Singing for new patrons at the Eel

Val repeated fondly the argument he and Lorelei had had many times before.
"Sometimes a person wants a gourmet meal, and sometimes they're just craving a jumja stick. Someone's got to be the jumja stick."

Lorelei almost sprayed her champagne. The jumja stick comparison never got old.

Gammon, strangely enough, didn't look particularly amused by the metaphor. He was looking Etilen over with concern. Finally, though, he decided, "I suppose anything's better than Cardassians."

Val's 2 kanars were beginning to make his head swim - Falten usually watered them down for him but HJ didn't seem to understand that concept very well. He giggled.
"I actually liked some of my Cardassian clients on Bajor.. they were very generous. And they've got those little rings on their pricks that sort of flair out.. It was quite nice sometimes."

Lorelei covered her mouth, stifling a giggle. She could tell Val was getting sloshed and hailed for some water. "Oh my. You know, I've never been with a Cardassian. Now I'm almost tempted to try."

"They're twats," Val laughed. "You could handle one though."

It wasn't until Val called Cardassians twats that Gammon finally laughed, lightening up considerably. "All you have to do is bicker with them and make them feel superior and they're ready for whatever you want. The bickering I could do with aplomb. It was the making them feel superior I never quite managed." He grinned. "Not that it slowed me down."

"More tales of conquests?" Lorelei asked over the rim of her glass with an amused arch of an eyebrow.

"I knew one who liked being made to feel inferior," Val giggled into his water glass. "He even gave me a call the other night. Still remembered me."

"Now, Lorelei," Gammon replied with faux scandal, "I don't have conquests. I'm a lover, not a fighter." He grinned again, broadly, rakishly.

Val got a sideways look. "Which one was that?"

"I'm not at liberty to say," Val said, crossing his arms and gazing across the bar.

Lorelei openly guffawed at this, nearly spilling champagne onto herself. She sat the glass down on the bar. "Val Etilen, inter-galactic sex spy," she introduced.

"He just wants us to guess," Gammon laughed, rolling his eyes. He downed a large portion of his kanar. "Shall we go alphabetically, Etilen, or do you want me to really take a psychological stab at it?"

"You two!" Val perched his fists on his waist. "If he was still in power, I'd get into a lot of trouble."

"Oh no," Lorelei said very seriously, leaning forward, "If you told us... would you have to kill us?"

Gammon laughed heartily at Lorelei's comment and chased it with the rest of his kanar. "He'd at least have to try to make us feel inferior."

Val leaned across the bar conspiratorially, restraining more laughter.
"He used to have me tie him to a chair and pretend to be a liberation terrorist."

Lorelei covered her mouth and shook her head. "That's... so hot," she blurted out after a moment, and downed the rest of her champagne.

Gammon was trying hard to think of just which Cardassian formerly in power Val might mean. Right up until Lorelei said it was hot. And then he was terribly distracted from just about everything about the woman next to him. "You know," he began suavely, "I have a chair in my quarters."

Val resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but if Lorelei was enjoying the man's flirting, who was he to discourage it?
"I'd smack him around a bit, and bring him right to the edge. ...and then I wouldn't let him finish until he'd confessed all his empire secrets."

Lorelei chewed her pinky, listening to Val''s details. She glanced at Gammon when he mentioned the chair, "Do you know any empire secrets?"

Gammon lifted his brows enigmatically at Lorelei. "Only one way to find out."

Lorelei watched him, pinky still between her lips, her gaze slowly traveling down his muscular body. She imagined those thighs bulging out of the Rubicon shorts again, and her chest rose and fell with a flutter of excitement. "Oh, I can think of more than one..." She straightened up, "I better get back to the stage for my last set."

Gammon sat fully displayed for Lorelei's gaze, watching her with that half-smile the whole time. He clearly enjoyed being looked at as much as she was enjoying looking. "Do come back by when you're finished," he told her, his voice low in his chest.

He turned his attention back to Val once Lorelei walked away, giving a helpless shrug by way of apology. "Let's get down to the good stuff. What have you been up to these last five years besides growing up?"

Val leaned his head on his hand and traced the rim of his glass with his finger. He'd seen many men react that way to Lorelei, and he really did try keep from being jealous. After all, they were as different as could be, and sometimes a person just has a type.

"Well... After the dust settled on Bajor, there wasn't much there for me. The Cardassians were gone, and most of my clients were to busy or too happy to come back.. Not to mention, some of them suddenly took exception to my profession and decided to denounce me and my mother as collaborators." He took a deep breath, shaking off the feelings the statements dredged up. "It's one thing to learn to survive in crisis, but it's another to have to learn to survive when the crisis is over too. I set my mum up in the country and came up here in a freighter. Luckily, most of the travellers who come through here couldn't care less."