Conversation as foreplay - and what comes after
This article is part of a series. To read the first part, click on the following link: Who am I really?
I am not someone who rushes the foreplay. In the broadest sense of the term - not only what happens in a bedroom, but everything that comes before. Dinner, drinks, conversation. For me, all of that is part of the same thing. An evening that begins well at the table has every chance of continuing well elsewhere. An evening that begins with awkward silences and small talk about Geneva's weather - that happens too, and it can be recovered, but it takes more work.
What I love is when the conversation itself becomes erotic. Not vulgar - erotic. The distinction matters. A man who slips something ambiguous into a sentence about the restaurant's cooking, who holds my gaze half a second too long after saying it, then picks up the normal thread of the conversation as though nothing has happened - that is desire used well. That is someone who understands that anticipation is a form of pleasure in its own right.
The Private Restaurant - One Evening in Particular
There is one evening I often return to in my mind when I think about this.
It was a client I was seeing for the third time - let's call him Édouard, elegant fifties, Franco-Swiss, in wealth management. Someone I genuinely liked, with whom conversation was always rich without ever being heavy. He had booked somewhere I didn't know - a near-private restaurant on a side street in the Eaux-Vives, the kind of address with no visible sign that you only hear about by word of mouth. Ten tables at most. Candlelight. A sommelier who knew Édouard by his first name.
We arrived at 8pm. We left after midnight. In between, something had happened that had little to do with the food - even though the food was excellent.
How It Began
The first twenty minutes were ordinary. We had ordered, he had told me about a recent trip to Lisbon, I had asked questions. Nothing particular. And then at some point - I couldn't say exactly when - something shifted register.
He initiated it, but so subtly that I could have ignored it had I chosen to. We were talking about something - languages, I think, about how certain words exist in only one language because certain cultures are the only ones to have named a precise experience. And he said, looking at me with very deliberate lightness: "There are things that French cannot say as well as the body can."
A one-second pause. Then he resumed the conversation about languages as though the previous sentence had been nothing but a parenthesis.
I smiled into my glass. The game had begun.
The Tension Beneath the Table
What happened next unfolded over two hours, in gradual touches, without ever crossing a line that would have been out of place in that context.
His hand on my forearm when he wanted to emphasise something - natural in appearance, but lasting a second too long. His foot against mine under the table, no accident, clearly intentional, and when I held the contact rather than withdrawing my leg, he continued speaking in the same voice without changing his expression.
At one point, around dessert, he reached toward me and very slowly removed an invisible thread from my shoulder - an innocuous gesture, an obvious pretext - and his fingers grazed the back of my neck as they withdrew. I was looking at the candle on the table and felt something travel down the length of my spine. He resumed his sentence at precisely the point where he had left it.
That kind of control - continuing to exist socially while something physical and intense builds in parallel - is a rare skill. Most men cannot hold both threads at once. Édouard could. And I know how to play that game too. That evening, we were evenly matched.
Words as Hands
What fascinates me about this kind of evening is how words eventually do the same work as touch. At a certain point of tension, a well-placed sentence produces a measurable physical effect. That is not a metaphor - it is literally what happens.
Édouard had this ability to speak about one thing while saying another. We talked about music at one point - about how certain pieces build an almost unbearable sense of expectation before resolving it. He described this with technical precision while something in his voice made it obvious he was not only talking about music. I let him develop the thought. I responded in the same ambiguous register. We understood each other perfectly while pretending to discuss something else entirely.
That is a form of erotic intelligence I find deeply seductive. It assumes the other person is capable of reading between the lines - and therefore pays them the compliment of believing they can.
In the Taxi
We took a taxi together around 11:30pm. His hotel was ten minutes away. In the taxi, he placed his hand on my thigh - not gradually, not hesitantly, but with the quiet certainty of someone who knows the moment has come and that the preambles are over. The difference in tone between that gesture and the light touches of dinner was striking. As though we had changed chapters.
He said nothing. Neither did I. The driver watched the road. Geneva's lights drifted past behind the window.
Those ten minutes in the taxi felt both very brief and enormous. The entire evening compressed into a ten-minute journey, hands no longer pretending, breathing changing imperceptibly.
When the hotel lift closed around us, he looked at me with something I might call satisfaction - not arrogance, not triumph, but the quiet satisfaction of someone who has conducted an evening exactly as he had imagined it. And honestly? I shared that feeling.
What Happened After
The room was equal to the evening. That is all I will say.
Well, not quite all. I will also say this: there are nights when hours of accumulated tension finally releases in a way that exceeds what one had anticipated. Nights when the body has been so prepared, so ready, that what follows has an intensity out of proportion to the objective circumstances. That night was one of those.
I got back to the Pâquis around 3am. On the tram - because I sometimes take the tram at night, I love cities asleep seen from a tram - I thought back to the sentence about French and the body. His foot against mine for two hours. The imaginary thread on my shoulder.
All of that to arrive there. And yet, in a certain way, the dinner was as good as the bedroom. Perhaps better, at certain moments.
That is what I try to explain to people who think this profession comes down to what happens behind a closed door. The closed door is often the conclusion of a story that began long before - in a double-edged phrase, a hand on a forearm, a gaze held a second too long.
Desire is, first of all, a language. Everything else is the translation.
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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