Love Him Free: Book One of On The Market

by Lindsey, E. M.

  A small tug on his pant leg roused him, and he let Levi clamber into his lap. His soft curls tickled the underside of Simon’s chin as his chubby fingers curled into the front of Simon’s shirt.

  “Are you sad?”

  Simon almost laughed. He felt too old for such young bones. “I’m just tired, Levi.”

  “Wanna sleep in my bed?”

  Simon clung a little tighter and a part of him did. A part of him fought back waves upon waves of crashing anxiety that if he let Levi or Bubbe out of his sight for even a second, they’d be taken from him. Then he remembered Ema was sitting just an arm’s reach away when her life ended—and he knew then it didn’t matter what he did or where he sat. Or if he kept to his own bed.

  Nothing was permanent.

  “I’ll be okay. Do you want a story?”

  “The rabbits,” Levi told him with a sleepy yawn.

  He took his brother’s hand and walked him to the room next to his. Levi’s bed was covered in 101 Dalmatians toys with matching pillowcases, and he tugged his Pongo close as he burrowed into the covers like a small nest. Simon selected Watership Down and fought back a sort of anguished laugh at how morbid and sweet his brother was, all wrapped up in bright, wondering eyes and wild curls.

  He sometimes wondered—more than he wondered about himself—what Levi would be like when he grew up. He was so much like their Bubbe—free spirted and without fear. He rushed head-first into anything, and he had tiny burn marks all over his arms that he didn’t care about because they were the marks of his early baking triumphs that he’d been accomplishing at Bubbe’s knee since he was old enough to walk. Levi was still so young, but already Simon could tell this was where he thrived.

  The last thing in the world Simon wanted was to be stuck here—in this little apartment, sweating in that kitchen, toiling his life away.

  Bubbe said it was his legacy though, and every time she said it, it felt like someone pressing a pillow to his face. But he’d do it, if she needed him to. He’d do it if it meant that Levi got to race head-first into the wildness of real life and freed himself from the chains of this small town.

  He cleared his throat and started to read, and six sentences in, Levi was breathing even and deep. Simon was pretty sure they’d never get through the book. Levi could never keep his eyes open when Simon read to him, but it was worth it. He set the book back on the shelf and leaned in to kiss his brother’s forehead. Levi murmured and turned over, and Simon wondered what it would be like to sleep without the heaviness of life pressing in on him.

  * * *

  He was just eighteen when his letter of acceptance came in. He almost hadn’t applied out of state, terrified of the cost because Bubbe wasn’t exactly raking in millions with her small bakery. But when he’d hesitated, she took him by the cheeks and kissed him on the nose and let her eyes convince him as much as her words.

  “Do something that makes you happy, Simon. It’s not forever. It’s just for a little while.”

  He understood she mistook his fear to leave this place for fear of being alone. That wasn’t it—not at all. Levi was heading into middle school and he was wild and had grown from curious to a little mean, and Simon wasn’t sure he had the strength to leave him. All the same, he craved silence. He craved a space where all the corners were filled with himself, and not the echoes of dead parents, and a struggling grandmother, and brother who was just growing more sullen by the day.

  In the end, he turned in four applications, and the one acceptance letter took him almost a thousand miles to the West Coast—a journalism program with a vague idea of working with words, something he’d been good at as long as he wasn’t speaking out loud. Bubbe couldn’t afford to take time off for the campus tour, but she presented him with a set of car keys and his first tuition check, and a warm kiss the day he set out to leave her.

  On the first stretch of empty miles, he cried, but by the time he made it through Arizona, it felt like the entire world was ahead of him. If he’d known that it was all going to crash down in three years, he might have stopped to appreciate more. Or hell, he might have just stayed home and not tried to seek freedom at all.

  But it was what it was—and that was something he was coming to learn with a ferocity that consumed him. No matter what he did, what bargains he made, God had plans for him. Even if there was no God at all.

  Chapter Two

  Sitting in the dark, Rocco stared at the faint glow of his laptop screen. His Twitter feed was stale, the little alert at the top telling him to refresh, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His verified account offered him the ability to ignore tweets and re-tweets weighing in on Eric’s infidelity and their separation, but he didn’t want to deal with sympathy or blame from strangers.

  His fingers shook, and he reached for his bourbon, the easy burn as he swallowed only slightly distracting him from the fact that he wasn’t hurting the way he probably should have—not after this many years. His dad would laugh himself stupid if he was here. After all, he’d looked Rocco right in the eye fifteen years before and said with both words and sign, “That man is not right for you.”

  Rocco had spent so many years doing what his parents told him not to—or not doing what they told him to—that it was a habit. He no longer knew if he was with Eric to piss them off or because he really liked him. Eric had become something like a bad habit after a while. Eric had become his blind spot and his excuse. He was a shitty interpreter and a shitty advocate, and for some reason, Rocco had come to his defense when the man needed to be dragged.

  He’d cut off Deaf friends and hearing colleagues all because his boyfriend was kind of a dick, and he’d allowed it. He let out a frustrated groan, feeling the way it ripped at his throat, and he dragged a hand down his face. He didn’t really expect to be crying, but he expected a little more than this vague apathy that settled in his bones.

  “Don’t eat where you shit,” had been his dad’s sage advice once Rocco was old enough to get a job. At the time, none of them had really considered that porn would be on the table. His dad was merely trying to warn him that fucking an interpreter not only crossed moral lines, but it would cause complications Rocco wouldn’t be able to handle.

  And maybe Eric really had been a fuck-you to his parents who would never know what it was like to need someone like Eric in his life just to communicate with the outside world. But Eric was also different than most people he’d worked with. He was smaller, and he was pretty, and he didn’t turn his nose up at the fact that when he was hired on, it was to provide director interpretation on a porno set. Eric’s hands never hesitated when the director told him to thrust harder, or to use more lube, or to turn his head slightly to the left so the camera could see when his tongue sank into the other man’s asshole.

  He thought maybe Eric was the exception in interpreters—or maybe he was the exception to the rule that you can’t mix business and pleasure, but thinking back, Rocco wasn’t sure he was ever happy. He loved him—in whatever way you love someone who had been in your life for that long, but in love?

  He never really did wonder when Eric started to change. It was years later and subtle, in a way. It started with Eric answering questions for Rocco instead of interpreting them. It seeped into meetings where Rocco found he was agreeing to terms and shoots and movies he wasn’t quite sure he had the time for.

  ‘You’re not my agent.’ It was the one time Rocco brought it up. ‘You’re trying to make decisions for me without including me, and you have no right.’

  But Eric had pouted and seemed genuinely hurt by the accusation, and Rocco gave in because in truth, he was a sucker for those baby blues and full lips.

  Though, in reality, Rocco was just a sucker. He let his college degree gather dust the way his bank account gathered zeroes, and though Eric never pushed for a marriage, they shared everything else. A nice house in Malibu, and one on Coronado Island. They had three cars they both used freely, and Eric’s expense account never ran out. Th
ey lived like celebrities with the bonus of most people being too nervous—or maybe ashamed—to approach them in public. And he was fine with that.

  It let him order his Starbucks from blushing baristas who wouldn’t ask for his autograph with everyone watching. He got to grocery shop and walk his dog in the park and make sure his siblings and parents didn’t want for anything. And he got to come home to a nice guy.

  And that nice guy decided to leave Rocco one Tuesday afternoon during a rainstorm, and publicly announce it before talking to about it Rocco first.

  On Twitter.

  Thunder crashed— he knew it by the way the table rattled under him. Storms this bad were rare for their little seaside cottage, and he held his breath, but the power indicator on his laptop didn’t blink. It probably would, eventually, not that it mattered. He was nursing the raw, fragmented edges of his shattered relationship and the dark felt appropriate.

  His phone buzzed and he saw his brother’s name on the screen. He had half a mind to just turn the damn thing off—too many people wanted the in—not just reporters, but people he’d barely call acquaintances. He was ready to shut down his social media, and his technology, and his brain if this kept up. Having a life that allowed for the public consumption of who he was—it was difficult most days. Today, it felt impossible.

  Pietro: Do you want to talk?

  He thumbed a reply, then changed his mind and slammed the phone down on the table so he couldn’t see it. He scratched the empty spaces behind his ears—his hearing aids were long dead and he had no intention of changing out the batteries. He didn’t want a single excuse to be able to hear the way people were clawing at him for more, for everything, for every last drop he had to bleed.

  He finished his drink, the buzz humming in his veins, then he clicked on the faint letters reading What’s Happening on his Twitter feed, and stared at the blank space he wasn’t sure he had a hundred and forty characters to fill.

  @SylentOfficial: The best revenge is living well. That’s the way I try to live my life. Tell me how I can live better.

  Asking that question was asking for trouble, but he felt like if he didn’t say something—do something—he was going to explode. He didn’t have the strength to watch the replies yet, but he would. Maybe. When he was drunker, and a little sadder, and steps from sleep.

  His Skype alert began to flash, and he nearly ignored it, but when he saw his agent’s name, he knew he wasn’t going to have much of a choice. He clicked the answer button, and immediately Xander’s mouth was flying faster than his fingers on the keyboard.

  Rocco had freely and often admitted how much it annoyed him that Xander wouldn’t even learn the basics of ASL, but he had been good at making sure Rocco was earning some of the top money in his field—and he figured trading cash for that peace of mind was enough. But Xander was clearly losing his shit and waiting for the chat bubble to post wasn’t great for his state of agitation.

  Meeting tomorrow. Shit hit the fan.

  For the sheer amount of time he’d taken to type, and the flow of words from his lips, Rocco was annoyed that’s all he’d managed to type out. He considered typing back, but it was just to annoy Xander, so he didn’t bother. “I don’t have my ears on, and I don’t plan to get them, so I didn’t catch anything you just said.”

  Xander scowled at the screen and it was too easy to make out the word, “Great,” on his lips.

  “I’m drunk as shit right now and I’m going to be drunker before I fall asleep. Text me the details, but don’t make it too early.”

  With that, he signed off, knowing he was leaving his agent swearing up a storm at his blank computer screen. Another call lit up, so Rocco slammed the lid of his laptop down, then sat back in the chair, leaning as far as he could toward the counter where the bourbon was resting at the edge of the polished marble. His fingers scrabbled for it before it fell against his palm, and he didn’t bother with a glass this time.

  Who the fuck was he trying to impress now?

  He took three more shots into his mouth before turning over his phone, and he swiped away all his text alerts before opening up his Twitter, and hating that there were so many retweets of Eric’s words that flipped his world upside down.

  @DaddicusRex: I hate the phrase newly single and ready to mingle but that’s my entire mood. Where’s a broken-hearted guy go to get some rebound dick? Last night wasn’t enough.

  There was a text waiting for him too. Three long pages of Eric’s endless words explaining why he was leaving, and none of them explained why he decided to take to Twitter ten minutes after everything ended. And none of them, really, explained why after fifteen years, Rocco suddenly wasn’t enough. Or why he’d fucked a guy the night before he bothered to end things.

  Maybe it was just because Eric was falling in love with someone else.

  Rocco: Just tell me why.

  Eric: I don’t know how to explain it. I guess maybe he makes me feel the way you used to when you appreciated me. I want to be sorry, but I don’t know if I can be. Not when it feels this good. I know this has probably hurt you, but I bet it doesn’t hurt the way it should. Am I right?

  He wanted to throw his phone against the wall and watch it crumble to the floor in pieces because that son of a bitch was right, and it didn’t hurt the way it should. But he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. He wanted to get away, do something new and different and maybe completely off brand for him, only because he wanted to shed the outer-layers of himself that were all imprinted with the man Eric was.

  He hit the home button, Eric’s tweet disappearing into the void of time and space, and he tried not to look at his DMs because he knew they were full to bursting. He had a few celebrity friends—and a few old real-life friends who were probably watching his life implode on itself, waiting for the supernova to consume what was left.

  He wouldn’t let that happen.

  Probably.

  He would live well, god damn it.

  Maybe.

  Dragging a hand down his face, he tried to stand, but a wave of vertigo caught him so hard, he stumbled sideways and just managed to hit the couch cushions instead of the floor. He felt himself groan—it was probably loud, not that anyone was around to hear it. On his belly, his drunk-heavy limbs reached for the throw pillows that still smelled like that asshole, and he buried his face in them before closing his eyes.

  When had he stopped loving Eric? Or more importantly—had he ever?

  * * *

  Rocco strolled into his agent’s office refusing to take off his sunglasses. His double shot Americano was cooling against his palm, and he was just barely starting to feel like a person again after a greasy plate of hash browns and two mimosas. He felt coated with grease and liquor sweat in spite of an extra-long shower, but it was hard to care when he knew something was going on.

  He hadn’t bothered opening his text yet. The ones from Eric had stopped somewhere around nine the night before, and two of his brothers tried to get him to respond, but they were easy enough to ignore. None of them had really liked Eric, so at best they wanted to gloat, and he wasn’t in the mood.

  Mostly, he was just stressed. He’d lost both his boyfriend, and more tragically, the interpreter he’d been working with the longest. The last thing he wanted to do right then was get in touch with the agency that employed Eric—and not just because he’d have to explain, though it was likely they already knew. But they hadn’t turned out the best interpreters in the past and once upon a time, Rocco had felt lucky to have Eric.

  A bitter, sharp-edged laugh threatened to slip out, and he took a sip to wash it down as he tipped a little hello to the receptionist. If she tried to get his attention to stop him from pushing the elevator button, he wasn’t aware of it, and he was inside and riding up before she could follow.

  Rocco knew he approached his agent with swagger that came with his own notoriety. He was unique—in the fact that he was as big as he was, with a body that required massive amounts
of protein and the number of hours he spent in his gym with his trainer. He was attractive—which was a given for his industry. He had a nice, big, uncut cock that was sought after for close-up shots even when he wasn’t a headliner in a film. He was Deaf, and he knew both fetishists and the curious alike watched for that one single line at the end of every movie where he let himself voice his Deaf accent to the world.

  Part of him hated that people got off on it, but the bigger part appreciated that his new Gucci loafers didn’t put a dent in his credit line. Those people existed anyway—might as well profit.

  Pressing two fingers to his temple to ward off his lingering hangover headache, Rocco managed most of his coffee before he reached Xander’s office, and he didn’t bother knocking as he walked in. There was a woman sitting in the corner of a room with hands primly on the top of a grey wool skirt. Her hair was a soft blonde, pinned back, and her shirt was high-collared. He hated making snap judgements, but he was fairly sure she was the interpreter, and he was fairly sure she was going to walk out before the conversation got fully underway.

  She was at least polite enough to make introductions before he had to address Xander, who remained seated with the edge of his foot hooked on the corner of his desk. He looked arrogant as ever with his silk button-down and tight jeans. He was a wanna-be, which was why he was an agent not a star, and Rocco knew that there was some level of bitterness with every job he booked for his clients.