5. Dylan

CHAPTER 5

DYLAN

Two days later, I was back at my apartment in Chelsea. Tate was at work, the rent was paid, and I’d been cleaning the same spot on the floor of the shower for an hour. It was clean, it had been clean for a while, but something about the position of being on my hands and knees, of cleaning the floor, of my ass being in the air and still sore from how thoroughly Alex had fucked me…all of it had my cock half-hard and my balls heavy. I wondered if I kept scrubbing the sponge over the now invisible stain on the tile for long enough, the erection would go away, but it hadn’t.

Tate wasn’t due home for another hour at best, so I made a quick decision. Rocking back on my heels, I tore open the fly of my jeans and curled my hand around my shaft. The release was almost immediate, my body responding to some stimuli I wasn’t even aware of. With the smell of bleach in my nose and my fingers pruned from being wet so long, I shot my load right onto the spot I’d spent the last hour cleaning. I didn’t bother giving myself time to enjoy the release. I was immediately back at it with the sponge and the bleach, scrubbing the tub until my cum was gone.

“What the fuck, dude?” I muttered under my breath, slumping against the wall and screwing my eyes shut.

After I finished cleaning up the mess I’d made on Alex’s floor, I’d made quick work of getting my clothes on. I was still horny, but I was embarrassed, the heat of shame racing through my veins and threatening to combust if I didn’t get out of his house quickly. The air smelled like leather and sex, and I could still taste the salt of my tears on my lips.

I’d taken money for sex, but that wasn’t what had made me cry.

I wasn’t embarrassed about that, no.

I was embarrassed about how hard my cock got when Alex had spanked me. He’d set out with the intent to hurt me, and I’d not only consented, I’d welcomed it with open arms. Before Alex, the extent of my kinky experience had been a couple soft slaps on the ass while taking it from behind. Maybe once there had been a blindfold; I couldn’t remember now. A blindfold was nothing compared to what he’d done to me, and somehow…I knew what he’d done to me was nothing compared to what he’d wanted to do.

With a simple exchange of cash for skin, Alex had inadvertently cracked my entire understanding of the world open. I wanted to hate him for it. Tate was already on a hellbent chase for the high from the best sex of his life. There was no way I could follow suit. If I let myself chase after Alex—or men like him—I’d lose sight of the most important thing in my life.

Which, at this point, was making enough money to pay my rent.

I could jerk off and clean the floors for a few months and wait the feeling out. I didn’t need it again. I wasn’t even sure I wanted it, because getting hard at the thought of cleaning the floor sounded like a problem for a therapist, not a John. I could get through this. I had to. It was just like all the other curveballs life had thrown at me.

Tucking myself back into my pants, I shoved the cleaning supplies under the sink and forced myself up off the floor. Maybe the shitty ventilation in our tiny apartment had finally gotten to me. The bleach must be making me crazy. Desperate to clear my head, I grabbed my guitar and a beer, then shoved open the window to the fire escape. Sitting down on the floor beside the window, I stretched my legs in front of me, strumming some chords while I tried to settle my brain. That mindless relaxation that normally came from having the guitar in hand was lost on me, the pain in my ass and the backs of my thighs far too noticeable to let me fall into the familiar comfort.

I’d left Alex’s house with purple bruises scattered across my ass, and I’d woken up the next day looking like I’d been thrown into a brick wall by a catapult ass first. If I got close enough to the stand-up mirror in my bedroom, I could see the shape of his fingers curling around my thighs. if I pressed my own fingers into them, my cock thickened. It was some new and unwanted Pavlovian response, between the near-constant pain and the act of cleaning, I was an aroused mess pretty much all the time.

It was going to ruin my life.

The easy solution would be to tell Tate that I didn’t have the money to keep the apartment. We could sit down together and figure out what to do, how to balance things so neither of us got underwater. He’d started out years ago as my roommate, but he was my best friend now. He’d understand.

But Tate was one of those good-hearted people, and I was sure if he knew about my finances, he’d take all the overtime his work offered. I’d never see him, and he’d work himself into a state of exhaustion to cover the loss on my end of the rent. Chelsea wasn’t as expensive as Manhattan, but it was far from cheap. I’d picked it because it was distant enough from my dad’s office that I’d be able to escape at the end of the day, but the price tag of the rent hadn’t had any bearing on my choice at all.

I should have paid better attention.

Or something.

I chugged the beer and tossed the empty bottle into the sink, then closed my eyes and forced my fingers to do their job. Strumming through a progression of chords, my brain went soft enough for me to get lost in one of the only comforts I’d ever known. I was able to ignore the ping of my cell phone, which had been going off near constantly since I’d changed my bio at the bar. I had at least a dozen men in my inbox wanting to pay me for sex, and I’d left them all unread.

It was one thing to do it with Alex. He was a stranger, but I’d had a decent amount of time at work to watch him, to pick up his vibe before agreeing to go home with him. I had clocked him long before I made the decision to fuck him for money, which I could tell he had plenty of. These other men in my inbox? I didn’t know anything about them. It was risky, and there was something arousing about that fear, but not enough to overwhelm the arousal that had become a near constant state for me since Alex had spanked me for the first time.

I must have lost track of time because the next thing I knew, Tate was home, loosening the top button on his shirt and flinging himself onto the couch. He propped his feet up on the table and crossed his legs at the ankle, awkwardly trying to toe off his too tightly-laced dress shoes.

“How was work?” I asked, forcing my eyes open.

The sun had sunk below one of the buildings, and the room was cast in a gray and orange glow. It was a color that felt specific to New York. I imagined, with as much concrete as there was, everywhere just always looked some degree of gray.

“The usual,” he said, waving a dismissive hand. “I’ve been trying to see if the guys from the tenth floor are going back to that club again anytime soon?—”

“You’re obsessed,” I told him, knowing I wasn’t much better off. I’d just committed myself to wiping my memory instead of trying to replicate.

“It was the best sex of my life!” Tate exclaimed. “Of course I’m obsessed.”

“How many men are you up to after him?”

“Ten,” he answered, frowning.

“And?”

“No one even comes close.”

I set my guitar down and leaned toward the fridge, opening it up to get a second beer. I had to work later, but two beers weren't enough to get me anywhere close to buzzed. Besides, the conversation with Tate was enough of a downer to make sure the alcohol didn’t do anything to my head space.

He’d lost his virginity to a rando at a sex club, and he’d spent the past handful of months trying to find someone else to fuck him as well as the Upper East Side stranger had. He’d come up short, but he’d added nearly a dozen notches to his bedpost, which felt commendable. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but I wasn’t ready to try and catch up to his tally, even if it would have kept the lights on for another month.

“The true loss of our generation,” I told him, taking a swallow of beer.

The only reason we could afford beer was because Marigold let me take home the bottles that she couldn’t sell. It was almost always some weird flavored IPA from California that no one in New York cared about, but I admired her optimism.

“Do you work tonight?” he asked, falling sideways on the couch. His hair fell over his eyes, and he looked so sweet.

There was no way I could ever tell him.

About any of it.

“Yeah. Did you want to come get a drink?”

“Are you playing or…”

“No gig tonight,” I said, feigning a smile when he opened his eyes. “Just bartending at Tryst.”

Tate hummed, rolling onto his back and flinging his arm over his eyes. “Maybe I’ll come by in a bit, but I’m pretty wiped out from work.”

“What happened?” I asked, finishing the rest of my beer and pushing myself to my feet.

I listened to Tate tell me all about the intern at his office who wasn’t pulling her weight, which forced him—an administrative assistant—and a paralegal from the tenth floor to pick up the slack. While he talked, I dumped the two empty bottles into the trash and frowned at the small puddles of beer left pooling in the sink. Turning the water on, I rinsed the basin, ignoring the way the extremely mundane and basic task made my cock twitch against my thigh.

I’d just gotten off. There was no way cleaning beer out of the sink was going to be a new trigger for me because, if so, I’d have to quit the only paying job I had left. Music sure wasn’t cutting it, but bartending at least helped me get close to the total owed to our landlord at the end of the month.

“That sounds frustrating,” I said to him, drying the sink and tossing the soiled paper towel into the trash can.

“It’s just part of the gig, I guess.” He sat up and shrugged. “The intern’s mom is some SVP or partner or something like that. It’s just a checkmark on her resume that she doesn’t even need. She’ll have a job when she’s ready to stop bottle bleaching her hair.”

“You sound bitter,” I said, scratching my ear.

Tate knew my parents were rich. He thought they funded my bank account so I could pursue music. He didn’t know I’d turned down the same kind of internship he was currently bitching to me about.

“I just think it’s stupid to pretend she needs the work experience,” he said. “She doesn’t need a job; it’s just trying to satisfy her parents.”

“Parents are the worst.”

“Except yours.” He grinned at me so earnestly, I thought my heart was going to shatter. But as a bonus, at least my erection had gone away.

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat and pasted on a fake smile. “Except mine.”