escort diary® of Antonella: The Long Way Up
He booked two hours and asked, almost apologetically, whether we could spend the first one downstairs.
I love a man who asks for something like that as if it might disappoint me.
The bar on the ground floor of his hotel is one of those rooms that never quite commits to an hour of the day. Low amber light, dark timber overhead, rain running down the glass in long unhurried lines because of course it rained. I arrived eleven minutes early, which is a habit I've given up trying to break. Eleven minutes is enough to choose the right seat, order something cold, and let a room settle around me before he walks in and the evening actually begins. wore the green dress. Not the obvious one. The one that behaves impeccably while I'm standing still and rather less so when I cross a room.
He stood up when he saw me. Pushed his chair back, did up his jacket, waited. Such a small thing. I promise you it is not a small thing. We talked. That's the part people outside this work never quite believe that a man will pay for two hours and spend the first one asking about my week, and mean it. He'd flown in that morning from somewhere colder. There was a deal that had gone sideways and a daughter starting university and a father who has started forgetting names. He told me all of it in the order it came to him, not the order that made him look good, and somewhere in the middle he stopped performing altogether and just sat there being a person.
By the third hour we had both stopped pretending the conversation was the point. He asked me something ordinary about my drink and I answered him without hearing my own voice. He was looking at my mouth. I let him.
"We should go up," he said.
Not a question, not quite an order. Somewhere in between, which is precisely where it should be. The lift was mirrored on three sides, which is a design decision I've always suspected was made by someone who understood exactly what happens in hotel lifts. He stood behind me and slightly to the left. He put his hand at the small of my back flat, warm, not going anywhere and the doors slid shut on the eighth-floor button and I watched the two of us in the glass and thought, this is my favourite minute of the whole night.
Because it is. People assume the best part of what I do happens behind the door. Sometimes it does. But the hours before the slow assembly of want, the courtesy of a man who waits, the moment someone decides to stop being careful with you that's the part I'd keep if I could only keep one.
The doors opened. He let me walk out first.
I'll leave you there, I think.
