by Solace Ames
“I guess any of those would be...acceptable,” Jay managed to say after a deep breath. “Right. Acceptable.” Jay wondered if Adriana was smiling right now. He tried to lift his heavy eyelids a sliver to see, but that was when she slowly pushed in, tracing a circle on the inside of him, so he closed his eyes even tighter and moaned through clenched teeth. She’d done this for him before, but having Paul watching and waiting and directing made it feel like the first time. There was a voice in the back of his head that whispered, Wrong, this isn’t the way you’re supposed to love, your clock hands are running backward—
—and then time stopped entirely as he let the pleasure carry him away.
Adriana sighed a long drawn-out oh and might have said something like “He’s ready for you.”
Strong, large hands moved his legs up, the bed shook beneath him, and Paul sank into him slowly, inexorably, stretching him to what felt like the limit, and then beyond. No pain. Like magic.
“You’re taking it so well,” Paul growled. “That’s it. That’s my good girl.”
Wrong. So wrong he almost came right then, his whole body tightening to the edge of spasming before he made himself relax, sobbing for breath.
Paul fucked his ass in long, lazy strokes, no particular rhythm, taking his time. When he was all the way inside Jay, all the hot stiff length of him, it was impossible to do anything but feel, but at least when he pulled out most of the way, Jay could flicker his eyelids and glimpse the world outside his fevered skin. Paul covered him like the sky. Adriana curled beside Jay, petting his hair.
Paul’s breaths were rasping and heavy. “Take it. Take it.”
Jay couldn’t even say yes anymore, just let the sounds come out, the ones he knew Paul loved.
“Yes. Good. I want to see you come. See your pretty face. Suck his cock, baby.”
Jay untangled that. A twinge hit him.
Wait, I didn’t say you could call Adriana baby.
Give Paul an inch and he’d take a mile and make you fucking like it, at least in bed—outside was a different matter, and anyway, Adriana’s tongue was already lapping at his cockhead, sucking away the last trace of conscious thought.
Something intangible snapped inside him, breaking beautifully and pulsing through his whole body. He held on for a few seconds before he came hard against the roof of Adriana’s mouth. His cock and sac and hole felt like they weren’t his own, just vessels for pleasure, his own...and theirs. “Oh God, sorry, fuck, fuck—”
“It’s all right, Jay. Shh.” Paul stroked his heaving stomach. Combed fingers through Adriana’s hair as she licked up the last of his come. “Do you want me to keep fucking you, or is this too much?”
“Too much.”
The friction of pulling out was maddening and right on the border of not so good, but when Paul was gone Jay still felt the loss and shivered toward him regretfully.
Then Paul knelt upright on the bed, pulled off the condom and took himself in hand, a spectacular sight. There was a look of intense concentration on his face, lips tight and curled back from his teeth. “One of your mouths. Now.”
Adriana rose to her hands and knees. Eager for more. So was Jay.
Maybe they could share again.
There’d be some kind of price for all of this, eventually. Nothing so perfect came without a cost.
I’d pay it for you, whatever it takes. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to anymore—Paul, Adriana, himself—but God, he’d pay.
* * *
Paul’s life in this past week, if represented by a painter, would be a chiaroscuro landscape of obscure misery lit by the few brilliant hours he’d been able to steal with Jay and Adriana. There were due dates on design projects, and essays and exams, and time-consuming client emails even with a pre-cleared end-of-semester work schedule, and absolutely no sleep.
Caffeine only went so far.
Nodding off in the far back corner of this auditorium was a time-honored tradition, anyway. An awkwardly placed structural support created a fold in the wall perfect for the discreet pillowing of sleep-deprived heads. A case of poor design, though Saylor University architecture students never complained about it.
The reading continued in the professor’s hypnotic monotone, punctuated by random soothing hisses from a faulty speaker. “As the theoretical limits of the moment become undefined through frantic and diverse practice, the iconicity of the gesture spatially undermines the remarkable handling of light, and what starts out as triumph soon becomes corrupted into a tragedy of defeat, leaving only a sense of failing and the possibility of a new undefined.”
That sounds nice, Paul thought. He’d already drifted across a dreamworld border, aware that he was in a class but not sure quite where, or when, or why. Perhaps if he opened his eyes he’d be back at Greenstone Preparatory Academy, behind a dark oak desk, no poor design here, ornate Beaux-Arts style with pilasters framing the blackboard and sunlight slanting through stained glass windows lighting up dust motes in the air like plankton floating in an ancient syrupy sea.
Someone passed him an intricately folded square of notepaper.
Paul unfolded it with great care, dimly aware that it was a precious but dangerous thing.
The pale angles of his hands flattened the crinkled paper and framed a penciled heart with an arrow through it. His heartbeat stuttered in helpless response. When he looked up, there was Jay in the shadows with his big dark eyes and white teeth, smiling shyly, because he wasn’t supposed to be here, and he didn’t want to get Paul in trouble, but he had to let Paul know...
Paul couldn’t move. Couldn’t even blink. And he wanted to, more than anything in the world. I’ll be with you soon, he tried to tell Jay, but his mouth wouldn’t move, or maybe the air was too dream-thick for his words to travel.
The teacher walked down the aisle toward him, her hips swaying to silent music. As she approached, Paul’s sense of dread whiplashed into anticipation, because of course she was Adriana, and she was smiling too, and gently tapping on his desk with a ruler, beckoning him.
Some part of him remembered this was a dream, and it was probably for the best that he couldn’t move a muscle. He tried to change the setting, keep Jay and Adriana but move them out of the closetspace of his memory, mothballed in childish anguish...a picnic would be perfect, yes, they could all teleport into the bright afternoon of a Seurat or Manet painting, unpacking a basket on the bank of the river Seine.
Just as he tried to conjure up the details of the white linen suit Jay would be sporting, the setting changed. But not the way he wanted. The colors were all neon. The bar went on forever. No windows, and the lighting was perfectly even, its spectrum cunningly calculated so that no one would ever know what time it was outside.
Las Vegas. Or hell, if there was even a difference. And the man and woman staring at him didn’t smile. His eyes were hungry, hers were sad, like always. He wanted to walk away, but he had to see this out. He owed—damn it, he’d forgotten what he owed. Wake up. Wake up.
“Hey, Deuce Bigalow. Wake the fuck up.”
“Ow,” grunted someone who sounded a lot like himself. His shoulder hurt. He shook himself awake. “I was sleeping. What—is class over?” It obviously was. The only other person in the abandoned auditorium was John Sun the A/V tech and part-time erotic photographer, who was poking his shoulder with a screwdriver. “Stop that.”
“Yeah, it’s been over for almost an hour,” John said, sticking the screwdriver into his tool belt. “You’re lucky I woke you up before the next class.”
The chrysanthemum tattoo covering John’s right arm was searing bright and messed with Paul’s attempt to recalibrate his hazy vision. He blinked, rubbed his aching neck and staggered to his feet. “Don’t ever, ever call me that name again.”
“All right, midnight cowboy.” John’s face swam into focus
—high cheekbones, sardonic grin. Paul wasn’t seriously annoyed, but he couldn’t bring himself to thank John, either. And Paul couldn’t help noticing that they were at the exact same eye level, so taking into account John’s motorcycle boots, Paul was probably an inch taller. Not that they were competing at anything, of course.
“Did you get a date set up with Ebony?” he asked, keeping his tone casual. John wasn’t quite a friend, but he was more than an acquaintance. Their photo session, which involved an hour of Paul mostly naked, occasionally jacking off to stay hard, had broken the ice pretty thoroughly.
“We’ve got it booked for next week. Thanks, by the way. I suck at advertising, so I appreciate the word-of-mouth stuff.”
“No problem,” Paul said, and slung his laptop case over his shoulder. “She’ll be easy to work with.”
“Have you done jobs together?” John seemed honestly curious, not fishing for sex talk. Paul didn’t do sex talk, not for free.
“We were going to at one point, but the client flaked out. Our bases don’t overlap that much. I’ve just known her since I started working in L.A., and she’s always been very professional. She’s like me, though—we don’t do the social scene.”
“I used to see you at those parties in Los Feliz with whatshername, Sandra?”
“No. Sindy, with an S.”
John quirked the corner of his mouth in response, but this was L.A., after all.
“We’re not together anymore. She’s in a total power exchange relationship with some guy in Pasadena. I’m—” Paul cut himself off from saying single as a warm feeling rose up through his chest, pushing out his irritable exhaustion. “I’m dating a couple.”
“Men? I’m shacked up now, by the way. It’s fantastic. She loves fucking in public, too.”
“Congratulations,” Paul said, and meant it. “No, they’re straight. In a manner of speaking. I’m happy as well.” He meant that, too. His current misery had a well-defined end date, but Jay and Adriana were the sun and moon that peeked over the horizon.
“Yeah, you’re smiling like a stupid motherfucker. I guess you hit the bisexual motherlode. Well, I’ve got to finish swapping out the speaker.” John stepped back a few paces, letting Paul leave the corner.
“Thanks for waking me up,” Paul said on his way out. “If I see you around on campus, I’ll pretend I don’t know you.”
“Same for you,” John promised cheerfully.
Paul’s good mood lasted until he walked around the corner to his advisor’s office, where he got the message that he was failing his Professional Practice course due to unexcused absences, and Saylor University believed in giving nontraditional students a chance, but it wasn’t as if he was a lower-income single mother, so maybe he needed to reexamine his priorities or get the fuck out of Dodge, in not so few words.
He just nodded grimly. The thought of pulling out the tricks he’d learned in Las Vegas did cross his mind once, but he was tired of lies, tired of it all, and a bit of humiliation wasn’t that hard to take in the grand scheme of things. The dressing down was fair. He could have been working harder. He couldn’t do the design without the drudgery, and he still loved design. Design was his constant, his compass, his untranslatable German compound word nestled in the center of the densest theoretical essays.
One more week.
The back of his neck still ached. He rubbed it as he went downstairs to the studio, not sure if the sun had set or not, then poured himself some coffee and settled in next to the other sleep-deprived, softly muttering zombies.
He stared down at the black circle of his coffee cup, the white square of his paper.
And then he penciled in a little heart, light as a ghost, in the margin.
* * *
There’d be no break after the mandatory morning meeting at Sapore, just a full afternoon and evening of work. Adriana wasn’t too upset about it. The morning had gone well, after all. She’d woken up with plenty of time for fitness video exercise, a long shower and a light breakfast with Jay.
She stared at the big calendar on the Sapore breakroom wall. She had a weekend off soon, plus a five-day stretch right before Christmas to see family and friends in Washington. The squares of days without her name were windows into freedom.
Paul would be free, too. She raised the coffee cup to her lips to hide her smile at the thought. Maybe she and Jay were in denial, but the only worries they had about the relationship now involved scheduling. Paul hadn’t been able to come by in four days, but he kept up a steady stream of text message updates, and every night around eleven he’d call them from the design studio just to quietly say good-night.
And sweet dreams.
They’d talked it out, and Jay was all right with her having some time with Paul, just the two of them, in the full knowledge of how that time would be used. Well, full knowledge minus explicit details. I won’t ask for anything dangerous, she’d promised Jay, and he seemed all right with that. And maybe once they found a rhythm in the new year, Paul could keep Jay company in the long nights when she had to work, and there’d be a natural balance.
One of the prep cooks stopped by the breakroom to tell her that el jefe wanted all the sous chefs at the sauté station. She thanked him, left her lukewarm coffee in a bus bin and walked into the kitchen.
“Let’s talk nuts, youse guys,” Wallace said. He looked paler than usual, and kept shrugging his left shoulder and shifting his bulk. “Say you’re sitting down looking at a Costolette di Agnello with gorgonzola sauce, and you’re thinking to yourself—where’s the nuts?”
She half expected Steve to grab his crotch, but he was obviously half-awake and red-eyed. Lorenzo just shrugged.
“I’d be expecting something sweet to balance out a blue cheese,” she said. “Not necessarily nuts. Yeah, pine nuts maybe, but we’ve already got—”
“A shit-ton of pine nuts on the menu.” Wallace picked up a block of gorgonzola and glared at it accusingly.
She thought this would be a straightforward special dish walk-through, but Wallace was being uncharacteristically indecisive.
“Walnuts,” Steve suggested.
“Too much like a salad,” she countered.
“Fuck you,” he said, in a bored drawl.
Adriana waited without the slightest reaction.
“Yeah, sprinkle some croutons on top and call it a fucking retarded salad,” Lorenzo said, reliably siding against Steve.
“Hurts,” Wallace said. The block of cheese slipped out of his fingers and fell.
His face twisted.
“Get him down to the floor,” Adriana screamed as she grabbed her phone. Wallace wobbled like an earthquake had hit, his own personal earthquake, and thank God Lorenzo leaned in, as big as Wallace but strong and young enough to hold him steady and ease him down.
“We need an ambulance,” she told the 911 operator. “I think my boss is having a heart attack.”
Chapter Fifteen
The bookstore owner shot Jay a warning glance while pointing to a sign—in red letters, dripping stylized drops of blood—that said loud cell phone usage was prohibited.
Jay winced apologetically and put his phone on vibrate.
“What the fuck is going on?” Eduardo asked. He and Jay were settled into easy chairs at their favorite independent bookstore. “I can’t catch half of what you’re saying. Is Adriana all right?”
Jay couldn’t help flinching at the thought of Adriana being involved in the situation he was dealing with. Any woman, really, but Adriana in particular. “No, this has nothing to do with her. She’s slammed because her boss collapsed and that’s why she couldn’t make it today. But remember that young couple I told you about at the flea market? We stayed in touch. Pilar called me up. Told me a friend of hers was beaten up, and her boyfriend was about to do worse.”
> “That’s terrible,” Eduardo said, his look of annoyance disappearing. “And I guess she doesn’t want to go to the police.”
“I found a safe place for Pilar’s friend.” Jay smiled and allowed himself to feel a cautious sense of satisfaction. What he’d done felt a lot like work, and he’d done it quickly and well, and that went a long way toward making up for the humiliation at the temp job in Glendale. “My old boss at the hospital is running a women’s shelter now, and I hooked them up.”
“Awesome.” Eduardo smiled and then frowned again immediately, his normally wry face trapped in a state of vulnerable confusion. Jay knew why. Stories this violent, people were supposed to feel sad in the middle and happy at the end, when the woman got out, but sometimes it was hard to know when the story ended. “I mean—I hope she’s okay.”
“I’m going there for an interview. My old boss says there’s a part-time job opening, and she didn’t know I was looking for work, and she thinks I’d be good at the work. I’m still kind of numb. Don’t go around telling people, okay? In case I bomb at the interview.”
Eduardo nodded and threw up his right hand for a congratulatory high five, then lowered it when the store owner coughed pointedly at them.
They read magazines for a while until the store filled up a bit and conversation wasn’t quite so dangerous. And then Jay took a deep breath, kept his voice low, and told Eduardo all about Paul, which was the whole point of coming here in the first place.
“There’s something very morally weird about this,” Eduardo said, and then sucked at his front teeth.
“You’re reading VICE magazine,” Jay pointed out. “You can’t judge me.”
“What?” Eduardo seemed genuinely rattled there, even though Jay wasn’t all the way serious. “It’s not about judging you. It’s about her.”
Jay sighed and looked out the display window so that he wasn’t making direct eye contact. “I wish Adriana was here right now. She’d tell you she was okay with it. Well, more than okay. Her whole situation with work is so messed up right now.”