Page 2 of Call Me Anytime
Margo frowns and takes another drag from her ciggy.
“Was that bad?” I ask, my voice sounding as awkward as I now feel from Margo’s anticlimactic reaction. I loathe feeling like I’m letting people down, but really, that’s no surprise.
My people-pleasing gene is hardwired, a gift from my mom I can’t return. When I was little, her whole world was making me and my dad happy and being the mother and wife we needed. She attended every PTA meeting, sat through countless gymnastics classes despite my obvious lack of Olympic drive, and dedicated every Saturday to balancing the books for my dad’s home construction company.
“It’s a little stiff,” Margo comments, shoving back into her seat and crossing her arms over her ample boob balloons, two fingers and her cig extended to keep from burning herself. “Though I’m sure some of our callers will cream their pants over the sweet-and-innocent thing you’ve got going on.”
I’m sorry, but did she just saycream their pants?
“You got any hard limits?” she asks. “Anything you won’t do on a call?”
“Hard limits?” I tilt my head to the side, a puzzled wrinkle forming between my brows. “Like on sales attempts?”
Margo shakes her head, ticking off fingers. “Blow jobs, anal, foot play, piss parties, choking, or aggression?”
My eyes widen enough to encroach on my cheeks, and vomit threatens in the back of my throat. When I was rehearsing some practice questions and answers last night, this didn’t make the cut.
“Those are normally the big ones,” she continues as I choke on my own saliva. “But everyone is different. Different kicks for different chicks and all that. What won’tyoudo?”
A harsh buzzing explodes in my ears, and I blink what feels like one thousand times. I ... I thought this was a job selling toner ... orextended car warranties. Something.Anythingother than blow jobs and anal and ... my God ... piss parties.
Is this ... is this a phone sex line?
“Did you just saypiss parties?”
“You’ll get a few curveballs in the beginning, but you’ll get used to it pretty quick,” Margo replies on a shrug. “A lot of these men call because they’re ashamed to admit their fetishes in person, you know?”
I look around the messy office and back at Margo, an ugly realization dawning well after the chickens have hatched. “What exactly does Call Me Anytime do?” I ask. “You never specified in your ad.”
“Phone sex, hon. We’re a twenty-four-hour hotline.”
Oh, freaking hell.I can’t take a phone sex job! I’m a virgin, for Pete’s sake.
“The more calls you take, the more money you make,” Margo rattles off while my brain feels a little too close to bursting inside my skull foranylevel of comfort, past or present. This isn’t just outside the zone; this is a whole other freaking planet. “Most of my girls make well over two thousand a week, but since you’re just starting out, I’d keep your expectations low and plan on fifteen hundred.”
Hold up ... did she just sayfifteen hundreddollars?My throat is so tight I feel gagged, but the numbers sound too musical to my ears for me to run from the pressure. In this case, maybe just maybe, I could deal with being choked.
“Fifteen hundred dollars a week?” I ask, my voice as squeaky as her pants. “Before or after taxes?”
“After.”
Have mercy.That’s six thousand a month, which is almost double what I was making at Alliance. Hell, that would pay for bills and my mom’s caretaker, Lovie,andI could put food on the table. Maybe I’d even have an extra hundred or so to spare every other paycheck.
But ... I can’t do this. Right? I can’t.
“You could start today, actually,” Margo updates me. “It’s hard to keep reliable girls, and the men on our Ruby line are starting to get alittle stir-crazy now that my girl on that line has no-showed for the past two days.” She rolls her eyes. “I guess that’s what I get for letting some girls work from home.”
I ignore the strangeness of a work-from-home phone sex job and fixate on the start date.
“I could starttoday?”
“Now,” she clarifies. “I can’t leave that line on hold much longer without chancing a boycott or something.” Margo stands up and snuffs out her cigarette in the pink crystal ashtray at the corner of her desk. It’s full of stubs and old soot and yet manages to be about the tidiest thing in the room. “Come on. I’ll show you around. You can see where your desk would be and meet a couple of the other girls. Then we can go from there.”
Insane thoughts rush through me as I stand to follow her out of her office and down the dark hallway to a door that looks like it leads to an apartment. She taps a code into its keypad and pushes it open, waving me through and closing it with a click behind us.
The space is entirely different from what I imagined—likely because a sex hotline has never, ever been in my head before now—and largely wide open. Eight cubicles line the walls, each decorated with its own theming and lighting, and women of all shapes and ethnicities sit inside, headsets in place as they chat with callers.
Margo jerks her chin at me to follow, so I do, walking first by the two nearest cubicles, lit with green and blue LED lights. “These are our Emerald and Sapphire booths,” she explains, keeping her voice low as the woman with red hair and a pointy chin in the green booth moans into her mini microphone. “They get a lot of callers who like the rough stuff.”
