I'm not quite sure:

I understand what's happening here. The guy's fallen in love with the once-a-week prostitute he's hired? Except before he tells her he loves her, he tells her he doesn't want to be more than friends? There's a mention of his wife, too, but even though they're at the guy's house, I don't get any sense of what's happened to her--is she dead or did she leave?--or how long ago it happened. As for Roseanne, she asks if he will stay with her, he says "Always," then she gets up and leaves till next week.

To say that emotions are irrational is one thing, but, well, the old saying holds that fiction is different from non-fiction because fiction has to make sense. Does Roseanne just want the narrator's continued business and doesn't care about anything else? Does the guy want more from her but knows she won't give it so he just keeps paying for whatever he can get?

That's what I've put together from what's here at any rate, but everything's so tamped down, I'm not entirely sure. It was a lot of work for me get even that much, and frankly, the payoff's not wowing me. Probably if I knew more about this guy, I'd care more, but right now, it's all just kind of a frustrating tangle.

Mike

The text here strikes a nice balance between being unobtrusive and still managing to sprinkle in bits of really descriptive imagery. Overall, the reading experience was very pleasant and smooth,

To be honest, though, I think I'm having trouble understanding what the ultimate takeaway is supposed to be, here. To me, the narrator's actions don't really have clear emotional motivations behind them. The fact that he kind of goes back and forth between wanting change and wanting the status quo kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Since he was the one who initiated the interaction with something different (no sex, just talking), the fact that he apparently still expected things to stay emotionally the same seems really odd.

I'm also having difficulty trying to parse out what exactly Roseanne wants from this, outside of a paycheck. The "you know how I feel about this" seems to imply that she doesn't like it when her clients become emotionally attached. But adding the "will you stay with me" bit feels like she's backtracking. I'm just not sure why she'd ask that from him at this point.

So in the end, I think I would like a little more clarity on what exactly our two characters want to get out of this interaction. It's okay for characters to have inner conflict, but since we don't have a very clear idea of why they'd have conflicting emotions, the whole thing comes across like two people who are just very wish-washy about this matter. I personally think that you can risk being a little more telly here for the sake of properly conveying the internal and external conflicts at play.

Thanks for submitting!