What Hookers Do on Valentine's Day

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R and I were introduced by a married couple who enjoyed playing Cupid for their pet bachelor, a junior I-banker. A guy from the wrong side of the tracks who had put himself through business school, he was still paying off his student loans. I've always been partial to men who have to make it on their own. After our fourth date, I decided not to hide my work from him.

When I pointed out that I'd been in bed with more women than he had—"and I'm not even into girls!"—he laughed. He admired me for being a self-made woman, and wanted me to meet his mother, though we stopped short of telling his family about my scarlet career.

I thought I was rather edgy, a former teen runaway thumbing her nose at society, but as February 14 rolled around I couldn’t help falling for the most saccharine of romantic conventions with R. I decided to serve a heart-shaped meatloaf. After dinner, we sat on my couch, pleasantly tipsy on Cabernet, and R produced a book written by Richard Nixon. “The title made me think of you,” he said. When I got to the title page, I saw that the book had been carefully defaced—there was a square hole where the words “America's Challenge” should have been, and just below the title, “Seize the Moment,” was a two-carat diamond ring, glittering above the words “One Superpower World.”

I was an unrepentant prostitute experiencing the ultimate bourgeois fantasy: getting engaged on Valentine's Day. Showing my ring to customers and coworkers, I felt like a scrappy, unknown athlete who’d just landed an Olympic gold medal. I had to remove the ring during sex to avoid damaging my customers' tender body parts, but I was beaming with pride—I had hacked the system. The system that says you can’t tell a normal middle-class guy what you do for a living and be with him in any serious way.

People assume that a call girl lies to her boyfriend about her work, but it's not that simple. Sometimes call girls lie to each other about what we've told our boyfriends. This can make things…complicated. For instance, my best friend Jill didn't want R to know she was a call girl. I didn't want her lecturing me about what she thought I was doing wrong, so I lied to her and said he didn’t know I was a call girl. After working all week, sometimes together, Jill and I would go on double dates with our respectable boyfriends—who must never, ever find out what we did for a living. I had an obligation to protect her, so I told R that Jill would be “shocked if she knew." I was lying to my best friend and my fiancé, but as tangled as it got, I felt it was for a good cause. And somehow, because we all loved going out for sushi together, the intrigue and confusion were worth it.

But once I started wearing a ring—his ring—R grew jealous of my customers. He was trying to be open-minded, but he would get upset if I couldn't see him on a weeknight, and I loved him too much to tell him to get stuffed. He was putting pressure on me to renounce my career, but it was a difficult choice. I was proud of the business I had built. Having worked so hard to get where he was, R understood my dilemma—at first. But when we moved in together, he became less sympathetic, more openly possessive, and I grew nervous.

That's when I met Julian. I knew right away that Julian wasn't going to be threatened by my unusual career—because he was a male escort. As we exchanged numbers, I found myself fantasizing about a partnership. I'd heard about some of those happily married porn-star couples. Maybe they had it all figured out. Could Julian be the answer?

He entertained me with stories about rich married ladies and said that sex with me—or rather, with him—would be "a professional courtesy."

Wait.

A ... professional what?

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