"Good morning, girls."
The voice came out of the ceiling, and it startled me wide awake. I discovered I was in the big bed, but alone; evidently Dottie had gone to her own bedroom next to mine, and Cookie had vanished to her own place too. Except for a deliciously tired feeling, I wouldn't have known what a small orgy I'd been having the night before. The window was open, and I could see the city in the distance.
"Dottie and Honey? Are you both awake?" the voice said. It was Mr. Smith's voice; probably the speaker was in the other room too. I sat up, and the voice chuckled approvingly.
"Mr. Lancelot was terribly pleased with you girls," the voice said. "If you will look over on your bed tables…"
There was a large orchid pinned there, and something green wrapped around its stem; I grabbed for mine, and opened it, and it was a wad of money. Five one hundred dollar bills!
"However, Mr. Lancelot has asked me to say that-he does not really feel you should stay with us. He says that the trouble is that you enjoy your work so much that you may very well wear our customers out, and while he will regret losing you, we must consider the larger Picture."
"Gee," I said, regretfully.
"Mr. Lancelot suggested that you stay for a day or two, till you have other plans clear in your minds. There's no hurry, naturally. Of course, if you should see any clients you're particularly taken with, you may… ah, turn a trick or two, as we say in the business. And Mr. Lancelot particularly hopes you may be around for the weekend orgy scene, if you're in the mood."
"Orgy?" I asked. "What do you call last night, anyway?"
Mr. Smith's voice chuckled. "Dear me, hardly a full-sized orgy."
"I hope we didn't get the maid into trouble, inviting her to stay," I said, anxiously. "I mean, Mr. Lancelot seemed to think it was a good idea."
"He thought it was an excellent idea." Mr. Smith said. "He is thinking of installing an entire Oriental wing, to be called the Wang Dynasty Rooms… "
There was a buzz and a click as he turned off his microphone. I slipped on a robe that hung at the bedside, and padded to the door, and opened it. Dottie, sitting up in bed in her room, looked at me.
"He left me five hundred dollars!" she said, excitedly. "Wow, I didn't know balling was worth money."
"Me too," I said. "But I guess he's a bit special. Plain ordinary balling is just for fun."
"If we stayed here, we'd make lots of money," Dottie said, round-eyed with thought.
"Not if the customers kept dropping dead from too much of a good thing," I said. "Dottie, baby, not everybody is like Mr. Lancelot."
"Nobody is," she said, her pink tongue dampening her lips reminiscently.
So most of the customers are probably old goats," I said. "That's the only sort with money enough to come here."
"Gee," Dottie said. "If only we could find fellows with… oh, you know, the right sort. And plenty of money too."
"You're mercenary," I told her.
"It's your fault," she said. "All I needed was to have my marks in English get a little better. And you said it was my psychology, and if I got a little bit of sex and stuff everything would be all right. But I don't even know what my marks would be, now, and I've had a whole lot of sex, and darn it, I don't know what to think. Except maybe I'm a dope for listening to you."
"Oh, come on," I said. "Listen now, has anything bad happened, really? So, if we go home, we'll probably flunk out, but there's always next year. And we know lots more about men now, don't we?"
"That isn't going to improve the men back home any," she said.
"Don't you realize we've got all this money?" I said. "We could go looking around other places. There's bound to be a little bit of life going on here and there. Gee, all we did was take one trip, and look what's happened."
"Next time we'll probably get murdered,"
Dottie said darkly. "You act like this has been one big picnic, Dopey."
"Well, hasn't it?"
Dottie had described it all perfectly. A picnic. We certainly had tasted all the goodies in sight, right? And I think, with this wicked little smirk on my face, I'll end my little story right there.