NECKBEARD

Neckbeard waited impatiently for his prostitute as I waited patiently outside. It was a cool night—calm, quiet. The windows were thin, and I could hear every word from the TV inside the room as he watched a succession of YouTube videos, his impatience and appetite growing with each suggested video and skipped commercial.

Every now and then, he would open another tab to browse videos on Pornhub. He had favorited the ones he liked best and clearly knew them all intimately. They all featured young girls and they were all amateur videos, shot by the participants themselves—a young girl masturbating in a tartan skirt, a young couple enjoying a hasty romp on a park bench. He had memorized his favorite timestamps in all the videos and cycled through them with unnerving speed, getting himself prepared for the night ahead by watching the moments of climax in each of his favorite clips, no doubt picturing doing the same thing.

By the time his date arrived, he looked ready to explode and jumped at the sound of the doorbell. I had been so engrossed in his activities and the silence of the successive still-framed climax shots that it also took me by surprise, too. He stood with a noticeable bulge in his pants, made some readjustments, and then hurried to the door, ready to ruin a young girl’s life.

The girl the agency sent wore a large black coat with a hood pulled over her head. She looked like the grim reaper as she stood in the doorway, her diminutive stature the only thing that gave her away. I watched through the windows as he helped her with her coat, escorted her to the bedroom, and then unceremoniously dumped her on the bed.

She seemed taken aback, the fear in her eyes evident. I wasn’t an expert, but I had seen enough of these encounters on TV to understand that it usually began with a drink and some small talk, a bit of verbal foreplay to ease the tension. The escort site reviews had suggested the same thing, with many men complimenting the girls on how they made them feel at ease and took the time to be accommodating.

Neckbeard wasn’t interested in any of that. He wasn’t the nervous, anxious sort—he didn’t see it as an awkward exchange. She was there to do a duty, to fulfill a need. To him, it was as basic as taking a shit or eating a pizza. He set an alarm on his phone to make sure he got his money’s worth and unclipped his belt.

I snuck around to the front of the house, keen to avoid seeing any of the gory details and to make sure I didn’t miss my opportunity. In his haste, he had left the door unlocked. The noises from the bedroom—fake moans of pleasure from her; real moans of exasperation from him—drowned out what little sound the door made as I slid inside the house and clicked it shut behind me.

In his reviews, he played the role of a stud. In between comments about how a girl’s breasts “could have been bigger” or how he noticed “stretchmarks and cellulite” and would have preferred them with “a little less pubic hair,” he boasted about going all night long. But I knew enough about his personality to know that he was lying. I’d also had the misfortune of watching him masturbate, both in person and via the clips he had sent to unfortunate and unsuspecting women.

I didn’t have long.

My thoughts were confirmed when I heard him reach a loud climax seconds later. I slipped inside the bathroom, barely suppressing a smile when I heard the escort follow Neckbeard’s vociferous climax with a meek attempt of her own. She had clearly seen the reviews and knew that if she wanted a full five-star rating, she either needed to fake it or be the embodiment of perfection.

His need for her to climax was borne not of empathy, but of a desire to be the alpha man, the macho stud who could get the job done and leave any woman quivering in delight. It was the image he portrayed online, the person he pretended to be when professing his frustrations to other sad, lonely Neckbeards.

I heard the bed creak and groan, followed by a loud exhalation and a messy throat-clearance. He had rolled off her and was now seemingly lying beside her, no doubt grinning like a simpleton while she wondered if her work was done and if she could go home for the night.

—

Neckbeard never paid for the night. He didn’t even pay for the hour. He talked a good game online, but he knew his own limitations and took the shortest appointment that he could get, which was half an hour. If they had offered him five minutes, he would have accepted and used every single second of it, getting his money’s worth before the poor girl even made it through the front door. But they didn’t, so he reluctantly paid for the full half hour, blew his load in a few minutes, took a short nap, and then began round two.

Twenty-five minutes into the appointment, with his snoring shaking the foundations of the house like a passing bullet train, Neckbeard’s alarm sounded. The snoring broke; he spluttered, coughed, cleared his throat, and then said, “You wanna go again?”

The girl, undoubtedly, did not want to go again. I had spent the previous twenty minutes in the closet, calmly planning my actions, but I could have just as easily been making myself a cup of tea in the kitchen. She wasn’t going to move from her position beside him; she spent the entire time just lying there, staring at the ceiling, regretting all of her life decisions and quietly waiting for the half hour to be over. But she felt obligated to accept, her reluctance palpable as she agreed.

He subjected her to another few minutes of rushed, uncomfortable sex, after which he paid her, and she left. She was quick to get out of the house, not even taking the time to freshen up or decontaminate in the bathroom. Neckbeard followed her out, keeping pace with her hurried steps and hinting that she was going to get a good review for her efforts.

He shut the door after her, and I heard the lock followed by a sigh of satisfaction and a declaration, “That was amazing. I loved carving that cunt wide open.”

Ironic, I thought. Neckbeard and I shared a common interest after all.