Heartbeat Repeating - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,27

but he likes drawing shapes in the condensation. He glances at the ring on his finger—expensive, polished, the first pointless gift he bought himself after he signed the contract.

“You are an ass,” she says with a toothy grin. She’s wearing coral lipstick that stays behind on the glass after she takes a sip. It matches the color on her nails, which she uses to tap out a little nonsense pattern. “But that’s why I love you.”

“How was your salad,” he asks, and he curls all of his fingers except his middle one into his palm as he holds his water toward her.

She laughs then twists her own middle finger into one of her braids and sits back. “It was fucking delicious. How was your baby cow?”

“I would never,” he says through clenched teeth, and he knows she only does it because the thought of eating baby animals terrifies him, and she enjoys the look on his face when he gets indignant. It’s why he won’t eat chicken nuggets even though he knows they’re not made from baby chicks.

A few moments pass, then her face does that sort of pity thing it does whenever she brings up Alejandro. “Did he respond to the photo?”

Avery sighs because he had seen the message go from delivered to read—because Alejandro is at least kind enough to keep read receipts on. “No. Fucker,” he says.

“Your boyfriend is mean.”

“He’s my sugar daddy. He doesn’t have to be nice, he just has to pay well.” Avery picks at his teeth and ignores Sharice’s viscerally offended look at his bad manners.

“First of all, stop being fucking disgusting. Second of all, yes, he does. You are a person, Avery.” She leans forward with her elbow on the table and her eyes—very golden as she leans into a patch of sun—are fixed on him in a way that kind of scares him. But it’s out of love, he knows, so he doesn’t mind. “You deserve to be acknowledged, even if he is paying you. That’s how these things work.”

He raises a brow at her and fiddles with his empty wrist where his watch should be—but he couldn’t bring himself to put it on that morning because it was so heavy and useless. “You an expert in sugar daddies now?”

“I have more than one friend who got through college that way,” she says primly. “Some of them were treated like shit, and they got out of there. Some of them are still friends with their former daddies because those relationships were transactions between human beings.” She digs her teeth into her lower lip then sighs. “You’re not an object, no matter what he says.”

Avery doesn’t need to hear it, because he knows. He knows this whole thing is fucked up. He knows Alejandro is fucked up in ways he hasn’t begun to uncover, because the man is a goddamn steel trap, lodged in a cement block, buried in the earth’s core. There’s pain every time he blinks, but he won’t speak about it. He just sits there in silence while Avery talks, and then he leaves him standing on the curb like old furniture he keeps coming back for because he just can’t let go.

“I thought it was his meds,” Avery says after a beat, and Sharice chokes on her drink. She leaves a second lipstick mark on the rim like an echo of the first, and he fights an urge to photograph it with his macro filter on his phone. He thinks it would look good—the way the light was hitting it—framed and hung in Alejandro’s office. Not that he knows what his office looks like, but he can imagine. “He has OCD. He takes meds for it, and I read up on what that shit does to you. I thought he had ED or something.” He drums all four fingers on the table. Tap tap tap tap, and it makes him wish—stupidly—that Alejandro was there.

She shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t know if you should be telling me this.”

Avery shrugs. “He says I can tell you anything. He told me to tell you everything. Probably to keep me from getting my feelings all over his nicely pressed trousers,” he mimics Alejandro’s Northern accent and tries to make his voice as gravelly as the other man, but ends up sounding like a Bond villain instead. “He’s not ashamed of it. He’s talked about it in magazines and stuff. But it turns out I just don’t do it for him.” Avery finishes his