Khaosan Road. In the words of Susan Orlean, ‘the place to disappear’. I find the massage parlor at the address provided by the private investigator and step inside, grateful to be out of the sticky Bangkok heat. Bloated, sunburnt backpackers fill the reception, waiting for their favourite girls to be finished with their current clients.

"You have a girl who speaks English," I say to the older woman at the desk, flashing enough money to move to the front of the queue. She nods and I'm led down a grime-encrusted hallway lit only by the crackling blue neon of bug-zappers. Individual rooms branch away with flimsy curtains over the doors providing little privacy. The woman draws back a curtain of one room and I'm ushered inside.

The young woman inside is lighting incense, her back turned. Her body is stunning, wreathed in incense smoke and not much else. Just a thong wedged between her toned cheeks and a scrap of a bra adorning her bronze skin.

"Intira. You have customer. 200 dollars," the older woman says. "You have her for hour," she tells me before leaving.

"Gimme a second to set up here and I'll be right with you," 'Intira' calls over her shoulder in flawlessly accented America as she moves to assemble massage oils. "Two hundred dollars, huh? Wow, big spender. So… What will it be? Massage? Or for cash like that perhaps you just want me to skip straight to the happy- fuck."

She turns, swearing at the sight of me, the bottle of massage oil falling from her hands.

I start to strip my shirt. It clings to the sweat of my chest. Her lip quivers, eyes darting for the door that I'm blocking. "Go on. You were about to offer me the happy ending, yes?"

"I… she…" the girl stammers. "Me no speak English."

"You don't speak English? You spoke it quite well a moment ago."

She glances at the window. Three stories up, it's a rather drastic escape plan. "Me no understand. Y-you go find other girl."

"But I already paid for you," I say calmly. "And no English is fine. Reā s̄āmārt̄h phūd p̣hās̄ʹā thịy dị̂ t̄ĥā khuṇ t̂xngkār?" I pause for her reply as her mouth moves silently. After two years hunting for him abroad, I'm content to drag this out for my enjoyment. "I said we can speak thai if you prefer," I translate for her, a supposed local. "I've been in this country long enough to learn the language." He'd never been good with languages.

She shakes her head. "English is... fine. I speak little."

"Shall we get started then?"

I lie back on the table, my eyes open and trained on her, and wait patiently. Her reluctance is plain as she begins, her fingertips barely gracing my skin as she slathers me in oil. She's trembling. Looking like a deer in the headlights, I almost feel sorry for her.

"You're very good at that. You've been doing this long?"

She avoids eye-contact. "I masseur two years. Masseuse," she corrects herself quickly. "English not good," she reminds me. "You here long time?"

"About two years. You can use more pressure than that."

I watch her expression, like swallowing a mouthful of bile, as she starts to knead my muscles more firmly. My body responds naturally to her touch and, as she moves to work on the lower body, her hands divert in wide circles to avoid the obvious bulge in my shorts, which she is pretending not to have noticed. I allow one arm to slip off the table, running my fingers along her toned physique before groping her ass. She merely forces a vacuous giggle, a weak efeeminate swat at the hand being her only resistance, knowing one call to the police is all it would take.

"Why you here?" she asks with a forced, sweet smile, trying to wiggle her ass out of my grip.

"It's a long story. But I suspect you already know part of it, Intira. A couple of years ago, a member of my family stole a lot of money from us. He ditched his family, and ran away overseas. I've been hunting him ever since."

"You find him?" Her hand grips my wrist, trying to pry my groping hand away more firmly. I squeeze harder in response until it hurts, and she relents, allowing me to play with her as I wish.

"It took a while. He covered his tracks well. All I had to go on was a trail of cosmetic clinics. See, he was trying to mask his appearance, to blend in here, and there's no shortage of surgeons willing to give a man the chop in this country. Eventually I tracked him to... well... Maybe I found him. What's left of him anyway."

Her shaking hands have frozen. I goad her on with a quick ass squeeze and she resumes the long, slow strokes, still glancing at the door as if preparing to run the moment I'm distracted. "At first I thought when I found him, I'd be able to talk sense into him, maybe convince him to come home. But the more I saw the procedures he was having, the more disgusted I was. What sort of man would fill himself with silicone... feminize himself... rather than face his family and the consequences of his actions? No man at all."

Out of curiosity, I hook one finger into her thong, teasing it down around to take an inquisitive peak at her crotch. Kudos to whichever surgeon sculpted that tidy little organ. As I give an appreciative whistle, she blushes crimson and tries to tug her underwear back up.

"Now I wonder if it wouldn't be a more fitting punishment just to leave him here with the life he's chosen. He must be running out of money after so long. Who knows what means he resorted to to support himself. What he'd be willing to do $200."

"Maybe your- maybe this man sorry for what he did," she says quietly. "Maybe he take it all back if he could."

"Maybe," I shrugh. I'd come here with noble intentions but now that I see her body... I never imagined they would have made him so beautiful. "Maybe... But I'll still take that happy ending."