When I Fell in Love with a Client

I once broke a rule I had given myself. Not the one about photos, not the one about times. The one everything hangs on: never tell anyone anything they could look up.

I told him my first name and mentioned, in passing, where I work during the day. Two pieces of information that mean nothing on their own. Together they are an address.

It was years ago. Enough time has passed that nobody can recognise anything in it any more, and still I hesitate as I write this sentence. It was a mistake. I am putting that right at the beginning, so that this text does not start making excuses for it.

Normally I put a date away the next morning. Even a beautiful one. Not out of indifference, but because the people in it are not supposed to mean anything to me. It is a silent agreement nobody speaks aloud: he returns to his life, I return to mine, and the evening stays where it happened. For a few hours something is allowed to be real without having to find a place in everyday life afterwards. That is not coldness. It is a form of care — for both sides.

That is how this profession works for me. And it was exactly this rule that this story broke.

The evening

The beginning was unspectacular. An ordinary booking — which, for me, does not mean I have many. I rarely have any, and I choose. That is precisely why I need the rule of letting them go afterwards: someone with few evenings cannot afford to pretend they mean nothing to her.

All the same, he was a man I would presumably never have seen again. Clearly older than me, a whole generation, physically not my type at all — nothing I would ever have turned around for.

Then we sat opposite each other, and something was right anyway. There was a chemistry that, judging by everything I had expected while reading his enquiry, should not have been there.

That did not surprise me. It happens in this profession — not often, but it happens, and it is the part I like about it: that I meet people I would never have met in my own life, and that sometimes it simply works. I knew what it was, and I also knew it would be over after this one evening.

He did not know that. For him it was new. At the time I only sensed it — in his disbelief, in that brief faltering when he wanted to say something and then let it go. I had it confirmed only at the very end, from the last person I would have expected it from.

We did not stay at talking that evening either, and I will write nothing here about what happened. Only this much: it worked, completely. With a man I would have ruled that out for beforehand. That is the strange thing about this profession — the body does not abide by what you tell yourself about your own type.

And exactly in that lies the difference that explains everything later: for me it was one good evening among several. For him it was the first of its kind.

Still, what made it special was what I said afterwards.

Two hours became six. At some point the glasses had long stood empty on the table, outside it had gone quiet, and we were still talking. Not that careful question-and-answer of a first meeting. We jumped from one thought to the next and arrived back at each other every time. I forgot to look at the clock.

He told me he had never married. But that there was a woman in his life — one who was about as young as I was. I remember the small pause after that sentence, and how I began to do the maths. A man his age, never married, a woman at his side with whom he had apparently never reached that point. What is missing in a person that they cannot manage it in a whole lifetime? The question would not leave me alone. It was the real reason I grew curious. Not him. The question.

And then he said one more thing. He had never proposed to a woman. He had never felt ready for it. He said it quietly and looked at me as if I were the most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him — and as if the rest of the sentence lay open in the room without his needing to say it. That perhaps, with me, it would be different.

That was our first evening. We had known each other for four hours.

Back then I took it for sincerity, not for a number. Perhaps it was even both.

And somewhere in those six hours I said what my real name is and what else I do. Not as a confession. Simply the way you say it when you have talked for half an evening.

All the same, I wanted to go home afterwards. Exactly as always. It was a job I had done well, nothing more. I was certain I would never see him again.

A first name is not a small thing when a second sentence stands next to it. Together they are the door you cannot close again.

What it became

For a month I heard nothing from him. That was normal. The evening shifted to where such evenings belong: to the back, among other memories.

Then it all came at once. Not one message on one channel, but everywhere at the same time — my email address, my profiles, everything of me that exists. He had needed nothing but what I had given him myself. An hour of searching, and I lay completely exposed in front of him.

At first I was frightened. Then it flattered me. Both were true at once, and I never decided which of the two was more true.

I answered briefly. It had been a lovely evening. For further meetings he could contact the agency at any time.

The number

The next time he asked for my number, and I said no. Not evasively — explicitly, to his face, pointing to the agency. I was proud of that no. It felt like proof that I was in control.

He kept writing. For weeks, across every channel, without becoming unpleasant and without stopping.

And at some point I gave it to him.

Not because I had grown tired. That is the lie I told myself for a while afterwards. The truth is: it felt good. In this profession you are constantly wanted, but almost never meant. Here was someone who for weeks wanted not the woman he had booked, but the one he had talked to for six hours. I felt special. And someone who feels special no longer defends any rules.

From then on there was no clear edge any more. A message in the morning, a call between two appointments, a thought one of us still wanted to send the other quickly. At some point it was around the clock. When he could not sleep at night, he called. When I could not sleep at night, I called. Neither of us ever asked whether that was all right.

We kept meeting through the agency, always proper — but the essential had long been happening in between.

And the whole time I kept telling myself the same thing. Every time he pushed for more, I thought: we get along well, it should stay as it is, what does he even want from me. He is far too old, after all. I thought that while talking to him on the phone at three in the morning. The sentence prevented nothing. It only allowed me not to look.

How an appointment became a habit

I noticed that I was looking forward to these evenings, and I did not notice it by thinking it. I noticed it because I started considering earlier what I would wear. Because I made no plans for afterwards any more. Because on the drive home I left the radio off, because our conversation was still going on inside me.

With him I could talk about anything under the sun. About my work, too, about what I am building besides this profession. He knew my plans and took them seriously. Sometimes we sat over an idea until the table between us was covered in notes. We discarded something, started over, argued about a detail and laughed about it five minutes later. Professionally we were a team, and we both felt it. That level had nothing to do with the first attraction, and precisely for that reason it bound me more firmly.

I noticed how he was falling in love. Not from some grand declaration. From the fact that he kept little things I myself had already forgotten. From the fact that he grew calmer the moment I entered the room.

His infatuation did me good. That sentence is still hard for me to this day, but without it the story is not honest: I no longer felt so alone with my double life. There was exactly one person in front of whom I did not have to sort, hide, or put anything into a fitting order. And that person, of all people, was a client.

I no longer felt so alone with my double life. That was the beginning of the end.

The argument

At some point he wanted to meet me outside a booking.

I said no, and we argued. Not about money. What struck me was that a taken man expected me to give up the clear order between us. An affair I did not want to be. And that he would leave someone because of me — I wanted that just as little. I have nothing against open relationships and nothing against a taken man booking an escort — that is an arrangement with clear edges. But starting an affair while you are taken I consider weak. Someone who wants to end a relationship should end it. Not only once the replacement is already waiting.

After that, the contact broke off.

In the first days I was mostly angry. I went through my daily life, answered messages, did what needed doing. Only in the silences in between did I notice how used to it I had already grown. In the evenings I looked at the display although nothing had rung. When something absurd happened to me, I immediately formed in my head the sentence with which I would tell him — and then had to tell myself that I could not. Back then I would not have called that missing someone. I called it annoyance, because annoyance was easier to bear.

It took weeks, not months. Today I say that almost apologetically.

The return

Then he got in touch again. The message was short: he was on his own now.

I read it several times. I had firmly expected him to end his relationship only once the next one was already secure — exactly what I had accused him of. Now he seemed to have done exactly the opposite. Something in me decided before I had decided. I respected him again. And I had missed him.

Nothing changed in the terms. We kept meeting through the agency, just as before. On the outside everything stayed in its place. On the inside, nothing had been in its place for a long time.

Reason did not vanish in a single moment. It went in small steps: when I kept an evening free without anything being arranged; when I saw his name and smiled before I had read the message; when I told him something I told nobody else. At some point I was sitting alone in my kitchen, the light above the stove the only one in the room, and I had to admit to myself what had long since happened. I had fallen in love. With the man I had actually never wanted.

To this day I do not know in what exactly. Whether it was the evenings, or the projects we sat over together, or the phone calls that had no end. Perhaps it was none of those on its own, but only the amount. You do not always fall in love with a person. Sometimes you fall in love with the place someone occupies in your own day, and you only notice when that place would be empty.

It was beautiful. I do not want to make it smaller than it was. He sent flowers to my home, the most beautiful I have ever received. And he wrote to me. Long texts, at night, when he could not sleep — about the evening before, about what was going through his head, about things I had said that he had remembered. Flowers can be ordered. This cannot. Nobody writes pages to a woman he is indifferent to.

What I remember most strongly is something else, though. We were sitting in a very good restaurant, and I did not like the food. I said so, rather in passing. He got up, we left, and ten minutes later we were sitting in the Italian place across the street, eating pasta in the middle of the night. No discussion, and without it embarrassing him. That is the evening that stayed with me. Not because it was romantic, but because in that moment I was not the companion who adjusts to the setting. I was the one the setting adjusted to.

And when something happened in my life, he was there. He did not even live in the same city. He came anyway, at short notice, without my having asked, and without asking whether it was worth it. That is the part I cannot argue away to this day. Flowers cost money, letters cost time, but someone who drops everything and boards a plane because you are unwell is giving something up. For the first time in a long while, I did not have to look after myself alone.

There were mornings when we talked on the phone too long, and evenings when I did not have to say goodbye the moment the agreed time was over. Above all, there were weeks in which, for the first time, I did not lead two lives but one. When speaking, I did not have to consider which version of me was meant at that moment. Both things stand side by side: it was wrong, and it was the lightest thing I had felt in years.

How the bubble burst

From the first evening to the day it was over, nine months lay. It took me a long time to grasp how short that is.

The truth did not come from him.

It came from the woman he had said was the past. She wrote to me. She knew everything about me — my name, my work, every detail. She had found me exactly the way he had found me, along the same trail I had laid myself on an evening a long time before.

He had never left her. Not for a single day. And she was not simply his girlfriend — she was his fiancée.

I remember fixing my attention on a perfectly ordinary sound in the room while I grasped what that meant. That is how the mind works sometimes. It holds on to something insignificant because the essential is too large.

She had read his entire correspondence, going back years, and me in the middle of it. So I had not been the first. I was only the one where it went differently — and I had not known that beforehand, because I could not know it. Of all people, it was she who confirmed to me what I had believed I was only imagining the whole time: that between us there was something that had not existed with him before.

So it was real. And it changed nothing. That is the part I had the hardest time getting over.

All at once the past months did not become untrue, but they took on a different colour. The alleged separation. The being alone. The respect I had given back to him. And that sentence from the first evening, about the proposal he had never made because he had never felt ready — said by a man who was engaged. My bubble burst, and underneath lay exactly what I had never wanted to be. I had been the affair. From the very beginning.

And then nothing more came. No explanation, no attempt to set it straight. Not even an apology. That is the part I chewed on the longest — not the lie, but the fact that it apparently was not worth even that much to him.

No happy ending like in Pretty Woman. In the end I was exactly what I never wanted to be.

What remains is not a sentence I carry around with me. No since-then-I-know, no lesson for others. Only a caution I did not have before: I no longer tell anyone anything they could look up. Not out of fear. Because I have understood that a piece of information cannot be taken back, and that in the end it is not only used by the person you gave it to.

Sometimes I still think of those nine months in which I did not feel alone. The memory is no longer warm, but it is not only bitter either. It lies somewhere in between. To this day I do not know whether I would give it back.