Roman
“Landry Photography, Roman speaking.” Answering the phone when I didn’t recognize the number was my first mistake. Not hanging up immediately was the second. My only excuse was that I was just getting back in the apartment and juggling bags when the phone rang.
“You changed your number.” The accusing tone set my nerves on edge.
Shit.
“Yes, that’s what happens when your number gets blasted all over the internet as a sexual deviant.” I’d gotten calls from everyone from local daytime talk shows to people wanting to save my soul. A new phone number had been the easiest way to shut them down.
“They took things the wrong way, and it got out of hand.” The whiny tone was probably designed to remind me how cute he was when he was bent over my knee, but all I felt listening to it was frustration.
“Bullshit. Why are you calling me, Ken?” If he’d called after everything had first happened, he might have been able to play me enough to convince me to take him back. Fortunately, I was smarter now.
“I miss you.” I could almost picture the pout he was trying to give me through the phone.
Another bullshit line. “Money’s all gone?”
“Roman.” He dragged out my name like he was exasperated with me.
It wasn’t going to work.
“Ken, I’m not sure what possessed you to blast my private business all over the goddamned internet, or why you thought anyone needed to know what we did in the privacy of our home, but I’m done. You burned this bridge.” He’d burned it the first time I’d had to explain to my mother why someone would want to be spanked.
By the third time, because she really didn’t get it, I’d never wanted to even hear his name again.
“I was drunk. I didn’t mean it.” His voice dropped quieter, and he tried to use a teasing sexy tone, but it went over flat on me. “I was bad and need my Dom to punish me. I’ll be good.”
“Don’t call me again. You ruined my business. You made it look like I was abusive. And I had to move cross-country to get away from it all. Don’t call me. Don’t even think of me. Find another sucker to steal from.” Maybe I should have been more upset about the explosion of my relationship, but at some point, I’d moved on.
“You said the money belonged to both of us.” The pout in his voice was starting to drive me crazy.
“Because you were trying to break into modeling and weren’t earning enough to pay for ramen noodles, much less help with bills or have fun. I was trying to be nice, not give you every dime I’d earned!” Taking several deep breaths to try to get my anger under control, I almost missed it when he started to speak.
“But I am a model. People loved my pictures. They want to use them in some kind of European ad. You said they couldn’t. Roman, they’re my pictures. You’re being mean to me.” Now it sounded more like he thought I was an irrational master who didn’t understand that I was being ridiculous.
“No, they’re my photos that I took of you. I never signed any kind of release and still own the photos.” I’d spent days chasing every one I could down and getting them off the internet.
There were still a few floating around, but because I’d owned the rights, reputable news outlets had taken them down fairly quickly. The threat of a lawsuit had worked wonders, even though at that point there wasn’t money for rent, much less a high-powered lawyer.
But no matter how quickly I worked, it hadn’t been fast enough to keep my family from seeing them. As long as I could tell myself that he hadn’t been able to profit off of them, it somehow made it less maddening.
Ken sighed dramatically. “But Roman, I look so good in the pictures.”
“Tough shit. Don’t call me again and don’t try to use my pictures anywhere.” Then I did what I should’ve done when I first heard his voice—I ended the call.
Maybe I was a selfish ass, but he was never going to make a dime of profit off those pictures. I was going to go to my grave waving those damned photos in front of him, not destroying them, but still making sure he knew he’d never see them anywhere.
I’d had several people say that I should be the one making money on them. They thought I should sell them at an outrageous amount and use it to help me start over, but I wanted Ken to suffer more than I wanted money.
It was too bad they were such good pictures.
Erotic, but not porn; romantic, but with an edge that made you take a second look at them. Even I had to admit they were some of the best I’d done. It was really too bad they’d stay in my computer forever.
Trying not to let the growing frustration get to me, I finished setting my stuff down on the table and started browsing around for food. Past lunch but not quite dinner, it was a weird time to be eating, but I was starved. Eli’s drama had made what was supposed to have been a short shoot go on forever, completely throwing my day off.
Looking in the fridge, my options were almost nonexistent. It was either a freezer dinner or leftover Chinese food that had seen better days. Giving the lo mein a sniff and deciding it wasn’t too bad, I dumped it in a bowl and threw it in the microwave.
The rest of my afternoon and much of the evening were going to be spent editing photos and getting the new website updated. It was almost blank at the moment with no personality or good explanation about what kinds of pictures I took, but it was all my brain had been able to come up with.
Something was holding me back and until I figured out exactly what it was, I had a feeling my business wouldn’t be going anywhere.
****
Sorting through photos of a half-naked Eli was some kind of punishment. There was no other word for it. Editing was even worse. It was a weird kind of torture because each photo had to be analyzed, and there was no way to ignore the passion and fire coming from him—or the erection that filled and strained the panties.
I must’ve had a screw loose to take the job.
Watching a sexy brat parade around nearly naked just for attention was not a real career path. Instead of tasteful photos like the other models tried to take, it was like some kind of live-action porn that I’d gotten dragged into photographing. The way his body moved and his hard cock filled the fabric made it impossible to maintain my distance.
As his erection continued to fill the screen on my computer, and I had to watch him trail his fingers over his cock frame by frame, my blood pressure started to rise. Just out of anger, nothing else, but it was making it even more difficult to think and to be objective about which pictures were the best.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t looked at the blog. In my defense, I’d wanted to find out the reactions to the new photos. Seeing what they were responding to would help me see what direction I needed to take for the edits and even for future shoots.
I’d only sent him a few, but he usually didn’t take too long before he posted something from a shoot. He was a bit of an attention whore and would want to get his followers all stirred up. Eli usually posted about everything, from how the shoot went to random facts about his day, all while showing off his body and the lingerie.
I might have been stupid for looking at the blog, but he was just an ass.
It was one long rant about me. Well, it didn’t start that way. Toward the beginning, he was teasing about the new shoot and giving vague hints about how they were going to love the new pieces. How he wasn’t really supposed to be sharing them, and how Preston would punish him for even thinking about letting the pictures out, but he just couldn’t help himself.
The way he wrote, I could almost hear him purring in my head about how naughty he’d been and how he needed to be spanked—but that he would do it anyway just for them. It made me want to pull my hair out and then demand to know what was going on between him and Preston. If he was screwing the owner, I was going to be out on my ass as soon as the brat batted an eyelash at him.
And if he was bending over for Preston, why in the hell was he flirting with everything that moved?
As he started to ramble on, oversharing and talking about the shoot itself, I could almost feel his anger rising. No comments about his own idiotic behavior, just random notes that they knew how a shoot affected him, and that he wanted his passion to come through in the photos.
Then it took a turn for the nasty and absurd.
Every little comment I’d said, and some I couldn’t even remember making, was laid out on the website. He told them I called him a hooker and said he should be making twenty bucks a blow job on the corner. I never said an amount or what activity he should be doing.
Not that the specifics would matter much if Preston saw.
The brat was clearly trying to get me fired.
By the time I’d finished more of the edits and sent the photos off, my messages were getting terse, and I was a bit…frustrated. The comments on the blog were clearly supporting Eli’s fucked-up version of events, and I was getting tired of reading about what a horrible person I was.
Finally giving up, I closed the computer and walked away. Hours of staring at the computer screen had my head hurting, and hours of watching Eli’s long, naked body had lower parts of my anatomy rebelling.
As much as my head realized how difficult he was and how I was never going to get involved with someone like that again, my cock didn’t have the same aversion. Knowing that my own body was betraying me, and making it harder to do my job, just made my frustration rise even higher.
Everything in me knew Eli and everyone like him was bad news, but my goddamned dick couldn’t get the message. The last time I’d had a shoot with him, I’d had to break down and jerk off. I wasn’t sure what I’d been angrier about when it was finally done, myself for being weak, or Eli for being a temptation I didn’t need.
When I’d first started dating, I couldn’t figure out why the nice girls or even the wicked ones didn’t really appeal to me. After I figured out I was gay, I’d run into the same problem with the nice, professional guys my mother kept pushing at me.
After the initial shock had faded for her, she’d made it her mission in life to find me a “nice boy,” not letting anything stop her from getting me fixed up with someone she thought of as perfect. But the polite, presentable guys she dragged me to meet at every social event she could find weren’t any more interesting than a lot of the women I’d been introduced to.
Sure, my imagination and libido took more interest in the guys, but the passion that people talked about had been missing.
Well, it’d been missing until I’d met a bratty little twink in college. With nothing in common but a mutual love of spankings and drama that turned into fiery sex, we hadn’t lasted long, but it’d shown me what I was missing.
My mother had chalked it up to a man’s love of “bad girls” that she translated to “bad boys,” but I hadn’t even tried to explain. Until it’d become absolutely necessary after the disastrous explosion that my life became when Ken lost his fucking mind.
Pushing that out of my head, I found myself looking back down at the computer. My finally behaving cock went back to rebelling at the thoughts of Eli’s pictures that were just there waiting for me. But I was a professional photographer, not some porn director who jacked off to his model's pictures.
Needing a break, and a way to release some of the energy that was building inside me, I started stripping off my clothes. I might not have a gym membership, but I had a few weights at home and a park not far from the apartment that was well lit and busy enough in the evening that I didn’t worry about being out after dark.
Ignoring my hard cock that was still pushing for attention I wasn’t willing to give it, I headed into the small bedroom. It was plain and sparsely furnished, but it had a bed and dresser, so I couldn’t complain. Before I could even grab my workout clothes, my phone started ringing again.
“Shit.” If that idiot thought he could badger me into changing my mind, he was crazy.
Long strides had me out to the living room in seconds, my anger coming out in every step. Swiping my finger across the screen, I saw that it was a different number from earlier and tried to rein in my anger. “Landry Photography, Roman speaking.”
“You have to reshoot the scenes with the red panties.”
Eli.
“I thought those pictures turned out fine.” They were from the first part of the shoot and had a different look than the ones I’d taken toward the end, but there was nothing wrong with the photos.
“The color is coming out pink, and I want different lighting on them before we put them on the site. There’s no way I’m putting up pictures that look pink but that are labeled red. It will confuse the customers.” His tone said he thought I was a moron for not understanding what he was talking about.
He was insane. “Fine. When we do the full line, we’ll reshoot those.”
“No, it needs to be now. I need to post about it, and I want those photos for tomorrow. It has to be tonight.”
“You're insane. I’m not reshooting those photos because you don’t think they look red enough. You have plenty of pictures from that shoot already, pick one of those. You’re half-naked and harder than a porn star in almost all of them, so it doesn’t matter what you put up!” So I was probably crossing the line with that one, but I really didn’t care.
“Your job is to take the goddamned photos I tell you to. A trained monkey could do it! Don’t make me explain that to Preston. I’ll be at the studio in half an hour and your judgmental ass better be there.” Then the brat hung up.
“Of all the—” Too angry to even finish my sentence, I started grabbing my clothes.
If he wanted pictures, I was going to give him pictures, but if he thought he could hold his fucking relationship with Preston over my head when he was shaking that hard cock at everyone who scrolled through the site, he was crazy.
I’d just about had all I could take of that little brat.