Candy meets Dan

The afternoon sun sat low and golden as Tiffany and Candy walked side by side through the residential streets toward Dan's place. Their footsteps fell into an easy, natural rhythm. Candy had to take slightly shorter steps because her skirt was very short and she was carrying her bag in both arms pressed against her chest, which was the only way to stop it swinging into people.

"So how old are you?" Tiffany asked.

"Eighteen," Candy said brightly.

"Aw, eighteen!" Tiffany said warmly, in the tone of someone recalling a simpler time. "That's such a fun age."

"It's okay," Candy said, with the breezy equanimity of someone who found most things okay. "School's a bit rubbish though. I'm kind of failing most of my subjects." She said this without any particular distress, the way you'd report that it was slightly cloudy. "My teachers keep writing these letters home but Mum works nights so she's mostly asleep when I get in and she doesn't always read them straightaway, so."

"What does your dad say about it?"

"Oh, I don't see Dad much," Candy said lightly. "He and Mum separated like three years ago. He calls sometimes." She smiled — it was a real smile, not a brave one, just genuinely uncomplicated. "It's fine. I'm fine. Mum tries really hard."

"That must be lonely though," Tiffany said, and genuinely meant it, because Tiffany always genuinely meant things.

Candy tilted her head, thinking about it. "Sometimes," she admitted. "School's not great. The girls in my year are kind of mean actually." She glanced down at her chest with a wry, self-aware look that was somehow both sad and funny. "They say things. About how I look. Like, horrible things sometimes." She shrugged one small shoulder. "But honestly? The older men around town are super nice to me, so it balances out."

"The older men?"

"They're always so friendly," Candy said warmly. "They stop to talk and everything. And apparently I give really good hugs? So I give out loads of them. Like, there's this man near the corner shop who says my hugs are genuinely the best he's ever had in his life. He asks for one most mornings." She smiled beatifically. "So that's nice."

Tiffany looked at Candy — eighteen, parents separated, failing school, mother asleep by day, isolated from girls her own age, sustained socially by the enthusiasm of older men who really liked her hugs — and felt a wave of warm, protective feeling mixed with what she was certain was inspired professional thinking.

"Candy," she said, "I genuinely think Dan might be the solution to basically all of that."

Candy looked at her. "Really?"

"The school thing — Dan could help you find a direction, so school doesn't even matter anymore. The loneliness thing — Dan's place becomes like your base, you know? You're there every day, you're training, you're working toward something." Tiffany's voice was full of the sincere, enthusiastic certainty of someone describing a spa break. "And you'd always have me. We'd be scene partners."

Candy's face did the thing it did when something overwhelmed her — all the brightness concentrating at once into her eyes, her mouth pressing together around a smile that was too big to fully express.

"I just need to trust him?" she said.

"Completely," Tiffany confirmed. "Just do what he says and trust the process. He knows exactly what he's doing." She squeezed Candy's arm. "Two weeks ago I was nothing. Now I have auditions."

Candy nodded slowly, converting this into belief in real time. The conversion took about four seconds.

"Okay," she said simply. "I trust him."

Dan opened the door in a stained t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, a cigarette burning between his fingers.

He took in Tiffany first — her pink crop top, her easy smile, the familiar architectural marvel of her chest — and then he moved to Candy.

He was still for a moment.

Candy stood slightly behind Tiffany's shoulder with her bag held against her front, her enormous blue eyes looking up at him with the open, unguarded expression of a creature that had never had a reason to distrust anything. She was small — shorter than Tiffany, slight everywhere except the one place she absolutely was not. Her white top was doing extraordinary structural work. Her blonde plaits were half-undone from the afternoon. She had a small smear of grass on her knee from the bushes. Her face was round and soft and absurdly young and pretty, her freckles catching the afternoon light, her lips slightly parted around a tentative, hopeful smile.

Her breasts were every bit as colossal as Tiffany's, straining the white cotton of her top into a state of genuine architectural emergency, sitting high and round and enormously full on her small frame. On Tiffany they looked extraordinary. On Candy's smaller body they looked almost physically impossible.

Dan took a long, slow drag of his cigarette.

"Come in," he said.

They arranged themselves on the famous couch — Tiffany on Dan's left, Candy perched on his right, sitting forward slightly with her knees together, looking around at the cluttered, smoky flat with the curious, non-judgmental attention of someone who has decided in advance to find everything interesting.

Dan's left hand found the hem of Tiffany's pink crop top immediately and slid underneath it, his fingers closing around the warm, heavy underside of her breast in a slow, familiar squeeze. Tiffany barely registered it, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees to look at Candy around Dan's considerable middle.

"So tell him how I found you," Tiffany said warmly.

Candy turned to Dan with her full, earnest attention. "I was in the bushes by the school," she began, with no apparent awareness that this opening sentence required context. "There was a man there with a medical condition? The breast milk thing — I don't know if Tiffany told you—"

"She didn't," Dan said, his thumb moving in a slow circle over Tiffany's nipple.

Candy explained the situation in full, careful detail — the rare condition, the massage technique, the relaxation benefits of the simultaneous manual assistance, the fifteen minutes of dedicated treatment, the interruption. She reported all of this in the tone of a competent medical administrator summarising a case note. Dan listened with his face entirely still.

"That's very generous of you," he said, when she finished.

"I couldn't just let him be in pain," Candy said simply.

"Of course not." Dan looked at her steadily. "Tiffany tells me you're interested in acting."

Candy sat up straighter, which did significant things to the white top. "More than anything. I'm eighteen, I'm failing school — basically everything except drama, which I love — and I just..." she looked at Dan with those vast, trusting eyes, "...I really want to do something. Be something. My mum works nights and my dad's not really around and I just feel like I've been waiting for a direction, you know?"

Dan said nothing for a moment. His hand continued its slow, casual work under Tiffany's top.

Did she, Dan thought, looking at Candy — eighteen, isolated, parents absent, failing school, currently sitting voluntarily in his flat having been recruited off school grounds by the girl he was already successfully prostituting, looking at him like he was a lighthouse, actually just bring me a personal sex slave.

He turned this thought over carefully, the way a jeweller turns a stone to assess its facets.

One I can introduce to the process at whatever pace I choose. One who has no adult in her daily life who will ask pointed questions. One who will do anything I frame as acting practice, because she has just watched Tiffany do exactly that for two weeks and arrived here happy and eager and completely unafraid.

Tiffany, Dan thought, with something approaching genuine admiration, you absolute weapon.

Candy was still looking at him, waiting, her fingers laced together on her knees.

"Can you train me too?" she asked. "I promise I'll work as hard as Tiffany. I'll do everything you say." She glanced at Tiffany for reassurance, got a warm, encouraging nod, and looked back at Dan. "I want to be devoted to it. Like, completely."

Dan stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the couch.

He looked at Candy for a long, considering moment — the blonde plaits, the freckles, the blue eyes, the white top, the whole impossible, willing, unprotected picture of her.

"Alright," he said. "I'll take you on."

Candy made the overwhelmed face — hands clasped, brightness flooding her eyes.

"But you need to understand something before we start," Dan said, and his voice was calm and serious, the voice of a professional setting expectations. "This is real work. It's physical work. The training I do is intense and it's demanding on your body." He held her gaze. "You will be sore. There will be days where you ache in places you didn't know you could ache." He let that land. "But you're young. Your body heals fast. Tiffany will tell you — she's sore by the end of every session, and every morning she wakes up completely fresh."

"Every morning," Tiffany confirmed earnestly. "Like nothing happened."

"So you push through," Dan continued, "you trust the process, you do exactly what I tell you in every scene without question, and in return—" he looked at Candy steadily, "—I will open doors for you that you cannot open yourself."

Candy was very still, listening with her whole body.

"Okay," she said.

"You'll start tomorrow morning," Dan said. "Nine o'clock. Same as Tiffany." He glanced between them. "You'll train together."

Candy turned to Tiffany with an expression so radiant it was almost difficult to look at directly, like a small, freckled sun.

"We're going to be scene partners," she breathed.

"Scene partners," Tiffany confirmed, taking her hand and squeezing it.

Dan's hand continued its slow, absent work under Tiffany's crop top, his thumb tracing a long, lazy circle, his eyes on Candy's face.

Tomorrow at nine.

He reached for another cigarette.

Life, Dan thought, lighting it, was very good.