[ 4:20 PM ]
It’s been a week since Bradley and I started … not-dating. He’s so insistent on us being cool and comfortable with one another that he even invites me back to his house after my jobs, even if it’s super late at night. “The code to get in through the gate is 7-2-4-6-8 … or P-A-I-N-T, which is the evil program that started my addiction to graphics.”
His house code. He gave me his house code. I’ve only known Bradley for a week and he …
Well, if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that he’s “going through a time” in his life, and he’s thrown every golden milliliter of caution into the fiery pits of Mount Doom, because he acts like we’re already married. “Can you pick up a half-gallon of milk on your way here?” he texts me seconds after I blow my load into a client’s mouth. I text back: “1% or 2?”
Do not-boyfriends celebrate not-one-week anniversaries? It’s been three whole days since I’ve even stepped foot in my own apartment when I invite myself into Bradley’s home on Saturday afternoon. I need a shower badly, but when I reach the foot of the stairs, he calls out my name.
“What’s up?” I come to the back of the couch, lean over it to find him curled up with a blanket swallowing him, only his head and a hand clasping the remote poking out.
He eyes me. “Do you think I was stupid and should’ve went into business?”
I sit on the arm of the couch, right by his feet. I’ve never done the boyfriend thing, yet I’m practiced at making instant connections with my clients, so this whole relationship-at-the-speed-of-light thing comes quite easily to me. I massage his blanketed feet, soothing him, and respond, “Do you think I should’ve stayed in high school … or attended college at all? Do they even offer a major in pleasuring people?”
“It’s called Politics.” We share a laugh, the remote hanging limp from his hand as he turns his head to face me. “I’m inheriting a lot from my dad. I don’t have to work a day in my life, ever again. I could support you.” His eyes cast downward, forlorn, terrified suddenly.
I want to keep things light. Ever since that first day at the bar, I got the instant impression that the reason he likes me around is, he enjoys my hardness, my buddy-like energy, my cool demeanor. Almost in the way that a client lets on what he’s “into”, I feed on that and behave accordingly. Like Bradley is just another client I’m satisfying.
Sometimes, I don’t even really know who I am. This business has been a part of my life for so long, I don’t even know what I’m into.
“Kinda depressing,” he admits. “Doesn’t matter how good or bad my art is.”
“Well, you don’t do it to make money. You do the graphics thing because you like it, right? Fuck whether or not it sells.”
“It doesn’t work like that, sweetie.” He smiles at me, as if to apologize for calling me “sweetie”, even though I kinda liked how the word sounded. “People pay me to do graphics jobs. They pay upfront, and I do the graphics work and deliver it. I’m not a painter. I don’t slap paint on a canvas making some Bob Ross wilderness wonderland, hang it at some gallery and pray it sells.”
His eyes burn whenever he talks. It’s kinda cute. The way a kitty gets excited when it finds a toy, captures it, then gnaws on it and twitches its tail agitatedly.
“I get paid upfront, too,” I point out. “I do a job, fulfill customers’ interests, with creative liberty to do as I see fit to fulfill said interests.”
“We’re both artists,” Bradley decides.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from a client who wants me to take him out tonight for his birthday. He wants me to wear the red shirt and super tight grey jeans I wore last time, his favorite outfit. Pick me up at ten. Please, Axel, I don’t wanna spend another birthday alone, the text goes on and on. We don’t even have to fuck.
“You’re wanted,” Bradley remarks.
Self-consciously, I shove the phone back into my pocket. “Not until tonight. A birthday boy.” I study Bradley’s reaction, looking for a hint of jealousy. He keeps his eyes blank as two pools. “He’s a regular, so …”
“I’m totally okay with what you do,” Bradley announces, as if he needs to reassure me, but it sounds more like he’s still trying to convince himself. “You make people happy.”
The difference in what I do and in what Bradley and I have is, after he cums, I don’t go. My mind is in a constant state of war. I have a strong instinct to leave all the time, yet I still feel needed. My client isn’t satisfied. Bradley. Bradley isn’t satisfied.
He is not your client. He’s your not-boyfriend. Don’t you understand the difference, you dumb fuck? Are you even capable of love?
“What’s wrong?” he asks suddenly, sitting up. “You look weird.”
My face must’ve given it away. “I’m good.”
“No,” Bradley states, disagreeing. “I’m the one who’s weird.” He climbs off the couch and drops the blanket, revealing himself to be naked and “happy to see me” downstairs. “Really, I should thank you for putting up with me. I’ve been such a basket of bananas ever since you met me, and you’ve been nothing but good to me. I have no right to judge you or your questionable line of business. I just want to do everything while I’m still alive. Do you wanna fuck in my yard?”
I have about twenty different responses to his spiel that I want to make, but he shuts them all up with that last question. “I-In your yard?”
“Let’s do it on the roof. Oh my god, I need to show you the roof!”
He races past me, grabs my hand, and then I’m trying not to trip over my own feet as I’m yanked up the stairs. He pulls me to a guest bedroom window, which he quickly shoves open. Stepping out onto the brief stretch of roof that overlooks his front lawn, I’m forced to follow. Only twice do I balk, struck by the height of his house and the fact that, even just on the second story, his yard looks like it’s miles below. Just two and a half somersaults and we’d fall.
Before I have a chance to find my balance, he pulls me on top of his naked body. With a grip on my shirt, my startled face is drawn to his, and our lips are lost in a world of breath and wet heat.
I detach. “Can your neighbors—?”
“Shut up.” He pulls my mouth back to his.
He twists and we roll over twice, causing my heart to leap to my neck, and still somehow we’re on the roof. His hands become more daring by the second. The left one gets lost somewhere below, making quick work of my pants as they slowly loosen and slide down my legs. Well, I’ve done a fair share of racy shit in my line of work; I suppose adding “indecent exposure” to the list isn’t such a stretch.
“Let’s not wrestle anymore,” I whisper. “I don’t want your orgasm to end with our backs broken at a hospital.”
“At least we can say we had fun before we died.” Then dives in for another kiss.
And really, this whole morbid gambling-with-his-life reckless-as-fuck game he’s been playing since we met was endearing a week ago, but a voice in the back of my mind cries out, expressing concern for this … troubled soul.
This troubled soul that I don’t know how to heal. “Brad,” I get out between all the forceful kisses and smacking of lips. “Brad. Slow down. Brad.”
He stops. Our eyes connect, and there is so much intensity between them that I’m rendered silent. I’m dumbstruck. I’m caught in the bright blue headlights of this beautiful boy’s eyes. His tragedy has shattered him. He’s a pile of shards, some sharp as a knife, others smooth and delicate as the stroke of lovers’ fingers. He doesn’t want me to put him back together; he wants me to just jump into this dangerous mess with him.
“Put it in me,” he says finally, breaking the trance.
“My condoms are downstairs.”
“I trust you.”
“Brad, it isn’t about trust. You can’t—”
But then he spits into his hand and reaches down, his all-too-quick hands finding my cock, and I gasp, surprised by the touch. It feels so good. I’ve been touched a million times, but there is something different about his touch … something that makes me lose all concerns or cares I just a moment ago had.
“Stop,” I whisper to him, but it sure as fuck doesn’t sound like I want him to stop.
He doesn’t anyway. Spitting into his hand again, he works my cock until unexpectedly I find him pushing his supple, perfect ass onto it, wriggling across the rough, unforgiving surface of the roof. Stop, I’m thinking now, breathing heavy, my eyes shut as I experience the thing I’ve experienced countless times in my life, and somehow having it feel like the first.
“Fuck me, Wes,” he pleads, whimpers.
I’m a good person. I thrust, feeling my cock slip inside him with surprising ease. His body was ready for me. I fuck him slow, yet firm. The backs of my eyelids keep my world in blissful semidarkness, and I know we’re atop his house in full view of anyone driving by, of any curious neighbors, yet somehow I imagine us on a cloud, adrift somewhere high above the boring planet, leaving behind all our pesky responsibilities and duties and grievances. The whole world is watching, I tell myself. I’m healing the world one rooftop-fuck at a time.
Suddenly, I flip open my eyes to gaze down at the boy I’m only-half-willingly barebacking. His sad, watery blue eyes are still connected to my face. I doubt he ever looked away, even while I was in my other world in the sky.
“Don’t leave me,” he pleads, another pitiful whimper. “Don’t ever leave me.”
This level of intensity after one week. No person in their right mind would stick around with this emotional wreck. But maybe it’s they who aren’t in their right mind. Maybe those who would run from this fragile boy are wrong. He needs someone, now more than ever. Who am I to witness a person in so much pain and just … look the other way?
So many pairs of eyes I’ve looked into over my nine years of escorting, and all of those eyes say the same thing: I’ve been left. I’ve been turned away from. I’ve been ignored. Some of my clients are conventionally attractive. Most are not. In my line of business, you come to find the beauty in everyone. The sexual prowess. The animal. It was my first lesson with that older man with the dimples, Rod. He’s got a handsome face, I remember telling myself as I slowly and clumsily worked myself out of my shirt. Just focus on his face. But all I could see was greyish hair. All I could see was the unkempt bush sitting atop his hard-and-ready-for-play dick. I saw the folds of loose skin at his abdomen. I saw how his pecs—which might’ve been tight and muscular two decades ago—now sagged. Find the beauty in him, I kept thinking. Everyone has a beauty. Find it. Rod, my first, my teacher.
Bradley is not lacking in the attractiveness department one bit. He is beautiful everywhere. His hole is so tight, I might believe it’s his fist I’m fucking. His ass, firm. His arms, taut and slender. His torso, smooth and trim and subtle. His face is chiseled and clean, his eyes like two soft pools, his lips a garden of roses. Listen to me, I’m turning into some fucking Shakespeare describing those lips.
“I can’t leave even if I wanted,” I whisper back, a much delayed reply to his moaning plea. “My cock is stuck inside you.”
He laughs. It’s so untimely, it’s perfect. I watch as a tear escapes his left eye, runs down his face, and he turns his head, smiling ear to ear with his choked laughter. This is the first time I’ve heard you laugh, I realize.
“Oh,” he says suddenly, eyes wide. “Do that again. I’m close.”
“Do what again?” I ask, thrusting deep.
Then he cries out, yet another plea, but this one is for the heavens, and probably all his neighbors too. And maybe the police, later. The cum spurts between us, streams of it licking both our chests into a messy, sticky bliss.
When his cry of pleasure comes to a merciful end, he stares into my eyes, breathing hard, and says, “I want you to do that to me again, and again, please, in every corner of my house, in every room and on every bed. I want to stain every sheet I own with our cum.”
I slide out of him gently, still hard, and clasp his hand. Carefully, we get to our feet and crawl back through the window into the dark comfort of his house. I imagine his neighbors uncovering their children’s eyes, reopening their windows, and carrying on with their business—now that we’ve finished ours.
“Cheese,” he exclaims.
“What?” I turn just in time to catch the flash of his digital camera. Blinking the light out of my eyes and laughing, I say, “Brad, you could’ve warned me.”
“I did. I said, ‘Cheese’, didn’t I?”
We look at the little screen together, my relaxed face just milliseconds before the flash wrapped up the moment, capturing it into a little pretty cluster of megabytes on a memory stick. Sorcery, right at his fingertips.
“You’re beautiful,” he decides, running a finger along the screen, stroking my silent, digital face.
“I have my moments,” I decide. Everyone has a beauty in them. Find it.
A couple hours later, after we’ve had a bite to eat from his pantry and I’ve cleaned up in one of his four bathrooms, he says, “You don’t have to go.” He says, “Whatever birthday boy’s paying, I’ll double it. Just hang with me and watch movies. Your buddy. Your not-lover.”
I study Bradley’s crushingly beautiful face. I consider the world out there, full of lonely boys and hungry men who desperately need me. I think on the birthday boy and his plight. It is a game of hide-and-go-seek out there, and every lonely person on Earth is a participant, whether they know it or not. I’m just a means to an end. I’m the key for a certain lock. I’m an answer to the most frequently-asked question.
I tell Bradley: “I’d never take your money.”
“Then stay with me for free, Wes.”
The phone buzzes in my pocket. The world of pain clings to my back like a red satiny superhero’s cloak. Red as passion. Red as a flushed face. Red as blood and rubies and ink.
And the cloak is so heavy.
Forty-six minutes later, I knock gently on someone else’s door. The birthday boy answers. “Axel,” he cries out. “You’re even wearing my favorite outfit!”
I smile, so proud of myself in my smart red shirt and tight jeans. “I’m all yours tonight.”