It's being a hard day for clients. Usually she really enjoys her job - well, the actual work part of her job. She doesn't understand why the rest of the world can't treat people in the escort business with a little respect. If the trade wasn't illegal then she'd get a far better class of client. Today... today she's having a hard time not snapping at the customers. Usually she doesn't have problems getting into how attractive any given customer is, finding their charm points, building rapport. But today they all just feel... ugly. Beneath her. It's hard to suppress her disgust. She kind of hurried her last client along and doesn't feel like she did a good job. Her work is awful. She's awful - no, she's above this. She's strong and beautiful and way out of all these johns' league.
She still has a shift in the host bar to do, though, so she tries to focus. Tries not to feel like she's being pawed. Tries to push through it all.
But it just keeps getting worse and worse.
Maybe they were right, maybe she's just inured to the profession, maybe it's finally breaking through after all this time, even though she picked a good agency, even though she chose this line of work herself, even though, even though -
It's just getting worse. Everything feels wrong, now. The velvet seats are awful and stained with unnameable fluids, the music on the stereo is off-key and she's sick of this song, the smiles on the patrons' faces feel like leers, she can feel the press of her manager across the room watching her, like he thinks he's better than her -
Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
She clutches the ruby necklace at her throat to her breast, makes a lame excuse to escape her latest client, and almost staggers away, drowning in a wasteland of awful, horrible people and things. God the barkeep has a pimple on his right cheek it looks absolutely revolting she wants to hurl -
She has a necklace. The necklace is still beautiful. She's still beautiful. But she can feel it slipping away from her, trying to escape, her motions becoming graceless, unartful -
It's disgusting, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting -
Through the crowd she spies a shock of pink-dyed hair. A woman she's seen before. She looks fine. She looks pretty, even. She's not disgusting.
She stumbles into the stranger without really intending it, drawn by the only beautiful thing in the whole world.
