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“What do you want to do?” she asks curiously.
“I want to give you everything I have to give.”
“Oh, wow! That’s a lot to give some prostitute that you’ve only known a short time. What’s it been a little over a week, maybe two weeks?”
“You’re not just some prostitute, Ari. You’re a woman with a good sense of humor, you’re kind with the right amount of sass, and you’re compassionate. I haven’t spent a lot of time around you, but the time we have spent together that is what you have shown me. I can look in your eyes and know these things are true about you.”
“I’ve never had anyone talk to me the way you do, Blaze. Why are you saying all of this to me? I mean, let’s be real, it hasn’t been that long ago since you were out surfing for random women to take home.”
Dang. How do I come back from that?
I could tell her the truth and let the pieces fall where they may. But, that would be reckless and could end with her storming out and never coming back.
“I was lonely,” I admit, which is the truth because I didn’t have anyone to call my own. Before I went out on this assignment and met her, the only thing I had to keep me company was my work. “Seeking out women for hire isn’t something I normally do or agree with. I just found myself out there that night searching for something. Then I saw you, and I was drawn to you,” I admit. Once again, everything I’m saying is one hundred percent truth with a few omissions.
“I’m curious. Since you don’t normally find women this way or agree with it, what are your thoughts on me out there?” she asks.
“I want you to quit. I want you here with me. I can show you much better things in life if you let me. I think we belong together.”
She pushes her half-eaten plate away from her. “I have to go.”
“We were having such a good conversation. Why leave now?”
“We can get together again tomorrow,” she says, avoiding my question as she stands.
“I hate that you’re leaving, but I would be happy to see you again tomorrow, Ari. Do you want me to come to pick you up?” I ask, trying very hard not to think about where Ari has to run off to. Every conclusion leaves me upset that another man might touch her tonight. But if it’s one thing I’m confident about, it’s knowing he won’t be able to touch her as deeply as I have already.
“No, I’ll come to you around ten,” she promises.
I kiss her for a long time at the door, making sure to slip the takeout receipt—with my number carefully written out on the back—into her back pocket. I want her to be able to reach me at all times. I walk her to her car and then come back to my apartment and plop down on the sofa.
I slowly feel myself opening up the vaults of things that should be locked away from a woman like Ari—a nightwalker that dwells in places of criminality and dishonesty. None of how I feel about her makes sense, but I can’t stop this feeling, not even if I wanted to.
It keeps happening, over and over again. I’ll send her a text around ten or eleven at night, trying to work around her schedule, and she keeps coming over, somehow always miraculously in between clients. Sometimes, I can’t find it in myself to sleep with her due to my jealousy of the thought of other men touching her.
I like Ari. She’s hilarious, smart as fuck, good in bed, and ridiculously hot, whether she’s dressed regally or wearing a ‘come fuck me dress’ designed to make married men spend all their money on sex.
I can’t bring myself to ruin Ari’s life by arresting her. I’ve written it off at work, passing the assignment off to someone else, and hoping they go in another direction, to any other hooker in the entire city besides Ari. I have reserved myself to the fact that I’m going to continue ‘paying’ Ari for sex with meals and spending time with her. I hope to fucking hell that no one in the department ever finds out about us. That will be the end of my career as a police officer, and as of right now at twenty-six years old I have forty years left before retirement. I laugh at that thought.
Except, the thing is, I’m not sure I’ve actually paid Ari for sex; not in a way that counts. We’ve fallen into this weird bartering pattern, just shy of illegal. I’ve made passionate love to her in every way imaginable—oral sex, sex in the car, sex in public, sex hard and fast, sex slow and sensually. But the barter is always, “Order some Thai,” or “…grab me a bottle of wine before I get there.”
The first time Ari slept over the entire night, accidentally falling asleep after I pounded her until tears were leaking out of the corner of her eyes. I had been nervous that was going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back—that for some reason Ari was going to turn around and demand compensation for all the other meetings she’d missed that night. Instead, she only smiled at me across the pillows, half of her face illuminated by a beam of sun coming in through a window.
“Do you have pancake mix?” she’d asked me the next morning and even helped me flip them.
It’s risky and unexplainable what Ari and I share. Something in my gut tells me she’s not who I think she is. She’s too good to be out in the streets working. But, she continues to slip away from me whenever I’m sleeping. I wake up to an empty bed, ready to chase after her…to chase the next feeling of passion that we will undoubtedly share. Whatever this is between us, I don’t want it to end.
