She told me once she has a man's heart, she can get anything from him. I fell for it anyway.

My name is Dale, I'm 52, American, and I'd spent enough time in this scene, across several countries, to think nothing could really surprise me anymore. I was wrong.

In September 2021, with the pandemic still running the show across most of the world, Thailand was one of the few places an American could actually get to without too much drama. I used the Phuket Sandbox scheme, two mandatory weeks on the island instead of two weeks locked in a Bangkok hotel room. Only a handful of bars open on Bangla Road, the same faces every single night wherever you went. It had the feel of summer camp for adults, everyone knew everyone within three days.

I'd been drinking most nights at the same bar, with the same girl sitting with me every time, until one evening she was busy with another customer. That was the night a woman nearby, called Tan, started talking to me.

You could tell right away she had experience, that she wasn't some fresh arrival straight off the farm chasing her first paycheck in the city. She was upfront from the first minute, told me flat out she'd been working bars since she was 18, was 29 now, eleven years in the trade, and at one point mentioned, almost in passing, the way you'd mention the weather, that once she gets a man's heart she can get whatever she wants from him. She said it without drama, not trying to impress me or warn me, just as another fact about her life, and that flat, calm tone was exactly what made me lower my guard instead of raising it.

I'd spent enough years in bars like it, in Manila, in Cartagena, a couple of places I'd rather not dwell on too much, to spot the usual script a mile off: the shy girl who'd never done this before, the sick brother, the tears timed perfectly for when you asked for the bill. Tan didn't offer me any of that. She told me exactly who she was and how it worked, and somehow that brutal honesty came across as more seductive than any well-told lie I'd been fed before.

Anyone would say that should have scared me off. Instead it felt almost like a relief. Tan had sized me up in a matter of minutes and decided I didn't need the usual script, the excuses, the shy-girl routine. We ended up going out together that night.

She came back for me the next day, this time in her own car, something I immediately read as a sign she'd been doing this a while and doing it well. We spent every remaining night I had on the island together. After that first night she never asked me for anything else, I'd pay for drinks at her bar and cover food when we went out, exactly like you would on any normal date anywhere in the world.

Once her shift ended we'd usually head to after-hours parties in condo units up in the hills above Patong. The alcohol curfew, still in force because of the pandemic, meant those private parties were literally the only game in town for drinking past a certain hour, so they filled up with people from the scene, bar girls, managers, the occasional lucky customer like me.

Being with Tan completely changed how people treated me at those parties. I stopped being a customer and became one of the girls' plus-ones, so people talked freely in front of me, no filter. I watched up close, from the inside, all the hustles and games playing out between the girls and the foreign customers, who was faking love for who, who was juggling three different men in the same week without any of them knowing, who already had a husband back in her Isaan village and never mentioned him to certain customers, who kept an exact tally of how much she'd pulled out of each man that month, like someone running the books on a small business, because that's basically what it was.

I remember one night in particular, sitting on the edge of a pool at one of those condos with a warm beer in hand, listening to two of Tan's friends laugh as they compared how much each of them had managed to squeeze out of their respective foreign boyfriends that week, one German, one Australian I think. They said it without a shred of embarrassment, right in front of me, precisely because I was with Tan and therefore no longer counted as a regular customer whose feelings needed managing. I laughed along with them that night, like one of the group. I saw all of it and, like an idiot, kept thinking whatever I had with Tan was different from any of that.

I went back to Thailand three more times over the following ten months, each trip a little longer than the last, each time inventing a slightly less convincing work excuse to justify it to myself. By then I was completely in love with her, no reservations, none of the usual caution a man with my mileage should have had. Between visits we'd video call for hours, some nights just leaving the camera on while we slept, each of us on our own side of the world, twelve time zones apart, as if that somehow made up for not sharing an actual bed. I bought her a new phone so the connection wouldn't keep dropping. I couldn't picture a life without her tucked away somewhere in it anymore, without asking myself too closely which corner of that life I actually fit into.

Reality, of course, kept pushing through no matter how hard I tried to paper over it. Tan kept working the bar, we argued about it every time I was there, and the story kept shifting a little at a time, with a logic that only made sense if you wanted to believe it. First she told me she only worked for drinks now, nothing more, that she didn't sit with customers outside the bar anymore. Then the version became that as long as she only loved me, the rest shouldn't matter.

When you're that deep into something, your brain finds a way to make any explanation sound reasonable. I believed her, or pretended to, which by that point amounted to the same thing.

Then the calls started getting shorter. She disappeared more often, with the usual excuses, broken phone, too much work, a sick cousin. On what turned out to be my last trip she told me, without much preamble, that she was marrying an American and that this would be the last time we'd see each other. I was devastated, standing right there in her usual bar on Bangla Road, a half-finished beer on the table in front of me.

Looking back now, the signs were everywhere from the very start and I chose not to see a single one of them. I chose to see an honest woman who happened to have a complicated job, instead of exactly what she'd told me she was the first night we talked.

Still, I spent the five nights I had left with her anyway, because I'd already made the trip out to Thailand and because, simply, I didn't know how to do anything else. We went out for dinner, went to her bar like always, talked about nothing much as if neither of us had said anything significant a few days earlier, and at some point I stopped trying to understand how she could act so normal and just let myself enjoy what was left, which wasn't much but was all I had.

On the last night I sat in the lobby of her apartment building while she went upstairs to call her fiancé goodnight, something she did every single night without fail, she told me herself, no discomfort at all, the same calm way she'd told me everything else since day one. I sat there on an uncomfortable lobby sofa, watching other residents come and go, not quite sure what to do with my hands or with what I was feeling. She came back down twenty minutes later, gave me a normal hug, the kind you'd give a work friend, and that was that.

For years I wondered how smart, experienced men, men with plenty of money so they'd never need to do anything foolish, ended up falling into situations that look so obvious from the outside. Now I know exactly how, because I'm one of them. You don't have to be stupid or desperate. You just have to spend time with someone you like, day after day, night after night, and the feelings come on their own whether you want them to or not. Nobody's immune to that, not even a 52-year-old guy who should already know exactly how the game works.

I still go to Thailand regularly, a couple of times a year, and I hold no grudge against the country, or against Phuket, or against Bangla Road. The place was never the problem. I just come away a lot wiser about how this game actually works, and with the habit now of paying attention to the signs I used to prefer not seeing.