“That’s not how I paid for my divorce,” he finally said. “Not waiting tables.”
“I thought you were barely making a hundred bucks a week in the chorus,” Adrian replied. He remembered that year clearly: his apartment in Back Bay, Tom present only long enough to sleep on the couch, shower, and radiate misery between restaurant shifts and rehearsal.
“Yeah. And I definitely wasn’t making enough to pay for a lawyer at the first restaurant I worked at.”
“Okay, so, what did you do?”
Tom blinked a few times, gave Adrian a guarded look, and then, after a long hesitation, grabbed his laptop off the coffee table.
“I’m not saying it was ideal. But it was fine for a while. And I think, you know, it’s not as stigmatized these days—”
“What,” Adrian said flatly, worried he was about to hear that his roommate had been selling Adderall to Harvard undergrads.
“For an artist, you are surprisingly conventional, did you know that? Practically bourgeois.”
“Tom!” Adrian said, now impatient to hear about it.
“I’m just saying, hear me out.” Tom typed something into the search bar, then spun his laptop to show the page to Adrian.
A young woman in a short party dress laughed and displayed her white veneers to a middle-aged, tuxedo-clad man with a chiseled jawline and graying sideburns.A relationship on your own terms, the site’s slogan promised in lacy white font. The log-in prompt was discreetly tucked at the bottom of the page. Adrian reeled back from the screen, hoping he was vastly mistaken about what the site advertised.
“Jesus Christ,” he said automatically.
“You don’t know what it is.”
“It’s an escort site,” Adrian said.
“It’s not that. It’s different.”
“Okay, what is it, then?”
“It’s, like, a sugar-baby thing—”
Adrian snorted, the noise ripping unwillingly from his throat. “That is the same thing! Jesus, Tom, you werehooking? You should have said something.”
Tom winced. “Yeah, this reaction? Is why I didn’t.”
“No, no, no, I’m not— Sorry. I’m not upset at you.I’m sorry. I wish I could have—done something else. I thought you were just upset about Rose. If I’d known you had to—”
“I didn’thaveto do anything. And you were doing plenty! You were already feeding me, housing me, listening to me whine about my divorce—”
“I would also have done something to keep you from taking a job that leads to your dismembered body turning up in the Charles River!” Adrian said, catching his voice just before it turned into a shout.
“You’ve got the wrong idea about it. It’s not sex work,” Tom insisted, shoving Adrian’s shoulder lightly.
Adrian gave him a long, skeptical glower.
“I mean it,” Tom said. “Not this site, anyway. Not even all the men I went out with thought they got to sleep with me.”
“So it’s just a dating site, then?”
“Sort of. I mean, it’s dates, yeah, but for money.”
“Which is... different from sex for money,” Adrian repeated, still alarmed.
“Because you don’t have to have sex with them! That’s not what they’re paying for.”
“What are they paying for, then?”
