Chapter 4
Four
Asher
“He’s definitely married,” Theo says before taking a large gulp of beer.
“No, he’s widowed, I told you: wife is dead. Do you ever listen?”
“I listen.” He can’t decide whether to be hurt or insulted. “You talk a lot, it’s hard to keep up.”
“I talk a normal amount, and rarely about men, so this should have been easy to keep up with.”
“That’s true,” says Amata. She is listening, too well. It’s giving CIA. “You never talk about men. I mean, except for the ones you sleep with for work and the nutcase who kept you in a fucking cage.”
I roll my eyes at her dramatics. “It was a lodging house for wayward boys.”
“With bars on the fucking window,” she points out.
“I think the walls would have to have bars too, for it to be considered a cage,” adds Theo unhelpfully.
“He locked them in at night, Theodore.” Amata glares terrifyingly.
“Can we leave my childhood trauma alone for tonight, please,” I sigh, signalling the waiter for another round of vodka bombs.
He’s cute, and I’m sure he’s been giving me the eye since I came in.
I’m sort of tempted, but I’ve a shoot tomorrow and I should save my sexual energy for that.
I really shouldn’t be drinking either, but I decided about an hour ago that that was tomorrow Asher’s problem.
“So will you call him?” Amata asks, leaning in to suck her Sex on the Beach through the smallest straw known to mankind. “Tell him you finished it?”
I shrug. I want to call him. I’ve been staring at his number on my corkboard since I finished the painting.
I’m not saying I finished it quicker than I needed to in order to have a reason to call him, but I’m also not not saying that.
It’s been a month since he came back to my apartment and kissed me stupid in my kitchen.
And I am fucking stupid. Because there’d been absolutely nothing to suggest he was waiting for me to call, or that he even wanted to see me again, except for the fact that he gave me his number.
Which, for all I know, is just about the painting.
Because every time I let myself think it could be about me, I remember that I’d offered myself to him on a silver platter last time and he’d basically turned me down flat.
I’m not that emotionally immature that I didn’t pick up on the fact that he’s clearly working through some stuff.
But aren’t we all? I wasn’t asking him to get down on one knee and propose.
It was a ‘no strings attached’ blow job from a hot younger guy on a Sunday afternoon he’d turned down, which suggests that maybe this whole thing is a lost cause.
I don’t know anyone who’d have turned that down.
I down the pink and orange vodka bomb the waiter puts in front of me with a slow, meaningful smile.
He certainly wouldn’t have turned it down.
“I think you should call him,” declares Theo. “Because you’ll always just be wondering if you don’t, and like, who needs that shit, right? You’re Asher Foxxx, you’re the guy every guy wants to fuck right now, and if he doesn’t, then fuck him!”
“He already made it pretty clear he doesn’t want me to fuck him.” I will not address the other part of that ridiculous statement. Dazed magazine might have suggested such a thing in their article, but it’s not a truth I’m ever gonna accept in my own head.
“Well, no, that’s not true, Ellen,” Amata interjects.
“He simply did not want you to suck him off as payment for helping you out. Which could be interpreted by some”—she points at herself—“as him being a gentleman. Something you’re not too familiar with, so I don’t blame you for not recognising it.
And he left you his number. So that, in my view, is a pretty solid invitation. He wants to see you again.”
“The girl has a point.” Theo knocks his beer against Amata’s glass.
“Who you calling girl, girl?”
“But he probably isn’t down to fuck, right? I mean, that much was clear when he said thanks but no thanks to the blow job? He’s probably just curious about the painting.”
“Mmm, no, I don’t think it does,” she says. “I think it just means he didn’t want a blow job.”
“Who doesn’t want a blow job, though?” asks Theo with a frown.
“Exactly my point!” I hit my glass off his.
Amata rolls her eyes. “Men. Well, and this might be a little out there, why not call him and find out? Tell him you’re done with the painting and you’re interested in selling it. At the very least, you make some money from a hot, rich British guy—and not in the way you usually do.”
“I actually don’t know if he’s rich,” I muse.
“Well here’s your chance to find out.”
“I don’t care. I’m not looking for a fucking sugar daddy, Am.”
“Yeah, okay, working girl.” She scowls. “Might be nice not having to worry about rent, that’s all.
So, what are you looking for from James Bond then?
A quick fuck? Because that’s literally your job, which means you’re looking for something else, something more, something like a relationship.
And before you get into one of those, you best check he can pay his own way because I will not let you date some useless fuckboy. ”
I laugh at this. “He is the least fuckboy guy I’ve ever met. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“Okay, well, good. So,” she says, “is it a relationship? Is that what you’re looking for from him?”
Is it? I don’t know. He intrigues me. More than most guys do.
I’m attracted to men, obviously. I like fucking them, sexting them, and looking at them.
But my experience dating them has been..
. well... sort of painful. Christian is hot, sure.
Older, like I prefer. So that comes, on the whole, with a guarantee of maturity—definitely what I prefer.
But it’s more than both of those things.
There’s something about his way of existing that I like; something gentle and calm.
A quiet steadiness that makes me wanna curl up in his arms and take a nap.
After fucking him, obviously. There’s something in his eyes, too, something sad, I guess—his dead wife, yeah, I know—which makes me want to find a way in. A way to make him look less… sad.
I shrug again. “Maybe I just want to sell him my painting.”
When I get home a couple hours later, tipsy and horny, I make myself shower off the bar and change into clean shorts and a T-shirt before I send the text I’ve been thinking about all week.
All month, if we’re being real. I stare at the painting across the room, sat up like a sentinel outside my bedroom door.
There’s a chance he’ll hate it. My art isn’t to everyone’s taste; sometimes it’s not to mine, but this will be the first time I’ve essentially done a portrait and had that person see the end result.
Except for Jeremiah. But I don’t include him, ever.
I try not to think about him, generally.
I hadn’t saved his number in my phone, because I didn’t trust myself not to send him a dick pic or something when I was out and/or horny.
So after I’ve snapped a few pictures of the painting, I take the pin out of his number and carry it with me back over to the sofa.
I’m not sure whether to be cute or businesslike, and what’s more likely to get a response, then I decide I’m being pathetic overthinking it this much.
Me:
Hey, it’s Asher. finished the painting. let me know if ur interested
I attach a couple of the photos and hit send.
When I wake up the next morning, he hasn’t replied, and for about ten minutes, I feel the embarrassment like a sunburn all over my body.
But I have work to do today and shit to get ready, so I don’t have time to feel any kind of way about it.
So he’s not interested. So he was just being polite about wanting to buy the painting.
It’s not the end of the fucking world. Plenty of older, hot, sad British guys in the sea.
I shower and prep thoroughly, eat a very small breakfast of fruit and a granola bar, and set up the cameras in the living room—one by the balcony and another over by the kitchen. I move Christian’s painting into the bedroom because I’m not about to get fucked ten ways from Sunday in front of it.
Carter’s Australian but moved to the States for a guy, another creator whom I’ve also worked with, but they broke up about a month ago.
By the looks of it, Carter is trying to fuck his way through every creator in North America in an attempt to prove something to his ex.
Or to himself. I’m unsure. We met at a group scene I did for SCX a month or so ago, and we hit it off.
Not in a romantic sense—these things are rarely (if ever) romantic—but I liked his energy, and we’d looked really good on camera together, and he was down for shooting some content independent of the studio.
“Man, I really like your place,” he says as he follows me into the living room. “You live here by yourself?”
“Yeah, just me.”
“Damn, boy, you must be making bank.”
I shrug. “I do okay. But rent here is a lot less than NYC, so I’m actually able to save a little, too.”
“Yeah, okay, no need to brag.”
I laugh. “You’re staying with Jayden, right?”
He nods, face going a little closed off. A sign of a story if I ever saw one, one I’m not particularly interested in, honestly.
“When’s your visa up?”
“Next month,” he says. “So I’m trying to get as much done as I can before then.”
“Well, you can do me…” I say with a small smile. I’m ready to get this show on the road. He grins, but then his face melts into something more suggestive. “Yeah, baby?” He knows the cameras are running, and he turns it on like a pro. “I’ve been thinking about fucking you since I first saw you.”
When I reach him, he skims a hand over my ass and pats it through my jeans, which are loose and hanging off my frame. “I’m all yours.”
He nuzzles his face against my neck, and I all but melt, eyes closing in bliss. As far as jobs go, this isn’t the worst.
??
After, Carter’s cum soaking my face and my own plastered over my abs, I stand to switch off the cameras.
“You’re incredible,” Carter sighs, still breathing hard from where he is in the centre of the bed. “That is one tasty little bussy.”
I laugh. “Cameras are officially off, you don’t have to say that now.”
“Hey, I meant it.” He’s standing now, stretching out his tall, lean limbs. He’s kinda jock-ish, big, blonde, and blue-eyed. Pretty much a carbon copy of every guy I had a crush on at His Humble Messengers. Now, my tastes run in a slightly different direction.
In Christian’s voice, I hear: Older, British, and grieving a dead wife?
“Mind if I use your shower?” asks Carter.
“Go for it, it’s through there.” I point at the door off the hallway. “There should be clean towels in there.”
“Thanks, bro.”
I smile because it’s a far cry from what he’d been calling me for the last hour: baby, good boy, pretty little fucktoy.
I’m focussed on looking through some of the footage when the doorbell sounds.
I’m expecting some art supply deliveries today, and I assume that’s what it is as I go towards it.
I’m still half-scrolling through the camera when I pull it open to find Christian standing there.
He’s the last face I’d expect to see here, least of all today.
I almost drop the camera. He’s wearing sunglasses; expensive-looking ones with mirrored lenses, and I catch sight of myself in them, covered in cum and looking like I just got thoroughly and completely fucked. Which I did.
Christian slides off his sunglasses and slowly takes me in. I’d pulled on a pair of shorts right after, but I might as well be butt naked by the way he’s looking at me. The shy smile he’d been giving me slips off his face.
“Ah, I… um… should have called first,” he says in a weirdly formal tone. “You’re busy, I can see.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I mean yeah, I was, but it’s fine, you, um…
do you wanna…” What the fuck am I supposed to say?
Come in? Meet Carter? He just fucked me on camera until I came, shouting his name.
I’m debating this when the bathroom door opens and steam billows out, followed by a naked Carter Forrest, drying himself off.
“Shit, oh, hey man,” he says when he spots us. He makes some attempt at covering his dick with the towel he’s using on his hair, but none of it matters. “Great shower, thanks,” he says breezily before wandering off down the hall, humming to himself.
I look at Christian, who’s watching Carter retreat with a complicated look on his face.
“Look, this isn’t… he isn’t… we’re not…” I attempt to explain, but like, what the fuck do I say?
“It’s quite alright,” he says, cutting me off. Blinking, he gives me an apologetic smile. “This was a terrible idea anyway… all of it. I’ll have my secretary call you about the painting.” He’s moving away from my door.
“No, wait,” I say as he turns. “Can you just wait a minute?” I start after him, then stop.
Am I seriously about to go after him covered in another guy’s cum?
To explain how this isn’t what he thinks when it’s potentially even worse.
I wasn’t planning on hiding the fact that I do porn, but I had planned to ease him into the idea slowly.
This definitely isn’t how I imagined it going down.
It’s better that he thinks Carter is a quick fuck.
At least for right now. Which means there’s nothing I can say here. Still, I try.
“Christian,” I say.
“Asher,” he says in an almost sad tone. I fucking hate what it does to my chest. “I told you, it’s quite alright. I... goodbye.”
His strides are quick and purposeful as he walks away, clearly keen to put some distance between us as rapidly as possible.
“Fuck,” I mutter as I watch him go.