Shane (Mallick Brothers 1)

I didn’t exactly have the disposition for a server. There was no way I was going to drop fifteen extra things off at your table with a smile and then accept the two dollar tip with a shrug. Fuck you and your extra mayonnaise you cheap piece of shit.

And, well, I couldn’t create a spreadsheet to save my life.

So, phone sex it was.

And if I didn’t land the job, I would become intimately acquainted with what an empty stomach felt like.

That was why I was stressed; everything was dependent upon this Fiona woman hiring me.

I sighed, climbing out of my clunker of a car that I was sure qualified for Lemon Law, turned, and looked at my reflection in the window. How one was supposed to dress for an interview to be a phone sex operator was beyond me, so I dressed in tight skinny jeans and an uncharacteristic light blue silk tank top. My long brown hair was left around my shoulders to do its typical wavy, bed-messy thing and I had done my usual mascara and black liner around my dark eyes routine. That was it.

“You got this,” I told myself with a firm nod as I turned from my car and walked to the plain brick building and pulled open the glass front door where For A Good Time, Call… Inc. Was written.

The inside of the building was decidedly upscale. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting, maybe some dark cubicles full of unsavory types or something. But this wasn’t that. In fact, it looked like the kind of place where a bunch of women in great clothes picked out Fall’s best fashion trends instead of where women talked dirty to masturbating men on phones.

The floors were sleek, a gorgeous tiger strand bamboo hardwood. The walls were painted a fresh sage green and the entire space seemed empty of typical office clutter, everything seeming to have a place and be living in it. The whole center of the room had six small glass-enclosed cubicles where women sat, most of whom were on hot pink phones.

Now, you might hear “phone sex operator” and think “freak”. Maybe you’d picture goth or punk women, women with black, blue, purple, or pink hair, piercings, and tattoos who looked like they spent their evenings doing burlesque shows. What I found instead, though, was half a dozen soccer moms of varying ages.

Freaking soccer moms moaning into phones while men jacked off on the other end.

I had led a colorful life.

I had thought I had seen everything.

But that was a new one.

“Can I help you?” the pretty, slightly mousy, girl at the font desk asked, her voice a hesitant little whisper.

“Hi. Yeah. I’m Lea. I’m here to see…”

“Me,” a voice said from my side, making me start and turn.

And there was the owner of For A Good Time, Call… Inc.

Fiona Mallick.

She, like her workers, was nothing like I had expected. First, because she was much younger than I would have thought. She couldn’t have been any older than her early thirties. She had beach-wavy blonde hair, green eyes, and a killer rack. Her sense of style made me feel a little dumpy standing next to her in her tight skirt and bandeau-type top with ankle-aching five inch heels on her feet.

Unlike her soccer moms working for her though, Fiona did have tattoos. They completely snaked up her arms and I could see one peeking out from the hem of her skirt on the side of her thigh as well.

“Oh, hi,” I said, lamely, giving her a smile. “I’m Lea.”

“Fee,” she said with a smile. “Come on, let’s get some coffee,” she said, nodding toward the open office door to the side and I followed her.

Her personal office, like the main room, was freakishly neat. The walls were white. The furniture was white. Every single little accessory was either black or white. There were no toppling piles of papers or scattered paperclips.

“I know,” she said with her back to me as she poured coffee from a white carafe on her all-white sidebar. “I’m pretty fucking anal about having things in order. I have a weird past. I’ve never been able to shake the habit. How do you take your coffee?”

“Cream, no sugar,” I said, watching as she made her own.

“Okay,” she said, handing me my cup and taking her own back toward her desk, sitting on the edge of it. “So, you want to be a phone sex operator?”

To that, I snorted quietly and exhaled. “Um. Well, I want a job,” I said honestly.

“I didn’t exactly want to listen to guys get their jollies off either when I started. It was out of pure necessity that I did it. That being said, the money is good. The hours are usually negotiable. And, well, listening to some random grown ass man call you a naughty girl to the sound of his mother calling him to dinner can be downright friggen hilarious. There are definitely worse jobs.”