Pay For It

Room 305 in the Bowery Hotel smelled like sex, meaning the juices of desire and the dank odor of sweat. Jack was dripping in heat and Sitara thought her left arm was going to become more muscular than her right. "Grip me tighter and jerk me exactly twenty-six times." That was a command.

Sitara held Jack's hard cock in her tiny hand and squeezed. Her mom used to tell her she had pianist fingers, long and elegant. She was around stroke number fourteen when she lost count. She then vigorously jerked Jack as many times as she pleased. He came either way.

Jack frowned at the puddle of semen on his hairy belly, the forehead wrinkle of his deepening. "I don't get why it's so difficult for you to count." Sitara held his crumpled face in her hands. "If I was good at Math, I'd be an Engineer, I wouldn't be sitting here in bed with you." She ruffled his hair as if he was a child. "Anyway, I think your OCD is getting worse. I'm doing you a favor, you really need fewer people submitting to your neuroticism. You can be quite the dictator."

Jack rolled his eyes, but laughed because he knew she was right. He lifted himself from bed with half a hard-on and his boxers down his thighs, and waddled over to the coffee table. Jack was not like the other clients who rushed to the shower. Together Jack and Sitara sat naked together at the coffee table to chat and drink an espresso, all while watching New York play its games from the sixth floor of the hotel window. After sex, the city looked different to Jack, shinier. It was some kind of halo effect derived from his elation. He wished joy could be self-generative, but the truth was he extracted it from Sitara.

Everything became clearer to him after sex, more lucid and precise. Sitara participated in this lucidity. He didn't exactly pay her for her body, but more so for the peculiar sensations after her body was offered to him so generously. She made him remember what it was to be alive. To be a body that could sweat and fuck and feel. In the midst of sex, he forgot that he paid her, and believed she wanted him as desperately as he wanted her.

More than the fucking, it was the high feeling afterward that proved more significant. With blood circulating, and the electric rush of energy, Jack was thirty once again. The world opened to him, its door was ajar and he was ready to leap through. For this reason, he saw Sitara in the mornings, and felt she was a necessary start to his week. As much as he needed her to feel, Sitara needed him, but for what exactly, she was unsure.

Jack's sexual needs, his confiding in her, and the dynamic itself gave her something without a name. It was a mix of understanding herself through their contradictions and tension. In knowing Jack, she could see and dissect her own complexities. But Jack did not know Sitara.

Sitara liked to think of sex work as a durational art performance. This made her not only a performer but allowed the work to be wonderfully creative. This approach allowed her to distance herself from herself and observe her behavior from the outside. She was another woman, namely whoever she chose to be.

With some clients, her body was machine-like, automatic in its motions to obtain the final result of climax, and as quickly as possible. That's what a lot of men needed: a fast fix. That sex was like eating junk food. Cheap dopamine that makes you feel sick right after. But with Jack, sex was of a more subtle less grotesque realm.

It was different, not mechanical or predisposed. The sex was not necessarily good, but consistently interesting. What imbued their sex with its fascinating quality was the fact that Jack loved her. Other men had technique, and he had the tenderness of his love. Today, he was in the clutches of his OCD and their intimacy was mathematical, calculated, and strange. Last week it was slow and soft, each caress, a wordless message from the urges of the flesh. There was experimentation and freshness in their togetherness because Jack listened to her body, and did not use her. He wanted her to bathe in pleasure. Pleasure he had caused.

Jack's love was the way love always is: for no reason and for every reason. It was illogical. It made no sense.

Sitara was easy to fall in love with. She knew the laws of seduction in a psychic sense. She was unpredictable. One week she wore a cream slip, no makeup, and a loose chestnut braid. She looked like a forest nymph from a Midsummer Night's Dream. The next week she wore a pantsuit and black patent heels, and her eyes were painted with kohl. She was a different woman depending on her mood or the emotion she wanted to provoke in her 'durational art performance'. Jack could not figure her out, and like all wild women, he couldn't tame her.

In order to tame a wild beast, there must be a strong lure. There must be something to reel them in with. This proved difficult because there was nothing solid Sitara truly wanted from him. Yes, his money helped her, but she was not enamored by his obscene wealth. When he boasted about an Emmy he'd won for a film, she wouldn't congratulate him, but shrug. When he name dropped a famous actor he went with on a weekend Paris trip, she'd say she didn't know who he was. Jack couldn't figure out what touched Sitara. He could not recall her speaking passionately about her beliefs or dreams either. She seemed to hold life loosely.

They talked idly over coffee and Jack watched Sitara examine New York from above, her intelligent green eyes scanning the crowded streets and her face that held no emotion. He had just penetrated her and still somehow she was impenetrable. Jack made her promise to see him again next week. She agreed.

When Monday rolled around, Jack decided he'd try a different approach to intimacy. They would talk first over coffee and Jack would not fuck her until there was some clarity on her feelings. He'd attempt to decipher her emotions toward him, and see where he stood in her consciousness. Did she care at all as he did for her?

Today Sitara looked as casual as possible; she wore sky-blue jeans and a black cotton t-shirt that clung to her breasts. Her beauty was effortless and in her lack of extravagance, he sensed humility. Jack poured her a mug of coffee and she asked him about his most recent film. It was a philosophical art house movie about the multiverse.

Jack liked the idea that in this reality Sitara was his secret woman, but on another timeline she could be his wife, and in another reality, his best childhood friend. Now they were in a hotel in Manhattan, but in a parallel reality they were under an olive tree in a Turkish village or in the suburbs of Wyoming raising twins.

Sitara listened intently as Jack spoke. Those intelligent lagoon eyes narrowed in focus. She nodded and asked him a slew of other questions. Jack promptly realized this tactic was what Sitara consistently did. This was why he could not figure her out. She was too busy figuring him out. Each question he asked her, she deflected back to him. Each comment she made was a reinforcement of his own commentary. Sitara didn't let him in.

Jack felt robbed. Here was a woman he was foolish enough to believe he loved. He could only believe he loved her because he knew nothing of her. In her self-containment and anonymity she could be anything he wished her to be. She had only seemed open and vulnerable because she was sexually. But that was her job. It dawned on Jack that he was the vulnerable one, for he was the one who loved, and to love is to open oneself.

Jack continued to pry something out of her, anything at all, but she remained shut. During one of his probing inquiries, Sitara stood up as he blubbered on, and silently slipped off her jeans and with one arm tugged off her blouse. She stood in front of him with her porcelain skin and thick nutty hair. Her body no longer looked familiar. Who was this woman?

Jack had paid Sitara dozens of times to stand here this way, naked and barefooted. This was what he had wanted, yet he felt no longing, but instead a subtle fear that became a lump in his throat. His dick was limp, and his balls shriveled.

Sitara straddled Jack's lap and pressed her lips into his. For the first time she felt cold, and he realized he was kissing the lips of a stranger, the lips of a whore.