escort

0.1

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

~ e. e. cummings

Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see. That's what his father always tells him with that smile of his, the one that says, I'll tell you that much, but the rest will cost you. Troye never knew what he meant, but he gets it now that he's sitting in the dim bar of another hotel he won't sleep in, the ice melting in his £18 gin and tonic. He doesn't even like gin and tonic, but it's all part of the game. And it is a game. It has to be, because if it isn't that means he doesn't enjoy it and he does. He doesn't just enjoy it, he loves it. He loves the theatrics of it, of shaving carefully and layering on cologne, something different every night - Floris on Tuesday nights, Acqua di Parma on Thursdays - and picking which suit he's going to wear. The pinstripe one that makes him look older, maybe the black one that makes him look taller. He doesn't care what your last name is and he won't remember your birthday, but Troye always remembers those things, like who likes him to wear Floris. And he keeps track of the gifts as well; who gave him which watch and who gave him the monogrammed cufflinks with the wrong initials on them. That's part of the game, too: being a different person every night. He'll be whoever you want him to be. He'll be your date for your cousin's wedding and smile for photographs as he tells the story of how you met in a bookshop, reaching for the same copy of Middlesex. Or he'll lick his lips and call you Daddy if that's what you want. Anything so he doesn't have to be himself. So maybe you should believe none of what you see, either.

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Nathan. He didn't think too much about it when he picked it, it was just the first name that came into his head when he was asked. He didn't have to change his name, but when he met his first client, an overweight middle-aged man with sweaty palms, he didn't even want him touching him let alone saying his name, so Nathan it was.

That was three years ago and he'd like to say that it's just a name, but he knows that it's not. When he's Nathan, he's a little smoother, a little more careful. He doesn't spill drinks or babble about an article he read in the newspaper about a wristband that can tell when you're having sex. He doesn't say anything at all, in fact, just listens to you cry about your wife and whinge about work. Listens when your toes are on the edge and you'll tell him anything for him not to stop, tell him every lie you've ever told, every secret that you're trying to keep. You'll tell him your fucking PIN number if he'll keep doing that thing with his tongue. He hears it all, but he doesn't say a word.

He never says a word.

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Okay. Whatever you're thinking is wrong. He isn't paid by the hour and he certainly doesn't hang around hotel bars smiling at lonely businessmen. He works for an agency that you've never heard of and you never will. It doesn't have a website or a number to call when you're tired and lonely and drinking mini-bar scotch because your hotel room feels so far from home you don't know if you'll ever find your way back.

The agency, if you can even call it that, is basically one woman: Charlotte Gordon a Grace Kelly blonde with a sharp tongue and an even sharper smile who works out of her house, a perfectly-balanced Georgian in Chelsea that Troye can suck dick for the rest of his life for and will still never afford. But then that's how she earned it, she told him the first time he went there, by marrying one of her clients. She said it with a grand wave of her hand as if to say, All of this could be yours, too, Troye. And it is a fairytale, he supposes, if fairytales end with rattling around in a huge house while you wait for your husband to have a heart attack. So Troye smiled and admired the Barbara Hepworth sculpture in the garden because it was kinder than telling her that it wasn't his fairytale. He was only doing it to pay off his student loans then to pay for his flat and now he's only doing it until he has enough money to move to New York so he can write that book he's been scribbling onto napkins for the last three years.

Until then he's Nathan. Not that you'll ever meet him. He may smile and hold a door open for you or sit next to you at a bar, smelling faintly of something expensive - something Italian, sunshine and espresso and something else you can't quite put your finger on that makes you feel like you're somewhere else - but you'll never know his name. And even if he tells you - and he won't - Nathan Sivan doesn't exist. Google him and all you'll find is a car salesman from Chesterfield.

No. Nathan Sivan meets you, if he's interested, and he isn't because he already has five clients - two politicians, two CEOs and a premiership footballer - and that's quite enough, thank you. They're each allocated one weeknight, a date they tend to keep wherever they are in the world. He's been on business trips with clients, wandering around Brussels drinking coffee while they're discussing the Eurozone crisis, and on holiday with them, in a room two floors down from their wives who wake up in the middle of the night and pretend not to notice that they're alone. He even saw one client on his wedding day, the pink petals from his boutonnière falling at Troye feet like confetti as Troye fucked him half an hour before he walked down the aisle.

He's seen the world, seen it all and he loves it all. Not just the breathless biting sex in hotel rooms that cost more a night than his rent, but being the one thing they can't live without. He'll cross the Atlantic just to spend a few hours with someone but it isn't about seeing them - it's never about them, not really - it's about being wanted. About being the guy they'll risk their careers for, their families for, because they can't wait a week to see him. He knows all of their secrets. He could ruin them if he wanted, bring the country to its knees, but he never would. He just likes to know that he can when they can't wait until they get to the hotel and fuck him in the back of the limo, Troye cheek pressed to the backseat so all he can smell is leather, or when he's listening to another desperate voicemail begging to see him. Men like that don't beg, but he makes them beg.

He's not doing it right if they don't beg.