Let me just preface this little narrative by saying that I am not the most proficient of lovers. I have trouble meeting ladies. I don’t know why. I’m shy, you could say. But I'm human, like Morrissey says, and I need to be loved, just like anybody else does.

So, instead of going out and meeting someone, I thought I’d try hiring a prostitute. I’d never done it before. And, to be honest, I didn’t even know how. You can’t just look them up in the yellow pages. And I didn’t trust the ads I saw in the free paper. So I decided to call my friend, Steve. Steve not only could hire a prostitute, he even had his own girlfriend. He was pretty well-versed in the lady territory. He was the one who explained to me what a happy ending was. I thought it was the dessert you get at McDonalds. That’s not what it is, by the way.

I called Steve. The phone rang about eight times. I knew to keep letting it ring. He liked to make himself seem important by making the caller wait. He picked up on the thirteenth ring.

“Hello?” he said. Man, this guy was smooth.

If there was one person I could kill and trade lives with, maybe by cutting his skin off and wearing it – I don’t know – it would be Steve.

“Hello?” Steve said again, getting a little annoyed.

I told him it was me and he said me, who and I said Jared and he said Jared, who?

“From Whole Foods, remember?” I said. “I was buying all that laxative…”

“Oh, right. Jared. Yeah. What’s up?”

I told him about my dilemma and what would his suggestion be? He gave me a phone number to call and said, “Ask for Angela. She loves a cum shower.”

“What’s a—?”

“Hey, Jar, I gotta go. Good luck, man. And remember: cum shower.” Click.

Cum shower?

I thought about Googling it but I felt embarrassed. I knew what a shower was, that part was obvious. And I knew what cum was, thanks to another conversation with Steve when I ran into him at the Synagogue. But, how did they relate?

I wanted to make my date with Angela really special. So I had to figure out what a cum shower was before I called to book her. Is that what hiring a prostitute is called?

I went into my bathroom and looked at my shower stall. It was fairly generic with a faucet for filling up the tub. A stopper. Rubber ducky. Showerhead. I wondered if I unscrewed the showerhead and ejaculated into it…? That made sense to me. Yeah, that was it.

I wasn’t feeling particularly aroused at the moment. Well, maybe I could call and book Angela and then worry about that later. So I held the phone in my hand and looked at the number Steve gave me. I was feeling really nervous and my palms were all sweaty. I could hardly hold the cell phone. I didn’t know if I could go through with it. But I was so lonely. I screwed up my courage. “Screw,” I thought and giggled.

I pushed some of the numbers. I pushed the three numbers of the area code. Was I calling a whorehouse? I pushed the three other numbers. Or was I calling a pimp? I pushed one of the four remaining numbers. Then I dialed another one. My fingers were trembling. I quickly dialed the last two numbers. On the last number, did my finger slip and dial the five instead of eight? Then I heard this sultry voice on the other end and I tried to get my voice to say something but I couldn’t make it work. Thankfully it was just a recorded opening telling me to press one for birthday parties, two for funerals, three for bachelor parties and for all other occasions press four. I pressed four. A few minutes of muzak played while I contemplated hanging up. Finally a man’s voice came on the line.

“Yeah?” he said.

I didn’t know what to say. “I’d like to order a prostitute, please,” I finally said.

“What would you like on it?”

“You mean like pepperoni?”

“Why would I mean pepperoni?”

“I don’t know. You just made it sound like I was ordering a pizza.”

“Well, you’re not ordering a pizza. If you want a pizza, you’ve called the wrong number.”

There was a long pause.

“Hello?” I said.

“Yeah,” the man’s voice said again.

“Is Angela available? Id’ like to order Angela, please.”

I really wanted to hang up and just masturbate, but it was too late.

“Yeah. Angela’s available.” And then he told me the hourly rate which was a lot of money, but I couldn’t say no now.

“Ok,” I said.

Angela would be over in an hour. I looked at my apartment and it was kind of messy and I still needed to prepare the cum shower.

I thought if I masturbated in the showerhead I wouldn’t have enough left for Angela. I wanted everything to go just right for our date, so I pulled my pants down and held my penis in my right hand and the showerhead in my left hand and tried jerking off into it.

But I was completely unaroused. I thought of the prospect of having a prostitute and that made me a little harder. Finally I came a little in the showerhead and screwed it back into the shower stall. There. Everything was ready, sort of.

I got out some candles. They weren’t romantic candles or anything, just leftovers from Christmas and had depictions of snowmen on them. I turned the snowmen so they faced the wall. Maybe Angela wouldn’t notice. I made my bed and picked up all the dirty clothes from the floor. I looked at my watch and saw how much time had passed. Angela was already fifteen minutes late.

The doorbell rang and I wiped my hands on my pants and ran over to the snowmen candles and lit them. At the door I collected myself and smoothed down my hair. I opened the door.

There was a woman standing there wearing a purple knee-length skirt and matching blouse. She had her brown hair tied up in a bun and she was wearing glasses. She looked about 37 years old.

“Can I help you?” I asked. I was going to tell her I was expecting someone or just give her $5 for whatever charity she was collecting money for.

“I’m Angela,” she said.

“Oh.”

I looked at her, kind of disappointed. It’s not that she wasn’t attractive, or, to put it bluntly, fuckable, it’s just that after watching so many movies, most of them pornographic, one starts to get a mental picture of what a prostitute looks like. Angela looked perfectly respectable. As soon as I thought that, I felt an immense shame, but I just pushed it aside because my loneliness was also welling up and threatening to consume me. I thought maybe I deserved to be alone. But Angela was already there, so I might as well make the most of it.

I asked her to come in. She didn’t look at any of my things, not even my book collection I had meticulously organized. I pointed at the candles and said, “I, uh…”

“You’re supposed to pay first,” Angela said.

“Oh. Right. Of course.” I took eight twenties out of my wallet and told her to keep the change.

She moved towards me and put her hands on my belt buckle. It was the closest any woman had ever been to me. I felt something flip over inside my stomach.

“Um,” I said. “I’ve prepared you something. Do you know Steve?”

She gave me a blank stare.

“Well, he’s the guy who recommended you to me and he said you really like cum showers?”

Still no response.

“So I’ve made you one. If you’d like.”

I led her to the bathroom and showed her my shower stall. You couldn’t tell by looking at it that it was a cum shower.

“So, do you want to…?”

Angela shrugged and started taking off her clothes. She put her glasses down on the sink which made her look about ten times more fragile. She took her blouse off and her skirt. She wasn’t doing it in a strip tease sort of way, but just how any woman might take off her clothes for a shower. I was pretty sure that made it sexier. I didn’t have an erection yet, so maybe not.

She took off her bra and I saw her breasts were average-sized. She wasn’t skinny or fat. She was the Goldilocks of prostitutes. She pulled her panties off and put them on top of her folded-up clothes on the toilet lid. I moved closer and put my hand on her torso. She looked at me with an inscrutable glance and I removed my hand.

She turned the water on and felt it as she turned the knob to get the right temperature and then got in. She drew the curtain behind her and began to take a shower.

I stood there thinking most of the cum had probably already washed down the drain. I didn't know what to do, so I just stood there, absolutely still, waiting for her to finish.

She was in there a long time. I wondered if I was supposed to take my clothes off and join her. I could lather her up from behind. Bend her over and fuck her with the shower water beating down on us mercilessly and slightly tinged with cum.

I strained my ears to hear if she was enjoying herself. But then the water turned off and she pulled the curtain back.

“Do you have a towel I can borrow?” she asked.

“Of course.” I handed her a clean towel from the closet and watched as she dried herself off. I watched her rub her hair which was down now around her shoulders and pass the towel along her back and dry her breasts and between her legs were her vagina was folded closed.

She put her clothes back on and left the bathroom. I followed her out to the living room. She was headed towards the door and I realized she was leaving.

“Don’t you want to…?”

She looked at her watch.

“Your time is up.”

I tried kissing her but she wouldn’t let me.

She opened the door and closed the door, and then she was gone.