Chapter 1

Eric POV

The boy beneath me has a beautiful back.

That's the only thought I allow myself, clinical and detached, as my hands press flat against the mattress on either side of his hips. The sheets are high-thread-count Egyptian cotton — the Blue Tears Club changes them between every appointment, one of the few things about this place I find tolerable.

He's good at his job. They all are, the boys the club keeps on staff. This one — I haven't asked his name, I never do — knows exactly how to angle himself, how to time the sounds he makes against the rhythm I set. There's a craft to it, I'll grant him that.

He arches his spine with practiced precision, and the moan that escapes him is low and drawn out, calibrated to land somewhere between genuine and theatrical. I recognize the performance for what it is. I've heard its variations dozens of times in this room, across however many months it's been since I started coming here instead of doing something more respectable with my evenings.

I feel nothing in particular. That's not a complaint — it's the point. To feel nothing, or close enough to nothing that everything else goes quiet for a while. It works, more or less. For a while.

I don't do gentle. I never have, and I stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago. My hands find his hips and grip hard enough to bruise, and I set a pace that's closer to punishment than pleasure — for me, anyway. For him it seems to be working fine, judging by the sounds he's making, sounds that bounce off the marble walls and the high ceiling and mean absolutely nothing to me.

My body runs on its own logic when I let it off the leash like this, something blunt and relentless that I keep buttoned under three thousand dollar suits the other twenty-three hours of the day. The thought surfaces briefly, sharp with something like dark humor: this afternoon I sat across a boardroom table from seven men with gray hair and expensive watches and argued about patent licensing strategy for four hours.

They called me son when they thought I wasn't paying attention. They deferred to me when they realized I was. Not one of them — not a single one of those old bastards with their mahogany desks and their framed Wall Street Journal profiles — would believe what their CEO is doing right now.

The thought dissolves. My grip tightens. I stop thinking.

He's close — I can tell by the way he's stopped performing and started actually falling apart, the sounds going ragged and uncontrolled, his arms barely holding him up.

I don't slow down for it. I pull him up by the hair, the angle changing, and he makes a broken noise that echoes off the walls, and I finish what I came here for with the same focused efficiency I bring to everything else, which is to say: thoroughly, and without sentiment.

When I come, it's quiet. Just a sharp exhale, my forehead dropping for half a second, and then it's over. He's louder about it. The room holds both sounds for a moment, and then the air conditioning hums, and the moment dissolves into nothing, the way these moments always do.

I pull out. Strip the condom. Drop it in the waste bin with the same indifference I'd drop a crumpled receipt.

The money is already counted — I'd folded the bills before I arrived, a reflex, the kind of thing you do when you've made a habit of being prepared for everything. I cross to the sofa, pull the stack from my jacket pocket, and drop it on the bed beside him without looking at his face. He's still breathing hard, still somewhere in the tail end of it, his hair a wreck and his arms trembling.

"That's yours," I say. "You can go."

There's a pause. Then the professional in him reasserts itself, the way it always does with the boys this club keeps. "Thank you, sir," he says, voice steadier than I'd expect. He collects the bills. He collects himself. I've already turned toward the bathroom before he's found his shirt.

The shower runs hot — hot enough that the steam builds fast and the mirror fogs over completely within thirty seconds, which I prefer. I don't need to look at myself right now. I stand under the water and let it work at the tension in my shoulders, and for a moment it's fine, it's just heat and pressure and the sound of water, and I think about nothing at all.

The sound is the problem.

Water has a way of filling a room that I don't like. The way it drowns everything else out, the way it presses against the ears — it's too much like—

Dark. Cold going all the way through, the kind of cold that has weight to it. Ethan's hand locked around my wrist, and then the grip loosening, and the surface so far above me, light-fractured and unreachable, and the silence underneath—

I turn the temperature down hard. The shock of it hits like a slap and I breathe out, slow and deliberate, both palms flat against the tile, eyes open, staring at the drain. Just water. Just a shower. Just Lockwood, Tuesday night, the Blue Tears Club on Fifth and Meridian. My pulse takes a few seconds to get the message.

Fourteen years, I think, and say nothing, because there's no one to say it to.

I finish washing. I do what I always do, which is construct a wall between myself and whatever just happened, fast and without ceremony, and I don't examine whether the wall is holding because the answer to that question is never as reassuring as I need it to be. The interval keeps getting shorter. That's the thing I don't think about.

I dry off. Dress. The ritual of it is reliable in a way that very little else is: undershirt, shirt, cufflinks — matte silver, no monogram — suit. By the time I'm straightening my collar in the fogged-over mirror I look exactly like myself again. Composed. Presentable. Twenty-eight years old and completely fine.

My mother has a list. She mentioned it again last Sunday, over the kind of dinner where everything on the table costs more than most people's rent and nobody says what they actually mean. "There are several young women I'd really love for you to meet, Eric. Wonderful families. I think you'd be surprised." She'll mention it again next Sunday. She always does. I told her I was busy. She said she knew. She smiled the way she smiles when she's decided to be patient, which means she's decided to wait me out, which means this isn't over.

I put on my suit. I turn off the bathroom light and leave.

The back corridor of the Blue Tears Club is unremarkable: gray carpet, fluorescent strips, the kind of hallway that exists to be walked through and forgotten. I take the service exit rather than the main floor, as I always do. The night air outside is cold and smells like asphalt and something faintly metallic, the particular exhale of a city that never fully sleeps.

Marcus is already there, the car idling with its low, expensive hum, his posture behind the wheel the same as it always is: attentive, unhurried, incurious in the way that only very well-paid people learn to be. Four years, and he's never once asked a question I didn't invite. That's worth more than the salary.

He catches my eye in the rearview as I settle into the back seat. I'm already pressing two fingers to the bridge of my nose, where a headache is assembling itself with quiet persistence.

"Mr. Perry," Marcus says. "Where to go now please?"

Outside the window, Lockwood slides past in ribbons of light — red and white and the cold blue glow of a sign too far away to read. The city looks almost decent at this hour, from inside a moving car, when you're not required to be part of it.

"The apartment," I say.

Marcus nods. The partition stays down. I lean my head back and close my eyes, and the quiet I'd bought for myself tonight is already gone, thinner than it ever really was, the static returning at the edges the way it always does. The things I don't think about, repositioning themselves. I don't open my eyes. I don't give them the room.

Every single one of them, I think. Exactly the same.

The car moves through the city. I let it carry me. I tell myself that's enough for tonight.