Have you ever had an instant connection with someone?... An attraction so deep and so intense, that you start to question yourself?
It was an unremarkable booking on an unremarkable day. When he messaged me, it seemed like just your average 30-minute booking; nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing to foreshadow what I was about to experience. I was in a rush that morning. The traffic had held me up, the batteries to my air-con remote had died, the towels needed folding, and I had a million other things on my mind. I was distracted.
When I greeted him at the door, I momentarily noticed that he was an attractive man. Maybe not conventionally handsome in the way that most girls would find appealing, but pretty damn close to my ideal type. Perfect smile, gorgeous skin, nice arms. I noted the checklist off in my head, but I was still far too flustered to appreciate him fully. His attractiveness was just a passing observation; an absent-minded thought while I was busy worrying about being all over the place this morning. I did not feel like my usual put-together self.
We exchanged the necessary pleasantries; the polite yet stilted small-talk as I led him to the shower. We chatted very little really; brief spurts of mundaneness lightly veiling the heavy sexual subtext beneath. This was a guy I knew next to nothing about… Which makes what happened next all the more unbelievable.
From the handful of words he did say, I detected the faint undertones of an accent. Just enough to make me contemplate where he’d come from, what new secrets he could teach me, and what worldly mysteries he could show me. Although he hadn’t said much, he intrigued me in a way that I found myself listening intently on the off chance that he might choose to disclose something more. Don’t ask me how, but it was almost as though a part of my body sensed what this stranger might soon mean to me.
While he showered, I tried in vain to compose myself. I paced back and forth in my heels, flitting here and there to light a candle, change the song, straighten the pillows. My anxiety was palpable. I tried to take a couple of deep breaths as I perched on the edge of the bed. My hands stroked my thighs as I attempted to calm this tormenting inner restlessness. What was going on with me? Why did it feel like I was on the precipice of something monumental?... What was it about this man?
As the door to the bathroom slid open, the hot steam tumbled out into the bedroom. He emerged from the shower with a towel slung low around his hips. Something flickered in his eyes as he approached me. Curiosity? Lust? Or something more visceral? A kind of darkness maybe? It scared me, yet excited me at the same time. I stood and walked to him, suddenly becoming very aware of just how nervous I was. I could feel the heat rise in my body, burning my palms and flushing my cheeks.
When we kissed, it was soft at first. My kiss was shy and timid, while his was tempting and teasing. Mine was like testing the waters, while his was daring me to dive in. He gently coaxed my lips with his own, his tongue finding mine with a kind of patience and reverence. He was drawing me out of my hiding place, luring me in, challenging me to meet him half-way, guiding me by the hand into the depths of desire. Quickly our kiss began to build into something more passionate. Frenzied and desperate, we clutched at each other like we were drowning. Our hands explored each other’s bodies with an urgency that shocked me. With his fingers tangled in my hair, he tilted my head back as he captured my mouth with his own. His teeth grazed my lips, his breath mingled with mine. My pulse beat just beneath my skin in tempo with the drumbeats of his lust. It was a dance of possession, of control, of abandon. The maddening push and pull of desire. The tortured tango of two bodies clashing and blending in equal measure.
I wondered absently whether he was this skilful a kisser normally, or was it the combination of us together that made it so amazing? I lost myself in his kiss. Disoriented to time and place, it was just the two of us... Everything else just fell away. The kiss was everything. The kiss was... sex. More than sex. Have you ever been kissed by someone and it felt like everything? Like more than sex? A kiss so good you don’t need to take it further, because there is no further. Well this kiss was like that. It was the kiss to end all kisses. I can’t remember the last time a standalone kiss had felt so powerful. So completely all-consuming.
But of course, we did take it further. And it’s not to say that what happened next was any less perfect... or breath-taking or mind-altering or soul-changing. Because the sex was all of those things. But if I could help you understand, even in just a small way, how epic just the kiss was... then I really don’t think I need to put the sex itself into words. Even in my own mind, when I think of the sex with this man, the words escape me. All I see are images; moving pictures like snapshots of time; like a roll of film tracking through an old-fashioned projector. Flashes of two naked bodies slick with sweat, fitting perfectly together, and moving in synchrony; in the most effortless harmony. The words don’t exist, only the feelings do. And that feeling of being with him, it will forever haunt me; it will forever be the sweetest memory. It’s true that we knew nothing about each other. Yet somehow it didn't matter. This was a soul connection. Some deep primal part of me was drawn inexplicably to some deep part of him.
Afterwards, we lay in bed and fell into easy conversation. After just a few minutes of talking to him, I could tell that he was a nice man. A polite, decent and genuine man. But it struck me as odd that there was nothing immediately profound about our conversation. On a personality level, there was no instant connection; no sense that we may have met in a past life; no homage to the significance of the experience we had just shared. But then again, what could compare to the physical connection we just experienced? Anything is going to pale in comparison to that. Was it any wonder that our topics of conversation were so utterly underwhelming compared with the gravity of what had just transpired between us? Eventually as we lay in wake of the unequivocal passion that had so recently materialised from thin air, we just sunk into a kind of comfortable silence. "Comfortable,” being the key word. It was… well... it was nice. Just very very nice.
And because it was so very nice, I did the one thing I’ve never done in all my years of escorting. I started to wonder what if? What if there’s potential here? What if he’s the one I’ve been waiting for? Until now, I had actually been convinced that I was not waiting for a man at all. But what if I just didn’t know that I wanted a man until I met him? Could this person be my future? Was this man lying right here beside me, the One? The ever-elusive soulmate?
Then the voice of sanity chimed in, trying frantically to halt the train of thought that was quickly running out of control. “Don’t be silly Jasmine. It was just great chemistry, something you’ve had with other men before. Don’t fall for it.”
But then came the other voice again, more quietly this time so that I had to strain to hear it. Yet as it played over and over again in my mind, that voice became as loud and resounding as if the words were right there hanging in the air… “Yes, you have felt chemistry before, but this… this was different.”
As I lay in the stranger’s arms with my head on his chest, I closed my eyes and wondered if he was feeling the same. I wondered if every girl he kissed, every girl he slept with, felt this way? Was it him? Was he just that good? Did he have the ability to cast a spell on every woman he touched? Or was it us? Was it the way we sparked a fire together that ignited this entire room from wall to wall and ceiling to floor? I liked him, I realised… I just really really liked him.
I couldn’t think about this anymore. I had no right to let my mind go there. What was I doing to myself? In a tragic attempt to drown out my own self-destructive thoughts, I grasped for the protective shield of small-talk; anything to fill the empty silence. As I gently caressed his chest, I began to prattle on about some new restaurant I tried last weekend. And then came the moment my heart sank. The stranger’s gruff post-sexual-oblivion voice murmured in my ear:
“Oh yes, we tried that last month, their gnocchi was fantastic.”
“We?” I asked.
“Yes, me and my wife.”
I felt a sudden coldness fill my body. He was married. He belonged to someone else. He belonged to another woman... err go, he was not mine. He had never been mine. How had I gotten so carried away? How had I let my mind play tricks on me like this? In only 20 minutes, my carefully perfected mask of logic and self-control had been completely turned upside down. In a mere 1200 seconds, this man had managed to obliterate an iron-clad exterior that had taken me years to cultivate. How could I be so completely and utterly reckless? Where was all my well-meaning self-preservation now?
I tried to pretend I was mad at myself for my lack of professionalism. I tried to turn it into a critique of my obligations as an escort. How could I so belligerently and irresponsibly ignore the emotional boundaries I had always stuck by? But if I’m being honest with myself, it wasn’t my behaviour as an escort that I was disappointed in. It was my behaviour as a woman that bothered me. How could I let my guard down and be so vulnerable with a man before knowing anything real about him?
I felt so stupid. But the strangest thing of all is that I also felt betrayed. And then I immediately felt even stupider for feeling betrayed. Why wouldn’t he have a wife? Why shouldn’t he? We just met. No matter how much I liked him, I have no business feeling hurt or confused or rejected. This is my job. This is just professional. I was paid to share my body with this man. It was my own stupid choice to go and give him so much more than that. It’s not his fault that he didn’t feel what I felt. It’s not his fault that I like him more than an escort is supposed to like a client. I’m the one that let my imagination run wild. I’m the one that crossed the line. And it’s my own fault that I’m standing out here all alone with these feelings.
Then came that quiet voice again: “But why did it feel so real? This never happens. I never feel like this." But the fact that this was so rare, served as no consolation whatsoever. In fact, it only made me feel all the more cheated.
~ ~ ~
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this story was grounded in fiction or reality. Maybe this is just my way of expressing how I can empathise with the way some of you struggle to reign in your feelings as our dalliances grow deeper or more frequent. Or maybe I too, have first-hand experience of how suddenly and unexpectedly a chance encounter can shake you to your very core. We are all human after all, and isn’t that the very essence of humanity? Our overwhelming desire to connect with one another?
When it comes to protecting our hearts, we can build up our walls and ensure the best laid boundaries are in place. But the very act of intimacy (whether paid or unpaid), will inevitably leave us exposed and open to some degree of emotional turmoil.
But it’s in trusting another person to witness you at your most helpless and vulnerable, therein lies the true beauty of intimacy. I can only reassure you that at times, we all succumb to it; none of us are steadfastly immune to it; and although intimacy sometimes hurts, it’s undeniably worth the risk.
~ Jasmine Lane
