The ideal client - and what he really does to me
This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?
I'll start with what he is not, because that will be quicker.
He is not necessarily the most generous financially. He is not the most handsome. He is not the one with the most impressive suite or who arrives with an extravagantly priced bottle to show he can. Those things are pleasant - I would be dishonest to say otherwise - but they don't create what I'm truly looking for in an appointment. They create comfort. Comfort is good. It isn't enough.
What creates something else is much harder to buy.
The Man Who Listens Before He Speaks
I have a fairly reliable indicator for knowing, within the first twenty minutes of an appointment, whether the evening will be good or merely adequate. It's simple: is this man truly listening to me, or is he waiting for his turn to speak?
The majority of men I see are intelligent, cultured, accustomed to having authority in their field. Which also means they are accustomed to being listened to, and that genuine listening - the kind that involves letting the other person exist fully - is not always their strong suit. That is not a character flaw. It is simply a habit that sets in when you spend your days leading teams or making decisions.
My ideal client has unlearned that. Or never learned it the wrong way. When I speak, he doesn't glance at his phone out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't prepare his response while I'm still finishing my sentence. He is there, present, and it shows - in his gaze, in the rhythm of the conversation, in the questions he asks afterwards that prove he genuinely heard what I said.
That man, after an hour of dinner, has already half won me over. Before we've even left the table.
What He Radiates - and Why It Changes Everything
There is a quality I don't quite know how to name that I look for in every appointment without always finding it. It isn't exactly self-confidence - I see many self-confident men, and that can be as fascinating as it is exhausting. It is more something like an absence of any need to prove anything.
The man with nothing to prove doesn't boast. He doesn't try to impress me with his travels, his connections, his bank account. He doesn't test either - those men who ask small trick questions to see whether you are "really" cultured, "really" interesting. All of that is insecurity dressed up as assurance, and I spot it within minutes.
My ideal client is simply there. Curious about me, not to validate something about himself, but because people genuinely interest him. That curiosity - unperformed, unstrategic - is perhaps the most seductive thing a man can possess.
The Hands - Always the Hands
I look at hands early in an evening. Not for any mystical reason - simply because hands are revealing in a way that the face isn't always. A man who manages his hands well - who knows when to place them, withdraw them, let them rest without unnecessary restlessness - generally has the same relationship with everything else. With rhythm. With space. With another person's body.
I had a client, a Genevan lawyer of fifty-two, whose hands I noticed before he had even opened his mouth. Large, still, laid flat on the table as though he had nowhere to be in a hurry. That evening, those hands kept their promise for several hours. I was not disappointed.
Conversely, I have learned to be wary of hands that fiddle with objects, that rub together, that cannot seem to settle anywhere. It is not an absolute rule - some nervous men are very good lovers once the nerves have dissolved. But it is a signal I read every time.
When the Boundary Begins to Blur
I am going to say something that some people in my profession would not say, or would not say quite this way. With certain clients, there are moments when I no longer know exactly where I stand on the spectrum between professional and something else.
It is not love. I know how to recognise love - or at least, I know how to recognise its absence - and what I am describing is different. It is more precise than that. It is the moment when I realise I am laughing in a genuine way, not in a pleasant-for-him way. That I am asking a question because the answer truly interests me, not because it moves the evening along. That when he touches me, my body responds in a way that has nothing to do with a job well done.
I recognise those moments now. At first they unsettled me a little. Today I welcome them. They are part of what this profession offers that few other situations can - intense, brief intimacies that don't have to carry the weight of what came before or what comes after.
Thomas - The Closest Portrait
If I had to put a face to what I'm describing, it would probably be Thomas. I've given him that name here - the real one starts with something else. Forty-eight years old, director of an international foundation based in Geneva, divorced for a few years with a serenity on that subject that had struck me from the very first evening. No bitterness, no grand pronouncements about "women" or "marriage." Simply someone who had been through something difficult and come out the other side with greater clarity about what he wanted.
We saw each other about a dozen times over eighteen months. Each time, dinner first - not as a matter of protocol, but because we both enjoyed it, talking over a table, taking our time. He would sometimes read things to me - passages from essays he found important, or a sentence he had noted down somewhere. I would bring him Italian books I recommended. He was the one who introduced me to Tabucchi.
Outside the table and the bedroom, we didn't see each other. We didn't call. That boundary was clear and comfortable for both of us. But within that framework, there was something real - a complicity, a mutual attentiveness, a shared pleasure that wasn't performed on only one side.
The day he told me he was moving back to Montreal for family reasons, I felt something I would describe as quiet regret. Not grief - I didn't fall apart when I got home. But a kind of clean, slight sadness, the kind you feel when something good ends naturally, without any dramatic reason.
He sent me a message from Montreal two months after leaving. Just to say he had read the Tabucchi I had given him at our last meeting, and that it was exactly what he needed to get through the Canadian winter. I smiled reading that. For a long time.
What He Does to Me - Truly
The question in the title deserves a direct answer.
What my ideal client does is make me want to be there. Not just to be present - I can manage that with anyone if I am professional. But to be truly there, in my body, in the conversation, in what is happening between us. That quality of presence, when it exists on both sides, creates something I can only call a particular electricity - a living tension that makes everything more intense, from the first drink to the last moment in the room.
He also makes me, sometimes, lose the thread of what I am supposed to be controlling. And that - that slight, chosen loss of control, with someone worthy of it - is perhaps what I seek most. In this profession as in everything else.
These men are not the most common. But they exist. I continue to find them, from time to time, at Geneva dinners or hotel lounges in Milan or Zurich. And when it happens, I generally know within the first hour.
The body recognises that kind of thing before the mind has finished calculating.
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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