dancer
Britney's first job wasn't a club.
No one at the Sunset knew what her first job was, what she had to do and how much she didn't get paid. Her first job wasn't a club, but it wasn't a public space and only people with an invite could get in.
It was actually a private home, owned by people who made money off girls with curves - dainty, petite, starving girls.
People called them brothels, but that wasn't true. When Britney looked around that place, she knew it wasn't a brothel. It was just an apartment in one of the tenements, hotter than hell in the summer. Brothels gave you a mind of satin draperies and couches everywhere, places for all sorts of evil things to be going on right out in the open. This was just an empty apartment.
This was a party. It just wasn't very fun.
Her first job was as a dancer, a pole dancer or a cage dancer or just a regular dancer, but always making sure people were watching her. Elliot rented a bunch of apartments, didn't furnish them with anything but pretty attractive people, and then invited people who wished to take advantage of pretty attractive people to come and play. Britney was paid to make sure the real patrons of the party had a good time.
Eventually, she wasn't just a dancer. She didn't like her job, but it paid. Her parents had warned her when she left home to be sure she took care of herself. She didn't think this was what they meant.
~
prostitute
Britney's first night in the city she slept on a bench in a warehouse where twenty five other kids were waiting for employment. A man supervised them, gave them some water to wash and to drink, and in the morning a black woman with sharp eyes came to evaluate them one by one.
Looking at the woman who called herself Elliot, Britney felt a thrill of excitement right in her groin. She wanted to be picked. And sure enough, when the woman came over to her, she had said "this one" in a clear voice, and smacked Britney's ass hard. It had stung, and Britney had gasped, hoping that she'd get someone to sleep with her that very instant.
They went underground instead, walked for miles. On the ten minute break Elliot gave them all, Britney crept away and touched herself, moaning into her hand quietly. The need to get off was that urgent, that desperate.
When she came back to the group, Elliot hadn't been angry. She'd been a little impressed. "You're gonna be a good one," she'd told Britney. "Well worth the money."
Then began training. She trained in a lot of different things, and most of it was how to let people watch her properly. Eventually it was how to let people touch her properly. She wasn't ever supposed to touch them back.
Elliot kept them fed and watered, and they lived underground with the rest of her employees. Not all of them were dancers, a lot of them were thieves. Her friends always came by. Britney didn't even know who the people living with them were, nevermind all the people who dropped by. She shared a room with seven other girls and boys, all dancers, all being trained the same way.
She was the quickest study.
Elliot even gave them a little bit of pocket money, and they were able to go to the surface in their time off. Britney could have run away, but there was nowhere else to go. Britney went each Friday and sent her money to her parents' farm. She'd only left because they couldn't afford to support her and her sister anymore. They'd packed her off and told her to be careful. She was.
~
companion
Elliot started sending her to other people's parties, places where Elliot herself wasn't even invited, just because Britney was that well liked. Well liked; at least well lusted after. Britney had a big following at any symposium she attended, so much so that she started getting bought things.
"Take it all, girl," Elliot told her when Britney showed her the earrings another patron had purchased for her. "You've earned it. I'm only gonna take a cut, so whatever else is yours to keep."
Britney started attending balls and dances, dinners, even without Elliot knowing. She had an apartment above-ground for entertaining guests at, paid for by Elliot, gowns and cosmetics and mirrors and even use of a car, at least when she went to any of the fancier symposiums. All the men and women there would look at her. She knew, by now, how to let them. It didn't mean she fit in any better, she was always the outsider and they were always allowing her entry, but Elliot told her that's what people wanted from her. That's why they paid.
Pay they did, and Elliot was a good employer. Britney only had to give her forty percent, and the rest she could keep. Britney was honest, and she handed over the money willingly, eagerly. She liked Elliot and her partner Tim, even if by law she was indentured.
Every month, though, most of her wages went home to her family. Her mother said that they'd bought a horse, that Jamie was learning to ride. Britney pictured her little sister on horseback, and tried not to feel jealous.
It was Tim that told her Elliot was known to that warehouse, and that her parents had called the two of them before she'd arrived in the city. "Sure, homegirl," he'd told her. "They mentioned you to the guy that runs the pen. Thought you'd do well."
She asked her parents, on Elliot's Connect line, whether they knew what Elliot did for a living, how she made sure all of her girls were fed and kept and clothed. Her parents didn't say yes, but they didn't say no. She didn't ask if they'd pointed out that particular warehouse to her on purpose.
She did stop sending them money.
~
singer
Britney always wanted to be a singer.
When Lou asked her if she wanted a chance at the Sunset, not even the way he smacked his lips put her off. She made sure to find someone else right away and latched on, a patron who didn't have rumors floating around about how they liked to hit people in bed.
It was easy to buy her freedom, to move out of Elliot's apartment and take the things people bought for her with her, when she was saving every penny anyone gave her. It was easy not to spend money when she could see a life, a real life, with her own things.
Everyone who saw her sing - at first, at the brunches held in the conference rooms, then slowly and slowly and slowly making her way up the food chain to the ballroom - said she was beautiful.
Justin called her smart. Each night she went home alone, never let anyone come home with her because her apartment was the only place she was ever alone, where people didn't own her. Justin came home and said, "you're smart." It didn't seem like enough to make such a big mistake, but she did him anyway.
The rest of the time, she stuck with blowjobs and the VIPs of the Sunset, anyone who could help her get a VIP ID herself. Sean took her home one night, wanted a threesome and Britney made sure to keep his wife between him and herself. By the time Justin ran away, she didn't have to worry about it anymore, she'd already moved into the patron quarters, inside the walls themselves.
Britney got up on stage in the main ballroom for the first time the Sunday night she found out she was pregnant. Everyone watched her, looking at her hips and waist and stomach, and she felt out of control. She knew everyone could tell, from the way her belly was bulging a little, about the baby.
The song was sultry and exotic and she'd been trained well, so she did her job. She didn't know if this was what real singers did. It was what she did. It was kind of like her first job.