Worst Men: An Enemies to Lovers Gay Romance

by Rachel Kane

  I looked at him warily. “Fuck you, Hunter. What, you can’t have me, so you make up some shit to Sergio?”

  There were so many teeth in his predatory smile. “Make up? I told him the truth, Marcus. About the men before Xavier. The wealthy men you’d used. I was surprised you hadn’t told him. Don’t lovers confess all their past dalliances to each other? I know I told Josh about many of my conquests, when trying to curry his favor.”

  The entire world froze. Not a molecule of air could move, in the silence between us.

  The wealthy men you’d used. That wasn’t right. Not at all. That’s not how it was. I knew who he was talking about, and I hadn’t used them.

  But nobody was supposed to know about that. Nobody. I had pushed it so far away from me that they didn’t even come to memory, most days, just appearing in occasional nightmares.

  Oh, but I recognized the shame that washed over me now. I recognized that feeling of a pit inside my soul, pulling everything down into its darkness, lost forever.

  I reached a hand to the freezer doorway to steady myself. I don’t know what was colder, the freezer air blowing across me, or the chill inside my heart.

  I began, “I don’t know what you told Sergio--”

  “The truth. Which is more than you were willing to offer.”

  “You don’t know the truth, Hunter.”

  “You disappoint me, boy. In business, we’re very proud of our clients. So why do you look so ashamed? You and your kind have their place in the world. You’re pretty trinkets for us to play with, until you get boring or old. Of course, I suppose you are getting a little old now, aren’t you? The flush of youth draining from your face. All that innocence gone, leaving something weary in its place. Definitely not as attractive. No wonder you launched yourself at someone like Sergio. He’s a naif when it comes to these matters. He doesn’t understand the way the game is played. He doesn’t understand that you are used goods.”

  I felt like I was going to throw up. I felt like I was going to scream.

  “Still,” he said, “I suppose I’ve inoculated Sergio against you. Now that he has all the facts, he can make a rational decision about you. Maybe he will keep you around! You’ve still got some of your looks, after all. And those muscles, yes.”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  He held out his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “It’s for your own good, boy. Look at you! You look like you’ve lost someone you love! Clearly you’ve lost your touch. You need to keep things superficial. Keep them businesslike. You don’t fall for clients. Isn’t that the motto for whores like you?”

  All my life there has been a deep well of rage inside me. It’s a well that has only gotten deeper as the years go on, as one after another, every person I’ve ever trusted has hurt me. For the briefest time with Sergio, that rage had gone away, had melted out of me like ice melting in the spring. But it never really went away, did it? It was always there, ready to freeze against my heart again, making it hard and cold.

  The first time I ever got in a fistfight was with a rough kid in sixth grade, who was pushing around my friend. The second time was with Sergio in that parking lot, inaugurating the trouble between us.

  The third time was with Hunter. I grabbed him before he could react, and pulled him in close. It was like a sped-up version of a romantic embrace, except instead of a kiss at the end, it was my fist connecting with his cheek, hard.

  If I’d thought he would go down with just one punch, I was wrong. “You...you fucking filth,” he said, and rushed at me, shoving me further into the freezer. He grappled with me, stronger than I realized. The space inside the freezer was tight. He threw a punch at my midsection, and it pushed all the breath out of me.

  “I’m the filth?” I wheezed. “You had no business coming into my life at all. Nobody asked for your gossip. You just...you just enjoy the trouble.” I swatted at him, but there wasn’t enough room for me to really swing a fist; it just ended pushing him back a little, but not far, because now he had his arms around me in a sick violent parody of a lover’s embrace, trying to drag me into position so he could hit me again.

  “You think I enjoy it?” he gasped. He shoved me back. “People like you, turning our town into a sick marketplace? Only way a man like me can get a boyfriend is to be the highest bidder? You think I like that?”

  “People like me?” I said. “Do you even know what happened to me? Can you grasp for even one second what it was like to be in the clutches of a guy like you, unable to escape, unable to do a fucking thing for myself? Do you know what it’s like to have your life ruined because some rich old guy gets bored of you?”

  “And yet you keep doing it,” he said, with a smug look on his face.

  I punched him. It was hard. Harder than I’d hit that kid back on the playground, harder than I’d hit Sergio in the parking lot.

  Hard enough to send him toppling backwards.

  Directly into Sergio’s sculpture.

  I stared with a sense of horror as he fell into the ice. At first I had some slim hope it would be okay. He steadied himself as the sculpture rocked. Maybe it wouldn’t be hurt.

  It might have been in slow motion. I watched as he reached out a hand to keep himself from falling. Watched as he slipped against the frost on the floor. The sculpture, made of blocks, buckled in the middle, and fell apart.

  All Sergio’s work hit the floor.

  Hunter, his hand against the shelf, stopped his fall. He looked down, then looked at me.

  I was too shocked to say a word. He shoved past me and left the freezer.

  I stood there for many long moments, the cold prickling against my skin, staring down at the carved blocks. Some had smashed themselves to pieces. Others seemed almost salvageable, and I had the crazy urge to try to put it back together, press the pieces until they stuck again.

  “Marcus?” called a voice from outside the freezer. “Are you here?”

  Sergio.

  I waited with a terrible sense of dread for his approach. There was so much to say; there was nothing that could be said. I looked down at the wreckage around me. I’d done the right thing, fighting back against the evil in my life, and yet I’d somehow ruined everything.

  From the door he said, “I was going to call you, but then I realized I’d left my phone down here because Hunter had freaked me out, and--”

  He didn’t looked shocked. His eyes didn’t go wide. In fact, he seemed to have no expression at all, as he saw me in there, his destroyed masterpiece in pieces all around me.

  “What...what did you do?” he asked quietly, his voice almost lost in the sound of the fans.

  I had hoped we could talk through our problems. That hope had begun to die when Hunter told me he’d spoken to Sergio. Now, it was completely gone, and the dead cold look in Sergio’s eyes confirmed it.

  “It’s not--I didn’t--” I tried to find the words, knowing it was impossible.

  “How could you destroy my work?”

  It wasn’t me, I wanted to say. It wasn’t just me. I didn’t mean for this to happen. My mouth was too dry for words to form. My mind was going in circles. Wasn’t me. Didn’t mean it. Wasn’t me.

  I remembered a time when I was very little, and had knocked a vase off this tiny table my mom kept all her photos on. I had just been running around, being crazy like kids are, but when she saw it shattered, she broke into tears. I didn’t understand why, and I’d clung to her and cried too.

  Part of me wanted to cling to Sergio right now, to share the horror and sorrow. But he wasn’t crying. His fury and incomprehension were plain on his face.

  “Please don’t misunderstand,” I began, but there were no more words behind it. Just the plea. Don’t believe Hunter. Don’t be mad. I tried to be good.

  “Is this about my stupid offer to send you to college?” he asked. “I know you’re still mad about it. I get that you think I did something wrong, and hell, maybe I did, and maybe we could’ve talked through it, but Jesus Christ,
Marcus, to come in here and destroy this, my gift for Nat and Owen.... You knew how hard I worked on this. I went through so much trouble.”

  I couldn’t say a word, just looked at him.

  He finally looked up from the broken chunks of his work. “How could... Are you bleeding?”

  Lifting my hand to my face, I felt something sticky at my hairline. I hadn’t realized Hunter hit me that hard. “It doesn’t matter.” Don’t be nice to me. Don’t think about me being hurt. Just end this quickly.

  He’d gotten over the initial shock, and began looking around. “What did happen here, Marcus?”

  I shook my head. I felt a little woozy now that I’d seen the blood. “You’ve already made up your mind about me. It doesn’t matter how this happened, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. Your kind, my kind...we’re different species, Sergio. We’re natural enemies.”

  If for even one minute he could think this was because of his ridiculous fucking offer, then what could I say to him?

  Hunter had told him everything. I could see in Sergio’s eyes that he was thinking about those bald, lying facts. Thinking that he’d learned something new about me. Confirmed something he’d always thought about me.

  “Enemies,” he said. His face had gone back to being still. He was turning into a statue before my eyes.

  “Everything hurts too much to think about,” I said. “I think talking about it would kill me. Can’t we agree to just hate one another? Don’t look at me like that, Sergio.”

  “Hunter said--”

  “I know what Hunter said.”

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “You keep saying that. Some things do matter, Marcus.”

  I shook my head. “They don’t. You’ve already made up your mind.”

  “Were you this offended when all those other men offered you money? That’s not the way Hunter made it sound.”

  Oh. That’s how this was going to go. I could hear the superiority and injured pride in his voice. “Is that what you’re mad about?” I asked. “Hunter told you some gossip about me, and now you’re going to use that as a weapon?”

  “Maybe I didn’t bid enough, was that the problem? Or was I supposed to wait until I was really wrapped around your finger, before you’d start demanding gifts? What was it, Marcus? Which part of this transaction did I not understand, that made you so mad you had to do that?” He gestured at the broken blocks of ice.

  There were so many things I could have said. You don’t mean that. You’re just mad. I could have been calm. I could have led him, logically, through the steps that had gotten us here.

  But he had just rubbed my fucking past into my face. Amazing how fast people could show their true selves, under pressure. Sergio was just another rich guy who saw me as an object.

  “There is nothing you could ‘bid’ that would make up for what you think of me,” I said. “All the money in the world can’t make up for what you’re doing to me right now.”

  I walked past him, my shoulder shoving him on the way out. He glared at me from the door of the freezer.

  “Have fun picking up the pieces, Sergio. Maybe you can hire somebody to help you fix that. Money can solve everything, right?”

  I didn’t look back at him. I didn’t want him to see me crying. He hadn’t paid nearly enough for that.

  21

  Sergio: Pick Up The Pieces

  The ice was like a jigsaw puzzle except with pieces that melted when you held them. If I hadn’t been so pissed off I might’ve appreciated the symbolic meaning of something I’d worked so hard on, melting away in my hands.

  I was in pain. I was angry. So I did what I always did when I felt this way: I worked. Brushing off pieces, kneeling to get a good look at cracks and fissures in the ice, looking back at the base to see what could be salvaged.

  All the while, a voice in my head kept saying, How could he make me feel like this?

  I couldn’t get into the zone. That creative state of mind was locked off to me. I picked up chunks of ice, began sorting them by where on the sculpture they belonged, if I could figure it out. Meantime I told myself all the rational things: This had happened too fast. You can’t have vacation relationships. Those are always ephemeral, born out of adrenaline and excitement. They don’t last.

  At any other point in my life, that might have made perfect sense. A week-long fling, throwing off any worries about what would happen when I got home, not caring about repercussions, just a mutual understanding of the short lifespan of the relationship.

  The blocks at the bottom of the sculpture were mostly intact. I hefted them up and tried to get them back into place. They wanted to stick, just an inch or so from where they needed to be. Off-center, rotated the wrong direction, and now I couldn’t get the ice turned around.

  It’s not like we were really right for each other. He so clearly had a grudge against anybody with money. He had no interest in the arts. He didn’t care about bettering himself. What possible reason could we have to stay together?

  I know. I know. There were other thoughts in my head too, as I struggled to get the middle block of ice into place. Thoughts like what if you’re wrong and you’re being awfully defensive and you know you said something truly awful to him just now.

  It didn’t matter. What I’d said to him was awful, but no more awful than we would’ve made each other feel, if we’d stayed together. He’d get over it. To him, I was just another wealthy enemy to add to his long list.

  How many more guys had there been, like me? How many people had he cozied up to, so they could pay his way?

  I felt so used. Manipulated.

  And there it was: manipulated. The one thing I hated feeling more than anything else in the world.

  When I’d broken up with Harris, the thing that hurt the worst was uncovering how he’d lied to me. He would pursue other men, and to keep it secret, he’d blame me for causing distance between us. I felt like an emotional wreck, like I couldn’t even understand what I was doing wrong...how did I keep starting fights between us, when it seemed like he was starting them? How was I so emotionally distant, when it seemed like he was the one running and hiding?

  Amazing how you can blame yourself for something someone else is doing to you.

  Amazing how you can tell yourself never again, and then get right back into the same kind of relationship.

  If what Hunter said was true, then Marcus really was a master manipulator. He’d had years of practice portraying just the right mix of anger and need, so you wouldn’t realize you’d been taken advantage of. By the time you realized, you’d have given him tons of gifts, made endless promises, pictured yourself taking care of him forever, while he laughed all the way to the bank.

  Something inside me kept saying, That’s not right, that’s not the way things happened, you’re accusing him of something with nothing to back it up, but I ignored that voice.

  I stepped back from the sculpture. My head slowly shook from side to side. No. It was awful.

  None of the blocks matched up anymore. There was too much damage. The heads had been smashed. Arms were fractured, hands were nothing but ice dust.

  I could put it all back together. If I tried really hard, if I worked every moment between now and when I had to suit up for the wedding, I could make this work. I could reshape the sculpture into something...maybe something more abstract, maybe something that at least suggested the amount of work I’d put into it....

  I leaned against the side of the freezer and exhaled a long breath of fog. There was nothing that could be done. Marcus had utterly destroyed it. I didn’t know how it had happened--clearly there had been some violence in here--but I just didn’t care anymore.

  My phone went into my pocket. The tools went into their cases. I locked the freezer behind me.

  I was one of the richest guests here, but I had nothing to offer Nat and Owen for their wedding. I had nothing to offer anyone. I was cold and empty inside.
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  22

  Marcus: Best Men

  I remember the moment Xavier threw me out. It was the most frightened I had ever been, and that was saying something. I’d always been a hard worker, always prided myself on being self-sufficient, and somehow I had it in my head all through the Xavier-time that I was the same person, that all it would take is me being on my own to get back that sense of self-reliance.

  When he broke up with me, though, it was like discovering you’d sat on your leg and it had gone to sleep without realizing it, and when you rise, there is nothing in the world but pain and stumbling. My self-reliance was gone, atrophied to the point of nothingness. I would enter the world without skills, without friends, without hope. Thinking about life after Xavier gave me a sense of numb vertigo. He had stolen the world away. He had made me weak.

  I worked hard and I got back the sense that I could take care of myself, but it was hard starting from zero all over again. It took ages for me to feel like I could trust myself again. And yet...and yet...

  It hadn’t hurt as much as Sergio’s words hurt.

  Without giving it any thought, I’d wound up back at the ginja bar. I held up five fingers to the bartender. He chewed his cigar and looked beyond me, as though I were buying a round drinks for some hidden friends, then looked back at me and scowled. He looked from my eyes, up to the bruise above my temple where Hunter had smacked me one. I waved my hand at him and tried to remember the Portuguese word for five, finally gave up and said, “Yes, five. All for me.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, okay, five okay.”

  I didn’t watch him prepare anything, just stared back towards the resort, the heat shimmering off the road, listening for the grunt which meant my drinks were done. I downed two quickly then carried the rest to the table.

  The injustice was what hurt worst. That Hunter would tell Sergio something about my past, and Sergio would just believe it. Not only believe it, but use it against me. Sergio was clearly a smart guy, but why was he such an idiot when it came to believing shit people said about me?