So I’m seeing this bloke once a month. From Harlow of all places, one of the worst places on Earth. Why?
Believe me, I’ve sat there so many times sitting in the dark, just thinking to myself, Em, what the hell are you doing? You’re better than this. But I can’t help it, I can’t stop it. Sometimes I want to stop it, but I can’t.
I’m a professional woman, I don’t have time to be messing about with dating apps, or being forced to sleep with a hundred guys just to find one I like. This one literally fell out of the sky out pure accident one day, and he’s so highly skilled I just can’t stop.
I don’t have to do anything to him, no blowjob, handjobs, no actual sex. Never seen him naked. I don’t even care. He’s a rich woman’s sex toy. A secret. I just lay there letting him do his thing and it’s better than any sex I’ve ever had. It’s worship, and that’s putting it lightly. I don’t leave feeling used and icky. I leave the hotel every time feeling broken, walking funny and so run through and it’s glorious. It hits in way sex never has. Pride intact, self respect surprisingly in order. And everything from his end so secret, that I have no problems at all.
And all it took was the balls to send a message.
Talking to other women, I may as well be selling snake oil. Not that I am, I’m not sharing his name, never. But I was there myself once, didn’t believe a word of it. I have a book written, 500 pages, all about my investigation into him, how I found him, what happened and it’s sitting there complete, has been for months, and I’m not even allowed to publish it. It was that book that sent Lisa after him. It’s so good it can turn the most innocent of women. Maybe I’ll send the PDF to anyone that asks, but I could never release it. He won’t let me. Granted, it gives me a certain bargaining chip, but that book could make me a ton of money.
But I’ve chosen something other than money.
He said, if I publish it, I lose all “benefits” as he put it.
Maybe one day. But I swear, the access more important. While I have needs and a sex drive, and while he agrees, that book stays unpublished. You have no idea how good that access is. So I am the only person person on the planet with the physical book. He has a PDF obviously, because I sent it to him, and I wanted his blessing.
Instead, I got, oh hell no!
The problem with the book is his name. Without his name, the investigation is worthless. It’s just a guy. Just another book. Like all my investigations I keep a diary. That book is essentially my diary, all the research, all real therapists I interviewed trying to find out if all the rumours were even possible let alone true. I interviewed twenty women, all in there. His competition, from back in the day, that knew him, documented. Hundreds of sources. And my spiral. I went in a reporter, and slowly, my brain doing these really unprofessional gymnastics trying to justify all kinds of nonsense. I even sent a a friend after him, secretly, before he even knew about me, to test out the rumours. That really turned it. All documented. That book had everything. Including my first meet with him. And I can’t even publish it, because without a name on it, it’s just words.
Because what he does with a woman’s body is frankly ridiculous. He makes orgasms the way magicians pull rabbits out of hats, except the rabbit is you and the hat is your nervous system and somehow he already knows which string to pull before you’ve even finished saying hello.
Nobody else has ever come close. I mean that. I’ve had decent sex. I’ve had enthusiastic sex. I’ve had the sort of sex where both people are trying really hard and you both leave feeling like you’ve done a group project. This is different. Not only is it not actual sex per say, or even at all… it’s a different meal altogether. He treats the whole thing like a craft he’s been perfecting since before I was born, and the results are so stupidly good that I’ve started budgeting for it the way other women budget for fillers.
The Trade Off
He’s far from perfect though. Sexually, yes. Can he keep you a secret the moment you send him a message? absolutely. But in every other way… he’s a fucking head scratcher!
The trade-off is that he is, in almost every other way, a complete headache. He is grumpy by default. If I suggest Tuesday he will say Wednesday. If I text that I’m on my way he will reply with something that makes me want to turn the car around. When I tell him I’m about to cum he stops. Not every time, but enough that I’ve started bracing for it.
He is rough in the way that leaves me hungry for more and a slight limp the next day. He manhandles. If I ask for a cuddle afterwards he gets up and puts his jeans back on like I’ve just asked him to discuss his childhood. Sometimes he does, but not when I ask. Every single message he sends feels engineered to trigger me, and often about nothing.
He talks to me like I’m an annoying little girl who has wandered into the wrong room and is wasting his time, even though I am thirty years old and paying him. He’s like this because firstly, someone has broken him, that much is obvious, even to an air head like me. But secondly, he knows it’s what we all love deep down. He has female psychology tapped, and it’s annoying as hell. All we’ve ever wanted is for a man to understand us, but when one does, it’s as delicious as it is annoying.
I’d never tell you who he is or how to find him because firstly, I’d get banned and something tells me it would be for good this time, and two, it’s unlikely you’d respond physically by looking at him anyway. You kind of have to look past the physical and trust the process, so much so, even his ex weren’t interested in the end. But if you get past that, do it, just the once, it rewrites everything.
I’ll say to him, so, who you seeing at the moment?
He’ll say,
Nobody. I can’t deal with too many of you at any one time.
Every compliment is a twist to keep me in my place. I know he’s lying, and I feel the jealousy in my stomach. I get it, it’s none of my business, and it’s part of his thing. But I get moody. It’s so good, he’s so good, the thought of other women enjoying it makes me puke in my mouth.
He doesn’t react. He don’t care how I feel. He hasn’t given me a silly pet name, and doesn’t treat me like a girlfriend. But it doesn’t put me off. It just makes me worse, hungrier, more desperate. The woman that get’s everything she wants, when she wants, now does as she’s told by a grown up and by a man in a world of feminine men. I can’t get enough.
Part of me knows he can’t give me up, because I’m his high earner. I pay him £1000 in his pocket, the rest on his debt, and he earns it. That being said, I want him all to myself, and at the same time, I want him seeing others just to keep him him at arms length. He is a total confusing mess.
I’ve seen him change.
When I first met him he was just a normal guy licking his wounds. I know nothing about his ex, I don’t even know her name, but I feel the damage. I feel the utter disrespect he has when he looks at me, or one of the women we pass in the hotel corridors giving him a cute smile as they look up in awe. The damage is obvious.
Now his ducks are in a row, his personality is now dark and grounded, rarely smiles and he cares about nothing, nobody, people are cattle to him. And I’m not going to lie, it’s hot. He’ll crack a one liner, knowing it hits you in the gut. It’s never insulting on a personal level, it’s always a crack that’s funny but it also has teeth, bitterness, but it doesn’t hurt long. He’ll drop a smile quickly soothing the pain. Maybe it’s because he is the high energy and rough in the sheets I’ve always wanted that does it. I’ve only ever had men that treat as me something breakable, giving me silly pet names a worshipping me like I’m special to the point of vomit. He does none of that. He’s there to do a job and does it. Without asking me if I’m fine half way through, he knows I’m fine, better than fine. He knows what I like and does it.
And I cannot get enough of it.
I keep turning it over in my head the way you keep poking a bruise.
Why does this land?
Why do so many of us end up circling men who treat ordinary requests like personal insults and still show up once a month because the sex rewires the week? I am not interested in the tidy answers. “Because trauma” is too neat and also too easy. Plenty of women with perfectly ordinary childhoods still find themselves refreshing the chat with someone who has never once done the thing they asked for on the first ask.
So let’s actually look at it.
The body knows before the brain does
There is a particular silence that happens right before he decides to stop. My breathing changes. The muscles in my thighs start doing that involuntary tremble. I can feel the edge of it, the point where everything is about to tip, and then he just… doesn’t. Sometimes he pulls back an inch. Sometimes he keeps the same pace but moves his hand somewhere less useful.
Don’t give me that shit about not telling when I’m about to cum. He knows, I can’t hide. There’s something that happens down there that none of us know about, something secret that lights us up like a set of traffic lights.
Sometimes he asks a question in that flat voice like we’re discussing the bins. The orgasm doesn’t vanish. It just gets delayed, stretched, made slightly worse and therefore slightly better. My body learns the pattern faster than my dignity does. After the third or fourth time it starts anticipating the interruption the way it anticipates the good part. The wanting gets louder because it has to fight for it.
This is not the same as being with someone who is simply bad at sex. Bad sex is forgettable. This is skilled sex that withholds at the exact moment the skill would be most obvious. It creates a tiny loop in the nervous system: the thing that feels best is also the thing that might be taken away. Once that loop is running, ordinary reliable sex starts to feel a bit flat by comparison. Not worse, exactly. Just less interesting. The brain starts treating the grumpiness and the contrary replies as part of the same package. The headache is no longer separate from the magic. They arrive together.
He is allowed to be difficult because the difficulty is expensive
Most of the time, in ordinary dating, a man who argues with you over the day of the week gets blocked by Friday. You do not have the energy. You have friends, work, a life that already contains enough people who need managing. This one gets a pass because the thing he is good at is rare enough that the rest of the nonsense starts to look like the cover charge.
Once a month is not a relationship. It is an appointment. Appointments can tolerate a certain amount of friction that a boyfriend cannot. You can leave the argument in the car park. You do not have to introduce him to anyone. You do not have to explain why he never replies to the group chat. The limited contact makes the bad behaviour feel containable. It also makes the good behaviour feel concentrated. Two hours of someone who knows exactly what he is doing can outweigh a fortnight of someone who is kind but vague.
There is also the small, slightly ugly fact that paying changes the maths. When you are the one handing over the money, some part of you expects to be in charge of the schedule and the tone. When he still refuses to be in charge of either, the refusal registers as a choice rather than neglect. He is not failing to text back because he is busy or forgetful. He is choosing the more irritating option on purpose, and he can afford to because you have already decided the sex is worth the irritation. That decision sits in the background of every message. It gives him room to be difficult that a free man does not get.
The little girl voice and the thirty-year-old who still answers it
He calls me things that would sound ridiculous if anyone else said them. Not cute nicknames. More like the tone you use when a child keeps asking the same question. “Again?” “We’ve done this.” “Stop.”
I’m thirty. I have a job and own multiple properties and opinions about politics that would bore him rigid. None of that seems to matter once the clothes are off or even, sometimes, while they are still on. Part of me hates it. Part of me notices that the hating does not stop me from texting back. There is a strange relief in being spoken to like competence is irrelevant. Most days I am required to be the adult in several rooms at once. I manage people, deadlines, family logistics, the low-level performance of being a reasonable woman who does not make everything about her.
With him the performance is not required. He reduces to me to being pointless. He has already decided I am difficult and small and not worth the effort of proper conversation. I do not have to prove otherwise because he will not be convinced. The only thing that works is what happens when he decides to pay attention with his hands instead of his words.
Plenty of women recognise this even if they would never book the appointment. The man who treats you like an inconvenience can also be the man who does not require you to manage his feelings about your desire. He is not waiting for you to reassure him that you still fancy him. He is not checking whether the roughness was too much. He assumes the roughness was the point and moves on. For someone who spends a lot of time translating her own wants into language other people can tolerate, the absence of translation can feel like a holiday. It is a shit holiday. The hotel is rude and the minibar is empty. But you do not have to smile at reception.
Someone has clearly treated this bloke badly at some point. A girlfriend, a death, an attack, some ordinary slow erosion that left him with no interest in being managed or soothed. His solitude in recent years has left him at a point where actual levity is painful. Who knows the details. The rest of us just end up paying the invoice for it. Not in a tragic way. More in the he will not put up with any shit kind of way. Even Lisa clocked it after one conversation and said he comes across as very guarded, like the drawbridge stays up unless he decides otherwise. I’m very jealous of her too, she’s a pretty little thing, I’m the ugly mate and now I’ve given up asking if they still talk, I never get a straight answer anyway. She has a boyfriend now, but I doubt that would stop it. That guardedness is what lets him ignore the request for Tuesday and still get paid on Wednesday. It is also what stops the whole thing from sliding into the usual back and forth where someone has to be talked into wanting you.
Why the fight over nothing keeps working
The texts are the part that should be easiest to ignore and somehow are not. A message that could have been “7pm” becomes three sentences about how I always change plans and never stick to anything. I know, rationally, that this is nonsense. We see each other once a month. There are no plans to change. Still, I find myself typing a reply that defends a version of events neither of us actually lived.
The argument is pointless and I know it is pointless while I am having it. That knowledge does not stop the small spike of adrenaline. Something in the exchange feels like proof that he is still thinking about me between appointments, even if the thinking is mostly irritation. Neutral silence would be worse. Neutral silence would mean the appointment is just an appointment and nothing else is happening in his head. The fight, however stupid, suggests occupancy. He has room in his day to be annoyed by me. For some of us that registers, against all better judgement, as a form of attention.
This is the bit that is hardest to admit out loud. A lot of women are extremely good at being low-maintenance until they meet someone who refuses to let them be. Then the low-maintenance setting starts to feel like it was never really chosen. It was just the setting that stopped other people from leaving. When a man will not be managed, the part of you that has been managing everyone else gets a night off and also gets slightly furious about it. The fury and the relief sit in the same place. You can want him to be less of a dick and still notice that the dickishness is what stops the evening from feeling like every other evening.
Roughness as a shortcut past the polite version of sex
Most sex, even good sex, contains a certain amount of negotiation that never quite leaves the room. Are you comfortable. Is this okay. Do you want me to slow down. The questions are reasonable and also, after a while, a little exhausting if what you actually want is to stop being consulted.
He does not consult.
He moves you. He decides the angle, the pressure, the moment he will or will not let the thing finish. Some of those decisions are better than anything I would have asked for. Some of them are worse. The point is that I am not the one making them in real time. For a few hours the constant low-level project of translating desire into requests that will not be rejected or misunderstood gets put down. The body gets to react instead of direct. That is rarer than it should be. Once you have had it, the version where everything is discussed and agreed in advance can start to feel like sex with the training wheels still on, even when the training wheels were your own idea.
None of this requires the man to be a good person. It does not even require him to like you very much. It requires him to be competent at one specific thing and careless about almost everything else. The carelessness reads, to a certain kind of tired nervous system, as confidence. Confidence is attractive even when it is attached to someone who would lose an argument with a parking meter. The attraction does not cancel out the parking meter. It just means you keep the appointment anyway.
He does it, walks away, nobody ever finds out, he doesn’t discuss me, boast, nobody in his life even knows I exist. And that is a draw in itself. To be a persons secret. I don’t know why, but it has a pull. It’s not because he’s ashamed of me, it’s just part of the deal. It’s how he does things. Every convo, text, email and night, never once his mouth in a world where everyone boasts about everything. That’s why I won’t ever reveal who is, because I’m sure most of you would want that. Someone that could satisfy you and ruin you every time and be silent about it. I never knew that even, I could even exist.
I challenge all of you, when you find a guy like this, send him a message, say you want to discuss something but it must be secret and nobody must know. If all you get is an “okay”, with nothing else, and you know he has a reputation, you’re in. You tell him what you want and what you need, then take his lead off and give yourself to him. And I promise you, you’re in for the time of your life if you have constitution for it. It’s glorious. If he gives the speech, “Oh babe, I would never….” then gives a long dire tribe why secrecy is important, then he’s over compensating and fooling only himself.
What we are actually chasing when we say we do not know why
I do not think most of us are chasing punishment, although the marks sometimes look like it. I think a lot of us are chasing a few hours in which our own competence is irrelevant and our own politeness is not required. The grumpy, contrary, slightly cruel competence supplies that. It also supplies an orgasm that does not need to be talked into existence. Those two things together are strong enough to survive a lot of bad texts and worse manners. The psychology is not especially mysterious once you stop looking for a single clean reason and start looking at what the nervous system is being offered that it does not get anywhere else: skilled attention that does not ask to be managed, difficulty that stays inside the appointment, and a body that is allowed to want something inconvenient without having to justify the inconvenience in advance.
I still do not have a tidy ending. I will probably see him next month. I will probably argue with him about the day. I will probably leave with the same slight limp and the same stupid grin I am trying not to examine too closely on the drive home. The fact that I can describe all of this and still want the appointment does not make the wanting smarter. It just makes it harder to file under “I should know better.” Most of us already know better. Knowing better has never been the part that decides whether the car gets turned around.
The guys an asshole. But he’s also my guilty pleasure. I both hate it and love it.
He’s the only only guy that makes me forget everything for a few hours.
As always, email me about this, the book, him, or any story, even submit one at emmawebb19976@hotmail.com or fill out the form below…