Love Him Free (On the Market #1) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,5

screen. His Twitter feed was stale, the little alert at the top telling him to refresh, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. His verified account offered him the ability to ignore tweets and re-tweets weighing in on Eric’s infidelity and their separation, but he didn’t want to deal with sympathy or blame from strangers.

His fingers shook, and he reached for his bourbon, the easy burn as he swallowed only slightly distracting him from the fact that he wasn’t hurting the way he probably should have—not after this many years. His dad would laugh himself stupid if he was here. After all, he’d looked Rocco right in the eye fifteen years before and said with both words and sign, “That man is not right for you.”

Rocco had spent so many years doing what his parents told him not to—or not doing what they told him to—that it was a habit. He no longer knew if he was with Eric to piss them off or because he really liked him. Eric had become something like a bad habit after a while. Eric had become his blind spot and his excuse. He was a shitty interpreter and a shitty advocate, and for some reason, Rocco had come to his defense when the man needed to be dragged.

He’d cut off Deaf friends and hearing colleagues all because his boyfriend was kind of a dick, and he’d allowed it. He let out a frustrated groan, feeling the way it ripped at his throat, and he dragged a hand down his face. He didn’t really expect to be crying, but he expected a little more than this vague apathy that settled in his bones.

“Don’t eat where you shit,” had been his dad’s sage advice once Rocco was old enough to get a job. At the time, none of them had really considered that porn would be on the table. His dad was merely trying to warn him that fucking an interpreter not only crossed moral lines, but it would cause complications Rocco wouldn’t be able to handle.

And maybe Eric really had been a fuck-you to his parents who would never know what it was like to need someone like Eric in his life just to communicate with the outside world. But Eric was also different than most people he’d worked with. He was smaller, and he was pretty, and he didn’t turn his nose up at the fact that when he was hired on, it was to provide director interpretation on a porno set. Eric’s hands never hesitated when the director told him to thrust harder, or to use more lube, or to turn his head slightly to the left so the camera could see when his tongue sank into the other man’s asshole.

He thought maybe Eric was the exception in interpreters—or maybe he was the exception to the rule that you can’t mix business and pleasure, but thinking back, Rocco wasn’t sure he was ever happy. He loved him—in whatever way you love someone who had been in your life for that long, but in love?

He never really did wonder when Eric started to change. It was years later and subtle, in a way. It started with Eric answering questions for Rocco instead of interpreting them. It seeped into meetings where Rocco found he was agreeing to terms and shoots and movies he wasn’t quite sure he had the time for.

‘You’re not my agent.’ It was the one time Rocco brought it up. ‘You’re trying to make decisions for me without including me, and you have no right.’

But Eric had pouted and seemed genuinely hurt by the accusation, and Rocco gave in because in truth, he was a sucker for those baby blues and full lips.

Though, in reality, Rocco was just a sucker. He let his college degree gather dust the way his bank account gathered zeroes, and though Eric never pushed for a marriage, they shared everything else. A nice house in Malibu, and one on Coronado Island. They had three cars they both used freely, and Eric’s expense account never ran out. They lived like celebrities with the bonus of most people being too nervous—or maybe ashamed—to approach them in public. And he was fine with that.

It let him order his Starbucks from blushing baristas who wouldn’t ask for his autograph with everyone watching. He got to grocery shop and walk his dog in the park and make sure his siblings and parents didn’t want for anything. And he got to