Antoine fixed him with a glare framed exquisitely with the darkest eyeliner Kyle had ever seen. “Do I need to explain what was wrong with what you said just now?”
“All right, all right,” he said, raising his hands in surrender. “You don’t like Beyoncé. Noted.”
“I like Beyoncé just fine. Not the point, white boy. It’s called profiling.”
“Okay, okay. I get it. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“So, who do you like better?”
The shoulders of the blazer rose and fell with another shrug. “I like all kinds, on the understanding that Saint Grace reigns above all.”
“Saint Grace?”
“Grace Jones?”
Kyle stared at him blankly.
“Aaaaand we are done.” Antoine picked up his cocktail and started back toward the dance floor.
“Hey, wait a second,” Kyle said, taking gentle hold of the man’s blazer sleeve, releasing it at his stern glare. “Don’t be like that. Who’s Grace Jones?”
“Ask your Momma, Shreveport.”
This time, Kyle felt the anger flicker through his own face.
An apologetic look seeped into Antoine’s expression. “Sore spot, huh? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be a bitch.”
“You weren’t.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“Forgotten?”
“Forgotten.”
The two of them couldn’t help the silly grins that spread over their faces.
“Wait here,” Antoine said, crossing to the DJ booth, pressing a banknote into the DJ’s hand and whispering something in his ear. The man flashed them a smile as Antoine returned to take hold of Kyle’s hand, barely giving him enough time to replace his beer on the bar.
“Hey, what are you—”
“Come on, Shreveport. Class is in session.”
Kyle swallowed as the last howls of some generic, autotuned pop starlet faded from the sound system, replaced by a gently rising flow of sultry synthesizers, bleeding together in a song Kyle was sure he’d heard, but couldn’t quite place. “I…I don’t dance.”
“You don’t have to dance. Just move. I got you.”
Kyle looked around nervously as several of the younger dancers vacated the floor. Most stayed. A few whooped in excitement as the synths rose again, and a forceful, female voice surged to meet them. He slowly began to sway his hips, trying to follow Antoine’s movements, which flowed with an effortless grace Kyle could only envy.
“It’s not about me,” the man whispered in his ear.
After several deep breaths, Kyle felt himself bobbing back and forth, swaying gently in time to the music. Its rhythm picked up some bounce, and his movements quickly followed, feeling more and more natural as the lights flashed around him. He caught a glimpse of Antoine’s broad grin as the man took gentle hold of Kyle’s hand and leaned back.
“Yaaaaaaaassss!” Antoine bellowed, coming back up to full height, his smile brighter than ever. “Ladies and gentlemen, le garçon de Shreveport has arrived!”
“Geeze, will you pipe down?” Kyle muttered.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of having a good time.”
“I’m not! I just… Jesus! Do guys actually say that? All that ’yaaaaaassss’ stuff?”
Antoine burst out laughing, putting his hands on Kyle’s shoulders and pulling him closer. “Only when there’s something worth celebrating.”
Kyle moved uncomfortably under Antoine’s hands, only now noticing the stares. Dozens and dozens of eyes on the pair of them. The disheveled, unshaven white guy in the faded check shirt, jeans, and white t-shirt, next to Antoine, tall, dark, and flawless in his high fashion girly blazer, skin-tight trousers and perfect makeup. He slowed his dancing, trying to concentrate on the rhythm.
“Do you want to sit down?” Antoine asked.
He nodded immediately.
They returned to their seats at the bar, where Antoine ordered them two more drinks before Kyle could stop him.
“You did pretty good out there,” he said in Kyle’s ear. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
Before Kyle could say so much as ‘thanks,’ the guy was gone. Kyle took out his wallet as the bartender Antoine had called Miles brought their drinks.
“It’s taken care of,” the bartender said, setting them down and moving on to serve a fit, balding guy around the corner of the bar.
Kyle folded his bills away, save a couple of bucks tip in case Antoine had forgotten. Damn it, he could pay his own way. Maybe not far. He’d need a job soon enough. But he hadn’t come to New Orleans for anyone’s charity.
“You made yourselves quite a show out there.”
He turned to see the speaker, the cute-ish blond dude who’d caught his eye before. The man leaned on the bar, one side of his mouth raised in a half smile that unsettled Kyle in a way that made him want to take a swing at the guy.
“Did you hear me? I said—”
“I heard you,” Kyle said, taking a pull of his beer.
The blond guy grinned at him, his perfect upper set of white teeth marred by a single malformed canine. “You like her? Her highness?”
“Huh?”
The man nodded in the direction Antoine had gone.
“He’s fine,” Kyle muttered.
“Whoa, okay there, stud. No judgment. Just thought you’d go with someone more your type is all.”
Kyle’s frown deepened as he noticed the guy had drawn closer, their faces now just inches apart. “What do you think is my type?”
“You know. A man’s man.”
“You mean someone like you?”
“Now, I didn’t say that, necessarily,” the stranger leaned in to whisper in Kyle’s ear. “Though you did look pretty funny out there with that nigger.”
Kyle forced him away with a hard shove, only to cop a furious, silent snarl from the stranger and a cautionary look from the bartender. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Antoine cutting back through the crowd.
“Everything all right?” Antoine asked.
Without waiting, Kyle pulled Antoine closer and kissed him hard on the lips. Antoine quickly returned it with just as much vigor. Kyle tasted the sweet juice of the cocktails he’d been drinking, and the sweet, soft flesh of his tongue as it explored his own.
“Whatever, faggots.” The blond stranger eased himself off the bar and let them be.
Kyle gently broke from the kiss, trying to ignore the thick smear of makeup he could feel across his mouth. “Go to hell,” he muttered after the asshole.
Antoine took a napkin off the bar and dabbed his own smeared mouth. “Just so we’re clear,” he began, “I’m going to assume you had a very good reason for doing that involving the douche you just chased off, but in the future? I don’t much care for being kissed by some boy I just met who’s out to prove a point.”
“I’m sorry. That guy just—” Kyle reached out, gently touching Antoine’s sleeve. “How would you rather I kissed you?”
The gleam of a smile returned to the man’s dark eyes. “How about I show you?”
MARC
“Five dollars.”
Marc swallowed, tossing a glance at the guys up on the bar as they gyrated and bent down to flirt with patrons eager to tuck tips into their jocks. “Actually, I’m just here to ask about a job.”
“Yeah?” the guy answered, his expression unchanged, giving Marc nothing. “Friday night, you come in here, you get and you pay for the same show as everybody else. You want to work? Talk to Dan behind the bar.”
Marc silently cursed, fishing five bucks he really couldn’t part with out of his pocket and passing it over.
The guy finally smiled, stamping his hand with the lurid purple logo. “Don’t worry, handsome. Guy like you’ll earn it back in no time.”
He shuffled inside, trying to ignore the hungry gazes of the guys nursing drinks by the wall, not yet settled on a firm focus for their lust. Marc waited for a break in between the d
ancers on the bar, watching one tall guy duck to avoid a low wooden beam before going back to his movements and tossing a cocky smile at a grey-haired customer to his right. Shit. Was that what this was gonna be? He felt a sudden strange and compelling urge to punch the bartender at the Pub who’d tipped him off.
“Rafael to the bar, please. Rafael, you’re up next.”
Marc watched one of the dancers hop nimbly down from the bar and scan the room until he found a patron whose gaze was fixed on him. The boy smiled in the guy’s direction before disappearing behind a red curtain next to the pool table. Swallowing his nerves and pride, Marc took his chance to approach the bar. “Umm… Excuse me?”
“What can I get you?” the guy asked through several folds of reddened flesh carpeted in grey stubble.
“Actually, I’m uh, here about the job.” Looking up just in time to see the built Latin guy coming out from behind the red curtain, he suddenly felt about ninety pounds underweight. And fat. Somehow both underweight and fat at the same time. And white. Far, far too white.
“Only jobs I’ve got are for dancers.”
Marc fought every impulse to steal another look at the Latin guy, who’d fixed on entertaining a couple of suited guys at the bar beside him. “I…I can dance, I guess.”
Without looking at him, the bartender raised his eyebrows. “That sounds like confidence. Stick around ‘til it quiets down some, then show us what you got.”
He nodded, averting his gaze from the perfectly bronzed sex god that crossed his path on the bar and taking up a relatively safe spot along the wall near the pool table. One of the dancers leaned across it to line up a shot, making a show of wiggling a perfectly rounded butt barely contained by blue briefs, all for the pleasure of a tall, older gentleman who watched with an unabashed smile.
At least if Marc was out of his depth, he could play pool. Maybe.
His gaze fell on the red curtain behind the table, with a hastily painted ‘Employees Only’ sign at its top. Employees? Right. He had to remember that. This was just a job. It wasn’t as if he knew anyone else in New Orleans or had any other leads. He’d take what he could.
“You know, it don’t magically pull back just because you keep starin’ at it,” a sly voice chided him.
He faced the stranger, whose pale white skin stretched over a sinewy body marked up with a number of intricate tattoos. A bloody looking skull at the base of his stomach. A snake that coiled around one of his arms before finally biting into his wrist, and some kind of leopard-looking cat down the other. The guy was smiling at him, lips just far apart enough for Marc to make out his teeth. He couldn’t hide the weirdly shaped one up top. Still, the guy was kind of hot. Handsome, too, thanks to the sharp lines of his jaw and cheekbones, all topped off with an unkempt mess of dirty blond hair on his head. Two piercing blue eyes ran Marc over from head to toe, then back again.
He tilted his hips to cover the uncomfortable stirring in his jeans. “Wasn’t staring. Just curious.”
The guy’s grin pulled back to show his teeth in all their imperfect glory. “Everybody’s curious their first time. Second time? Well…that’s more than curiosity.”
Marc nodded, pretending to understand. “You dance here?”
“What do you think?” The guy pushed back his shoulders to make a show of his body, clad only in a pair of tight black boxer briefs and sneakers.
Marc shuffled his feet. “You like it?”
“It’s good enough. Get to have some fun, make some folks happy. Send ‘em home with hard-ons.” He laughed in a way that almost made Marc feel foolish, but the smile that followed immediately softened it. “Really your first time here, huh?”
Nod.
“So, what? Ain’t you drinking?”
“Kind of tight for cash right now. Sorry.”
“Awww,” the guy said, flashing a smile at an older couple of guys who were eyeing them before turning back to Marc. “Just as well I’d give you a dance for free then, huh?”
“You’d… Wait, what?”
The guy flashed him one last smile before ditching him for the silver daddies.
Marc swallowed. Now he felt like a damn fool, just standing there while a half dozen guys his age in jocks, shorts, briefs, or less worked the room, putting away the dollars—and tongues—of guys twice, maybe three times their age. Okay, maybe they weren’t like models or porn stars or shit, but most had tighter abs or bigger muscles than him.
The guy who’d come up to him kissed each of the old guys on the cheek as one tucked a bill into his boxer briefs. The Latin guy hopped down with a jock full of bills, only to be replaced by some white dude even more pumped. A skinny guy grinned as one of the three women in the place slid a bill all the way down his chest, tucking it into the front of his waistband. So, this was what it was about. Even if they weren’t God’s fucking gift, these guys sure strutted around like they were.
This was dumb. He’d been an idiot. Spectacularly fucking dumb.
“Hey! Where you goin’?”
He turned to look at the blond guy, who’d returned just in time to head off his hasty retreat. “I don’t think this is really my thing,” he explained sheepishly. “Think I made a mistake.”
“Comin’ in here without cash? Yeah, you did. Here.” The guy held out a glass of what looked like Coke. “You need to loosen up some.”
“Umm… I don’t think—”
“What? It’s not roofied, you paranoid fuck.” He grinned again in a way that made it impossible for Marc to feel offended. “It’s a rum and coke. You look like you could use it.”
Marc took the drink with a faint smile. “You talk to all the customers like that?”
“Only the ones I like enough to buy a drink.” He put out a hand. “The name’s Ash.”
“Marc.” He returned the handshake before lifting the drink to his lips. The bartender had been stingy on the pour, but in that moment, already on the verge of making a damn fool of himself, he didn’t mind at all.
“So if you ain’t here to drink, and you ain’t here to tip, what brings you into this place, Marc?”
He gulped down a big sip of his drink. “Someone told me they were hiring dancers.”
“Shit. Another one, huh?”
Marc winced, hoping Ash hadn’t seen it.
“Dan’s always hiring dancers. Guys come in here, they do a shift or two, thinkin’ they’re gonna make big money. Then when they don’t, you never see ‘em again. No great loss.”
“You make okay money, though?”
“Nosy, ain’t ya?” the guy said through his smile. “Yeah, I do all right. Expectations, man. It ain’t a whole lot, but it’s easy money. Dan seen you dance yet?”
“I…I ain’t dancin’ with that on the bar.” He nodded at the white muscle guy who was kneeling down accepting a bill from a guy who then patted his ass.
“Who? Alex? Don’t mind him. I’ll tell you somethin’ about this place. If you ain’t got the body, use your face. If you ain’t got the face, work your body. If you got both, dude, get the fuck out of here and do porn, or get in with one of the agencies.”
“Agencies?”
“Yeah, you know. The big guns. They send dancers around to Atlanta, Dallas, Houston…like, to all the gay pride parades and shit. But you basically gotta be porn material to dance with them. Think Alex, but prettier. Alex with your face, maybe.”
Marc laughed, almost choking on his drink. “You’re full of shit.”
“Dead serious, man. You see ‘em at Decadence every year. Check ’em out if you don’t believe me. You go to Decadence? Bet a guy like you’d do all right there.”
He shook his head, letting the compliment pass him over. “Kind of new in town.”
“I don’t much like it myself. Too many faggots. Hey, no offence. When I say ‘faggots,’ I mean the real queens, not like… Hey, you ain’t—”
“Now who’s bein’ nosy?”
Ash smiled again. “Okay, stud. I guess I deserved that. I dug my
hole. Anyway, I don’t care who or what you do. Neither does Dan. If you can fake it, you can dance. I’m not sayin’ ignore the chicks. They got money as good as anyone else. Just don’t let it look like you’re givin’ ‘em special treatment or more attention than the guys. Dan fuckin’ hates that. Turns off the regulars.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“Where you stayin’?”
He stopped, feeling his mouth go dry as the words hit home. “I…umm…”
“Is this a hard question? Or just none of my business?”
“Well, it’s kind of a guest house, I guess.”
“Aww, shit. In the Quarter? Man, no wonder you ain’t got money left. Hell, I got room at my place. You can—”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yeaaaaah, well, actually I kind of do. My roomie just up and took off. I mean, just fucked right off, the asshole. I guess I don’t have to stay. I’m not on the lease or nothin’. My buddy set me up, but he wants cash. It’d just be easier if somebody took over. Keep it nice and quiet. You get me?”
Marc nodded. The guest house may have been a bug ridden old hell hole with lousy air conditioning, but it had still managed to bleed him almost dry. For Ash to suddenly come out with an offer like that seemed almost too good to be true. But damn! Could he afford to say no? “How much?”
“Cheap enough between two guys. A hell of a lot less than you’re payin’, I promise you that.”
He couldn’t help but grin, drawing more of his drink. “I’ll think about it.”
“Kellan, to the bar please,” the voice boomed over the sound system. “Kellan, you’re up.”
“Hey, that’s me,” Ash said, backing off toward the stairs that led up to the bar. “You think about it. And if Dan likes your dancin’, you owe me a drink.”
Marc watched Ash/Kellan nimbly hop up on the bar and shake his ass for the obvious pleasure of several onlookers. Damn it. He was thinking about it. He wasn’t carrying that much extra weight. Hell, barely enough to see in this light. As for the scarring on his chest, well, most of the guys in here had tats. He had scars. Some guys had to find that sexy. His own unique markings.
Ash flashed him another smile as he stepped over a customer’s cocktail with catlike agility. Marc felt the stir in his jeans once more. Ash wasn’t just being friendly. There was real sex in that smile. He felt weirdly connected to the guy. Fated, even. If Marc had had the money, he would have strutted right over there and stuck twenty in the guy’s shorts right now.
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