Chapter 12
TWELVE
PERRY
The honor of choosing our third date went to me.
The only problem with that was that the only proper dates I’d been on had been with Rex, so the experiences I had to draw from were limited.
Which explained why I’d shown up at Lukas’s house on a day when I wasn’t working, but I knew Blue would be there.
Blue and his boyfriends, Asher and Jax, filmed a lot of content together. It wasn’t how they met, but it was kind of how they got together. It was romantic in a porny kind of way.
I sat on the floor of the green room in Lukas’s basement, my legs splayed out in front of me and a very content dog nestled in the space between them. With her head on my thigh and her tail intermittently thumping as it wagged, it was clear that I wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
Blue walked in, finally, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw me from the corner of his eye.
“Shit! Perry, what are you doing here? Besides fucking lurking in corners, scaring the shit out of people.”
“I need help with Rex.”
Blue whirled around. “What kind of help? Did he do something? Boss or no, I’ll murder him if he hurts you.”
“Holy shit, Blue. Down, boy. Nothing like that.”
Blue visibly relaxed and dropped down onto the couch. He sat close enough to reach down and pet Lara, who loved the attention.
“It’s my turn to pick our date, but I don’t know what to do. Where do I take him? What do we do? He’s put so much thought into our dates that it seems lame to just be like hey, I’m taking you for dinner. I want to do something Rex will like.”
“And what does your gut tell you?” Blue asked, reaching over to scritch Lara between the ears.
“My gut tells me that if there’s any kind of animal involved, Rex will be happy. But that also feels like too work-adjacent, doesn’t it? Like hey, you deal with animals all day, let’s go see some animals.”
Blue was quiet and thoughtful for a minute as he tried to figure out how much he could divulge about his boss and get away with it.
“The thing about Rex is that he's dated before, right. Like, obviously he has. But he seems to end up with these twats who don’t like that sometimes their weekend gets disrupted because someone’s cat got sick.
Or someone’s dog got hit by a car, and he has to humanely euthanize them sometimes.
And, yeah, you’d be so horny coming home after dealing with a dead pet and a grieving family. Seriously, the bar is on the floor.”
“So, basically, I’m good so long as I don’t morph into a huge douche overnight.”
“Who’s a douche?” Asher asked, walking in and taking a seat on the couch next to Blue. His hair was damp like he was fresh from the shower, but that didn’t stop him from curling into Blue’s side.
“Rex’s exes,” Blue said, wrapping an arm around Asher. “I’ll catch you up on the lore later, but right now, Perry needs our help deciding where to take Rex on a date.”
“He took me to the art show at the community center for our first date, and to a drive-in movie for our second date. He set the bar kind of high.”
“Well, if he likes art, you could do one of those paint and sip things where you drink wine and learn how to paint a sunset or a winter scene or a mountain or whatever.” Asher shifted around on the couch until his head was in Blue’s lap.
It was nice to see Blue so happy. He’d spent a lot of time not allowing anyone to get close to him, not in any meaningful way. But then Jax and Asher came around and had blown through his defenses. His walls had tumbled down, and he was now the happiest I’d ever seen him.
I was kind of envious of him and the relationship he had with Asher and Jax. Not that I wanted two boyfriends, but someday I hoped to have a real one. Not a pretend one I wanted to kiss, and not just as practice for his brother’s wedding. A real one to go on real dates with and kiss after.
It felt like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Because if I planned a date, I didn’t want it to be too special, not like a dream date or anything, because Rex wasn’t really my boyfriend.
If I made the date too special, I worried that no one would ever measure up to my fake boyfriend.
But Rex had clearly put effort into planning when it was his turn, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was not putting any effort in at all.
I let out a sigh and thumped my head against the wall, prompting Lara to raise her head and give a gentle woof, like she was maybe sort of thinking of being a guard dog, but she quickly put her head down and went back to sleep instead.
Lukas popped his head into the room and shot me a quick smile before turning his attention to Asher. Asher was new to the filming side of the business but had been around for a couple of years working as Lukas’s personal assistant.
“Can I steal you for a few minutes, Ash?”
“Sure thing, boss.” Asher sat up, stole a kiss from Blue, and slipped out of the room. Blue turned to me, a hint of something close to triumph glimmering in his eyes.
“You like him.”
“Ash?”
Blue groaned. “You’re so dense. No, not Ash. Rex.”
The expression on Blue’s face challenged me to argue with him. So I did.
“Of course I do. He’s a nice guy. We’re probably going to be really good friends after the wedding.”
Blue narrowed his gaze. “Don’t make me kick you.”
“Lara will protect me.” I buried my fingers in her fur, and she made no move whatsoever to rise to my defense.
“Lara and what army? We all know the most violent thing about her is her lethal dog farts.”
“Blue… I… Yes, okay. I like him. But I don’t know what to do with that information. I’m not exactly dateable.”
“The fact that Rex is already dating you proves otherwise.”
“These are just practice dates. So when we go to the wedding we don’t look like two strangers trying not to be awkward together.
They’re like dress rehearsals. He hasn’t even kissed me.
” I tried and failed to not sound like I was pouting about that.
Clearly I was perfectly fuckable to some men and invisible to all the others.
With Rex I was neither of those things apparently.
I could deal with being fuckable. I could deal with being invisible.
But I didn’t know how to be seen by someone who wanted to know my cat’s name and what my favorite movie was but then didn’t want to kiss me.
“I can’t like him.” The words trembled out of me, and I fought the urge to bury my face in Lara’s fur and smother myself to death.
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Plenty of things.”
Rex could reject me. Which would suck. I couldn’t imagine being rejected by my fake boyfriend. That would be worse than being rejected by a real boyfriend because at least he’d have been real to start with.
Or maybe he’d kiss me out of pity. The only thing worse than no kiss at all was a pity kiss that tasted of failure and bone-crushing loneliness.
Or Rex could give me a shot only to decide that he didn’t like my career after all.
Blue exhaled. “You’re the only person I know who makes me feel like I need to bring a brick to a pep talk so I can beat you over the head with it and knock some sense into you.”
“That’s unnecessarily violent of you.”
“Okay, let me ask this. What’s the best thing that could happen?”
Rex could like me back. He could date me for real.
Kiss me because he wanted to. Rex could be true to what he’d said and not care about what I did for a living.
I wouldn’t do porn forever, but I’d never been good at picking a direction in life and so far this was the only thing that had stuck with me.
I’d dropped out of college after a semester because I’d hated every moment of it.
I’d entertained something like hair or nails but had no aptitude for that kind of work.
I’d had my fair share of minimum wage gigs.
Fry cook. Convenience store clerk. Six miserable hours handing out free samples at a grocery store once.
Sometimes I thought that the only thing I was good at was having sex.
And I was fucking great at sex.
But I wanted to be great at other things too. Like being a boyfriend. Or thinking of the perfect date to take someone on. And not just any someone. Rex.
“You can’t say anything to Rex about this,” I told Blue. “Not a word.”
“I know.” Blue looked almost offended. “For the record, I think you should tell him, but I’m not getting in the middle of this.”
“You literally introduced me to him so I could be his fake boyfriend. You’re already in the middle of this.”
“Okay, so I don’t want to be in the middle of the middle.”
“You make zero sense.”
“All the more reason to keep my mouth shut, am I right?” Blue grinned at me, and it was easy to see why all the boys loved him.
He was charming when he wanted to be. But his grin faded into a more serious expression.
“I need you to know that it’s worth it to let the right people in.
Before Jax and Asher, I was pretty closed off.
I had my reasons and I don’t regret protecting myself, but I would have regretted not making space in my life for Jax and Asher.
So before you decide what to say or do, if anything at all, have a good long think about what kind of regret you can live with. ”
“Pretty sure there’s only one kind of regret.”
“Not really. You can regret the things you have done. We all know what that’s like. But there’s also regretting the things you didn’t do, and the pain of not knowing is a special kind of burn.”
I sighed and closed my eyes, letting my head rest against the wall.
After a minute, I finally spoke. “Hey, Blue?”
“Yeah, Perry?”
“Remind me next time to just google shit to do on a date instead of asking you.”
“Happy to be of service.”
I could hear the humor in Blue’s voice, but I couldn’t make myself open my eyes. “You mean happy to be a menace.”
“That too.”
I heard Blue shift around on the couch, and then his feet padded toward the door to leave the room. “I’ll be a menace whenever you need, okay?”
Finally, I cracked an eye open and looked at him standing in the doorway, ready to leave but needing to know if he should or not.
“Okay,” I answered, silently promising him that I was okay now and would be okay later. I’d be even better when I figured out where to take Rex for our next date. With a sigh, I did what I should have done from the beginning and pulled out my phone to scour the internet for ideas.