The bar was half empty and honest about it. Two regulars nursed cheap whiskey in their cigarette fog. They were rubbing the glasses with their palms like they were trying to wake something up. Nobody was dancing. Though if one of them put a dress on, the shorter one had the legs for it. I smiled at nothing in particular and kept scrolling, because dry is dry and six weeks of it tends to clarify your thinking about what constitutes a reasonable Friday night.

Bangder. Where else? The app had dignity. The dignity of not pretending to be anything other than what it was.

The ad appeared between a woman with a silly smile and a faceless couple looking for the third.

Discreet companion sought for scripted encounters. No experience necessary. Femininity encouraged.

My thumb stopped.

F-e-m-i-n-i-n-i-t-y.

I'd thought about it. Of course I had. The way you think about something during ten minutes of a specific kind of porn you'd never discuss, then close the tab and tidy up the evidence like a man who'd had a perfectly ordinary evening. Those particular fantasies had always been detailed in a way that felt less like invention and more like recall: not elaborate scenarios with plots and characters but something more granular, more physical. The texture of certain fabrics. A specific angle in a mirror. The feeling of being looked at in a special way. As if someone knew exactly where to look. I had never examined this too directly. Direct examination tends to produce questions, and questions tend to want answers, and answers require a conversation. I had never found a way to start.

The ad didn't accommodate any of that careful arrangement.

I clicked. No photos. No names. Just a handle and a single prompt: Tell me what you're curious about.

My fingers moved before I'd made a decision. One paragraph, deleted. Another. Sent before I could delete that one too. Two sentences. Honest in a way I had not been in a long time, possibly ever, about this particular subject, to this particular category of person, which was: anyone.

The reply came in under a minute.

Tomorrow. 9 PM. Suite 12, The Grand Moanlawn. Wear something easy to remove. And, John, rule number one: leave your expectations at the door.

I read it twice. Then a third time, on account of the name.

I hadn't given her my name.

I spent the next twenty-four hours not thinking about it, which took considerable effort and produced mixed results. I went to bed and woke up and made coffee and did not check the message thread more than four times. I stood in front of my wardrobe for longer than was strictly rational, chose something easy to remove as instructed, and told myself I could still not go, all the way until I was in the elevator going up and the option quietly expired.

The Grand Moanlawn's lobby was cool marble and the particular hush of a hotel that charges enough to make people quieter. Twelve. Number twelve. I had no strong feelings about twelve.

The suite door stood slightly open.

She sat at the vanity with her back to me. Dark hair up. Her curves fill a red and black lace babydoll the way architecture fills a frame. Cherry lipstick visible in the mirror before she turned around.

"You're late," she said, still looking at the mirror. "Next time, I'll punish you." A beat. "Goddess Cleo."

My eyes went to the garment bag draped across the armchair.

She noticed it in the mirror. "Open it, John."

Inside: black lace, finer than I expected. An auburn wig on a small mount. A lipstick, a red that had no business being seen in daylight. I swallowed. "I've never..."

Mom's nylons don't count.

"Good," Cleo said, already moving toward me. "First time should feel like a confession." Her fingernails traced once across my chest, the lightest possible pressure. "Sit. Let me show you."

I sat.

She worked without rushing. Foundation first, blended down into my jaw with the careful attention of someone mapping a new surface. Blush at the cheekbones. Lipstick. Her fingers on me. Goosebumps down my body. And I sat still. Like I've been waiting a long time for and would never, under any other circumstances, admit to waiting for.

The wig came last. Her fingers worked through the hair at my temples, making small adjustments, and I felt the attention in my jaw and my collarbone and several places further down.

"Look," she said.

The mirror showed me someone I recognized. Softer. More deliberate. The same face with different permissions. My heart was doing something irregular. I noted it, filed it, and moved on.

"Perfect," Cleo said. Not a compliment. A confirmation. "Now kneel."

She settled onto the edge of the bed and spread her legs and looked down at me on the floor with an expression that was not unkind and not soft and would not be argued with.

"Show me how well you suit my needs."

My hands were shaking. My knees were on the carpet. The lace scratched faintly at unfamiliar places, the wig a warm weight against the back of my neck. I leaned forward.

I pressed my mouth to the inside of her thigh first. Not avoidance. I needed one moment of my own choosing before everything else became hers. Her skin was warm under my lips, the stocking's edge a faint ridge against my mouth, and she allowed it, a few seconds of it, before her fingers pushed into the wig at the back of my skull and directed me where she wanted me.

Her taste arrived all at once. Warm, specific, entirely itself. My lipstick smeared against her as I opened my mouth. A mark of the moment. I worked my tongue slowly, tasting her the way you’re tasting a new meal in a luxury restaurant: carefully, with full attention, ready to adjust.

She made a sound, low and not decorative, and her hips shifted once. A correction. I took it.

Her thighs closed around my head by degrees. The stockings rasped against my cheeks, warm and faintly textured, and I was aware of being held there, not trapped but contained, exactly as much space as she was granting and no more. I stayed in it. I found what she responded to and returned to it without varying too much, building the same thing repeatedly until it stopped being a technique and became a conversation she was directing with the pressure of her hand and the movement of her hips.

She pulled the wig tighter. Not pain. Emphasis.

I took the emphasis.

Her breathing shortened above me, each exhale sooner than the last. Her thighs tightened in small tides, and I felt her focus narrowing, the whole of her attention converging on my tongue, moving without rest. The want in my own body was there, present, aching against the fabric of the lace, and I registered it as secondary information. Acknowledged. Besides the point. The point was the grip in my hair and the heat of her thighs and the fact that the shame I had been bracing for, quietly, for longer than I would admit, had simply not arrived.

Something else was there instead. Not a word I was ready to use. But entirely mine.

Her nails went into my shoulders. Her thighs locked. She came with an economy that felt less like restraint and more like someone who does not perform for an audience, and I held her through it and felt what was left in me afterward: not relief, not pride, not the particular deflation that usually follows ten minutes of browser history I've already decided not to examine. Something that held its shape.

When her grip loosened, I sat back on my heels. I breathed.

Cleo reached past me for the wine, poured two glasses without rushing, and handed one down without looking. I took it and stayed on the floor. The lipstick was still on my mouth. Hers was on me somewhere. I didn't wipe any of it.

"Most people resist," she said. A different register now. Settled, the way a room settles when it's been agreed upon. "But you." She looked at me with an assessment that was frank and without judgment. "You leaned into it."

I took a sip, still kneeling, still in the wig and the lace and the makeup she'd built on my face. "I liked it," I said.

The words sat in the room and I left them there.

Cleo's smile was slow and had nothing in common with reassurance. "Good." She lifted her glass. "It's just the start of your journey."

✦ ✦ ✦