I took pride in being able to endure. I cherished my stubbornness as much as I coveted the money. Maybe that was my talent, my trade secret: that I’d inherited the selfish obstinance of my father. It was how I affirmed and sustained self-respect; I didn’t give up because I didn’t have to. And I wasn’t worried because I believed in my power and control. Sometimes they asked if I was afraid. One man tied me up and went through my purse, but I’d left my ID at home and he couldn’t tie a knot for shit—and he, like the man from Chicago, hovered over the DNS (“do not see”) list. (The BDSM agency he’d given as his reference said two girls had blacklisted him, but one hadn’t.) No, I wasn’t afraid. I felt no alarm, only disdain for his ineptitude.

Whatever the men told themselves about who had the upper hand, I was my only boss. And I was there to prove something to myself, to undergo a ritual. It felt less like I was testing myself than that I was testing the world, waiting for something to give. It wouldn’t be me.

Each day in that Chicago hotel room, I shut the bathroom door and stared at my own eyes in the mirror. I would have had the look I usually had in private with my reflection at work: the suspicious and conspiratorial gaze of a woman studying her double, seeing herself when she was not quite herself—I mean, seeing myself not quite myself. My self was in a vault; that was what made the work possible then. In a vault even I couldn’t open. It didn’t matter whether the date lasted three hours or three days, whether I adored him or could hardly stand him—I always left with a part of me he hadn’t touched, a piece locked in a place without a key, without a door. An invincible dignity. An irreducible core. No other moments in my life made me so aware of its existence.