guilt.”
“Okay, it’s a little bit guilt. If you turn me down here, if you walk out without accepting this offer… I mean, you could do that. It’s totally within your right to walk out, to tell me to go to hell. It’s my fault you got fired, and if you run to a lawyer to tell them I said that—”
“I wouldn’t.”
“—I’ll deny it unto the ends of the earth. But it’s my fault. This isn’t charity, it’s just trying to bring a little balance to the world, okay? And I promise you, this isn’t just some scheme for me to get into your pants.”
That got him blushing, so hard he couldn’t look at me, except I saw him smile, almost laugh. “God, don’t say that.”
“I need to make it clear! We’ve got to be on the same page, right? Can we be grown-ups and talk about this?”
Now he does laugh. “I don’t actually know if I can be a grown-up and talk about this. It’s so embarrassing.”
God, why can’t I just kiss him? Why does everything have to be so complicated?
“You and I… We had a moment, all right? I admit it. You know it. You were in the room.” Fuck, why am I talking about this? I can feel my cock stirring. I could take him right here on the damn couches. Maybe just sit here and let him blow me the whole rest of the day, just let myself come in his mouth over and over again, ignore all the calls, all the meetings.
The meetings.
Fuck.
I glance at the clock. I’ve got to seal this deal in the next ten minutes because I’ve got Iowa on the phone then.
You have got to get your head on straight.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “All that is over. I’m not going to try a thing. You’re… You’re safe here.”
I don’t know what happens to his face then. I’m no good at descriptions, at the poetry of human expression.
All I know is, when I say the word safe, something changes in him, and it’s not that he relaxes exactly, but it’s almost like that’s the one word he has been waiting to hear all this time. There’s a looseness in his limbs that wasn’t there before.
“Safe,” he says.
“I don’t think the club was good for you. I don’t think that Jimi had your best interests at heart.”
Now he’s laughing and there’s a certain madness to the sound. “No, I think you’re right about that!”
“So that’s what I’m offering you. A job where you wear actual clothes, no fucking loincloth or whatever the hell Tarzan garb he was making you wear. A job where nobody’s going to touch you. Nobody’s going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
It’s the weirdest fucking job interview of my life, because usually there are only two levels going on, the upper level of the actual conversation, and the lower level of fear and need that your applicant feels. But this thing has got a million levels, and I don’t know how I feel about any of them, all I know is, I’ve taken a risk, and it’s dangerous, and if he agrees—if he agrees—my life is going to be so hard, because I’m going to want to touch him every minute of the day, but I can’t, I won’t be able to, that’s the promise I’ve made to myself.
I almost want him to refuse.
Because if he refuses, if he walks out of here, I never have to see him again. Our lives do not connect in any other way. I don’t have to worry about keeping my hands to myself, my thoughts pure. Whatever this weird hold he has on me will be broken.
Yeah, right. After that first night, I kept hoping to see him everywhere. Every hallway here at work, every street corner, every table in every restaurant, I just knew he’d be there somewhere, and in his absence he seemed more present than he had any right to be.
If he leaves, I’m going to look for him. That’s what I’m realizing.
I need him to say yes.
And he might not.
I can’t imagine the guilt. If he does leave, then the universe isn’t balanced at all, and I’ve just managed to ruin a guy’s life for nothing. I can imagine him going back to Jimi, asking for his job back. Begging for it. Jimi, that gold-toothed smile, might ask him to do things, horrible things, to get his job back, and suddenly I’m