I wasn’t expecting anyone that night.
The air was heavy—Mumbai’s monsoon heat pressing through the windows like an uninvited guest. The kind of night that makes silk cling to skin and thoughts unravel without warning.
My heels were off. My hair was unpinned, falling in soft waves across my shoulders. A jazz record played in the background, some old tune that made loneliness sound romantic. I had just poured a glass of red wine when the doorbell rang.
Three short buzzes.
Not a code I recognized. Not a regular. Not a client I was expecting.
I paused, my body still. This job teaches you to listen—not just to words, but to silences, hesitations, the rhythm of footsteps, the language of the unknown.
I slipped on my lavender robe—light, satiny, the one with the sash that always made me feel slightly dangerous. Then I walked to the door, barefoot, calculating how much distance to keep and how much warmth to project if it was a stranger.
I opened it.
And there he was.
He looked like a man who had been awake for days. Not unkempt, not homeless, but... hollowed out. Mid-thirties, salt lightly dusting his dark hair, wearing a grey shirt, sleeves rolled up like someone who once cared about appearances but had recently stopped trying. His eyes met mine, and they were the eyes of someone quietly drowning.
“Are you... her?” he asked.
It was the way he said it—soft, unsure, like someone asking if the moon could listen.
I gave him a slow nod. “I’m Maya.”
He stared at me for a second longer, then looked over my shoulder into the low-lit living room. The record crackled faintly behind me.
“I don’t want sex,” he said suddenly.
I raised an eyebrow, just slightly. “Most men say that. Some even believe it.”
He didn’t smile.
There was something about his presence—fragile, almost reverent—that made me drop my usual armor.
“I just...” he began. “I didn’t know where else to go. I just needed... someone.”
I paused. That part of me, the one I don’t let out often—the woman beneath the persona—leaned forward inside me. It was late. I should have closed the door. But there was no hunger in his eyes, no lust, no manipulation. Just... ache.
I stepped aside. “Come in.”
He entered like a man walking into a temple he didn’t believe in but desperately needed to.
He didn’t sit. Instead, he walked slowly along the edge of the room, as if reading a history written into the curtains, the furniture, the scent of rose and sandalwood in the air.
He stopped in front of the bookcase, his fingers grazing the spines.
“I lost her six months ago,” he said, not turning. “My wife.”
Silence.
“She was thirty-two. Aneurysm. One second we were planning dinner, the next—just... gone. Everyone tells me to move on. As if grief is a hallway and you can just walk out of it.”
I sat down on the velvet sofa, folding one leg under me. “They mean well. But people are terrified of sorrow. It reminds them they’re not immune.”
He finally looked at me. “And you? What are you afraid of?”
I let out a slow breath. “Cages. Judgments. Feeling invisible.”
He nodded as if he understood—truly understood. And then, he sat across from me.
He didn’t ask what I charged. He didn’t touch me.
Instead, we talked.
For hours.
About death. About guilt. About the strange intimacy of being seen fully clothed, without performance or expectation.
He told me she used to sing when she cooked. That the silence in his apartment now was so loud it felt violent.
I told him about the train ride to Mumbai. About the version of me that had once cried herself to sleep every night in a women’s hostel. How becoming “Maya” wasn’t about selling sex—it was about reclaiming something I had been told I could never own.
He asked if I ever felt ashamed.
“Not of my work,” I said. “But sometimes of the way people assume they know me before I’ve even said a word.”
He didn’t interrupt. He just listened, like every sentence mattered.
At one point, I got up and poured him a glass of wine. Our hands touched briefly. No spark, no seduction. Just skin and skin, with nothing in between.
He stayed until dawn.
No kisses. No lies. Just presence.
At the door, the sky was a soft gray, the kind that holds both ending and beginning. He turned to me, hands in his pockets, looking like a man who had finally exhaled after holding his breath for months.
“Thank you,” he said. “You reminded me I was still human.”
I nodded. There was nothing else to say.
When the door closed, I stood there for a moment. The apartment smelled like morning now. I walked back inside, past the untouched wine, past the still-playing record, past the world I usually controlled.
That night, I wasn’t an escort.
I was simply a woman who held space for a broken heart.
And sometimes, that’s the most intimate thing of all.
React
