24 - The darkest night will pass…

“Could I have found a worse job?” Seth muttered to himself as he handed over the room key a lady of the evening and her john.

He suspected he could have, although he wasn’t sure what it would have been. Maybe cleaning sewers or emptying dumpsters. Or stripping the sheets off the beds at this sleazy hotel before the next ‘customer’ arrived. The very thought of doing that made him shudder.

Checking the clock yet again, he realized he still had an hour to go before he could head back to Rikard’s. He opened the paper he’d been reading and began searching the want-ads. There had to be something there he could do. Tracing his finger down the columns, he realized yet again there were few, if any jobs that would allow him to start after dark and leave before dawn. Well, few which didn’t also require that he be trained to do them. When he’d first started looking he’d thought being a security guard would be perfect, until he found out they would run a background check on him. That could have been amusing, to say the least.

He had to stop twice more to take money and hand over keys, before his finger landed on a job which sounded interesting and like something he could actually do and have fun with. Grabbing the phone he called the number in the ad and within minutes he had an interview set up for the next evening.

Two nights later he was dressed, barely, as he danced on one of the small stages at a gay bar in the heart of the Quarter. He’d been surprised when the manager had taken one look at him and said, “If you know your right foot from your left and can move to the beat you’re hired.” It turned out the club had lost two of its dancers in the last few days and was desperate to find anyone who was young enough and sexy enough to keep the customers’ attention.

Seth grinned as a cute blonde slipped some bills into the waistband of his skintight shorts, dancing back before the guy could touch more than the club allowed. He’d found out very quickly that the customers liked to try doing that, so he learned how to move away to the beat of the music without insulting the men.

However, he wasn’t above doing some checking out of his own of the guys on the dance floor. They ran the gamut from young and cute, to thirty-something and knowing, to old and hopeful. And as fate would have it, the only ones he found remotely interesting seemed to be attached at the hip to the men they were dancing with, be they partners or just a pick-up for the evening.

Not that Seth was really looking for anyone. He discovered years ago he wasn’t into one night stands. If he did meet someone who interested him, he made that fact known immediately. It did nothing for his sex life he’d found out, much to his amused frustration.

At the end of the evening he found himself more than a few dollars richer, and the possessor of several phone numbers that had been slipped to him along with the bills. The numbers he tossed, the bills he put in his wallet. Then he finished dressing and headed home.