Trish stormed through the party, looking for her boyfriend. He was standing, smiling, talking to one of her ex-boyfriends: Joe, the man who she had found in bed with a waitress. No, not just a waitress: their regular waitress at their favorite cafe.

“Excuse me,” she said with an attempt at a smile, and whisked Tim away.

“Hey babe,” he said casually, ignoring the scowl on her face. “Enjoying the party?”

“No,” she hissed, “I am not enjoying the party.” She pulled Tim by the arm and maneuvered him past Roy, her ex-boyfriend who she’d kicked out after finding his collection of internet porn. As if the BDSM stuff hadn’t been enough, Roy had owned enough midget porn to fill three external hard drives. Trish hadn’t even realized there were that many midgets on the planet.

“That sucks,” Tim said, looking over his shoulder. “Still, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it more when the entertainment arrives.”

Trish opened her mouth in fury, but after a brief pause as Tim opened another can of beer, pursed her thin lips together instead. Clearly this relationship wasn’t going to work ... but the conversation would have to wait until after the party.

It was almost a pity. When Trish had first run into Tim at her local grocery store, she’d admired the confident way he approached her, the self-assured way he’d asked for her number. It had been a complete chance encounter, too - Tim lived and worked on the opposite side of the city, and had been in the area doing work for a client.

And she had to admit, the surprise birthday party had been an incredibly sweet gesture. If only he hadn’t invited everyone she knew...

Trish was halfway across the party, trying to squeeze past her ex-boyfriend Jerry (who she had broken up with when he had suggested a threesome) and her ex-boyfriend Larry (who she’d dumped when she’d learned he was still on his ex-girlfriend’s lacrosse team) when a thought struck her.

Entertainment?

The sound of cheering coming from her lounge room increased her heart-rate, and she practically shoved her ex-boyfriend David (dumped for eating toast in bed) over as she rushed to see what was causing such excitement.

Her heart dropped when she saw what it was. Her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend Tim was standing in the middle of the room, next to what looked like a ... but no, it couldn’t be.

“Honey,” Tim said, grinning broadly, “Happy birthday.”

With that, the woman standing next to Tim pressed a button on the boom-box she’d brought, and it began omitting thick, sultry beats. Trish’s face was burning, her throat felt like it was closing up, and it was only with a great deal of effort that she managed to force a sentence out.

“Tim,” she raged, “What ... the ... hell...”

“Relax, babe,” he said, cutting her off with a grin. “You know you need to relax.”

“Why the FUCK is there a whore STRIPPER... -”

Before she could finish the sentence, the stripper butted in.

“Call me Rose. Now sit down and relax - your boyfriend paid big bucks for me, and I want to make sure you have a birthday you’ll never forget...”

For reasons she couldn’t explain, Trish did as the stripper instructed, and sat down. As she looked around the party, she noticed her ex-boyfriend Mitchell watching with a gleeful look on his face. Of course he’d be loving this, she thought - she’d dumped him when learning that he had been a regular at strip clubs before they had met.

The beat dropped, and Trish noticed that the stripper had started her routine.

She really is very talented, she was forced to admit. She was dressed in black thigh-high boots, a tight leather mini-skirt, and a red button-down top that barely went below her boobs.

Her dancing was ... hypnotic. Without looking around, Trish could tell that every set of eyes at the party were on Rose. And even though she had never been even remotely interested in girls, Trish had to admit that her dancing was very ... alluring.

As the stripper threw her head back and forth in time with the beat, her long black hair flew one way and then the next. Trish watched the motion, entranced, before moving her focus down to the girl’s face.

Was that a ... nose-ring? In the past, Trish had always despised nose-rings (any form of piercings on a man was a deal-breaker for her, and she thought anything more than earrings on a woman was just trashy) but she had to admit that it somehow suited her.

It gave a focus to the girl’s friendly, rounded face, with her button nose and her heavily made-up eyes. She’d stopped whipping her hair back and forth, and was now slowly walking toward Trish, a smile on her face.

As Trish realized what was going to happen next, she knew she should be feeling dread. Stripping was a disgusting practice for women with no self-esteem to making men feel superior. So ... why was she looking forward to it? She had no interest in seeing the other woman’s body - Trish barely liked looking at her own body in the mirror, and had dumped at least two of the men in the room when they had kept pushing for sex above the covers with the lights on.

No, it wasn’t that she wanted to see the stripper’s body. She just wanted to see how she did it - every move she made was so graceful, so ... perfect. At this stage, Rose could have pulled out a knife and started cutting pieces of Trish’s flesh off and she would have watched to see how elegantly she could do it.

In the few seconds that the boom-box stopped blaring out one song and the next begun, Trish looked around the room, and a thought struck her. When everyone had yelled “surprise”, she’d noticed in horror that Tim had invited a number of her ex-boyfriends. But, now that she thought about it, he didn’t seem to have invited anyone else...

Trish had never had time for many friends, but there were a few women at her office who she was on good speaking terms with, not to mention her family who lived in the area. But the only people at the party seemed to be ex’s ... she’d been so blinded by fury that she hadn’t even noticed before.

Before she could follow that train of thought too far, the next song started, and her attention was drawn back to the beauty in front of her. Trish smiled - she didn’t know exactly what she was going to see, but she knew she was going to enjoy it.

As Rose began unbuttoning her shirt in time with the film, Trish didn’t even notice Tim approaching her chair. She just watched in awe as Rose’s peep-hole bra came into view, and briefly wondered if tits that perfect could be real.

Contrary to what Trish had assumed, not every set of eyes were fixed on the stripper as she slowly disrobed. Instead, they were flicking between Rose’s increasingly-revealed flesh, and how Trish was reacting to it. When the girl unzipped her skirt, standing there in nothing but a set of underwear and a pair of thigh-high boots, smiles began to spread across the faces of the assorted when they realized that their up-tight ex wasn’t outraged, she wasn’t getting up and leaving...

She was just sitting there, drinking it in with her eyes.

As one of the stripper’s magnificent breasts came into view, Tim knelt down beside Trish, and started speaking directly into her ear. No one else at the party could hear him, but since they’d all had a part in writing the script, everyone had a pretty good idea of what was being said.

“Are you enjoying this, Trish?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Good, because she costs a lot of money. She’s my wife, you see - yes, I know, she doesn’t look old enough to be anyone’s wife, but you’ll have to trust me, she is. And you do trust me, don’t you?”

“Mmmmm...”

“Right now, you should be furious. You should be furious that I have a wife, you should be even more furious that she’s taking her clothes off in front of you, and you should be downright outraged at the fact that it’s all happening in front of your ex-boyfriends. But none of that matters, does it? All that matters is how pretty she looks, what a good dancer she is. Would you like to be a dancer like my wife, Trish?”

“Mmmmm...”