Aeneas’s invitation was only meant to be kind. But when the paparazzi insult his Twitter date, he finds anger isn’t the only thing of his on the rise.
Notes:
Yeah, so I would die for @Lavineas5Ever, and also die to be her. It’s complicated, okay?
* * *
. . . last of the paparazzi slink out the restaurant door, broken cameras cradled in their arms.
Maybe they’ll sue. He can’t muster any real concern, not with Lavinia candlelit across the table, her lush mouth parted in shock, her breasts heaving with the aftermath of violent confrontation.
Blood running hot with fury, he finds his cock has become a divining rod, pointing hard and true toward the only relief for such deep, deep thirst: the woman he met on Twitter only yesterday.
Dimly, he hears the shattering of glass. The gasps of other diners.
“Um . . . Aeneas?” Her voice, sweet and low, only makes matters worse.
“Yes?” He stands tall and proud and erect. In this moment, anything she wants, he’ll give her.
“I think you just knocked over a water glass with your dick,” she says.
And so he has.
9
“MY TRAINER SAYS I SHOULD HAVE A CHICKEN BREAST within reach at all times,” Marcus told his parents the next day. “The more protein the better, especially when you’re trying to bulk up.”
Which he wasn’t. Not now, anyway.
That didn’t matter, though. For the sake of this private show, pretense took precedence over reality.
He stretched out an arm and let it rest along the top of the dining room chair next to him. With a smug smile, he cast a caressing, lingering glance over the muscle definition evident beneath and below his tee. The bulge of his biceps. The thick solidity of his forearm. The veins on the back of his hand. All evidence of endless, sweat-soaked hours at innumerable hotel gyms around the world. All evidence of how seriously he took his job and how hard he worked at it.
In his profession, in the role he’d inhabited for seven years, his body was a tool to be maintained. Kept strong and flexible both. Polished. Admired by the audience.
He appreciated the actual exercise, how it felt and what it helped him accomplish, much more than how its results looked in the mirror. But once more, this wasn’t about reality.
“You’re supposed to carry a chicken breast at all times?” Horizontal lines scored across his mother’s high forehead, as familiar as the graying ponytail at the nape of her neck. “How would that even work? Would you bring a cooler with you everywhere?”
Under the table, he tried to find enough open space to stretch out a bit, but amid the tangle of four chairs, his parents’ own long legs, and the legs of the table itself, there was nowhere to go. Fair enough. If his knees were beginning to feel a bit cramped, he supposed he could suffer through the discomfort for another hour or so.
Like the rest of this San Francisco home, the dining room was barely large enough to serve its purpose. Five years ago, flush with Gates money, his parents’ cramped quarters in mind, he’d offered to buy them something bigger. They’d immediately, and emphatically, refused. He hadn’t asked a second time.
They didn’t want what he had to give. Again: fair enough.
“No cooler necessary.” He lifted his shoulder in a desultory shrug. “Ian, the guy who plays Jupiter, always has a serving of fish in a pocket somewhere. A pouch of tuna, or a filet of salmon.”
That much, at least, was the truth. It was only one of many reasons Marcus and most of the cast avoided Ian.
Fishy motherfucker should’ve played Neptune, Carah had muttered only last week.