Dad Next Door (Crimson Club Book 5)

12. Quinn

“Knock knock.”

I looked up from the blueprints I was bent over to find Jesse standing at my open garage door. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Not much. I was in the neighborhood and took a chance that you were home.” He strode into my garage and looked around. “This is every mechanic’s wet dream.”

He wasn’t wrong. The oversized garage would make an excellent mechanic’s workshop with its high ceilings, bright lights, and gleaming floors.

“You’re off today?”

He nodded and peered over my shoulder at the blueprints spread out on my worktable. “Is that for the job Pops was telling me about?”

“It is.” I ran the tip of my finger over the page. I’d signed a contract for my company’s first job this morning, and it still didn’t feel real.

“Why does your face look like that?” He propped his hip against the table and crossed his arms.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re about to pass out.” Understanding crossed his features. “You’re freaking out.”

“A little.”

“Come on and tell your big bro all about it.” He made a beeline for the chairs next to my fridge.

“You’re younger than me, asshole.”

“I’m not talking about age.” He lowered himself into one of the chairs and grinned at me.

“Shut up.” I pointed to the fridge. “Want a beer?”

Jesse and I had similar builds, but he was an inch taller and had wider shoulders. Until he was seventeen, I’d been the bigger one, but he hit a late growth spurt and shot up almost four inches in a year. He’d also started working out and packed on almost thirty pounds of muscle in that time, and he never let me forget that I was now the smaller brother.

He nodded. “I’m staying for dinner too.”

I pulled two beers out of the fridge. “Am I cooking, or are we ordering?”

“Ordering.” He took the bottle I offered him. “Pops told me you guys signed a lease yesterday too?”

I settled in the chair across from him. “We did. It’s not much, just a small office in the industrial area. Mostly just to have an off-site place to meet with clients and an address for my paperwork.”

“How are you feeling about everything?”

“It’s kind of surreal. I mean, I’ve been setting this up for months, but it’s like everything came together overnight, and now it’s really happening.”

He took a pull from his beer and stretched his legs out. “What’s freaking you out?”

“Just how much responsibility is on me. Before, when I was only doing the online stuff, it didn’t really matter if I messed up or whatever because the only one who’d suffer was me. Now I have my crew to worry about, who are also my friends, so that adds a ton of pressure. I told you what happened to the guys at their old job, right? How their boss fucked them over?”

He nodded.

“I just don’t want to be that guy. The one who’s like, ‘Hey, come work for me and put all your faith in my ability to not run my new business into the ground,’ then proceeds to run said new business into the ground and leave everyone high and dry.”

“Something tells me you’re the only one worried about that.” He shot back more of his beer.

“Maybe, but it’s hard not to worry when so many people are depending on me for their livelihood.” I sighed and sipped my drink. “You had a booking nearby?”

He nodded and finished swallowing. “A regular.”

“Oh yeah?”

Jesse and I had a bond most people didn’t understand. Part of it was the stepbrother thing. I’d met him and his younger brother when I was twelve, and they were eight and five, and we’d officially become a family when our dads got married three years later. They were my little brothers, even if we had no blood relation.

We also had the unique connection that came with being full-service sex workers. My friends at the club understood more about my life than almost everyone, but Jesse was the only one who truly understood the ripple effects our jobs had on our lives and the unique issues we had to navigate.

Something was bothering him. He didn’t tell me personal information about his clients to protect their privacy, but he wasn’t shy about sharing details of his bookings or his observations of his clients and people in general.

“Yeah.” He picked at the label on his beer. “Today was our last meeting.”

“It was?”

He nodded, his eyes on the label. “I’ve been thinking of quitting.”

I kept quiet and let him talk.

“I know I’ve said this before, but I only have a few regulars I see, and I haven’t taken a new booking in months. It feels like the right time to step back.”

“You said you’d do this for as long as you enjoyed it and it was worth the risk. Has that changed?”

He nodded, his eyes still on his bottle.

“Jess.”

He looked up, and the mess of emotions in his eyes was staggering.

“Did something happen?”

He cleared his throat and looked back down at his bottle. “It’s nothing.”

“Obviously it isn’t.”

“I just… The last booking I had went sideways. Nothing horrible happened, but I got a bad vibe from him and refused when he wanted to book me again. He figured out who I am and showed up at the garage a few weeks ago.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.” He chugged a few mouthfuls of beer. “Thank fuck it was dead and I convinced him to leave before he outed me to everyone, but it was a close call. The guys at work are chill, but I have no idea how they’d react if they found out. I can’t risk my career like that. Not now that I’m finally at a place I like and with people who treat me like family.”

“The fact that he figured out who you are is a huge safety risk.” He already knew this, but Jesse needed validation that his fears were legitimate, otherwise he questioned himself and sometimes made decisions he regretted because he went against his instincts.

“That too.” He sighed. “A part of me is still waiting for him to show up at my place or at work again. I’m not worried about him trying to hurt me or anything like that, but he knows enough to destroy everything I’ve worked for. And it’s like you said, if he figured it out, it’s only a matter of time before someone else does. And they might not be as harmless.”

“Sounds like it’s time to stop.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“What are you going to do about your regulars?”

“Probably keep meeting with them until I figure everything out. I only have three left now. And they’re companionship arrangements. Still risky, but not illegal, since no sex acts are being exchanged.”

“Are you okay with quitting?”

“Mostly. It’s weird to think that safety net will be gone if I need quick cash again, but the double life part of it is getting to be too much. I’m always lying to everyone, and it’s hard to get close to people when I have to always watch what I say. And it’s not just dating, but friendships too.”

“Yeah, our type of work adds layers of complication to things,” I said, my mind wandering to Tristan and how he really didn’t seem to care about my online work or my time in porn.

Jesse shot me a scrutinizing look.

“What?”

“You’re good at masking, bro, but I know you. Something’s going on, and it has nothing to do with work. At least not contracting.”

Now it was my turn to pick at my beer label. “I kinda sorta started dating someone?”

“Was that a question or a statement?” He tipped his head back and drained what was left of his beer.

“Statement. Mostly. It’s complicated.”

“It always is. You wanna talk about it?”

I nodded. Jesse was one of the few people who’d understand what I was going through.

He made a go ahead motion with his hand.

“My neighbor and I kind of hooked up over the weekend.”

“Which neighbor?”

“That one.” I pointed toward Tristan’s house.

“The single dad?” he asked slowly.

“Yep.”

“Now I get the confusion.” He smirked.

“Believe it or not, the fact that he’s a man isn’t what’s tripping me up.” I finished my drink. “Another?”

He nodded and handed me his empty bottle.

“I was twenty-two the last time I dated someone.” I stood and went to the fridge to get refills. “Back when I was in the city. My entire life revolved around making it. Every audition or call-back was the be-all and end-all of my world, so our relationship was low on my priority list, even though I had real feelings for her. She was an actor too, so it worked until it didn’t. But Tris is…an adult.”

Jesse snickered.

I closed the fridge door and popped the tops off with the opener. “Shut up. You know what I mean. He’s a veterinarian and a father. He owns his house. He’s a fully functioning adult who’s doing something with his life. I’m a guy who shows his dick on the internet and is cosplaying as a businessman.”

“You’re a businessman. Full stop.” He shot me a hard look. “You’ve been running a successful content creation business for almost seven years, and through it, you’ve built enough equity to buy this place and finance your next career. You’re not cosplaying anything. That’s your ADHD talking.”

I made a face. Jesse was one of the first people I’d fully dropped my mask for, and he wasn’t shy about calling me out when I let my anxiety brain take over.

“I can’t help it.”

“I know, but that’s why you have me to point out when you’re being a dumbass.” He grinned cheekily. “PS: you’re being a dumbass.”

“Thanks, asshole.”

He blew me a kiss. “So, you and your neighbor. That’s interesting—but not surprising.”

“You’re not shocked I’m with a guy?”

“Nope. I don’t know a ton about being demi or what the nuances of it are, but I do know it’s not uncommon for people who are demi to also be bi or pan.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” I chewed on the corner of my lip. “I don’t know how to be in a relationship. I’ve never been in what people would consider a traditional one. I mean, my first girlfriend and I were long-distance and only saw each other four times in the two years we were together, and most of that was at the camp we worked at over the summers. My next attempt at dating lasted all of three months before she cheated on me because I wanted to take things slow. Sabrina and I were together for over a year, but we barely saw each other because we were both so focused on work, and we eventually drifted apart.

“Tris is my neighbor, and he’s my best friend. What if I fuck things up, and we end up being strangers who share a property line? And he has a kid. I don’t want to be the guy who waltzes into his life and bonds with him, then bails and leaves him high and dry because his dad and I aren’t bumping uglies anymore.”

“Quinn,” Jesse said, his voice gentle. “Your fears are valid, but there’s nothing you can do to change or even predict the future. And I think the fact that you’re so worried about messing up your friendship and hurting his kid shows you won’t be that guy. You’re overthinking things.”

“That’s kinda what I do,” I snort-laughed and rolled my still-full beer bottle in my hands.

“You really like him.” Jesse’s tone was soft, but his look was scrutinizing.

“Yeah.” I leaned back in my chair. Freaking out about my new career and a new relationship at the same time was using up almost all my mental and emotional bandwidth. It made my head a very loud and chaotic place. “I didn’t even realize it until a few nights ago.”

“I say this with all the brotherly love in the world, but you’re going to sabotage things before they even start if you let your ADHD brain take over.”

I toasted him with my bottle. “Say less, bro.”

“So tell your brain to shut the fuck up and let you enjoy your life.” He chuckled. “Glare at me all you want, but you know I’m right. I’m not saying you can shut down your anxiety or control how your ADHD processes things, but you have experience starting a business. And you have a solid friendship with your new beau to fall back on. You can always talk to him when things get loud or you need reassurances.”

“Yeah,” I grumbled. “I just hate how I have to do this shit because my brain never stops spinning, and it makes me overthink and obsess about everything. I hate that I have to struggle so damn much just to be at everyone else’s baseline of getting from point A to B without a million mental side quests and having to wade through layers of negative self-talk. And having an actual voice in my head that’s always telling me I’m stupid and worthless and everything I do is a disaster in the making. It’s exhausting, and it never fucking stops.”

“It sucks,” he agreed. “But you’ve got people to lean on. You’ve got your family, your friends. Your new guy. You don’t have to be the strong one all the time. You don’t always have to be the one who’s there for everyone else but who never lets anyone else be there for him.”

“Are you getting hungry? It takes forever to get delivery here.” I pulled out my phone and unlocked it.

“Yeah.”

He knew that was my way of saying the conversation was over. Not because I didn’t want to talk to him about it anymore, but because I couldn’t.

My toxic trait was that I needed to be needed. Maybe it was a holdover from being constantly rejected by everyone except my family in childhood, or maybe it was from never feeling like I belonged anywhere because I didn’t want the same things as everyone else, but I truly felt like my worth was in what I could do for others.

Like I had to be useful to keep my place in their lives or earn their friendship and love.

“So, what are you in the mood for?” I asked. Right now I needed to think about food. I could go back to the self-flagellation later.