13 Men Who Bought Me: C1: The One Who Tried To Own Red.

Note: This is a series. The prologue can be found here. The second chapter will be posted next week. These pieces can be read as standalone pieces but you will get the best out of them if you read them as a series. In the end, the series will be compiled into a book and all Patrons can have a kindle-copy of it for free. 

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Chapter 1: The One Who Tried To Own Red. 

I used to travel as if I was going to be quizzed on the country I was entering the moment I arrived. I still do that; I think I live in eternal fear of being caught without an answer. So, it wasn't odd that I was looking up the square-footage of the airport in Tokyo when I received my tickets. The flight was at 2 AM and I only had eight hours to pack and put my affairs in order but I had gotten used to living like that, I'd learnt that the best clients weren't the ones who wanted to see you when they were in town, it was the ones who wanted to take you out of town with them. They were usually married businessmen. While rich, married men weren't the most generous tippers, they were always the most consistent customers, and the thing about money is that it's always better to steadily have an ample amount of it that to go through the ups-and-downs of jackpots and slumps with it. You don't need tips when you have designed your income in a way that you can always save enough to invest and give yourself a tip, and the key to an income like that is stability. Married men were stable. I know it's hard to think of a man in marriage that requires the helping hand of a whore as stable in any way but stability means a different thing to us than it may to you. With married men you always knew when they were coming, you knew how often and how long they'd stay. As sums of money you are expecting to receive, they were always calculable. A calculable income goes a long way. Unlike many of the other women I knew who did the same kind of work I did, I did not like to travel. I did it because it was lucrative, and I suppose I did like the authentic variety of the food I got to eat, but I wasn't ever a fan of seeing new places or even meeting new people. I think it has to do with being from a travelling-family, I saw most of the world before I was eighteen, and the prospect of getting on a long flight only to realise that people are the same everywhere just did not appeal to me as much as it did to the others. I like staying where I am, buying the same groceries from the same store every day, running the same route regularly, being stuck in traffic at the same junctions as yesterday.

People are surprised by that, i think maybe I represent a certain way; a bold, risk-taking woman perpetually drunk on passion, and I am that, but that doesn't mean I like the things most often associated with that. There is a danger to associative imagination, and I think Eliot recognised it much better than Wordsworth, it limits your worldview. I see that also in the way people think of prostitution, it's either immoral or it is desperate. You're either morally-wretched or you are financially-wretched and your morality is compelled by that. The materialistic gold-digger or the whore with a heart of gold. I am  neither of those things. My heart is alright, it's no better or worse than any other heart. I like money, but it doesn't drive me to achieve past survival. It doesn't bring me joy, only satisfaction and security, it doesn't give me the thrill that I am given to understand that it should. And as I said, nor did getting on a flight. It was my second time going to Tokyo with the same client, he did something with computers. He bought their parts in China and had them developed in Japan, then he sold them in North America. He didn't have the look we have come to expect from tech-millionaires, I feel like they are the rockstars of our times, aren't they? Changing the world, gutting its resources in the mandate to save it, ending marriages, having affairs and revelling in eccentricity. He wasn't any of those things and he often explained to me that he wasn't a man of tech, he was a man of business. I can understand that, I know many people who sell things, and sometimes the product you sell is not as relevant as the business of selling. I met a guy who ran a company that sold toothpaste once, worst teeth you ever saw, but he was an excellent salesman, after i was with him, even i considered buying what he was selling. The business of selling is much more fascinating to me than the business of product development. He was a seller of things. A very ordinary man in many respects: he prayed before he got on flights, he wore a red thread around his wrist possibly for protection, I wouldn't know, I wasn't taught the rituals of godliness, he didn't eat meat, he was politically-ambivalent and nothing inspired very strong emotion in him. He was my first truly rich client, prior to him I was still wading in the pool of established investment bankers, senior lawyers and kids who came from family money, and they were wealthy, but they weren't wealthy like him. They were "shop till you drop wealthy", he was "just buy a franchise of the store" wealthy. There is a hierarchical system of class within the wealthy as well, and he was my first step up. It was from him I learnt what wealth really does to one's political opinions, and what it really does is allows you the privilege of not having them  He didn't care about what happened to society, only tax-brackets and making sure they were discussed with him before they were announced to the public. The country of the wealthy has the same roads and trees as our country, but that's where the similarities stop.

After I got my tickets, I packed my purse first: passport, my visa had been stamped weeks ago, wallet, a book for the plane and such. Then I packed my suitcase, I've always been a light traveller so it didn't take much time, a lot of what I packed was red lingerie anyway. Somewhere along the way, I developed some fetishes of my own. It started off as a strong preference for red, but I owned many different sets in many different colours, and then I started to discard them and buy more and more red ones until one day I opened my closet to find that all of my lingerie had turned red. It was a beautiful sight, a hundred different shades of red looking at me from the closet, I remember a shiver going up my spine and then visibly shuddering at the sight. After that I never bought any other colour and I was surprised that no one ever requested a different colour except for the one man who always wanted me in white. I feel like there is something much deeper at play with the colour red than the instigation of a primal urge upon viewing the colour of blood. Red is a colour that women aren't allowed to participate in until they are married. When I was a young girl, my mother would tell me that I shouldn't wear red lipstick or nailpolish, and she'd often explain that my father didn't like it at all, and he still wouldn't let her put it on. Brides are made to wear red, it's the colour of matrimony, but I believe in reality, it is the colour of sex. Nowadays we fuck in and out of marriage, but I am given to understand that there was a time when there was much fanfare about the occasion of fucking your bride on the night of the wedding. It really creeps me out, the concept that people are privy to your timeline of fucking for the first time, and that they participate in it in strange ritualistic ways. I think virginity creeps me out in general and when you add matrimony, religion and fanfare to that, I just cannot stand it. I do love the colour red though, it speaks. You're told to stay away from it, to only be seen publically wearing it after you've been fucked and to cease any contact with it when you're past your baby-making years so opting for it, whenever you want and brandishing it feels like an act of ownership. I was scared of the colour red, and now it owns me. I thought for a while the I owned it, but you can't do that, no one owns red.

A couple of hours later I called a car to take me to the airport. He never flew with me, and would be arriving several hours after I did, but he always sent a car to the airport. The flight was uneventful and quiet, I did my nails and fell asleep, so when I woke up they were a mess and I had to do them again. It passed the time nicely. When I arrived there was a car and a sign waiting for me, he drove me to a different hotel than last time. Tokyo has always been interesting to me, actually the entire country has always been interesting, its very existence seems so dichotomous. On the one hand I met people there who were freer than any I had encountered in any other part of the world, and at the same time I've met people who were more rigid and proper than any I have seen ever before. I could not make sense of it, but I liked the lights in the city at night. Tokyo was vibrant like that, always shining bright, a little too bright, as if it was hiding something. The man who had brought me to the hotel checked me in as well, I gave him my passport and he filled in a form and signed it. I wonder if he signed on my behalf, sometimes retrospectively I wonder if I was ever in any danger. It never felt like I was, but I didn't have anxiety back then, and now I am able to posit all sorts of scenarios that could have come to pass and I feel a slight fear in the pit of my stomach. A young woman in an orange coat guided me to the elevator after she gestured for someone to take my bag, I waved my dissent but a young man took the reins of my suitcase anyway. She gave me directions to my room, and he followed behind me on the elevator, dragging my lifeless belongings of an unnecessary contraption with wheels that looked like it would be fun to roll down a street in.

He arrived a few hours later. He wasn't a very stylish man but he was a good dresser, everything was always neat, ironed and well-fitted. He sometimes opted for colours like mauve or peach that did nothing good for him but I feel like he had the insecurity of being the least cool kid in the popular group, in many ways that feeling is worse than anonymity and social obscurity. A lot of people aren't special, so you make your peace with that, but it's especially hurtful to learn you just made it to special and reside on its lowest rung. He wasn't insecure about his wealth, he was, I think, insecure about his utter lack of eccentricity. I didn't mind that about him, I liked it even, it was no work at all for me. When he came in, I dismissed the bell-hop, he tipped him and I wanted to tell him that was culturally inappropriate but he did it all the time in the wrong places and I don't think anyone wants to be corrected by their whore. It's not my place. One of the great joys of doing what I do is that you get to say things like that, what I love about my job is its specificity, I get to say things like that As a woman you can be anything you want, as a person too or as a wife, but as a whore there are rules, and it's okay for there to be rules. I love rules but not because I want to follow, even though I do, I love them because they're thoroughly unambiguous. The complexity of determining the appropriate behaviour is too much for me when I have to be who I really am, so I respond very well to structures that determine my behaviour for me, and I find sex-work is very clearly determined. Once he walked in, I greeted him cheerfully and kissed him on the mouth, I know the trope about whores not kissing, and I do think it makes some sense. Kissing is thoroughly non-essential to the evolutionary purpose of sex, you don't need to do it to make babies, and so it must have some other motivation, and perhaps the assumption is that motivation has to do with emotion, but I kiss everyone because I resent the notion that emotions interfere in my work. Emotions interfere only when you give one more credence than the other. Emotions interfere only when you give one more credence than the other. If they're all on equal footing, you can engage in one or the other whenever you want and never take any of them home with you.

As he closed the door, I took his suitcase over to the other side of the room. It was a two room suite, and I hadn't unpacked my stuff because I didn't know which room he wanted. I brought him a drink, and as he sat down on the couch, I got on the floor and removed his shoes. I did that to all the men I saw regularly, but oddly when I did it to a man I was dating, he was offended on my behalf. He couldn't believe I would do something like that, and even though I felt nothing but joy at the prospect of taking off a man's shoes, he insisted that the process was demeaning to me. I don't think it's demeaning. I've learnt that things that are demeaning for wives and lovers to do for men are not necessarily so for whores. See, I understand, women have been in-charge of tending to men for centuries and we're tired of being relegated to this role now - cook your own food, pack your own bags, take off your own socks and don't act like a little boy who just realised he cant live without his mama - but I don't see myself as a woman when I do these things. I see myself as a professional stereotype who gets paid to take on the role, and I enjoy it. That's what I really enjoy. As he relaxed on the couch, I asked him which room I should take his bag to, and began to unpack it. Men appreciate little acts of service more than an hour-long blowjob, and people often chide me for speaking in these binary terms but I can't help my area of expertise. I find it's most appreciated when you do these things without being asked, few men tend to ask a woman, maybe even a whore, to be their servant-girl, but a lot of men appreciate it when you take that on of your own volition.

After I unpacked his things, I unpacked mine and undressed. He was sitting in the living-room still having a drink.

"Do you want to go downstairs for dinner or should I have it sent up for you?" I asked him, adjusting the strap on the new red, lace-defined  bodice-hugging camisole i was about to debut.

"Just have it sent up," he said turning around to look at me in my finery, "In...one hour maybe."

"And what you like to do for an hour?" I asked, walking to him.

I walked slowly, turning and twisting my waist more than is ever necessary for anyone to do when they walk.

"You look so hot in that colour," he said standing up and walking only a couple of steps in my direction, "Just looking at you makes my cock hard."

I'll be honest, I have never understood why men find me attractive. In the maximum capacity of vulnerability and humanity I am able to display, I will say that in my head I still look how I did when I was ten. I have bad skin, hairy pits and my original nose. I think it has to with my scent, I may have grown up to look very different than the unattractive girl who worried no one would ever want to fuck her, but I still smell just like her, and olfactory memory is stranger than anything else. As long as I still smell like her, I will never be able to look in the mirror and see what men see in me. I never understand what he saw in me but he was always demonstrating his erect cock to me and telling me how it was purely a response to how attractive I am. It got him off, not how hot I was, but how hard he could get so fast. Men are strange about their cocks, I am sure anyone who fucks men can concur, but the most interesting of these peculiarities is how much men like to brandish what their cocks can do.

Look how hard it can stand. Look how big it can get. Look how it quivers. Look how it disappears inside you.

They just love what it can do, but that tendency in men infantilises them to me. They're like children when they see an electric train for the first time, gripping the fingers of their mothers exclaiming: Mama! Look what it can do!

"What does it want to do to me?" I asked walking almost close enough to him to be touched before getting on my knees, "Does it want to feel me from the inside?"

He came close enough to me for me to unbutton and unzip his trousers, every time I am put in the position to do that I worry for a second that I forgot how to do it but as soon as my fingers feel the fabric, it all comes rushing back. I edged him back to the couch and removed the rest of his clothes before getting back down on my knees. I like to take my time sniffing and smelling a person, and I find men feel much better about themselves when they realise the sex really did last an hour. Another one of those peculiarities. I buried my face into his crotch, taking it all in with my nose. I have two irrational beliefs; the first one is that I can make it rain, so long as I use my power judiciously, and the second is that I can tell how a man wants to be sucked from the scent of his cock. His cock told me, as it often did, to spend a few minutes licking gently around the base and then moving my way down to the balls and then back up until I could see his cock quiver. I took it in my mouth, tentatively, one small centimetres at a time until the distance down my throat started to seem like an excruciating walk on a scenic route. He wasn't one of those guys, he never grabbed my head and fucked it like it was a cunt. In fact, he never did much at all. He liked me to take gentle charge of the situation, never telling him what to do, but always focusing on providing him maximum pleasure with minimum effort on his part. I called these men the "get on top" people, because that's what they always wanted. To be fair, the majority of men who came to me wanted me to be on top, I don't mind that, but it makes me wonder. Women's magazines told me that women getting on top is about us taking control of our pleasure, but I get no pleasure from the position, the men seem to love it. To lay there and be ridden like a pony seems very appealing to them.

I am used to men who want me on top, it's the visual stimulation, apparently, that adds just the little incentive they need, but I don't need to be fed explanations, if they want me to do all the work, it's alright. They do pay me to do all the work, after all. In fact, it's the men who don't want you on top that are the real freaks. I must admit I have an affinity for the freaks. He wasn't a freak, as I sucked his cock deep into my throat he groaned and closed his eyes. Sitting there like that, with his head thrown back and his mouth half-open, he looked like a man trying to identify the source of pain in his body. I extracted the condom hidden in the lining of my panties and silently slid it onto his cock. It softened just a little bit, but once I slid my body on too of his, it went back to its previous state. I put my feet on either side of him and my back to towards his face. His arms wrapped around me and grasped my breasts, moving the sheer fabric aside so his fingers could meet my skin. I took him inside me slowly, at first, and then faster. I found men liked it when you made those little sounds that made it seem like they were hurting you just a little. I fucked him on the couch like that for a bit, bouncing up and down slowly, the momentum of my body and the spring of the couch synchronised perfectly to create a nice pace until my feet started to numb, so I bent down and grabbed his ankles. I liked being in that position, it had me on top, but only on a technicality. It was only a few more minutes of bouncing and moaning before he grasped my waist, pulled me up straight and really thrust inside me for the first time. One good thrust, that was really all I was guaranteed to get from him.

I got off him and pulled the condom from his cock, knotting it in a manoeuvre I had perfected years before then. I put his slimy, softening dick in my mouth and licked it up and down until all of the remaining liquid was inside my mouth. He lay there, limp and lifeless, with a big grin on his face. I truly hate nothing more than smiles, but I see so many around me I've learnt to hide my contempt. I got up and went to the bathroom, when I came back he was on the phone. I made a cup of tea and sat beside the window, looking at the bright lights for a while, then I made the call to order dinner up to the room. His call continued until dinner arrived, I set his food up for him at the table and dropped mine off in my room, I never ate in front of the men who bought me. It felt too intimate, perhaps that is what other people mean when they say kissing is too intimate. He got off the phone and came straight to the table.

"Thank you," he said, looking at the food.  

I nodded my head and went to my room to eat. He never stopped me, he never asked if I had eaten or if I wanted to, and I was always grateful for that. He was a man of great distance. After dinner I went to ask if he needed me for anything else, it was not like him to put his cock in me more than once a day, but sometimes he liked me to lick his ass, and jerk him off before he went to bed. It was, one of the more interesting things about him.

"Have a drink with me," he said.

"I don't drink," I told him, surprised that he hadn't noticed but also impressed at how little attention to felt comfortable paying me.

That might be my favourite thing about what I do, no one cares about my preferences, choices, habits or anything at all. I could be anyone, and even those who have felt my tongue inside their asses wouldn't know.

"Finish that coffee you started then," he said pointing to the cup I had left on the table beside the window.  

"Of course," I said, bringing him his drink before fetching my cold cup of coffee and sitting across from him.

We didn't talk much, in general, but I knew things about him from when he did feel like sharing them. I knew his wife was a doctor, his daughter wanted to attend Oxford but he worried she wasn't smart enough to get in, I knew his mother had died and his father lived with him. There had been moments, between us, when he had told me things I do not believe he ever spoke about with anyone else.

"Is there something on your mind?" I asked him, "Would you like to talk to me about something?"

He fiddled with his phone for a few seconds, intermittently looking up at me and then back down at the phone.

"Yes," he said finally in a voice of authority he rarely ever used with me but I often heard him use on the phone, "I wanted to make a proposition to you."

I knew what it was before it even came out of his mouth. That always happened with long-term clients, they got so used to seeing you and paying you a certain amount of money every month, they thought they should get you as a package deal.

"I see you regularly, and I would like to keep doing that," he started in predictable fashion, "What if I got you a place in the city, I would pay you a fixed amount monthly and only I could see you whenever I wanted?"

Sadly, sometimes, you have to cut one loose.

"But that would be like you own me," I said, repeating words I had had to say before.

I could sense the hostility coming up, even the best of men don't always handle rejection well.

"I own you now," he said, almost smug, and a little bit more condescending than he had ever been to me before.

"No," I said, "You rent me now."

"Well, think about it," he said getting up and walking towards his room.

I sat there, not thinking about it, but wondering how I should play the next few days.

"Are you coming?" He said, curtly, from the doorway, "My ass isn't going to lick itself."

I didn’t need to think, he had decided how we were going to play the next few days. It didn't matter so much though, I could handle a few days of being treated like a bad employee but I couldn't allow myself to be owned by a man. That's not how it works. 

No one owns red. 

Not even me.