He was a little older than the pictures on his profile, but not embarrassingly so. She thought he wasn’t bad looking for his supposed late fifties, having retained a full head of hair and two rows of nice, albeit artificially bright, teeth. But he was blurry in the way all older white men were to her, like he could have been anyone.
Once they’d greeted each other with a limp one-armed hug, she settled in across from him at the table. They had arranged this introductory lunch after matching on the site, so that he could examine her before purchase like a racehorse and she could determine if he was planning on feeding her body to a woodchipper. His profile had said he was looking for someone educated, someone with whom he could have a real conversation. Under the about me section, he’d written a list of his other preferences: looking for a well-manicured and intelligent young lady, between 20-25 years old. College educated. Preferably exotic.
“You have a lovely dark complexion,” he said in greeting. “Very nice skin. Do you tan? Or is this your natural…” He trailed off, skimming a finger around his water glass until it made a high-pitched sound, like cicadas rubbing wings.
“Nope,” she assured. “This is just how I look.”
“Good girl. I had a freckle on my back biopsied last year. Doctors kicked up a huge fuss, gouged a hole the size of a quarter. All that and it comes back benign! Not that I’m complaining,” he complained. “Better safe than sorry, right?”
She nodded around bites of salad, aware she was supposed to be performing interest without alerting him of the performance aspect. As she chewed, he explained he was an executive for a national accounting firm, and flew in for monthly meetings in the mirrored glass building downtown. She had walked past it before, noted the dead birds littering the sidewalk.
“I know the website is, well, gauche. But this way, we both know the expectations going in,” he offered conspiratorially, like, you get it, right? “I’d like to have someone consistent to spend time with when I’m in town.” He was like most men who sought out this type of arrangement, distasteful of the explicitly transactional nature of traditional sex work, but too impatient or busy for the intricacies of maintaining a full out affair. He wanted an excess of convenience, a thin ghost of intimacy. The thing that felt the least like money for sex, while still being money for sex.
“Before I forget—” He pulled a tangerine box out from under the table and presented it to her. “Go on, open it.”
She undid its ribbons to reveal one of those bulky, monogrammed Louis Vuitton purses, all buttery calf leather and gold-plating.
“Oh,” she said. “You didn’t have to.”
“Do you like it?”
She did not. The overt branding made it the sort of panting symbol used to proclaim that you’ve become marginally less poor and she was uninterested in making such announcements. But the bag, of course, was not a bag. It was an outstretched hand.
“I love it.” She leaned across the table and pressed her lips against his papery cheek, leaving the flushed imprint of her lipstick. “Thank you.”
* * *
He asked her the question the next time they met, at a restaurant close enough to his hotel to intimate certain expectations.
“Why are you interested in this sort of thing? You know, with someone…older.”
She chewed, pretending to consider her response.
“I’m just tired of dating boys who don’t have their shit together. I’m looking for someone established.” She lowered her gaze in a manner she hoped would project sincerity. “Someone I can learn from. Like you.”
It wasn’t true, of course. She’d made a profile on the site for the same, ordinary reason as every other girl: money. But the sort of man who had it in excess despised hearing about those who did not. He didn’t want to hear about how she was the first in her family to attend college, how she’d finished with a dung heap of student loans and had, however foolheartedly, decided that a graduate degree would improve her job prospects. He didn’t want to hear about how she lived off a paltry teaching stipend and had the credit score of a corpse, paid constant overdraft fees and worked demoralizing side jobs, sold her plasma and collected Safeway coupons like they were shavings of gold. The truth was that she wanted a softer life, a life without the suffocating, daily presence of not enough. It wasn’t about the patina of wealth—she just wanted to catch her breath, even while aware of what this would require of her.
“Established,” he smirked. “You’re very diplomatic. I’m practically your age in dog years.”
“How many people years is that?” she wondered. “Sorry, I’ve never had a dog.”
“You’ve never had a dog? Not even like a family dog? Really?”
She laughed at his theatrical disbelief, as if she’d said she never had a roof over her head or clean water to drink. He was clearly the dog is just god backwards type of white person, and she was used to a different cultural mentality surrounding pets, where dogs were well-treated, but still considered animals and animals had a function. They guarded or herded or guided the infirm. She wasn’t accustomed to the idea of raising one like a baby, for the sole purpose of ownership.
In an attempt to further loosen up, she lifted her finger to order a third glass of wine, but he gave a small shake of his head. “I don’t mind if you have a drink or two, but I’d rather you weren’t drunk if we’re going to…” He trailed off meaningfully. She thought his discomfort with her being intoxicated during sex was vaguely admirable, but then he opened his mouth again. “I’m not trying to babysit.”
Outside the windows, the sky had grown swollen and cast iron black, promising rain.
“It’s probably not safe for you to drive home in this,” he said. A question, shrouded by plausible concern.
“Probably not.” She agreed, already set on her answer. In preparation, she’d waxed and exfoliated and slathered herself with sandalwood scented oil. The kind of meditative grooming that functioned as a preemptive decision, an acknowledgement of where the night would end. They’d already ironed out the details, so as to avoid the mood-dampening, will-they-won’t-they condom dance: She’d emailed him a PDF outlining her clean bill of health and proof of her contraceptive implant. The provision of documents had made it feel like applying for a passport.
There was something surreal about hotels, a neutrality that always made her feel as if she were acting out the parts of a script. It grounded her, in the elevator up to his room: the beigeness of the halls, the chirp of the key card. The anticipation in his eyes, which she realized for the first time were the pale yellow-green of wilted celery.
He kissed her, open-mouthed and filthy, and they met in the clumsy way that unfamiliar bodies do. She made herself soft and malleable and he adjusted her, moving her against the padded headboard, sliding a pillow under her hips.
“You can, uh, call me that,” he said once he was fully inside her, and it was funny that he couldn’t say it. “If you want.”
She murmured the familial endearment he wanted to be called—that they all wanted to be called—in a put upon falsetto and he groaned like she’d winded him. She felt a quiet contempt for him that was surprisingly not incompatible with attraction.
After, he led her to the room’s bath, running the tap until it was almost scalding. His pale, softened body flashed like a ship’s sail as he helped her in and submerged himself behind her. They barely fit in the tub, even with her back pressed flush against his chest. Water slopped over the sides, flooding the tile. She wondered absently over who would have to clean it up.
He rubbed his bearded cheek against her shoulder, reaching around to lather her with the hotel’s brand of shower gel. He took his time, using a soapy washcloth to gently trace her breasts and ribs, the softness of her stomach, between her legs. No one had ever bathed her before, at least not as an adult. It was somehow the most pleasurable and perverse way he’d touched her all evening, unsettling in its performance of intimacy.
She ghosted her fingers over his forearms, where his skin was thin, loose in a way she hadn’t expected. She pulled at it until he told her to stop.
* * *
A few days later, a woman in a Southwest Labrador Breeders T-shirt knocked at her apartment door, holding a squirming golden puppy with a ribbon around its neck.
What am I going to do with it? she messaged him, attaching a photo of her new gift chewing up her kitchen table.
I think what you mean is thank you, he responded, with a winking face.
Thank you, she responded and she sort of meant it, because no one had ever gotten her a living thing before and there was a sweetness to it she wasn’t prepared for. It would have been even sweeter if she’d ever wanted a dog.
* * *
At first, he gave her presents, not money outright, easing the path to explicit cash through the sort of gifts one would lavish on a real girlfriend. Once their schedule had been established—approximately one weekend a month—he set up an automatic deposit into her checking account.
“You can always come to me if you need more,” he said. “I don’t want you working too hard.”
“I don’t want that either,” she agreed.
But when unpredicted costs reared their heads, she had difficulty stomaching asking him for more. In her search to avoid asking her parents for money, she’d found something that felt exactly like asking her parents for money. She never requested gratuitous amounts, and he never refused her: covering an increase in her tuition, two new tires, and a pricey trip to the vet after the dog ate a sizable amount of her down comforter and threw up a bouquet of feathers.
“What did you name him?” he asked, after she’d shown him a copy of the bill as a courtesy. Trust me, she hoped the gesture said. I’m not scamming you.
“Huh?”
“The puppy? The one I gave you?”
She’d only been calling it the dog, as in: Can you please watch the dog? Can I bring the dog to class with me? Is the dog okay after all that puking?
“Oh yes, I love him so much,” she replied. “He’s adorable.”
* * *
They always met at his hotel when he was in town. Sometimes, she canceled class for him, haphazardly sending her students to watch presentations in the library. Sometimes, he forgot to tell her that he was busy, but she didn’t and couldn’t take issue with that. The unspoken rule of their relationship was that for a few hours at his beckoning, she became an amorphous, pretty entity without needs. She’d wait, sunning herself by the hotel pool until he returned, watching the fighter jets streak into the sharp jaws of the mountains, leaving silvery papercuts in their wake.
She didn’t have a problem with this arrangement. As far as men went, he was not her worst, by far: He wasn’t sociopathic or violent and didn’t want anything too weird in bed. He even seemed interested in getting her off as a point of pride, eager with his hands and mouth. On one level, it was pure practicality: time spent for cash collected, making him the most lucrative job she’d ever had.
“Are you seeing other people?” he asked during one visit, splayed shirtless amongst the bleach bright sheets. The soft curve of his belly, nearly white enough to be indiscernible from the linens.
“Does that matter?” She lounged beside him on her front, paging through the room service menu.
“Well. I’d rather you not—I can, um, incentivize that.”
She considered it briefly, but there was something repellent about the thought that he could purchase her fidelity. Apparently, she had limits, and this was one of them. Maybe she also needed to preserve the hazy, liminal space they inhabited between relationship and ownership.
“Don’t worry. It’s just you.” She had technically been monogamous with him, albeit purely by accident; she was too busy at this point in her semester to take on either new clients or potential love interests.
“Thank you.” He kissed her, long and lazy. “And uh, me too. I’m not going to…with anyone else.”
“Okay,” she said, placid. She wasn’t sure if she believed him. Or if it really mattered, either way.
* * *
There were many things she didn’t like about him. He was a caricature of a certain kind of man, made up almost entirely of talking points swiped from centrist news podcasts. He liked to reminisce in monologues about his mountain summits and fishing trips. His idea of pillow talk was asking her questions that were unsettlingly generic, like, do you believe in God? Whenever she said something he disagreed with, he’d squint like he was in sudden and tremendous pain.
“Do you remember where you were on 9/11?” he asked, during one of his post-coital inquisitions, his words chasing her body’s slackening away with a stick.
“Kindergarten, I think,” she answered, truthfully. “I remember they let us out of school early.”
He rubbed his beard in false chagrin, like he was trying not to smile.
“Oh, man,” he said.
To be fair, there were things she liked about him too. He was an unconditionally generous tipper to service workers. He never came to her with problems she’d be expected to solve. He gave affirmation constantly, a seemingly endless source of the word good. He kept his feet smooth and pumiced, soft against her legs. She liked the way he politely announced when he was going to come.
“I’m going to come,” he said. “In, like, thirty seconds, I’m going to come.”
“You don’t have to give me an ETA.”
“I’m trying to be considerate. Okay, shit, I’m coming.”
Sex with him wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it wasn’t bad either. It was a strange relief, abandoning the responsibility of one’s own desires. Her body’s unceasing hunger and complaints, quieted. Numb, but not unpleasantly so, like peppercorns, anesthetizing through brightness.
There was something satisfying about it, stranger and slipperier than pride. For a few nights a month, she became exactly what someone else wanted.
* * *
One visit, he accompanied her to the hotel pool, pulled a lounge chair right up to the edge and dangled a foot into the chlorinated water as he watched her swim. In the late afternoon light, he looked like a Hockney painting, flattened and domestic. His unbuttoned linen shirt exposing the pale expanse of his stomach, the flashes of blue-white incisors when he spoke. The sort of image that turned a bystander into a voyeur.
When he went to rise, she touched her pruned fingers to his ankle in disagreement. Gentler than she usually was with him, enough so to shock him into obedience.
She reached for her phone. He disliked her taking pictures of him, calling it her generational preoccupation with documenting rather than living, but this time, he allowed it. When she pulled herself from the water and showed him the photo, he was quiet for a long time, taking in his likeness.
“You really see me like this?” He stared and stared at his own softened face.
* * *
“You’re going to age well,” he told her, as he watched her clip her sweat-dampened hair up off her neck. “Could you leave it down?”
“What?”
“Your hair.”
“No, the other thing. What does that mean, age well?”
“Oh, yeah. Sometimes you just know someone is going to come into themselves later in life. I feel like when you’re forty or something, it’ll all come together. Like your age will finally match who you are.”
“Oh,” she replied. “I think I’ve come into myself already.”
“Sure,” he placated, mouth curling up. He reached across the bed. “Get over here.” The command yanked at strings she hadn’t realized she was attached to, and she curled into him instinctively.
“Would you still want to fuck me, if I were forty?” She rested her head on his chest, curious if he would be honest in his answer. He rumbled beneath her, laughing like she’d told a fantastic joke.
“Baby, when you’re forty, I’ll probably be dead.”
* * *
When her students acted particularly demoralizing, she liked to pretend he was one of their fathers. He could be, after all. She didn’t know anything about his real life besides his job and the fact he had college-age children, revealed casually and then never touched on again, because her job was not to ask. There were many reasons men wanted to be called the name he liked her to use: the arousal that accompanied familial taboo, the intoxication of an overtly gendered dominance, the sweetness of daughters and all the affection they seemed to conjure. Some men liked it for reasons that were much, much worse. She decided she was not interested in figuring out which kind of man he was.
Her willful ignorance bloomed into a secret game she played. When her students ignored and talked over her, she’d just think: I fucked your dad! I fucked your dad! It made teaching far more palatable.
* * *
The first and only time they fought was a few months in, when she received a message while pulling into the hotel lot, informing her he wouldn’t be available until late. Despite herself, she was annoyed. It was a forty minute drive to the foothills, and she was missing a lecture with a visiting scholar she admired. She knew her time was unimportant to him, but she thought she had sealed her indignation over it in airtight jars, stored in the cellar. She’d not accounted for the sheer resilience of her pride.
She posted up at the hotel bar and ordered their most expensive cocktail as she waited. He didn’t like when she got drunk, called it unbecoming. Whatever, she thought. She didn’t like him at all. In ten years, she told herself, she would be unbeholden to the world. And where would he be? Assisted living? She polished off four more drinks, billing them all to his reservation. By the time he finally returned, she was well on her way to belligerent.
“Finally,” she greeted, disdain undermined by a hiccough. He took in her flushed face, the empty glass she’d brought up to the room.
“What’s my one rule?” he asked, irritated. “What’s the one thing I don’t like?”
“I was bored,” she responded. “You were supposed to be here hours ago.”
“And you’re supposed to be an adult. Adults don’t need to be constantly entertained.” He kicked off a shoe with more force than necessary. “I don’t want to see you like this.” She heard it in his tone, like he was sending back an incorrectly cooked steak: This isn’t what I paid for.
His rejection opened up a small, mortifying part of her, the part that desperately needed to be wanted, and if that wasn’t an option, used. She wished she were sober, so she could think of something eviscerating to say, so she could articulate all the ways she thought him pathetic. Instead, she burst into tears.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out like she’d been ready to apologize all her life. “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t cry,” he instructed as he called her a car, which only made her cry harder. “Go home, okay? No man wants to deal with this.”
Don’t talk to me like that, she thought, but did not say.
The next morning, regretful of dismissing her company, he sent her a massive floral arrangement: lilies and roses, crowded by swathes of baby’s breath. She returned from an early morning walk all cotton-headed and miserable—she wouldn’t have even been awake, if it weren’t for the fucking dog—to the vase on her doorstep. Come back, the note read, and she did, carting her bruised ego over the threshold like a reluctant bride.
That was the first time she really didn’t want to sleep with him, but did anyway. It must have peeked through her schooled expression, because he stopped his rocking movements to cradle her face gently, like she was made of spun sugar. She wished he wouldn’t touch her like that, with a concern that she couldn’t deduce the integrity of.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked. “We can stop.”
She shook her head, because at that point, she really didn’t. Because she would never again forget exactly what this was. Because even if she said, yes, please stop, she wasn’t completely sure that he would—and that was a point from which they could not return.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said to no one, while sitting with her elbows on her knees, perched on the toilet. A new, unsteady voice sprang from her mind in response.
Then don’t do it, the new voice said. Testing the weight it could hold, like a foal. Just walk away.
She entertained the idea momentarily. Her newfound financial freedom was too intoxicating. No more minimum wage side hustles, swallowing her days. She could throw away the Safeway coupons. She could settle her bar tabs and send her mother flowers. Having enough was an over-ripened fruit, disintegrating against her teeth and running down her chin. A sweetness that she would never get enough of.
She ignored the voice and flushed the toilet.
* * *
For the week of her spring break, he took her on a trip to Mexico. Let me spoil you, he texted, with a screenshot of their proposed itinerary. You deserve it.
She called a friend in her program, unsure if she wanted to be talked into or out of going. With her peers, she’d been fairly open about the arrangement, simply saying that she was seeing an older man who “took care of her” whenever anyone asked. They were accepting of this to the point of ambivalence; she was not the first graduate student to dabble in sex work and she certainly wouldn’t be the last.
“Why wouldn’t you go?” her friend asked. “Do you think he’s going to kill you or something?”
“No, nothing like that.” She didn’t know how to explain her reluctance. She knew what they were when they were together, here in the hotel. She was worried that on vacation, under the sweet lull of elsewhere, they’d become something murkier.
“Okay, then I have another question—can you watch the dog?”
* * *
In Puerto Vallarta, they spent five days at an American chain resort. On the beach, her skin sucked up the sun, warm and greedy; beside her, he grew redder and redder like a boiled crustacean, until he gave up and sequestered himself to umbrella shade.
When the hotel attendants’ gazes lingered on them, she burned with a fresh, insistent shame, unrelated to their age difference: He looked like all the other American tourists, and she looked like them. When they addressed her in clipped, customer service English, she withered, but did not correct them. I’m sorry, she thought, when he requested an extra towel or sent back an oversweetened drink. I’m not like him, she wanted to insist in an attempt to assuage her own guilt, knowing that potentially made her even worse.
In the evening, they walked down a stretch of shore marked off by a hotel sign that threatened trespassers. The sand was warm and soft, giving way easily beneath her feet. A uniformed man in thick leather gloves patrolled the line of sun loungers, whistling periodically to call the falcons that circled above the resort to ward off pigeons and panhandling seagulls.
“This is where I’m from,” she told him absently, nearly drowned out by the roar of the Pacific. “Well, where my family is from.”
“Here?” he asked, bemused, as if he couldn’t believe anyone inhabited this place for longer than a week or two at a time. They had not strayed from the Hotel Zone. He knew nothing of the shirtless boys, hacking open coconuts. The women who walked the length of the public beaches, selling whole fried snapper skewered on sticks. The water and gas trucks, announcing their presence each morning with a bullhorn. Those were hers, and she would not relinquish them from her heart’s fist.
“Not here, here. From this state.” She nodded towards the ocean. ““Do you want to go in? The water is so blue.”
“No,” he responded. “But go ahead.”
She waded in, senses dulled by the cold, the salt. The meditative roar of the waves. Above her, the falcons cast a dark slash onto the water. She thought she saw a smattering of swimmers’ caps out past the break, but when she strained her eyes she realized it was only a line of buoys, roping off the hotel’s allotment of the sea.
On their last night in Mexico, he dug his fingers into her hips as she sat astride him, as if attempting to leave an imprint in still wet cement. “Please,” he whispered under her, “please, please, please.” She could feel his desperation, a thick humidity. She liked it best like this. Him, begging. Her, giving. A balanced call and response.
“Don’t you wish this was our life?” he asked, after he’d announced himself. When he said things like this, she knew he’d convinced himself of some reverence that had bloomed amidst artificiality. It made her sad, although she wasn’t sure on whose behalf.
“No,” she said. He looked wounded, so she elaborated more gently. “You wouldn’t like it as much if it was available all the time. Like how if you have too much of a good thing, it stops being good and starts being everything else.”
“So wise,” he teased, before growing pensive once more. “If only I’d met you thirty years ago.”
She both loved and hated when he said this kind of thing. Loved the longing of if only and years ago, loved being the subject of the sort of wistfulness that tried to unravel time. Hated the dishonesty of it—of course he wouldn’t want her if she were anything besides what he’d specified, if she had flaws and needs and plans of her own. The worst part was that he didn’t even realize he was lying.
* * *
She ended things between them a few months later upon the completion of her graduate studies, offering him an assortment of repurposed phrases from breakup texts and letters of resignation: “I’m entering a different stage of my life, but I really enjoyed our time together. Thank you for everything. Wishing you all the best going forward.”
He took it well, leaving the door between them cracked—“Don’t hesitate to reach out, okay? I’m here if you need me.” He only contacted her once more, a message sent late at night: I think about you all the time. She didn’t respond, because who was he even thinking about? Not her, not really.
As expected, the deposits to her account stopped. She accepted a job teaching at the university full time, which paid a borderline livable wage. To supplement her new mediocre paycheck, she took the Louis Vuitton purse to one of the higher-end consignment stores in town. She’d looked up the retail value as soon as she’d gotten it and had almost thrown up. Forty-five hundred dollars.
The streets were deserted, the temperature too brutal for pedestrians. The dry season had stretched this place to its limit: without rain, the heat was almost absurd. A cartoon sun. She’d bought the dog those overpriced booties to protect its paws from the pavement. The rubber soles squeaked against the store’s tile.
“Sorry—no dogs,” the girl at the counter said, without looking up from her phone. “Policy.”
“It’s over a hundred degrees.”
“Is it a service animal?”
“I’ll be quick,” she said.
The girl sighed, wiped her hands on her thighs like she was about to do something difficult. “It can’t come in. You can tie it up out front.”
She tied the leash to a post in the sliver of shade beside the door. The dog sat down immediately, pink boots splayed. Its tongue lolled out the side of its mouth.
“Selling or buying?” the girl asked when she returned.
“Selling.”
The girl flipped open a binder full of laminated pages with pictures of zippers and authentication tags in microscopic font. She paused on a close-up of stitching and tapped the picture with a chipped red nail.
“Real ones have a cross stitch, like this. I guess I can give you twenty dollars for it. Or forty in store credit.”
“Twenty?” Maybe she had misheard. “Like, two-zero?”
“Yeah. This is a knock-off,” the girl said, not unkindly. “Didn’t you know?”
Outside, the dog was waiting, stomach heaving like a bellows. She unwound the leash, overwhelmed by the quiet pull of its reliance. They walked two blocks before it stopped to shit in the middle of the sidewalk. She didn’t have a bag to pick it up. The dog looked up at her adoringly, like it had accomplished something they could both be proud of.
Katerina Ivanov Prado’s writing has been published in Narrative, Brevity, Catapult, The Rumpus, Joyland, Passages North, and others. She has won the Narrative Story Contest, John Weston Award for Fiction, and the AWP Intro Journals Award, and has received an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a 50th Anniversary Fellowship from VCCA, a Mary Gibbs and Jesse H. Jones Fellowship, a LitUp Fellowship, and a Rona-Jaffe Scholar’s Award from Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She obtained her MFA in Fiction at University of Arizona and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she is the Online Nonfiction Editor at Gulf Coast and an Editorial Fellow at Arte Público Press.