Tales of a NYC Sex Worker, Part 26: Money, It’s a Gas
By: Melinda Night, Brooklyn Beck, Call Girl
Tags: Christmas, Brooklyn, Sex Work, Chicago, Blowjob

Tales of a NYC Sex Worker, Part 26: Money, It’s a Gas

Photo (NOT of me, by the way) by Andre Sebastian on Unsplash

On Monday morning, September 27 I was in an elevator riding up to Office Guy’s small rented office again, my fourth time seeing him in eight days. I was actually a little turned on at the thought of stripping for him and giving him another blowjob, maybe partly because I’d told Roxanne I planned to imagine she was watching us this time just to make things interesting. But in almost two months doing this work I hadn’t really gotten turned on before a call where nobody was going to be doing anything to me.

My mind was also wandering to the question of why this guy would book me so much so quickly, and how much money he must have been laying out between renting the office and paying Dev whatever the total fee was that my cut came out of. Not that I wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth or bite the hand that feeds me or whatever metaphor you want, but I wondered what it would be like to have so much money I could spend it on something so crazy instead of worrying about the rent.

I started writing this blog entry from the living room of my sister Dina’s and her fiancée Cassie’s apartment in Chicago, where I was spending part of my Christmas vacation (the rest was at my Mom’s house in one of the two suburbs where Dina and I grew up). Cassie suggested that I tell this part of the story after the three of us had a serious conversation about what I’m getting out of this blog; she thought you might find the truth about Medium and my blog interesting. She also thought it might help me work through a really difficult emotional time… but more about that later.

After a few months of posting about my life and my sex work on Medium, one thing I noticed is that a lot of other writers seem to have landed on Medium based on the idea that they’d be able to earn a living just from posting articles here, or they’d at least make a little extra spending cash. The main way Medium writers do that is by “metering” their stories — putting them behind a paywall, where the reader has to be a paying subscriber to Medium in order to read those stories. The more paid members read your stories, the more times anyone who’s able to read your stories “claps” for one of them (the Medium equivalent of a “like,” except you can clap for the same story dozens of times), the more money you’ll make.

I haven’t metered my stories. I’ve kept my blog entirely free of charge.

But aren’t you trying to pay off a massive debt??

Yes, and that’s most of why I became an escort. I make pretty good money spending time with my clients and providing services that they’ve decided are valuable to them.

So why did you start writing about it, if not to make more money?

I started writing about my experiences as a sex worker and the circumstances in my life that led me there because I thought people might be surprised to learn about the very real women behind the stereotypes that everyone seems to have about us. I’m not a victim of child abuse or a drug addict, I’m not turning tricks to be able to crash on a pimp’s couch because I got evicted and I’d be homeless otherwise, I’m not a nymphomaniac, and I’m not punishing and exploiting men (and women).

I’m just a girl who’s been through a lot, who owes a ridiculous amount of money, and who found a way to start clawing her way out of that debt doing something she loves most of the time — something America’s puritanical roots and conservative politics have taught us to think is immoral and disgusting. I think people reading about my experiences might be able to shake off their own personal stigmas and stereotypes and see sex work for what it really is — real work that deserves respect and is in high demand, being done by real people who deserve respect.

Couldn’t you still do those things and make money from your writing at the same time?

Sure I could. But here’s the thing — right now even though all my articles are free, usually around a few hundred people will read each one. At my best I think Part 1 has had somewhere around 1,200 readers total. But that took four months, and almost none of those readers are paid members. If I metered my stories, I might make a few bucks from those paid members’ reads, I might get a few followers to make the leap from free to paid, and I might get some attention from other paid members around Medium that would also make me a bit of money, but I have to think I would also have a lot fewer readers in general. So if I made $25 extra every month as a result, would that be worth shrinking my audience from 300 to, say, 50?

Would your answer change if I told you that what I earned in my first four months of sex work would work out to be a low six-figure annual income? So let’s even be insanely optimistic and say I might earn $100/month extra from metering my stories here (which I doubt would ever happen). Is making low six figures plus $1,200 instead of “just” low six figures worth a much smaller audience, and a higher barrier for new readers to discover what I have to say?

I think it’s more important for me to help destigmatize sex work and sex workers than it is for me to make a few extra bucks from Medium. And in the meantime, I actually am making a few extra bucks from Medium — it turns out that if someone lands on Medium for the first time by clicking one of my blog links and then buys a paid membership, I get a little piece of their monthly membership fee even though I’m not metering my stories. Apparently that piece is $2.27/month. And one person has done that so far, so I’ve earned $9.08 over the last four months.

I’ll try not to spend it all in one place.

Why don’t you set up a “Buy Me a Coffee” type of tip jar or an Amazon gift card wish list or something? That way, your fans could give you a little something if they just happened to be feeling generous.

Because I think that would probably have an even smaller impact than metering my stories on Medium. And that’s not what this blog is about.

So that Monday morning I may have stripped a little faster than usual because I was turned on, and I don’t think it bothered Office Guy because he knew what was next. I gave him an outstanding blowjob that morning, and with the weird image in my mind of Roxanne watching us from on top of a nearby filing cabinet, I played with myself while I was doing it. And I made sure he knew I was playing with myself. I looked up at him more and locked eyes with him while he stared at me sucking on his cock and pleasuring myself at the same time. I rubbed myself faster. I thought about the money, about how kind his eyes seemed, and about how much I had looked forward to this call all weekend, and I came.

After I came, I worked harder on Office Guy’s dick with my lips and tongue and hand, and I kept staring into his eyes until he came in my mouth. I haven’t been so happy to swallow someone’s cum probably since high school, when I blew my then-boyfriend for the first time and I was convinced we were falling in love.

The first few times I visited Office Guy he said something to me after I was done and getting dressed. This time he was silent. He just kept looking at me, at my face, at my body with a little smile on his face. And when I was fully dressed and ready to go, all he did was give me a quick nod.

Inside I heard myself think, Kiss him. I had no idea where that came from. My face felt hot all of a sudden. I got the hell out of there before I could screw anything up by acting on it.

That evening I got a text from Dev letting me know that Office Guy wanted me back again for Wednesday and Thursday, and I quickly confirmed. Six times in eleven days?! This was insane! But it was also goddamn exciting. Obviously I was doing something right, something he was connecting with.

Tuesday Dev texted me to ask if I was up for a repeat visit to Gamer on Friday night, another two-girl call (with a new second girl who wasn’t Ginger, of course), and I said yes. Later that day on a Zoom call with my Mom, I got the surreal but still happy news that she was seeing someone seriously for the first time since she and my Dad divorced a decade ago. And those were fun distractions but I was mostly thinking about Office Guy and what Wednesday might be like.

Rupert picked me up Wednesday morning, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Office Guy wants an upgrade if you’re down for it.”

“Full service?” I asked, my heart pounding.

“Full service,” he confirmed.

“Works for me,” I said calmly and somehow forced myself not to grin.

Forty-five minutes later I was naked in front of Office Guy for the fifth time, nervous as hell without really knowing why. This time I undressed him from the top all the way down, and he lay down naked on top of his desk. I leaned down over him and took him in my mouth for a few seconds, but I was too wet and too impatient for any longer than that. He directed me to a condom in the desk drawer, and I had that thing on him fast. Then I climbed up onto the desk with him and mounted him.

I remember the moment when I slid down onto him for the first time and he was looking me in the eyes. He didn’t say anything and neither did I, but what I felt in that moment was that it wasn’t Melinda he had entered, it was Samantha. He was seeing me for who I was, not for who he was paying me to be. Or at least that’s what I imagined when I started riding him. Maybe I was completely delusional.

Either way, he guided my hips with his hands and it felt great. I rode him hard up and down, forward and back, grinding my clit against him as much as I could, my hands on his chest. I didn’t think about the role I was playing, about how much older he was than me, about how much I was getting paid or about how much money he had. He was just a guy who needed me and made his needs clear, and that was a huge fucking turn-on.

I came from riding Office Guy, and I know he felt it. I leaned down and kissed his neck while I kept riding him. He felt fantastic inside me, and I didn’t really want it to end but I also wanted him to enjoy this as much as possible so I reached behind me and below my ass to tickle his balls. About thirty seconds of that, and he grabbed hold of me tight and grunted.

After slowing to a stop, we lay there on the desk holding each other for a few minutes. With most clients, even the ones I liked, I wasn’t in the habit of lingering or being vulnerable. With Office Guy I felt safe, and I felt like he wanted me to feel safe. To be safe. I wondered what he was like outside of that building, what he might wear to go to a museum or a casual lunch instead of a fake business meeting. And as soon as I started picturing it, I realized I was heading down a dangerous path and I should go.

“Tomorrow,” was all he said to me when I left, but he was smiling. And so was I.

That night I told Roxanne about all of it and wondered what the hell was wrong with me. I was sitting there having a conversation about sex work with my friend while clearly yearning and aching for the middle-aged dude who had a premature ejaculation problem the first time I met him. She asked me how far I thought I could take it if there was a real connection there, if he really was lusting after me instead of just lusting, and I immediately knew I had to ask him to go down on me. I told her.

“You could even make it sound like it’s a bonus for him if you frame it right,” Roxanne suggested, and I laughed.

It wasn’t funny the next morning. I was so wet thinking about it by the time I finished stripping that I was starting to leave a stain on the chair. When I approached Office Guy this time, instead of undressing him I simply lay down on the desk with my knees up and slowly spread them apart. “I decided that you should get to go down on me, too,” I said. My voice shook when I said those words and I hoped to God he couldn’t hear it. If he could, it didn’t deter him — he knelt down on the floor, grabbed my thighs, and pulled me forward roughly so that my ass was at the edge of his desk.

“You’re so beautiful,” he said. I closed my eyes as his tongue touched me for the first time. He ate me out like someone who had already eaten me a hundred times just to figure out what would work best on me. He was much better than my ex Matt had been our first time together, and light-years ahead of the widower. His mouth played my pussy like a virtuoso plays a musical instrument and I couldn’t stand it or believe it. I was torn between wanting him to keep going down on me forever and wanting his dick inside of me immediately.

I don’t want to want any of my clients this much, I thought. On the other hand if I was going to want any of my clients this much, it might as well be the guy who was booking me a few times a week. “Enough,” I squeaked after Office Guy made me cum. “Fuck me now.” He stood up and his suit pants ripped as he pulled them off too quickly. While he was grabbing a condom out of the desk drawer, I stood up off the desk and bent over it with my ass up in the air. “Fuck me, goddammit,” I repeated. Who the hell was I?

That old man gripped my hips, slid inside of me from behind, then grabbed my breasts as he started railing me and it fucking felt fantastic. I wanted this man. Why did I want this man? Why did I want this man while I was having him? How could we fit so well together when we don’t know each other and he’s three times my age? He released one of my tits, reached down around my front, and quickly found my clit with his fingers. He rubbed it perfectly while he pumped in and out of me, and I came again hard after a few minutes of that. He kept on pounding away and I was glad he couldn’t see the huge smile on my face.

Why did I care why I wanted him? How could I choose anyone better to want than someone who also wanted me and was paying to be with me and was so fucking good at doing me?? You’d better book me again for next week, I prayed silently. Several times, I added.

When he finally came, he wrapped his arms around me in a tight hug and just kept our bodies melded together for a while. I didn’t want him to let go but I had to keep it professional, so when he started to get up I didn’t protest.

I dressed more slowly than before so I would have a little more time with Office Guy, since I actually didn’t know whether he was going to book me again. When I was finally ready to go, I told him I hoped he had enjoyed my visit. He stepped forward, took my face in his hands, and kissed me sweetly. I kissed him back. I felt myself wanting to keep the kiss going and not stop. So I broke it off as quickly but as gently as I could, and I left.

The rest of the day I had trouble focusing on anything. I wanted a text from Dev that day telling me I would have another three calls with Office Guy next week, but it never arrived, and to my surprise that hurt a little.

On the first day of October I awoke refreshed, and determined to be in the moment that night with Gamer and whatever other girl Dev was assigning to do him with me. I tried to put Office Guy out of my mind for the time being.

Then I got a text from Dev. It wasn’t the text I had been hoping for, and it absolutely floored me. Office Guy wanted me for only one call next week. One three-day, two-night call. In a hotel. Him and me in a hotel by ourselves from Monday afternoon through Wednesday morning.

What. The. Fuck??

Part 27 is now available here.