by Solace Ames
She shook her head and pointed a finger at his throat. “No. Lorenzo, I love you, but I will take my Masamoto and slice open your windpipe if you fuck with my Sunday.”
Beep. Double penetration? Triple? And then, because Jay was a smartass, Quadruple?
“This is too weird right now,” Adriana said under her breath. She looked up to see if Lorenzo had noticed, but he’d disappeared. Bastard. He didn’t get along with Steve either. She got up, waved to some of the other cooks and clapped them on the shoulders as she passed by, then headed for the bathroom.
Steve was in the last stall on the left, the one with the door wide open, bent down snorting a line of coke off a stripper’s thigh. The stripper had her right foot up on the toilet and was giggling like a chipmunk. “Move on, pervert,” she said to Adriana.
Adriana resolutely ignored her. “Steve. I’m supposed to tell you about the fish special tomorrow, but just call Lorenzo because I don’t need to deal with this. Eww. Just...eww. I’m going.”
“She’s not a pervert,” Steve said, turning around to face Adriana with a finger still stuck up his left nostril. “She’s a prude. Prudy Trudy. Talk about cold fish—”
She slammed the door in his face and stalked out.
None of this mattered. She’d take a shower as soon as she got home and wash it all away.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself on the dark freeway. It doesn’t matter. By the time she reached the apartment building, she mostly believed it.
She’d only been at Sapore for three months; she needed to prove she could hold the job for a year. That was the only path to a job with lower hours, higher pay. Yes, Jay was already looking for work again, but finding the right place would take a long time.
She opened the door softly. By the low flickering light of a silent television, she saw that Jay had fallen asleep on the couch, a blanket pulled up to his shoulders. He looked peaceful to the point of being angelic. She stopped to admire him for a few seconds, then quietly slipped into the bathroom.
The pounding water worked its miracle, smoothing away all the knots of tension and resentment hidden in her muscles. Sapore was only money. Here, in the walls of her home, there was only love.
When she rinsed the conditioner out and ran her fingers through her slippery hair, she imagined another man in the shower with her. Paul. Paul, who didn’t have a last name for obvious reasons. Whose pictures were strangely...decent, in contrast to the incredibly indecent words that accompanied them. Even his cock shot was well lit. That wasn’t the first thing she’d noticed, but then Jay had pointed it out.
She smiled to herself, remembering. Water flowed through her hair and trickled down across her back, and that brought memories too—how every part of her was alive and capable of desire.
Paul, the stranger, pulled her toward him as Jay watched. She sighed and slipped her hand between her legs, too sleepy and heavy-headed for full release, but just the heat of her hand felt perfect.
Some of those desires had always seemed too dangerous to bring into the light. Until now.
* * *
“One, two, pump those legs, ladies!” Miss Jossara pumped on the edge of the pool to a highly pumpable reggaeton beat. Everyone down in the waist-high water did their best to imitate her perfect form.
Jay stayed more or less on beat at the back of the class. The other Aqua Dance Fitness students frothing the water were all female, about thirty years older and at least a hundred pounds heavier. Miss Jossara was heavy too, but so fast and fit she could probably bench press Jay. And she usually remembered to address them as “ladies and gentleman,” but when her mix hit the Pitbull songs, she had a tendency to forget.
Jay didn’t mind. She gave the best high-energy low-impact workout at the YMCA. He was a devotee.
“How’s your back doing?” she asked him after the class as he was hanging up his water weights.
“Great. Really great.” He felt a little twinge of guilt and betrayal when he added, “I’m going to scale back to two classes a week, actually.”
“Just as long as you’re keeping up a flexibility schedule. Bye-bye, sweetie.”
After he rinsed off, he met Eduardo at a plastic table by the vending machines. “I saw you aqua-dancing,” Eduardo said. “You roll with some bad bitches, dude.”
“You should try it. Instant testosterone spike. I never grew hair on my balls until I started twerking underwater. Something about the friction, I guess.”
“I’ll stick to weights and rowing. Speaking of gender policing, guess who I ran into at my cousin’s birthday party—Tito. Remember him?”
Jay sat down and rubbed his eyes, which were itchy from the chlorine. He was reluctant to remember. High school wasn’t as bad as it could have been, maybe one of the milder circles of hell, but he was in such a good mood lately and—damn. Tito’s meaty face floated into his mind’s eye.
“Yeah.” He blinked and sighed.
“He fucking apologized to me. Said he was sorry for giving me shit. And he asked how you were doing.” Eduardo’s smile was faintly amused, giving off the same impression of distance and mockery that Jay affected when talking about those years. They were too close to them, still. Maybe in another decade, they could afford to get sentimental.
“Tito never kicked my ass, but he threw my backpack down a storm drain. What, is he queer now?”
“No, I think he just watched a very special episode of something or other. I’m not really interested in his psyche so I didn’t stay to find out.” Eduardo took a swig of protein shake and wiped a line of sweat from his forehead with his T-shirt sleeve. Due to an unfortunate quirk of genetics, he’d started going bald in his early twenties, so his head was shaved clean and shining in the harsh light. “Weren’t you banging his sister at some point? Maybe he found out and that’s why he asked about you.”
“Dude, that’s sick. But yeah, I did.”
“Your weird eleventh-grade overcompensation phase.”
Jay leaned back in his chair and grinned. He’d done well with girls in the eleventh grade. He was a flashy dresser and he’d been in a band—a terrible, unlistenable electronica band, but that didn’t really matter. “Overcompensation phases are awesome. I’m about to start another one.”
“Shit, you better not start rock-climbing and wrestling alligators. Adriana won’t let you.”
“Not that way. Physically, I’m totally on track. I don’t take being healthy for granted anymore.” The conversation had gone serious at last. They shared so much in common, but not this. Jay had chosen to work with sick people, then spent the last year sick himself, discovering that nothing he’d learned really helped when it was his own body, his own pain; Eduardo programmed financial software and had never taken anything stronger than Rogaine. “Six months ago it was so bad, I asked the lawyer if I could divorce Adriana so she wouldn’t owe all my medical bills, and now that the check from the settlement finally came though—it’s double rainbow time, man. I just mean I’m going to throw myself back into life again.” Paul. Don’t talk about Paul. Jay made sure his face was impassive and crossed his legs.
Fuck, he wondered how many times he’d done that at the coffee shop.
“Why don’t you take a year off and get your master’s?” Eduardo drained the rest of his shake and got up.
“It’s an MSW and it’d take more than a year. I can’t justify that, not when Adriana’s working so hard. I can get a job with my BSW and work on a part-time MSW.”
Eduardo took a second to process the stew of social work initials, but once he did, he looked down skeptically.
“I’ll be fine,” Jay insisted. “It’ll be good for me to get back to work, too. It’s stressful but it’s the kind of stress I know I can handle. We all need stress. You know who doesn’t have any stress? Dead people.” He got up—carefully, no twinges—and
walked out with Eduardo, the damp soles of his shoes squeaking loudly until they reached the sidewalk.
“I’ve got an hour before I go get Peter. Want to hang at the coffee shop?”
“Not the one around the corner,” Jay said quickly. Oh God. He’d be looking hopefully over his shoulder and crossing his legs the whole damn time. “But sure. I’ll pay.”
“Thanks for that free dinner at Sapore last week. The mussels were un-fucking-believable. Oh yeah, and Peter and me are going to this church thing on Sunday. You and Adriana might—”
“No. You don’t do Aqua Dance Fitness, I don’t do church. Especially this Sunday. No. Noooo.”
“Chill, dude. Whatever, you hate the baby Jesus. Come on, let’s get some soy mochaccinos.”
They’d reached Eduardo’s car. Jay opened the passenger side and settled in. He might have hesitated a few months ago, but being scared of cars in Los Angeles wasn’t psychologically tenable.
He still had a moment of vertigo when the engine started, as the noise hummed against his skin and shook down to his bones and reminded him he could go anywhere. The world was a limitless surface, marvelous and terrifying.
But he was happy traversing the familiar nesting circles. His friends, his family, his city, his life. Adriana.
The engine rumbled and roared.
“You seriously need to get this car looked at,” he told Eduardo. “Sounds like it’s got a badger under the hood.”
* * *
I have to see you again soon. Please.
Instead of typing something unkind in return, Paul tapped the side of the laptop and reminded himself to be patient.
He was working from a well-lit coffee shop in Venice Beach. He didn’t spend much time in his apartment—it felt too isolated, too impersonal. The steel bed that dominated the studio probably had a lot to do with that.
Feel free to book at my regular rate—no, that was cold.
Paul pulled up a response to a similar issue from a few months ago. He copied and pasted and personalized here and there. Our relationship is very important to me, but it’s based on mutual appreciation and respect. I know that you value me and value my respect, but asking more than once for a discount doesn’t communicate that.
The client was sixty years old and struggling to come out. He’d waited so long to live over again. Circumstances allowed for patience.
He went through the rest of his emails over the next half hour, peripherally aware of the river of humanity that flowed by on the other side of the window. When he reached the end of the queue without a last email from Jay, he was a little disappointed. They didn’t really need to talk about anything else before the session tomorrow, but he liked Jay’s emails, their polite punctuation and eccentric rambling humor.
Time to flip the switch on work mode. He signed out of all his escort accounts and killed the caches with a hotkey—he didn’t keep records on his hard drive—then logged into his class discussion group. A depressing critique of his latest submission lurked in his inbox. Three hours at the design studio tonight might be enough to fix it.
He packed up and ordered a coffee to go from the barista, a pretty young girl who smiled at him shyly. He kept his own smile remote. Something about her stirred a strange urgency in his chest, but as he turned to go, he realized exactly what it was.
Don’t wait, he wanted to tell her. Never wait. It only ever gets harder.
The advice was sentimental at best, misguided and patronizing at worst. Thank God he wasn’t going to school to be a therapist.
Jay wasn’t waiting.
Sometimes Paul had to spin his passion, his motivation, from the thinnest of threads. He always enjoyed having clients that didn’t task his imagination, and he really, really hoped they didn’t cancel at the last minute. The idea of converting Jay and his interesting, as-yet-incorporeal wife into regulars held an understandable appeal.
* * *
Sunday morning, Jay made her fresh-squeezed orange juice for breakfast, and then they went to LACMA for an exhibit of contemporary Mexican painters. Jay turned sideways and edged his sharp-shouldered body through the crowd, holding her hand, guiding her through to the shortest line. A small but effortless physical feat that would have been unthinkable only a few months ago.
Adriana noticed that. She also noticed, less happily, that Jay was nervous. A lot more nervous than she was. Between paintings, he checked his phone.
The museum was a space designed to train the eye, to bring bright things into sharp relief while the duller world melted into the natural light from the glass-vaulted ceiling high above them. But Jay still stared into the middle distance, avoiding her eyes.
And now she was getting nervous. Today was crazy electricity day—back at home, putting on her rayon wrap dress had given her a static shock all over her skin—and the little prickly feelings just kept piling on. They weren’t exactly good or bad yet. But worrying about Jay, whether he felt regretful or overwhelmed, had her leaning toward bad.
After the exhibit, they fooled around in the Urban Light sculpture. It was a hypergeometric forest of restored art deco lampposts just outside the museum, very striking. They’d taken wedding pictures here at dusk, two years ago, when all the lamps were lit and the pair of them looked like beautiful, doomed moths trapped in a monstrous candelabra. Today, they pretended to chase each other in slow motion through the rows, and Jay sang her a few lines from “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”
He’d be fine. He wanted this too.
Three more hours.
“We don’t need to go out for lunch,” she said. “Let’s stop at the grocery store on the way home and I’ll make us a vichyssoise. Or some macaroni and cheese. Whatever you want.”
“I’m not that hungry. But yeah, let’s go home. Not sure what order yet, but I need to throw up, take a shot of tequila and have a cold bath.” He flashed her a crooked smile. “Really, I’m going to be fine. I like the guy. I trust him.”
She didn’t need to say that she trusted Jay. She just took him in her arms and held him close.
* * *
“I turned the phone off, baby,” Adriana called. “Are you okay in there?”
Jay flattened himself against the inside bathroom door and made a horrible face into the mirror. Jesus, he was a wreck. An elegant wreck in skinny black jeans and a slutty black tank top, but still a wreck.
“Jay, I think we need a backup plan.” She was right on the other goddamn side.
He took a deep breath and opened the door.
Adriana was gorgeous with just a touch of eye makeup and plum lipstick, wearing the same simple wrap dress, except that he knew she’d changed into burgundy velvet lingerie underneath. She was ready. But not for him. Well, sort of for him. Don’t get confused. You’ve thought this out, talked it out.
“I’m fine. Really. And you look ridiculously hot.”
“Tell me the truth.” She tightened her lips. Compassion, but no mercy.
“Okay, I’m worried. Just that I won’t handle it right. That I made a mistake. Backup plan? Maybe I should just take myself out of the picture. I mean, for the hours. That way you don’t have to—”
“No. No way. That is not going to happen. I’m not sure if I—if I’d even have agreed to set it up that way, but we can’t change it now.” Her voice softened, her body melting toward him. “We can just cancel. No harm done. Pay the full price or the fee or whatever, it doesn’t matter.”
This was sheer hell. Adriana didn’t deserve this burden. She’d taken care of him enough. He’d taken something for her and made it all about himself.
Fuck useless guilt. He made himself look into her eyes and saw a challenge burning there. And God, he wanted to meet it. She needed his absolute honesty. She needed him to look inside himself deeper than any wound, and she’d accept whatever he f
ound there. He trusted her to accept it.
“Let me think,” he said, very carefully. “I’m going to think for a few minutes, that’s all I need, and then I’m going to give you an answer. Okay?”
“Do you need to be alone?”
“Oh, no.”
He looked over her, every curve, every angle, tracing her with his eyes as if she was a vision in a dream and his heart would break if he woke without remembering her.
He stepped inside her and imagined her desire.
Her fear and pain and surrender. And still, her desire.
His heart skipped a beat and then settled into a measured pace. The blood sang in his veins, warm and powerful.
“I’m good,” he said, and stroked the side of her neck, feeling her own warmth so close to the surface. “I swear.”
“I believe you,” she whispered.
The doorbell rang.
Chapter Three
“Hi, Paul,” Jay said at the door. His eyes were very wide.
Paul gave him a once-over. A very obvious full-body once-over. Jay’s outfit showed a lot more of his smooth, dark copper skin than at their meeting a week ago. Paul smiled to show that he approved.
He unshouldered the small duffel bag he’d brought and dropped it by the side of the door. Jay startled. He had to be wondering what was inside. Paul didn’t say a word.
He’d known the general layout before the door opened. A garden apartment that looked to be 1980s, one step up from a stucco box but no bigger than a one bedroom. He walked into the apartment like it was his own, right to the center.
The rush of taking over a space hit him every time. The ease of it, and the speed and the power. He’d been getting there already at the door, but he was hard as hell now, ready to fuck.
He blurred out all the background details of the apartment, all the meaningful little objects that homes held, and focused on a precious few things. The couch was a wide, dark blue sectional. He could work with that.
