Ruined

by Fen Wilde

  They’re sitting at a trendy Sydney café, enjoying brunch in the sunshine. Natalie is painfully conscious of her mother’s likely response at family lunch later in the day. The tight lips, the frown when Natalie doesn’t eat three servings. Even tighter lips when she makes her excuse about brunch with Eloise.

  But you knew you had family lunch, Upeksha would be thinking. Why would you go out for brunch just before lunch with the family?

  Natalie and Eloise have been friends since law school. Eloise is a high-flying human rights lawyer. She even looks a bit like Amal—tall, dark, striking. Feminine. She’s unphased by Natalie’s defection to sex work, and one of only two friends who are aware of it.

  She’s more interested in the pregnancy than the client requesting menstrual blood splatter, however.

  “How are you feeling about the termination?”

  Natalie hesitates. She doesn’t really know how to answer that, and her stomach tightens at the thought. But she feigns a confidence that she doesn’t feel.

  “Indifferent. It doesn’t even feel like a termination. It’s just medication. Then bleeding and cramps, apparently.”

  It’s not that she can’t be honest with her friend. It’s more that she’s not being entirely honest with herself, though Natalie doesn’t recognise that, even as she hesitates.

  “Surely in your line of work you should be on the pill, not relying on condoms?”

  Natalie shrugs and shakes her head. “I don’t like the pill. It makes me feel crazy. Angry. Something. Also, I’ve never had a condom break before. Ever. And, ironically, it wasn’t even with a client. It was some hot guy who accosted me on the street.”

  Eloise drops her fork back on to her plate with a clatter. She looks shocked. She can’t remember the last time Natalie had sex just for fun.

  “Don’t you usually just give them your card?” she murmurs, trying to recover a neutral face.

  “I thought about it. But I wanted to have sex with him. So I went with the flow. He keeps texting me, actually.”

  Eloise’s fork, which she’d just picked up, is placed gently down again. “And?” she asks nonchalantly, almost as though worried that if she looks too enthusiastic, she’ll scare Natalie off the topic.

  “I was all done up for work. I had a cancellation. So really, he met Ivy. I even told him my name was Ivy,” Natalie shrugs again. “So it was just a lovely aberration, really. You know how I feel about relationships while working.”

  Eloise looks at Natalie shrewdly. “I know how you feel about relationships,” she returns. Her concern about Natalie’s ability to shut people out existed long before sex work was used as a justification. “Sometimes, I think you chose this work so you have an excuse not to have a go at being close to someone.”

  “I chose this work to pay for Alex’s medical expenses,” Natalie says, terse, though that is not strictly true, either. Working as a lawyer would have more than covered any gaps. Not even Natalie is sure why she said that. She’s never felt the need to justify her choice before. She chose sex work because she wanted to do it.

  “Also, it suits me,” she adds. “I was too lazy to deal with working til 8 p.m. every night. I don’t know how you can still function at that time. Law is the crazy job if you ask me, not sex work.”

  Afterwards, on the drive to her parents’ place, Natalie tries to pin down how she feels about the termination.

  The truth is, she feels worse about it than she can articulate.

  She imagines holding a baby in her arms, and her stomach flip-flops all over the place.

  It’s not longing of any sort. She has never been maternal. She has never ooh-ed and ahh-ed over other people’s babies. She’s looked at them with slight distaste, their shrivelled little old-man faces, their screams. Their mess.

  So it’s not longing.

  It’s more a sort of questioning. Second-guessing herself.

  She’s not superstitious either, but nevertheless, it feels like some kind of sign.

  The one time she has sex for pleasure, not cash.

  The one time the condom breaks—at least, as far as she knows.

  The one time a man keeps infiltrating her thoughts.

  Griffin has texted twice more. The perfect texts. Not needy. Not pleading. Not disgruntled that she hasn’t replied. Just persistent. Upping the flirtiness, when she didn’t respond to the bossier one, and completely at ease with himself. Unafraid to convey that he wants her.

  All the things she has never wanted are all converging, right now, being handed to her on a silver platter.

  The man.

  The hot, perceptive, sex-god man.

  The baby.

  She’s thirty-eight. It’s now or never.

  A normal life.

  Natalie shakes her head. Where are these thoughts coming from? Is it just fear of missing out? That once that window closes, it’s closed for good? The ticking clock? Do all women who haven’t wanted children their whole lives have this moment of doubt? she wonders to herself.

  For someone who thinks she knows her own mind remarkably well, this uncertainty and second-guessing is unnerving. Unsettling. She needs to think.

  Thinking, of course, is difficult at her parents’ house.

  Natalie walks up to the front door slowly.

  Alex greets her as he always does.

  Natalie feels the tightness in her chest as she always does.

  Despite her brunch, she does her best to eat copiously.

  Upeksha nods in satisfaction.

  5

  Four Months Earlier – December 2017

  Natalie is supposed to be thinking about sex.

  Sex with Marek, in particular.

  But she’s not. She’s thinking about race. Again.

  Her mother would be mortified. Firstly that Natalie was on all fours, being gently lathered in soap and then patted dry by an older man—a brown one, no less. Secondly that she was in this position for money—though the amount of money in question would give her pause. Escorting Natalie-style is not the seedy type of affair you see referenced in popular sitcoms.

  In particular, though, Upeksha would be mortified that Natalie was once again thinking about race. Because, if it were not for the fact that Marek was brown, Natalie had just realised, she would probably consider this a racist fetish—if it were a white man, cleaning a brown woman before sex could seem sinister. And now she was not only thinking about race during work, which Marek was paying an astoundingly large amount of money for, and probably deserved more of her attention—but she was also thinking about her mother.

  She pulls herself back to the present.

  Marek is a new client, which is always a stressful experience. Natalie can’t let her guard down with new clients. She thinks she’s a good judge of character, good at reading people—but then, there was that guy at the Radisson who seemed so gentle and attentive, and then tied her up and wouldn’t untie her at the end of his booking. He’d jeered at her and called her a sloppy black cunt and had verbally terrorised her for twenty minutes before releasing her, refusing to pay. It was the only time she hadn’t been paid in eight years of escorting. It still stung. Not the loss of money—the fact that it left their sex as something murky. Not a transaction where both parties got what they came for.

  It was an abuse. An attack. An exertion of power.

  God, she thinks to herself now, nearly patted dry. She is being a very lacklustre guest for poor Marek.

  Still. She hopes the bath over the dining table is as weird as it’s going to get.

  Later, she’s sitting in silence with Eloise over dinner when her phone pings.

  Griffin: Not even a coffee? Not even a pash?

  Eloise snatches it up.

  “I’m going to accept,” she says, keying in Natalie’s passcode without missing a beat.

  “Don’t you dare,” Natalie warns, her tone mild. She knows Eloise won’t actually send the message. “How do you know my passcode, anyway?”

  “Darl
ing, you’ve used the same passcode for every phone and bank card you’ve ever had for as long as I’ve known you. I could empty your bank accounts if I wanted to.”

  Natalie snatches her phone back. She looks at Griffin’s message, wondering.

  But then she remembers all the reasons it’s a bad idea, and puts it away.

  “Just go for a coffee,” Eloise urges. “He sounded fun.”

  “He was indeed fun,” Natalie says, “but fun, at some point, will turn into telling him I’m an escort. And then things will start to get un-fun very quickly.”

  “You don’t know that. You’ve said lots of the escorts you know have relationships.”

  “They have relationships. I didn’t say they were functional relationships. I don’t know any of them well enough to ask. But I find it hard to imagine how you negotiate having sex with other men in your relationship, without there being so much weirdness that it blows up in your face.” Personally, Natalie doesn’t think it matters in the slightest. It feels like any job to her. But she feels doubtful that any old guy she picked up on the street—literally—would be evolved enough to cope with it. Most men, she suspects, would freak the fuck out.

  Natalie doesn’t mention to Eloise the other problem relating to Griffin, though. That, in fact, she has not yet had an abortion. That she is now beyond the time when she can have a medical abortion, and needs to have a surgical one.

  It’s not that she doesn’t trust Eloise or value her opinion. It’s more that she does not even recognise the Natalie who cancelled the appointment. She can’t talk about it because she does not have any actual words to say. All she has is a feeling, an uneasiness, a sense of something bad approaching.

  In her mind, she wants to say it’s biology: her body fighting against her essence, her soul. The hormones, maybe, coursing through her veins, sending messages that she doesn’t want to hear.

  That she would never have been receptive to had that condom not broken.

  Is it possible that messages are distorted once hormones start running amok in your body? she wonders. The message has been simple and clear for as long as Natalie can remember.

  No children.

  Why was it getting jumbled now? It’s inconvenient and infuriating. Natalie can’t work out what she truly thinks under all the other noise.

  “Well, I have some other news,” Eloise says, bringing her back to the present. “It’s about Grant Boyd.”

  Natalie’s focus switches gears seamlessly. Worries about relationships and foetuses fade into irrelevant background noise.

  “He’s being released from his latest stint in Long Bay. He served four years of a six-year sentence. I don’t know why anyone ever lets him out. He’ll be back in within the year, I guarantee it.”

  Natalie nods. She relies on Eloise to do the digging about this particular case, to keep her informed. They agreed that this was a way for Natalie to not get immersed in it.

  Unhealthily.

  “There’s more, though.” Eloise hesitates, concern in her eyes. Natalie just nods at her. She’s heard the worst news she could ever hear regarding Grant Boyd. She is sure nothing else will ever compare.

  “His parents were both killed in a car crash a couple of years ago. And for his parole he’s moving back into their home.”

  Natalie digests this information without responding.

  Grant Boyd living a few houses down from her parents is not acceptable.

  But living that close to Alex is enraging.

  “Nat?” Eloise asks a few moments later. Natalie becomes aware of shredding her napkin. She places it back on the table, smooths it down, and puts her hands neatly in her lap. Then she looks back up at Eloise.

  “Is there anything we can do?” she asks in a low voice, though she knows the answer.

  She presses her teeth together after speaking, her jaw clenching painfully, to prevent herself from grinding them.

  “I’ve already left a message with the parole officer. I’ll ask for a stipulation to be added, that he doesn’t go near their house or approach any of them. That’s about as much as we can do.”

  Natalie nods. She feels slightly breathless.

  Later, impulsively—recklessly—she texts Griffin.

  Natalie: Sure. How about coffee tomorrow at 10?

  His response dings through immediately.

  Griffin: I thought you’d never ask.

  6

  He thinks everything is going according to plan.

  Trust has been established.

  Now, it’s just a matter of time. Time and opportunity.

  This is the best one yet.

  But he needs to be patient.

  Everything has to be just right.

  Everything has to be perfect.

  So that there can be this time, and a next time, and another.

  Good things come to those who wait.

  He must wait for the right moment to make the next move.

  7

  “I was just about ready to give up on you.”

  Griffin is sitting across from Natalie, his eyes boring into her much like they did that first time. She feels undressed, exposed by his gaze. She squirms uncomfortably.

  “I have a busy life,” she says uneasily, wrapping both hands around her coffee, feeling suddenly cold, though it’s a bright early summer morning, warmth and promise radiating off the pavement on her walk here.

  Now that they’re seated, Natalie can’t quite work out why she proposed this meeting after all. Was it just an amateur attempt to shake off the bad feelings associated with Grant and abortions and her ticking clock? Sex was, after all, a distraction in itself.

  She didn’t turn to sex work because she hated sex.

  “So do I. But I make time for the important things.”

  At this, Natalie just manages to stop herself from rolling her eyes. Which part of our last encounter makes this important? she thinks, assuming he is referring to the sex. Which was, frankly, pretty memorable—and that is saying something, for Natalie, amidst a sea of often really very interesting sex.

  “It was a sign, our cars crashing,” he says, not smiling. “I knew I’d missed an opportunity at the gallery to meet you. I don’t often let opportunities pass me by.” Then he smiles, his eyes crinkling pleasantly, his intensity softened by the twinkle in his eyes. “So you see, it was meant to be.”

  Natalie shivers again. She doesn’t need someone else filling her head with signs and superstition.

  Still, sitting across from her in his nicely cut suit, with his black eyes and his sexy stare, Natalie can’t help but respond to him. She finds his attraction to her almost embarrassing, but still she feels a throbbing between her legs. And what was she here for, after all? A distraction, she thinks to herself. A distraction from all the other stuff going on in my life.

  So she relents a little.

  He doesn’t ask where she’s from, or even about her heritage, which is a good start. He asks about her work (she lies) and what she likes to do in her spare time (she tells him painting, brunch with friends, quiet mornings with the newspaper or a good book—the truth).

  He tells her about his business: importing and exporting various items that she doesn’t understand and has absolutely no interest in.

  He tells her that he enjoyed their encounter last month more than he has enjoyed anything in years. As he says that, he takes her hand, traces a finger along the inside of her wrist and around her palm.

  “I want you,” he tells her, his voice low and sexy. “Come home with me.”

  Home, it turns out, is Sheraton on the Park.

  Now that he has her where he wants her, some of his intensity dissipates. He pours her a glass of Riesling, though it’s barely midday, and agrees that this is not, in fact, his home.

  “I live out of a suitcase a lot. Trips to China, Singapore, all the major Australian cities. Sometimes, I wonder whether there’s any point in having a house at all.”

  “You’ve got to have somewhere
to keep all your stuff,” Natalie replies absentmindedly. Disinterestedly, perhaps. The room is beautifully appointed, but she’s used to being in nice hotel rooms. She wonders what Griffin would say if he knew. “Where is this pointless house, anyway?”

  “Melbourne,” he replies, clinking his glass to hers, a neat whiskey, then patting the couch beside him. They’re facing floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay. “Do you get there much?”

  “Sometimes, for work,” Natalie replies, which is true. She regularly tours Melbourne for four or five days at a time, meeting new clients, catching up with friends. But she lets Griffin imagine it in the context of lawyer-ing.

  She takes small sips of her wine. Conscious of the little life inside her. Wondering what that means. Just in case, she tells herself hastily.

  Suddenly, seeing Griffin again seems futile. Not only has she failed to mention she is, right this minute, carrying his child, but she has told him lie after lie about her work-related activities. She curses her spontaneity in landing her here. Nothing good is going to come of this.

  “Well, I should get going,” she says, moving to stand up, though she has barely touched her wine and they have only been in the hotel for about seven minutes. But Griffin puts a hand on her leg, and he might as well have lain on top of her. She wants him to lie on top of her. Naked. Licking and touching her like he did last time. Drawing her so far out of herself, her usual role in sex, that she gets lost in the moment.

  “I want to kiss you. Now,” Griffin says. He’s so commanding, so sure of himself. He takes complete control, and Natalie loves relinquishing it. She feels freer than she has in a long, long time.

  As he leans in toward her, his hand slides ever so slightly up her thigh. It’s a suggestion, a promise, a message for her rather than a touch to satiate himself. Already she longs for his hand to go higher, for his fingers to slide under her briefs, for him to feel how wet she is, to part her lips and push inside her.