Eighty Days Amber by Vina Jackson Page B

myself with every wanton sinew in my body, show him what he was now missing, provoke him even, display to every man all the things I would never grant him again. To prove I was no longer just his pony girl, but a woman every man desired.
    There was a big corporate IT convention on in town, at the Javits Center, and the club that night was packed, lines of limos parked at the kerb, powerful engines roaring softly, chauffeurs at the ready, and a multitude of sharply dressed and suited executives lining up to enter the premises once they had satisfied the scrutiny of our bunker-sized bouncers.
    While the other dancers did their thing, I sat in thedressing room, all dressed up, made up and with nowhere to go, with a posse of butterflies doing the tango inside my stomach. Still wondering whether his eyes would be in the audience, watching, lusting after me, missing me, maybe?
    There was a resounding hush as the lights went out and I took my place on the dark stage.
    The loudspeakers awoke and released my spoken introduction: ‘My name is Luba . . .’ My voice, my Russian lilt, my huskiness. It had taken me over an hour to perfect those four words as an overture for the Debussy music. I’d wanted to sound mysterious, remote, alluring, the very essence of me.
    The performance went by in a dream.
    It felt as if I was the only person present.
    Buried deep within the cocoon of the dance, a prisoner of the searing spotlight, a white body connected to the red-hot circle of a private sun. I’d even got the management to dismantle the dance pole so that nothing obscured the sightlines or distracted the men’s implacable gaze while I performed.
    I was flesh incarnate. I was the queen of the night. I was sex, breasts, cunt and arse. Every moment I had rehearsed was planned so that every single man present would desire me with a vengeance, would gasp, pant, grow hard like rock, lust uncontrollably for me with every atom in his body. I wanted them all to yearn, to want me more than they had ever wanted anything in their life before I had walked on the Grand stage and opened their eyes.
    But, at the same time, I also danced for myself, alone, ignoring the waves of sexual greed washing across me, as they journeyed from the audience in sheer red heat across the stage, my domain.
    It worked.
    As I flew from the stage when the darkness returned and provided me with a safe harbour, sweat pouring from me, my cheeks burning, my scalp itching in sympathy, my insides literally on fire with sexual need, Blanca gave me a sideways glance and whispered, ‘That was on the borderline of totally obscene and beautiful, Luba . . . You keep on surprising me . . .’ And she winked at me in complicity.
    The other dancers gave me curious looks, as if I had overstepped the bounds or personally offended them. It did not bother me. For them, dancing was just a job. For me, it was now an extension of who I was.
    Over the Tannoy, I could hear Blanca back on stage enthusiastically orchestrating the auction for my unique lap dance.
    His name was Lucian and he became my first millionaire and my second fuck.
    From afar, in Russia, or more specifically in a shithole like Donetsk and the Ukraine, California was an unreachable paradise. An idealised place where the sun shone continuously over a landscape of blue seas, palm trees and ostentatious affluence. Much like the Caribbean, where Chey had taken me, but without the inescapable, surrounding poverty. A promised land that only gangsters and their molls could reach outside of their dreams.
    And now I was there.
    Courtesy of Lucian, my software geek extraordinaire.
    I don’t know how much he paid for his private audience with me in the club’s lap-dance room; later Blanca just handed me a wad of notes which I didn’t even bother counting, not only the proceeds of the auction but also thebarrage of green bills that had been thrown onto the stage by appreciative male members of the audience at the end of my set. I never