My first man from the Gulf - when power enters the room
This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?
There are appointments that resemble all the others until the moment they no longer do at all.
This one I had accepted without thinking too much. An intermediary - a Lebanese businessman I had met a few months earlier in Geneva's circles and whom I trusted - had reached out on a Thursday morning. Short message, his usual tone. A client passing through, very high calibre, available Friday evening. Suite at the Beau-Rivage. Was I free?
I was free.
What he hadn't specified - or what I had failed to anticipate - was what "very high calibre" meant in this particular context.
The Envelope Before Even Going In
I arrived at the Beau-Rivage at 8:30pm. Cream dress, black heels, a bag I had bought specifically for evenings of this standing. I had put on the spiced oriental perfume - instinct, I didn't yet know why, but my instinct almost never fails me.
At reception, a man was waiting for me. Not the client - an assistant, clearly. Early thirties, impeccable suit, professional gaze, completely neutral. He greeted me by my first name, which slightly surprised me, and handed me an envelope, telling me that Mr Khalid hoped I had had a pleasant day.
Inside the envelope: an advance in cash, the exact amount of which I won't give here, but which corresponded to several times what I normally charged for an entire evening. Just the advance.
I slipped the envelope into my bag without changing expression. The assistant accompanied me to the lift. Fifth floor. He did not take the lift with me.
The Man in the Suite
Khalid was not what I had imagined. Fifties, but a fifties carried with absolute ease - slim, still very dark hair with little grey, dressed simply in a navy suit without a tie. No visible ostentation. No flashy watch, no gold cufflinks. That was the first lesson of the evening: at the level he occupied, money no longer needs to announce itself.
The suite was in a state I had never seen before. White roses everywhere - dozens of them, arranged with a precision that had nothing spontaneous about it. A bottle of Krug in an ice bucket. Very soft Arabic music coming from somewhere, low enough not to impose itself. Someone had prepared all of this before my arrival. Anonymous hands had transformed that hotel room into something else - a space that had been thought through, intended, orchestrated.
He stood when I came in and looked me over from head to toe - not crudely, but with complete frankness, without any of the social precautions European men generally impose on themselves. A calm, almost benevolent appraising look. Then he smiled and said, in French with a slight accent:
"You are even more beautiful than I was told."
Simple. Direct. Making no effort to impress. I understood in that moment that he was not in the habit of trying to impress anyone.
A Dynamic I Didn't Know
What struck me first was that he did not treat me like a service provider. Nor as a conquest - it wasn't that either. He treated me as a guest of quality, someone whose presence had value and deserved to be honoured accordingly. There was in his manner a paradoxical form of deference - paradoxical because this man was clearly accustomed to the world organising itself around him, and yet he tended to me with very concrete attentiveness.
He poured the Champagne himself. He wanted to know what I liked to eat, whether I was cold, whether the music suited me. These questions were not formulas - he genuinely listened to the answers. And at the same time, there was something indisputable in his gaze. Not arrogance, not menace. Just a quiet certainty that the evening would unfold exactly as he had decided. Not by force. By natural gravity. Some men have that - an authority that cannot be explained and against which one feels no need to struggle.
We talked for an hour. About Geneva, the United Nations, a book he was currently reading - a Mahfouz novel he quoted to me in Arabic before translating it. He laughed when I told him I knew the author. "I wasn't expecting that," he said. It was not a condescending compliment. It was genuine surprise, and he owned it.
What Money Changes - and What It Doesn't
I will be honest about something I hadn't anticipated: faced with this level of wealth and authority, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. A slight sense of being out of my depth. Not fear - I was never afraid that evening. But a sharp awareness that I was in a different register from the one I knew. The men I usually saw, even the most affluent, were men who had succeeded in their field. Khalid was in a category where the word "succeeded" no longer quite applies - where there is no longer any common frame of reference.
I handled that feeling the way I always handle such things: by remaining exactly myself. It is the only tool I have, and it has never let me down. I didn't start playing a role. I didn't try to seem more sophisticated than I am. I simply was Sofia - curious, direct, at ease in my body - and at a certain point in the evening, I saw in his gaze that this was precisely what he had come to find.
What Happened Next
It was he who made the first move. Not abruptly - with an almost choreographed precision. He placed his hand on the back of my neck, very slowly, and looked at me as if to confirm I was willing. I was. More than he probably realised.
What this man knew how to do, I won't explain in detail here - some things deserve to remain within the walls of a Beau-Rivage suite. But I can say that I had before me someone whose knowledge of the female body far exceeded anything I had encountered before. No rushing. No improvisation. A mastery of time and rhythm that unsettled me in a way I hadn't seen coming. At one point I thought - with a clarity that was somewhat absurd given the circumstances - so this is what it means to be truly attended to.
The silent dominance I mentioned earlier - it was physical too. Not aggressive. Not performative. Simply real. He knew exactly where to place his hands, when to speak and when to stay silent, when to quicken the pace and when to let the silence do its work. And at no point did I feel beneath him in that dynamic. It was more subtle than that - a dance where the roles are never fixed permanently, where control moves between people.
There was a moment, around midnight, when I found myself looking at the lake through the suite window - the lights of the quay reflected in the black water - and I realised I had completely lost track of time. That rarely happens to me.
Afterwards - and What I Understood
Around 2am, he asked for something to be brought up. Cheese, fruit, bread. We ate sitting on the edge of the bed, half-dressed, talking about inconsequential things with the ease of two people who have just shared something intense and have no need to discuss it to know it.
Before I left, he asked his assistant - reached by phone, invisible but present - to have the remainder of the payment delivered to me along with an additional sum he described as "for the Mahfouz book." He had a sense of humour. That too I hadn't anticipated.
In the taxi back to the Pâquis, I watched the sleeping streets of Geneva drift past with a feeling that was hard to name. Not exactly pride. More a kind of expansion - the sensation of having pushed back a boundary I hadn't known I had. I had encountered a world whose existence I knew abstractly, and which had just become real, concrete, physical.
Khalid reached out to me twice afterwards, during visits to Geneva. We didn't meet every time - not always available, not always in the mood. With him, I had learned something important: at that level, rarity is part of the price. Making myself too available would have broken something. He knew it. I understood it quickly enough.
That evening at the Beau-Rivage remains a reference point in my mind - not for the money, though the money was there, real and present. But for what it taught me about myself. About what I am capable of holding, receiving, inhabiting. About the fact that intimidation, when you don't run from it, can transform into something else.
Into something that looks very much like desire.
Sofia
Sofia, 27 — Based in Geneva, she fully embraces her life as a luxury escort and speaks about it openly.
Through her stories, she shares her beginnings, her experiences with an international clientele, the advantages of the job (luxury, freedom), but also the more complex realities. She writes in a simple, honest way about what truly happens behind the doors of Swiss hotels.
This text was originally written in French. It was then translated to be readable in your language.
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