Ten Arya
ten
Arya
When the door to the Philharmonic’s offices closed behind Arya, he finally unclenched his butthole.
What the statistical fuck?
What crimes had he committed in a past life that he’d be here, now, with Ben Liu as his client?
The whole point of hooking up in Napa Valley was that it was no strings attached! He’d never see Ben again!
And it wasn’t just the hookup. He’d told Ben way too much about himself.
About his friends, about his fears. There was a reason Arya kept his personal life to himself and didn’t share it with clients: If they knew what a hot mess you were, they might not trust you to handle their events.
And Arya had always stuck by that philosophy.
It had served him well for nearly twenty years!
Yet now, here he was, and not only had he slept with a client, but he’d also fucking ghosted him and pissed him off.
Arya never slept with clients.
His only saving grace—if you could call it that—was that, technically, Ben hadn’t been his client yet when they slept together.
But fucking fuck!
He should’ve given up after the shitty cheating guy at the pool. Hell, he should’ve invested in a cock cage or something. A chastity belt.
Or just some fucking impulse control.
God, he was supposed to be the one at MME with his shit together. Mitchell was imploding, but Arya was steady. He was in control. He was keeping the lights on.
He didn’t make messes. He fixed them!
“Why do you look like someone took a shit in your coffee?” Carley asked as he stalked over to her car. She’d volunteered to drive them over from the office. Arya shoved himself into the passenger seat.
“I don’t drink coffee.” She knew that, of course. Caffeine made him too jittery. Arya knew some folks with ADHD who swore by it, but he’d never been one of them.
“Okay, well, why do you look like someone took a shit in your herbal tea?” Carley enunciated every word.
“It’s personal. Nothing to do with work. I’m fine.”
“Hm.”
It was clear Carley didn’t believe him, but one of the things he liked about Carley was that she’d let him get away with his bullshit as long as it didn’t affect anyone else.
And it wouldn’t affect anyone else. First of all, he’d never sleep with Ben again, so there’d be no conflict of interest, no further entanglement.
Second, he had apologized, meaningfully and sincerely.
The truth of the matter was, he hadn’t intended to hurt Ben.
He’d halfway assumed Ben already knew the score about hookups.
And in his experience, at least 20 percent of guys—probably more—preferred avoiding awkward morning-after interactions altogether.
He salvaged this. Right? Ben wasn’t going to tank everything, was he?
Arya couldn’t imagine Ben doing so. He didn’t know Ben super well, but he hadn’t come across as vindictive. Just hurt, rightfully. Arya hadn’t communicated well what his understanding of the night had been. He’d corrected that problem.
Everything would be fine.
Carley’s phone rang through her car stereo.
“Shit, that’s Val. Answer it.”
Arya tapped the screen.
“Val, I’m here with Carley,” Arya said. “Any update on the LED wall?”
“I don’t know which eldritch gods you sacrificed to, but that place you found us in Vancouver had what we need. It got cleared through customs a while back. Should be here in a couple hours, max.”
“Good. How’d the rest of the load-in go?”
Arya slipped off his jacket and sighed with relief as he walked into his apartment, letting the door swing shut behind him. Between the truck debacle and this thing with Ben, Arya’s brain was fried. He wanted to relax and have some dinner. And then find some dick.
Some good, old-fashioned, definitely-not-a-client, won’t-be-mad-about-leaving-the-next-morning dick.
His apartment was in Three Light, one of the modern apartment buildings for yuppies that had sprung up around the Power & Light District.
His unit was on the twentieth floor and had a great view of the Western Auto sign lighting up the Crossroads to the south.
It was a great place to live. It was decently close to work, had easy access to many of their most important clients downtown, offered endless food options, and, best of all, was an ideal location for making dick appointments.
Arya heated up some leftover khoresh gheymeh from Shiraz Bistro. One of the nice things about being mostly a top was not having to think too hard about what he ate.
God bless bottoms. He could never live on an ice cube diet. Why was the human body so weird?
When he was done eating, he loaded the dishwasher and flopped onto the couch to check his apps.
“Hello, darkness, my old friend,” he sang to himself as he started swiping on Grindr. His left hand shifted toward his dick, still trapped in his suit pants, soft but sensitive and eager for action.
Arya hadn’t actually gotten any action since Ben, now that he thought about it. He’d been too busy, with work and Nowruz and everything, but he finally had a night off, and he was ready to get his dick wet.
Said dick woke up, tingling as he trailed his fingers along the shaft through the thin wool of his pants and thinner cotton of his underwear, while he assessed his options.
Unfortunately… they weren’t great.
It was Monday, after all, and a good percentage of available men were recovering from the weekend. Or sore from leg day. Or telling themselves that this week, this week, they were going to stop hooking up and start looking for love.
It was all bullshit, of course, but somehow, the bullshit was easier to believe at the start of the week, fresh and sober, than it was on a Friday night.
Still, there were some men online. There were just a few problems.
First of all, the pool was smaller. When Arya was younger—in his blessed twenties, and hell, even into his midthirties—there had been an endless variety of men looking for someone like him.
Fit, attractive (if he said so himself), and, crucially, a top.
Technically he was a vers top—he didn’t mind bottoming every once in a while, as long as he had lots and lots of advanced warning and, to be honest, a notarized request—but he didn’t put that in his bio usually.
Second of all, and more dire, so many guys had their profiles set to cut off matching with guys over thirty-five.
Arya understood—he did the same when he was younger—but damn, now that he was on the other side of it, it really fucking sucked.
Worse, the matches his age all seemed to be closeted finance bros, high-strung doctors who would be total assholes during sex, or couples looking for thirds.
Where were all the sexy men his age? He knew they existed. His friends were sexy. Not that he’d ever thought of them that way, of course. Gross. Ramin and Farzan were like brothers to him.
But they were sexy, empirically, if Arya pretended they were strangers for a second.
And they’d both landed men their age who were also sexy.
Noah had gone to high school with Arya and Farzan and Ramin, for fuck’s sake, and if Arya was being honest, he might’ve had a little crush himself.
Nothing like Ramin’s—and he certainly didn’t want Noah now—but still, it was hard not to wonder What if? sometimes.
Fuck. Even Ben was sexy. Obviously. But he was a hundred percent off-limits. A thousand percent, even.
Arya had spent the meeting with the PhilBall committee half hard, desperately trying to keep his focus on the event, and not on the way Ben’s lips had felt against his.
Arya sighed and switched over to Scruff, swiping a few times before he finally found a prospect.
The guy was fifty. Ten years was pushing the edge of what Arya was comfortable with, age-gap-wise, not because of anything physical but just because his parents had been nine years apart and adding another year to that felt… weird somehow.
But before he could message the guy, his phone rang.
Arya let go of his dick and dropped his phone. It fell under the couch, and he rolled over to pull it out, finding a missing sock in the process.
His mom’s photo flashed on the screen. Arya answered in Farsi.
“Allo? Maman?”
“Allo, Arya-joon, how are you doing?”
“I’m good, how are you?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine. How are Farzan and Ramin?”
Arya chuckled and answered his mom’s usual barrage of questions about Farzan and the restaurant, and Ramin and his boyfriend’s kid, even though she’d just seen them all at Nowruz.
And then she switched to asking about his job, about Carley and her family, about Mitchell and his twink from two twinks ago, and even about Arya himself.
Arya loved his mom to death, but he talked to her several times a week, and there was no way she was really this behind on news.
She was avoiding something. Which was wild, because she could’ve avoided it even better by not calling him in the first place.
He decided to put her out of her misery.
“Maman, is everything okay? Is there something you needed to talk about?”
She went quiet. For a second Arya wondered if she’d dropped the phone into a sink full of soapy water again. He got his clumsiness from her.
(He was pretty sure he got his ADHD from her, too, but she’d adamantly refused to get tested.)
“I talked to your dad the other day,” she said. “He’s planning a visit.”
“Oh.”
Arya and his mom didn’t discuss his dad. Arya always got annoyed, his mom always got a little sad, and it was just better for everyone if they acted like everything was fine rather than dealing with the fact that his parents’ marriage was fucked up in all sorts of ways.
Afshin Nazeri had always traveled a lot for work. He was out of town all the time when Arya was growing up. So now that he lived in Iran, not that many people noticed.
Not even Farzan and Ramin knew. Arya couldn’t bring himself to tell his best friends, and they knew everything about him. Even that time he’d found a lump on his left testicle. (Thankfully it had been a benign cyst. It had scared the shit out of him, though.)
Arya had spent his entire life in the shadow of his parents’ marriage.
It hadn’t been so bad when he was really young, but as he got older—and as his big sister had moved away for college—it had gotten really bad.
The fighting, yes, but worse were the days, weeks, of painful loaded silence.
The murmurings of his dad’s mistresses, of his mom taking a new lover in retaliation, all while they smiled and doted on their baby boy finishing high school and desperately counting down the days until he could go off to college, come out, and fuck his way through every available gay man on both sides of State Line.
All things considered, it was better now that his dad was in Iran. With his live-in mistress. And Arya’s mom here in Kansas City, with Parviz, even though she insisted things were “completely casual.”
That didn’t make it any easier.
Fuck my life.
Arya tried to muster up some sort of emotion other than dread.
“When is he coming?”