Behind the Elegance — A Sugar Daddy Story in Burwood, Sydney

I met Marcus at a private wine auction in Paddington. He was sixty-two, built like a retired rugby player gone soft around the edges, with a bespoke suit that cost more than my first car. His wife had left him three years ago. He didn't want sex — or rather, he didn't just want sex. He wanted someone to have dinner with, to travel with, to laugh with at the Opera House when the soprano hit a note that sounded like a dying cat. He wanted a companion.

Our arrangement started formally. Two nights a week, mostly. I'd meet him at his Burwood apartment — a penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city skyline. He always made tea himself. Earl Grey, loose-leaf, steeping for exactly four minutes. He had rules etched into the architecture of his loneliness. I learned them all.

"Tell me something real," he said one night, after I'd told him about growing up in a country town and moving to Sydney with nothing but a suitcase and a fake sense of confidence. "Not the scripted version. The version you don't tell your other clients."

I didn't correct him on the word "clients." But I thought about it. About the version of myself I'd curated over three years of being a Sydney escort in the eastern suburbs. The version who laughs at the right jokes, who listens without judgment, who knows exactly when to touch a hand and when to pull back. The version who is perfect because she isn't real.

"Something real," I repeated. I took a sip of his tea. It was good. "I'm terrified of turning forty alone. Not of being single — of being alone. The kind of alone where you order dinner for one and eat it standing over the sink because the table feels too big. I think that's why I do this work. Not for the money. To remind myself that people want me. Even if they're paying for it."

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I've been paying women to stay for three years. You're the first one who stayed without being paid."

He started crying then. Not the theatrical kind. Just two tears that escaped down his cheeks before he wiped them away with the back of his hand. I didn't know what to do. So I did the only thing I knew — I reached for his hand. No script. No performance. Just a girl and a man and the weight of two solitudes pressing against each other in a Burwood penthouse.

I still see Marcus. Not as a client anymore — as something else. Something I don't have a word for yet. But when I walk through the doors of that Burwood apartment building, the concierge nods and says, "Mr. Harrison's expecting you," and I feel, for just a moment, less alone.

That's the real secret of this city, I think. Behind the glossy facade of Sydney's escort industry, beneath the transactional surface of every incall and outcall — everyone is just looking for someone to hold. And sometimes, if you're lucky, you find each other in the most unexpected arrangement of all.