Sugar, Spice & Sex at a Price. Narrative non-fiction. Unformatted copy.

I'm shivering at a table for two where yesterday I shared dinner with a boy. It's now New Year's eve. On an uneven floor of chipped tiles bowing with age at the kitchenette centre towards the bathroom beneath. On the second floor of a traditional, rickety town-house buried in the semi-arid Mediterranean. Quadratic porthole in the wall in front of me. I don't dare open it. I can define the outline of my breath condensing in the air. Little house for one, plus one collie, outside the village stacked above and around itself on the Spanish mountainside.

Alone.

I say alone, there's a sun-dried, middle-aged Spaniard, trying to deduce why I've not had hot water the past three weeks, shooting side glances at me like I'm the first thing with youthful vaginal lubrication he's crossed paths with this past decade.

Pig boy of yesterday past? Pig boy wanted to, cough, have me, and then have off. I sigh kicking my laptop screen up with the heel of my palm.

I'm twenty-four years old and I'm not promiscuous. I'm not sure what it is you think you can give me on a one night stand which my vibrator can't achieve more efficiently. Frankly, if you're so keen, what's in it for me?

I begin filling in boxes on my portfolio setup. Why should I give away anything? My time, my heart, and most especially my body, for free? I don't need a man for anything, I've got a dog. The men though? Whatever it be, there's something about the warmth of woman's body they will go out of their way to hunt down.

I'm twenty-four years old, I won't be twenty-four years old forever, and that's a niche in the market.

Sugar Daddy: 'a rich older man who lavishes gifts on a young woman in return for her company or sexual favours.'

Infinity pools backdropped by the Westminster skyline. Tech giants promising private flights over Paris. A partner for a luxury spa retreat in the Malaysian mountains. Or somewhere similar, I wasn't paying much attention, scrolling incoming bids reading five grand for three weeks with a skippy heart.

The classic, gift-based sugar relationship is the least favoured. Diamonds are not a girl's best friend, many prefer debit. Replaced, by PPM or Pay Per Meet. For the gentleman who desires a repeat escort with friendship-Esque chemistry whilst they narrate at length, for their own benefit, that escorting is in some way the gutter of morality and this is different. This is about real connection. Intimacy. At a price. These men don't necessarily need to be rich, they just need to be able to pay upfront.

Systematically evaluating my pool of potential suitors I settled on three. I'll tell you about two. I almost had four, but I came to my senses re the Savile-Rolf-Harris spin-off, a specimen displaced from the East India Trading Co. who wanted to fly me out to Africa or similar, I wasn't paying attention, distracted by "have me live in situ wearing nothing but a maid's apron."

What can I say? He wasn't offering a monthly wage.

Classic London Gentleman or "My Classic."

Perhaps it was the Londoner in us both. From his starting message to his final bid I blushed, anticipated, and rolled on my sheets forgetting myself to him. As it developed, in this game, forgetting 'yourself' is an essential prerequisite.

There's a beauty in knowing it's sex, chemistry flows easier. The questions are gone and the dance of future trade-offs embedded in the evaluation of how a future companionship will benefit either of us, abandoned.

Mr. Classic was a sensual-dominant. A collection of urban-wealth based fantasies in an unremarkable shell. A word from the wise: neither a Sir's masculine equipment nor his skills of using said, correlates with how chiselled his jawline.

Mr. Classic was smooth and Mr. Classic was safe, behind a screen absent of the bar's pick-up pecking line. At a price he had a contract of friendship with butter-rich benefits, abandoning his middle-aged wife, who I'm sure would have herself enjoyed the spas where he spread his sugar ladies against skyscraper glass to play the exhibitionist above City's lights below.

Mr. Classic wanted a nymphette from wealth. Nigella Lawson femininity. A siren who shed her clothes in forest veiled, seaside alcoves. She found the bar-boy sneaking peeks at her. She followed him back to the bar. Smiled, appreciating the boy's appreciation of her. She confidently ignored the poor locals at plastic tables, allowing the boy to examine her naked uninhibited.

Allow. Ironically chastity is the queen play piece of the Sugar game. They're paying for you and part of your job is to leave them sleepless questioning whether they'd even have to. You're enthralled with them and you're just for them.

"Mr. Sadist"

For Mr. Sadist the concept of a woman within sexual parameters was as a reciprocal for the male. More dominant, stronger, smarter, more powerful, and more successful. The male as God. You're a wet, mindless, and beautiful drone pleading to please.

You're also something more.

Outside of the walls of his sadistic hotel cell where you swallow scat and whimper in tears which he examines because it pushes him closer to climax: You're smart. Capable. Independent. You're the conquest. That artefact of educated and independent modern feminism on her knees pleading for him to backhand you.

Mr. Sadist, a handsome movie producer, didn't just want to hurt my body, he wanted to break me. Permanent trauma. A parting gift to remember him by. Fifty shades is the nursery playpen of padding-edged paraphernalia. True sadism, true dominance, the ability to Pavlov-dog condition a partner to orgasm, flies fifty layers deeper and is a psychological pig never to be presented to the pseudo-respectable face of polite society.

Mr. Sadist's fantasies included but were not limited to: drugging women to abuse their bodies for them to wake to. Promises to imprison me for days. He once told me at length on how he'd paid for a rape victim as a Sugarbaby. He'd had her recount the details of the violence reined on her whilst she masturbated him.

Disgusted and infuriated he brought back a part of me I'd stamped out and simplified and somewhere along that timeline of hibernation had spawned claws. There is a trepidatiously fine line between soda-masochistic play and psychological and physical abuse. Mr. Sadist crossed it.

The more he told me the more I had to work with. Photo-shoots of my tear-streaked face posed ever more infantile. His low bar for innocence and weakness. Others of the hourglass-corseted fair maiden begging for abuse. I developed and extended his fantasies with the brain I didn't have until I fell asleep with weak thumbs and wondered how he held down that day job.

The deeper we went the more vulnerable he made himself. Until I took away the thing he then desired most and flipped his own verbalised fears of the man he'd exposed to me. There are few times in my life I have turned tongue on someone aiming to hurt them. Using every fear he'd confessed to me, I pray he never got over it. For the women who never fully recovered after him.

I fed Mr. Classic one fantasy. Life's taxing, bankers, and politicians, big strong breadwinners. For Mr. Classic the female was the escape from the stress of success. I fed Mr. Sadist similarly. I fed them all fantasies. These men aren't signing up for a real girl between waxes with a post carb complexion.

However, manipulating them I first had to pull the same on myself. If I believe it they will. Bloating partial truths available in my world to tick a box for their desired seductress.

Unlike escorting, sugaring is a relentless gig. You're available to entertain and delight twenty-four seven. Notch by notch I was bitter. Stamping down me mournfully to humour misogyny. I was not cinematically Venus because Venus is a character construction and simple in that. Simple was what they wanted. No matter how kind, or educated or progressive the man. I simplified myself for them so they could be more.

In some, like Mr. Sadist, the desire to put women in their place ballooned to a violent extreme of objectification. Perhaps feminism has overdone it, the male ego threatened, expressing itself sickly and subconsciously. Or perhaps it's the very same feminism was founded to fight. An impulse still alive but now unwelcome and so forced to skulk behind screens aiming at an end game of preying on a young girl. Naive until she's alone, stripped, and battered post-coital on a soiled hotel bed sheet.