Midtown Masters

by Cara McKenna

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I think more people need to get comfortable articulating their boundaries.”

  “I don’t mind either,” Meyer said. “Though my list of won’ts is quite short.”

  John looked back to Suzy.

  “Race stuff, right off the bat,” she said. “Anything where I feel like I’m just there to be Asian. I mean, I get when people are simply attracted to one race in particular. Most of my crushes are on white dudes, frankly—for no particular reason, that’s just how it’s always been. So I get that some people have a default, as far as who their bodies are attracted to. But I can tell when someone’s into Korean girls, and not me, personally. Like they have one box they care about ticking, and everything else about you is incidental. And that sucks, because you want to be like, ‘Hey, asshole, we’re not all interchangeable.’”

  “Sure.”

  “So there’s that. And anything that feels misogynistic or vaguely violent,” she went on. “There’s sexy, subversive ways to play with that stuff, but I can tell when the person who’s calling the shots is just into male dominance, or if there’s something sketchy and more chauvinistic underneath it.”

  “Suzy’s like a bloodhound for creepers,” Meyer said. “She can sniff them out from the introductory e-mails alone.”

  “Hazard of being a woman who’s occasionally in the market for casual sex,” she said. “My powers haven’t let me down in a long time. Boundary-wise, I also won’t do super aggressive oral. Like, I’ll deep-throat Meyer, that’s fine, but only if I’m driving, you know?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I hate when clients want Meyer to straight-up fuck my mouth.”

  John flinched, and a flash of rare anger zapped him, to imagine anyone being so crass as to want such things from her.

  “It feels violent,” she said, “and degrading, the way some people ask for it. And sometimes things like that, they don’t come up when you’re negotiating how a scene might go down, with a new client. People get revved up on the performance and the power, and they ask for things you don’t expect. But luckily Meyer’s really good at taking those requests and twisting them so it’s me leading the action. And if a client persists even after we tell them we’re not going there, we tell them to fuck off and just kill the feed.”

  “And keep the money,” Meyer said dryly.

  “Can I ask how many clients you have? Surely you can’t say yes to every request.” Even at their luxury price point, the demand was surely greater than the supply, as it were.

  “We’re closed to new clients right now,” Suzy said, and sipped her wine. “Once our waiting list got to the point where people were going to have to wait a month or more, we cut it off. I mean, we’re only planning to do this for another six months.”

  “We’ve got a nice stable right now,” Meyer added. “We cam six times a week, for a collection of regulars, sometimes swap in someone from the waiting list if there’s a cancellation. Personally I wouldn’t say no to a little more variety—new clients are always exciting, like sleeping with someone for the first time. Though I think I like that aspect more than Suzy.”

  She nodded. “As often as not a new client turns out to be great, and those nights the sex can be really electric, when you don’t know what to expect but you can tell the person on the other end is after something new and exciting. But you never know. The new person could be a jerk.”

  “Is it ever hard to get into the mood?” John asked.

  Meyer shook his head. “Not for me. I have an addictive personality, and sex and cigarettes are my only remaining vices, so I’m always keen.”

  “Depends,” Suzy said. “On the client, on the time of the month, on whatever else happened that day before the camera starts rolling.”

  “Your nights are never an issue,” Meyer added, smirking.

  John blushed and tried to hide it by taking a drink. “Oh, well. Good.”

  “You’ve been Suzy’s favorite, far and away.”

  “I, um, I hope you found my nights tolerable, yourself.”

  That smirk deepened. “I’ll admit, I wasn’t always your biggest fan. Or rather, I’m not the biggest fan of romantic, slow-paced sex. Though you became drastically more interesting the second you ceased being a middle-aged spinster virgin librarian.”

  John had to laugh. “I’m that exciting, huh?”

  “Suzy found you . . . How did you put it?”

  “Refreshing,” she supplied.

  “Right. Plus, she was always guaranteed to come at least twice on your nights. I would have preferred for my talents to have been exploited a bit more, let’s put it that way.”

  “You say that like every guy is good at straight-up, high-quality vanilla sex,” Suzy cut back, swirling her wine.

  His brows rose. “Aren’t we?”

  “Oh my God, no.”

  “But it’s so easy. And it’s the default when there’s nothing but a penis and a vagina in the room.”

  “I feel like the younger the guy, the worse they are at the simple stuff. You need to find men who didn’t have the Internet during puberty or something. I’m all for porn, obviously, being a cam girl, but I swear guys who came of age before the net are more creative or patient or something. Maybe just more realistic?”

  Meyer made a thoughtful face. “There might be something to that. I do recall a quaint time in the nineties when I only had my own depraved imagination to jerk off to.”

  “I’ve never enjoyed pornography,” John said. He surprised himself, jumping into a sexual conversation as anything more than an audience.

  Suzy raised her glass. “That’s probably why you can even appreciate vanilla sex.”

  Meyer shook his head, annoyed. “Quit villainizing porn. I’m sure there are people who can’t stand porn but are into the sickest shit you ever Googled, and other people who jerk it four hours a day to missionary soft-core. Porn’s a tool. People need to quit imbuing it with the power to destroy society.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Suzy said. “I didn’t even say it’s bad. But I do think it’s changing people’s tastes, and expectations. Maybe you feel it more when you’re a woman.”

  “Maybe,” Meyer conceded. He looked to John. “So you don’t like porn, and you came to us for research. So is it just you and your hand and your daydreams, alone in bed?”

  John’s head felt foggy, tongue thick. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that look in Meyer’s eyes was warm, that maybe he was even coming on to him, just a little. He nodded. “My imagination, or memories. Not of actual experiences,” he clarified, mentally adding, not until last night. “But of love scenes from films or books or television shows, that sort of thing.”

  “About women mostly, or both?”

  “Both, but women, more. My feelings about men are complicated. Or intimidating. I’ve had a hard enough time just navigating the dating world as a straight guy; to imagine acting on something with a man is just exhausting.”

  Meyer laughed, the sound bright and heart-stopping. “But you’ve imagined it?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ve watched gay porn.”

  He nodded. “Only a little. It’s hard to find just . . . I don’t know, entry-level stuff.”

  “Pardon the pun.”

  “I usually get overwhelmed and just shut the computer off. I’ve found that—until you two—I don’t really want to watch the details. I’d rather watch a mainstream, R-rated film with really attractive, well-lit actors going through the motions, and just fill in the blanks myself.”

  “Fair enough. And no personal experience with men?” Meyer asked. “No clandestine fumblings in the bunks at sleepaway camp when you were fifteen?”

  John shook his head.

  “That’s a shame.”

  A long pause followed that proclamation, and Meyer’s gaze on him made
John break out in a sweat. That stare was heated, if not pointed. Questioning, or maybe inviting? He felt like a deer in the headlights, except that part of him he really, really wanted to get nailed by that car.

  When he looked at Suzy . . . It felt the same, but also different. He was attracted to her, intensely so, but he also felt safe. His heart and his ego were in good hands with her.

  Meyer felt dangerous.

  He was difficult to get a handle on. John couldn’t guess if a minute from now he’d announce he had other plans and disappear, or offer to fuck Suzy on the bed while John watched. He was growing both impatient and terrified to find out.

  “So you’ve never even kissed a man,” Meyer finally said. It felt as though he’d waited to say it until John had put his glass to his lips and taken a drink, and that gave John the duration of one long, burning swallow to recover from the hurricane of emotion those words unleashed.

  He met Meyer’s eyes fearfully, and set his glass between his legs, holding on to it for dear life. “No. Never.”

  A smile as slow and sticky as trickling sap. “Would you like to?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lost, John looked to Suzy. Her expression was calm, though her eyes seemed to sparkle and her lips were parted. She didn’t offer a nod of encouragement or a look of warning, nothing to help John settle on an answer. He imagined that was by design; she wouldn’t hand him his decision. Not on this one.

  John scanned his body, thinking about what Suzy had said about intuition. Was this fear rooted in his gut, his body’s alarm system shouting that this was a bad idea? Or was it merely the fear of the leap, of the reward? Was he a skydiver, or some lost soul teetering on the rail of a bridge? He opened his mouth, not even knowing what might come out until he heard the words himself.

  “I think so.” Not a powerful or definitive answer, but the one that felt right.

  Meyer was far more forthright. “Would you like to kiss me? Now?”

  “I think so.” He’d only last night kissed a woman for the first time in years. “I can’t say I’m feeling terribly confident,” he admitted.

  Meyer was already moving, relocating to the corner of the big bed. “I’ll be gentle.”

  Will you? There was something about Meyer that made him not a hundred percent easy to trust. Slyness, or mischief. Nothing cruel, John didn’t think, but quite possibly wicked. But so much about him was so intoxicatingly natural and instinctual as well. He spoke and moved and, John imagined, fucked without fear or forethought. And John wanted to feel that. Taste that.

  Meyer turned, his knee brushing John’s. John did the same. Their eyes were level, as were their mouths, and John’s attention snagged on Meyer’s lips. Would they be as soft as Suzy’s? As patient? Unlikely.

  Just surrender. The directive came echoing up from somewhere deep inside him, some part that was sick to death of fretting and hungry to make a mess.

  He leaned in, and that was all he needed to do. Meyer did the rest.

  There were too many details, too fast. In a blink John was half in a panic, wanting to record each and every one. I never expected this to happen. Kissing another man. It had gone from an impossibility to reality in an instant. If he breathed he’d miss it, so he didn’t breathe.

  He felt Meyer’s hand first. It cupped his neck, low, at the juncture where it met his shoulder, the touch at once rough and tender. His fingers were warm on John’s skin, the contact as electric as anything their mouths could do. There was possession in the way Meyer held his jaw, bossiness in the way his thumb stroked up and down John’s jugular.

  Christ, this was madness. Not twenty-four hours ago he’d not even known how to kiss properly, and not kissed a woman in the better half of a decade. Now he was about to do something he’d only fantasized about, and never imagined he’d ever actually get around to in his lifetime.

  “I probably taste like Scotch,” John managed to mumble. “In case that’s a problem.”

  “That’s very much the opposite of a problem for me.”

  “If you’re sure—”

  And those lips were on his.

  Meyer didn’t waste time. Now their mouths were angling, lips parting. John’s heart beat hard, but he felt that throbbing beyond his chest, as well. This was exciting. Undeniably. Instantly. It shocked him, the fierceness of that realization. When Meyer’s lips urged him to open up, he did, without thought.

  The kiss was bold. Deep. Dirty in seconds flat. And just as John realized he couldn’t get enough, Meyer pulled away.

  His smile was broad and smug. His tongue teased the corner of his lips. “You taste like an abusive ex-lover of mine.”

  “And you’re sure that’s okay?”

  Meyer didn’t answer in words, but with his hands. They rose and slid the glasses from John’s face, folded them neatly, and hooked them onto John’s shirt collar. Something about the prim cockiness of that gesture was so hot he may as well have cupped John’s cock.

  The next kiss was rougher, and John’s breath caught in his throat for a beat, his body tense, then all at once melting.

  Meyer felt ravenous, and he was only too happy to be devoured. He reveled in the sweep of this man’s tongue, the press of his fingers, the smell and the taste of him. He ached for more, for so much more than he would have imagined he was ready to feel. For that hand to move down his arm, across his belly, between his legs. To feel this shameless mouth doing things John had never experienced before, not with a man or a woman.

  Meyer broke their mouths apart only long enough to say, “Kiss me back.”

  With Suzy, John would have been a mess of hesitation, apologies, assurance-seeking, but Meyer left no room for that. All John could do was obey, and goddamn if it didn’t almost feel good.

  A voice from beside them shook his world. “That’s really fucking sexy.” Suzy.

  Meyer made a sound, a warm hmm of amusement, and pulled away. “You’re telling me.” He glanced down, and smoothly slid the tumbler from John’s cupped hands. He passed it to Suzy, who set it on the side table.

  “Do you still want what you told her?” Meyer asked John. “To watch us?”

  He wouldn’t have thought his body could get any hotter, but the question was fresh wood tossed in a smoldering fireplace, the lust crackling, chasing, rising, licking at John’s bone and muscle and brain. His mouth answered for him.

  “Yes.”

  Another slow, sly smile spread across that gorgeous face. When John looked to Suzy he found her wearing a very different smile. Soft, sweet. Intrigued and approving.

  “Now?” Meyer asked. “Here?”

  “If you both want that.”

  Meyer looked over his shoulder, and Suzy offered a single nod. “I do.”

  “That sounds like a consensus to me,” Meyer said, and he stood.

  John fumbled to get his glasses back on, not wanting to miss a thing.

  Meyer held Suzy’s gaze as he undid one, two, three buttons on his shirt. Then he looked to John, and John didn’t know where to focus his own gaze—on those elegant fingers or the deepening slice of pale, taut skin they revealed, or those eyes boring hot and fearless into his.

  “Wait,” Suzy said, stopping John’s heart. If she was about to change her mind, to pull the plug . . . Gentleman though he was, John had to admit that the idea would anger him, in a way. He wanted this, undeniably, and to have it taken away would equal frustration in its most visceral, homely form.

  Suzy didn’t say another word, but rather stood and rounded the bed, standing before Meyer. He had two buttons still fastened and she undid them, slow and deliberate and seductive, then spread his shirt wide, slid it down over his lean, toned shoulders. John’s mouth went dry, just from the way Meyer looked down at her, eyes burning, body perfectly patient. It struck him, plain as day—he wanted to be looked at like that. By that man. And he wanted those
hands, Suzy’s, peeling away his own clothes.

  Meyer’s voice cut through the haze. “What next, John?”

  His pulse was hammering so hard the room could’ve been quaking. What next? How many times they’d asked him that through two computers, in a previous life he’d lived only two weeks ago.

  What next, John?

  “Her clothes,” he said. There was something about her nude, and Meyer still dressed, something subtly sinister and sensual in that little power imbalance. He could never hope to be as masterful as Meyer, but it thrilled him all the same to watch. Which of them he wanted to be in this equation, he couldn’t even say.

  He rose from the bed, giving them all the room they could use. He grabbed his drink from the table and moved to the chaise lounge. It was miles from his chair at his desk, in his den—three hundred literal miles and ten thousand more, experientially. He could see everything in the low light. When they made love, he’d be able to smell it, hear every subtle sound that never made it through the digital ether. He knew what each of these people tasted like now, and the feel of their hands on his own skin. He clutched his glass just as he had when Meyer had kissed him, holding on for dear life. He barely dared blink. To miss a single second of this would be a crime beyond redemption.

  Meyer started at the very top, with Suzy’s hair band. He slid it free, tossed it atop his shed shirt on the floor beside the bed. Her earrings next, slid smoothly from her lobes. Her necklace.

  John shivered. There was such an unexpected intimacy to this, such an understated vulnerability, as though a woman’s jewelry was her armor in some way, and letting a man remove it an act of surrender.

  Suzy’s dress was long, some swishy, summer fabric, patterned with painterly slashes of vivid magenta, ochre, and sunflower yellow. It was cinched around her slim waist with a narrow leather belt, and Meyer unclasped it as easily as if it were his own belt, one he’d unbuckled a thousand times. It joined the rest of the growing pile. Meyer bade Suzy to turn with him, until her back was to John. The dress plunged in a deep V, and below that a zipper ran from her midback to her thighs. Meyer’s arms encircled her, fingers finding the pull effortlessly, easing it down her back, over her backside, exposing her smooth skin, shoulder blades, and the lacy cream triangle that composed the back side of her scanty underwear. John’s collar felt tight.