Lovely Beast

 

 Let me introduce you to Taylor Thorn, an exotic entertainer who began experiencing flashback-related panic attacks in her early twenties.  Struggling to understand what was happening, she sought professional help and agreed to be institutionalized.

 While in therapy, Taylor came to understand that embedded deep inside her psyche were alternate personalities developed as a survival mechanism in response to repeated traumatic incidents of abuse during her childhood.   

     Taylor escaped the cruel clutches of a sadistic doctor who had her drugged and bound to serve his sexual obsession, only to be kidnapped as she fled the hospital by a ruthless group of global anarchists who forced her to become an operative and assassin.

     

Find below the cover pic with a link to purchase and copy for Chapter 1!

1

LET ME OUT of here . . . you know I hate the dark! I can’t breathe. Let me out . . . I’ll do it, I’ll do anything you want, just let me out of here!" Taylor screamed, searing the silence in the middle of the night, on what began as a quiet evening on the cusp of a new moon—on an oppressively hot night in July, so black, so dark that Moonbeam, Taylor’s white Siamese, didn’t even scratch the screen to prowl.

 

"Taylor, wake up . . . Taylor . . . you’re having another nightmare," her roommate Natasha said while shaking her shoulders trying to roust her out of the state of panic she’d been gripped with during the latest in a recent string of disturbing and desperate dreams.

 

"What’s wrong . . . hey, stop it!"

 

"You’re having a bad dream. Settle down, everything is all right."

 

"Oh . . . sure . . . ," Taylor mumbled after regaining consciousness just long enough to stop the nightmare before rolling onto her right side and slipping back into the peaceful space of a deep dream-free sleep.

 

She slept in the nude, but an impulse of subconscious modesty caused her to pull a corner of white silk sheet delicately over her right hip while leaving the rest of her sculpted contours in full view—a vision that took Natasha’s breath away.

Taylor’s bad dreams had become a recurring disturbance for Natasha, strangely only a few days in a row each month, around the same time of the month. She couldn’t help but notice that Taylor’s voice was much different during the nightmares—more like a child’s, and connected to a child’s mind.

 

The nightmares began a few weeks after she moved in to share expenses with Taylor who’d purchased a duplex—paying for it in cash with the money she’d earned and saved during three years as an exotic entertainer. Natasha was also in the business, at Heartbreakers, an upscale suburban club near O’Hare in Chicago, but no one banked like Taylor.

The club was open from lunch to close, at 4 AM. Taylor prowled during the day shift, which, because there were so many girls and so few customers, was not easy unless you had the killer looks and irresistible charm to attract the high-rollers who wandered into the club, often for a playboy business lunch. Hypnotized by the seductive vibe, many would stay to play with the dancers long into the afternoon.

These guys laid down $300 for a half hour of VIP Taylor time with the casual disregard for cash that the rest of us would feel after paying three bucks for a Big Mac. The club kept a hundred.

 

During a typical day shift, Taylor was seldom available for the normal rotation on stage because there was usually a numbered list of eager well-healed whales waiting for their turn to crest in some of her X-rated VIP waves. If you were fortunate to see her stage routine, you would not soon forget Taylor’s high-energy Goth interpretations of the pounding alternative stripper rock the DJ’s always played for her.

Grabbing the pole with a strong grip, she typically began with a clockwise spin flexing her right leg bringing her knee up to waist level before launching her head straight back allowing her long jet-black hair to tickle her Jessica-Alba ass. Responding to the bold sound bolts, with her left hand now also on the pole, a series of dramatic thrusts forward and back followed a counterclockwise move while characteristically lifting her left leg past her waist. If there were guys at the tip rail, and there always were when she was on stage, Taylor would head to the floor directly in front of one of them.

It wasn’t uncommon for a customer, experiencing the sensual excitement of seeing Taylor for the first time, to shower his entire stash of singles on her, one after the other, floating down like angel’s feathers, while she posed and gyrated in front of him.

The tease continued as she brushed down his face with her all-natural 16-year-old C-cup breasts before heading down to his crotch where she usually felt a building bulge. Usually, that meant the bait was taken, the erotic hook set, which would lead to typically more than one private dance or perhaps a session in VIP.

The dayshift had the feel of a members-only establishment—very few customers, but among the ones who came, some could buy and sell the club on a whim. The nightshift saw Heartbreakers fill up with a much younger, and much less affluent group of guys who spent most of their discretionary cash getting drunk enough to approach a dancer and barter their remaining Andrew Jackson’s for whatever sexual services the dancer might offer. Taylor couldn’t be bothered trying to hook the smelt at night when during the day the $100-a-pound blue fin tuna were just begging to get caught in the afternoon erotic feeding frenzy.

For Taylor, exotic dancing was her six-figure career and she treated it like a profession. She wasn’t there to pick up enough cash to fund her next fix. No drinking on the job, either. She was all Monday-through-Friday business and her cash was well invested in stocks and real estate.

In every sense of the term she was a highly paid entertainer and therapist, and she earned every penny of the $1,000 or so a day she brought home, taking in a doctor’s income without a framed degree hanging in her office—the VIP room.

Today’s upscale gentlemen’s clubs are a far cry from the sixties seedy side-road strip parlors where the dancers were not much better than two-dollar whores, and or had become tragic figures because of drug or alcohol problems that left them unable to manage their money or their lives.

On a high-fashion Milan runway, the clothes are the admired art form and the models aren’t much more than animated mannequins. On the catwalk at an upscale strip club, the dancers, their beautifully sculpted living breathing forms, become the art, first being admired, then auctioned off to the highest bidder.

In a club like Heartbreakers, many of the beautiful dancers were mothers, college students working on degrees, aspiring actresses, or professionally minded women looking to be discovered as models, and they made so much money just dancing they didn’t have to cross the line into prostitution.

Some of the girls, though, did get into Ashley Alexandra Dupre top-dollar call-girl gigs, but Taylor wouldn’t usually go there. Because of certain childhood experiences, she’d been desensitized to the powerful emotions that normally accompany sexual contact with another human being, but also, because of her childhood, there were limits to what she was willing to do with a stranger. That wasn’t always the case, however.

When Taylor stepped on the strip-club stage it was to exercise her right to manage and market just one of her valuable personal assets—her Miss-America beauty. Diablo-Cody curious about the possibilities surrounding exotic entertainment, the prospect of fast easy money, and the opportunity to turn the tables of control on the kind of men who were forced on her as a child, Taylor was easily seduced into the profession.

Since Playboy began opening career-path doors for models who graced the adult-rated pages of their magazine, exotic dancing came next as way to get exposure and Taylor wasn’t shy. She understood the value of networking, and guarded the secrets gleaned from successful businessmen whose tongues were loosened by the social lubricants of premium single-malt Scotch, a ten-dollar cigar, and Taylor’s enchanting, irresistible exotic appeal and sensitive genuine conversation that always left the man wanting more.

Hanging on the walls of the club’s main lounge were beautifully framed 3’ x 4’ adult art photographs of erotic fantasy female forms, so captivating that depending who was on stage, a patron might find himself locked onto a picture until someone worthy of upstaging the frozen image started dancing. At Heartbreakers, the draw was that many of the dancers did embody the sexual fantasy standards most guys dragged into the club along with their sex-starved libidos, chronically over stimulated by endless media images of the perfect female or the ultimate erotic escapade.

There was Paullina. When God designed the prototype for the perfect female, Paullina was the result. All other women have some flaw by comparison. She was outrageously tall, blushingly beautiful, exotically proportioned with long limbs, naturally curly, textured hair flowing down her back, and sexy young, firm, full Barbie-Doll breasts. When she took the stage, everyone in the club stopped to watch, even the bouncers and other dancers, who often flocked to the tipping rail.

More than her physical beauty, she seemed untouched by what she was doing for a living. Unaware of the power she could bring to bear because of her intimidating physical beauty, Paullina appeared to be forever a blushing, basically shy, teenager still uncomfortable with her long, once gangly, now supermodel-exotic limbs. Her charming shy presence was as disarming as her Angelina-Joli body, but she never pressured anyone to go where she easily could have led them; to just open their wallets, or to give her literally anything she wanted.

Then, there was Carina. This is a woman with the kind of unheard of genetic makeup that after giving birth, she looked even better than before her son, Mick, named for Mick Jagger, came into the world. One of her eggs should go for a cool mil on the celebrity unfertilized frozen egg bank market. Carina looked like she worked out seven days a week and watched everything she ate, but none of that was the case. She was God’s gift to the strippers’ sisterhood, setting the standard about as high as the bar could go.

Heartbreaker’s was a carnal coliseum where the dancers carried the gladiator’s swords—an erotic arena where the patrons were the victims destined to be sacrificed to the god of carnality. Everyone knew the rules and the guys didn’t have a chance, which meant they wouldn’t leave the club with any cash. Their only hope was to avoid maxing out their credit cards by the end of the night. Natasha often watched with awe and wonder as Taylor circled the club like a Great White before clamping down on her next victim.

Natasha was from Eastern Europe, just one of the millions of legal visitors turned undocumented illegal aliens, who through various means manage to make their way to American shores, desperate to escape desperate circumstances in their home countries. She flew in on a visitor’s visa with her boyfriend, never intending to stay. The plan was to earn money and return to Belarus to use the American dollar’s buying power back home to build a better life. That was the plan.

They trusted a labor broker who took their money and betrayed their trust—setting them up with an unscrupulous man who exploited their hard work on a cleaning crew. He was worse than a thief, refused to pay them, and when they complained, hospitalized her boyfriend before calling the local police who were in on the scam. On survival autopilot, they split that scene and ended up in the Chicago area where things were better, but not good.

Up at the crack of dawn, they slaved every day performing dirty, demanding, demeaning work, and ending up with pennies. Next Natasha landed a gig as a nanny. Her boyfriend found day-labor-for-cash construction work. Then, one day during a troubling call from her home in Belarus, she learned her father was near death after battling cancer.

She desperately wanted to get home to be with him before he died, but didn’t have the plane fare. That’s when a friend brought her to the exotic club where she danced for some quick cash to buy a ticket.

Her father passed before she could arrange to fly home, which would have been a problem even if she had the money. Over six months had passed since she entered America with her valid visitor’s visa. Natasha had now joined the throngs of undocumented illegal foreign residents. Her plan to return home with suitcases full of American currency was not even close to being realized. She just couldn’t leave yet and besides, Natasha was afflicted with the addiction of wanting to achieve some portion of the American Dream. Had she managed to fly home to be with her father, she probably would never have been able to return to America.

There was a new manager at the club where she started dancing. He was putting pressure on the girls for sexual favors as a condition of their employment. Natasha wasn’t about to be manipulated like that, but now hooked on the fix of fast money, it wasn’t long before Natasha moved on, found Heartbreakers, and Taylor.

"You can dance!" Taylor said, after being surprised by the sexy polished energy of Natasha’s stage performance.

Natasha’s storm of long, feathered, textured midnight-black hair hung down her back—magnificent hair is often found on a magnificent female, bold and confident enough to display the mark of her potency. Her costume featured silk ribbon streamers dangling down from her hips and shoulders, and when she moved they created the illusion she was floating in a mesmerizing erotic mist of fairy dust. Relationships were never Taylor’s strong suit, but after getting out of a bad marriage, and able to enjoy the sexual company of both men and women, she wasn’t above flirting with some of the dancers.

"Yeah, thanks, I’ve been on the pole before, at another club."

"What brings you to Heartbreakers?"

"I had some creepy customers and a new manager who wanted freebees in the back room. I needed a change," Natasha shared without going into too much detail.

"I know how that can be. It’s good here, though. This is my fourth year, good money and no problems, so far," Taylor shared.

"Well, I hope things work out as well for me. I really need some stability in my life," Natasha admitted.

"Are you from the area?"

"Oh . . . my parents live in Canada. My father is in banking and travels a lot. I’m commuting from Wisconsin right now, but I’d like to get a place near the club. How about you?" Natasha asked.

Natasha wasn’t honest with Taylor because there was so much going on in her life and she really couldn’t trust anyone with the truth that she didn’t have her citizenship documentation. She also didn’t share that she’d recently split with her boyfriend, or come clean that she’d been using drugs regularly and drinking too much. She also had a gambling problem and was falling behind in her rent.

"I’m on my own right now. I don’t see my parents much and I’m recently divorced, but I just bought a house, so that’s keeping me busy," Taylor shared.

"I’d like to get there some day. We can’t dance forever, can we? I really need to start saving some money," Natasha guardedly replied.

"Well, I’m up next. Nice meeting you," Taylor said before walking to the stage.

Taylor could tell that Natasha was struggling. There was some kind of dysfunctional chemistry that kept drawing her to people with problems, people who were needy and troubled. Taylor had come such a long way since escaping her problematic parents at 13, and helping others was a way to keep her act together.

Taylor was looking for a roommate to share expenses, and perhaps to have a relationship with. While on stage she kept noticing Natasha and decided to invite her to go out for a drink after work. While talking and sipping on a good northern California Cabernet Souvignon from the Dry Creek Valley, they quickly became comfortable with each other.

Natasha didn’t tell Taylor everything, but she did admit she needed a place to stay. Within a few days, 

 

Natasha was sharing morning coffee with Taylor and providing her with some much appreciated company.

At first Natasha thought Taylor might be gay. Many of the dancers at Heartbreakers were. It made it easier to get physically intimate with the customers when there weren’t any emotional bonds developing as a result of the close contact. Natasha was bi so that wouldn’t have been a problem, but after some weeks of living with her, and sleeping in the same bed, Taylor never made a move toward anything sexual. Taylor had been married, but after a messy divorce, seemed to prefer the company of women.

With Taylor’s disturbing nightmare over for the moment, and their bedroom now silent again, Natasha was able to get back to sleep, but realized something had to be done about whatever was upsetting Taylor if their arrangement was going to continue. The next morning they talked.

 

"Do you remember having another bad dream again last night? This is starting to get to me. I can’t sleep knowing you might freak anytime during the night," Natasha shared, much more wanting to help than lodging a complaint.

"I know . . . what I don’t understand is where these dreams are coming from. I never had them before. The details aren’t clear, but what’s happening during the dreams is so strange and terrifying," Taylor shared.

"Let me help you. I want things to work for us here, but something has to give with these nightmares and besides, I’m worried about you," Natasha added, genuinely concerned.

"I’m not sure where to start or what to make of all this, but something I’ve never shown anyone are stacks of poems I’ve written, but never read. Something comes over me, I grab a pen, slip into a kind of trance, and the next thing I know I’ve written a poem. I can’t read them so they’ve just been piling up," 

Taylor finally admitted to someone, about the possible encrypted truth hidden on the pages she’d concealed even from herself.

 

"Really, I’ve never heard of anything like that. Would you let me look at them?" Natasha suggested, thinking there may be clues as to what was triggering her bad dreams.

"I wish you would. For some reason, I can’t bear to even handle them," Taylor shared, shaking her head in disgust over this problem she didn’t understand that had compromised her otherwise well ordered and controlled life.

Natasha didn’t mention the radical personality shifting she’d observed at home and at the club, the severe mood swings, language pattern changes, tonal voice alterations, and strong mannerism differences. Most of the girls had a kind of alter ego, a persona they slipped into in order to play the stripper role at the club, but what was happening to Taylor went way beyond acting.