Chapter Eighteen
“GOOD MORNING, this message is for a Mr. Daniel Greene. Hi, my name is Bill Oren with Missouri Loan Express. I’m sorry to inform you we were unable to approve your small business loan application. Give me a call back with any questions.”
Daniel quickly stuffed his phone into his pocket and plastered on a smile so Aaron wouldn’t wonder why he was frowning and threaten to drown him in a pile of cash. Two weeks had passed since he’d moved into Aaron’s apartment. Aside from all the constant questions about his loan situation and the refusal to accept any form of payment toward anything ever, living with him had been phenomenal.
Aaron pointed to an avocado. “That one.”
Daniel plucked an avocado from the heap. Even a run-of-the-mill grocery store trip was oddly lovely, regardless of Aaron transforming into the produce military.
“No, not that one,” Aaron said, then mumbled under his breath, “Obviously.”
Daniel chose another.
“Well, not that one either—”
“Aaron.” They’d been at this for five minutes. He might just squeeze one until it guacamole’d everywhere. “They all look the fucking same.”
“Well, they’re not the faaacking same-uh ,” Aaron mocked in a Southern California accent—which was a stretch; his vocal fry wasn’t that extreme—and nudged him out of the way. “And you have to pick them right, by color and squish. You maybe want a 15 percent squishiness. See? Feel this. You feel the squishy? That’s a good squishy.”
He yanked Aaron into a hug, because what choice did he have? It wasn’t like there was any explaining how nerdy that sounded.
Aaron glanced around, squeezed his ass, then whispered in his ear, “Do we need lube while we’re here?”
“What? They sell that here ?” Daniel gasped as he spun in a circle. “Where? ”
“Over there next to the cucumbers.”
Daniel’s entire body lit up. “Shut all the way up! Really?”
“No.”
They moseyed through the store, ate half a bag of chips, made out in the aisle that had the lube because lube was hot to think about, then gawked at the lobsters in a tank. Well, Daniel gawked. Aaron seemed unfazed that there were literal lobsters. In a tank.
“Hi, buddy,” Daniel whispered, bending down to make eye contact with one of them. “Oh, I feel bad. He has no idea what’s coming.”
“Have you heard back from that last loan officer?” Aaron asked, handing him a bag of peeled shrimp.
“Aaron.” He widened his eyes, whipping the shrimp behind his back. “In front of him ? They’re, like, cousins.”
Aaron chuckled as he followed him down an aisle with sauces. “Have you heard back or no?”
Daniel glanced over his shoulder to make sure the lobster didn’t see, then tossed the shrimp into the cart. “There are two I haven’t heard from, but it doesn’t mean—”
“Two?” Aaron blinked up from where he’d been reading a cocktail sauce label. “I thought there were three.”
“There were three. Now there are two.”
“Daniel,” Aaron groaned.
“What? It doesn’t mean I’m getting denied.”
“Yes, it does. Look at me. Look at me.” Aaron grabbed his hands and forced his eye contact. “This has gotten ridiculous. You need money. I have money. You’re letting your pride get in the way of your dreams. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t already own that studio. Come on. Let me help you.”
The temptation tugged at the seams of his resolve. But even if he was running out of time, hope, and options, he couldn’t accept Aaron’s money. He couldn’t . “I’ll figure it out.”
“Madeline is leaving soon. Meaning she’s going to have to take the original offer. You realize that, right? Have you thought about what happens if you don’t get it by then?”
“Thank you for your concern—”
“Then you’ll have missed out on this thing you’ve always wanted, and you might even be out of a job. ”
“So generous.” He kissed the tip of Aaron’s nose, ignoring the huffy eyebrow lift. “But I’ll figure it out. Now, if you’ll excuse me? I need to find out what a caper is once and for all.”
“A caper is a—”
“I know you are not about to spoil the surprise.”
“Fine. Meet me by the cheeses when you’re done. Call me if you need me.”
“Wait.” Daniel spun around. “Did you just say to call you if I need you?”
Aaron cut his eyes to the side, which meant he probably hadn’t even realized it. For being so young, he had a full-blown coddling mother hen of a personality. It was adorable, and Daniel couldn’t help but make so much fun of him for it.
“Do tell, Aaron. What would warrant my needing you in a grocery store?”
Aaron scrunched his nose, his shoulders bunching. “I don’t know. Never mind. Let’s not make a whole thing about it.”
“Aw. You afraid I’ll get lost, mister? Kidnapped?” Daniel tried not to sound so curvy-blond-on-a-subway-grate, but he couldn’t help himself. “I’ll be super careful in the big bad grocery store. I’ll be back before the streetlights come on.” And extra breathy as he said, “Daddy.”
Aaron’s mouth twitched as he glanced around and whispered, “Stop it.”
“Did you say the cheeses?” Daniel moaned through his teeth as he slid a finger down his neck. “That’s so far. I’ll miss you, Daddy.”
Aaron spun the cart around. “Okay, I’m walking away.”
“I’ll miss you so hard.” He blew a puffy-lipped kiss.
“Bye, Daniel.”
“So, so hard.”
Before Aaron turned the corner, he whispered back, “Save it for later.”
Daniel couldn’t find the capers, so they probably didn’t exist, and it was a worldwide ruse to make him feel foolish. When he meandered to the cheeses, there stood Aaron being drooled over by a girl who twirled her ponytail around her fingers and giggled too loudly at whatever mediocre dairy joke he likely made ( Have you tried that one? It’s really Gouda ) . The unfortunate result when hot people made jokes? Hot people growing up thinking they’re also funny.
When Aaron saw him, he cinched him by the waist and kissed his cheek .
“Oh.” The girl’s eyes darted between the two of them, her cheeks flushing the same rosy pink of her blouse. “Thank you for the advice. I’m going to go with the Drunken Goat.”
“Good choice,” Aaron said as she scurried away, shifting his attention to a wedge of cheese.
“She was cute.” Daniel rested his chin on the back of Aaron’s shoulder. “Have you ever been with a girl?”
“Yes.”
He whipped Aaron around by his shoulders. “You have?”
“Well, yeah. Not a lot.”
“What’s not a lot? Like, one?”
“Probably more like four. Maybe five.”
“Holy shit.”
“Shh.” Aaron glanced around the store. “I don’t know. It was high school.”
“You nailed five high school girls!”
“Daniel, shh!” Aaron waved at a glaring old woman.
“Well, how was it? What do you say to a girl in bed? ‘Hey, cool boobs’ or something?”
“I can’t think of a worse thing to say to a girl in bed, and it was fine. Fun, I guess. They’re just soft, is all.” Aaron’s eyes dripped the length of Daniel’s body and settled on his lips. “I prefer hard if that makes sense.”
“No, that makes no sense.” He leaned over the cart and giggled like the Drunken Goat girl. “Please, mister, do break it down for me.”
The mister, suddenly distracted by his phone, did not break it down for him but responded to a text instead.
Daniel flopped his body over the handle of the shopping cart and sighed with his total lung capacity. When Aaron didn’t acknowledge him, he moaned. Then again. “I love having meaningful conversations with my boyfriend.”
Aaron tapped away on his phone. “‘Hey, cool boobs’ is not a meaningful conversation.”
“Okay, then what about this—how’d you get into escorting?”
Aaron’s eyes zoomed up.
“When did you start doing it? ”
“You want to talk about it?” Aaron asked, his attention hooked as he worked his phone into his pocket. “Here? In a grocery store.”
Daniel bit the inside of his cheek and shrugged. He was maybe already regretting it, but he’d started something.
“What is happening? Is this a good sign?” Aaron’s smile was cautious, but his tone had strayed halfway to excitement. “Are you maybe getting more approving of it?”
“You can settle all the way down, sir.”
“Sorry.” Aaron held up his palms, but the smile was growing. “I’m just proud of you. Can I not be a smidgen proud?”
Daniel sighed, tapping his foot as loud as he could.
“Okay, so how’d I get started? When I was nineteen, in college, I met this boy out one night.”
“Name?”
“Chase Garland. A little older than me. Exciting, super charming, wild as hell . And he lived this lifestyle that no one could figure out how. Like, he’d buy everyone dinner, he spent really big, especially on shoes and suits. And every time I tried to ask what he did for a living, he’d say something like ‘Nosey isn’t cute on you,’ then buy me a shot.” Aaron bounced on his heels, lost in a reminiscent chuckle. “We hit it off. He liked me.”
“Okay, so boy meets boy. What’d he look like?”
“What’d he look like? Sexy.” Aaron gazed off into the distance at a colorful bell pepper display, which couldn’t help but mimic a romantic sunset with the orange, yellow, and red. Not cool. “Way sexy. Hair color about like yours, eye color about the same too. About your height. Only he had some, you know, pigment to his skin. Not as ivory.”
Oh, good for him! Daniel fought the urge to chuck a grape at Aaron’s face. It wasn’t that he was jealous of Tan Chase. He just wished he didn’t exist at all. There was a difference. “So, you guys were a thing?”
“We weren’t not a thing, I guess.” Aaron waved the thought away. “But nothing serious. So, one day, we’re hanging out, doing something stupid. Oh! We’d made a fort in his living room and were goofing off in it—think we were kinda stoned—when he gets a text. He looks over at me with a smile and says, ‘Hey, Silva, wanna make a quick couple hundred bucks?’ ”
Daniel pictured Chase, the nonpasty version of himself, as twiddling his paper-thin mustache with lots of maniacal cackling as he asked that question.
“And all I had to do for a couple hundred dollars was—”
“Nope.” Daniel spun on his heels and darted toward the exit. “If you need me, I’ll be in the car.” He balked, goose bumps covering his arms. “Don’t say I didn’t try.”
LATER THAT evening, Aaron was mother-henning around as Daniel sat curled in an armchair, holding his hands over his eyes. “What are you doing back there?”
“Stop asking questions,” Aaron called out from somewhere behind him, clanking around. “Meddlesome. Meddlesome is what you are.”
Daniel huffed and kicked his legs over the arm of the chair, sinking farther.
“Okay, it’s ready.”
“It is?” he asked, twisting around to see. “Can I look—?” He grunted when Aaron scooped him out of the chair and tossed him over his shoulder. His arms dangled limply toward the floor as Aaron hauled him down the hallway. He sighed, “I don’t know why you do this.”
“This? Because I like how burly it makes me feel.” Aaron smacked his ass and said with bravado as he thrust an arm toward the sky, “I am big strong man with tiny chosen mate.”
He snorted. “But tiny chosen mate can walk.”
“Shh, tiny mate. Look what I’ve done for you.” Aaron pushed open the bathroom door and gently lowered him to his feet. “Big strong man has made you fire.”
Daniel gasped, his hands snapping to cover his mouth. The bathroom had been transformed into an unbelievably spectacular venue for romance with a bathtub filled to the brim with iridescent bubbles, bath bombs that fizzed like geysers, and glittering candles balanced on about every flat surface.
“When did you?” He could hardly speak, lifting his arms so Aaron could tug his shirt overhead. “Why did you?”
“Because I wanted to.” Aaron kissed his cheek. “Because I like to make you smile, tiny mate. Get in. ”
This man. He shook his head in disbelief as he stepped into the bubbles and settled in. This man was dreamy. So damn dreamy that he even knelt beside the tub and lathered a loofah in the most balanced air of humble and dignified to ever exist. He frothed Daniel’s arms and back while they held each other’s gaze. While the silence broadened. While Daniel searched his mind, struggling to identify ways in which he might ever compare to how dreamy this man was.
“What are you thinking?” Aaron asked after a moment, rinsing his back with scoopfuls of water. “You seem deep in thought.”
Daniel fortified himself with a breath. “You should tell me the story from earlier.”
Aaron’s surprised gaze flashed to his. “From earlier at the grocery store?”
“Yes. Tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s something I don’t know yet.” He folded his hands over the side of the tub and rested his cheek. “I want to know what makes you you . I want to know everything there is to know about you.”
“Yeah?” Aaron grinned a little as he readjusted in his seat. “Okay, so I was in college.”
“For what? For interior design?”
“Yeah.” Aaron rubbed his eye. “And I met Chase.”
It was quite the task, but Daniel kept his nose wrinkle shockingly brief. “Do we still talk to Wild Chase?”
“No. No, he moved, and we lost touch. Anyway, we’re in the fort, and he asks if I want to make a quick couple of hundred bucks. I’m not sure what to think when he follows up with, ‘I kid you not, Silva, all you have to do is let this guy kiss you.’”
Daniel squinted, pulling his knees to his chest. “Kiss you?”
“Uh-huh. Kiss me.” Aaron smirked. “Kiss me while he did his thing .”
“His thing?”
“His thing.”
Daniel bit his lower lip. “People pay money for that?”
“You’d be shocked. So anyway, I said yes because that’s a lot of money when you’re nineteen, and kissing isn’t that big of a deal, right?”
“Kissing is no deal at all. If it were, I’d be screwed. ”
“Right. So that experience, which was my first, was eye-opening. Because there I was in this nice hotel room with this nice guy who was trying to hand me money for having kissed me, and I can’t take it. I can’t take his money.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I felt guilty. I felt crazy guilty for some reason. So we talked for a long time. He was a good guy. I’ll never forget what he said. He shoved the cash plus a fifty-dollar tip in my pocket and said, ‘I know you don’t believe it, but trust me. You’re worth it.’”
Hmph . Daniel grazed his fingertips down Aaron’s arm. “Well of course you are. You didn’t believe you were worth it?”
“See, that’s the thing.” Aaron’s gaze wandered around the bathroom. “No. Er, well, not to start. It took me a long time to wrap my head around it. Firstly, to wrap my head around that kind of wealth. Money was always a fight in my house, and there was never enough. And secondly, to wrap my head around the fact that someone would give it to me so freely. For doing what? For showing up?”
“Do you not know what you look like, sweetie?”
“Well, so I learned pretty quickly that I had… we’ll call it a talent for it. That guy referred me to another guy, who referred me to another guy, then another, and so on. I started getting popular. Really popular. Here I was, a nineteen-year-old kid who came from absolute squalor with suddenly so much cash I didn’t even know what to do with it all. For the first time in my life, I felt powerful. I felt unstoppable.”
“So what happened? You dropped out of school to pursue it?”
“Hell no. Don’t get me wrong. It was a rush, but it wasn’t like I ever saw myself doing it seriously. Certainly not for any real amount of time. I knew what I wanted to do. I had a plan.” Aaron’s long eyelashes flicked downward. “But then my mom got sick. She’d been in remission, and it came back with a vengeance.”
Daniel interlaced their fingers, his heart squeezing at the shift in Aaron’s tone.
“My dad had already split. She was barely making ends meet without him. She didn’t have money for the medication or for one of those scarves for when she lost her hair. She didn’t have money to support Andrew; he was still in high school at the time. She didn’t have money for anything that would’ve just made her life that much more comfortable, and there I was.” Aaron’s voice had gotten shaky. “Fucking drowning in cash. ”
Daniel gripped his chest.
“Escorting was suddenly a no-brainer. If I dropped out of school, it meant I could take care of her during the day because I was working mostly nights. It meant I could take care of Andrew—drop him off at school, make sure he was fed—so she didn’t have to worry about him either. I could make sure she wasn’t alone, because above all, she didn’t deserve to have to do it alone.”
Daniel wiped at his tears.
“I got smarter too. Clever, more tactful. I told myself the rate is the rate . I told my clients the rate is the rate , then I charged what I fucking wanted to charge, and it wasn’t a couple hundred dollars either. By the time she passed, we had the best care for her, everything she needed to make it as comfortable as possible. I just… I never really looked back after that.”
“Oh my God. That’s. That’s so.” Daniel sniffled and smeared his hands over his face. “I had no idea. That’s noble . It’s noble, Aaron.”
“No-ble.” Aaron seemed to dissect the word. He shook his head. “No, not really, but that’s a nice thing to say—”
Daniel tugged Aaron into a hug, drenching his shirt in bathwater as Aaron whimpered from how firmly he gripped. “I’m so sorry I didn’t ask sooner. I should’ve asked sooner.”
“No.” Aaron exhaled, his arms slowly wrapping around him. “No, you shouldn’t have. S’okay.”
“You’re the salt of the earth, you know that?” He released him to run his hands through his hair over and over, kissing him sweetly. “You’re everything to me.”
It was all so clear. Crystal clear just how everything he was. The dreamiest, everything of a person. His big strong man. His mister. He deserved so much more than Escorting was suddenly a no-brainer . He deserved a reset button on his life and one that would erase his pain and reorient his future. He deserved to do something he loved.
If interior design was what he wanted, then interior design was what he would get.
“The salt of the earth,” Daniel whispered. “I’m going to make sure you realize your worth.”