My name is Natalie and I am writing to tell you all how I found myself last weekend introduced by my husband to two total strangers as a paid whore. Objectively the idea that I am or could be a whore is beyond belief. I am married to Paul who is only my second lover. As a thirty-six year-old woman this is not many lovers. Yet this moment represented for me the intersection of fantasy and reality, where the real somehow conformed to the imagined. The truth twisted and flipped and the false became true. My husband sincerely believed that I was indeed a whore, or at least had been a whore. His own fantasies of course encouraged him in this belief, but a belief it was. So there I was dressed in a clingy, short black dress, my favorite sexy panties and bra, a pair of black ankle-length boots, walking into an apartment as the paid-for prostitute. But before I get to the details of this encounter I should explain how I arrived at this singular point in my life.
I was a shy, gangly teenager whose experience with boys was limited. I attended a Catholic school for girls where I excelled at academics and played on the volleyball team. I listened intently to all the stories my friends told about their sexual adventures, knowing all along that these stories were mostly fantasies rather than realities. But in a way it didn't matter. The stories themselves provided fuel for my own private imaginings. I will not bore you with my childish sexual fantasies especially since they lacked the specificity a basic knowledge of anatomy and biology would have provided. I arrived at college a virgin and stayed that way until the end of my junior year. I devoted myself to my academic studies and fulfilled the sports requirement by running on the cross country team. As my body filled out my height was no longer a source of embarrassment. Indeed it made me noticeable in ways that were pleasantly new. I welcomed the attention from men but my shyness made me seem distant and standoffish. Besides, my studies were my first priority and although I imagined great love affairs I never actually dated. I was happy to go out in a group of my girlfriends with guys invited along, but apart from a little innocent flirting I usually excused myself before anything could happen. As time passed I was not really happy with this. Increasingly I chastised myself for my inability to "take the plunge" and date. But the guys at my college stopped asking and I could not overcome my shyness to approach them.
In my junior year I made a friend of a guy who was as shy and as devoted to his studies as I was. He was the typical nerd – skinny, glasses, spotty and, most importantly unthreatening. We started studying together and he became very attached to me in his quiet unstated way. I knew this but he did not fit with my imagined great love and although I became fond of him I could not bring myself to take the relationship further. I know this hurt him and I could see him struggling with his feelings. One night we were in my room preparing for a logic test. He put down his pen and took off his glasses. I think he did this so that he would not see clearly my reaction to his words.
"I think about you all the time," he said.
"What do you mean?" I replied knowing exactly what he meant.
"I love you."
"Don't say that," I said softly. "You don't know what love is. Its just sexual stuff. Its not love, it can't possibly be love."
"I know what I feel," he said, his myopic eyes fixed somewhere on my face.
"I don't deserve your love even if it is real. There are many other women who could love you," I lied.
"I love you Nat" he repeated, the first embarrassing tears rolling down his face.
I spent the rest of the night trying to persuade him that it was lust rather than love he was feeling. I did this to save myself the trouble of having him love me. I had no other intentions. But a week later I found myself in a corner.
"Maybe it is just lust," he announced out the blue. "I do think of you a lot in that way. A lot," he added with emphasis.
I was simultaneously relieved and alarmed.
"What do you mean?" I stumbled.
"I mean I masturbate thinking about you," he said with an aggressive tone to his voice.
"I can't, I mean that's not how I think about you. I'm not ready for that yet and ... it would have to be with someone I love."
"I just want you to touch me. Is that too much Nat? Is that too fucking much?"
"Look ..." I begun to reply.
"I'm not asking to touch you. You don't have to sully yourself by letting me touch you. I'm asking so little of you."
I was embarrassed by his begging and a little frightened by his aggression. I also felt guilty. I knew I had no real reason to feel this way, but I did.
"What do you mean by touch," I asked.
"Jerk me off," he replied quickly savoring the crudeness of his words.
"That's all? Nothing more?"
"Nothing more. Just that."
Two things struck me at that moment. The first was that I was negotiating supplying a sexual service and the second was that this was what prostitutes do. I was not going to receive money but I thought I would receive amnesty from his claims of love. This was a transaction. I felt an unaccountable sense of arousal, the heat rising in my tummy and the hardening of my nipples. Somewhere in my unconscious the connection between sex and love had been broken.
I asked him to lie down on my bed. His cock was already hard in his pants. I kneeled next to him facing away. I popped the button on his jeans and unzipped him. He lifted himself so that I could pull down his pants far enough to expose his erect cock jutting firmly out from its bed of pubic hair. He moaned when I clasped his cock in my hand. I watched my hand slowly, naturally, instinctively, move along his shaft. The pace of my movement matched his quickly growing excitement. The tip of his cock shined with the promise of his ejaculation. I felt his breath hotly against my calf. Suddenly he tensed, his moaning stopped and a stream of cum shot up, arced close to my face, and fell splattering across my wrist and his jeans and shorts.
The next night after we had finished our studies I repeated the same service. This time though I looked back and saw how his stare was fixed on my ass. I always wore jeans but the tightness caused by my bending over his cock clearly outlined my ass and thighs. As his tension increased towards its highest point I asked him whether he would like me to wear a skirt next time. His response was an immediate shower of cum.
We progressed from a skirt to panties only, to panties pushed aside to no panties at all. He kept his side the bargain and never touched me. My own excitement at being looked at, my pussy spread and swollen was evident. On the final night of term I let him fuck me. I borrowed a condom from a bemused friend and allowed him his ultimate satisfaction.
The next year he went back to declaring love for me and I ended it. My Catholic guilt combined with the embarrassing presumptions of my friends that I was dating the school nerd made me very cruel in my rejection of him. When I left for graduate school I thought that would be the end of my dealings with my unhappy little nerd. In this thought I was mistaken.
I went to graduate school in a large city and shared an apartment with two girlfriends. I resisted their attempts to fix me up with a date and instead immersed myself in my work. I also began collecting books and articles on prostitution and became something of an expert on prostitution in 19th century England. My walk to the street car took me past a sex shop. This place fascinated me. It seemed like a cave filled with forbidden treasure. It took me about a month to work up the courage to go in. It was a Saturday afternoon and I dived in like a secret agent hoping that no one who knew me would recognize me. The air was full of exotic smells. It was a mixture of leather, PVC and plastic. I made for the clothing section, my eyes straight ahead. There I had the opportunity to look around. The shop was small. Along the walls were shelves stuffed with assortments of dildos, vibrators, toys and videos. Higher up were soft porn posters. Behind the counter was a small, slightly bald man of indistinct age. There were two other men in the store. I started looking at the clothing – miniature leather skirts, lacy see-thru skirts, corsets, PVC and vinyl shorts and tops, panties and bras. I felt the eyes of one of the men on me. It was a peculiar feeling since I felt somehow that he was entitled to look. That my being there in that place was a sort of permission I had granted him. The feeling slowly turned to an unpleasant self-consciousness and I quickly left.
I returned a few days later, ducking into the door with my hat down over my eyes. The clerk looked up and smiled in recognition. I had returned because somehow I had to. It was a place apart for me where my private imaginings acquired a real form and distinctness. Of course I couldn't just be there; it was a store after all. And so I bought a random piece of clothing. The next time I bought another and then another.
With my door locked tightly I tried on these outfits – the leather skirts and red lace bodices, the tiny black panties, the dog collar. I admired myself and imagined myself looked at by rooms full of men. I pressed the leather to my nose and ran my fingers across the smooth surface of the PVC. I started wearing the panties to class instead of my regular white cottons.
The clerk's name was Tom. He introduced himself to me late on afternoon when the shop was empty except for me.
"Natalie is it?" he enquired, his red round face peering up at me. "I know because of the credit card. It has your name on it," he explained. "I'm Tom," he said extending a smile rather than a hand.
"Pleased to meet you," I said stupidly.
"Cigarette?" He asked, fishing out a battered pack of Camels from his pocket.
I was an inexperienced smoker. At that time I had perhaps smoked five or six cigarettes but it seemed foolish to refuse this minor transgression of good sense in a store full of temptations to major transgressions.
I leaned on the counter in what I took to be a sophisticated pose and Tom resumed his perch on his stool. He looked at me quizzically, allowing the ash of his cigarette to fall on the floor.
"You don't look like you are on the game," he said studying me.
My response came instantly from my fantasy world.
"It's difficult to pay fees and the rent."
I took at long drag on the cigarette and allowed my words to be shaped by the smoke I exhaled.
"Why did you think I was ... on the game?"
"The whores come in here to buy their outfits. You buy lots of outfits. There's something about you that doesn't fit. But these days," he continued, "who can tell?"
I nodded attempting to share his worldliness.
"I don't do it very often," I offered as an explanation.
"Good," he said in a fatherly tone. "You are very pretty in an innocent sort of way. Keep studying and get out of it."
As I left he gave me a pile of porn videos. "Helps speed things up," he said smiling.
As the months passed Tom and I would share a cigarette. He offered advice, showed me new stock and gave me discounts. I was there so often regular customers began to recognize and greet me. I moved to a new apartment partly because I needed more space to store my clothing, dildos, toys, whips and masks.
My nerd returned one afternoon while I was in a Starbucks sipping a latte and tapping out an essay on my laptop. It had been three years since I last saw him. He looked almost exactly the same. He joined me at my table and told me his story. He had left graduate school and got married. He worked for some insurance company. He lived in a city a good plane ride away. His pathetic situation and the knowledge that I was safe from his romantic claims encouraged me to say to him that I was whoring to make pay the bills. I think he would have been less surprised if I had told him I was an alien from Mars. He was stunned. His myopic eyes widened in disbelief. But I could see him thinking why would she lie about something like that?
"You mean you fuck guys for money?"
"That's what whores do, right?"
"But it took me nearly four years before you allowed me anywhere near you. Jesus," he exclaimed in a hissing whisper, "now you just fuck anyone? Anyone?"
He was angry I could see. His past resentments were released in red blush of anger that covered his face and neck. He tipped back in his chair.
"You're bullshitting me."
"Believe what you like," I replied as if I were uninterested in whether he believed me or not.
"Prove it," he challenged.
"Why should I prove it to you?" I asked.
