Roger had an account on The Erotic Review and wrote reviews when a woman asked him to. When together, we followed the TER formula to some extent—the order is textbook straight sex, paid or unpaid—but he wasn’t an aggressive kisser and rarely wanted sex to last more than fifteen or twenty minutes from start to finish. I mimicked enjoyment, but he didn’t try to force my orgasms, and they didn’t occur naturally, which was fine by me. After I started working for myself, I realized I didn’t like coming at work. It was too private, and I hated turning it into a gimmick delivered on demand as if I were a captive animal doing tricks. Being able to determine when and how and if I came felt like an important indicator of my control over the encounter as a whole.

Moreover, I worried real orgasms would throw my faking into relief, thereby setting the bar too high for future sessions, though eventually I learned clients found my true orgasms less satisfying than the fake ones. It’s not fair to say their unwitting preference was proof that they didn’t care about my actual pleasure. They just cared about their own more, and my climax mattered not because of how good it would feel to me but because of how good it would feel to them.