Chapter Text
Julian stepped out into the warm, muggy night. It was late, or maybe early. Either way it was past midnight tonight. It had been a long evening for him, but it wasn’t something to complain about. A long, leisurely dinner at an elegant, and extremely exclusive restaurant, followed by a few drinks in an elite member’s only establishment. It was all work, but this wasn’t difficult for Julian. In fact, it was well established, in certain discreet circles, that he was extraordinarily proficient at what he did. Which is to say, he provided women of means with the service of his company for an evening. This was accomplished in any number of ways and avenues according to the needs and desires of his clients. His talent and skill lay in the obvious traits: physical touch, sometimes sexual intimacy, courtesy, politeness, refinement. Less obvious were his ability to engage in actively listening, empathizing, offering advice, and simply being a comforting presence and confidant. The real skill, however, lay in reading each situation and individual accurately to determine how best to approach them and serve the need most required with them. This is what made Julian stand apart. Any common prostitute could offer their body for copulation. The best escorts in the business had the uncanny ability to excel at the more subtle nature of the game; the deep traits. It was inherently more advantageous to be a woman in this regard, as their nature dictated a natural inclination to these skills, but Julian had honed them all his life, every since he’d been a teenager, through his careful tutelage by his madame, Olga. He was well versed in how to utilize those subtle traits for maximum effect with his clients, and they were all quite satisfied with his proficiency. The client he’d been escorting tonight expressed as much, telling him that she was glad to have seen him again. She was a recurring client and one he’d actually known through word of mouth. He’d gotten in touch with a client from many, many years ago, who hadn’t been in need of his attentions anymore, but she had, in turn, recommended him to others and his skills were put to use.
He slipped into the seat of his Benz, started it up, and drove down the highway to get back to his own bed. It might have been the opportunity for many a mind to shift themselves into automatic gear, but not Julian. He was working in his mind, calculating. He was constantly calculating, evaluating, planning. Life might be taken up with fancy dinners, great drinks, and high-end company, but the reality, the hard mathematical reality, is that it was an ever-shrinking opportunity on the timeline. There were any number of angles he had to bear in mind. His old client roster had been helpful in launching him back into his work, but the list had considerably shortened since he’d returned to the trade. Some women were happily married, some had moved away, some simply weren’t interested in carrying on with an escort the way they had nearly two decades ago. A few had passed away. It was a shrinking list. He’d been fortunate enough to find recommendations from those who did engage with him to new clients. He had no issues with ages, within reason, but some of the youngest clients were harder to relate to or satisfy. Not on a physical level, but on many levels. Julian preferred to stay within his own age range and that, for many practical reasons, was not always a huge pool of available women. His compensation was not cheap, which was also a factor in clientele, and adding to this, work wasn’t something that he engaged in every single night of the week. What it came down to, in the simplest of terms, was that he was an escort who’d found himself in a world of slowly dwindling prospects. He couldn’t keep this up forever. The job was for younger men, and it edged out the older ones in favor of them.
Julian thought of his contemporary, Lorenzo and how he’d transitioned himself into the handler for so many new faces in the industry. Julian had come across some of them when he’d been out, but they also operated in a way he’d not been familiar with. Everything was online now. Everything was streamed through technology. It was fast, very fast. It was, Julian felt, much more vapid in the exchanges that it offered. As transactional and surface as his profession could be, Julian felt there was at least some measure of pride in “the way things used to be” and how clients were both acquired and how they were engaged. Everything now had dissolved into something much more instantaneous and shallow. Whereas before, men were stereotypically all about the sex, women now behaved very much the same way. Casual was the norm for both men and women. Online videos flooded porn sites from just as many women as they did men, who offered sexual stimulation for a small profit. Everyone had flooded his industry, and every amateur with a cell phone could post a sex video for a few dollars. His craft was becoming much more specialized as he simultaneously became more marginalized in it. The thought had occurred to him to imitate Lorenzo’s choice to become the pimp for an up-and-coming group of people who he’d be able to rely upon. He considered that he would be a much better manager of talent in this line of work than his own madame, Olga had been, wrangling underage teenagers for sex work. Definitely, he felt he’d be much more compassionate, if it could be called that, than the new madame of Olga’s old empire, Isabelle, whom he’d watched grow up in the trade. The truth was, little black books, a telephone, and cruising high class bars and other establishments for clients, were bygone traits of a nearly obscure and retired culture.
Mostly, Julian remained where he was for several different reasons. Isabelle’s taunt when he’d last saw her, mocking his restaurant job for its obscurity and unglamorous embodiment, an essential waste of his natural talents as a gigolo, had goaded him. Although, that job had been more of a cover in order for him to gain the apartment he’d been trying to get at the time. Deeper than that, he needed to direct himself somewhere. The whole fiasco of his life, starting with his murder charge, his subsequent release, his dealings with Detective Sunday over an ever-deepening quagmire of murder and false testimony, on top of reconnecting with Michelle and learning he had a son, had made a wreck of any semblance of normal life he was trying to gain after his release from prison. He had simply returned to what he knew, the life he knew, what he was good at: being a gigolo. This was especially true considering Michelle’s decision to remain with her husband in order to facilitate an environment for her son Colin to find stability and his own much needed care after everything he’d had to go through. That decision, while understandable, had essentially uprooted any last semblance of having his own desires met in life. How long would he have to sacrifice his dreams? Forever maybe? He didn’t know. It was all a personal mess and left him with nothing. He still thought about her often, thought about Colin, his son. He had watched them once, about three years ago, walking along the beach together with her husband Richard, the semblance of a cohesive family unit. That was right before his decision to get back into the escort service. That life didn’t belong to him. That family didn’t belong to him. Michelle… she had once, and he had grasped at the very tenuous thread of hope that maybe she would again, but she’d made a different choice.
He was sitting in his car outside his apartment. He wasn’t sure exactly how long he’d been sitting there thinking, but the weariness of his evening finally hit him, and he longed for his bed and some sleep. He didn’t sleep for very long though. He turned over and sighed heavily, opening his eyes and staring at the ceiling. The earliest hint of dawn was creeping up outside. He threw back the covers and began to move throughout his apartment. Dressing himself, he walked onto the landing outside his front door and sat in a chair, sipping coffee. His landlady, well, really his friend, Lizzy, walked downstairs. His location may not have been glitzy and glamorous, but he liked his apartment, the close space of it, and most of all, he appreciated her. She kept him grounded and kept him from being swept away in the tide of chaos which had surrounded his life. She’d been an anchor for him.
“Well, well, you’re up early,” she said, stepping down onto the landing and leaning against the wall facing him. He turned toward her and gave her an easy grin.
“Won’t accomplish much sleeping all day,” he replied casually.
“Hell, it’s barely half past, what’re you looking to accomplish this early? Only things getting done right now usually involve being in bed anyway.”
He chuckled at that and asked her if she wanted some coffee, but she declined. She was on her way out and it was a long drive for her, but she offered to catch up with him that evening if he was going to be around.
“It’s a date,” Julian said easily.
“I’ll be here with bells on, ” she replied in her wry manner, waving at him as she walked down the stairs and toward her car.
Filling up his cup for a second time, he heard his cell phone ringing. Who would be calling him this early he didn’t know, but clients booked all the time, so he grabbed the phone up and flipped it open answering it.
“Hey, Julian, it’s Detective Sunday. Can you talk?”