“The scene?”

“That’s what we call it. A scene. Scening. A roleplay scene. A Mommy scene. A humiliation scene. Whatever he’s paid for. Anyway, let’s say it’s a pain scene. I’ll put him on the St. Andrew’s cross and hurt him with various instruments of kink-play—floggers, whips, paddles, canes. I see a lot of masochists in my dungeon. Most of them can orgasm from pain or can orgasm very easily after a beating.”

“The men do that?” Cyrus cleared his throat.

“They’re allowed to touch themselves. I don’t jack them off or anything.”

“Isn’t that…unsanitary?”

“Germaphobes don’t usually become dominatrixes. I make them clean up after themselves.”

“What do they use? To clean it up, I mean? Lysol?”

“Something like that. Or their own tongues if I’m feeling particularly sadistic. And then Lysol after. And bleach. I keep a very clean dungeon.”

Cyrus stared at her, stared a long time.

“Yes?” she said with a smile.

“Sorry. Head swam there a second,” he said.

“Kink isn’t for everybody.”

Cyrus wiped a drop of sweat off his forehead. The cold house was suddenly not so cool anymore.

“All right. The scene ends with him coming and cleaning it up. Then he pays you?”

“Oh, forgot that part. I get paid upfront.”

“How much, can I ask?”

“Really depends on what he wants. A basic two-hour pain session is going to be about five hundred dollars, and I usually get tipped another hundred. That’s here in Nola. I charged a lot more in New York.”

“Nola gets a discount?”

“Nola’s got a much lower cost of living than Manhattan.”

Cyrus chuckled. “I believe that.”

“For more serious scenes—blood-play, fire-play, all-nighters—it can run into the thousands of dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money. You must be rich.”

“I do okay. I mostly see clients now for fun. Old regulars from New York fly down. And I have a few new locals I adore. I might only see five to ten clients a week.”

“So a regular two-hour scene, just the basics, would cost a man six hundred dollars minimum?”

“Right.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I’m worth it.”

Cyrus nodded, leaned back on the sofa, and exhaled.

“Another question…you do anything they pay you to do?”

“Within reason,” she said. “We all have our limits. But if it’s something I’m not into, I can refer the client to someone who will do it. I know a specialist for almost every fantasy, every fetish.”

“What won’t you do?” he asked and didn’t know why he was asking. Just nosy, if he was being honest.

“You’d be surprised by the guys who want me to dress up like a ‘sexy Nazi’ and order them around in German. That’s a hard ‘no’ for me,” she said. “Nazis aren’t sexy.”

“That’s one hell of a fantasy.”

“Many of the men I know with those sorts of fetishes are as horrified by them as you are. The brain is weird. If a man gets the standard set of wiring, he’ll find a woman sexy, or another man, or both. Nothing fancy. If you get a slightly different set of wiring, you’re turned on by popping balloons, dressing like a baby, getting beat up by Nazis, and you have very little say in the matter.”