There is a delightful scene in Corey Doctorow’s new novel The Bezzle where our hero, a formidable forensic accountant, has been dragged to a party of the super-rich and is making friends with one of the only other people at the party who works for a living:

I tapped my left nostril. “You missed a spot,” I whispered.

She bared her teeth even more and wiped away the white powder from her own left nostril, rubbed it on her gums and then wiped her hand off on her dress, looked down to make sure she hadn’t left a streak, then back at me.

“I have some to share, if you’d like,” she said. “JK gets lots of it.”

I let her lead me to the powder room.

In the enclosed space, she smelled of expensive perfume, floral and fresh and outdoorsy. It was a good Catalina Island smell. As soon as she closed the door, I became uncomfortably, overpoweringly aware of her position relative to mine, the inches between her bare arm and mine feeling electrically charged. I was not the kind of guy who found himself in the bathroom with beautiful younger women who wanted to share their cocaine.

“Let’s do this,” she said. She bared those perfect teeth again, then dug a little bottle out of her clutch and held it up so I could see that it was nearly full of white powder.

“JK gets good drugs.” Draaghs. I loved that accent.

“Have you two been together for very long?”

She gave me a searching look, like she was trying to figure out if I was pulling her leg. “I see JK when he books me,” she said. “He likes variety, so only every month or so. But yes, for a year, I think.” She watched me absorb that and her smile got wider. “You’re a nice man,” she said.

She produced a small, silver coke spoon and held it so it caught the light. She mounded it high with coke and held it up to my face. She took my chin with long, cool fingers and tilted my head, brought the spoon up to one nostril and pinched the other, her fingers resting on my lips. “Cheers,” she said, and I took a deep sniff.

She stared into my eyes as the coke came on. My skin felt all-over tight. My pulse thudded in my throat, where her thumb still had my jaw, and in my lips, where her fingers rested. She looked at me this way and that, chin tilting, staring into my eyes like a jeweler assessing a gemstone. Finally, she gave the tiniest nod and withdrew her hand. My skin tingled where her fingertips had been.

She held my gaze for another minute. “My turn,” she said, and scooped out her own mound. She sniffed it daintily, wrinkled her nose, closed her eyes and turned her head to the ceiling, giving me a long look at her long neck, the vein in her throat, her collarbones and the top of her cleavage.

Then she shivered from top to toe and looked me back in the eyes. “I don’t think you’re rich, Marty,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Not like our host.”

“Not like JK.”

“No,” I said.

“At first, I thought you might be. You’re not one of these people, and sometimes that means you’re from a higher level. But you’re just someone’s friend, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I said. I looked at her cocaine vial, now noticeably depleted. That was a business-development asset, and she’d wasted it on me. I wanted to apologize, but I didn’t want to offend her.

She followed my gaze. “It’s okay,” she said. “I knew you weren’t rich before I gave it to you. You seem interesting. Not boring, the way those rich ones are. It’s nice to chat with someone who I’m not doing business with.”

There it was. I’d passed by an uncountable number of sex workers who were soliciting on the street, and objectively, I must have passed an equally uncountable number of sex workers who were just out shopping or going to the movies or the doctor’s office or the daycare center. I’d even learned to recognize the telltale signs of a man’s sex-worker habit from his financials, after a couple of divorce jobs where I got hired to audit the family books (big cash withdrawals, obviously, but that could also be drugs; for sex workers you also needed to look for regular charges from certain anything-goes payment processors, the kinds of places that host reviews or make arrangements).

But I had never (knowingly) conversed with a sex worker up until that moment. I was worldly enough to suppose that questions about the job, or how she got into it, would not be welcome.

Clearly she was good at what she did: not only was she carrying a two-thousand-dollar handbag and accompanying a very rich—if very dull—man, but she’d smoothly flirted with me in a way that had left me tongue-tied and disoriented. If I’d had the same kind of money as Tommy Bahama—JK—and she’d named a price, I’d have been very, very tempted.

But I was just someone’s friend. Thankfully.

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