Chapter 7
Evan POV
I hang up and stand there for a moment with the phone still in my hand, the way you stand after you've said something you can't take back.
He did it on purpose. The forgetting — that was deliberate. I'm not certain of much, but I'm fairly certain of that, because that line was specific enough that you don't just misplace it, and if he really did blank on every proposition he's made to men he hasn't slept with yet, then he must say it often enough that it blurs together.
Either way, it had cost me something to stay on the line a little bit longer instead of hanging up immediately, and he'd made me sit in that silence long enough to know it.
It exists in people who want to watch you squirm. I had to say it out loud anyway, and he knew I would, and he let me, and then he gave me the address like it cost him nothing.
I sit down on the edge of the couch.
The thing is, Dom wasn't wrong. Neither was he. I've been turning it over for four days, ever since I walked out of Lily's room with my throat tight and her weight still on my shoulder, and what I keep landing on is the same uncomfortable arithmetic: the bills exist whether or not I find this distasteful, and the money attached to that name card is real, and there is no version of conventional employment that closes this gap before Lily's next cardiology consult.
I know what I'm doing. I went to school for four years and I understand cost-benefit analysis and I am choosing this with my eyes open, which is more than most people can say about the difficult things they do.
It isn't about what I am. That part I've already settled. I'm not gay. Or at least that was the category I had always put myself in.
This is a transaction, the same as any other form of labor — you have something someone wants, you negotiate a price, you provide the service. Dom said it himself, and he runs a business that depends on that logic holding up.
There is no hierarchy of dignity here that I can locate. I'm choosing to do this because Lily needs the money and I need to be the person who gets it for her, and that's the whole of it.
I text Dom before I can talk myself back around. [Can't make it tonight — something came up. Sorry for the short notice.] He'll be irritated. I'll make it up to him later.
It's four-fifteen. I have four hours and forty-five minutes.
The shower runs hot because I turn it all the way up, which is the only way I know how to take a shower, and I stand under it for longer than necessary.
At some point my hand drifts, the way it does without consulting me, and then I think about tonight — about what tonight actually involves — and everything stops. I just stand there under the water with my hand on the tile and the steam collecting around me, trying to get my bearings.
A man. I'm going to be fucked by a man.
I'm twenty-three years old and I have never in my life lost sleep over a man, and I haven't lost sleep over Eric Perry either. I've thought about him the way you think about an unsolved problem — the name card sitting in my pocket, the number saved in my phone, the arithmetic of what he was offering versus what Lily's next bill was going to look like. That's all it was. The fact that he's good-looking is a fact, and I've noted it and moved on.
But here, with the water running and nowhere to go, I can't quite sustain the explanation. I let go of the tile. I press my palm over my face and stay there, crouched under the showerhead, until the water starts to do what water does and I stop thinking about it.
When I get out I shave, because I haven't in two days and it seems like the kind of thing that matters. I wipe the mirror clear and look at myself for a moment and then stop looking. In the cabinet there's a small bottle of cologne I bought one year ago for a job interview and have used maybe four times since.
I think about Eric Perry standing in that private room, close enough that I could smell something expensive and faintly chemical, like cedar and something colder underneath. I uncap the bottle and spray it once on my wrist, then once at my collar.
I don't eat. I'd heard the men at Blue Tears mention it once in passing — that they didn't eat before a booking, that they'd eat after. At the time I'd filed it away as industry trivia that had nothing to do with me. Now I stand in the kitchen looking at the half-empty box of crackers on the counter and close the cabinet again. After seems fine.
The Pearl Hotel is on Meridian Street, which is the kind of address I've passed a hundred times without ever having a reason to go inside. The lobby is marble and low light and the particular hush of a place where the staff have been trained never to look surprised.
I walk to the front desk and give his name, then mine. The woman behind the counter types something, pauses, and then types something else with the unhurried efficiency of someone confirming a standing arrangement. "Mr. Perry left instructions for your arrival," she says, without any particular inflection, and slides a key card across the marble.
"Tenth floor," she says. "Elevators are on your left."
Room 1014 is at the end of a carpeted hallway that smells like fresh linen and nothing else. I use the key card and push the door open and stop.
I don't know what I expected. Something functional — a large bed, a window, the standard geometry of a hotel room scaled up.
What I'm looking at is a suite with a separate sitting area and floor-to-ceiling glass along the far wall showing the city at dusk, the skyline going amber and grey in layers, and a kitchen counter with a fruit arrangement on it that probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget.
There's a couch the color of dark slate and a reading lamp and a desk and a bedroom through an open door beyond, and the whole thing is so far outside the scale of anywhere I've spent the night that I stand in the entryway for a moment just taking inventory.
Then I step inside and let the door close behind me.
8:55. I sit on the arm of the couch because sitting fully on the couch feels presumptuous in a way I can't quite articulate, and I look at the city through the glass, and I wait. My phone is in my jacket pocket. I'd saved his number from the name card four days ago, which I told myself was practical. The name in my contacts reads "E. Perry" and I haven't looked at it since.
When it rings, the sound is so sudden in the quiet room that I reach for the phone faster than I intend to.
"Where are you?" His voice on the phone is the same as it was in the private room — level, unhurried, with that particular quality of a person who does not ask questions they don't already know the shape of the answer to. "Have you arrived?"
"I'm already here," I say. "Room 1014."
A brief sound — low, almost nothing. It takes me a moment to identify it as a quiet laugh. "Good," he says. "Stay there. I'm downstairs."
The line goes dead.
I set the phone down on the cushion beside me. The room is very quiet. Outside the window the city has gone a deeper shade of grey, the lights coming on in layers, and I can hear my own heartbeat with a clarity I find inconvenient. I breathe in once and out once and look at the door.
The electronic lock disengages with a soft click.
He comes in wearing a black shirt, untucked, collar open — no tie, no jacket, which is such a departure from the version of him I've been carrying around in my head all week that for a second I just look. Dark trousers, sleeves rolled to the forearm, moving with the same deliberate economy he had in the private room, like a man who has never once been unsure of where he was going. He closes the door behind him without looking back at it.
Then he sees me.
Something crosses his face — too fast for me to name, gone before I can be sure it was there at all. He crosses the room with a directness that doesn't allow for much interpretation, and I have just enough time to register that I am still sitting on the arm of the couch and that this is a ridiculous place to be sitting.
And then he is close enough that I can smell it — that cold cedar thing, the same as before — and his eyes are on my mouth, and he doesn't say anything, not a single word, and then his lips are on mine.
