Colleen

Colleen could talk the paint off a canal house and knows precisely when to stop. Red-haired, twenty-five, hidden up a Jordaan staircase.

The real gift is not talking, it is timing, and Colleen's is faultless. The first minutes of her bookings are unreasonably entertaining, the city observed, the week skewered, some story that cannot possibly be true and clearly is, and then, on a dime, the register changes and the same instinct that shaped the stories starts shaping the hour. She is twenty-five, red-haired to a degree that makes strangers comment, and lives up a Jordaan staircase built for thinner centuries. English is her only tongue and she has never needed another. Her sensual and oil sessions carry her warmth all the way through; guests arrive strangers and leave, unmistakably, guests.

Colleen decides which bookings she takes and may decline any of them; she sets the limits for what a session includes, says what they are, and may end a visit at any point, as the terms set out.