Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 82250 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82250 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 329(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Derek isn’t on the couch when I get to the living room. Something tells me Gary is gone too, but still, I go to his room and knock. When he doesn’t answer, I leave their condo and take the elevator to the seventh floor, where I can cut across the pool level to get to North Tower. There, I jump on the elevator again and head for my floor.
I really want to walk my ass to the gym and exercise, but I have some work I need to do before my meeting tomorrow with an investor I hope will decide I’m worth dishing money out on.
I love what I do—fucking love it—but traveling around to people’s homes to give them massages is getting old. There’s nothing I want more than to have my own space—a place where people can come to me.
I’d tried like hell to do it on my own, but money doesn’t come easy. Cash is one of the things my parents held over my head when I got caught just before I took a really nice cock at twenty-one—in my own apartment, I might add. As Mom had told me, they paid for it, which made it theirs. And when they realized I was gay and tired of hiding it, of trying to do everything to make them proud, they reminded me they had a lot of money to give me. That if I didn’t do what was right, then they would have nothing to do with me and I’d never be able to do it on my own.
Fuck what they think is right.
Fuck living your life for someone else.
Fuck not doing what you want and not being damn proud of the person you are.
That’s what I took from the moment, and I’ve been living my life that way ever since.
Only they were right about some of it because here I am asking for someone’s help, which means even if it’s mine, it won’t fully be mine—the same way my apartment at twenty-one wasn’t.
It’s just a logical step, I tell myself. You have to do what you have to do, and I’ll be damned if I let them believe they were right about me. It might be taking me a whole lot longer to get my shit together than I planned, but I’m doing it on my terms, and my way, and that’s all that matters.
3
Gary
“Nice work ditching me with the hottie this morning, asshole,” I say to Derek as I step onto the treadmill beside the one he’s running on.
I can’t believe he did that to me. Travis is hot as fuck, and if I’d run into him in a bar, I would have been fortunate to hook up with him. But he wasn’t in my condo to fuck me. He was there to fuck Jacob. And considering how awkward I was, if there was ever a chance of anything happening between us, I’ve killed it. Murdered it violently.
Derek turns to me, beaming. He hasn’t broken a sweat yet, so I don’t figure he’s been here long.
This morning, he left without any word other than a text that read: Gym. 2.
I typically work out at the fitness center in our condo building. Not as crowded and I don’t have to worry about getting cruised. I only started frequenting the popular gym again because Derek thinks it’s a necessary part of my assimilation back into the world of gay singledom. I tried to convince him I’m not ready to work out at the Midtown Flex, where I’m surrounded by muscle-bound Adonises.
“It’ll motivate you,” Derek kept saying when he first dragged me here the other day. Yeah, motivate me to sit on the couch and spend the rest of my life eating pasta and cheesecake, since no amount of exercise will ever make me look like one of these muscle-bound gym rats.
“I heard you talking to him when he left my room,” I add. “So, you must’ve dashed out of there real fast because you knew I was gonna beat the shit out of you when I came out.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, shifting his eyes about as he wears a guilty expression.
“And I noticed you didn’t respond to any of my messages,” I say as I hit the button on the machine and program a mild three-mile-per-hour powerwalk.
“I had a date.” When Derek says date, he means he met up with some guy on Scruff, and the guy tossed him around in bed for a few hours. If not a bed, a car, a bathroom stall, a cluster of trees on the side of the road—any place that would offer the flimsiest amount of privacy. “It was good, but I doubt it was as good as the beefcake you hit the sack with.”
“We didn’t do anything.”