Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 102903 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 102903 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
“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, and I 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 a little 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 start today?”
“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.”
“The rough stuff?” I question, making Margo nod.
I swallow hard and try to keep a neutral face, but it’s a fight made in vain. The roughest things I know are hard water and scratchy sweater fabric.
“When I first started Call Me Anytime, I was a naive little pickle like you,” Margo continues with a pink-lipstick smile in my direction. “I knew the business—I worked at the Crazy Horse as a stage girl for a decade or so—but I didn’t think about how many specialty areas there are and how much more you can capitalize if you facilitate the niche.”
I almost laugh at how strategic she makes it all sound, but something about the overt sounds of sex at ten in the morning has robbed me of my humor.
“I used to have one line, and calls went to first available, but having separate lines for separate desires has worked ten times better and doubled our business. I make more, the girls make more. We’re all happy.”
I nod woodenly. Happy. Yeah.
Next, we pass the orange and purple booths, where the women’s voices are noticeably higher pitched and whinier. “Amber and Amethyst handle most of our role-players. Animals, characters, you name it. They do a lot of the kink.”
The next colors are yellow and pink, and the girls in these booths are calmer—almost subdued, actually. “Topaz and Opal deal with a lot of our alphas who want to dominate.”
I smile, but inside I am crying. What in the living hell have I gotten myself into?
Finally, at the end of the line, sit two more cubicles, one of which glows with bright white light and a sweet-looking young woman with a blunt blond bob and a big smile. She waves at me, and I wave back, trying my best not to look scared to death. “Your neighbor is Diamond. She deals with the rarest, most unusual callers in the whole place. And then,” she says, turning to the cubicle at my back that’s bathed in red light. “This would be your desk. The Ruby line. It’s pretty straightforward, with some mild kink and predilections, but takes a lot of calls.”
A lot of calls. According to Margo, a lot of calls means a lot of money.
“What do you think, hon? You’d really be helping me out of a bind if you start right now.” Margo crosses her arms beneath her chest and leans a hip on Diamond’s cubicle wall. “You can make your own hours, no problem. We’re here twenty-four seven. But I do ask that you keep in mind the commission-like nature of your pay as well as establishing somewhat of a schedule so your callers know when to get you. Trust me, it’s best for everyone. And if you’re not coming, you need to call me. I can’t do any more of this no-show bullshit.”