I’m sitting in a busy coffee shop on Jasper Avenue on a workday afternoon playing an intriguing game: “Guess the Prostitute.” It’s not a game I’ve ever played before, because, to my knowledge, I’ve never met a prostitute before, and I’m not sure what to expect.

I’m having coffee with a working girl because, frankly, I’m fascinated by the concept. Not that I want to be a working girl. Nor do I think my husband would be OK with it if I was. Or my mother, for that matter. But still, I’m fascinated by what it’s like to make a living at the world’s oldest profession.

I’m a bit early for our meeting, so I check out every woman who walks into the coffee shop. What do you look for in a prostitute? Are there telltale hooker signs? The woman with the large hoop earrings is dressed pretty provocatively for the office. But she pays for her latte and leaves without making eye contact. Or is it the blonde who’s flirting with the baristo? I giggle a little when the nice little old lady tries to share a circle of comfy chairs with me. I tell her I’m having a business meeting, and she sits, wisely, in the opposite corner and takes out her knitting.

When my coffee date arrives, I’d never have guessed it would be her. I’ll call her Melissa, because she thinks the name is pretty. Melissa is young and sweet-faced, fresh from a spa appointment. She’s dynamic and vivacious and we look like two girlfriends hooking up for a chat. She’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and a fashionable scarf, and she looks about as pure as apple pie and driven snow.

And then she shocks me speechless.

“Yeah, there’s this one guy who pays me extra to dress up in a snowsuit and play footsies with him,” she says when I ask about her day. “Then there’s ‘red lipstick guy.’ And then there’s the guy who asks for my used condoms at the end of the day. Well, let’s just say he’s not doing shots of vodka.”

My mind is officially blown.

But it’s just another day for Melissa. She works in an adult massage studio. She’s one of the city’s hundreds of licensed prostitutes, or “wholistic practitioners,” as her licence puts it. Which I find funny since my reflexologist is also a wholistic practitioner. “Yeah, it’s the same licence,” she says with a smirk. “But it’s certainly not the same job.”

The massage parlour business is, for all intents and purposes, legal. But in many cases it can also, for all intents and purposes, be a brothel. Which, considering that the solicitation of sex for money is illegal, seems quite the contradiction. “Yeah, there’s a lot of winking and nudging going on at City Hall,” Melissa says. “They know exactly what we do, and we do get visited by vice cops who also know exactly what we do, but since we’re inside and relatively safe, nobody seems to worry about it too much.”

So, what exactly do they do?

“You name it, and you can pay for it, we do it,” says Melissa.

The process seems pretty simple. You’re a guy, or you’re a couple (“Couples are my specialty,” says Melissa) and if you don’t already know who you want to see before you arrive, you’re seated in a nicely appointed waiting room and a bevy of scantily clad beauties are paraded in front of you. You make your choice, she takes you into another room and locks the door, invites you to take a shower, and then you negotiate exactly what service you require, using all kinds of code. And then you pay.

And do you ever pay. Handjobs run close to $200, and other services just go up from there. Many of these working girls set their own prices, but there are industry standards, and the girls hate it if they’re undercut by one of their own. “The whole system has to adjust if one girl cuts her prices,” says Melissa. “And everybody suffers. It’s total crap.”

But of course, the universal answer to the question “Why do you do it?” is the money. The girls pay a studio rental fee, but then everything they make on top of that fee, including tips that can be as extravagant as trips, cars, and houses, are theirs to keep. Melissa can make upwards of eight grand per month, in a good month.

Yet again, my mind is blown. I confess to her what I make as a writer per month. She looks at me, shocked, and says, “How do you live?”

I don’t buy Prada handbags, for a start, which I find out is the key to my “Guess the Prostitute” game. “Check out her purse,” says Melissa. “If a young girl is carrying Prada or Louis Vuitton, she’s probably a hooker.”

Which doesn’t suit my image of prostitution at all. Or big-name bags, for that matter. Aren’t hookers drugged-out high school dropouts? Aren’t they all caught in the vicious circle of addiction and street life? How can this pretty, fresh-faced girl possibly be who she says she is?

But life hasn’t been all Prada for Melissa. She arrived in Edmonton three and a half years ago with a suitcase and $20 to her name. Just 18 years old, she roomed with a girlfriend, whose abusive boyfriend kicked them both out on the street, with just the clothes on their backs. Young, scared, and with nowhere to go, they found an ad that offered big-time money for adult massage.

“At the time, I had no idea what that meant,” she says. “I thought it meant massaging adults — you know, instead of kids. I thought, ‘I could do that,’ so I gave them a call.”

Her innocence was blown when she discovered what adult massage actually meant. But she needed the money, so she went through with it. And she continues to go through with it every day. “You just do it and take the money and run,” she says. “You can’t think about it too much or you’ll drive yourself crazy. And I’m trying to get out of the industry.”

In a year, she wants to be going to school. I nod supportively. By now I feel like we are friends. She sees me nodding and says, “See, that’s the difference between regular people and hookers. You believe me when I say I’ll be out in a year. If you were on the inside, you’d be saying, ‘Yeah, right. Whatever.’ But I really am making plans. I’m socking as much money away as I possibly can.”

I continue to nod.

I find I’m nodding a lot a few days later when I meet Melissa’s friend Cynthia (also not her real or her professional name). Cynthia is also a massage girl. And, like Melissa, Cynthia is pretty, young, and cynical. She’s been in the business for a bit over three years, and at 23, she’s seen it, heard it, and done it all.

“Even though it’s 110 per cent consensual, sometimes I feel like I’m being raped,” Cynthia confesses. “Some days are just excruciating. Sometimes the guy is abusive, sometimes he’s totally screwed up and says things like, ‘Pretend you’re an eight-year-old girl.’ On those days I just want to curl up and cry.”

So I ask the question again. Why does she do it? Why do any of them do it? And the answer is predictable. For the money. Cynthia has months that top 10 grand.

But she has other reasons too. “Sometimes I think that we’re performing a public service, you know?” she says, her eyes downcast. “Sometimes I think it’s good we’re there to do what we do, to keep the freaks busy, so they’re not out there hurting somebody innocent.” It doesn’t seem to cross her mind that she might be innocent too.

I ask her about relationships. “It was actually my ex-boyfriend who got me into the business,” she says when I ask if the people in her life know what she does for a living. “And my parents just found out. They are pretty freaked out, but they love me and are doing their best to support my decisions. But my daughter will never ever know.”

Cynthia’s eyes brighten a bit as she talks about her daughter, who is one of the inspirations in her life. So is her new boyfriend, who is about as far removed from the sex industry as possible. “He’s a farm boy,” she says. “He’s pretty innocent, but he knows what I do. He doesn’t like it, but he’s a good person and he supports me. And I try not to tell him about my day.”

I want to know how sex on the job affects sex in her personal life. “It’s totally different,” she says. “It’s a complete 180 shift. It’s funny, because you’d think I have sex all day, I wouldn’t want to have sex with my boyfriend. But it’s so different, I hardly make the comparison.”

How is it different? “Well, for one thing, I do not kiss on the job. Ever. Kissing is way too intimate. And with my boyfriend, I’m way more affectionate. Sometimes all I want to do is cuddle. Whereas with my clients, I can hardly bear to touch them.”

So what does she really think of her clients? “They disgust me,” she says with a shrug. “I’d say about 95 per cent of them are married. Some of them are well-known. Politicians, people you’d know. And sometimes I’ll see them out, you know, at restaurants and stuff, and they’ll be there with their beautiful wives, and I can’t figure out what they’re doing with me.”

Another issue for Cynthia is self-esteem and body image. “Some girls get more confident doing this job because they have guys salivating over them every minute of the day,” she says. “But I think I’ve gotten more insecure. And I feel pretty shitty about myself. And I think the world is a pretty bleak place. There are a few good things about it, like my daughter and my boyfriend, but people are pretty sick generally, I think.”

I keep nodding, but I really just want to give Cynthia a hug. I change the subject to what she ultimately wants to do with her life.

“I plan on going back to school,” she says. After what Melissa has said, I’m wondering if this is a common line. “I actually want to go into the justice field,” she says.

So what’s it going to take to get her to switch industries? “I’m not sure,” she admits. “But I can’t do this forever. I’d die first.”

Cynthia leaves and goes on with her day. I stay at the coffee shop and sit in stunned silence.