Will You Be My Escort

by Meg Harding

  “But I’ve realized something, and please don’t take this as an insult because I really don’t mean it as one. I’ve been thinking over everything, and how I’ve been acting, and I… I’m embarrassed. I’m so embarrassed that I let things get to a point where I hired someone to pretend to be my boyfriend and then tried to work my issues out on you. In no way is that fair to you. You’re a fantastic guy, and I should never have used you in such a way. Even if part of that is your job.”

  Aaron’s staring at him, and that’s the end of Jackson’s speech. He’s not talking, not blinking, just staring. Did he say it all too fast? Did the embarrassing part actually upset him? Jackson reaches out and takes one of Aaron’s hands in his. Maybe Aaron’s thinking about their living situation and how awkward that’s going to be. He’s probably trying to come up with a way to ask for a new condo or a plane ticket home. Jackson feels the like the worst person ever.

  “I can… I’ll talk to the hotel about moving you to your own condo. Or another resort if you want. I don’t want this to ruin your trip. You can still come with us when we go out and everything. I’m sure Tristan will be happy with that. I know I won’t mind.” He can manage to keep his feelings to himself. It’s just a few more days and then he’ll never see Aaron again.

  His stomach rolls. Okay, so that’s an unpleasant thought. Maybe he will see him again, but with enough time for him to have gotten his act together and for his feelings to have moved on to someone whom he hasn’t made an ass of himself in front of.

  “Jackson,” says Aaron. “Can you focus for a minute?”

  He blinks, feels his cheeks heat up. “Sorry.”

  Aaron smiles, but it’s not his normal one. It’s a little off, less bright. Makes sense considering the circumstances, Jackson supposes. He doesn’t like it, even so. “I think it’s probably for the best if I go home. No offense, but I don’t really want to be around when you tell everyone I’m an escort.” He huffs out a tiny laugh.

  Jackson unconsciously squeezes Aaron’s hand, hard enough to elicit a soft noise. “Sorry,” he says again, letting go. “I won’t tell them you’re an escort. I’ll just say you’re a friend doing me a favor. Or that we’ve broken up. I can think of an excuse and tell the truth later. You really don’t have to go.”

  Aaron stands, stooping to press a soft kiss to his right cheek. “I really do.” He kisses his left cheek. “I wish you the best.”

  Aaron’s gone by the next morning, and Jackson stares at the spot where his suitcase was.

  It’s time to face the music.

  AARON FEELS like he’s been kicked in a very sensitive place, and he doesn’t know why. Jackson has just made his life easier. And he’s happy for him. He really is. Jackson seems to finally have a grasp on himself. And Aaron, Aaron was going to break it off with him. So the end results are the same, and everything is perfectly okay.

  He rests his forehead against the cool plane window and watches the Hawaiian landscape flash by beneath him.

  Now Aaron just needs to forget Jackson.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Next Six Months

  JACKSON RETURNS from Hawaii with a mom who’s giving him the silent treatment, a no doubt soon-to-be brother in law who won’t stop glaring at him, and a posse of siblings who keep shooting him worried glances. He’s somewhat comforted by the fact that his mom isn’t speaking to any of his siblings either. And he wasn’t even the one to rat them out. His mom discovered their deception all on her own. She’s spooky like that. He also returns without the Carlisle Trophy. They came in a whopping sixth place—he was hoping the loss might distract his mom, but she seems to be pretty fixated on the whole “my kids lied to me” thing.

  He doesn’t stick around his home long when he gets back. He takes the first job that’s offered to him, and three days after coming home from a two-week vacation, he jets off to spend a month in Atlanta, Georgia, on a television production of The Hardy Boys.

  He wasn’t talking out of his ass when he ended things with Aaron. So going to Georgia isn’t running. He’s not avoiding the truth that has now become blatantly obvious. But he is ignoring the lingering feelings about Aaron (these things take time)—and possibly his family. There’s only so much confronting that he can do at once.

  So he’s dealing with his issues regarding relationships. He’s determined to go on dates and make himself speak up about what he wants. He’s trying to relearn what he likes and what he doesn’t, what he’s okay about compromising on and what has to be a firm line.

  It takes him a week and a half of dates that don’t work to realize what one of his biggest problems is.

  The whole thing goes a little like this:

  Jackson’s out at a bar with the makeup and hair crew, and he’s sitting in a booth with friends on either side of him. He’s been nursing a beer for the last hour while he scans the crowd. There’s a cute chick on the dance floor. She keeps switching partners, but she dances like no one’s watching, and she’s got the biggest smile on her face. It’s charming.

  He wants to ask her out.

  Lauren, one of the hairstylists, slaps his arm gently. “Want to get me another beer?”

  “No,” he says, “but I’m nice and I will.”

  She laughs, pecking his cheek. “You’re the best.”

  He’s at the bar, waiting on the drink, when a big burly guy comes up next to him and starts chatting. Before Jackson knows it, the guy’s asking for his number and if he wants to go out sometime. The guy obviously likes him, so why not give him a chance?

  Lauren’s slap to his arm after he hands her beer over isn’t anything close to gentle. “You’re killing me, Carlisle,” she says. “How stupid can one guy be?”

  “Huh?”

  Charlie, a fellow makeup artist, leans across the table. “You’ve been staring at the chick in the blue dress all night, but you just gave your number to the first person to ask for it. Maybe—and this is just a suggestion—if you actually asked out the people you want to go out with instead of the ones who want to go out with you, things would go better.”

  Put like that it seems pretty obvious.

  He asks the girl—Ginger—out, and they go for pizza two days later. When she asks if he wants to come in after dinner, he shakes his head. It may be juvenile, but he’s not ready for that. Not even close. “No,” he says. “But I had a really good time, and if you’re cool with going slow, I’d like to take you out again.”

  She goes up on her toes to kiss him. “All right. I’ll pick the next place, yeah?”

  He nods, smiling. “Yeah.”

  He never does end up sleeping with her. He likes her too much to do that when he still can’t stop thinking about Aaron. But they end up friends, and she keeps texting him random things about her day once he’s back in New York at the end of the month.

  It’s all right, he thinks. This was his first real attempt. With a little more time, and a different person, he might be able to move on.

  He says that two months later, when he ends a seventh date with a guy he met walking his dog in the park. He says the words, “I like you, but this isn’t working out,” and he feels bad, but not bad enough to take them back. The truth is, he likes the man’s dog more than he likes the man himself. Not that the dude isn’t nice—he is. He’s just a little too clingy for Jackson’s taste.

  Turns out Jackson doesn’t like being texted all the time.

  A month later, he repeats those words to a man he—ironically—meets in a coffee shop. He likes PDA and holding hands too much, and Jackson doesn’t want to hold someone’s hand when he’s walking down a sidewalk in New York.

  Two weeks later, he doesn’t end a date with the classic, “I’ll call you.” He’s on set in London for a film, and he went out with a guy to a pub. The man talked with his mouth full. Turns out Jackson’s not down with that either.

  Six months after his trip to Hawaii finds him on James’s couch, watching a movie with Bastien while James works in his off
ice. They’re not so much watching the movie as Jackson is telling Bastien about all of his failed attempts to date.

  “But it’s been good,” he says when he’s done relaying them all. “I’ve discovered all of this stuff that I don’t like, and I’m not as willing to ignore things that bother me now. So when I meet someone, and those things don’t bother me, then I’ll know.”

  Bastien’s staring at him.

  “What?”

  Bastien shakes his head. “Wait right here.” He gets up and disappears into James’s office. He comes back with James a minute later and pushes him onto the couch. “Tell James what you just told me.”

  He’s a little confused as to why that’s necessary, but he does, repeating everything. At the end, James stares at him. He’s starting to get unnerved. “What?” he asks again. If he says it enough maybe someone will eventually answer him.

  “I say this with the utmost love, but you are the biggest dumbass I have ever met in my life. And that’s really saying something,” says James. “How can you be so obtuse? I told myself I’d stay out of this—that clearly you were working up to something—but now I see I gave you too much credit. You haven’t learned anything at all, have you?”

  Jackson blinks, taken aback. “I just told you what I’ve learned.”

  James tugs on his hair. “Arghhhh!”

  Bastien rolls his eyes. “Your dramatics aren’t helping anything.” He sits down on the coffee table, blocking the TV. “Jackson,” he says, “when you meet the right person, those things are still going to bother the hell out of you. You’re just going to be willing to deal with some of them.”

  “Honestly,” butts in James, “that’s not even close to the biggest issue we need to address.”

  “Like James’s tendency to interrupt,” says Bastien, voice rising to talk over James. “It makes me want to strangle him, but I don’t, and we’re still together. Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “It’s a little late to be asking me what I mind,” points out Jackson.

  Bastien has the good grace to look a little sheepish. “True. Why did you end things with Aaron?”

  Jackson automatically looks away. “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.” Six months and that name still makes his heart skip. But he’s stubborn. That’s all. Eventually he’ll stop feeling this way.

  “You know exactly what it has to do with.”

  Jackson bites his lip, refuses to make eye contact. “I realized the situation I’d put myself in was ridiculous and asinine.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Maybe partly, but it’s not even close to the whole thing.”

  “I was using Aaron to work out my issues, and that was wrong.”

  “Try again.”

  “It was time for me to stop using a shield and to start fighting my own battles.”

  “Good try, warrior. Not buying.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” exclaims Jackson in frustration.

  “Not even a little.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Obviously. But I think you should.”

  Jackson screws his face up. Fine. The words come tearing out of him. “I liked him. Is that what you wanted to hear? I managed to develop a giant-ass crush in the time it takes a person to say hello, practically. I fell for someone who was being paid to date me at first. Who lives in another state. Who I had to ask to sleep with me, who I insisted to and promised that it would just be a fling. I tried to use him to get over myself, and I completely fucked it up. I can date people without getting run over now, but I can’t date people because none of them are him. Do you want to hear that?”

  Bastien sits back, propping himself on his hands. “Yes,” he says. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. That, my friend, is a fixable problem. Now here’s what we’re going to do about it….”

  AARON IS a practical man, so when he gets home from Hawaii, he gives himself one week to mope. He watches nothing but sad romantic movies and eats ice cream by the tub while barely ever leaving his couch. It works for some people. Maybe it’ll work for him. At the end of the week, his feelings are still there. They’re like a splinter, constantly aggravating him, but he just has to wait for them to work out on their own. He buries himself in work. If he’s not taking a job, he’s remodeling his house. If he’s not doing that, then he’s relandscaping his yard. Every room in his house has been repainted. He has palm trees framing his driveway now. His sister visits and looks at him like he’s grown a second head when she sees all the changes, but Lola admits everything does look very nice.

  Months later and he’s looking at this as a good thing (even if sometimes, late at night, it makes his chest feel tight and his head ache). He’s become superefficient thanks to Jackson. If sometimes he still thinks about Jackson’s smile or the way he rambles when he talks, the way he covers Aaron like a blanket while he sleeps, well… it’s a little painful, but he can deal. He’s guessing there’s a reason people say things take time. He’s learning that firsthand now.

  He’s ruminating on this, bored as he waits at a restaurant to meet a potential new client, and for a second he thinks his thoughts of Jackson have projected themselves onto the approaching man. The guy walking toward him could pass as a brother of Jackson’s—from the same length, somewhat-too-long dirty-blond hair, to the way his lips curl when he smiles in greeting.

  Aaron shakes his hand, and it takes him a minute to find words. “Hello, I’m Aaron. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Hi. Jeremy. It’s nice to meet you too.”

  They take a seat, and Aaron forces himself to sit still and not fidget. “What were you looking to hire me for?”

  Jeremy frowns. “My family is a little worried about me. Haven’t dated anyone in a while, you know how it goes. I’ve been doing the whole figuring myself out thing. Trying to discover who I am outside of a relationship, what I want. I think it’s going good. But my mom, she’s a little concerned—says I’m running from having real feelings again—and she keeps trying to set me up with one of her friend’s sons. I’ve got a family barbecue coming up next week, and I’d like to bring a date. Just to clear her mind, you know?”

  Aaron smiles tightly. He knows all too well. He’s tempted to say no because the whole thing sends bells trilling in his head, but he shoves that urge down. He’s going to overcome himself.

  “I do know. I’ll be happy to help you.”

  He’s expecting Jeremy to be a one-time thing, but he hears from him soon after the barbecue (which was a success as far as Aaron could tell). He wants to know if he can book Aaron for a beach weekend for his sister’s wedding. Aaron thinks that only in California would someone be having a beach weekend wedding in late November. Well, maybe in Florida too. He accepts, despite yet more bells going off. Weekend gigs pay well, and he wants to repaint the outside of his house next. He packs a smallish suitcase, folds his tux into its bag, and sets off to spend a weekend in the sun.

  They’re staying at a nice hotel, right on the beach, and he’s sharing a room with Jeremy. And subsequently a bed. He discovers that Jeremy sleeps like a rock, and he doesn’t move at all throughout the night. Which would be fantastic, except he sleeps in the dead center of the bed. Aaron wakes throughout the night to find one of his arms or legs dangling from the edge as he attempts to sleep on his tiny sliver of space.

  He finds Jeremy doing yoga on the beach in the morning. He doesn’t find it nearly as distracting as when Jackson did it. He’s going to use that as his excuse for letting Jeremy talk him into sitting down and contorting himself painfully along with him.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?” asks Jeremy.

  “Ask away.” He could use the distraction from how he can’t seem to bend his leg quite that much.

  “Do you think it’s possible to fall in love in a matter of days?”

  Aaron freezes.

  Jeremy makes a choking noise. “I’m n
ot talking about you. I’m sorry. I guess I should provide you with background, huh? Several months ago, this band was recording at my studio for a week. And they’re from London. Fantastic accents. And the drummer was… he was something else. And we… you know. I wasn’t with anyone in a while, but I thought it would be pretty safe since it was just for a week. How much could happen in a short time like that? I figured he would be a good rebound.

  “We went out for dinner and stayed up late talking and caught early movies before anyone got working. I showed him around the area, and he told me all about London and all the things I should visit if I ever went there. So he’s leaving in a day, and I start tearing up thinking about it, you know? It just hits me. I’m ass over teakettle for this guy, and that was totally not how it was supposed to go. So I panic, and I tell him I’ve got a family emergency, and I skip out a day earlier. Because if I could fall for him that quickly, who knows what could happen with one more day. And if it went further than that, I could get hurt. The whole point of it was that it was supposed to be safe, and now it wasn’t. Is that crazy? I feel like I’m losing my mind because I still think about him, and I look at plane tickets to London sometimes and think ‘what if.’”

  Aaron can’t breathe. He has to look away from Jeremy’s earnestly questioning face. “Do you know a Tristan by any chance?” This is too… he has a hard time believing this is a coincidence.

  “Um, no. What does that have to do with anything? The guy’s name is Dylan.”

  Sucking in air has never been so difficult, but he has to inhale deeply and calm himself before he does something stupid. He’s jumping to conclusions. Is paranoia one of the steps of getting over someone? “Sorry. It just reminded me of something.” Another deep draw in. His stomach rolls, and he honestly wants to get up and walk away. “I think it’s definitely possible. Sometimes you’ve just got great chemistry.” He clears his throat. “I’m kinda hungry. Do you mind if I skip out on the rest of this?” He waves his hand, encompassing yoga with that one movement.