Read Shoe Addicts Anonymous for Free Online

sound. After all, that was a sound that was ignored—by patrons and employees alike—in most stores countless times per day.
    She couldn’t ignore the next alarm, though: the footsteps coming up behind her and the male voice at her shoulder saying, “Excuse me, ma’am. We’ve got a problem. Can you come back in the store with me, please?”

Chapter
3

    I ’m wearing my red leather stilettos….” Sandra Vanderslice padded across the floor of her Adams Morgan apartment in bare feet, telephone to her ear, and stopped in the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator door very quietly.
    “Oooh, baby,” the man on the other end of the telephone line said, “I like you in red. Have you got your little red thong on?”
    Carefully, Sandra took the orange juice out of the fridge and cooed, “Yes, baby, just like you like.” She tipped her glass so he couldn’t hear her pour. Two ounces. That was all she could have. She filled the glass the rest of the way with water.
    “I’m ripping them off of you with my teeth.”
    Sandra moaned obligingly and screwed the top back on the orange juice bottle. “Oh—oh—oh yes!” Sip. “You’re driving me wild!” She headed back to the TV in the living room. “Mmmmm. Yessss.”
    “Now I’m licking your wet pussy.”
    “Mmmm.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “Oh, baby, you’re so good.” She’d said the words so often now, they were automatic. They no longer had meaning. It was just a mantra that she repeated in order to earn herself a dollar and forty-five cents a minute as an operator for A Touch of Class Phone Friends.
    Class, indeed.
    She moaned again, hoping to sound like she meant it, and sat down on the couch. “Ahhh…ahhhh…”
    She picked up the clicker, hit MUTE , and scrolled through the TV channels until she landed on a repeat of last night’s Daily Show .
    “Perfect,” she said, more to herself than to the caller, then proceeded to make more of the obligatory moans and groans her callers liked—and mirrored—so much, while she watched Jon Stewart interview the latest politician to be indicted for fraud, reading the closed-captioning.
    “You taste so good,” he muttered between what she’d come to think of as “spanker’s gasps.” “I could…do…this all…fucking day.”
    “Please do,” she cooed, thinking of the Pliner boots she’d been eyeing online. A steal at $175. “Keep…going…” Camel or black? Maybe this guy would go long enough to get both. Nah, it would take almost two hours for him to cover just one pair. None of her callers had that kind of restraint. She’d just keep him going as long as possible and hope for another couple of long calls so she could log off. “Do it…do it to me.” She panted a little bit, drawing the attention of her Persian cat, Merlin, who jumped onto her lap and spilled the glass of orange juice all over her.
    “Shit!” She yelled it before she could think to stop herself.
    Fortunately her caller, “Burt,” liked that.
    “Ooooh, yeah. Talk dirty to me,” he grunted. “Do you want me to eat your pussy some more? Huh? Do you like it like this? I’m sucking your clit.”
    Once upon a time, this kind of talk had been seriously disconcerting to Sandra, who had grown up in a family so conservative that the word damn was the single worst curse, and it was saved for only the most severe situations.
    But now, like her own telephone dialogue, it was just noise. Noise that acted as a means to an end. Rent, food, utilities, and her many, many catalog and online purchases.
    It wasn’t a bad living.
    “Oh!” she cried, pulling her sticky wet shirt off. It was probably the first time she’d ever actually taken an item of clothing off during a call. “Oh! Oooooh!”
    “You are so wet!”
    “I am,” she agreed, balling up the orange juice–soaked T-shirt and trying to dry herself with the small piece of it that was still dry. “I’m sooo wet. And I taste like fruit,” she added, just to amuse