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Undercover: The Adventures of a Real Life Gigolo
Luke Bradbury
When young Aussie Luke Bradbury finds himself alone, broke and out of ideas in London, things look desperate. Until he spots a temping ad. Lured by the promise of easy money – and the chance to bed as many women as he can handle – Luke becomes a gigolo. It’s a job millions of men would kill for.Luke quickly learns all there is to know about women in his quest to give them the ultimate pleasure, climbing inside their heads as well as their beds.But all too soon, Luke discovers the darker side of his lucrative new profession. Is he selling his soul as well as his body?
LUKE BRADBURY
Under Cover:
The Adventures of a Real Life Gigolo
With Catherine von Ruhland
To ‘Pretty’ for all your love and support.
Contents
All In A Day’s Work (#ueae71a15-d2b8-5e19-90e0-a113c5daec99)Beginnings (#ub9edb8d3-1dd1-549b-b153-d99a68a8ad44)Jenny (#uc3e6825a-229a-5948-accb-7daac4da9c5f)Clare (#u708d7d48-6faa-5366-ae62-c335e0a3a2ec)Louise (#uc31767a0-7c2f-5edf-9c35-aad967e0425b)Jenny Again (#u541cc8f3-1f04-58b6-8015-7f9e15060d85)Sasha Plus One (#u4ece5c08-a8d6-5d41-9b91-18ba2d1d110e)Mark (#u5fd1cbc5-6305-5b43-bd72-9fe8b0cc8a96)Adele (#u86d83891-8e53-561b-ac09-36751d231a57)Cyan (#ub4d6c814-179c-56be-b6aa-b3454de27220)Stagz (#u592f1057-6004-5d3d-9d93-6108abf00a69)Janice (#u3e68760b-aa92-5bd6-896e-5bcd10770deb)Mae (#u02a0b1bb-521b-5435-94d5-1dd34481f9b6)Shelley (#u1799843b-a281-5aa3-99c2-e3198d5f8b90)Sasha (#u2d35d858-6ca6-56d3-9bd2-a1e69af4042f)Fiona And Martin (#ua3836a44-0421-503e-86f7-812fd4a3a63f)Giselle And Friends (#u62fc115d-e1a0-5ca4-b9f7-8d566a71c450)Mae Again (#u1b183af4-3ae4-545f-84e6-c3937df90894)Sasha Farewell (#ub5995706-9b2d-5e29-9c25-deadf3161041)More Stagz (#u546fd6b9-c945-5118-b467-351c58e831bb)Emma And Louise (#u057f8317-69cf-59ee-a203-7b03810bf564)Bob And Deborah (#u69fd9abd-621a-518f-bbbb-c8183a65548c)Out With Mae (#uc7f515aa-b1e3-5813-8c8e-2d330d7aec99)Back Home (#ue13051fa-3be0-53b8-81fc-af936547ff77)Sheena (#u47ecb5a4-c5e5-5efe-8af3-efd3a03d5a74)Graham (#u04880246-1ecd-5fe0-bf07-68dc9e78229d)Ralph, Cindy And Us (#uff299987-b3ef-59a0-ba93-9df1a69aa4a7)Myleene (#u3853ad4e-1140-57af-aa99-6a8a49d21a73)David And Charley (#ue2953f0f-063b-51ef-ac71-ee6030e532e8)Ralph And Cindy’s Private Island (#u551c9be8-10a4-5903-b28b-749abc05ecbc)Helen (#u362cef20-c86b-53a9-8023-af6fd7f4157d)Original Titles from Mischief (#u719937c9-ef5c-52f3-8503-b1600471afdb)Acknowledgments (#u5e318cda-03bc-50e4-8b5c-9b6b680a8b74)About the Author (#ude2f7daf-d896-5985-864d-bf61c58da257)Copyright (#ua1027eb7-3e6a-5ae6-9434-6e1b647ab89c)About the Publisher (#u506c9639-9999-5aa7-88d2-bd525fb86f34)
All in a day's work (#uf92b4f6a-13f8-5322-8824-4351d4bbb0fe)
For fuck’s sake, how much longer? Ring the bell, you bastard!
There’s me and this gorgeous girl at it on the floor. Carrie or Emily or something, I can’t remember her name. It’s a bit of a blur by number six. It’s not as if she isn’t good at what she does. She’s been hired, after all, same as me. So she knows all the moves and is fit to boot. It’s just I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up. Literally.
I’m trying my hardest. And both of us are into our stride. Hammer and tongs, wearing the creaking floor away. It’s like we’re swimming together in our sweat, our damp bodies sawing against each other. We’re barely coming up for air, and a strand of her long blonde hair is in my mouth, and everything else is drowned out except for our panting, heavy breathing and thumping heartbeats.
And all I yearn for is the tiny silver jingle of the bell, held between Brian’s index finger and thumb. He’s silent. Watching us.
When he finally shakes it, satisfied, both of us collapse, dead spent. As we catch our breath, Brian comes out from behind the curtain and tosses us both bathrobes. I help the girl to her feet, my arm around her narrow shoulders.
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah,’ she mouths through a half-smile, catching her breath. She’s pretty. She must be about twenty-three. Same as me.
‘Luke, you stay here a while,’ Brian instructs, tightening the belt of his dressing gown. ‘Emma, come with me.’
Emma. That was it.
Brian guides her out of the room. I look at her go, her bare legs glistening.
As they leave the room, Emma turns to me. ‘Nice meeting you, Luke. See you again, maybe.’
‘You too, Emma.’
Maybe.
I stand there, waiting. A short while later, the front door slams shut, and I head to the bathroom and wash Emma off my skin. The warm jet of water is like a curtain between her and the next one.
Is that it for tonight?
I step out of the shower and dry myself down and wrap myself in the bathrobe again. I like the feel of its softness against me. I’m still tying it up when I enter Brian’s lounge again. He pulls his armchair out from behind the curtain and sits low down in it, his legs stretched out before him. He raises his beer bottle to me.
‘Cheers!’
‘Bloody hell, Brian, I thought you were never going to ring that damn thing!’
‘I thought you enjoyed sex,’ he teases.
I sit down in the other armchair across the room, and pick up the open bottle that’s been sitting there since before Emma arrived.
‘Up to a point. It’s easy for you. You don’t have to put the effort in.’
‘Guys your age are supposed to be gagging for it!’ he smirks.
I lift the beer bottle to my lips and knock some back before answering.
‘Well, yeah,’ I laugh, ‘but even so. That doesn’t mean I don’t need to come up for air!’
My muscles silently scream in agreement.
With Brian, I gave as good as I got. We’d built up a rapport since I’d started working for him. Let’s face it, we’d had to. Because although he hired both me and some girls, we weren’t all there on an equal footing. Because Brian was a voyeur. Which, I suppose, made me his Tester.
Brian had once hired me as many as twelve girls in one night. He would call me early evening and we’d have a drink together, and then he’d phone for a girl for me. And the bell was his method of communication, of control. If he wanted the sex to stop, he’d ring the bell. It might be after twenty minutes, it might be after five. She’d go, I’d stay, have another break, and then Brian would phone the agency for someone else for me. And a quarter of an hour later there’d be another girl on the doorstep.
Brian never joined in. All he wanted to do was hide behind the curtain and watch. And whatever else he got up to back there. Everyone gets their kicks some way. Sometimes the sex went on for so long that, like with Emma, I was willing that damn bell to ring. You can have too much of a good thing…
Still, I couldn’t quite believe I was getting paid to do this. My mates would be up of a morning to go to work in offices, schools and cafés, whereas I could lie in bed all day or do whatever I wanted to. Until the evening. When I might have sex with five different girls Brian had selected for me. And earn in that night what my mates would in a week. It was almost too good to be true.
Brian was looking at me. His beer bottle was empty. Mine was still half full and held in mid-air on the way to my mouth. I could tell what he was going to say. He was pushing back the armchair with his bare feet even though he was still sitting in it, even as he was opening his mouth to speak. He held his mobile in the other hand. He’d put the agency number on speed dial so it took no time at all.
‘Right, Luke,’ he said with a wolfish leer. ‘Get ready for number seven.’
Beginnings (#uf92b4f6a-13f8-5322-8824-4351d4bbb0fe)
Early August
‘We’ve been shafted, the bastards!’
Mark spat the words out across the kitchen table. He’d just shown me his bank statement, and the evidence was there in bright red. I looked down into my mug of tea and nodded. I knew what he meant. But the truth was, we well and truly hadn’t been. That was the problem.
‘Meet loads of girls. You’ll be sent out on six dates a week, andmake £90 an hour…’
That was what the freesheet ad for the internet escort agency had promised us—and no doubt hundreds of other guys like Mark and me. Guys with too much male pride and not quite enough money to live on, who just assumed there would be women falling at our feet, and who were mugs enough to fork out £180 to register.
But in the three weeks since the two of us had coughed up our money, not one girl had called for Mark’s services. Nor mine.
I took a sip of my tea and looked across at Mark. It wasn’t even as if either of us was that bad-looking. Not that I’d ever admit I was good-looking. You got a clip for that in my family, for puffing yourself up. I’d been told that I looked a bit like the Spiderman actor, Tobey Maguire. Which was good enough for me. I was six foot tall with dark blond hair that bleached easily in the sun back home in Australia, while Mark’s hair was brown and he was slightly shorter than me. We worked out. Both of us had a reasonable Saturday-night success rate.
Mark shook his head. ‘This is London, for God’s sake. Where are all the girls?’ He took a digestive from the packet upended on the table and bit into it. He had a right to ask. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t seen enough of them falling over each other on any of our weekends out on the piss.
‘Not choosing to call out for a guy, presumably. That’s what blokes do.’
I could see the callbox windows in my mind’s eye, completely covered from floor to ceiling with brightly coloured ‘whorecards’. Blocking out the muted sunlight. That’d been my introduction to England nine weeks ago, dialling my mum to let her know I’d got here in one piece.
‘We can get a number for a girl from any phone box. But they can’t…’ I was working out the problem with our plan as I was saying it.
‘But that’s what the internet’s for!’ Mark spluttered, spraying crumbs. He swept them off the table with his forearm.
I ran a finger along the edge of the pine tabletop until it hit a dent in the wood. I drew my nail again and again through the groove and looked Mark in the eye.
‘Yeah, but they’re not looking because they’re not even aware that there’s a service for them. They take their chances on a Saturday night.’
Mark nodded: ‘Or go without.’
‘Exactly. And even if they knew there were guys they could pay for via their PCs, that doesn’t mean they’d do anything about it.’
I picked up my mug and took another gulp of tea, and thought of the callbox again and all the sex phoneline ads in the freesheets that I’d seen when I was trying to find somewhere to live. That’d been a grim time, sleeping on friends of friends’ grimy floors while all the while I could sense they didn’t really want me there. Sharing a room with Mark in this house for the past month had been a damn sight better than that, even with the beer cans clustered on the floor round the bin from when we hadn’t thrown straight. He’d been looking for someone to make up the rent and I’d seen his ad on Gumtree. It’d helped that the two of us had hit it off as soon as we’d met over a drink. Same small-town Aussie background, I suppose.
‘I mean, have you ever phoned for a hooker?’ I raised my eyebrows at him as I said it.
He shook his head. ‘Course not. As if I need to…’ he crowed.
I put my mug down. ‘Well then.’
And that’s when it hit me. What hadwe been thinking?
There was not even a market for sex with straight guys. Or not one that involved money changing hands. On the girl’s part anyhow.
‘They’ve well and truly buggered us, haven’t they?’ I sighed.
A grin crept up Mark’s face. ‘Thankfully not. And that’s something to be damn grateful for.’
We both laughed, but it couldn’t disguise the fact that each of us was seriously out of pocket. We’d taken a gamble on making easy money and lost.
‘Well, at least we can’t be the only ones who’ve fallen for this scam,’ said Mark. ‘Think about it. There must be hordes of guys across London,’ he continued, flinging his arm out as if to embrace the whole city and not just our poxy kitchen in a crappy area of West London, ‘just like us, weeping into their tea at what might have been!’
I sighed. Surely it was the ultimate part-time job. Screwing girls for cash. We could have waved goodbye to the crummy minimum-wage waiting and bar jobs and selling stuffed pittas while hung over from a stall at Camden Market for friends of friends who always paid shit money. God, London certainly hadn’t turned out to be all it was cracked up to be.
I looked down at my half-full mug and felt the cogs whirring even as he was saying it.
‘Well then, that’s how we make our money back, isn’t it?’ I suggested.
‘What?’
‘Look, there’s clearly enough money out there to make it worthwhile setting up an agency that gets guys to pay to sign on.’
Mark’s face momentarily fell. ‘What, and rip people off just the way we were? Come on.’
Miserably, I nodded. ‘I agree it’s not exactly ethical.’ I thought for a moment. ‘But then it’s not exactly not. What if we were to set up an agency, y’know, advertise our services to women, and ask guys to sign on? The blokes cough up, and of course we’ll give them work if there’s enough going, but we’ll always have first call. What is wrong with that? We can’t lose.’
Mark cocked his head to one side and shook it. But he was also smiling. ‘God, Luke. A couple of months in this country and you’ve turned into a London spiv!’
I smirked back. He raised his mug to mine and we chinked.
My mind was already in overdrive. We’d advertise in the London freesheets. We could do it cheaply, surely. Advertise for clients, and put something on the internet to draw in the men as well. And photos. Me, Mark and the lads, to give the girls something to choose from.
‘Face it, Mark. We’re broke. We might as well make a go of it. We’ve got nothing more to lose.’
I suppose I expected it to happen overnight. But of course it didn’t. And when it didn’t, it meant it didn’t seem real. It was just mates mucking about. Even after I’d spent fifty quid I couldn’t really afford on a box ad in a London magazine; even after we’d put a whole lot of our pictures up on the net. Seven of us had spent an afternoon taking photos of each other, all of us with a big grin on our faces in front of the drawn curtains in our lounge room so it looked like we’d hired a studio or something. So we were able to still kid ourselves that we were only having a laugh.
But we weren’t, were we?
Or, as it turned out, I wasn’t.
The phone rang. Mark and I were lounging on the sofa with our cans of Stella and having our last-night debrief. We looked at each other for a beat, and since he didn’t get up, I did and sauntered across the room.
‘Hi?’
‘Male Escorts Esquire? I saw your advert.’
Shit!
I pulled up a chair and sat down, half out of shock. The name we’d come up with wasn’t the greatest, but it had clearly done its job. I struggled to get my head into gear. She was the first to call—though I wasn’t about to let her know that, of course.
‘Hello, how might we help you?’
What have we got ourselves into?
‘Uh, I’ve never done this before,’ she mumbled. ‘I was wondering if you might be able to send me someone tomorrow evening?’
What was I thinking? I can’t do this. This isn’t for me. That was why I’d volunteered my phone number in the first place, so I could act the receptionist and palm off anyone who rang onto one of the others.
It was one thing to fantasise about girls phoning you for sex, it was quite another to be faced with the sheer reality of going with whoever happened to ask. Suppose she sounded better than she turned out to look? What did you do then?
This one wasn’t too young—I could tell by the tone of her voice—and she was clearly nervous.
Join the club.
I sat up straight on the dining chair and went into professional mode.
‘Is there anyone on the website you liked the look of? Sorry, your name is—?’
Mark’s ears pricked up. He stared across the room at me with excited saucer eyes and a smirk. I shook my head as a sign to him to ease up, and tried to focus on what was being said to me.
‘Jenny,’ she replied. ‘I don’t have a computer.’
Ah, definitely an older woman. Okaay.
‘Nice to talk to you, Jenny, I’m Luke. That’s not a problem. What would you like him to look like? We have a range of young men on our books.’
