Fran Furnivall - Shack-Ups!

She left the Pierre that night with two hundred dollars tucked into her bra. Before Duane opened the door to her taxi she spun around on her heels and said, "I want to see you tomorrow night."

His head bounced up and down eagerly like a cocker spaniel and said, "Honey you got a date!"

Duane Sholes turned out to be a good starting point for Toni Corbin in New York. As luck would have it for the both of them, he was in town for a week and for Duane that meant getting his cock sucked like it had never been sucked before and for Toni it meant fifteen hundred dollars plus a lot of little extras.

For Duane it was like a new beginning-almost a love affair. Toni was using everything she had to get as much from this tycoon as possible because she didn't look forward to doing this as a steady diet. The way she figured it was to get a bank roll so she could get into something else. That something else could be a dancing career-all she needed was a little time.

Duane had Toni picked up by limousine every afternoon for lunch and every evening for cocktails, a Broadway show, dinner and some head afterwards back at the Pierre. He paid two weeks rent on her room at the Gorham and on their third "date" gave her a diamond bracelet that must have set him back a few steps but nothing that he would ever notice and certainly nothing he would ever miss. Every night before Toni took off for an empty bed which she didn't mind facing, he handed her two one hundred dollar bills.

Toni toyed with the idea of checking out and asking for a weeks rent back from the hotel so she could get herself an apartment and save all that money, but then decided that after all it would be a cheap gesture and things would take care of themselves. She also thought about selling the bracelet to raise more cash as she wasn't especially fond of jewelry but felt that it wouldn't do much harm to hang onto that particular bauble for awhile. Diamonds didn't depreciate.

She made the whole thing as exciting for Duane as she could. She wanted him to feel like he wasn't being taken and after three days she couldn't help but like him in an off hand way. There wasn't much to dislike about him except that he was too old for Toni and a bit of a country corn pone. She went down on him in the shower and blew him before cocktails when all he had in mind was a little conversation.

She sucked him off in the back of the limousine after dinner after giving her own instructions to the driver to take them out to Jones Beach which she had heard so much about. She took charge of Duane and learned she had a lot of power at her command. All she had to do was act upon her instincts and open her mouth. That seemed to be all most guys wanted and it took little to make them happy. What she lacked in long range experience she made up for in enthusiasm.

Before Duane left New York he gave her a full length red fox fur coat that was truly a thing of beauty. He also told her that he would recommend her to some of his friends when they were in town and she cautioned him with, "Only if they are classy as you are and as nice."

Duane Sholes was no fool in spite of appearances and he answered her "Don't worry honey, they are as rich and as generous as I am. Don't forget those are Texas boys we're talking about." On the way out to the airport she jerked him off into a silk handkerchief under the blanket of her red fox coat and was sorry to see him go.

Toni got herself a cozy one bedroom apartment on East 57th street, furnished it and stocked the refrigerator with the money she had made from Duane. She had eight hundred dollars in cash, a diamond bracelet and an extraordinary fur coat left by the time the last dish fell into place and she was ready to embark on a new career. Three days later she got a job dancing topless at the Metropolis Cafe.

The work was hard but she enjoyed it and most of the other girls were very kind to her and taught her the ropes. She found out that she could make close to three hundred dollars a week if she nailed down two dancing jobs steady for five days. If she wanted to work more it was there for the taking-there were a lot of bars paying good money for girls who had no inhibitions about wiggling their asses and jiggling their tits in front of a lot of beer soaked barflies.

"I could always become a full time hooker," she told herself, "but that's not what I really want to be." Instead she settled for an occasional free lance hustling assignment and thus she reasoned, "I've got the best of both worlds."

Duane Sholes as it turned out wasn't shooting the shit about his fellow Texans. He told the boys back home about the hottest pair of lips in New York City and Toni Corbin's reputation spread through certain quarters of Dallas society like a brush fire fanned by a hot wind. Toni had no objections to any of this and invited them to come see her dance.

One dude named Edgar Lewis she took quite a fancy to and managed to pump her bank account up a few notches at the same time. It was a Monday afternoon and she was at home soaking in a hot tub with a gin and orange juice when the phone rang.

"Yes, hello?"

"Is this Miss Toni Corbin?" a Texas voice asked very slowly, coming at her like it was exiting from a deep sleep.

"Yes," she replied telling herself that good old Duane had come through in his promise to do a bit of public relations for his brunette bombshell, "and this no doubt is a Texas gentleman who happens to be a friend of… " she broke off leaving her sentence trailing in midair just to see if her supposition was totally correct.

"Duane Sholes, Mam," he filled her in "and how did you know I was from Texas?" he asked in genuine bewilderment.

"It's that sexy voice of yours with that panhandle brogue that led me to that brilliant conclusion.

"Well I'll be knee high to a grasshopper," he added quaintly.

"So what's on your mind, and by the way what's your name now that I've told you I'm me?"

"Edgar, Edgar Lewis."

"Do your friends call you Ed for short?" Toni asked toying with him, feeling very big city.

"Toni my friends never call me Ed and they never call me short." There was something in the way he delivered that piece of information that made Toni slip out of her lethargic, soap bubble daze and listen more closely to what was going down at the other end of the line.

"Do you think we might be able to get together for dinner this evening?" he asked.

"Sure, but it'll have to be a late dinner, closer to supper because I'm dancing tonight-that's my line of work you know. Say listen why don't you come down and see me do my act and have a few drinks and we can go on from there?"

"That sounds all right to me. Make it around eleven." She gave him the address.

"And say how will I know it's you?"

"Oh I'll be wearing a Stetson hat. You know what a Stetson is don't you?" "Of course I know what a Stetson is. Will you tell me something please?"

"What's that?"

"Why is it that everyone from Texas seems to wear Stetsons?"

"That young lady, is the magical question and tonight you just might find the magical answer. By the way how will I know you when I see you?"

"Oh you'll know me when you see me-you'll know."

The thing that made Toni different from the other girls who worked the bars and strip parlors of New York was talent. The thing that made that talent exciting was the fact that Toni had the capacity for growth. It was something that was very tangible, it was a maturation process that made everyday an event for her; it was something worth waking up for.

Toni would take a two and a half minute record and turn it into an event; she could transform the most banal of AM pop hits into an occasion of wonder. Toni was inventive and progressive where the other girls were content to.walk through their routines with the minimum of thought and rhythm. Everyone told her she was going places.