It had been months since John’s lead, and Jasmine’s life
looked starkly different.
Monica—her reunited mentor—was delighted with Jasmine’s
quick progress. It had taken weeks without income for Bernard to consider the
consequences of Monica refusing other clients. John needed only minutes. He
offered to support Jasmine the next day.
But Monica had been right: study him. Learn everything. No
detail was too small. Focus on one client.
So Jasmine spent a month reading prison memoirs, AA
literature, watching recordings of meetings, studying Boy Scout manuals, and
combing through hundreds of academic articles using a former classmate’s JSTOR
login. She annotated. Diagrammed. Visited her family and dreamt of what could
be.
Before she walked into his lead, she already knew what his
reaction would be. His mental state.
She could embody him—step into his skin and wear it like a
pencil skirt.
Even his lead, his story, felt like a rerun of a show always
on television.
No surprises.
Except one.
She hadn’t anticipated Andrew.
Drunk. Sloppy. The failed prospect who followed her there.
Nor that John was carrying illegally that night.
She had expected to improvise around some small
offense—forgetting to open a door, failing to introduce her. Instead the
heavens opened and placed a 9mm Glock beside Aphrodite’s feet.
A first sacrifice.
In that moment she knew there would be many more.
Anything she asked.
And she adored him for the surrender.
Monica had also been right about the business model. The
hourly-rate approach limited income and forced Jasmine to meet wildly different
expectations within narrow windows of time.
A retainer changed everything.
A fixed monthly payment based on her minimum expenses
allowed her to focus exclusively on John. Time problems gone. Money problems
gone.
And—an addition that genuinely impressed Monica—Jasmine had
begun offering “customized upgrades.”
Upgrades that required additional money.
“I’ve been having the most marvelous dreams,” she told John.
“Absolutely fantasizing about making this real—with you. But of course I need
time. Supplies. Planning. How much you contribute will determine what I can
create. I can only do so much with limited resources.”
Venmo payments followed.
John always sent more than she would have asked.
His faith in her imagination pushed Jasmine deeper into
forums, novels, recorded lectures—anything that might spark new ideas.
At times she felt guilty. Then the savings grew.
Her expenses began disappearing.
Dinner with John: halfway through her steak he noticed a
chipped nail. The next week her manicures—including the tip—were prepaid
indefinitely, provided he chose the color.
Now her lease was ending. Another expense about to vanish
while her income kept rising.
She would move into his house. The house she had decorated. More
access. More control. More data.
Her research was thriving.
She had once laughed at John’s claim that money seemed to
follow him.
But within months she saw it.
Money really did drip from his skin and shower the people
around him.
So Jasmine made sure she was always around him.
As the phone rang, she adjusted the emerald pendant John had
given her.
“Hello, Jasmine,” Dr. Morrison said, his voice rough and
tired.
A rush of nostalgia followed the sound of her graduate
advisor’s voice. She could picture him clearly: bulldog jowls, white hair and
mustache, a red, swollen face leaning toward the phone.
Jasmine eagerly began describing John’s progress.
In only a few months he had transformed. Confident now.
Expanding his business after years of depression, confinement, and timidity.
“Look,” Dr. Morrison interrupted, “I know you believe in
this. But it’s the same thing as before. It isn’t real. This ‘sexual healing’
theory of yours—you’re romanticizing sex work. Ignoring the real problems and
jumping to conclusions.”
Her shoulders tightened.
She had heard it all before.
For years.
“Furthermore,” Morrison continued, “you didn’t discover domination. First dom escort ever? Hardly. Couples across the country whip each other
and call it a day. I’m not even sure what you’re describing is different from
prostitution with a bit of kink.”
Jasmine winced at the exaggeration but pressed forward.
“This helped him,” she said. “It helped him survive the
death of his mother. It’s undone ten years of institutional damage. We would’ve
progressed even faster if I’d dropped the dumb-bimbo escort script earlier. If
I’d known what to ask. What to build on.”
“Jasmine,” Morrison said, sighing, “you’re a smart girl.
Maybe this man is special. Maybe you are. Maybe you even stumbled onto
something interesting. But it’s still a sample size of one. In the Civil War a
bullet once passed through a soldier’s testicle and lodged in a woman’s womb
across the room. She became pregnant. It happened once. The NIH didn’t adopt it
as a fertility treatment. You cannot build a theory on a sample size of one.”
“It’s a sample size of two. It’s not just my experience,”
Jasmine said quietly, thinking of Monica and Bernard.
“Oh. Two.” He paused, “My mistake.”
Then more sharply: “Still not enough. Wake up.”
He exhaled, calming himself.
“My advice? Take the internship with my lab. Align your
dissertation with existing research. Finish the degree. Don’t make this harder
than it needs to be.”
“That’s not for me.”
The thought revolted her.
A PhD built on stale research about recreational
erectile-dysfunction drugs. Thousands of interviews with young men bragging
about erections lasting days.
Sure, she could pivot. Ask how many used escorts. Strip
clubs. Sex workers.
But who would that help? No one. It was jock party time
disguised as scholarship.
Morrison sighed.
“Then there’s nothing more to discuss, is there? You must
withdraw.”
“I will,” Jasmine said. “Happily. But you didn’t let
me do anything. I’ve been trying to prove I’m right. It’s just clear now that
academia isn’t how.”
She ended the call.
Was she blurring professional boundaries? Yes.
But fuck scientific impartiality.
How could a man whose dissertation had been typed on a
typewriter understand what she was doing now?
This was new. It was real.
The bitterness surprised her—it wasn’t her fault. It was the
system itself.
Dr. Morrison had spent forty-five years inside ivory towers
that knew nothing about the past few years of her life.
A man who had never left a session with a black eye and no
payment told her she romanticized sex work?
He had never sucked a dick. Never wondered what his body was
worth. He knew nothing.
Her thoughts returned to John.
Maybe his mother had scouted the mine. The Boy Scouts
extracted the ore. Prison cut him into a rough stone. AA hardened it.
But Jasmine—Jasmine alone—was polishing the jewel.
She would set him in gold. John would shine in her crown.
This was different.
The Wright brothers built a plane once. Now thousands fly
every day.
A quiet voice—John’s voice—echoed in her head.
I’m helping you too. There’s give and take here. Where do you think your courage came from?
She shook her head.
“Not now, John,” she said to the empty room. “I need to get
going.”
Later that day, settling into the big leather armchair in John’s library,
Jasmine recounted the conversation with Dr. Morrison. John knelt at her feet,
carefully washing them.
“Good for you! Who even reads dissertations?” he asked,
sliding the edge of a towel carefully between each toe.
“A committee. Then it’s filed in the school’s library
archive. Other academics.”
“Hmm.” John held her left foot thoughtfully, kissing each
toe quietly between his sentences.
“No one who could actually benefit from it,” he replied.
“You know, when AA started there wasn’t really treatment for alcoholics like
me. Just locked up in a sanitarium, drunk on the street, or dead.”
Moving to her right foot, he continued.
“AA was once just two men in fucking Akron, Ohio. Then they
added more, man by man, sharing their stories, relating. Actually helping
people who needed help.”
Jasmine couldn’t help thinking back to childhood Sunday
school descriptions of Jesus collecting disciples—fishermen gathered one by
one.
Pokémon, gotta catch ’em all.
She smiled down at the weathered, strong hands carefully
massaging lotion into her soles.
“You’re right. It never would have reached the people who
need it. I wanted a PhD—to be legitimate, to publish in serious research
journals. That’s gone now.”
“Professionals! A professional can’t talk to an alcoholic,” John scoffed.
“Not like a drunk talking to a drunk. That’s why AA works. Books… diplomas…
they can’t make you know what a drunk tremor feels like. Hallucinations during
detox. Wanting to stop but not being able to. You can’t learn it. You have to
live it to share it.”
Yes. Dr. Morrison couldn’t understand her. Couldn’t
understand John. People like them.
He didn’t understand that this was something
special—something that needed to be shared with the world.
Sunlight streamed through the window, beams swaying across
the lush wool carpet Jasmine had selected for the room in what felt like
another lifetime. That day at the furniture store had been when she first
realized her tired scripts—her old patterns—no longer worked. The old wheels
and gears in her head had begun to move and churn again.
Perhaps this PhD business was just like John. There was
another way to prove her theory was correct. Another way to help people.
How everything had changed after that lunch with Monica. A tête-à-tête.
The winter wind had blown fiercely that December day,
Christmas decorations already up around town. Between polite bites of salad and
covering her mouth with her hand, Monica had explained how she solved the
eternal call girl problem: the endless grind, the danger, living not even
paycheck to paycheck but dollar to dollar.
Through a mixture of studying marketing and the business
tactics of luxury couture brands, Monica had fashioned a model that worked for
her. She laid out the details to Jasmine that cold afternoon.
What was it John always said about AA?
You could only lay the tools before a newcomer.
Her pleasant daydreaming was interrupted abruptly by John.
“You spend most of your time here. Heck, between the
furniture and the renovations you planned, this place is more yours than mine.”
He motioned toward the lavish, fully stocked library. “Maybe when your lease is
up, you move in.”
Jasmine smiled.
Ahead of her plans yet again.
“I will. I love this place. It’s home to me.” She paused,
carefully formulating her words. “My Aphrodite statue would look much more at
home among all these nice things instead of surrounded by my crap.”
She stressed the word nice, secretly meaning expensive.
Though she didn’t expect him to come right out and say how much he had paid for
it, she had spent months vying for hints, parameters—any general idea of the
cost.
“Oh, she—the goddess—will be returning home,” he replied
vaguely, kissing the subtle curve of her ankle with a longing smile.
Maybe he meant the statue. Maybe he meant her. She wanted to
know for sure.
“You know,” he said carefully, “sometimes I wonder if I’m
just throwing money at you.”
Jasmine raised an eyebrow.
“Do you feel that way?”
He shook his head quickly.
“No. No. I just… I don’t want this to be the only reason
you’re here.”
Jasmine said nothing more.
So he would keep the mystery of Aphrodite’s price a secret
for longer.
It would continue to bother her.
She knew the cost of a gallon of gas, how much remained of
her student loan balance, the monthly amount John gave her—but not how much
that nude marble woman had cost him. The number had been scribbled on a piece
of paper the salesman scratched down and showed only to John. Maybe it was on
some invoice hidden in a drawer, or long gone in the trash.
Not even a hint.
Frowning at the tub of soapy water and towels on the floor,
she snapped her fingers and pointed.
“Clean up this fucking mess.”
From experience she knew it would take at least thirty
minutes for John to clean everything to her standards.
She had time to think. And so Jasmine thought about the past
decade.
Undergrad. Graduate school. Dr. Morrison discouraging her
every step of the way.
She remembered herself as a young, excited co-ed sitting in
his office, rushing through her ideas while he redirected them back toward his
own research—or ignored them entirely.
The first real argument came when she proposed focusing on
sex workers.
She could still see his reddening face.
“This clinical round was supposed to be easy, Jazz. Hand out
condoms. Pamphlets on STDs. Intake paperwork for free Pap smears. Now I’m
getting complaints that you’re taking notes without informed consent?”
He still complained that the National Science Foundation
required proposals to be submitted online as PDFs. A dinosaur then and now. He
couldn’t see the vision.
She was working on the front lines of human sexuality. That
was where the field belonged—not in sterile lab coats.
Looking back, it seemed obvious.
He had never been an advisor.
He had been a horse breaker.
For years he had tried to break her spirit—emotional
hobbles, hackamores, snubbing ropes.
And then came the meeting.
The worst day of her academic life.
Since preschool she had been the star student. Teacher’s
pet. Best in class.
For it to fall apart in one scheduled meeting.
The conference room was bright. Dr. Morrison sat beside the
department chair, the dean, the Director of Student Ethics, and several other
men in varying stages of aging and baldness.
The scholar she had once admired read from a sheet of paper
as if presenting charges.
“On May 20th, I received a phone call from the Community
Clinic. Ms. Kopernick’s advisor found notebooks belonging to Ms. Kopernick
containing private patient information detailing sexual and illegal acts,
personal identifiers, and violations of HIPAA laws. I discussed this with Ms.
Kopernick in my office the following day, at which point she stated she wished
to redirect her research.”
Pens scratched across paper.
She had talked to people. Written down what they told her.
It was research.
“On July 2nd, Ms. Kopernick informed me she intended to
begin working at a local gentlemen’s club as an exotic dancer for research
purposes. I strongly discouraged this and directed her to continue her
literature review.”
At the time Jasmine hadn’t even understood why the meeting
had been called.
She only wanted to embody the research.
Jane Goodall lived with chimpanzees. Napoleon Chagnon lived
with the Yanomami.
This was the same thing.
Real research. Raw research.
Yes, she had deviated from the original outline.
But she had seen something important at the clinic.
The women.
Sex workers.
People.
“On August 15th, I received an anonymous email stating that
Ms. Kopernick had begun associating with a woman named Monica, who has prior
arrests for prostitution, and that Ms. Kopernick herself had begun selling
sexual services.”
Each statement sounded worse than the last.
Jasmine tried to explain.
This mattered. This was real research.
The men listened politely and wrote notes.
But they were not listening to her.
They were listening to procedure. To protocol. To how
research was supposed to be done: Their way.
She just needed another way around academia.
“All cleaned up, Jasmine,” John cheerfully announced as he
reentered the library.
With two snaps of her fingers and a motion toward the floor,
he got on all fours before the leather armchair, and she rested her feet on his
back.
“John, I think you’re right about academia not being
suitable for my research. Even you’ve recognized how important it was to embody
the research, participate on the front lines—strip, escort. Vital.”
“It certainly benefited me.” His words vibrated through her
feet.
“John, tell me more about AA. How it works.”
“Well, it’s not professionals, no institution—just people.
All alcoholics. Does it work for everyone? No. But that’s true of all
treatments. Professionals can’t argue with the results, though. A couple
hundred sober people write a book on how they got sober, and then it’s
thousands of people—hundreds of thousands—getting sober. Professionals had to
pay attention. Now treatment centers have the Twelve Steps on the walls and
charge insurance companies for the same ideas you can get for a dollar in
almost every town. Sure, they sprinkle in some medicine and doctors’ and
nurses’ guidance, but they aren’t offering anything new. You’re released with
guidance to attend meetings. The courts even mandate AA meetings sometimes.
That’s how I came into the program. But the start was just a couple of guys
sharing their stories.”
“John, do you feel you benefit from this?”
“God, yes. This is the best my life has ever been.”
She poked him in the ribs with her toe and slipped into the
mean tone he liked.
“Quit fucking moving, John. You’re disrupting my thoughts.”
“Sorry, Jazz.”
“And there are other men like you too? Men who could benefit
from someone like me?”
John hesitated before answering.
“Maybe,” he said slowly. “But AA always says you don’t go
out chasing people. You wait until someone asks for help.”
Jasmine tilted her head.
“What do you mean?”
“Well… if someone’s drowning, sure, you pull them out. But
we’re warned not to play savior. That’s ego stuff. They have to want it.”
Suddenly she visualized John entering incel message boards
and men’s-rights groups. All her interviewees, colleagues, connections.
If she was as right about her theory as she believed, this
wasn’t research.
This was a revolution.
“John, I love you. I love how your mind works. Now get up
and get me a notebook. I have plans. Ideas that need to be written down.”
She did love him.
A love deeper than Dr. Morrison could ever understand in his
shriveled old heart.
What escort or lonely man was reading that?
She thought back to what Cliff, the salesman at the
furniture store, had said about the Aphrodite statue: old methods and tools.
This would be person to person. No training—just heart,
want, mentors, sponsors.
This is my experience, strength, and hope, and you can do
it too.
This was possible.
Maybe she would never be a doctor on paper, but she would
help more people than Dr. Morrison ever had from his corner office, looking
down at freshmen playing Frisbee in the quad.
She didn’t need to go through gatekeepers.
Universities hoarded knowledge behind paywalls and jargon.
She would go another way.
She needed to enter through the emergency exit, just like
Monica had at the art gallery.
Burn down the ivory towers that had told her no. Dr.
Morrison still locked up there with his data sets.
She would carve this vision using old tools. Heart to heart.
Person to person.
Let me tell you my story. Do you see yourself in the old
me? Do you want what I have now? Can I show you the way?
She didn’t need science. She needed something
ancient—something older. Folklore that lived in the bones of every human since
we were apes. The ability to relate, to share, to guide, to fail and succeed
together.
There would be no diploma in a shiny frame at the end of
this rainbow.
Yes, a pot of glittering gold for her—and women like her.
But something more important.
More important than being right. More important than proving
Dr. Morrison wrong.
Lonely, sad men scattered throughout society. Bitter, angry
men. Men who loved and hated women and fought themselves every day.
Suddenly on their knees.
Kissing toes.
Visions of men smiling, happy to hand over their crypto
accounts and NFTs to women in stilettos and glossy red nails.
Maybe this was the start of a different kind of society.
Once, they locked alcoholics in sanitariums until they died.
Now they sat in rooms down the street drinking coffee, dropping dollars in a
basket, and becoming useful members of society.
Maybe this was the first crack in the old order.
“This isn’t research,” Jasmine said quietly. “This is
something bigger.”
John shifted beneath her feet.
“Careful,” he said. “In AA they warn us about thinking too
big too fast. Ego is what gets drunks drunk again.”
“Of course, of course.” She waved off the warning. “John, I
need you to do something for me.”
Looking up with devoted eyes, he said, “Of course. For you,
anything.”
He didn’t need to say it.
She already knew.
