After a few drinks: courtesy, a clear head and her right to end a session

Nobody expects a guest who has spent the evening at a restaurant or a bar to arrive back at his room entirely sober. A glass of wine with dinner, a beer at the square, a digestif pressed on the table by a waiter: none of that is a problem, and none of it needs to be declared. The line this guide is about sits a long way further on. It is the point at which a guest stops listening, stops taking no for an answer, or cannot stand up to open his own door. Very few guests ever get near it. The ones who do almost always could have seen it coming at the table.

The rule, stated once

Deciding what a session includes falls to the therapist and to nobody else. Her limits are hers to state, in her own words, before anything begins, and they stay fixed until she leaves. She may decline a booking before she sets out, decline at the door, or end a visit at any moment, and she does not owe anyone a reason. Where her safety or her comfort is not respected, or a limit she has named is pushed at, the visit ends there. The fee for the time that was reserved stays due. Nothing is added to it, and nothing is taken off it.

That last part surprises some guests, so it is worth being plain about why. The hour was held for you and nobody else. She travelled across the city to reach you. When a visit is ended because of how a guest behaved, the time cannot be offered to anyone else, and the reason it ended lies on the guest's side of the room. Refunding it would mean that the one guest who made the evening unsafe paid less than every guest who did not. The booking terms say the same thing in more formal words.

What she is looking at when she arrives

A therapist reads a room within the first minute. She is not checking whether you have been drinking; she can usually smell that you have, and she is not bothered by it. She is checking three simpler things. Can you hold a normal conversation? Do you hear what she says the first time? Is the person in front of her the same person who wrote the booking message two hours earlier, or has the evening changed him?

A guest who answers the door, says hello, listens while she explains how she works and asks a question or two is fine after a bottle of wine shared over dinner. A guest who talks over her, repeats himself, cannot find the balance he was asked to have ready, or treats her limits as a starting position for a negotiation is not fine after two beers. The drink is not the issue in either case. Attention is.

Habits that keep a guest nowhere near the line

None of these are rules. They are what guests who book on the way back every trip tend to do without thinking about it.

Book before the next drink, not after it

The moment you decide to write is usually the moment the evening turns. Write the message, then switch to water or a soft drink for the rest of the time you are out. It keeps the thread accurate, because a room number typed after the fourth glass is sometimes someone else's, and it means the guest who opens the door is the guest who booked.

Leave the minibar alone

The ten minutes in the room before she knocks are for a shower and a glass of water, not for a miniature from the fridge. Arriving slightly flatter than you left the bar is better than arriving livelier.

Eat something

If the evening was drinks rather than dinner, eat on the way back. A sandwich on the walk does more for the next ninety minutes than anything else on this page.

Keep the room yours

Friends who wanted to see the room, a colleague who needed somewhere to sit for a minute, a stranger from the bar: none of them are there when she arrives. The booking is for the guest or the couple who made it, everyone present must be twenty-one or over, and she may leave before anything starts if anyone in the room was not part of the arrangement. The page about leaving the group behind is written for exactly that moment.

Nothing stronger than the drinks

Alcohol is the one substance this guide deals with. If the evening has gone further than that, do not book that night. Write the next day instead.

Courtesy that costs nothing

A booking made on the way back asks for very little from a guest, and the small things carry a lot of weight at the end of an evening.

• Be back before she is. Being early by ten minutes is courteous; being late by ten minutes means she waits in a corridor at night.
• Answer the phone. If she writes from the lobby to ask for the floor, a reply within a minute keeps her from standing in a public space.
• Open the door yourself and let her in without fuss. Dressed or in a robe is fine.
• Settle the balance at the start when one is due, in the amount agreed in the thread, so money does not sit between you for the rest of the visit.
• Listen once. When she explains how she works and what she does not do, that is the arrangement, not an opening offer.
• Ask rather than assume, at any point, about anything.
• If you want her to stop, say so, and if she asks you to stop, stop.

Guests sometimes worry that a request to slow down or change something will seem rude. It never does. What seems rude is guessing.

When the right decision is to cancel

There are nights when the honest answer, on the walk back, is that you are not in a state to give anyone your attention. The right move then is to cancel, and the earlier the better. On a booking with a deposit, a cancellation sent more than twenty-four hours before the booked time returns the whole deposit. Written inside the final day, with her still at home, it costs half the deposit as fee already earned, and the rest is repaid. From the moment she has left, all of the deposit counts as earned. On a booking with no deposit behind it, cancelling before she sets out costs nothing, and after that it costs the share of the fee that her journey represents.

Put next to a visit that ends at the door, those figures look very different. Take a first ninety minutes, confirmed with half of its fee. Called off on the walk back, before she has so much as reached for her coat, the deposit is cut in two, one piece kept and one piece sent back. Called off once she is on her way over, none of it comes back. Ended at the door because a guest could not stand up straight, the complete ninety-minute fee is due for the time reserved. The arithmetic points the same way as common sense.

Two guests, one Saturday

Picture two visitors on the same Saturday, each staying near the canal ring. The first has dinner in the Jordaan with a bottle of red shared between four, writes at the cheese course asking for ninety minutes at half past eleven, drinks water for the last half hour, walks back, showers and is sitting on the edge of the bed when she knocks. The second spends the evening at the square, writes at quarter to one after a long run of rounds, forgets to mention that the street door locks, cannot find his phone when she writes from outside, and opens the door eventually with a glass still in his hand. Both drank. Only one of them made the booking easy to keep, and the visit that follows reflects it.

Why a clear head matters more than the hour

Guests who book after the club sometimes think the late hour is the obstacle. It rarely is. A booking confirmed at half past three for a guest who has been drinking water since one is a calm, ordinary visit. A booking confirmed at eleven for a guest who has not stopped since six is the one that goes wrong. The page about the small hours after a club covers what the reply asks at that time of night and why.

What happens after a visit is ended

If she ends a visit because a limit was pressed or her safety was in question, she leaves, and the house writes a short internal note of the date, what happened, and the name and number the booking came from. It is held for twelve months, nobody outside the house sees it, and it decides one thing only: whether a further booking from that name is taken. How to object to a note or ask for it to be corrected is set out on the privacy page. A guest who drank a little too much and was asked to call it a night is not treated as a criminal, but he may find that the next reply is a polite no.

None of this is meant to make an evening out sound risky. For the guest who had dinner, a drink or two and a walk back, the whole of this page reduces to three words: listen to her. Everything else follows from that.