If It Walks Like a Duck

Last night I left the hotel where I was seeing a client and as I left, I smiled and sashayed past the attendants and bellhops as I always do. And as always, they (always men, never women) smiled effusively and kow-towed to me on my way out, grabbing doors, bowing and tipping hats, generally falling over themselves to help me.

This particular hotel is one that I have visited multiple times, and it is not the only one where I make a semi-regular appearance.

Becuase I do not book hotels -- I merely visit my clients wherever they are staying -- I do not have much say in where I show my face, or how often it happens. Though it is relatively unlikely that I will run into the same employees every time I visit a given location, I do often feel that they are smiling, or perhaps smirking, behind their little white gloves.

Let's face it: I am an attractive young woman, who walks into a five-star hotel alone, dressed to the nines, with impeccable hair and makeup. I am not carrying any luggage, only a large tote, and I smile and greet the attendants on my way in while my stiletto heels mark my passage down to the elevator bank. I almost always meet a gentleman in the hotel lounge (which is usually near the entrance) and accompany him up to his room.

One or two, sometimes three or four, hours later, I click-clack my way back down the hall; put-together but perhaps not quite as impeccably as I was on my way in. As I make my way towards the door, the procession of attendants begins again. Often, I give them a sly smirk -- I cannot help it, I feel as though they are in on the secret, and they probably are -- as I wait for them to open the door. I am ever so pleasant, occasionally jovial, and they are like little boys, eager to please me as I head off into the night. Sometimes I catch them nudging each other with their elbows when they think it is outside my field of vision.

I know they can't help but notice my slightly-tousled hair, or the simple fact that I spent only a couple hours in the hotel, visiting a room, before I leave again. Or, in some cases, the fact that I was at the very same hotel only a few days earlier, or last week, playing the same game.

Sometimes I wonder how many of us the hotel workers must see in any given day, week, or weekend. I do not know if they suspect anything at all, if they suspect but wonder about whether it is possible, or if they just know flat out what is going on beneath their noses. Does it amuse them? I cannot imagine that they are clueless as to what the girls like us are doing. I play coy and hope that they are on my side, which they appear to be.

A Decision Is Made

I know I have been absent as of late. I have been struggling a bit with the Redford situation, but I think my turmoil has abated.

I have still been taking appointments, though not many. I have not been going out of my way to advertise, but I also do not feel the conflict that I did a month or two ago about taking appointments.

Basically I have made a decision and I have chosen the business over Redford. I hate to say it so bluntly, but this is the truth. I am not sure whether Redford is not the man I had hoped, or if I really am not meant to be in a committed relationship right now. We are still together, but he wanted to take things slowly and I have just been letting it crawl along. Such a pace is not at all conducive to passion, and in my opinion, slightly counterproductive to the formation of intimacy. Luckily, the passion quota is being fulfilled by my business escapades. Intimacy, we shall see where that goes.

I still believe he is a great man and would make an excellent husband and father; I am just not sure whether that is what I am looking for now.

At the same time, my original conflict when this situation began must mean there is a glimmer of romanticism in me somewhere. I harbor visions of a family, of a committed and loving relationship somewhere inside me. Yet, when the possibility arises, I lose all interest in making it a reality. The allure of the adventure of being with different men beckons so strongly. Or is it that the threat of commitment scares me away? Maybe I just realized I did not like Redford as much as I thought I did. Honeymoon periods always end, do they not?

Oh, I do not know. I am skimming details; the situation is not so cold as that. The Redford saga is not nearly over yet, but as far as its relationship to my escorting, I think I will not be talking about him nearly as much.

After A Break

For the past several months I have taken nearly two weeks off from escorting, each month. Sometimes it is self-imposed, such as during the STD scare (all clear, by the way), and sometimes it is just due to the ebb and flow of clients.

Each time I schedule my first appointment after the break, I am incredibly nervous. It is as if I am a novice escort all over again. I worry intensely about whether my screening process is adequate, whether I will live up to the client's expectations, whether the client and I will actually click, whether I will get found out this time -- granted, this is more of an issue since Redford entered the picture.

I have a new client tomorrow and I have been screening him relentlessly. He was a bit harder to verify than some, but because he is in the same field as Redford, and approximately the same age, I had to try to be sure there was no connection between them. Paranoid? Yes I am, thank you for asking.

Getting Seasoned

Until now, I still considered myself a fairly newbie-ish escort. Yes, I have been at it for longer than many, but I did not see very many clients and considered each one a new and exhilirating experience.

For the most part, I still find a certain thrill in seeing new clients. Of course, there is currently the dark cloud of my fear of STDs, which has only slightly abated, but I am trying to re-assess my risks and precautions in order to deal with that.

I keep a calendar where I mark down the days that I work as an escort; I only ever see one client per day, so by looking at the day I can generally remember who I saw and what the experience was like.

That time has ended for me. I was looking over my calendar for this month and I noticed that I had two appointments just last week. My first reaction was to think that I was mistaken -- I did not remember seeing two clients so recently. My second was to rack my brain over who they were. Once I remembered who the clients were, I did not, as I used to, go over the details of our time together -- I simply remembered their names and faces, and then promptly erased the memories from my mind.

The third thing I thought of was how close (temporally) my next encounter with Redford was to each of those appointments. Because I do not remember being with Redford this past week and having any thoughts of escorting, or any guilt about seeing clients when Redford and I are so obviously growing closer.

Despite this, I am still seriously thinking about put escorting on hold while I am with Redford. I am finishing up any appointments I already have scheduled, and I am going to try not to take any new ones. This is somewhat easy to say now as I require advance booking and client requests have been barely trickling in, which is extremely unusual. I am not sure what led to the slowdown, though I have been slowly drawing away from most of my internet involvement in escort circles. My tactic is to just to take it for what it is and use the lull as a natural way out for now. Normally I would have been pushing advertising before it got this slow, but the current state of things makes it easy to decide to take a break. It is somewhat frustrating as I recently paid in advance for advertising on some sites and that was a waste of money.

I only have one month's worth of savings, so I need to get on the ball with some other sources of income if I really intend to go through with this break. Hopefully I can stick to my guns and ignore any new bookings no matter how much I need the money. My newfound ability to instantaneously forget about appointments makes it ever-so-tempting to continue on this way -- perhaps not using escorting as my main source of income, but taking the errant appointment here and there for extra cash while Redford and I develop our relationship. So easy and so dangerous. We shall see what happens. I am making no promises just yet.