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“Can I ask you something?” she asks hesitantly. Her hands still their caresses and tracing shapes.

“What do you want to know?”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but whydidyou escort? You said most of the time you weren’t hired for sex.”

“No, most of the women who hired me only wanted me to take them to events like work functions, weddings, or the occasional date to make an ex jealous, that kind of thing. We’d meet at the event, and I’d never know where they lived or see them again.”

“Most?” she questions, cautiously.

“There were the occasional women that hired me only for sex. It wasn’t like that in the beginning. At first, it was only dates, and after a few months, I was approached by the agency to see if I’d be open to the possibility.”

Her body goes rigid at the mention of sex with other women, but I continue on. She wants to knowwhyI started, not when I started to have sex for money.

“My senior year in college, I started to feel run down, and thought it was the flu that was going around until I found a lump in one of my testicles. I went to the clinic and was diagnosed with testicular cancer.”

“Cancer?” she asks shocked, over her shoulder.

My only response is to nod. It’s not something I like to talk about, but she needs to know why, and I’m not going to start off our relationship by lying.

“Oh my God, Tyson.” Sadie turns and straddles my legs, her eyes wide. “You’re okay, now aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m healthy now.”

“What are the chances of you getting cancer again?” Her voice is soft with a slight tremor.

“I have about a fifteen percent chance of a reoccurrence,” I shrug as if it’s not something I think about daily. What if it comes back, and what if it’s too late when I find it this time? “You should know that I can’t have children of my own. I don’t know where this is going, but I do know that can be a deal breaker for most women.”

Sadie chuckles to herself as one hand shifts through my hair. “I gave up on the dream to have children a few years ago. The barely there sex I did have wasn’t producing children. Now, I’m almost forty-years old and starting over again. There’s more of a chance of things going wrong the older the mother gets, so I’m okay with that. I don’t need children to feel fulfilled.”

“What do you need?” I ask because most women feel the need to be a mother.

She tilts her head to the side with a small smile. “To be happy and successful in life. The love of a good man who treats me right,” she shrugs. “Two out of three ain’t bad, right? Isn’t that what the song says?”

“Song?”

What the hell is she talking about?

“Never mind, you’re too young to know what I’m talking about. What about you? What do you need in life?”

“To be healthy, happy, and debt free.”

“All good things. Simple.”

“Simple, but not always easy to have. In six months, I’ll have paid off my medical bills. Talk to me then.”

“That’s why you became an escort,” she states with a look of astonishment in her eyes. “To pay off your bills.”

“It paid the bills better than any job I found while finishing college and interning.”

“What about your parents? Couldn’t they help you?”

I rest my forehead to hers and shake my head. “I grew up poor. Beyond poor. My father was never around, and my mom was either working to feed us or sleeping. She never had money for insurance, and once I was in college, neither did I.”

“I’m so sorry, Tyson. I hate the thought of you sick and scared, and all alone. I know about growing up poor. My mother drank every bit of money we ever had or gambled it away. I studied my ass off in high school to get the best scholarship possible to get away from her, but she always finds me, and comes begging for money. Even when I was a poor college kid, living off my scholarship money.”

“Looking around your house, you’d never know.”

“Thanks,” she brushes her lips to mine. “I’ve been remodeling it since I found and bought it. Once the inside is done, I want to work on the outside. Maybe put in a pool and a small flower garden. It would be much easier with a big strapping man around to help me.”

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