When I Fell in Love with a Client

I once broke the rule I had given myself. Not the one about hotels, not the one about photos, not the one about times — the one everything hangs on: I gave my real name. It was years ago, and I only tell it because so much time has passed that nobody can recognise anything in it any more. It was a mistake. I am writing that right at the beginning, so that this text does not start justifying itself.

It began as a job like any other. I have to state that clearly, because otherwise nobody understands what happened later: at that moment he meant absolutely nothing to me. An appointment, done well, and I was certain I would never see this man again. He was not my type at all to look at, a generation older than me, far from everything I had chosen before — and still: the sex was incredibly good; there was a chemistry for which no explanation existed. I wondered about it more than I care to admit. How can something work that should not work on any sheet of paper? Afterwards I still only wanted to go home. Exactly as it should be. An evening I had done well, and nothing I wanted to take with me.

And then I told him my name. Not the one he had booked me under. To this day I do not know why. Perhaps because the date was extended; two hours became six, and those six hours flew by as if they had been thirty minutes. We talked so much that at some point nobody was talking like a companion any more, only like a person sitting next to another person. He told me he had never married, but that there was a woman in his life — one who was exactly as young as I was. That was the real beginning. Not the sex, not the chemistry, but the question that would not leave me from that evening on: how can a man his age never have married, have a girlfriend half his age, and not feel this one feeling with her? I turned that question over long after I was already home. It made me curious in a way I should have forbidden myself.

A name is not a small thing. A name is the door you cannot close again afterwards.

A month later he wrote to me. Not through the agency — he had found me on social networks, with nothing but a first name, and then he found me everywhere. My first thought was: what a stalker. My second, and it is the more honest one: I was flattered. I answered briefly. I wrote that it had been a lovely evening, and withdrew again. For further meetings through the agency, I added, I would be available any time. In that moment I truly believed that sentence was a boundary.

How an appointment became a habit

We met more regularly. Always proper, always through the agency, and always with that drive home on which I noticed I was in a good mood. I could talk to him about everything under the sun — and about my work; that is the part that almost never appears in stories like this. He knew what I do besides this profession, knew my plans, and we began to think about them together. We developed ideas together, discarded them, rebuilt them. Professionally we fit together, and we both felt it — it was a level that had nothing to do with the first one, and in the end it bound me more firmly than any chemistry. At some point he wanted my number, and I gave it to him, and from then on the contact was daily. We phoned. We wrote. I could think with him — out loud, disordered, without explaining myself. And still I kept wondering: he was not my type, too old, all of it illogical — and it worked anyway, without my being able to say why. Although I never could or wanted to imagine anything with him, I grew used to him.

I noticed how he was falling in love. And that infatuation did me good. That is the sentence I am most ashamed of, and at the same time the only one that explains the whole story: I no longer felt so alone with my double life. He knew everything about me. There was exactly one person in my life in front of whom I did not have to sort anything — 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 without paying. I did not want that, and we argued. Not about the money — about the audacity that a taken man expects something like that from me. Because taken he was; that much was clear to me. An affair I certainly did not want to be. And that he would leave her for me? No way. I think nothing of men who leave their woman for the next one. Booking an escort: yes, that is what I am here for, for open relationships too, for any arrangement two people honestly make with each other. But starting an affair while you are taken I consider weak. Then you separate beforehand, not once you have found a replacement. So we lost contact.

In those weeks I noticed how much he had already become part of my day. Not in big moments — in the small ones: that in the evening I looked at the display without anything having rung. That I no longer gave away a free evening without briefly hesitating. I would not have called it that back then. I called it annoyance.

The return

Then he got in touch again. He was single now. That surprised me, because I had firmly assumed he would only separate once he had brought himself to safety with someone new. I had been wrong, thank God, I thought, and suddenly I respected him again. I found that strong. And if I am honest: I had missed him. He told me that he had never proposed to a woman and had never felt ready for marriage. He said it with a look and a voice as if he wanted to add: until I met you. That was how he seemed — crazy about me; I truly felt it, for months. I wanted to believe it.

We settled on something in between — a financial contribution per meeting, no longer the full amount, because by then I wanted to be with him myself. I know how that sounds. It is the point where reason gets off in stories like this, and in mine it got off exactly there. I let myself fall. Further and further, until I had to admit it to myself: I had fallen in love. With the man I had actually never wanted.

It was beautiful. I do not want to belittle that just because I know how it ends. They were months in which, for the first time, I did not lead two lives but one. Both things stand side by side: it was wrong, and it was the lightest thing I had felt in years.

How the bubble burst

It came out that he had never left his ex. She was more than a girlfriend — she was his fiancée. None of it had been true — not the separation, not the loneliness, not the respect I had given back to him, not the feeling I had read in his look. My bubble burst, and underneath lay exactly what I had never wanted to be. I had been absolutely mistaken. I should have listened to my head, which had known from the very beginning, and I had listened to everything else. In the end only two questions remain, and I have the answer to neither: What was all of that to him? And what was I to him?

It was no happy ending like in my favourite film, I suppose. 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. What remains is that I keep my name to myself — not out of fear, but because I have since understood that it is the only thing in this profession that truly belongs to me. And what remains is the memory of months in which I did not feel alone. To this day I do not know whether I would give them back.