Red Shoe Diaries 007 Fantasy
People assume, when they learn what I do, that I must meet the most fascinating men in the world. And honestly? They're not wrong.
I value many of my clients deeply. I've had clients I didn't care for as much too — that's just life, regardless of the profession. But there are stories that stay with you. Stories that remind you why the work matters. This is one of them.
The Suspension of Disbelief
Let me tell you something I had to learn the hard way: fantasy role-play is not stupid.
When I was younger, I thought it was. That's just silly, I'd think. How can anyone take something like that seriously? What I didn't understand then — what I had to grow into understanding — is that fantasy isn't about being serious. It's about being present in the story. It's exactly like watching a movie.
When you sit in a cinema and watch a thriller, some part of your brain knows you are sitting in a chair eating popcorn. The car chase is not happening in the room. The explosion is not real. And yet your heart pounds. Your palms go a little damp. You gasp. You laugh. You feel it.
There's a term for this: the suspension of disbelief. We humans are extraordinary, layered creatures. We have a frontal lobe that reasons, what's sometimes called our "mammal brain" that processes emotion and connection, and beneath that the ancient reptilian brain that governs our most primal responses. These systems work together in a kind of beautiful tension. And one of their most remarkable collective tricks is this ability to choose to believe — temporarily, willingly — in something we know isn't real. It's how story works. It's how art works. It's how, for an hour or so in a tastefully arranged room, a woman can be a Greek revolutionary and a man can be James Bond.
The Client
He is a sweet man. Gentle, curious, with a dry sense of humor that surfaces in unexpected moments. He is also suffering from multiple sclerosis, and the disease has been advancing.
He came to me, in part, because his body was becoming less and less his own. MS is a particular kind of grief — it asks you to mourn yourself incrementally, still living. What he wanted, more than anything, was to be in his body again. To feel it respond. To remember that he was still there inside it.
He had been having trouble becoming aroused. Not from lack of desire — desire was very much present — but because the connection between mind and body, which MS can fray and interrupt, was making intimacy feel further and further away.
He knew I was playful. Spontaneous. That I didn't flinch from the imaginative or the unconventional.
So one afternoon he showed me something private: a fantasy he had carried since boyhood. A dream shaped, like so many things from that era, by James Bond.
The Mission
007. The tuxedo, the gadgets, the impossibly cool composure under pressure. And always — always — the girl. Not just any girl: a woman who matched him, who challenged him, who was his equal in danger and desire.
Growing up watching those films, my client had fallen in love with a particular kind of story. The hero and the spy. Two people, each loyal to opposing causes, each trying to get the other to reveal what they know. The weapon of choice: charm. Wit. The body. By any means necessary.
He wanted to play that game.
So we built the scene together. I would be a Greek woman — passionate, proud, fiercely committed to keeping her country's historical treasures from being bought and spirited away by foreign money. He would be the British agent sent to find me, to learn the location of the underground revolutionaries, to use every asset at his disposal to make me talk.
And I, naturally, would be trying to do exactly the same to him.
Pussy Galore Meets 007
I will not pretend the premise was high cinema. It was delightfully, gleefully ridiculous. We both knew it. That was part of the pleasure — the shared conspiratorial joy of yes, we are doing this, and we are doing it properly.
What I remember is how he changed when we stepped into it. The man who had come in carrying the weight of a degenerative illness, the man who worried about his body failing him, that man receded. In his place: a British operative with rakish confidence, deploying his masculine charm against a stubborn and rather formidable Greek patriot who was absolutely not going to tell him anything.
(Reader: I told him everything. Eventually. Wink, wink, nudge nudge.)
He was incredibly grateful afterward. Left a generous tip. But it wasn't the tip that stayed with me as he left — it was his face. There's a particular quality to the expression of someone who has been, for a little while, entirely free of the thing that burdens them. A lightness. He wore it well.
What Story Does
We talk about sex as if it is a purely physical event — a question of mechanics, of chemistry, of bodies in proximity. And it is those things. But it is also, always, narrative.
Who am I in this moment? Who are you? What do we want? What is at stake? Will we, or won't we?
The tension lives in the story. It always has. The will-they-won't-they of a slow burn. The electricity of two people circling each other. The particular thrill of a game where everyone loses and everyone wins. Human sexuality is threaded through with plot.
What fantasy role-play does — at its best, in the right hands, with trust and play and mutual delight — is give you permission to enter a story deliberately. To cast yourself as someone who is not burdened by the particular circumstances of your actual Tuesday afternoon. A spy. A revolutionary. A person whose body does exactly what they ask of it.
For my client, that hour of fiction was not an escape from reality so much as a doorway back into himself. The arousal he had been unable to find through direct means arrived sideways, through story — the way water finds its path through rock.
What I Am Grateful For
I did not choose this work for noble reasons, and I will not dress it up as pure altruism. But there are moments that settle differently than others. Moments that remind me that what happens in these rooms is not simply commercial transaction.
We helped a man with a terrible disease find his erotic self again. We gave him, for an hour, a body that cooperated. A story in which he was the hero. A woman who looked at him across the room and needed to be convinced, which meant — crucially — that she thought he was worth the trouble of convincing.
For that, I am genuinely grateful.
And if you'll excuse me — I have secrets to keep.
For now.