Hot Match by Tierney O’Malley Page A

was told and now I am fired because I refused to suck a donkey’s dick?
    Man, she’d made mistakes in her life that she regretted to this day, just the reason why she ended up working here. But that didn’t mean she deserved to be treated as soulless, prideless—if that was even a word—and heartless being. Even naked pole dancers should be treated with respect.
    “We are like everybody else, damn it!”
    Outside the club, she was just another woman who shopped at Wal-Mart , watched The Simpsons , was crazy about American Idol, in love with Suits characters, and enjoyed a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup on top. She never dressed in a way that gave any hint of what she did for a living. She, Jade Belfry, always shed her erotic dancer character whenever she clocked-out. Her job stayed inside the bar.
    Jade was a lap, table, and pole dancer. She would do anything to satisfy a customer without the actual sex to give a customer his money’s worth. To make a man come while sitting on his chair. Damn. That wasn’t easy. Still, she’d done it many times. And she would’ve kept doing it, too, if Brad hadn’t mentioned bestiality.
    When she signed an agreement with Sugar and Spice, she made it clear she wouldn’t be performing sex and other things involving pain. She didn’t mention anything about sex with an animal because who in the freaking world would want to see that? Fucking or getting fucked by animals didn’t sit well with her stomach. And for the producer to ask her to suck a donkey’s dick or let a real dog fuck her from behind was not only insulting, but also disrespectful. Only a person with an unsound mind would agree to that kind of freak show.
    Yes, sex between man or woman and animal was beyond the norm and freakish in nature. She would rather have sex with an alien with one black eye and long arms that dragged on the ground when he walked and legs that looked like a green grasshopper’s than taste a donkey’s cum. Gross!
    If she could just find the inspiration she’d once had to create sellable paintings again, ones that could fetch a reasonable amount, she’d stop dancing. Painting was the only decent job she knew she was good at, and it, too, had disappeared, along with her family’s respect. But her muse had left her years ago. When would it come back? Would it ever?
    Jade thought about the paintings she had sold in the past. People praised her work and she was recognized locally as a painter with great potential. All of it disappeared, though, because of one small mistake. She’d smoked weed and got caught. She went to jail and her life had been going downhill since then. What a hell of a way to pay for inhaling one small joint. Too bad Washington State hadn’t legalized marijuana before she’d tried it.
    She was almost to the door when her heel caught on a crack in the floor and broke. Damn it! Her anger hitting the highest point, she removed her shoe and threw it at the sign on the door, Sugar and Spice Club: You Ask, We Provide , but her aim was off. The shoe flew from her hand and hit the wine bottles on display.
    Rocco, the bartender, busy ogling Pam, turned to look at the display case and the floor. “Gotta pay for that, Jade.”
    “No, I’m not. It was an accident.” She lifted her chin and limped her way out the door.
    She didn’t care if she broke more than one bottle. The whole fucking club could go up in flames and she would just laugh about it. Not a bad thought, she told herself. If this place was gone, then women that worked there would be forced to go somewhere where they would be treated like human beings. The men…well, they could all go home to their families or go to Hell.
    Men, as far as she was concerned, were pigs pretending to be humans, particularly Brad. That horrid beast! May he rot in hell.
    She was so tired of living like a rat in a gutter and dealing with people, especially men—men who treated her as low as a crawling bug they squashed with