Getting Crush-ed

I poke a lot of fun at some of the bizarre clients I've had, but a few of them are delightful kindred spirits who I get along with as well out of the sack as I do in it. Only once, however, did my affection for a client cross over into the real of a crush.

When I first met him, I was on my period, so I tried to cancel our appointment, but he told me to come on over anyway. He was house-sitting for a friend. I would later find out that he was peeking out at me as I came up the stairs, and that his very first image of me was this nice college girl who looked like she’d just come from class walking up the stairs brushing her hair.

For some reason it embarrassed me that he saw me brushing my hair. I was supposed to be the fantasy; all the preparation to be the fantasy should have been behind closed doors. It’s telling that the first thing he saw of me was a real thing, even a tiny one.

He was this kind of sensitive-looking long-haired guy, very much my type. We watched a Charles Bronson movie on the couch and flirted. We talked about ‘zines and underground cinema and British TV shows.

We had sex, I left. It was very good sex, but a lot of it was.

I started to see him about once a week. We would meet at the St. Marks Hotel right next to Kim’s Video, the kind of place where you can actually join with the other hookers you can hear moaning in adjacent rooms like some sort of primal wail of sex worker sisterhood. We'd walk around and look at Something Weird DVDs in Kim’s, then get a 40 dollar 2-hour room. He brought a joint or a six-pack (or nipple clamps or a buttplug). We spent the first hour talking about life, and the second hour fucking in front of the mirrors. I think it was some kind of therapy for him. We were completely uninhibited together; he could have licked my elbow and it would have seemed like a fetish I'd been into all my life.

Once time he got a phone call in the middle of a session that he had to take, so from that point on I pretty much figured he was married.

He always put the money in an envelope with my name written across it and some kind of little oddity tucked inside: 3D glasses, a kitschy pamphlet. Our emails had been standard negotiations before, but after meeting we exchanged lengthy missives full of banter and personal revelations. I didn’t feel romantic toward him at first. Part of it was just my mental state at the time; whatever I was doing to myself had built up a hard shell and I don’t know if I would have felt romantically about Prince Charming had he ridden up and offered me a six-pack and Elvis Costello tickets.

And no matter how well I thought we got along, me and this guy, there’s an artifice to that situation. I wasn’t totally me and he wasn’t totally him. That made our relationship glamorous but also unrealistic. Plus, you know, I’m a hooker. What’s this guy going to do, bring me daisies and take me to the Sizzler after months of spanking my ass with paddles at a sleazy motel?

So when he asked me if I wanted to grab a beer as we hit the street from the short stay after a session, I said no. He was regular, you know? I didn’t want to end up fucking him for free.