As some of you may know, I wrote a book last year (slow clap). It’s called Slutever and it’s about my long, clumsy and continuing journey toward slutty enlightenment—and also about sexual agency and sex work etc etc. If you’re stumped on what gift to get your boss or your mom this year, I’m pretty sure my book is the answer. Read an excerpt here! – Karley Sciortino
Buy Slutever on Amazon HERE :) And, if you want me to be the voice in your head while you do errands, I also recoded an audio book! Without further ado…
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Meeting My $oulmate
I had a good feeling about this guy. He had invited me for lunch at Milos, a Greek place in Midtown with a distinct expense-account vibe, which seemed like a good sign. I excitedly put on my new prostitute costume. (In an effort to take the sugar-babying business more seriously, I’d Googled “Where do prostitutes shop?” and the most highly rated response on Yahoo Answers was Zara, so I went there and bought a Dolce & Gabbana knock-off dress that felt like the perfect combo of class and trash.) I was feeling very powerful.
He was a geeky guy, around forty, with awkwardly long limbs and thick glasses resting on a big nose. He was sort of guy who could put on a $10,000 suit and it would still be obvious that he’d been beaten up on the daily in high school (aka my type). He asked me questions about where I grew up and about my writing, which no other guy from the site had done (I’m pretty sure they all assumed I did nothing). And then I asked him what he did for a living, and that’s when my stomach made a leap for my throat, because I suddenly felt like he might just be the one (a different one than the one we usually talk about, but you know what I mean).
I can’t give away too much information about him or I’ll get sued, but let’s just say he created an app that you almost definitely have on your phone. I knew I needed to make a good impression, so I downed three glasses of wine in like fifteen minutes. While I was drowning my nerves, App Guy was aggressively ordering more and more food, sending roughly every third dish back to the kitchen. “You have to send something back, or they don’t take you seriously,” he informed me with a straight face. When I brought up the arrangement, he abruptly cut me off. “Talking about money is boring,” he said, waving his hand in front of my face as if to say shut the fuck up. “How much do you want? You want two grand? I’ll give you two grand. Let’s just get drunk.” That was easier than I’d expected.
He ordered me another drink, insisting that we were “celebrating,” but kept refusing to say what exactly this celebration was for. I thought it was slightly odd that he seemed so intent on getting wasted—it was barely noon, after all—but an alcoholic loves an enabler, and so I chose to ignore what in hindsight was clearly a red flag.
By the time we got back to the St. Regis, where he was staying, I was more than tipsy. I made my best effort to remain upright as I stumbled through the lobby and into the elevator. Soon we were on his bed making out—sort of. We’d kiss for like five seconds, but then he’d find some ADD reason to get up and do something on the other side of the room—change the music, turn off the lights, close the curtains, turn the lights back on again. Eventually I got up and dragged him back to the bed by the arm, but then he just started awkwardly rubbing his face back and forth across my boobs, over my dress, with a blank expression on his face, as if he was meditating with his eyes open. It felt like that awkward scene in Big where Tom Hanks, who’s secretly a thirteen-year-old boy in a man’s body, is attempting to have sex with a woman while hiding the fact that he clearly has no idea what sex is. I suddenly felt like I was babysitting, and not in a hot way. I wanted to move things along, so I went for his zipper, but he dodged me and jumped up onto the bed.
“This isn’t right,” he said. “It’s the wrong moment. Let’s go down to the bar and get another drink.” And so I begrudgingly put on my heels as he dragged me by my wrist down to the bar.
The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, with its opulent velvet armchairs and thirty-foot golden mural, is the sort of place you imagine Salvador Dalí sipping cocktails next to chic old ladies in Chanel. It’s less the sort of place you go to take a drunken afternoon nap. But there I was, laid out on the velvet couch, my Zara dress riding up over my butt. App Guy was looking over the whiskey list. Their most expensive glass was $300. “Do you have anything better?” he asked the waiter, whose forced smile conveyed a quiet rage. “I only drink whiskey that’s older than me. And I’m forty-two.”
I put my hand on his inner thigh and slurred something along the lines of “Let’s go back upstairs.”
“I have a better idea,” he said. “We should call up one of your friends. Don’t you have any hot friends who would come hang out with us?” Predictable, I thought. As a Millennial woman, I’ve grown to accept that first-date conversations tend to go something like this: Question 1: “Where are you from?” Question 2: “What do you do?” Question 3: “Do you have any hot friends who you might want to suck my dick with?” Sorry, but when did threesomes go from being a dessert to an appetizer?
I suggested Madeline, but he wasn’t interested in her. “I don’t want a professional,” he said. “We need fresh blood.” I told him that, unfortunately, I didn’t have any friends who would be available to fuck a stranger at a moment’s notice at 3pm on a Wednesday. He frowned and slumped back into the couch, letting out a long sigh of disappointment at the epic unfairness of life.
And then I remembered my fan.
See, around this time I had this internet stalker fan-girl type person who’d been sending me near-daily Facebook messages with too many exclamation points. Ya know, like: “Hiiiii! I’m a student from Denmark!! I’m in New York for the summer on an internship!!!!! We should totally hang out because I’ve always felt like we could totally be best friends lolll!!!” I never responded. But suddenly, Danish intern seemed newly appealing. “Well…” I said to App Guy, “I do have this one internet stalker who seems pretty desperate. She might be down.”
He nodded excitedly. “She’s perfect.”
My Facebook message read: “Hi! Sorry I somehow missed your last 5 messages. But OMG I would totally love to hang! Actually do you want to come meet me and my boyfriend right now?” Followed by the sly-face emoji and the salsa-dancing-lady emoji. I had to type it with one eye closed, like a cartoon drunk person. She responded within two minutes. Overeager. She could be at the hotel in an hour. App Guy was thrilled. I was dizzy.
You know how there’s that tipping point when you’re drinking, when you’re trying to hold on to just enough sobriety to appear somewhat normal? And then there’s that other tipping point when you’re just straight-up trying to stay conscious? I was there. And then . . . I failed.
The next thing I remember, I was waking up with a dull headache in a dark, empty hotel room. Scary-ish, but also, realistically, not super foreign to me. The sky outside was dark, and since it was summer and the sun didn’t set until around 8pm, I knew it had been at least four hours since my last memory. Wait…was I just low-key raped? I wondered while scraping dried drool off my face. I still had all my clothes on, so it seemed kosher. But my confusion quickly turned to anger: Why the fuck did App Guy abandon me here? And more importantly, is he partying with my stalker without me?
Quickly, without thinking, I got up and marched out of the room and down the hallway. I hadn’t thought about where exactly I was going, but I was eager to get there. But about halfway down the hall I realized: Oh shit, I’m not wearing any shoes. And I don’t have my bag or my phone, which I guess are back in the hotel room? And I don’t have a key to the room. And actually, now that I’ve walked down the hall, I don’t even remember what room number I came out of. Fuck. I guess I could go to the front desk and ask for help…looking like a crazy shoeless nightmare whore from hell. But actually, I don’t even know App Guy’s last name. Uggghhh.
For some reason—drunken rage logic—I decided to pound my fist repeatedly on the door directly in front of me. I think I wanted to use the phone? To call the front desk? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. But I was definitely feeling confrontational and ready to yell at someone. And then the door opened, and there stood a shirtless, very sexy, and very confused-looking British man.
“…Hi?” said the shirtless man, who was roughly thirty and had a nose that looked like it had been broken many times over, but in a good way. He stared at me, waiting for me to say something, but I just stood there with my mouth open.
Him: “What’s going on…?”
Me: “Oh, not much. What are you doing?”
Him: “Not much…”
Me: “Well, so, I’m staying at this hotel, and I happened to misplace my key. Uh. And my shoes. And my phone. Could I use yours?”
Once I was in his room I realized I really didn’t want to make that phone call, especially in front of the shirtless hot British stranger. I was stalling. “So, what are you doing in New York? What kind of business? Oh, really? I find finance so interesting.”
He grabbed me some sparkling wine from the minibar. And then we started fucking, because I guess that’s the person I am.
I’m sure the sex was fine, although not exceptional enough for me to remember the details. You could tell he worked out, though. Anyway, sometime after (or during?) the sex I fell asleep, and the next thing I knew I was being woken up by the British guy, far too politely. “Excuse me, miss, miss. Uh, I hate to wake you, but I was just thinking that you probably don’t want to wake up here tomorrow without any of your things. Do you have somewhere to be?” He looked simultaneously scared for me and scared of me.
I looked at the clock: 11:30pm. Fuck. I grabbed the phone and called the front desk. “Um, hi, so, this is awkward, but I’m staying at this hotel with a friend and I seem to be lost. I think his name is—”. The person on the other end interrupted me with a long, resentful sigh. “Yes,” said the voice, “We’ve all been looking for you. Room 501.” Whoops?
By the time I got my clothes back, the guys at the front desk had clearly informed App Guy of my whereabouts, because when I opened the door into the hallway there he was, staring at me, looking sort of amused but mainly like an angry school teacher.
“What were you doing in that room?”
“Oh, just . . . taking a nap.”
He laughed a slow, maniacal laugh and placed his hand firmly on my lower back, leading me to his room. And there on his hotel bed was my fan, naked. She was thin with tight brown curls and the bland, rectangular brown-framed glasses of a cartoon librarian. “So nice to finally meet you,” I said, smiling awkwardly. She dropped her vibrator and ran over to hug me.
“I hope this is okay…” she said nervously.
“Hope what’s okay?”
“Ya know, sleeping with your boyfriend. He said you wouldn’t mind.”
“Oh, he’s not my…”
And then I saw App Guy behind her, miming slitting his throat in his anger. I shut my mouth. “Anyway, sorry to arrive late to the party!” And here we go again, I thought…
…. and so on and so on, blah blah buy the book!