by Daryl Banner
Even if I’m shitting my pants right now.
I face Melena again. “It just happened this morning,” I remind her assuredly, “so we’re still ahead of the game. I have my team watching the network traffic on Angelina’s phone while blocking the outgoing data packets from her boyfriend’s to ensure the video—or videos—don’t go anywhere.”
Her eyes lock onto mine as I speak. The look in them is pretty unmistakable, and I’ve seen it a thousand times. Her hair, as dark and voluminous as her daughter’s, flows over one shoulder and leads the eye to the slit of her robe, which plunges far too deeply down her cleavage to be decent. Recently divorced, starved for affection, and filthy rich, this woman is clearly hungry for something more than just my help in cleaning up this situation.
“You think you can fix this?” She raises one of her pencil-thin eyebrows and crosses an arm over her stomach, which pushes up her breasts ever slightly. Her whole demeanor has changed, as if the outrage with her daughter was all an act and she was just waiting for us to be alone together. “You can make it better?”
“My team and I will handle everything,” I assure her again, my voice like steel. “None of this will get out.”
“You really … know what you’re doing.” She takes another long drag, lets it out languidly in a twirl of smoke. “You’re saying you have the whole situation … under your control?”
Her voice bleeds with unapologetic innuendo. All I can smell is cigarette smoke and lavender. I almost feel sorry for her. She should know I’m gay by now, but denial is a powerful thing. “In a matter of hours, your daughter’s short-lived career in sex taping will never have happened.”
She bites her lip, her eyes drifting to my chest. “You never let me down, Benjamin. Thank you.” Like a finger along flesh, her gaze slides up my body and meets mine.
My cue to leave. Time’s ticking. “I’ll be in touch with you.” I make my way for the door.
She intercepts me with the swiftness of a panther, then leans against the doorframe suggestively. “What’s the rush?” Her lips purse as she hooks a finger into the waist of my pants. She is nothing if not totally to-the-point and utterly shameless.
“Every minute counts,” I tell her smoothly, as if I don’t even notice her finger caught in my waistband.
“You must be so stressed. Why don’t you let me do some of the work?” Her eyes flick down to my crotch.
There is a fine line I must walk of treating my clients with respect while also setting strict boundaries. I have never messed around with any of them—male or female—and certainly won’t be starting today. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not—”
“I have just the right idea,” she insists, then leans in and adds in a whisper, “I really like having a big, swollen cock in my mouth.”
I lean in just the same and reply, “So do I.”
Her body stiffens. Then she pulls away to get a look at me, as if I’d suddenly become a two-headed leprechaun. “I … I thought they were just rumors. You mean …?”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“N-No. Not a disappointment.” Flustered, Melena crosses her arms. After some thought, she tilts her head, reconsidering. “Now it sort of makes sense, actually.”
“Does it?”
“You’re too well put-together to be straight,” she decides. “I have never seen a man’s clothes fit as well as yours do. Plus, you are just too damned good-looking. And also you’ve never been married—I checked.”
I have no idea what to make of all that. “I just do what my company promises: I make people look good.”
“And you start with yourself,” she notes with a suggestive lift of an eyebrow, pursing her lips. She takes another long drag, then lets it all out. “If you decide you’re lacking a woman’s touch, you know where I live.”
“I think I have all I need. But I appreciate the sentiment.”
“Surely there’s something more you want,” she persists.
“Good day, Melena.” I give her a reassuring wink, then turn to leave.
Her voice catches me halfway down the stairs. “What could a man like you—a man who has everything—possibly want?”
I stop at the foot of the stairs and turn, seeing her standing over the banister, her robe half-open to reveal her nearly-nothing bikini underneath. She poses the question like a riddle.
A riddle for which I have not, in many, many years, had an answer.
“He’s got to want something,” she sings. Then, with a quirk of her eyebrow, she turns from the banister and disappears back into her room, leaving me with that last, lingering thought.
What do I want?
The fresh air outside slaps me in the face as I don my shades and rebutton my suit. I slip into the back of the black Jaguar out front. Ian, my driver, kicks the car into gear and burns rubber.
Just as my flight lands back home, I get another text, this one from Rebekah back at the office.
REBEKAH
Are you still returning Monday?
Or are you able to come in tonight?
Topher Sr. AND Jr. need to meet with you, plus Benson’s lawyers.
I check the date, then tap a quick response.
ME
Call them in for Monday.
Tonight is Lance & my anniversary.
REBEKAH
I’ll schedule them for Monday then.
Side note: I’m fairly certain you’ll like this batch of interns. They’re all very hard, dedicated workers.
I smirk. Interns. They’re the bane of my life. I should really be more appreciative of what Rebekah does for me, hiring the interns every year, but she seems to think she’s serving me by choosing good-looking young hotshots with muscles in their arms and nothing in their heads—or worse, their hearts.
Every summer, it’s the same story. I see the same dreamy look in their eyes when they approach me. I see the wants and the needs and the urgency behind their every movement. The desire for me to help them rise up to whatever great thing they dream of is so palpable, I can taste it like smoke.
And it always burns me just the same.
When I push open the door to my penthouse, the love of my life rushes across the smooth tile to embrace me, sliding and slipping excitedly along the way.
Lancelot, my Jack Russell Terrier, crashes into my legs, then tries to climb up my body as he licks and licks, his tongue eager for my face.
All the stress I was feeling a second ago drops to the floor like a sack of shoes. Or maybe that’s my luggage. I crouch down and let him have his way with me, chuckling as I rub his white-and-brown spotted coat. “Miss me?” I sing to him as he licks my face over and over. “I was only gone for a day and a half. Quit bein’ silly.”
He’s a rescue, and a damn near close call, if you ask me. Had I found him one day later, I’m certain he would have been dead. It was one really bad night after a really shitty week when I turned to the bottle and strolled down 8th Avenue, lost in heavy thoughts and despair. I stumbled over his emaciated body in the alley by King Arthur’s, a restaurant, and face-planted right next to him. Then there lay the sad pair of us that night—two thrown-away, lonely, damaged fools. It was seven years ago today.
“You know what day it is?” I ask him as I make my way to the kitchen, ignoring the luggage I’d left at the door. He pads along behind me, panting excitedly. “Our anniversary, Lance! I bet you knew that. Dinner for two, comin’ right up.”
An hour later, I’m eating at one end of the table while Lance sits in the chair beside me. Yes, he sits at the table with me. This is perfectly acceptable behavior in my home, as Lance is part of my family. In some sense, he’s my only family. He’s even eating his favorite meal from an ornate blue-and-white china bowl.
He’s the only creature on Earth—human or otherwise—I’ve ever let close to my heart. I’m not even sure my parents have earned such a place in it. When Gage Communications struck its first success, it wasn’t a call of congratulations I got from my moth
er; it was a lecture in morality, integrity, and how I’m throwing away my life on the spoiled rich brats of Beverly Hills.
I’d built this multimillion dollar business out of cents in my pocket, but my parents will never see it that way. I might as well be cooking and dealing crystal meth out of a white, unmarked van in Albuquerque. Considering how much damned weed my father smokes, I figure I’m ranked even lower than that.
“We started from the bottom,” I say to Lance across the table, “you and I. We started with nothing, and now look at us.”
Lance pants his response, then resumes licking his bowl clean with overflowing excitement.
Yeah, he gets it.
“Happy anniversary, Lance!” I lift my glass of bourbon in a toast, despite Lancelot totally ignoring me, as he’s six-hundred percent committed to licking every last bit out of that bowl. My words echo through the big empty condo, echo off the baby grand in the living room, echo off the ten-thousand dollar backsplash on the kitchen walls, echo off the crystal chandelier above us, echo off the floor-to-ceiling eighteen-foot-tall windows and down the giant archway into the hall and through my four guestrooms and my giant king-size bed, which I’d sleep in empty every night if it weren’t for that special canine at the foot of it.
So much space for my voice to echo off of. So much room.
So much nothing, if it weren’t for Lancelot.
What could a man like you—a man who has everything—possibly want? asked Melena over that banister.
The question still plagues me when I’m lying in bed hours later and Lance is already kicking in his sleep, his paws rubbing along the soft comforter as he chases dream bunnies.
Her voice keeps fluttering around my mind, taunting me. He’s got to want something. I stare at the ceiling, swallowed in cool white sheets and wearing nothing at all. A man who has everything …
For a man who has everything, my life sure feels like it’s full of nothing.
I put my hands behind my head and close my eyes, but even in the dark peace behind my eyelids, the question still haunts me.
Then Lance kicks me in his sleep and jerks himself awake, his big watery eyes searching for his imaginary assailant in a panic, confused.
I grin. At least I’ve got him.
3
Trevor needs to let loose.
“I’m not hungry,” I try to tell him, stumbling over my shoes, “and I still have to pick out a tie for Monday.”
“We’re not going out for dinner, cupcake,” Elijah teases me, throwing an arm over my shoulder. “You, Trevor, need to loosen the hell up. I promise, you can plan your week’s wardrobe when we get back, down to your matching underwear.”
On a Friday night like this, the streets are crowded with partygoers, friends meeting up, and drunken laughter. The city is alive, and its inhabitants never sleep. Elijah has been one of these inhabitants for two years now. Amidst the city noise, he’s totally at home.
And then there’s me, obsessing over whether a red tie will indicate a sense of desperation over a mauve tie.
Listen to me. Using words like “mauve”. I lean into Elijah with a heavy sigh, my safety net. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
When we finally arrive, I do a hell of a lot more than seeing. I do some coughing, some gagging, and a bit of squinty-eyed ear-covering. Elijah’s brilliant idea of how to loosen me up is visiting a nightclub we’ve passed every morning on our way to the office and every evening on our way home. I’ve never been to a bar, let alone a seedy downtown hangout with thumping music and throngs of sweaty, half-clothed people everywhere you turn.
Making our way to the bar, I witness a woman grinding her body against a shirtless hunk, whose eyes are glued to her breasts. I witness another guy gyrating his hips against a girl who grasps his hair in a fist as she hungrily pulls his mouth to hers.
This place is a den of sex, sweat, and slippery skin.
And then there’s Elijah and I ordering a pair of Cokes. Neither of us will be twenty-one for three more weeks. Did I mention our birthdays are just four days apart? We’re so stinking cute.
Shoot me now. I grab Elijah’s sleeve. “Over it already.”
“This place is exactly what you need. Just let it happen.”
“Yeah. A loud nightclub where I get to watch a bunch of men and women grope each other drunkenly.”
“Hey, there are gay people here, too,” Elijah assures me. “You aren’t all alone. In fact, that’s sort of the point.”
“The point?”
“Yeah. I want you to get laid.”
I blink at him—and not just due to the eye-watering smoke drifting through the air I’m desperately trying to breathe. Also, I’m trying not to notice a bearded guy getting what I presume to be a lap dance from a woman in a miniskirt halfway down the bar. The sight is very distracting and not in the spank bank way.
“Don’t give me that face, Trevor. You are too uptight, and this internship is going to break you unless you untie those panties—”
“We’re going home. Now.”
“Nope. Denied.”
“Then I’m going home.”
“Half an hour,” he begs me. “Give me just half an hour, and if Trevor’s not having even a tiny bit of fun by then, we’ll go home and order a large pizza with lemon garlic wings.”
“Ten minutes. Teriyaki wings.”
“Fifteen. Half-and-half.”
“Deal.” I cross my arms and sit on the stool next to him.
This is a little game he won’t win, and my unfinished planner waiting for me on my desk at home is proof of that. Even sitting here at this bar where we each nurse a totally-innocent Coke—which takes ten of our precious fifteen minutes to even get—all I find myself thinking about is which color tie will go with my slate-colored slacks. Maybe red is too desperate, too “look at me”. Do I go for a pink one to indicate sophistication, or something more saturated to convey my focus and passion?
Looking good is hard work.
“That one,” Elijah says, pointing.
He’s been doing this too for the past ten minutes, pointing out every guy in the club who seems to not have a half-dressed woman rubbing their lady bits all over him. “Straight,” I blurt back, just like the last four.
“How about that one?”
“Straight, too.”
Elijah smirks at me. “How can you tell?”
“They’re all straight or taken. All of them. Can we go now? I think I left your stove on.”
“Four minutes. You promised. And no, you didn’t.”
I slurp on my Coke. “We really should be spending tonight and tomorrow researching marketing strategies and preparing for—”
“We have a whole summer to do that. Tonight, all we research is dude butts.” Elijah lifts an eyebrow. “That’s what gay guys are into, right? Butts? You’re a bunch of puppies running in circles smelling each other’s holes, right?”
I shove Elijah for that, earning a hearty laugh from him as he nearly falls off his stool.
Then, across the room, I catch sight of a man standing at a tall bar table all by himself. He looks strangely out of place wearing a clean, fitted blue suit jacket with a slight shimmer to it and crisp slacks. Through the haze of people and smoke, his eyes are aimed my way.
Oh. At me.
He’s looking right at me.
Damn, his eyes can pierce like a spear. His hair, golden brown, is sharply combed, save for a chaotic tuft in the front. His chiseled face sports a bit of beard at the chin that tapers off like a razor’s edge down his strong jawline toward a set of smooth, shaven cheeks and high cheekbones.
Fuck, what a gorgeous face …
And his body. Wow. Even through the haze, I spot a button-up shirt beneath his sexy blazer that hugs a big, muscular chest. The sleeves of his jacket enwrap arms as thick as footballs, which immediately makes me think of him doing naked pushups for some reason. Even his legs are big and strong. The shape of his body is present
through the thin material of his clothes, which hug his form exquisitely. I can only imagine what those slacks are doing to his ass. I kinda wish he’d turn around so I can know.
And all of that smoldering sexiness is looking right at me.
Then, quick as a storm rolling in, the aisle of nothing that existed between me and that man closes in, filling with dancing bodies and half-fucking couples on the floor.
My view of the sexiest man in the world is obliterated in the blink of an eye.
“Besides,” Elijah is going on, oblivious to any of this, “you do realize we’ll probably be gofers for a good portion of the summer. I hope you’re good at taking coffee orders.”
I lean one way and then the other, desperate to regain eye contact with the man. Too many people are in the way. “I’m sure we’ll be put to much better use than that,” I retort distractedly.
“Doubt it. How about that one?” he asks, gesturing.
“Straight.” I didn’t even look. “And I don’t doubt it. You and I were chosen for a reason.”
“Yeah. We’re local. We’re young. We’re gofers.”
“We’re smart,” I state, “and we’re qualified, and we’re driven. And we got recommendations from our professors.” I give him my full attention suddenly. “I mean, have you really considered what this’ll do for our fourth and final year at the university, Elijah? Working for Mr. Gage?”
“The Gagency,” he quips.
I elbow him hard. “Gage Communications. Don’t be caught dead calling it anything else, dude. You saw how strict that supervisor is. Rebekah. She’ll whip you in half. Two minutes.”
“If you think she’s strict, she’s got nothin’ on Mr. Gage himself. He’s a downright bossy control freak with an attitude. Or so I hear. Three minutes.”
