Summary: Luka's blonde escort reflects on life, sex and Luka.
Rating: T-ish… just to be safe.
Spoilers: "The Advocate"
Disclaimer: Even the prostitute's not mine… Luka, Blond Sorta-Nameless Escort Lady and random snippets of "The Advocate" dialogue belong to whoever owns ER.
Author's note: What can I say – I'm weird… I know it's short and melodramatic and has no real point to it, but I'm just happy to see my muse come back to life, however limited her input is. Blame this fic on too many term papers, too much dental surgery and not enough chocolate… Some very minimal details about Mary are mentioned in "Up, Down and Away," so you might want to read that too…
Random dedication: to Wizened Cynic, for cheering me up and in hope she won't lose her mind again from too many Carby pregnancies. And to Klip, for agreeing to be this fic's first (victim) reader…
I call myself "Mary" when I am at work. I have been a freelance escort for three years already. I have never been particularly proud of the fact, but since I have never been able to get anywhere past low-paying government jobs with my brain, I decided that I could earn much more with my body. I charge a high price, and run a safe operation. My clients are automatically safer because of the price, although there are still rich sadists. I live quite well – I don't really have any regrets. I drive a car most women can't afford and I have a large apartment along with a hotel room that I can rent whenever I want – a strangely perverse woman's American Dream.
A long time ago I used to dream of a husband, two kids and a picket fence, the all-American shit every woman dreams of when her life is fucked up. But I could never see myself tied down to one person, not after what I've discovered about men in the course of my life. Someday, when I have enough money, I'll go off somewhere and write a book about men, about their dirtiest desires and their overblown images of themselves. I am meticulous – I have the names and amounts next to dates, descriptions of who did what, all hidden away in a safe. One never knows how one might need use those records, especially if some of your clients are due for re-election soon. But don't get me wrong, I don't do the whole thing for purposes of blackmail. I am just addicted to numbers. I used to be a statistician once, would you believe it…
There are some guys occasionally who I enjoy having sex with. If you'd ask me who my favorite is, I'd definitely say Luka. He's different from most of the guys who want to sleep with me. He's polite, something that johns rarely are. He actually cares about what I want. A strange one, without doubt. Doesn't have lame excuses for seeing me. "I want to fuck you because my wife's leaving me for cheating on her," "I love my girlfriend – I just need diversity," and so on – you wouldn't believe what some people come up with. He just looks like he's got troubles right now. I don't ask what those troubles are – if he wants, he'll tell me, and he does sometimes, and lately more often then not.
He's not bad on the eyes, so that's nice. After a while, sleeping with fat old ugly guys for money gets annoying, and one looks forward to the pretty ones, the ones with a slight aura of danger about them. The pretty ones are rare – they are usually taken, and the ones I get either want to hurt me because their woman hurt them or because I'm a better alternative to a beer bottle. He's shy in bed - doesn't do much more then the usual stuff, gets nervous when asking for a blowjob, real quiet too. Once, when he was giving me the money, a photo slipped out of his wallet, a woman and a little girl. The way he looked at the picture as he picked it up scared me a bit, made me feel a bit dirtier than usual.
He called me earlier today and asked if he could come for an hour. We agreed on the time, and then I came to "my" hotel room, got out a bottle of sparkling water out of the fridge, nice glasses, brushed my teeth and sat down to wait and think. He doesn't want to have sex so much lately, and I don't mind – hey, working girls need breaks too…
He knocks on the door and comes in, smiles at me and walks to the chair. He looks very tired, and somehow older than he was a week ago. I can usually determine a man's age in seconds, but when I first met him I was off by a couple of years. When I met him he was sexy as hell. He looked liked a panther – dangerous and dark, yet there was something desolate about him. Desolation in men leads to visits to women of my profession, so I approached. He looked about thirty, and I was quite surprised to learn that he was almost thirty-eight. Today he looks every day of those thirty-eight years, and perhaps some more. He looks a little unkempt. His hair is too long and his eyes are slightly bloodshot from sleeplessness, and he just looks like he has given up looking in the mirror. He squeezes himself into the leather chair, stares at nothing, and talks about how scared he is that he can't feel anything anymore, and I listen to him, and I wish I could help him, but what help can a whore, no matter how well-paid, provide? So I just listen, and hope that it helps him to get it off his chest, and that my presence means something to him.
He talks about his job, and I half-listen, staring at his face. His lips move and his eyes reflect his words, looking somewhere beyond my room, into a place I'm not sure I'd ever want to be in. His hands tremble slightly when he talks about the emptiness and uselessness he is feeling, and I nod, thinking that he really should be telling this to a doctor. He talks of the constant stream of patients, of their fleetingness and vulnerability, and I think about how much he is like me, in some ways. A burned-out doctor and an indifferent whore, just pawns in the game of life, selling our bodies for money in different ways and failing to change anything in the world. I ask him if he thought of taking time off. He replies in the affirmative and tells me about a cartoon he has seen in a paper once, and I can imagine him sitting in this chair, and two doors, with "Do Not Enter" and "Do Not Exit" written in fiery letters upon them, imprisoning him within himself, within this room, within me.
I remind him when he's only got fifteen minutes, and ask him if he wants to keep talking, or get to "it," putting my best seductive smile on. We whores do have to do our job sometime, and I want to make him feel better, in my own limited way, make him forget for a second that he is miserable, and maybe to convince myself that I can help. He gets up and walks over, tall and beautiful and sad, and I appraise him again, let my eyes travel across his figure. I don't mind having sex with him – it's like a pleasant vacation, touching soft skin and hard muscle instead of flab and kissing someone who doesn't stink of beer. He has a nice body under his clothes – a body that has been damaged before, if I can judge by some scattered scars that don't seem to be of the general surgical variety, but still a lithe, nicely shaped body any woman would like to feast her eyes upon.
He sits down next to me, and the bed creaks under our combined weight. He laughs, his laugh devoid of happiness, a short, dull laugh. I shudder slightly and move towards him, trailing a finger down his chest, making sure to press a little so he can feel my nail through his shirt. He closes his eyes and leans his head back, and I take this as an invitation to go further. A quick look at the watch, a glance at my well-stocked handbag and I move in towards the intended target. Carefully, I pull his shirt out of his pants and let my nails scrape against his skin. He bites his lip and lies back on the bed, his legs awkwardly hanging off the side. He is too tall for hotel beds, that's for sure, yet he seems to be ending up in them a lot.
I am about to unzip his pants when he stops me, puts his hand on top of mine, and I look up at him, unsure of what he wants.
"Would you mind if I hold you?" he asks, his voice quivering slightly.
"It's your money," I answer, trying not to sound too much like a cheap whore, and failing. I kick off my high heels, since they tend to catch on the bedspread and lie down next to him. He puts one arm around my waist and draws me closer to him. I lie there, and feel strange, not doing anything at all - no rolling around in crumpled sheets, no smell of sweat, just silence and a warm body next to mine. I put my head on his shoulder and close my eyes. Damn it. One should never get personally involved with a client, but I can't dissociate myself from him, because sometimes I feel like I'm the only one he can talk to, that he doesn't look at me just as a whore, that in a better world we might both have had better chances in life – we wouldn't have met if this was a better world.
The minutes tick away as we lie in our morbid embrace, and I wonder who he really wants to hold. His hands are around my waist, but he makes no move towards starting anything sexual, just holds me and dreams about someone from his past. I wonder about the woman he dreams. Is it the woman I saw on the photograph, or another one, more recent one, who he can't get over? Women are dangerous for men, because we can break their hearts in a million pieces, and they will never be able to put those pieces together no matter how hard they try-
The little alarm clock in my purse beeps suddenly, disrupting the silence in the room like a slap to the face. He jerks away from me, startled by the noise and then smiles nervously, embarrassed at his overreaction. We get off the bed in a practiced move, and I put my shoes on in silence while he tucks in his shirt and puts his jacket on. He helps me put on my coat and we walk out of the room, proceeding to walk down the stairs and through the lobby looking just like a upper-class husband and wife, in our expensive coats and with our stony-faced looks that hide a lot behind them, much more then any onlooker could hazard to guess.
We stop outside of the hotel and he reaches me an envelope, which I hurriedly stuff into my bag, suddenly embarrassed.
"Thanks," he mutters, avoiding my eyes.
"You're welcome," I say. He mutters a "Goodbye" and hurriedly walks off towards the parking garage, tall and lonely and lost in himself, and I watch him walk until he disappears from my view. When I am sure he is gone, I turn around, and walk back to the hotel, to wait for my next "appointment," who will not be of the kind that talks and who will help me feel like a whore again.