by Jerry Cole
He had been with women before. He had always been into women before. And then there was Mark, and within two days, he had changed everything. He shouldn’t have been allowed to do that. If he had been anyone else, Jon would have never allowed him to do that.
Jon knew what he had to do.
He had to forget about Mark. Mark was right. He had to find a replacement and forget about him, no matter the cost.
Chapter Twelve
Mark placed two fingers near his windpipe to check his pulse. He had been working out for about an hour and a half, and he still didn’t want to slow down. Usually he felt happier after an intensive work-out session, but even the endorphins flooding his brain weren’t able to erase the bad taste lingering in his mouth.
He was soaked in sweat, furious and out of a job. He had known that getting involved with Jon was a bad idea. He didn’t understand why he had let the stupid part of him win out. Because it had been stupid, no matter how sweet and good-looking Jon was. And he wasn’t sweet — Mark had been wrong. He wasn’t just angling for companionship. He wanted an escort. And if Mark had wanted to get into sex work, he could have easily done that without being tricked into becoming someone’s sugar baby. The worst part was that Mark had believed that Jon actually liked him. He had been stupid enough to believe that, instead of thinking that he was curious about having a same sex experience.
He didn’t mind being someone’s experiment dummy, provided that was something he knew in the first place. He didn’t want to have feelings for the person he was helping experiment, because he knew, from experience, that he couldn’t deal with that. Even now, as an adult, he couldn’t deal with it.
He stopped the treadmill altogether and stepped off when he saw someone staring at him from the corner of his eye.
He popped his headphones out of his ear and turned around. The stranger looking at him was tall and buff. He had dark brown hair that he had tied up in a man bun and a cheeky smile.
Maybe that was what Mark needed. He could just forget about Jon with a beautiful stranger at the gym. Get his heart racing in a different way.
“Hey,” Mark said. His voice sounded shaky, but it was probably just in his head. He was still upset, after all.
“Hey,” the man said. “I’m Kurt.”
“Mark.”
Mark waited for him to say something else. At this point, there was usually some sort of attempt at a conversation. Even if it was just a few phrases, discussing the weather or how full the gym was. But Kurt said nothing and Mark didn’t feel like speaking. He didn’t feel like being there at all.
Kurt smiled appreciatively as he looked Mark up and down. It made Mark feel like a piece of meat. When Jon looked at him with lust in his eyes, there was some wonder there at least. This guy was just assessing him, probably wondering what he would look like spread out in his bed.
“I’m vers,” Kurt said, his eyes lingering over Mark’s
“You are really fucking bold, too. You don’t even know if I’m —”
“Interested? Oh, I know that you are interested.”
Mark didn’t say anything. He wasn’t in the mood to argue with this man. Actually, he was very close to punching him, which made speaking right now dangerous. Because he didn’t want to get into a physical altercation, he just wanted to forget about Jon.
And he needed to stop comparing him to Jon. Because he wanted to forget Jon, not remember him.
“Once you’re done thinking about it, do you want to go back to my place?”
Mark opened his mouth to say yes. He told his head to nod. But he just stood there, doing nothing, saying nothing. His mouth was open and his arms were crossed over his chest.
Kurt raised his eyebrows and cocked his head as he waited for an answer.
Mark closed his eyes tightly and exhaled through his nose. “I — I can’t.”
“I won’t tell,” Kurt said. “I don’t know you from Adam.”
“I know, I’ve done this before. I’m just — I can’t. There’s someone,” Mark heard himself say. He hated that he said that because it wasn’t true. Jon wasn’t there. Jon wasn’t someone to him, not like that.
“Oh,” Kurt said, nodding. “That’s too bad. You’re really hot. Well, if you reconsider it, here’s my card.”
Mark took it, his fingertips brushing against Kurt’s hand as he did.
“Good luck,” Kurt said, winking at him. “Bye.”
Mark watched him walk out of the gym before he put the business card he had just received in his gym shorts’ pocket.
Chapter Thirteen
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Jon rubbed his temple and bit down on his lower lip. Laurie may have been concerned, but he wished that she would drop it. She hadn’t even been this insistent after his mother had died. Of course, back then, she wanted to give him space to deal with his grief. She didn’t know anything about Mark, mostly because he couldn’t bring himself to tell her. He had tried, but he had ended up discussing work or asking after her husband or children.
“Yes,” he said. “I just need to get out of this house. I thought renovating it would help me, I don’t know, cope. But it’s just complicated things.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just made things harder,” Jon said. “Watching everything change. You know? Like I thought it would be overnight, but it hasn’t been. I thought it would be easier to live here, but it hasn’t been.”
“Do you want me to fly out there? I can bring Nat and the kids. Or if you want, Nat can look after them here. We can get drunk and come up with aerial acts.”
“That’s never gone wrong before,” Jon replied, laughing. “I’m trying to cut back on the drinking.”
Laurie nodded, her hair lagging behind her in the window on Jon’s laptop. “You’re not an alcoholic.”
“Right now,” he said. “I’m not an alcoholic right now.”
“That’s bullshit,” Laurie said. “You’ve never been an alcoholic.”
“Right, but I could be. Look, I just don’t want to end up like my mom, okay?” He sounded angrier than he felt. They had spoken about his mother, obviously, but he had never actually told her how bad it was. It wasn’t until her pancreas was killing her that Laurie knew the extent of her disease.
“You won’t,” she replied. “Is that what you’re so upset about?”
“I’m not so upset,” he said. He knew that he was lying and he knew that Laurie wouldn’t believe him, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m not upset at all.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “So I don’t have an excuse to get away from the children for a week or so.”
Jon smiled. “Are they giving you grief?”
“I love them, I do. I just don’t have one maternal bone in my body. It’s not natural to want to punch your two-year-old in the face, is it?”
Jon laughed. “I have no idea. What does Nathan say about this?”
“He doesn’t know,” Laurie replied. “He knows I find it hard and overwhelming, you know. He’s much better at this than me. It’s just that twins were never in my life plan, you know? So this is hard. It’s a good thing he’s such a good dad.”
“Right,” Jon replied, swallowing. He hated how jealous he was of Laurie in that moment. Because she had something real and he didn’t. He had thought he was going to get something real and got nothing, instead. “Well, at least you have each other.”
Laurie smiled. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“Anyway, you might get a break from them after all,” Jon said, rubbing his temple. “I need to get out of this house. How would you feel about a one-week Europe show? We could do Paris or Berlin.”
“Sure,” she said. “Hold on, let me pull up my calendar.”
He watched her as she stood up and grabbed her tablet from somewhere off-screen. “I can ask Sara to book us at the Palladium, if you want to do London. That would probably be sometime around March 2018.”
“No,” Jon
said. “I meant like, next week.”
“But everywhere will be booked—”
“I know,” Jon replied. “So we get in touch with a small venue, make it a one week only thing, and do a pop-up show kind of thing. By the time the weekend rolls around, we’ll have made a tidy bit of money.”
“Next — next week?”
“It’ll be perfect advertising for our upcoming tour.”
“I mean, yes, but — but it’s one week notice. Can we put everything together in one week?”
“We don’t have to do anything difficult or that requires the crew,” he said, rubbing his temple. “Just a really basic, audience participation show. We don’t even need that many props.”
“But that’s not — I mean, are you sure? We’ve worked on the big stage shows for so long,” Laurie said. “People pay good money to see those.”
“Sometimes, I feel like you underestimate my talent,” Jon replied. He knew that he was being short, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t understand why she seemed to be stopping him from doing what he needed to do. “We didn’t start out by doing big stage shows.”
“Of course we didn’t,” Laurie replied, quietly. Jon realized that she was probably thinking that he was being a diva, but he didn’t care. He had always done his job, and he was good at it. The least he expected was for her to keep up her end of the bargain — after all, it wasn’t as if she wasn’t getting properly compensated. She was a star in her own right. Plus, by her own admission, she wanted to get away from her family. He was thoroughly unimpressed at how she was taking the news.
“Look, if you don’t want to do this—”
“No, no, of course I do,” Laurie said. “You’re right, it’s a great idea to promote the upcoming tour. And I never doubt your talent. I just worry about logistics, because it’s my job to worry about logistics. Let me call you back in a few hours, okay? I’ll see what I can do.”
“I need to leave,” Jon said, before she could end the call. “I can’t be here, Laurie. I don’t know how to deal with any of this.”
“Yeah,” Laurie said. “I totally get it. I’ll sort it out.”
Chapter Fourteen
Mark knew that Jon was probably expecting him, but it still hurt to climb up the stairs and stand in front of the door. He hesitated before he knocked. His limbs were sore from all the exercising he had been doing, but mostly, he was dreading this.
If there had been any way around it, he would have just kept on going with his life, never ever returning to the creepy blue house in the middle of the street. He hated that he needed the money, just as much as he hated the fact that he needed to take his stuff back. He hadn’t taken anything with him the day that he had walked out, so even if he had been wise enough to set up a direct electronic payment instead of being paid by check, like most normal people did, he still needed to pick up his clothes. His toiletries. He had even left his laptop behind.
Sighing, he brought his closed fist up and knocked quietly on the door. Maybe, if he was lucky, Jon wouldn’t even be there. If he was lucky, he would only have to deal with one of Jon’s servants. Because that’s what he had decided that they all were, little more than servants, people he cared about only in as far as they could contribute to his own life.
He watched as the door opened, expecting to see a man in a mask again. The same way it had been the very first time that he had walked into this house. What he saw, instead, made his heart skip a beat. Jon was standing in front of him, wearing a wrinkled white shirt and jeans. His face was clean-shaven, but there were dark circles under his eyes. And his eyes — they were red, small, bloodshot. Mark had to fight his instinct to ask him if he was okay, to wrap his arms around him and console him. He stood there, his arms over his chest, trying his best to look stoic, regardless of how he felt.
Jon looked him up and down before he stared at the floor, took a deep breath and moved out of the way. “Come in.”
Mark did as he was told, looking into the house and away from Jon. He didn’t trust himself not to reach out.
“Let’s do this in the dining room,” he heard Jon say.
Mark nodded and made his way there, only noticing that he was practically running when it was time to sit down. Jon joined him in the dining room a few seconds later, pointed at a seat with an open palm and they both sat down. Together. In silence.
Mark wondered if he should speak first. He was about to — for some strange, unknown reason, he didn’t want to make Jon uncomfortable, even after the way that Jon had treated him — when he heard him speak.
“I — I don’t even know where to start.”
Mark cocked his head. He hadn’t expected an apology, but as he sat there, he realized that he craved one. More than anything. He would forgive Jon in a heartbeat. He wanted to forgive Jon. He wanted to hold him and touch him and kiss him and —
“I guess you want to keep this professional,” Jon said, coldly. Calmly. Looking down at the hand he was gripping his dining room table with. “So I just want you to know that if you want a reference, I’m happy to provide one. Whatever happened between us, you’re pretty amazing at your job.”
“My job?” Mark said. He could already feel his blood pressure rising. He hadn’t planned to get angry at Jon. He did want to keep it professional. But Jon made it so easy. His callousness was getting to Mark, too.
“To be totally honest with you, I’m more than a little hurt,” Jon continued, completely ignoring Mark’s question. Mark’s mouth fell open. “But I don’t think the fact that we got involved should count against you when you’re trying to find another position. I can recommend your services to some friends, if you want. You may have to relocate, but —”
“My services?” Mark said, jumping out of his chair. “My services?”
“Yes, your services. You know, how —”
“I can fuck them until they slump over too? Touch their cocks? Show them what a man feels like?”
Jon watched him, shaking his head while his cheeks reddened. “No, I meant —”
“What the fuck did you mean?” Mark’s fists were balled at his side as he paced around the room. He knew that, while neither was ideal, it was better to punch a wall than his former boss. No matter how much he wanted to.
“I meant your — oh my God,” Jon murmured. “Shit.”
Mark softened at that. There seemed to be actual surprise in Jon’s voice.
“I’m such an idiot,” Jon said. “I didn’t — I didn’t realize how I was making you feel. I thought you were using me.”
“You thought I was using you?”
“Yes,” Jon said. “Because you said you were lonely and you pretty much walked out right after we, you know, did anything for the first time. I never realized that you thought I thought you were like a —”
“Prostitute?”
“Right. Because you’re not.”
“Then what am I?” Mark said, his voice shaking. He hated that he sounded like he was on the verge of crying. He didn’t understand why he felt like that.
“You’re not a prostitute,” Jon said, again. Mark closed his eyes and felt hot tears sliding down his cheeks as he heard Jon approaching him. He wanted to hide his face away. He didn’t even understand why he was so angry. He didn’t understand why he was so hurt.
He resisted for a second before giving in to Jon’s warm embrace, resting his head against the nook of Jon’s neck. Breathing deeply.
“I’m so sorry,” Jon said quietly. “I’m such an idiot. The thought just never occurred to me.”
“I thought you only wanted me because you wanted to try — I don’t know,” Mark said into Jon’s chest, his words muffled. “I don’t know what I thought.”
Jon ran his fingers through Mark’s hair, his breathing ragged. “You thought I just wanted to try having sex with a man?”
“I thought you just wanted to see if you liked it,” Mark replied. “And I can’t — I can’t do that. Not with you. Because —”
&nbs
p; “I didn’t,” Jon said. “That’s not what I wanted at all. I tried to fight against it, actually, because I just — I don’t know, I’ve never felt anything like this before.”
Mark moved away from him and looked at Jon’s face. His eyelashes were wet and his nose red. Mark hadn’t realized that he had been crying, too.
“What — what do you mean?”
“I, uh,” Jon said. “I have feelings for you. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I know that may totally freak you out, but it’s the reason I got so upset when you left. Because I — I don’t know. I was being stupid.”
“Tell me,” Mark said. “Please, tell me.”
“I just pictured this like, domestic ideal,” Jon replied. “With you. Only with you. Never with anyone else.”
“You — you did?”
“Yes,” Jon said, pinching the bridge of his nose and swallowing. “But you — you don’t need me. You need a job.”
“God,” Mark replied, shaking his head. “You really are an idiot.”
He wondered if Jon was offended for a second before he threw his head back and laughed. “Yeah. I know. I really am.”
Mark was feeling calmer, but his heart was still beating fast. He wasn’t angry anymore. The anger had given way to something much scarier, something he wasn’t even sure he knew how deal with anymore. Hope.
He hadn’t dared feel hope ever since he had found out what Roger had been doing. Ever since he had accidentally checked Roger’s voicemail, in their bed, sleepily thinking that it would be the real estate agent letting them know if their offer for the house had been accepted.
He didn’t even care about the fact that Roger hadn’t actually put in an offer on the house once he realized that Roger hadn’t told him about the appointment they were supposed to have with the adoption service people. After that night, everything had changed for Mark. It had taken on this white-gray tint that he had never actually noticed until now. It had taken over his life in a way that very few things did, and he wasn’t sure if he knew how to handle it. Because now things seemed to have of color.
