Julie led a pampered life as a normal, and modest (though very highly sexed), suburban housewife. But now that all was changing, possibly forever, after her husband Brad suddenly lost his high paying corporate job. At first neither of them felt too worried. Surely a man with his experience could easily find a comparable, if not superior, job before long. In the meantime they made the most of all the increased leisure time together. With a pandemic raging around them, a great deal of that time was spent indulging themselves at home, frequently in bed. But weeks stretched into months, and no good job offers materialized. Soon their savings were fully depleted, and one after another of their credit cards maxed out. Actually they never had much savings to begin with. To them, living well and living frugally was a total contradiction. Money seemed to flow through their hands as quickly as it fell into them, but now the spigot was dry.

As the bills piled up her husband’s self confidence crumbled, until finally Brad seemed a shadow of his former self. He stopped applying for high paying jobs, fearing the seeming certainty of yet another stinging rejection. And he became less sure of himself in every way, even in the bedroom. Sex, which had always been care free, ceased to be reliable fun, or more to the point, Brad had ceased to be reliable. Two days after a particularly disappointing tryst, Brad informed Julie that he finally had lined up some work, two new jobs in fact, both in the service industry. Neither of them however paid well. Between the two her husband earned a small fraction of his former income, not nearly enough to make ends meet, and the cumulative long hours Brad now worked kept him away from home, and from Julie, almost all of the time. In her darker moments she wondered if that in fact was why Brad chose those jobs. When her husband got home now late at night, on the days when he wasn’t working overnights, he was always “too exhausted” for sex. In his depression Brad was building a wall around him, with Julie left alone on the other side.

Julie too became depressed, both by their increasingly dire economic straits and by a growing sense of physical estrangement from the man she had always counted on to be there for her, to provide for her every need. However sheer panic finally forced Julie, however haltingly, reluctantly into action. They had fallen behind on mortgage payments on their dream suburban house, and Julie was becoming increasingly desperate over the prospect of losing it. At first she diligently tried to find a respectable job that would pay her decently, but Julie (who had never really worked a day in her life) soon found out that she had no marketable skills - outside of a bed that is. So she lied to Brad, reassuring him that she soon would be bringing in good money from a new gig selling costume jewelry to other well off wives in the neighborhood, but the truth was that she had already failed miserably when she attempted to do just that. However that innocent enough sounding lie offered Julie a perfect cover for what she knew she inevitably had to explore next, selling her own body to strangers.

Having no previous experience with the sexual underworld, and lacking any personal connections with the denizens who inhabited it, Julie anxiously ventured out (on one of the many nights when her husband would not be coming home) dressed in a lovely silk, but uncomfortably sheer, blouse that her husband had bought her for their last anniversary. She had only worn it once before, but that time she was safety accompanied by Brad at all times. They dined at a posh restaurant, and of course she made sure to wear a decent bra underneath the blouse.

This time Julie would be out alone, and this time there would be no bra to obscure her pink and stiffening nipples from view. Though she had never gone into that part of the inner city before, Julie knew exactly where its red light district was. Everyone did, the local news invariably covered some titillating story that for some reason took place there at least once or twice each month.

Julie drove around nervously for what seemed like a half hour, staring at the seedy array of liquor stores, porn movie houses and adult book stores that dominated the neighborhood whose streets were inhabited by a type of rough and disheveled men, each one looking more homeless than the next, that she had never previously crossed paths with. Finally she picked out a parking spot in front of an old boarded up store front, locked her doors, and sat there frozen in the car.