Chapter 3: Sweet Arrangement

My laptop, once just a portal to movies that offered escape, started to feel like a research station. The '90s erotic thrillers still flickered, but my curiosity had shifted—more desperate, more specific. I found myself watching hardcore studios like Kink, becoming obsessed with the way power moved between bodies. At the same time, I dove into lesbian pornography, searching for something I couldn't name—different ways women touched, wanted, surrendered. I was dissecting, hunting—seeking clues to a new way of being, a different kind of interaction I couldn't yet name but felt stirring within me.

Between restaurant shifts—months of them now—my writing transformed; those erotic stories took on new life. They were no longer wistful fantasies. They became lab notes. I wrote about women who shaped their desires deliberately, often through chosen surrender. Bold women, precise and in control—even in giving it up. The version of me on the page was a stranger: clear-eyed, unapologetic, unafraid. Unlike the girl still rattling around Bernard's renovated shell—sparking like a faulty wire, flaring briefly but never holding a charge, still waiting to begin.

It felt like something was just beyond my grasp—something I hadn't quite understood. Yet all the people in the movies I watched, the books I read, seemed to have figured it out. They seemed happy.

At 22, I compared myself to child actors with careers already behind them, gold medal figure skaters long retired, and chart-topping singers my age. They had all done more—and sooner. My confidence, my very ego, felt as though it were being slowly decapitated by the metallic rhythm of a tank. I had become nothing like the woman I imagined during those school days when I'd stare beyond the grilled windows, lost in dreams of freedom and happiness.

I looked out at the countryside and saw only the people who had failed the child in me. Blaming them came easy. But how could they have helped me when they couldn't even help themselves? I wasn't a child anymore—I had to take real responsibility. Still, I felt myself becoming just like them. I refused to follow the blind. I wouldn't become one of them.

I finally reached a breaking point. I couldn't keep letting my life pass me by. That realization ignited something in me. Not the paralyzing kind of anger, but the good kind — the kind that pushed me to act rather than overthink, to move forward without second-guessing. I understood that to escape the situation I didn't want, I had to take more risks.

Enough was enough.

Then, word came that my brother's girlfriend, Élodie, was looking for a roommate. She shared an apartment with her brother near Parc Lafontaine in Montreal; she described the neighborhood as not too sketchy and the apartment itself as not too expensive.

It felt like a much-needed step forward—a chance to take control of my life.

This move offered the change I'd been craving, a chance to reinvent myself. Returning to my city of birth, where the hum of multiple languages and the chatter spilling from café terraces filled the air with possibility.

It wasn't the grand adventure I had once imagined, but it was a practical one—and a lot cheaper than buying another plane ticket to Asia.

This time would be different. This time, I wouldn't return to the countryside that both raised and confined me.

I lived with Élodie and her brother, Mathieu, in a two-bedroom place with a converted living room; all of us shared one bathroom. She waitressed in Old Montreal. He, freshly out of culinary school, had just begun making his way towards becoming a chef. They were both in motion—striving, growing, becoming. I, on the other hand, had chosen stillness. Or maybe it had chosen me.

I avoided job hunting, afraid the same black hole of dead-end work would suck me back in. Instead, I clung to a desperate, self-imposed rule: wait until the money ran out—then I'd have no choice but to act. I knew I could always find something to scrape by. Something dull. Predictable. That was the worst part: the fallback was always there. Unwanted, but reliable. A safety net I resented.

So I drifted in a state of survival—looping Parc Lafontaine on foot by day and devouring free, steamy e-books by night. There was something in those stories: narratives of escape, unconventional power, women finding strength through submission—a different kind of freedom. They made me believe I could break free, even as my funds quietly eroded.

I'd been putting off the inevitable check for weeks. When I finally logged in: less than a hundred dollars to my name. Panic set in. I'd been in Montreal for a few months now, and the time for drifting was over. I had to make a move. But the thought of surrendering to another soul-crushing, conventional job was unbearable.

When Élodie wasn't waitressing, she was studying literature, dreaming of becoming an editor. She spoke with such absolute assurance about how the world worked—always sounding like she knew all the angles and how to get the best deals—that, although I sometimes found her claims a bit much given her own circumstances, I couldn't help but listen. Yet she was the one who introduced me to ideas and lifestyles I'd never encountered before.

Her tales grew more fantastic over lukewarm cups of tea at our kitchen table. She knew a woman who made $1,000 a night waitressing at private events. I couldn't help but be skeptical—surely she had to be naked or offering something off-menu? Élodie insisted it was only serving. But when I dug deeper, I found out this friend also worked at a "happy ending" massage parlor.

This sparked something inside me—a glimpse into a world where fantasy might bleed into reality. The city's anonymity was intoxicating, a shield from the suffocating familiarity of my small town where everyone knew my family's name. Here, privacy was freedom; I answered to no one. I pressed Élodie for more about her mysterious friend, who sounded like a character straight out of Eyes Wide Shut. That life of opulence and carnal pleasures called to me.

It was late 2014, and the cultural moment thrummed with obsession over unconventional relationships, thanks to the Fifty Shades of Grey craze. You couldn't escape it—whispered conversations, copies tucked beside beds, fantasies rippling just beneath the surface. Élodie, an aspiring editor, was naturally devouring it. Fueled by those charged ideas of forbidden desires and lavish lifestyles—ideas that had started to stir inside me—I pressed her again. That's when she admitted, half envious, half repulsed, that her friend was also active on Sugar Baby sites. I didn't quite understand at first, but she explained: wealthy older men paying thousands for female companionship. She described it like being a kept woman in old novels—shopping trips, fine dining, jewelry—but modern, empowered, temporary.

"So many girls have unfulfilling sex with guys our age and for nothing," I told Élodie, half-joking but not really. "If there's a chance to have sex that's actually good and get mentorship, travel, even money—why not?"

After that, Élodie kept nudging me toward trying those sites. "I see you with an older man," she'd say, eyes alight like she'd glimpsed my future before I had.

Her words stuck with me. I'd always felt more at ease around older men—a calm, attentiveness, even a kind of silence that didn't need filling. People called me an old soul, though I figured they just meant I didn't talk much.

But Élodie's fascination sometimes seemed greater than mine. I wondered if she'd tried the sites herself. Maybe she couldn't—not while dating my brother. Maybe she was living vicariously through me. I didn't mind. Part of me wanted to live it out too. But it wasn't just about the money. Not really.

Films like Secretary had left their mark. They stirred something in me I couldn't yet name—an ache for structure, a desire to be guided, maybe even owned. I wasn't looking for a boyfriend. I was looking for something with more weight. Something that resembled the power exchanges I found myself writing about late at night, wondering if fiction was the only place such dynamics could live.

Like in Fight Club—when you have nothing, you're free to do anything. And I had nothing. No cat, not even a plant. Just a few dollars in my bank account. After all my travels and attempts to escape, I had pushed myself as far as I could go on my own. I needed external input. So I opened myself up—to anything. Any opportunity, any sign.

The movie trailers for the first Fifty Shades were already airing, and I wanted to understand what had the world so entranced. When Élodie finished the first book and moved on to the second, I borrowed her copy.

Funny how life answers you when you finally ask the right question—even if you don't know what that question is. I didn't know what I was searching for, but I was sure I'd recognize it when I saw it.

Late one night, after finishing another chapter of Ana and Christian's story, I sat in front of my laptop. The blue light lit my face in the dark apartment as I hovered, hesitating over the link. What was I really looking for? Money? Experiences? Or something deeper—someone who would take the lead? I'd spent years being the adult, the caretaker, long before I was ready. Maybe now, I just wanted to be looked after.

I clicked.

The chapter continues with Marian's sugar baby experiences... Want to keep reading?