As I leave to go to Kevin in another hour, I am thinking about my role of escort with him and how it is proving to be an effective thing in a certain way.
As I’ve written before, I am to him sometimes a “friend with benefits,” but there is also between us an awareness that I am his regular escort, a role defined for me in this from the beginning. We flip back and forth between these types of relationships, but there are differences, and being an escort to him creates some boundaries that are useful.
Escorts have their regulars, of course — repeating customers that become casual friendships of a sort. And there are high-end escorts with wealthy clients who take them on week-long, even month-long, excursions.
I am an escort in both those ways to Kevin — to him a recurring as well as a longer-term sex-companion experience.
I assume that level of professional sex — repeated arrangements, longer gigs — involves a lot of relational “work” for an escort quite apart from the sexual center. Most long-term time is not spent in sexual play. Accordingly, an escort must be interested and interesting, entertaining her client-partner with grace and passion even when not in bed.
Likewise, I serve Kevin with my personality as well as my body. While Kevin may at times be quiet and inscrutable, he is an intelligent man with varied interests and pursuits. He finds me compelling enough even with my clothes on. So this is good. Even if he is not so immersed in the world of words as I am, we are able to have good conversations. I don’t think of this as “work” for me, but it is akin to what an escort does in such situations.
I sometimes think a test of the best relationship is when two people can be comfortably silent together, when the absence of talk is easy and natural. Again, Kevin is prone to silence, but in the past that hasn’t always been “comfortable.” Yet these days, he has opened up to me more, and I’ve learned some of his rhythms. We can talk for a time, but then fall into a silence — albeit now a silence that is warm and accepting. This, it seems to me, is the character of a friendship, even one with benefits. We don’t have to entertain each other. (As I’ve posted before, I think Kevin had not early on realized this, but I’m hopeful this time he will settle into this comfort zone of us as friends being around each other but not necessarily doing something together.)
On the other hand, there are different advantages with my being Kevin’s escort.
As friends, even as we assume the benefits, there is the obligation for sex to be mutual and timely — that is, “Do you feel like doing something later?” and “What would you like?” — the usual negotiation of sex between two people. But as Kevin’s escort, the assumption is that I have an obligation to service him. He can (and does) then say, “I want to spread you on the table” or “I want you to give me a blow job.” It can be sudden, opportunistic, demanding — and still appropriate in the context of my being his escort. As the “client,” he has every right.
Of course there is a kind of subservience in this, my bending to his desire, that suits the submissive me so very well even though this isn’t D/s. And, though I demur at Amanda’s oft-used comment about “my capacity for sex,” it is a rare time that, well, I ever “don’t feel like it.”
As an escort to him there is also a built-in emotional boundary. Sometimes the sex is more of the “tender is the night” sort that feels, delightfully, like actual love-making, and teeters on the precipice of relinquishing hearts. But even then in the afterglow of kisses, we both know this is not about falling in love, for I am his escort, not the girl next door.
It is true that in some sense I always fall a little in love with the one I’m with, but that’s a different thing, subject for another post…
It’s also true that this boundary between love-making and actual love is freeing to Kevin, allowing him to not worry about attachment and complication. The day after he makes sweet love to me in the bedroom at twilight, he will at lunchtime push me forcefully against the living room wall and fuck me standing up, using my body without explanation or gentility.
It’s as if the physical drywall between living room and bedroom is a virtual boundary defining what we are and what we are not supposed to be.
(And there I made a drywall analogy, which Kevin would appreciate so very much.)