by Amy Lane
“Don’t get attached,” Dex said softly, and Chase’s eyes jumped from the screen to Dex’s suddenly sober face.
“Dude, you’re the one who told me to kiss!”
“That’s not what that was.”
It was lovely. He was fun. We enjoyed each other.
“Man, I’ve got a girlfriend,” Chase said, holding his hands up in the time-honored “Hey, not me, man!” gesture.
“Yeah,” Dex said, nodding soberly. “You’ve got a girlfriend. We all know you’ve got a girlfriend. But so far that’s twice you’ve fluffed in about thirty seconds. Cam can do it because he’s a horn dog. He’ll hump fucking anything that moves! Ethan can do it in about thirty seconds because he’s a sensualist. Touch, any touch, just sends him over the moon. He’s got girls wandering through his brain, but it doesn’t matter when he’s got someone’s hands wandering over his body, right?”
Ethan’s not gay? Shit.
Chase nodded. He hadn’t known that about Ethan.
“Maybe I just like sex,” he defended, when the long silence that followed seemed to ask something from him.
“Maybe so,” Dex conceded, but he sounded doubtful. “Look. I’m just saying—Cameron’s a great guy, but he’s a pro. He enjoyed the hell out of today, but in two days, he’s going back to his boyfriend in Las Vegas, and they’re going to spend Christmas together. What are you doing when your plane leaves?”
Chase tried not to flinch. “Spending Christmas with my girlfriend, and maybe my dad.”
With Donnie and his family. Please please please please… let’s spend it with Donnie and his family. Mercy can come too if she wants, but Donnie’s family makes us safe!
Dex nodded and ran his hand through his hair. “Okay, good. Just remember that? We’re shooting stills tomorrow—they tend to be almost more intimate than this. You have to hold your poses longer, you have to look at each other and sell it. Just remember you’re going home.”
But I want to stay here, with all the pretty boys!
“My girlfriend’s counting on it,” Chase said, and waggled his eyebrows.
But Dex didn’t laugh.
CHASE managed to put the conversation out of his head during the barbecue. The sun that had so worried him on his white body had gone down, and most of the guys had put a shirt on. Dex grilled and ran them around, getting food ready, and then, thank God, they got to eat.
Chase found a chaise lounge and sat down, balancing the thick paper plate on his lap, when suddenly someone shoved a little round table in front of him.
“Thanks,” he said with a smile, setting his paper plate on the table, and he looked up, expecting Dex or Cam, or even Scott, but that’s not who was there, setting his own plate on the little table.
“No problem,” said Tango. “Okay if I eat with you?”
“God, no problem!” Chase said, smiling at him with genuine joy. They’d both had shoots, Chase had known that. Grant, the other cameraman that he’d seen that day at the office suite, had been there to film Tango and some guy named Kenny, but other than that, both of them had been busy with the shoot and then viewing the rushes—they hadn’t actually said hello.
“I saw you, you know,” Tango said, digging into the chicken that he’d pulled apart and scattered over his vegetables and dry baked potato. “That day back at the office site. I kept hoping they’d put us together, but they didn’t.”
Chase almost choked on his steak sandwich. “You mean, as in shoot a scene?”
Tango looked up. “Yeah. I mean, that’s how you get to know the guys, right? You shoot scenes together?”
Chase nodded. “I didn’t, well, they sent me here so I’d have a place for the hickeys and bruises and shit to go away.” Dex had been right. Chase had bruises on his hipbones from thrusting into Cameron’s body, and Cam had left hickeys all down his chest and stomach, and one even on his pubic area where the hair would normally be.
Tango nodded. “Girlfriend, right?” he said judiciously, and Chase nodded back.
“Don’t want her to know,” he explained.
Tango bounced a little more on the chaise before taking a bite. God, he was never still, was he? Cameron bounced a lot, but Tango—he damned near twitched when he wasn’t on camera. Was his brain that busy? Was he still horny? Chase’s usual casual pose grew even more still in response to Tango’s excessive movement.
“Then why are you doing it?”
I want to be free. I want to touch who I want, even if it’s just under contract. I want a reason to hang out with pretty boys and not worry about if my hand brushes their ass or if my arm lingers around their shoulder too long and not apologize for my man-pits and to not have to worry about what people think of me or wonder if they know.
“I want a house,” Chase said. “My whole life, we lived in apartments. I hated them. I’m going to have my engineering degree in about three years, but until then, we live in an apartment. It’s like a… a… a compartmentalized hamster cage. I hate it. I want a fucking house. And a lawn. And a cat and a dog and really beautiful pictures on the walls, with nails that say they’re going to be there for a while. You can’t do that as a night clerk at the 7-Eleven. You just fucking can’t.”
Tango nodded suddenly, and his bouncing got even more frenetic. “Yeah! The house! That’s everything! My mom had this apartment, right? In South Boston? But I’ve been doing this gig for a couple of years—I sent her money, and she moved into a house, and it’s just a small place, right? But it’s everything. Suddenly she’s sounding twenty years younger, and she sent me a picture last year and she’s dyed her hair and she’s like dating again, and I think it’s all about that pride, you know? You’re in a place of your own, right? It’s like no one can take that away!”
Chase nodded, and on impulse reached out and grabbed Tango’s hands, because on his last bounce, his knees had brushed the table, and Chase was still trying to eat.
“It’s all good,” he said, because he didn’t have anything else. “Yeah. It’s something someone can’t take.”
Unlike the people inside it.
Tango stopped bouncing and went back to his food. “So, you grew up with your dad, huh? I don’t even know my dad. What happened to your mom?”
I hate this fucking conversation.
“She died when I was a kid.” Chase kept eating. God, for the longest time, his dad had brought home squat for pay, and all it had been was peanut butter and jelly and ramen noodles. He’d never pass up good food.
Tango looked up from his plate. “Yeah? That sucks. How’d that happen?”
And this is why I hate this fucking conversation.
“I got home from school and she’d slit her wrists in the bathtub.”
Tango grew very, very still. “There’s so much that’s fucked up about that, I don’t even know where to begin.”
Chase shrugged, tried to make things light. “Yeah, well, we all gotta have our fuckups, right?”
Tango shook his head. “Naw, man. Growing up with my mom alone, that wasn’t a picnic, but it was alright. What’s your dad like? Is he cool?”
He’d sneak into my room and kill me in my sleep if he knew what I was doing right now.
“He’s pretty much the reason she killed herself,” he said, and then he almost clapped his hand over his mouth. God, just like how his mom died. It was one of two things he never said—ever. He’d had this conversation a hundred times—he could remember every one.
DONNIE:
“What’s your dad like?” Donnie asked when they were six. “You always come over here, but I never get to meet him.”
“He doesn’t like noise.”
“We’d better stay here, then. My mom doesn’t care. What happened to your mom?”
“She died.”
“Yeah. Definitely stay over here.”
KEVIN:
“What’s your dad like? Donnie says we have to play at his house, which is fine ’cause his mom serves us cookies and doesn’t care about armpit far
ts.”
“My dad never buys cookies.”
“Mine neither. My mom keeps saying they’ll make me fat. Donnie’s mom is so cool.”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“Dead.”
“Oh.”
MERCY:
“Am I ever going to meet your father, Chase?”
“Do you have all your shots and a set of earplugs?”
“Chase!”
“Honestly, Mercy, he’s not all that excited about my life, okay? Can we just sort of keep it between you and me?”
AND so on.
Of course, Mercy had met Chase’s dad since, a little at a time, and he seemed to not be a total fucking asshole to her in small doses. She’d even gone all out this year and insisted that Chase invite the old man for Christmas dinner and everything, because Chase had made a career, it seemed, about lying about how badly he hated his father.
Until now, when the voice in his head had veered one way, and his mouth—always so good at giving the right answer—had veered another.
Tango was looking at him avidly, those bright, black eyes hard and insistent on Chase’s own, and a flush—almost the kind that Chase had seen during the shower scene, when he was having sex—blotching up his neck and his cheeks and forehead.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would you even say that?”
Chase swallowed and wrenched his eyes down to his plate, and doggedly continued to eat.
“It’s nothing. I’m sorry. You got people here, and a party. I don’t even know why I said that. How about another subject? Have you seen a fucking gator yet? Man, I half want to and I’m half afraid I’m gonna wet my fucking shorts, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen a gator, Chance. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone so reluctant to talk about family drama.”
Chase grimaced. “It’s family drama. Everyone’s got it. How big was the gator?”
Tango shook his head. “About as tall as you—but probably not hung quite so good.”
That surprised a chuckle from Chase, and he thought it was all okay. Their conversation veered into comfortable grooves after that. Chase talked about baseball and how much he loved it, and how much he’d love to go pro, but “I’m not good enough. I mean, I’m good enough to pitch through college, but….” He massaged his shoulder, which had taken a workout when he’d been doing push-ups over Cameron on the bed. “I can play the next two years in college, and then it’ll be rec leagues for the rest of my life.” He shrugged and smiled. “As long as I get to play, you know?”
“You could always coach or something,” Tango said, those black eyes wide, and Chase felt a sudden pain he hadn’t expected.
“Uhm, probably not after this week.”
Tango blinked. “Oh yeah. I….” His twisted mouth was eloquent. “I forget, you know? You hang out with porn stars, you fuck porn stars—it stops seeming like something the rest of the world gets all weird about, it just stays at normal.”
Chase had to agree. He looked out at the pool area—it was late now, but there were bug lights and a fire pit and happy voices telling stories. Laughter. Lots of laughter. Again, Chase had to think about his baseball team—every baseball team he’d ever been on—and the matter-of-fact way they would make plays or run laps and accept the things their bodies could do. But not everybody could do those things. Donnie’s mom was comfortably plump, and he remembered the way she would marvel whenever she went to his and Donnie’s games.
“Some people,” he said, thinking about that in sort of an oblique way, at the same time he deliberately didn’t think about his father in that same oblique way, “some people think it’s… it’s almost inhuman. Either they think it’s beautiful—or, you know, we wouldn’t get paid—or they think it’s hideous and horrible. It’s like they don’t see it in the middle. Regular. Like working on a road crew but a hell of a lot more fun, or taking a vacation but a hell of a lot more work, you know?”
Tango nodded, that wide, mobile mouth twisted at the corners. “Yeah, I know.”
“So, how’d you get here?”
“By plane, just like you, genius.”
Chase rolled his eyes. “No, I mean… you know… here? I wanted to buy a house and provide for… you know. But I’ll have my degree in a couple of years. How’d you get here?”
Tango looked off into the rest of the party. The grill had been turned off, and the food was being slowly eaten to nothing. The guys—it turned out there were sixteen of them—had all broken into smaller groups. Chase looked off into the shadows, and he saw two guys—was that Dex? And Scott, it looked like—making out, softly, tenderly. Their lips were gentle, and their hands were slow. Nobody else was looking at them. In fact, most of the guys seemed to be treating it as though it was normal, even though Scott’s hand was deep in the front of Dex’s shorts, and back in the darkened corner of the yard, it looked like Dex was shuddering and needy. Chase looked at them and let out a subtle whine.
“Oh God,” he whispered. “And they’re just doing that?”
“Yeah,” Tango said softly. “Some of the guys… it’s like, when they’re on set, that’s the porn place. So, they, you know. They’re porn guys on set, and straight guys at home. Or, they’ve got boyfriends at home, and are porn guys on set. It’s like, if you’re going to put the job in a box….”
“It’s gonna be a good box,” Chase said, unaware of the longing in his voice until Tango grabbed his hand.
“You wanna?” he asked, his voice husky, and Chase looked at him in the dark, those black eyes shiny and intense, and remembered the way he’d looked in the shower, with a Goliath fucking him into the tiles. Loki the lunatic sex god… here for the taking.
Yes! Yes I wanna! I wanna lick you all over and kiss you… long kisses, long, deep, slow… forever. For the entire night, until you come just from my tongue in your mouth and my hands holding you close. God, I wanna—please please please please please!
Chase opened his mouth right when a quiet washed over the crowd and Dex let loose with a groan so deep, so intense, it could only be orgasm, a real one, private, in the center of his own stomach and not on celluloid for the world to see. The whole patio looked up to see Dex, his face buried in Scott’s shoulder, shuddering, while Scott rubbed his hands along Dex’s arms with so much tenderness it made Chase’s stomach hurt. There was a smatter of nervous laughter around the pool, and Dex looked up and grinned, his embarrassment clear. Scott stood up and offered Dex a hand up, and together the two of them disappeared into the shadows. Chase and Tango could see them as they skirted the light circle and went into the house, and Chase swallowed.
“That didn’t look like porn in a box,” he said quietly.
“That’s not what Dex is gonna tell his girlfriend,” Tango told him back.
“I’m going to have to keep my porn in a smaller box than that,” Chase said apologetically, and then, with more reluctance than he knew what to do with, he added, “I wouldn’t, uhm… Okay. I’d mind. But it’s okay, if you want to, you know. Go talk to someone else, right?”
Tango’s negative nod was all theatre. “No worries. I’m happy right here.”
So they stayed up and talked. They talked until the others had gone to bed—sometimes together, many of them alone. They talked until the lights had been turned off and the guys who’d been chatting by the table cleaned up the rest of the food and put it in the fridge for leftovers the next day. At one point, Tango got up to go get them some water and came back with thick blankets, and they wrapped themselves up in the blankets and talked until the lights in the house at their back had winked out, and only the porch light was left on.
Chase learned so much. He let Tango ramble on a lot—Tango did that. Just talked and talked and segued from one thing to another. It wasn’t rapid, or random, he just connected things and then ran with them.
“So yeah, there I was, going to school in Boston, thinking, ‘Geez, this would be fuckin’ awesome if
I knew what the fuck I wanna do with my life!’ when some guy just took me to dinner and then went down on me. He was a nice guy, right, but I thought the dinner was a study buddy thing—it wasn’t until I was coming in his mouth that it hit me: this was better than anything I’d ever gotten from a girl, and I really loved that it was a guy doing it. I wanted to return the favor, but that wasn’t his scene. Before he left, though, he told me I was hung like a fuckin’ god, and I should model for Johnnies. I had no idea, you know? I mean, I was workin’ retail, right? Fuckin’ retail, at PetSmart—”
“Do you like animals?” Chase had to ask, because this was their second hour talking and he’d learned by now that if he didn’t butt in, he wouldn’t get in, and Tango nodded, looking embarrassed.
“My mom has this real old cat, I mean, she got it for me when I was like, eight, and it’s still around, right? Because I’m only like, twenty-three, but he’s getting on in years, and he was old three years ago, when I got the job because I was trying to find the change to buy poor old Buster some prime old-fart cat food, and they had a sign up, and it was better’n fast food, which is what had gotten me through two years of junior college, right? Anyway, so there I was, working at PetSmart, thinking, ‘Oh hell yeah! That was one fuckin’ prime blow job, where can I get me another one of those?’ and this guy mentions Johnnies. I go home, Googled that baby, and they liked me. Flew me out to Sac the first few times, flew me out here after a year, and then I decided to move to Sac, just to make it easier, you know? Mom, she doesn’t know how much money I’m makin’—and I can’t keep up the lie about PetSmart too long, even though I was working there when I wasn’t doing shoots anyway. So, well, got a little house on F-street—it’s not prime, but it’s got a little yard, right? And it’s okay.” Tango shrugged then, and for the first time, Chase saw a crack in the “It’s okay.”
“What?” he asked, feeling drowsy and comfortable and strangely intimate with this guy he hardly knew. He sort of wished he could pull Tango over to his chaise. It was still chilly, thick blankets or no, and they were getting so close, so quiet. It would just feel nice, wrapping his arms around Tango’s shoulders—Tango worked out and everything, but his shoulders were just built narrow, even if his muscles widened them out. He made Chase want to hold him, just because Chase could.