Sexy Scandal Spectacular’s most famous dynamic duo!”

The curtain drops, but of course we aren’t free. We were bound individually before, standing shoulder to shoulder half a foot from each other. Now, we’re tightly bound together. I’m behind Livia, like I’m doing her in the ass. The positioning really does draw attention to our relative stature, but I’m fine with that — it’s a humiliation routine, after all.

Somehow, ‘coincidentally’, a double twist of rope with a knot in the center has made it into Livia’s mouth, acting as a gag. She has an exasperated expression on her face. My own look is a mixture of being caught unexpectedly and looking abashed at a screwup. When they see us, the audience chuckles. Livia blushes and struggles faintly (being very careful not to expose the trick rope’s elasticity), squirming up and down. “Mmph! Mmph!”

We do get some prurient attention from the audience due to the combination of her jiggling and acting quite convincingly flustered. The wannabe Casanova seems to especially chuckle at how we “screwed up” the escape. Of course, the audience knows it’s a comedy routine in their conscious minds — we’re making it pretty obvious — but Livia is also broadcasting cute-angry-and-embarrassed damsel in increasing distress with brutal effectiveness, directly into their subconscious minds, and it’s having the intended effects.

“Folks,” I say, “we may have had a slight technical hitch here. Mimi, hon, can you raise the curtain one more time?”

Mimi sighs in exasperation and cranks the curtain up again. Bon Jovi fades back in to drown out conversation.

Allow me time for a quick aside about Livia and sheer black underwear, which is what she has on under the cocktail dress for this act. She owns fifteen sets of lacy black bras and panties, three each from what she refers to as the five grades. They are all perfectly identical to casual visual inspection, differing only in one vital manner — the extent to which the fabric covering certain areas of substantive interest is see-through.

“Grade five,” she explained to me back in Washington when we were putting this act together, “is what I wear on the demo tapes we send out to venue managers to get them to approve the show, or grade four if it’s an adults-only venue. Grade three is what I wear to the actual show. Grade one is only used for gags that are basically naked anyway.”

Livia’s sense of mischief, in terms of getting things past censors and moderators, is just magnificently sexy to me. It’s a kind of premeditated, in-depth exhibitionism that’s just glorious, especially the sheer joy she seems to take in it. “Grade two,” she told me, leaning over to whisper in my ear, “could get me in serious trouble anywhere I’m supposed to be wearing underwear. As such, I save it for potential Escalations — or for odd circumstances, like when I want to slowly crawl on my hands and knees toward the exposed cock of a famously suave stud, and am curious if I can make him shoot his load before I actually reach it.”

When we first did the Rope Routine, she wore grade four. When we did the Risqué Rope Routine previously, she wore grade three. Today, she’s wearing grade two. The first notification of this I get is when she slides out of the cocktail dress.

Anyway, a minute later the curtain falls again. This time, however, I’m wearing the backless cocktail dress and Livia is wearing the men’s grey silk dress shirt. We’re still bound tightly together, however. Livia still has the ‘accidental’ gag in her mouth. Her hair is more disheveled, however, her glasses are tilted and she’s blushing furiously and squirming — almost hopping — in a way that really puts the goods on display. I, for my part, just freeze — a convincing way of acting out mortification. We do get a big laugh from the crowd with this.

Mimi stares in mock horror. “Oh, what the... I mean, how is that even possible? Er... let’s give our erstwhile and clearly professional magicians one more shot to get this right, okay, folks? Marc? Livia? The idea is to get out of the ropes, not out of your clothes, okay? My wrists are starting to hurt. Once more from the top...”

“Mmph! Mmph! Mm! Ghp!” Livia is cute when she’s angry, and very erotically cute when she’s angry, desperate and gagged. We know this, because she demanded Mimi and I spend literally a whole day rating her various “cute when angry and desperate” performance tricks on a scale of 1 to 10 for hotness. She actually gave us the kind of flip-book rating placards the kids have in the intro montage to Hardbodies. Livia is awesome, sexy and kinda OCD. More significantly, her well-rehearsed struggles are causing the silk shirt she’s wearing to rise up, and the audience is getting a look at those grade two sheer panties I’ve told you about. I hear a few gasps and spot a few double-takes.

“Now, Mimi!” I snarl angrily, remembering at the last minute that I have to be a bit disdainful of her in this routine for the next bit to make sense.

Anyway, she hops to it at my command, and our timing is perfect — the curtain is just going up as a few of the closer-seated guys get the idea that they should pay really close attention to Livia’s nether regions when it comes down again. I see whispering among tables with mostly guys as one points it out to the rest. I even catch two women — who I must say are very confident, great sports and wonderful dates — whispering to their male dates about what to watch for next.

Anyway, Mimi cranks up the curtain again and we get another minute of Bon Jovi. As it rises, I notice the Casanova to my right unsubtly devouring Livia with his eyes. His partner is less obvious as a lech, but does seem to be equally enthralled with our show. Well, O Bemused Readers, are we going to manage to pull off our trick successfully on this third try? Let me give you a hint: only performers who’ve flunked out of Comedy School would succeed right now. We are, however, going to give the audience a rather generous helping of what they actually want. Well, mostly — I do point out Casanova boy to Livia as soon as the curtain is up, and we seem to instantly agree he doesn’t really deserve an eyeful.

The clock ticks down. The curtain drops a third time. This time, Livia and I are still tightly bound together, facing the same direction, with her in front. We’re now both in our underwear, with the clothing scattered around the floor. In accordance with certain iron-clad laws of comedy — at least, in the time when we do this show — I am of course wearing white boxers with little hearts on them. There’s actually another reason I need to be wearing something loose, distractingly patterned and more substantial than what Livia is — I have my mechanism hidden in there. No, that’s not an euphemism — you’ll see what I mean.

Anyway. I can’t say no one’s paying attention to me — I’m probably more fit than anyone expects a magician to be, and there’s some ladies in the crowd that are eating it up. But obviously, the vast majority of the attention is on Livia, and she’s definitely earning it. I can’t see much at the time, being bound behind her (and focused on my part in the act) but rewatching the show on video... yeah, nips, almost topless, and fairly clear pussy lips if you knew to look for them.

But beyond the simple exposure factor, Livia is flushed, disheveled and distressed. When the curtain falls, she’s biting her left lip in a kind of comedy “yikes” expression. Anyone with two brain cells would have to realize the act had to be planned exactly this way, but Livia is still reaching out to the subconscious with her body language and projecting some red-hot vibes of involuntary vulnerability. Given that she hasn’t actually done all that much public nudity to date, I even wonder if she’s doing a bit of method acting here.

We just stand there for about twenty seconds, letting the crowd eat Livia (and me, for those interested ladies) up with their eyes. Well, most of the crowd — pickup pervo is sitting close enough to us that we can show Livia to everyone in the lounge except him just using rotation and line of sight tricks. I can tell it’s pissing him off, too — he’s not even being subtle about trying to get a look.

You may wonder, O Curious Reader, whether Livia and I are turned on for real right now. The answer is yes, substantially so, but in a more slow-burn sense than you might expect. You need to recall that not only have we done this routine a few times before, we’ve also had to rehearse it extensively. Not all the rehearsals had all the sexy clothes and other bits, but there were “camera tests” so we could see how it looked from the audience’s perspective — and those did have all the same naughty factors.

Now, add to this the fact that I’ve been teaching Livia somatic flirting — that’s a technique for touching women in subtle ways that appear innocuous on a social level yet still serve to arouse them — for a different routine that we’ll be doing at Summers. I’ve been teasing Livia by doing it to her while rehearsing the Risqué Rope Routine, daring her to try to spot it and call it out — and, implicitly, to return the favor.

Well, somatic flirting is supposed to be low-key and almost undetectable, but the physical flirting Livia and I often end up engaged in during these rehearsals... definitely wasn’t always that. We groped and teased each other mercilessly. Livia’s clearly hoping I’m going to lose my shit one day and just take her by force, unable to control myself. I’m not — men don’t “lose it” like that in real life, anyway, outside of romance novels. But I do tease it with body language at times, to pump the temperature even more — a desperate Livia is a hot Livia, after all.

It’s a tease-game, a push-pull back and forth, and we both enjoy it immensely during the rehearsals. Hands going into my boxers to adjust the mechanism turned into a partial handjob from Livia a few times, complete with an oddly erotic display of complete detached professionalism in everything else she was doing, as if she was daring me to acknowledge in any way what she was doing. During one rehearsal I got her really worked up and got a finger inside her in return, but only for a few seconds before I pulled back — we were both deeply horny that day, and if I kept up it would have slid into full-on, uncontrollable fucking. As I’ve said, I don’t want that until I’m sure I can give Livia exactly what she most wants. But we’ve both had a lot of fun teasing each other.

So compared to that, we are pretty professional during the actual live shows. The audience doesn’t know that, though — on reviewing the film, I think we both sell our personas really well in this show, and our sexual tension is palpable. Mimi also does some great character actor work this time around: she glances at us with a complete lack of shock and a weary, resigned contempt. Then she sets down the crane-pole and just nonchalantly walks away, sitting down in a chair away from us near the edge of our improvised performance-space, pulls out a ciggie and lights it.

Livia’s embarrassed desperation has reached a high which is both comical and erotic. “Mimi! Uh? Mimi? Curtain! Up!”

As rehearsed, Mimi looks the two of us up and down for a few seconds, ‘eating the eye candy’ as they say, and then delivers a deadpan “No.”

“Mimi!”

Mimi continues to watch the two of us with bored amusement and the slightest hint of prurient interest. “I’m on break,” she says in her best Annie Potts accent. “My wrists are sore. Get back to me in 15 minutes.”

Livia and I do a classical slapstick “oh no” moment. It’s tricky, because given how we’re bound we can’t look each other in the face — but we still make it work. “I should probably have worn different underwear today,” Livia finally says in a very quiet voice.

That gets laughs and cheers, and a fair few wolf-whistles.

“No shit,” I snarl back at her, conveying my own humiliation.

We let about thirty seconds pass with the audience just ogling us as we squirm and shoot desperate glances and signals at a disinterested Mimi. She’s merciless in her deployment of tactical-grade apathy.

“Well,” Livia finally says, “I guess we should be getting out of these ropes.”

This cues the part of the show which is basically two scantily-clad hot people being very embarrassed as they grind their bodies against each other in an extremely suggestive way. Guys are chortling. Women are covering their open mouths with a hand, in that kind of open-mouthed, awed laughter girls do when something is arousing them a bit and they want to play it off as merely being shocked and amused.

We’re very precise in this part — we have to avoid stretching the trick ropes and thus showing how the magic actually works — but we practiced well, and the ropes are only cut in places that are mostly crammed between me and her rather than in plain view of the audience anyway. Some of the ropes are quite solid, too — we need something to struggle against for it to look believable. It feels, on some level, like we really are in a kinky bondage predicament — and that adds to the heat we’re able to convey. We are very careful with this trick at Swank, as its method is still fully secret at this point.

In spite of the restrictions, we do manage to do some impressively evocative pseudo-sexual grinding that still looks mostly believable as two desperate people trying to get out of rather tight bondage. Some of the decidedly unladylike grunting that Livia pulls off in this bit... well, suffice it to say that sometimes I enjoy watching this routine on video just for my own enjoyment, even knowing full well how the trick works.

“I can feel the knot that’s stuck,” Livia whispers. “Can you touch it. It’s... ah, I mean... it’s right above my bum-bum.”

I feel proud of that bit. I had suggested that Livia use more child-like language to convey her embarrassment. I seem to tug and pull at the imaginary knot a bit, in fact setting up the ‘mechanism’ for our big climax. At this point we are standing directly in front of the big, cardboard standup of the two of us that we brought in. Our cardboard images are, as I’ve noted, three feet taller than the real thing, and they look regal, glamourous and confident in contrast to the real deal, which right now... does not look like that.

Livia squirms around a bit. This isn’t as aggressive as the grinding earlier, it’s more like she’s swiveling her hips and thrusting her groin. Given where she just said the knot is, that makes sense — but she’s still thrusting out her groin at the audience while wearing grade two panties.

“Marc!” Livia hisses in a tone both outraged and mortified.

“What?” I ask irately back.

“Are you getting... excited?!”

“No! Of course not!”

I quickly slide my hands away from the knot and move them behind my back. Invisible to the audience, I pull a small tube out of my boxers and hook it into a concealed valve in the cardboard standup.

“I can feel you getting excited!”

“Well... I can’t help it if my body does that...”

“Curb your enthusiasm!”

We do a final burst of very sensual, mortified squirming. Livia bites her lip again in that highly sexy caricature of pensiveness she had used earlier.

Here’s a fun bit of trivia: to get the climax to work right, we have to lube Livia’s inner thighs, right by her pussy. She not only has her legs clamped firmly shut — a necessity for verisimilitude given her persona’s current predicament — but they’re also physically tied shut. We use a water-based sex lubricant for this, one that doesn’t glisten overmuch. She is perfectly capable of doing it herself, but she always gets me to do it for her as part of the act — just part of the flirting and groping we get up to during the rehearsals. So I did that for her, back before the curtain fell the last time. Fun times, not that there were a lot of spare seconds to savor the act.

Livia’s thighs and pussy shift in a very suggestive way, and she gives a scandalized, shocked yelp that I find absolutely delightful to replay on our videos. Something squeezes itself between her tightly clamped legs — a tiny, bright pink nub. Now, a good portion of the audience was already staring at exactly that spot, and one overly excitable young women screams and points. The object forcing itself between Livia’s firmly-shut legs continues to expand.

“Oh, my,” Livia says in a breathy, scandalized voice.

“Is he wearing a novelty condom?” a lady in the audience whispers, amazed at the apparent audacity.

Actually, though, the object isn’t my cock — it’s a long, thin, bright pink balloon, of the type used to make balloon animals, attached by secret hose to a pump mechanism in the cardboard standup. As the balloon-cock continues to grow, we take the opportunity to get in all the requisite cheesy lines.

“It’s so big,” Livia gasps in faintly aroused awe, her negativity banished by the gods of comedic timing.

“Before you scold me, you know perfectly well I’m not the only man you’ve had this effect on,” I throw back.

Mimi glances up. “Maybe you should have a doctor look at that,” she says.

The balloon is slightly curved. It arcs away from Livia then back toward her. When it gets near its full expansion, it’s four feet long and level with her neck. “Try to think about baseball,” she tells me primly.

“I’m way past third base right now,” I reply, blushing furiously.

Livia squirms again. “I can feel it getting hard,” she says in desperation. “I think it’s going to —”

She times the line perfectly. The balloon reaches maximum capacity, cutting her off at exactly the right point — we messed up the timing on that in our last show, but not this one. Our pump hasn’t been filling it with air, however, but with whipped cream. It bursts with a loud snap, providing a quite delightful visual. There’s not all that much whipped cream, all-told, but it does splatter impressively. I watch a few audience members jump as they get flecked, Pervo and his girlfriend included.

“Oh,” I gasp. “Uh... sorry? My bad!”

Then I yawn, feigning tiredness to play into the comedy trope that men always fall asleep right after sex. “Say, does anyone feel like a nap?”

“I sure don’t!” Livia snaps back at me, red-faced with furious humiliation.

The audience is laughing over our patter at this point, so we just stand there, letting them get a good long look at Livia. She’s not totally plastered with cream; it’s concentrated in a suggestive outward blossom centered directly on her groin, with splatter on her shapely, toned midriff and specks up her cleavage and neckline. This time, we did spare her face — something I find ironic given her specific choice of underwear for the occasion. Of course, we’re still tightly bound together and unable to do much with our arms (except when we do, not that the audience seems to notice or care). The bondage, humiliation and bawdy comedy combine to make an absolutely delicious visual spectacle.

“I suppose you want a cigarette?” Livia asks in an absolutely acid tone. I’ve already covered Livia being cute when she’s angry, right? Then you can understand why I can’t resist stoking it a bit.

“Baby, I just had everything I want, and it was wonderful!”

“Mimi!” Livia howls. “Get us out of this now!”

Mimi is still supposed to be doing bored disinterest at this point, but at the point the balloon burst I think she shifted over to just staring at Livia in a state of raw, undisguised, primal lust. At least she remembered to daub a bit of whipped cream “splatter” in the most suggestive possible part of her cleavage while everyone was staring at the growing balloon. When Livia shouts, though, she drops immediately back into her disinterested persona. “You need to say the magic word,” she drawls, with perhaps a bit of Fran Drescher creeping into her Annie Potts impersonation.

“Word?!” Livia snarls. “What is it?”

“You should really know that.”

“Er,” I say. “Abracadabra?”

A few seconds of silence.

“Presto?”

More dead air.

“Presto-Change-O?”

“Marc, shut up,” Livia hisses.

So I stay silent until Livia gets desperate enough to be forced to start guessing herself. “Shazam?”

Silence, except for the guy in the audience excitedly telling his buddy how he can see Livia’s nipples through her bra. She blushes accordingly and looks more desperate. Unlike the frat boy chanting at the Noodle, this guy being overheard actually really improved the act. Livia, now ever more desperate, throws out her final scripted guess. “Kazaam?”

Next I get a bit of decent snark. “Hon, we’re grownups now. You should never admit to even knowing that word.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Livia hisses. “Mimi! I am covered in... in... unspeakable goo, and I want to be untied! Would you please just —”

Of course, as soon as Livia says the word “please”, Mimi thumbs a small radio control. Remember those prop Shibari knots I told you about with the servos and the rope-cutters? They go to work instantly, and as if in response to Livia saying “please” all the binding ropes instantly fall slack and fall off our sweat-slicked bodies, landing on the ground in a pile at our feet.

The audience does seem genuinely awed by this last, dramatic display of stage magic, taking time off from ogling us to appreciate the trick. Mimi gives them a second to appreciate it before delivering the punchline to the whole routine.

“The lengths a girl’s got to go to in this town,” she bemoans theatrically, “to teach her haughty employers some basic etiquette.”

The audience laughs genuinely at that one. It’s the right time, so the three of us promptly drop personas, walk forward into a straight line and take our final bow, indicating the show is over. It’s astonishing, watching Livia’s bashful, enraged and humiliated persona melt away back to her natural state as a being of profound and elegant sexual confidence.

The tanned skin of her face and exposed body is still flushed, however — no amount of shifted demeanor can change that until her physiology has time to accommodate it. And I must say, the mixture of flushed skin, supreme sexual confidence, see-through lingerie and splatters of whipped cream are an almost painfully magnificent look for Livia, to the point that I’m concerned about some quite real humiliation involving boners if I don’t look away — yet I can’t.

She makes no effort to clean up the cream splattered over her body, but does reach out to stick a single finger into Mimi’s cleavage, wipe up a smear of perfectly placed cream and lick it clean in a very sensual manner.

This gets a very large cheer. The show is, formally and in terms of pacing, over. But perhaps the most explicit bit happens just then. We start gathering our things together. In script, it’s Mimi that does most of this, as the two of us entertain the audience. Livia decides on a bit of a special flourish tonight, however. She picks up a tote bag, walks over to the curtain and starts to pick up the discarded clothes and fallen ropes. To do so, of course, she needs to kneel down.

She does so, and as she does... well, let’s just say she’s not overly careful in guarding her feminine secrets from onlookers. Indeed, one could say she is positively brazen, as might befit the silver key hanging from the clasp of her bra. Both our camera and large chunks of the audience get some rather intimate views of her. She isn’t playing oblivious, either — she makes delicious, extended eye contact with members of the audience in the front row as she immodestly gathers the clothing and ropes into her bag. At the time, I sadly mostly see her do this from behind, and only in brief glances. Her cream-splattered olive thighs remind me of a specific, quite infamous shot from Duran Duran’s recent scandalous music video for their hit, Girls On Film.

Pickup asshole does not get the same eyeful much of the rest of the audience does, however. I saunter directly up to his table, directly and intentionally obscuring his view. I do notice that his date — the delicious blonde with the avant-garde hairstyle squeezed into a stretchy orange dress a size too small for her — is actively ogling Livia as well as me, and the look on her face is not simple amusement or schadenfreude. Also — and I swear we did not set this up in any way — as if in a gift from the pickup gods intended to exalt the righteous pickup artist and strike down his unworthy counterpart, there is a tiny splatter of whipped cream on the sensual curve of her neck. Well, there is no way anyone who has unironically been given the title Lord of Seduction can let a setup like that go to waste.

“I’m so sorry our act got you all sticky,” I say. I copy Livia’s move right then — I reach out a finger, scoop the cream off her neck and lick it off my finger playfully. The hottie in orange meets my gaze, and I Eyefuck her shamelessly, showing her exactly what I want to do to her. She gives a faint, erotic gasp and blushes. She’s a quick-witted young lady, however, and is apparently also pretty good with the lines herself.

“I think you got a bit on my dress, too,” she says with a cocky smile. “Maybe we can get together and discuss the best way to get it off over dinner.”

This is (if I’m being honest, understandably) too much for her insecure date, however, and he forcefully shoves me back. I don’t say anything. I just meet his gaze and send a message with my eyes. Look at me, you dillweed. I just let myself be humiliated for laughs, because a man can do that. I’m standing here stripped down to boxers with hearts on them, splattered with whipped cream, and I still stole your girl. Because I can make her actually want to have sex with me, whereas all you ever learned was how to bully girls into giving it up.

Before you think I’m being too much of a bully, here, I should note that Pervo is, objectively, fairly handsome, tall, and his clothes suggest wealth. It’s not like I’m crushing a lonely nerd on the one dream date of his life. There is really no practical obstacle to this guy pulling girls in a way that makes them happy rather than uncomfortable. He just figured out somewhere along the line that being an asshole suits him and works for him, and decided to embrace it.

He lives down to my simple appraisal of him by answering my gaze with a brutal right hook. Now, I don’t fight much — a handful of scuffles in all twenty-nine years of my life. But, I do have the peripheral awareness that a magician needs, and Mimi taught me a very tiny bit of the Krav Maga she practices. Being utterly honest here, I do not intend to hurt him. All I do is duck at the right time.

It’s not my fault I’m standing behind a concrete wall and he put all the possible momentum behind his first enraged punch. I hear his agonized scream and see him clutching his blood-covered hand and now oddly-bent fingers as he falls to his knees. Even having deemed him an asshole, I don’t know him that well and thus feel a flash of sympathy and guilt when I see that his injury is not trivial and, apparently, quite painful. His date, however, knows him better than I do at this point, and thus does not feel any sympathy toward him.

“That looks like it could get infected,” she says, deadpan. “You should put something on it. Here, let me help.”

Delicious in Orange picks up a glass of vodka and tosses it on her former date. Despite her declared intent of helping, it ends up on his face rather than his hand. I don’t need to meet her gaze to confirm that it hit where intended — but since meeting her gaze had been so much fun earlier, I decide to do it again anyway.

This show is just a teaser, not an Escalation, so there’s no smoke and vanishing act. It’s nearly midnight by the time we get out. We do talk to management and give them a generous cheque for cleaning costs related to the whipped cream. They seem extremely happy with us. Livia is in a bathrobe, and her choice of underwear does not get mentioned in any critical sense. When the owner offers us a bonus, though, she does manage to find an excuse to take said bathrobe off before giving him a hug. I suspect he hopes we will be back over Spring Break, but the truth is we won’t — we have shows planned at Summers, and the Risqué Rope Routine takes too much planning and effort to repeat in an already busy schedule.

The topic of conversation during our drive back to our hotel meanders. I’m feeling more introspective than talkative, however, and have been oddly quiet until Livia starts directly interrogating me.

“So, I’ll admit to being a bit oblivious as I indulged in my wantonly exhibitionistic side, but Mimi mentioned that she saw you chat up that real cutie in orange — and that it had a bit of an aftermath.”

“Yup.”

“So... did you get a number?”

“Yup.”

“I’m just curious if you ever noticed her looking at me in a... less than fully platonic way?”

“Yup.”

“So...,” Livia asks, in an exploratory tone of voice most frequently used by children when asking their parents for an exceedingly expensive Christmas present. “Wanna share?”

I knew the question was coming, but I still hesitate in thought for an unintuitively long time before answering.

“Yup.”

The cutie’s name is Melody, by the way, and while Livia and I will eventually get to share her, that comes notably later. We don’t hook up over Spring Break — it turns out that the jerkass exemplar was not only her date but her dealer, and she broke up and took a road trip to Los Angeles to get a better supplier and avoid anticipated domestic violence from said jerkass. I will learn most of this with her on the phone the next day. She really does want to get together with me, however. And Livia. And Mimi. She mentions both by name, and her tone of voice conveys more of how she feels about them, and our show, than she probably intended for it to. But she needs to get some things sorted out first.

That isn’t why I hesitate before answering, though. The truth is, while I flirt and mack compulsively when I sense interest from a girl, and there is some real attraction, I’m not that interested in Melody at the moment — someone else was dominating my mind. Livia and I have already almost shared one girl this Spring Break, and I’m not sure I wanted another right away. Not because it wasn’t incredibly fun — I mean, fucking duh — but because it was going to lead to sex between me and Livia, and... well, you know the drill by this point.

I go over in my mind the points I think are necessary for meeting Livia’s “best ever” bar. She’s an exhibitionist and a performer. She likes to play games. She has all but said she wanted to be entrapped; she admires cleverness. She wants to be ravished, like in the edgier romance novels — she fixates on that word. She’s dominant and submissive at the same time. She wants to be aggressive, helpless and primal. She’s very experienced, very skilled in the physical element of sex — but then again, so am I, and I’ll just have to trust in my skills.

Why have I waited so long to make my move? I already have several different devious plans and schemes to capture her the way that I think she wants to be captured. Indeed, I’ve been brainstorming, looking for the perfect opportunity, coming up with devious fantasy scenarios both fanciful and relatively realistic, ever since the first night I popped off on her face and she basically dared me to claim her. I’ve even woven a few opportunities into routines I planned with Livia. But I just keep planning and never seizing the moment.

Not a confidence issue, obviously — at least, not a conventional one. I have that in basically infinite supply. It may be that Livia’s training of me led to some of her OCD rubbing off on me. More than any other conquest in my life, I want the wooing of Livia to be perfect, for her and for me. It must be artistic. In a way, I want it validate my choice of pickup artistry as a career, a pursuit, giving it a higher aesthetic worth. I think back to my uncharacteristic hostility to Melody’s dealer back at Swank. There’s something there, something related to my seduction of Livia. I want to use Livia to keep the promise I made to Tempest — to prove to the world that when a woman sleeps with a real pickup artist, it should be the best goddamn night of her life.

The pickup jerk is, to me, like the martial artist who focuses on Brazilian Jujitsu and contemptuously dismisses everything from Xingyiquan to Capoeira to Tae Kwon Do. His way works, he will say. He gets practical results. He can kill people with his hands, or get women to open their legs. He fixates on a simplistic, soulless, deceptively empirical criteria for what he is doing. He wants results. The results he wants are, of course, in reality worthless — everything he gets with all that effort could be achieved with a loaded pistol, or by giving a street hooker fifty bucks. It isn’t some grand mystery. The pragmatic pickup artist, just like the pragmatic martial artist, has forgotten what the word ‘artist’ actually means.

In contrast, to me the seduction of Livia has stopped being a game and become some kind of surreal philosophical thesis I need to validate my life. Indeed, I realize as I slowly unwind my consciousness, that desire for perfection is leading me to hesitate to a point that is obviously starting to frustrate Livia — and becoming actively maddening to me. I am haunted by erotic images of her at this point; it’s like a waking dream. It’s all-consuming.

Livia. Figure of a Clubhouse Treat. The ‘grade two’ black bra and panties. Clearly visible nipples. Faintly visible pussy lips framed by a full, glossy black bush. Skin covered with a slight glow of sweat from the athletics of the quick change routines. Looking flushed, both confident and vulnerable at the same time. Lightly splattered with whipped cream. Standing in one of the only places in this town at this time where people are expected to be fully clothed and relatively decent. Being proudly, defiantly, confidently unclothed and indecent. I think you can all figure out why the Risqué Rope Routine is so popular with our crowds.

This mingles with that other memorable image of Livia seared into my mind — her in that same black bra and panties, on her hands and knees, with strings of my spent ejaculate dangling lewdly from her face. I genuinely can’t tell which is sexier. I have to wonder if there isn’t a philosophical paradox of sorts there. Can suggestiveness itself be a fetish? I mean, the very first day I met Livia, I ejaculated on her face. And, while in no way diminishing how incredible an experience doing that was, it... gives me pause to think that a splatter of whipped cream, delivered in just the right way and just the right context, could transfix my libido with a magnetism coequal in strength to the more literal reality it merely eluded to.

Isn’t that art? Isn’t it the kind of transcendent beauty that reaches into people’s souls and transfigures them? So what if it’s obscene? Doesn’t that make it even more beautiful? Erotica is a form of art. Doesn’t Livia’s rich, smooth olive skin, cream-splattered and flushed, belong in a museum print beside all the Botticellis and Rembrandts? Does anything objective, beyond the odious cultural gatekeepers, really rank Christopher Marlowe’s life above Benny Hill’s? Can I make the conquest of Livia into a thing of transcendent and lasting beauty? Can I justify pickup artistry?

Before I give that final “Yup”, I already know it isn’t going to be an issue — I have mentally decided to make my move right here at Spring Break. I’m going to do my best to make Livia’s wildest fantasies come true, as soon as humanly possible, and on the rest of the silent drive back to our apartment I quietly nurse some quite vivid mental images of railing the unholy fuck out of her in so doing. It’s probably a good thing for everyone involved that I’m not driving the Scarlet Lady tonight. On consideration, I probably would have begged off even if I normally would have been. The images are imprinted on my mind, feverish and compelling, and I know they wouldn’t fade until properly sated.

I don’t chat that night. I go to my hotel room and lock the door. I don’t masturbate, either, which takes a surprising degree of will. I sleep very deeply, and have intense erotic dreams that night — a rarity for me, given how sexually satiated my lifestyle usually tends to leave me — but I don’t ejaculate then, either. Waking up, I feel invigorated and radiant — and then I realize it’s 10:00 AM, and our Summers show starts at 1:00 PM. And I have some things to prepare secretly. There might well be an opportunity at the coming show. I’m late by two hours. Damn. Still, I’m in good spirits. There will be no more hesitating.

It’s time. Well past, as a matter of fact.