Besides the thundering bass from outside the messy room, it was calm. Doors hadn't opened yet and so there were no customers. Other girls just gossiped and chattered away, many happy giggles filling the area. It made me smile. Many might look down at us for what we do, calling us names like 'whore', 'home-wrecker', and 'slut', but we still brought in the cash. More than what many of our daytime jobs paid us.

"I heard we were getting a new waiter or waitress," one girl, Lilith (ironic, isn't it?) announced excitedly. It was always fun when someone joined our neon team. I listened in while also trying to focus on gently putting blue glitter on my upper and lower lids without making a mess or getting it in my dark brown eyes.

"For their sake, I hope they're a waiter. They don't have to wear gross female uniforms, nor do they have to deal with greasy men thinking they're like us," muttered another, a beautifully sculpted latina named Ana, works slightly slurred as she was applying sticky gloss to her slightly thicker lips. My least favorite part was the gloss. I always seem to get my boring brown hair stuck to it, and it's not very attractive trying to do a twist or head flip and your hair gets glued to your face.

"My goodness do not get me started on those male uniforms darlin'," a third dancer, Lina, pipes up, curling her dark chocolate hair that contrasts beautifully with her darker skin, "when they show off the chests of all of the waiters. Delicious." The rest of the girls in the room snicker and laugh, myself included.

As I'm giggling, I add my two cents, "imagine one of the waitresses in that uniform. I would just die." It seemed like a joke, as that would never happen, but actually thinking about it made my face heat up. So see the line of the shirt dip and show the curves of their inner breasts, the line of their stomach that disappears into the rest of the shirt, and their collarbones. The form fitting pants and black belt, deft fingers lightly holding the buckle, those fingers becoming beautiful hands, wrists, and then defined, feminine, forearms.

"That's because you're gay!" Lilith shouts, giggling. Without a picture to her voice and dialogue, she would seem like the dumb blonde stereotype they have in movies and books, but she was just a cute and sweet thing. She had also curled her hair, but hers was shorter than Lina's and it was a bright orange that framed her freckles. I laughed with her.

Ana turned around and grabbed her pumps, crossing her legs and looking at me curiously, "why do you like this job? I mean it's a bunch of men touching you and you don't like men. So why do you like it so much here?" I paused in my routine, putting down the curling iron and thought for a moment. It was a good question. I couldn't fault her for it. I did private shows with men, let them stroke their hands down my body, eye me up and down, but I didn't like them. I would prefer much sharper eyes looking at me, smaller and softer hands trailing up and down my skin, to do a private show and hopefully myself get to see a peak of soft hills rather than a bulge.

"I get to perform with beautiful women, and every now and then a woman will come and watch. I guess with the men I imagine they aren't men, y'know. Is that mean?" I ask afterwards when I realize that the men think I find them attractive and that I like them.

Lilith quickly shook her head and rushed over to grab my calloused hand, "of course not! What they don't know won't hurt them!."

I appreciated that she came over to comfort me, because for the first time since I started, I felt gross and like a bad person.

"Girls, come confirm the songs you picked out and then we are going to meet at the bar to meet our new bartender," our manager came in. Most managers were creeps, used their own employees to get off and many take advantage of their dancers, but not ours. We got lucky, as ours was a sweet older man who genuinely wanted to let people explore their own creative freedom, specifically with a pole. And he got money out of it.

We nodded to him and when he closed the door, we all practically jumped on Lilith, "you said they were a waitress or waiter!"