Chapter 8
EIGHT
PERRY
After our date, in the interest of keeping things transparent, I decided to tell Rex about my scene. I’d mulled it over, trying to decide if a fake boyfriend rated high enough to be privy to my shooting schedule. In the end, it seemed like the right thing to do.
I didn’t want to spring it on him over a text message, though, so I did what any fake boyfriend would do—I surprised him at his job during lunch. Blue was there that day and he greeted me with a bright smile.
“Rex doesn’t usually take a lunch,” Blue explained to me when I told him I was there to surprise him with food. I’d stopped at Bennett’s on the way and grabbed a couple of burgers and fries.
“I should have brought Gumball instead of food then and upped my chances.”
“No, you misunderstand me,” Blue said. “He doesn’t usually take a lunch even though half the time we try to make him. Rex is dedicated to his job, which is admirable, but he could stand to be a little less dedicated sometimes.”
Blue walked around the counter and motioned for me to follow him. He took me to Rex’s office and told me to wait there and he’d send Rex along in a minute.
Rex’s office wasn’t anything special in that it revealed nothing personal about him.
It was a small space with a small desk that had room for a computer and a messy array of paperwork.
It sat in the middle of the room, and the walls were lined with shelves and a filing cabinet.
The shelves had textbooks on them. I rounded the desk for a better look.
“They’re mostly for show, but once in a while they come in handy,” Rex said from the doorway.
“I brought lunch.” I lifted the bag in my hand. “I’m not sure where to put it.”
He swept the paperwork up off his desk, first stacking it into a neat pile before depositing it on top of the filing cabinet. “Here is fine,” Rex said. “I wasn’t expecting company today.”
“It was a last-minute decision. I wanted to run something by you, and it seemed better to have the conversation in person.” Plus, it gave me an excuse to see him.
Rex had been on my mind ever since our date.
I’d put the flowers in a vase at home, and I loved looking at them.
I took so many pictures of them that Gumball got jealous.
I set the food out on the desk and plopped down into the spare chair on the other side of Rex’s desk. He took his own chair and cracked open one of the containers.
“I am all yours for the next thirty minutes,” Rex told me, grabbing a fry and biting it in half. “Blue tried to talk me up to an hour, but we compromised.”
“I’m sorry for interrupting your day—”
Rex put up his hand to stop me. “Don’t apologize. I’m glad you stopped by. Whatever the reason.”
“Right. The reason.” I hadn’t been nervous about a shoot in years, but my jitters about the one I had lined up had nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with Rex.
It had been a long time since I had to care about someone else’s opinion and logically I knew that our date was fake and that Rex was my boyfriend in name only.
But logic was apparently meaningless to my nervous system.
“I have a shoot tomorrow, and I wanted to tell you. I know we’re not actually involved, but I couldn’t go through with it if I felt like I was keeping something from you.”
Rex nodded and bit into his burger. I picked at my fries while I waited for him to chew and swallow.
“Can you tell me about the shoot? I mean, of course I don’t mind. Work is work. I deal with pet snakes and you handle trouser snakes.”
I almost choked on a fry. “Wow, Rex. Really? Trouser snakes?”
He shrugged and kept eating.
I could tell him about the shoot. There was nothing stopping me. And he’d asked, so after eating a few bites of my burger in relative silence, I decided to tell him.
“The scene is with a guy I’ve worked with before. We don’t really have a script most of the time; we just get in there and have fun.”
“Define fun.”
I leaned back in the chair and met Rex’s gaze. Heat crawled up my skin, starting at my core and flowing outward through the rest of my body. “Rex, are you fishing for details?”
“That depends on if you’re going to tell me anything. If you are, then yes, I absolutely am. If no, then I definitely was not asking that.”
“His name is Quinn, and I’ve worked with him a few times, but not recently.” I pulled my phone out and brought up a picture of him, a fully clothed one, and showed Rex.
He whistled. “Damn, my boyfriend gets to have sex with that? Lucky. He’s like a Temu Alexander Skaarsgard, and that’s not even an insult.”
“Oh fuck, I’m so telling him that.” I laughed and tucked my phone away.
“What do the two of you usually get up to? I mean, like…” Rex’s face turned an impressive shade of tomato.
“You mean who does what to who? Is it a two-way street or do things only go one way?”
“Something like that. Sorry if that was inappropriate to ask.”
“Rex, honey, you’re the farthest from inappropriate that you can possibly get. I think it’s normal to be curious about it. Especially when your not-boyfriend is involved.”
Rex nodded, but didn’t say much, just kept eating. I realized that he wasn’t going to ask more questions, but he looked open to hearing more about it.
“I’m vers, so I’ll top or bottom, and Quinn is vers too, but he has preferences. Most of the time he tops, but sometimes he’ll bottom. He also likes a lot of things that have nothing to do with penetration, so working with him is always fun.”
“What do you like? Like, what are your preferences?”
“I like to make people feel good. I mostly go with the flow.”
“Yeah, but what do you like? What does Perry prefer?” Rex shook his head. “That was probably too personal, sorry.”
“No, you’re fine. I—” I shoved a bite of burger in my mouth so I could gain some time to answer the question. There was something about being around Rex that made me want to crack my head open like an egg and show him all the contents inside.
I like making people happy. I like being the reason they feel good, and making them feel good makes me feel good. But what did I like? Specifically?
“I like the attention,” I told Rex without looking away.
“I like how they pretend that I’m the center of their universe.
I like feeling wanted, feeling important.
Sure, I like having my ass eaten, and I love riding someone as much as I love taking them, but it’s not…
like yeah, there’s certain things I enjoy more than others, but I want their attention. ”
“So you’re an attention whore?”
He smirked at me, and I let out a breath, feeling relieved that he kind of understood even if he’d framed it as a joke.
“Basically.”
“Then you’re in a good line of work.”
Coming from someone else, the comment might have been a dig, a barb, a tiny cut designed to hurt me. But coming from Rex, it was authentic. He genuinely meant that I’d found a good place to be, and that my job was suited to me. And he meant it in a positive way.
“When is this shoot again?” he asked, dabbing his face with a napkin.
“Tomorrow. After this I have an appointment to get a manicure. Got to make sure the fingernails are as smooth as possible.” I was also getting my hole waxed afterwards, but that seemed like too much information.
“I think you definitely have the more glamorous job. Tomorrow I have a bunch of spay and neuters scheduled with a local organization that captures feral cats. We sterilize them and some of the friendlier ones sometimes go on to the shelter to find a home, but the truly feral ones get a small notch taken out of an ear and released back where they were caught.”
“You notch the ears? Doesn’t that hurt?”
“No more than getting neutered, I’d expect.”
“Touche.”
“But it’s so they’re not recaptured. This way the organization knows that they’ve already been sterilized. Cat colonies can get out of hand quickly, so we do our best to try and mitigate that by adopting out the adoptable ones and sterilizing them so they can’t make more kittens.”
“Kittens are cute, but I get why you do this. When I was a kid, a friend had a cat who wasn’t fixed and they were always trying to find homes for kittens.
I never understood why they didn’t just get her fixed.
” I remembered the way his mom always seemed stressed about having more kittens, but my friend loved the nearly constant stream of them they had.
“I think half the town ended up with one of her kittens before she was sadly struck by a car. They got a male cat after that so that ended their kitten production.”
Rex glanced at his empty takeout container, then at the clock. I was already standing by the time he started to excuse himself.
“My thirty minutes are up, plus a couple.”
“I’ll let you get back to work, but thanks for making time for me. I didn’t want to have this conversation over the phone.”
“Well, thank you for coming by. My staff is always on me for working too much.”
“Maybe I’ll come by again then.”
The corners of Rex’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. “I’d like that. I can’t promise that I will always be available, because some days are crazier than others, but please feel free to try.”
I liked that he wanted me to come back and that he didn’t seem to count it toward his obligatory dates. We were just two men hanging out. Two new friends having lunch. Nothing more.
Definitely not.