R382 Prostitutes are capable of having sex for personal pleasure and intimacy, you know. This whole episode showed that she wants something more than being a hooker, and while Portia is attracted to bad boy dick and turned off by the good guy, the hooker normally is just treated like a carnival ride and she wants nothing more than a stable life and a nice guy to live that life with. Obviously, people are at odds with their personal situations.
And yes, Cameron and his wife obviously are in cahoots. They run scams together. Harper is analytical and intelligent but she is being manipulated. The other couple did a divide-and-conquer on them. Harper was fixated on her own suffering throughout the overnight trip, and on comparing herself to the other couple even though she said she was done doing that. While she was judging them harshly, the other wife was planting seeds of doubt in her head and she didn't even recognize it.
Cameron, yes, attempted to blackmail Ethan. And unlike Harper, Ethan was onto Cameron and he found himself in a situation he can't so easily explain away.
This is great writing. So many things are obvious and yet there is a lot of subtext that makes your mind ask questions. It is obvious that Cameron is preying on Ethan. And now Ethan has acknowledged it. It has been newrly obvious that Cameron has been trying to seduce (at the very least flatter) Ethan, and last night, that went from being an interesting implication to explicit: I want to be inside of you. Ethan was sick, but he had been made physically ill and at the same time, he realized all day that Cameron was doing all he could to compromise him. While Cameron was fucking the hooker, Ethan looked like "oh, fuck...I'm fucked." He knew he had been successfully compromised.
Why would Ethan not just tell Harper about this?
That is the big subtext for me and it seems pretty clear, although there's some possibility I am wrong.
Ethan and Cameron are not really suited to be friends. Yet they share a history. I think their relationship could be the kind of relationship that was mainly forged through sex. Many of us have known people we are attracted to physically while having nothing in common and not really liking one another's personalities, yet wanting to be around one another. There's no great reason for Ethan to have agreed to go with Cameron and his wife.
Ethan's inmediate reaction when Cameron said "I want to be inside of you" was not surprise or shock or to get upset. 'Bros' very well might say 'I want to be inside of you" / "no thanks" as a joke, but Cameron sounded like he was being seductive and a little desperate, not sarcastic, and Ethan's response showed no surprise at all—as if he had been expecting it. He didn't get upset aside from throwing up.
I think all this adds up to a history of Cameron having fucked Ethan. Does it necessarily make either gay? Not necessarily. There's also the juxtaposition of Portia feeling put off by nonbinary guys. She just wants a man's man to hold her down and fuck her. (Ironically, her aggressive man's man is likely a prostitute for a whole group of gay guys.) Ethan and Harper are more progressive and, lo and behold, Harper is with a guy as docile and gentle as Albie and unlike Portia, Harper actually is turned on by him, but in her case she assumed he's heterosexual and he may be sexually fluid/bi or potentially gay.
