Audrey Segal

I walked through the glass doors of Sofitel Downtown and the chilled air wrapped around my skin like the memory of someone I hadn’t touched yet and the scent of amber drifted through the lobby as if the night had already begun before I arrived and he was waiting

The air in the corridor was still, but I wasn’t, not on the inside where my breath moved faster than my steps and my thoughts moved slower than my skin and yet I walked with the same practiced grace I always wear like perfume because being a Dubai escort

The suite was booked under a name I didn’t recognize but the email had arrived like a quiet invitation dressed in certainty and nothing about it asked questions it simply told me where to be and when and there was something in the way it didn’t try too

I first saw him through the glass of the lounge at Bulgari his fingers dancing across a phone like he was writing code into the air and he didn’t notice me at first which was unusual and I watched him for a while pretending not to be there fully

He came to me with a mind full of noise the kind that lives behind polished suits and scheduled mornings and I knew it the moment he smiled like a man remembering how and I didn’t ask about the tension in his jaw or the pause before he said

It started like most evenings with him soft-spoken and dressed in a way that made every other man in the room disappear and I knew from the moment he kissed my cheek that tonight would not follow the usual rhythm because he looked at me like he already had

I met him on a Tuesday when the marina was quieter than usual and the wind carried jasmine from some balcony I never found and I remember thinking I should not have worn red because he stared at me for too long before saying a word but when he finally

There are moments that begin before a word is spoken and this one started the second I walked through his door, not because of what he said but because of how quiet he became as if my presence rearranged the gravity in the room and his world bent slightly just

I walked into that suite like I always do carrying nothing except the silence between my heels and the velvet in my voice because sometimes the softest sound in a room is a woman who knows she has already been chosen before the door even closed behind her and this