There are things in my life I’ve marked as off-limits and unbloggable, certain people, certain details, certain areas of my day-to-day existence. Among the unbloggables are my clients. Unfortunately, one of them is weighing on my mind. I might revise this unwritten rule.

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Different subject.

Immediately after I posted that blip on younger gentlemen, I received a note from a 26-year-old I met in London a few months ago. Pure coincidence. He was someone I met at a cafe and considered meeting for a drink before I left town. I’d given him my number and he’d given me his, but when I discovered that he was only 26 years old, I decided not to go through with it. It was that habit of keeping younger men at a distance.

He was interesting, though. Aggressive. I was writing in my notebook and consuming as much coffee as my body could handle when I glanced up and caught him looking at me. I looked away for a moment and when I looked back to check him out, he held my eye contact. He definitely didn’t look English – he was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with olive skin, and he was dressed in charcoal and black. He also had a tiny, almost invisible nose piercing. I guessed French. When he got up, walked to my table, and settled in the seat across from me, I was pretty convinced he was French. And then he introduced himself with a strong French accent.

We talked for a bit, though I said relatively little about myself. I learned that he was from Paris but living in London. He was interested in men’s fashion but could only get a job working as a tailor. He hated Paris and Parisians, but he didn’t like London much either. I could only shrug. I like both cities.

While he talked, I noticed he had a tiny diamond embedded in one of his canines, and I’d only seen that once before, when I was living in Italy. My boyfriend’s best friend had been obsessed with the tooth-diamond look. She was an interesting woman, a frenetic, fast-talking blonde from Modena with an amazing aptitude for languages: her English was spoken with a perfect English accent and her French was immaculate. She was literary (loved Molière) and stylish (loved bright colors) and very playful in her movement and demeanor. I remember the day she started to obsess over the tooth diamond – it was all she could talk about and we’d ask, “But why?” She’d shrug and say, “I just like it.” So she saved up for the right gem, and by the end of the year her tooth sparkled when she talked.

So when I saw it on the French boy, I stared. It was tiny, like the diamond in his nose, and I think it made me interested to get to know him. I know I had every intention of meeting him for that drink. It was only later, when he mentioned his age by text message (I can’t remember the context), that I paused and put him out of my mind. I canceled our plans, met with a friend instead, and assumed I’d never hear from him again.

But since then, he’s been sending me notes. He calls me “ghost” and he’s cycled through a few emotional states – frustration, lust, anger, desire. I ignored them all, thinking “off limits” but when he wrote the other day, just after I posted my interest in exploring younger men, the timing was good: I responded. I’m going to be in London, I said. Maybe we should have that drink.