About once a month I received a call from a wealthy gentleman by the name of Thomas Hambleton. He was the only client I accepted calls from, mainly due to the generosity of his payments, which made it seem a silly prospect to deny any request.
He preferred sending a chauffeur to the club rather than going himself, as is the custom of busy men living lavish lifestyles. Today his call came in the form of an unfamiliar voice, likely a new butler, informing me that a limousine was waiting for me outside. I dropped everything I was doing, which wasn't much, and left Miss Ginny's with a level of enthusiasm higher than usual that I accredited to the appeal of a man who wasn't a complete imbecile, treated me decently despite my unflattering job title, and provided me the rare luxury of conducting business in a sumptuous abode.
The limousine took me into Belgravia, where the streets were paved with the spirit of lofty refinement and anyone who walked outside stuck up their nose as a brazen indication of social status for the fifteen seconds that they weren't safely ensconced in one of their nine Bentleys. Not all of them were stereotypical snobs, but all of them lived there knowing that everyone knew that everyone who lived there was rich. Thomas only lived there because he had been advised to do so to impress people in the business world, and it undoubtedly worked.
My chauffeur dropped me off at the door and left me alone from there on out. I knew my own way around the place by now. Up two flights of stairs, at the end of a long ivory-colored hallway, was the room that Tom and I spent our time together. It could be called the luxury guest bedroom, as it visually paralleled the master bedroom on the other side. An entire wall was made of glass, tinted so that no one on the outside could see in. He was waiting on the love seat, looking out at the city.
I moved forward and leaned over to his kiss his cheek, forearms resting on the back of the seat, and half-whispered, "Hello, darling."
"Leo," he replied fondly, turning his chin to face me, and demonstrating several common business practices that had become habitual for him all at once; address people by their names as often as possible, look them sincerely in the eyes, and offer compliments. "It's good to see you."
He reached up with dainty, reliable fingers and coaxed me forward by the jaw to meet his lips. He had been drinking wine, but I knew it was for epicurean enjoyment rather than for getting drunk. Tom was too smart to get drunk.
"Tell me how you've been."
"Tired," I said, feigning a languid tone.
"Come, lay down with me then." He gestured at the meager empty space on the sofa with his legs outstretched, displaying his smooth and subtle sense of humor, so I found a comfortable place on his lap and looked out at the view he had just been enjoying. "What's worn you out?"
"Some interesting occurrences which came and went."
"Like?"
"I can't tell."
I saw him begin to pull a fifty pound bill out of his pocket, again with that sense of humor I found myself recurrently appreciating, so I said, "The confidentiality of my other clients is the one thing you can't buy from me, Mr. Hambleton." Then I smiled, rolled directly over the length of his body, kissed him with an eager mouth, and took the money anyway.
It had been a little more than a month since I'd last seen John, and this was therapy. He hadn't come back after the second time. I suppose his questions had been answered so he had no reason to come back, while mine were left completely unexplored.
A unique sort of rivalry existed implicitly between Mr. Thomas Hambleton and me that had proven, as of yet, to be the only thing that could fully divert my attention from cogitations of the mystery I had been unable to solve.
"Undress me," he ordered as I pulled away from his lips, but when I reached for his tie he guarded it with his own hand, breaking out an undeniably attractive smirk. "Undress yourself first."
With stubborn hesitation I rose and stripped myself beside the sofa while he returned his gaze to the city lights. It gave him power to nonchalantly choose not to watch, to listen to each garment hit the floor and do nothing when he had the freedom to turn his head whenever he wished. He enjoyed hints of bare skin through his peripherals and left the rest to be revealed at his own pace. In a way, it made it so that my body was under his control before he had even touched me.
When I came back to him I stayed close, where he could see only past my shoulder at my bare back. His hand followed the length of my spine, caressing me as I removed his tie, his silk vest, unbuttoned his clearly expensive collared shirt and smoothed it past his slender shoulders.
Once we were both fully exposed he drew in all of my features with a slow survey of my body, pulling a condom from between the cushions and a tube of lubricant from beside him which he handed over to me. I knew what he wanted. He could choose to dominate anyone, and that was exactly what he did when caught in the opportunity with another person from his area of the world. He had a reputation to keep up and no way to reliably determine what information an ordinary person would choose to share about his personal life. I had the promise, as I had just reminded him, of confidentiality. I could fulfill the hidden craving that he had now and again to be the one on the underside.
When I was done with the lubricant I pressed a kiss to his neck and pushed inside without mercy, sensing the will in his writhing and the pleasure in his cries. Because this was what he wanted, he still had control, but I was fighting for it, and our battle continued throughout the night.
At about four in the morning I slipped out of his grasp, clothed myself, and departed, picking up the munificent deposit he left on the shelf by the door for me on my way out. After a full rest and a walk around the city to pick up necessities, I started work again in the evening.
"Don't be so stingy, baby! Take it off, take it off!"
I made a gesture which my gullible audience reacted to by stuffing an accumulation of at least forty pounds into various parts of my waistband, so I smiled, shimmied off my vest, and gestured again. The tables around me roared in drunken complaint. I said nothing but continued my choreography, knowing they would give in, and just as the treasury in my pants was reaching its required quota to be removed, another banknote was laid down; not deposited in the treasury or even thrown, but laid down on the lighted platform at my feet, which would only be done by someone too timid to touch me in the crude, regardless way that everyone else did. It was a much larger amount than he usually deposited.
John was standing there with a rather blank expression on his face that, if anything, was alarmed, and the disoriented traces of alcohol-induced redness around his eyes. I moved away from the pole at the center of the platform and crouched down in front of him, where I could speak to him. "I didn't think I would see you again."
I slid my hand over his shoulder to the back of his neck, keeping him close, inviting him to touch me. The alcohol had made him bold; soon he had me kneeling, his arms around my waist, unafraid. The other club goers didn't matter to either of us. Not the ones who had paid me to take my pants off and weren't receiving recompense, and not the ones who were either shouting indignantly or whistling now.
"I didn't think so either," he said, nodding close enough to my chest to smell the scented body oil. "But I think I could actually use a bit of sexual comfort."
"Shall we go, then?" I offered, and he stared at me blankly a moment before the statement processed through his inebriated mind in a way that made sense. He nodded, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down from the platform.
Something must have happened to have caused him to resort to such a gross deviation of character. I had already witnessed his initial reaction to causing a fire in a major city building, getting sacked, getting dumped, and giving in to receiving oral from a man all in one day, and this reaction was far more drastic. It must have been a gradual build-up that was finally set off by a single trifling event. It would only happen once, so I was lucky that he'd chosen to come to me during it. But I didn't like to accredit things to chance. Rather, it was a human custom to use alcoholic stupor as an excuse to go back to things they'd previously regretted, but enjoyed.
At his flat he was struck by the same inexperienced loss for actions that he had the first time, which, coupled with his newfound boldness, resulted in a string of actions that were sloppy, experimental, and paradoxically charming. He undressed himself with a clumsy determination and appeared surprised when he turned around to see me sitting with my legs crossed on the side of his bed, waiting, with my own clothes in a neat pile beside me.
"You are skilled."
"You haven't seen the half of what I can do," I said, smiling. Then I grabbed his arm and pulled him on top of me, sliding back toward the middle of the bed. I knew I wasn't going to be putting him through any drastically new experiences tonight. My role would be as feminine as possible.
"Do you have, um?" He made a gesture with his shaking fingers that did not remotely remind me of a condom, but since I already knew that was what he was asking for, I pulled one out of the pocket of my discarded pants on the side of the bed. "And you're clean?" he added, pulling it open.
"Yes. Fully tested and always safe."
By the time he had the condom on I had turned around to face the pillow, because my back looked more alike to woman's than my chest did. Then he said something that surprised me.
"Is there another way to do this?"
"You mean…the position?"
"Yes."
"Of course, there are plenty." In a swift graceful motion I rolled onto my back. It didn't feel oppressive. I wasn't revolted by the sight of him. As a pleasant deviation from the norm, I felt comfortable.
"Good. I don't feel right shagging someone without seeing their face," he said, and suddenly I had an identity and wasn't just another person's nightly fuck.
"You'll have to hold my legs up. Just go at your own pace," I explained, in a weaker voice than I had expected because some strange emotion was overtaking me entirely and my mind was discarding the usual steps for good business, as if this wasn't just sex, as if he wanted me to be me and express what I was really feeling and not just moan to periodically drive out his insecurities, as if he wanted me to enjoy this as well. And I was enjoying it, on an entirely different level from all my other customers; even Thomas Hambleton, whose calls I enjoyed for the intelligent challenge in them.
This did not require my wit or careful training. This required emotion and pure actions it incited. That was what John wanted. He would know if it was faked. There was a fine line between him coming back and not coming back, and his subconscious would make the decision based on how genuine I was.
I knew then how easy it was to lose his patronage, and I refused to accept failure as far as I could help it. So I closed my eyes for a moment, breathed, relieved myself of all my business presets, and felt. I felt his hands against the back of my thighs, restlessly repositioning themselves in question of whether they were correct. I felt the bed sink beneath me as he shifted his weight, I felt his breath light and warm against my cheek, I felt the indelible connection that formed between us as he pushed inside, and the sting that came along with it and quickly faded, and the gentle exploratory movement as he adapted to the feeling of a man as compared to a woman, and finally I felt the friction building as he figured out what to do. I was gripping at the sheets to keep myself stable and whining in pleasure when he hit the right spot, and none of it was an act.
He had his eyes on me and they held nothing negative. They were adoring. At one point his hand slipped from my thigh and hit the sheets but he left it there, and eventually removed the other as well, finding more intimacy in allowing the skin of my legs to press against his shoulders.
I saw his muscles tense and pulled one of my hands from its grip on the sheets to assist my own need to be touched. He was watching me still, learning, and the pace continued for several minutes. All at once his heavy breaths broke out into quiet groans and his eyes glazed over in ecstasy and he lost strength and leaned in close. My legs were trapped tight between his chest and mine; his lips coincidentally brushed hot against the exposed section of my shoulder as he came. Moments later I was overtaken by the same sensation and for those seconds of white hot pleasure all I could see was John and all I could think was John and all I could hope was that it would be John over and over again from there on out.
Then he was laying beside me and the feeling of fullness began to fade. One by one the unwelcome indicators of reality set in; first the physical things, like the sweat and the liquid mess atop my body and the familiar ache in my backside becoming more potent, and then the truths as my mind pieced itself together again. I was hired for this; for my body, not my temperament. There was still a notable probability that he wouldn't hire me again. Most importantly, I hardly knew him. I knew who he was but had yet to decipher his thoughts and motivations. In addition, learning a person's personality took time.
So what in hell had gotten my emotions so worked up a few moments ago?
I cleaned up quickly by wiping myself off and discarding the sheets that had been soiled. Then I moved closer, to where my chest and his shoulder were touching, and stayed silent until we both caught our breath.
"May I ask you something?"
"Yes, what is it?" he answered, voiced muffled coming from the other side and sounding already half-asleep.
"What changed your mind? What made you come back?"
He was silent for several moments as he woke himself up and pieced the story together in his head. He switched angles to face me, and as he spoke his tone was totally honest; neither eager or uneager, just matter-of-fact. "Adrienne called me today and invited me on a sort of date. I suppose she expected me to have come to some grand realization since the last time I saw her about how I'm supposed to act in a relationship, and when she figured out that nothing had changed she disposed of me as heartlessly as she had the last time. It's silly how much I've let that woman affect me. It's like you said; she doesn't treat people right."
"It's understandable. People become attached to those who make them feel needed, whether it's in a positive or negative way. Often a person with a negative influence can actually harbor greater feelings of attachment. It's like an addiction. You're all fatally addicted to pain and abuse."
"You say 'you' like you're different from the rest of us."
"I am."
"I suppose your profession requires a certain type of apathy," he responded. There was a bitter tinge to it.
I didn't know what to say. I wanted to tell him that the same apathy didn't apply to every client, but that wouldn't be professional. Then I vexed myself with the question of whether it would be a lie or not.
"I think I'm going to regret this affair in the morning," he said suddenly. It seemed that he was looking at me but past me, already setting himself up to forget.
"You will consciously."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Your regret will be based on certain societal norms and perceptions of yourself that are already drilled into your head. If you were to throw out all biases and look solely upon the wonderful time you had tonight - the feelings - I don't think there would be anything to regret."
He broke out into a smile, laughed genuinely, and then turned back to the other side, signalling his desire to rest.
"You'll come back again, won't you? For the feelings? Pleasure yields a surprising number of health benefits."
The smile lived on in his voice. "We'll see."