Taking stock

As Alyssa tells her story, my amazement and my gratitude build and build until both are nearly overwhelming. I know I’ll need to say something to thank her for what she accomplished and tell her what an incredibly brilliant badass she is, but my head is spinning fast enough, I’m not sure how to find words. When she finishes her recitation, there’s a moment of silence and then I hear myself say, “Well, partner, you’re a medical pioneer.”

“Tha—wait, what?” she replies, doing an audible doubletake.

“You’re the first person ever to perform a bilateral orchiectomy without benefit of anaesthesia,” I tell her. Ahhh, OK, I think to myself as my forebrain catches up with my subconscious. Alyssa makes a puzzled noise, so I elaborate. “You cut his balls off, babe. And stuffed them down his throat for good measure.”

There’s another pause, and Alyssa explodes into delighted laughter. She laughs and laughs and laughs, and I laugh with her, and I realize she was as tense and worried about ter Haar’s threat as I was as I hear our collective anxiety flow away with the laughter. When we’re both mostly calm, she says unsteadily, “I did, didn’t I?” Though her voice still bubbles and wavers, her well-earned pride is clear.

“Yeah, you did,” I tell her quietly, my own voice still shaky as well. “I owe you big time, Alyssa. I’m blessed to have you as my friend and my partner. I can’t thank you enough for what you just did, and for all you’ve done for me; but at the very least, I think you deserve a raise, because I’d be making nothing at all without you. If we increase your share—”

“Hold on, Andrew,” Alyssa interrupts, just as quietly, but firmly. “I do deserve a raise, but not at your expense. If anything, you deserve one too. I have a better idea.

“I don’t know if you realize it—you probably don’t—but the demand for your services is increasing, for a few reasons. It all really flows from Kimberly Daniels talking you into playing baseball. One thing, word’s getting around that Andrew the Cunnilinguist is joining the baseball team. It’s a good thing Paul ter Haar didn’t hear that or we would have been in a lot more trouble, but it’s raising your profile and piquing the interest of potential clients.

“Two, all the work you’ve already been doing with Coach Hammer has been paying off—you’re starting to look honestly ripped—and that’s boosting the satisfaction and enthusiasm of our clients. In particular, my sisters are starting to talk a lot about how hot you are, while the gymnasts you’re fucking can’t stop talking about your cock. Fucking Keri standing up in the middle of the room? She’d been wanting to do that for years, but even though she’s a little thing with strong legs, she could never get a guy to try it. Not only did you do it, you made her cum twice before you had to put her down. She’s over the moon about it. And that thing you did with Vienna, where you were kneeling on the bed and she was lying on her back with her hips up? Does that position have a name?”

“Umm,” I say, “well, I suppose it does, but she didn’t tell me. Does it matter?”

“Just for convenience,” Alyssa says. “Anyway, she keeps raving about that, saying it was a porn-star position, you have a porn-star cock, you fuck like a porn star, and on and on.”

“Ohhhhhhhhhh my . . .” I say. “That’s . . . embarrassing.”

“I can understand how you might feel that way,” Alyssa observes, “but it’s good advertising. And besides, it’s true.”

“Oh, come on,” I object, but she overrides me.

“Seriously. One, you do have the cock for it—you’re big enough to satisfy any woman I ever heard about, and you’re getting really good at using it. And when you’ve fucked girls whose pussies were small enough that you could have hurt them, you’ve been very careful and gentle in stretching them out. Two, you’re in good enough shape now that you’re becoming quite the sexual athlete, which is why you made Keri and Vienna so happy.

“And three, the most important thing—what’s the main fantasy with porn?”

“That the world is full of beautiful, sexy women who want to fuck you at the drop of a hat,” I tell her. Alyssa laughs merrily.

“OK, for guys, I guess so,” she replies with a chuckle. “For girls, it’s the idea that here’s a man who will always do the right thing to please you. The thing is, you’re really good at that, to the point that I had one of my sisters ask me if you were a little bit psychic.

“I said, ‘Maybe,’ but I don’t think it’s that. You’ve always been the observer, as long as I’ve known you, always watching everyone and everything around you closely and carefully.”

“Of course,” I comment. “I didn’t want to offend anyone and end up out of the group.”

“It started off that way,” Alyssa demurs, “but over time, I think that changed. I only realized after we started here that in a lot of ways, you were the glue that held our group together.”

“Me?!” I ask, startled.

“Seriously,” she affirms. “You were always the one who asked the right question to open things up, or to clear up confusion or a dispute, or to get someone talking who needed to talk; and you were always the one with a joke at the right time to clear the air and calm people down when a conversation was going wrong. You watched all of us to see how we were each doing, and what each of us needed and wanted, and you responded to that—or steered others in the group to respond. You were always there weaving and re-weaving us together, listening when someone needed to talk, giving us permission to feel what we felt, seeing what was really going on with us even when no one else did.”

“Really?” I ask softly. I’d never really thought about it—but she might be right.

“Really. You were always watching, always paying attention, and I think once you started feeling safe and at ease, you shifted gears—not doing it to protect yourself, but to take care of us.

“Since we’ve started the business, you’re putting all those subconscious disciplines to work again to care for your clients—at least, that’s what I think is going on. If I’m right, you’ve been watching them, seeing how they react to things, and seeing patterns in how girls react, and so you’ve gotten extremely good at picking up on their cues—even the ones they don’t know they’re giving you—and figuring out what they want and what they will enjoy. It’s almost uncanny at times, honestly; you do the right thing with clients so often, including things they’ve never tried before and don’t know they’re going to love, it’s almost as if you were psychic—or, reading off a porn script. I’m sure that’s not what Vienna’s thinking about consciously when she says you fuck like a porn star, but that’s much of the reason she says it.

“Anyway,” Alyssa continues, “to get back to my point, demand is up. I think I had a third thing to say about that, but I’ve lost it. This spat with Paul ter Haar will boost demand a little as well, because I had to put the calls in motion to have a credible threat to hit him with, so we’ve gotten some additional advertising, and some new potential clients who are very interested. At the same time, you’ve already lost some session time to baseball, and you’re going to lose a lot more once the season gets rolling. So, demand is climbing, while supply has dropped and will be dropping further. To balance that, we have to raise your fee, and by a significant amount.

“—No, hear me out. I would be willing to bet anything you like that when we raise your fee by—spitballing—say, 50%, we won’t lose a single client. Some will book fewer sessions (which is what we need, with baseball season approaching), but none will quit calling. The only thing that will shrink the client list is if we drop any clients; they won’t drop us.”

*******

I end the call abstractedly, deep in thought. Alyssa finally managed to convince me that we need to raise my fee, but I still don’t want to raise it as much as she thinks appropriate. She’ll probably get her way, but—

The business line rings again; it’s Jenna. I answer, and she immediately asks what happened. I give her the short version of Alyssa’s coup, and she laughs delightedly. She asks me if I have any plans; I tell her no, not until dinner.

Suddenly, someone knocks on the door.