By Alisha Richards

When I was nineteen, I made the decision to move across the country with promises of big money from the booming oilfield industry. When I arrived, I answered an ad in the paper that said, ‘make four to five thousand dollars a week’. Even though it didn’t specify exactly what the position was, I had an inkling it wasn’t bagging groceries. During my interview, I had a tour around the ‘spa’ and the rest, as they say, is history.

I had a love-hate relationship with the sex industry. I was making more money in one day than I had ever made in an entire month, I went on trips and shopping sprees, and I had a sense of sisterhood with most of the women that I was working with. But I was also fucking upwards of four to six men a day that I would never otherwise have had there not been a handsome exchange of money.

Enter Chuck; all 6’5” of him. He had piercing blue eyes, incredibly straight teeth and the widest shoulders you’ve ever seen. He was a mixed martial arts fighter and football coach – and it showed. Truth be told though; I wasn’t really that attracted to him at first, but by the end of our session he had me in stitches. He was goofy and playful and for those sixty short minutes, I was actually enjoying myself.

For the first time since I started working at the ‘spa’, I didn’t feel the need to perform. I was completely at ease and, if I’m being perfectly honest, it was the first time that I ever experienced an orgasm with a client. Then reality kicked back in when he handed me my money. He didn’t tip, but he did say that he was going to book another appointment with me. Deep down, I was actually looking forward to it.

Now, I might be old school, but back in my day we had three basic rules in the industry: no kissing on the mouth, never share your real name with a client and never date a client outside of work. I broke all three.

The first rule I broke, if I remember correctly, was during the third appointment that Chuck booked with me. I didn’t look at him like I did the other clients and I couldn’t stand hearing him call me by my work name. So, I did the thing that I wasn’t supposed to do and requested that he refer to me by my real name. The second rule I broke? It was during our fifth (maybe sixth?) session together. I couldn’t tell you what came over me, but right in the middle of switching positions, I looked him dead in his eyes and kissed him. I think we were both equally surprised because I had made it very clear from day one that kissing was off the table, yet here we were. I remember thinking, ‘I can never tell the other girls’.

Eventually, I left the industry and got married to someone else, but Chuck and I still stayed in touch. Nothing serious, just a text or lunch here and there. When I got divorced, we started meeting up again. At first, it was just about sex. The dirty, kinky, messed-up sex that I never felt comfortable sharing with someone that I dated for fear of judgment. With him it was different.

Then the dirty sex turned into dirty dishes in the sink from the meals that I was cooking for him, and the messed-up sex turned into messed-up inside jokes that we shared. In a few short months, we had gone from latex and strap-ons to chilling out and binge-watching hours of trash TV on Netflix. So, I guess it only made sense when he asked me if I would meet his friends.

It never occurred to me that we might have to come up with a cover story for how we met, but we spent an entire afternoon and car ride rehearsing what we would say. I acted like I was ok with lying, but deep down inside it hit me that we were never going to be a ‘normal’ couple. He had expectations of me to be a different version of myself when we were in public, which was extremely confusing seeing as the reason I had fallen for him in the first place was that I never felt like I had to perform or pretend to be someone else with him. It seemed that he wanted the fantasy of the hooker with a side of domesticated bliss.

Look, I wasn’t ignorant to the fact that he was probably thinking, ‘why buy milk when you can fuck the cow for free?’, but prior to him asking me to lie, I had never felt like ‘just an escort’ with him. In fact, during our fifty-plus sessions, he had somehow found a way to make me forget that he was a client. I opened up more to him than I had with most of the people that I was close with in my life, which he ultimately used against me.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that our situationship didn’t last very long after that. I had just freed myself from my first marriage, and I wasn’t about to let some guy who used to pay to fuck me dictate how I should and shouldn’t act. No ma’am! But I’d be lying if I said that the age-old saying, ‘you can’t make a hoe a housewife’ didn’t cross my mind every now and then after what happened with Chuck.

Can you make a hoe a housewife? After a bit of thought, and as a proud feminist, I’ll respond to that with another question: do we really fucking care?