I licked my lips as a drop of sweet vodka dripped from my frosted martini glass. Gingerly, I set the glass down on the golden bar and looked at my friend, pursing my lips, anticipating her next comment.
“Got one,” she whispered in delight, and her eyes casually surveyed the rest of the room.
This is the sweet hunt you read about in the naughty sex section of Cosmopolitan articles: lusting for sugar daddies.
We sipped our £40 martinis in London’s most notorious sugar daddy hunting ground waiting to fulfill our perverted, narcissistic fantasy. We didn’t need the sugar — our outfits alone could have paid a couple months of rent in Chelsea or Notting Hill. But we yearned for the idea of our soft, naked skin engulfing the minds of London’s richest and loneliest.
This slow, irresistible seduction was as much ours as theirs, and in that tight black dress with a slit that revealed just enough to make wealthy 50-something year-olds thirst for the youthful adventure hidden in between my thighs, I felt powerful. I could write a thesis on the fucked up power dynamics of this fantasy — or my daddy issues while we’re at it — but it’s Thursday, so instead, I’ll slip you something sexy.
So we were sitting there, dim lights firing the mood for indecent thoughts, and a man across from us waved. I noticed his shiny gold Hermès cufflinks and ran my fingers through my hair, savoring the sheer admiration in his cloudy, blue eyes. Too drunk, he smacked his gray-haired friend and pointed at us, waving once more as he signaled the bartender over to him.
Seconds later, two flutes of Dom made their way over to our table, and we laughed, irresistible melodic tones dancing with the slow jazz in the air. The gold bubbles fizzed their way up slowly, each one tensely rising then exploding, like the lust in the eyes of the men. I couldn’t believe it had been this easy.
After a few sips, I stood up and made my way to the restroom, feeling the thirsty eyes in the room follow my every step. Turning a dark corner, I came face to face with a wall-to-ceiling glass window overlooking the city, its lights glittering brilliantly in the midst of the velvet darkness.
I heard a sweet laugh behind me, and I turned around. A blonde woman in her twenties wearing a crimson mini dress that hugged her every curve tightly covered her mouth mischievously. Clasping an older man’s hand behind her, she made her way out of a bathroom stall and into a dim hallway leading to the hotel suites.
As I stood there, stunned and uneasy, my friend rushed into the atrium smiling radiantly.
“Our friends invited us to their penthouse suite for the night. Are you in?”
The idea of spending a night secluded and overlooking the Palace of Westminster with a bottle of champagne sent a hot thrill through my body — only my vision didn’t feature men who probably struggled just as much as your generic, inebriated frat boy to get it up.
“Fuck it. Follow me,” I said, as I grasped her hand and left London’s velvet shadows behind us. 20 minutes later, we sat alone on our bright, white beds enveloped in plush robes devouring a warm pizza.
“Alright, so swinging next weekend?” my friend joked lightheartedly, and we laughed at the absurdity of the night’s experience.
Bored, old millionaires, college boys in vomit-stained basketball jerseys, foxy degenerates reading the Sex on Thursday columns religiously all lust after fantasies, and I do too, but in my brief flirt pursuing sugaring (borderline prostitution), I realized what I already knew: the idea of a fantasy tastes sweeter than the actual execution because it’s the thrill of the forbidden, not the forbidden act itself, that ignites us.
Veuve Cliq-Hoe is a student at Cornell University. Fire & Ice and Cherries in the Snow appears monthly this semester.