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Ad: NOW HIRING! Want to make easy money? Want to work as much as you want, from HOME? Fun, sexy, beautiful people only! That means YOU! Make serious cash just by chatting on the phone! Call 1-900-ADV-NTUR to start on your next amazing sexy adventure!
-Adventures Between The Lines
Stede dials the number cautiously.
A sexy woman's voice answers with a pre-recorded message. “Hello, lovely,” the voice purrs. “I hope you're having a sexy evening. If not, don't worry. You're about to. If you know your favorite adventurer's extension, press their number now. If you're new and looking for a good time, listen to the recorded messages from our gorgeous adventurers, then press the four-digit extension of your favorite to meet them. If you're calling to be a new adventurer, please press zero.”
There's a pause before another sexy voice begins speaking. “Hi, I'm Red Annie,” a woman who sounds a bit older, possibly a smoker, her voice deep, sensual, and breathy. “Ready for me to rock your face off? No cowards and no pansies. I only want to talk to someone big and strong enough to take me on in a fight. And baby, I fight dirty. Press 4200 for Anne and let me show you a good time.”
For a message that's so threatening, Anne makes it sound like a wild, sexy time.
The line clicks, and another recording starts.
“Howdy,” a deep male voice rasps. “I'm Calico, but you can call me Sir. I'm the cowboy next door, and sooooo much more,” he says in a slow Southern drawl. “I like ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between. Do you want me between your sheets? Between your cheeks?” he says with a rumbling chuckle. “Press 6969 for Calico, and you can be the lucky rider on this mustache ride.”
Stede considers listening to more of the hotline recordings, but he’s worried the call might be costing him money, so he quickly punches zero.
The line rings twice, then a rich baritone answers, “Adventure Between the Lines Hotline, where the hottest babes are always on the line. Ed speaking. How can I help you?”
Stede clears his throat, then raises the pitch of his voice to its highest, femme-presenting, pre-transition register. “Hi, um, I'm calling about your ad. I saw it on the back of the campus paper. The one to be, uh, an operator?”
“That’s us. And, oh, I like your voice already. You sound sweet as a peach. So, I take it you're a student then? Are you over eighteen?” Ed asks.
“Twenty, Sir,” Stede says.
“Oof,” he replies, as if wounded. “Busting out the ‘Sir’ this early? Baby, you will be the death of me,” he says with a deep chuckle.
Stede snickers, twirling the cord of his landline, his face flushing.
“Okay, Hun. Can you come into the office for an official interview soon? We need to verify your age. Not that I don't believe you, but you do sound about fifteen years old, and though that will serve you well with a certain demographic, we need to cover our asses legally. Are you free tomorrow?”
Stede glances at the calendar. It's Thursday, and he doesn't have class on Fridays. “Free all day… Sir,” he adds to really sell it.
“Mmm,” the man on the other end of the line seems to hum in delight. “Can’t wait to meet you, Sugar. Let's get you in here bright and early. Bring a valid form of ID. If you're a good fit, we can get the transferring service connected to your landline by the end of the week. How does nine a.m. sound to you, Love?”
The amount of endearments is almost overwhelming to Stede. He gets a heady rush of dopamine each time Ed slips a new one into the conversation. “Nine a.m. is perfect,” Stede responds.
Ed gives Stede the address and directions to be buzzed into the office building. He ends the call with, “If you want to bring a friend for security purposes, we won't be offended. Rest assured, we are operating legally, and—despite how flirty I am on the phone—we keep things very professional here. I'm a former operator, so I can't help it, especially when the voice on the phone is as cute as yours. Okay, okay, I'll stop now,” he says, laughing at himself, “but I should ask, what’s your name, Sweets?”
Stede pauses, trying to think if he should give his name, his dead name, or a performer name, like the other operators were sure to have. He glances at an open sketchbook, one of Lucius’s, no doubt, strewn across the coffee table, a beautiful drawing of a moth doodled on the page. Its fluffy pink and yellow wings are immediately identifiable: The Rosy Maple Moth.
“Rosy,” Stede replied with a wince, hoping he didn’t take too long to answer.
“Rosy, great choice,” he says, seeing right through Stede’s ruse. “I love it. See you in the morning, Darling!” Ed says, ending the call.
Stede hangs his phone back onto the receiver. After checking his checking account balance this morning and seeing a whopping $17 staring back at him, he panicked. He had enough groceries to last a week at most, and sure, his roommates Lucius, Olu, and Buttons might spot him a bit of extra food, but he might have to switch to Ramen for the foreseeable future. He thinks he can steal the occasional apple or banana from the food court at school, but he hopes it won’t come to that.
The real financial hurdle will be rent, and he has about three weeks to raise the money. After coming out to his Dad on one of the weekly calls home, he woke up the next day to being completely cut off. For a man who always complained that he had never had a son, you’d think that transitioning from female to male would make him overjoyed. Instead, he’s pissed that Stede isn’t going down the path of his mother: quiet, subservient, and willing to marry the rich, white man they chose.
He raced home and collapsed on the couch, racking his brain with what to do, and found the campus newspaper on the coffee table. Stede hadn’t worked a day in his life; his parents wouldn’t let him. After-school jobs are for poor people. His father wasn’t about to let Stede start a job at the local burger joint when what Stede really ought to be doing is watching his weight and learning to be a good wife and mother.
As soon as he was able to leave for college, he set out for New York and found a shoebox-sized three-bedroom apartment already occupied by three people. Stede met with Lucius and Olu, both NYU students, to get more information about the apartment. When he asked about the third roommate, they told him that Buttons, a weird older man with a Scottish accent so strong that Stede could only understand every other sentence he spouted, technically owned the apartment and rented the other two rooms out to Lucius and Olu, but Buttons never used his room. Instead, he sleeps on the roof with his birds pretty much all year long.
They asked permission to rent out Button’s room so Stede can stay there, to which Buttons cryptically replied, “Whit's fur ye'll no go by ye.”
Olu translated that to mean, “If it’s meant to be, it will be,” which—if we can assume he was talking about them—woo!
Despite three roommates and a room where one side of his bed touches one wall, and the tiny desk he shoved next to the other side of his bed touches the opposite wall, Stede relished having a place to himself, a warm place to sleep, and enough money from his parents to pay for his other expenses.
Until today.
Stede leafed through the college paper, hoping to find the employment want-ads.
The Adventures Between the Lines ad made him giggle. He couldn’t even imagine how that would work. Stede: a virgin, new on his transition journey, and a complete novice when it comes to the world of sex and especially the world of sex work, being a sex phone operator? It felt absurd. And yet, maybe that in and of itself could be a selling point? The kind of guys who used sex-operator lines had to be pretty desperate, right? Maybe they liked the idea of an “innocent girl.” Stede knew the type of man who liked that stereotype. The kind of man who hung out with his father and began leering at him when he was as young as thirteen. They were the reason he began wearing more layers of clothes when his parents’ friends were around. He hated the way the letches would look at his skinny legs and budding breasts.
But maybe there was a way to flip the table and take advantage of these asshats with money to burn. If Stede could pretend to be a girl, something he has years of experience with already, and keep these pathetic old men on the line for a while, he’d rack up cash by the minute.
Taking the pen and pad of paper from the phone, Stede started doing some math. The operator said it was $3.99 a minute; say the company keeps half that. Stede wasn’t sure, but he knew they’d take some kind of cut, and half seems logical, so if he earns around $2 per minute. If he could keep these pervs on the line for even 15-30 minutes each and bounce from one caller to the next, he could potentially earn around $120 an hour.
Stede sets the pen down and stares at his math. Even if he only worked an hour a night, he could make more than any job waiting tables, working on an assembly line at a factory, or crawling back to his parents and asking for forgiveness. Yes, he’d have to vocally present as a woman, which he didn’t love, but to swindle thousands of dollars out of the hands of rich, dirty, old men? Maybe it’d be worth it. Could even be a good time.