Chapter 4

Chapter Four

L eo Fisher didn't make waves. Sometimes he wished he'd had the nerve to at least try it, but at heart he was a peacemaker, not a boat-rocker. Even when he'd come out to his parents as a teenager, he'd ended his statement that he was gay with, "if that's all right?" That was how much of a non-rebel he was. His parents had told him that it was fine, as long as he didn't go around making a spectacle of himself. Like your great-uncle was unspoken, but the message was still loud and clear, and Leo had somehow felt he'd gotten their permission to be gay by the skin of his teeth.

Uncle Jimmy, on the other hand, had been delighted at his coming out and had called Leo and told him if there was anything he wanted to know, anything at all, to just ask. Leo, barely seventeen, had told him he was all good, thanks, mainly because talking about sex wasn't something he was comfortable with, but also because he knew his uncle well enough to say with certainty that he definitely wasn't ready for any stories Uncle Jimmy might choose to share. Uncle Jimmy's filter hadn't just been faulty, it had been non-existent, and there were some things Leo just didn't want to know .

In the end Uncle Jimmy had sent his congratulations in the form of one of those greeting cards that said, ‘It's a boy! ', only he'd added the word ‘gay' in front of ‘boy' in hot pink Sharpie. It had come with a gift box containing a rainbow lapel pin, a feather boa, a handful of heart-shaped confetti and a hundred-dollar gift card from an adult shop that Leo had never been brave enough to redeem. Still, Leo had felt the warm glow of acceptance and a sense of kinship.

Apparently Uncle Jimmy had felt the same, because in his will he'd left almost everything to Leo. And it turned out he'd had a hell of a lot to leave, including the shabby terrace house Leo was currently standing in front of—the one that was home to Tristan, the pretty blond sex worker from the funeral who was leaning casually against the doorframe in a silk robe of some sort that was tied loosely enough for Leo to catch a glimpse of a barbell adorning one nipple, the flash of silver a stark contrast to the deep brown of the nub.

Tristan had been saying goodbye to someone Leo assumed was a client—either that, or he'd been performing a tonsillectomy with his tongue—when Leo had arrived, and Leo was trying very hard not to replay that image in his mind, thank you very much , because he was here in his professional role as new property owner. No matter how much his thoughts and gaze kept straying between that tantalising piercing, the guy's messy blond locks, and the way he kept pushing his hair behind one ear with an elegant fingertip.

Professional , Leo reminded himself sternly. He was here to assess the property, not ogle the way Tristan's legs seemed to go all the way to his armpits under the skimpy silk of his robe.

It was a relief when the other roommate appeared and asked him inside, even though upon seeing Jack's tousled hair and pink cheeks, Leo had to fight back a blush when he thought of what Tristan had said Jack had been doing, although Jack had denied it. "They're fucking," Tristan had said, like it was no big deal. Perhaps to him it wasn't, given his profession.

Oh God . If there was a sex worker renting from him, did that mean Leo was a pimp now? Or was it an accessory after the fact? Was sex work even illegal? He shook his head slightly to clear his jumbled thoughts, took a deep breath, and followed Jack inside.

When Leo stepped inside the hallway of the dingy little house his uncle had left him, he was hit by the smell of Domestos, the unforgiving burn of it strong enough to make his eyes water. Obviously there had been some emergency last-minute cleaning going on. As he looked around Leo wondered why they'd bothered, because the place was a shithole.

The lino was patched and uneven, there were bare patches where the paint had flaked off the walls, and there was an ominous hum coming from the antiquated light switch. The skirting boards in the hallway appeared to be in a state of disintegration, and the bottom stair had somehow warped so much that the rats, which Leo was sure were vast in number, could use it as a ski jump. Leo had been expecting something a little old and rundown, but that old saying about not being able to polish a turd sprang to mind.

A cute guy in glasses, his hair mussed up, appeared in the doorway of what Leo guessed was the kitchen. "Hi," he said. "I'm Harry."

Leo shook his hand. "Leo. I'm the, um, the new owner."

Harry wrinkled his nose and his glasses shifted. "I'm really sorry about Mr. Erskine. "

"Thanks."

Jack slid an arm around Harry's waist. "He was a good bloke."

"He was an institution ," Tristan announced, flipping his hair back and displaying the long line of his throat. He tugged the edges of his satiny robe together. "I'll be in bed."

Then he sauntered up the stairs, and Leo definitely didn't stare at his arse. Definitely not.

"Do you want us to show you around?" Harry asked, nose wrinkling again. "Or do you just want to, um, sort of wander on your own?"

Leo tore his gaze away from Tristan's receding arse. "If you could show me around, that would be great."

It was weird going through the house and looking at other people's things, especially when the other people were standing right there with him and obviously trying to pretend that any slight sign of actually living there was totally out of character, and normally the place looked like a page spread out of House Beautiful , which was never going to happen with this house. This was definitely House Ugly . Hell, Leo wasn't even sure he should have been charging anyone rent to live here, and not just morally, but legally. When Harry explained how they had to turn the living room light off to get the oven to work, Leo's stomach dropped.

"Oh, God," he said. "Are you serious? That's—what even—oh, Jesus. I'm going to call an electrician out straight away."

Harry's eyebrows shot up. "On a weekend?"

"Yes!" Leo didn't want to electrocute his tenants just to avoid paying more for a weekend callout.

The rest of the inspection went pretty well, except for the part where Harry flung Tristan's door open and they all discovered Tristan crashed out, face down on his bed, his sheet pulled down low enough to expose the crack of his naked arse.

"Um," Harry said, and pulled the door shut again. "Sorry. He works late hours?"

The way he ended on an upward inflection made it sound like a lie. But Leo, who had a pretty damn good idea of exactly what Tristan's work entailed, knew it wasn't.

They headed back down the creaking, warped stairs to the kitchen.

"Do you want a cuppa?" Jack asked. "We probably should have offered you one at the start."

"That'd be great, thank you."

Harry sat down with him at the small kitchen table and set a Milo tin in front of him. "Nobody's collected our rent in a while, so um, here it is." He pried the tin open with a battered teaspoon and extracted a bundle of notes. "Jack, did Tris put back the fifty he borrowed the other day to go to the bottlo?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, it's all there then," Harry said, and slid the money across the table to Leo.

"I…I can't take your rent money," Leo said.

Harry paled. "Are you evicting us?"

"No! I just, I can't charge you for living here. I think it's probably illegal. This place is a dump, and it's not liveable!"

Harry's wide-eyed gaze drifted around the kitchen before it landed back on Leo. "It's liveable! We already live here!"

Leo made the mistake of looking to Jack.

"We can't afford rent anywhere else," Jack said. "I mean, the place is a dump, but have you seen rental prices lately?"

"I'm not kicking you out!" Leo said. "I just—this place might kill you! I'm pretty sure it needs to be basically gutted and started all over again. "

Jack and Harry exchanged a worried look.

"I've never been a landlord before," Leo said. "And I don't want to be a slumlord! Sorry, but this is all harder than I thought it would be, and I shouldn't be dumping that on you guys. It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of money to get this place up to code, is all I mean. I'll start by getting the electrician here as soon as possible, but it needs a proper inspection."

Harry and Jack didn't look reassured, and who could blame them? Fixing this place up would probably cost tens of thousands of dollars that Leo didn't have, if not even more than that, and in all likelihood the only way he could recoup those costs would be selling it when it was done. And nobody was going to buy a million-dollar home—because fuck Sydney real estate prices, seriously—then let three guys live in it for a Milo tin's worth of rent money.

Maybe he wouldn't have to sell. Maybe once he untangled all of Uncle Jimmy's finances, he'd find a way to repair the house and keep it. But at the same time, he had to be realistic. There was every possibility the figures wouldn't work out and selling would be the only option. He wasn't a charity, after all.

God. After only a few days as a landlord, he was already sounding like one.

There was a sudden thumping noise in the walls, as though someone was playing the drums.

"What's that ?" Leo asked.

"Nothing!" Harry said.

Jack sighed. "It's the pipes. They make that noise when the shower's on."

"Oh, my God!" He eyed the walls suspiciously. He wouldn't have been surprised if they caved in any second now. "Is that…?" He squinted at the corner of the ceiling above the refrigerator. "Is that black mould? Can't that kill you? "

"It's just regular mould," Harry said. "Right? Because none of us are dead yet."

"I don't think ‘none of us are dead yet' is a ringing endorsement!"

"It's regular mould," Jack said. "There's a leak, that's all."

Leo pinched the bridge of his nose. "Okay, look. I'm not going to evict you unless the building inspector literally condemns the place—which, let's be real, might be a possibility. But I'm getting an electrician and a plumber in straight away, and everything else? Well, I guess I'll have to see how bad it is before I make any decisions. But this is…I can't believe how bad this place is. I can't believe Uncle Jimmy didn't fix any of it."

"He wasn't a slumlord," Harry said. "He was just an old guy who let us pay cheap rent. Do you know how much I was paying before me and Ambrose got this place? Like, okay, it's not very nice, but at least he didn't crack the shits if we put in a picture hook or there was mildew in the tile grout when he came around." His nose wrinkled. "Jack got rid of the mildew once, but it just…keeps coming back."

"The mildew may be the only thing holding the bathroom together," Jack said. "That, and the remains of Tristan's hair product."

Leo swallowed at the reminder of Tristan's gorgeous hair. God, it was mesmerising. He was struck by a sudden urge to see that messy bun undone and golden locks cascading down Tristan's body like a waterfall, while another, more pragmatic part of him wondered if that was something Tristan charged extra for and how that even all worked.

Focus, he scolded himself. You're a professional.

"…that leave us, though?" Harry's voice pulled Leo's attention back to the matter at hand.

"Sorry? "

"I said, if we do have to move out, where does that leave us?" Harry pushed his glasses up his nose, his brow crinkled with concern.

"We'll figure something out," Jack said, throwing a comforting arm over Harry's shoulder and giving him a peck on the cheek. They were kind of adorable, and Leo was vaguely jealous. He wasn't jealous of their possible impending homelessness, though, and he didn't want them to think he didn't care.

"I, um, think Uncle Jimmy had other properties. I haven't got through the entire list yet, but I know there's a flat over"—he squinted at his clipboard—"a shop called…Pleasure Party? And I don't think it had tenants. I'd need to look into it."

"Mr. Erskine had a party supplies shop?" Harry asked, nose crinkling in confusion. "That doesn't seem like him."

"That's because they're not that sort of party supplies, precious," Tristan said, gliding gracefully into the kitchen fresh from the shower, propping himself up on his elbows against the kitchen bench. His hair, still damp, hung over one shoulder in a mass of loose waves, and it looked exactly as Leo had imagined. He'd gotten dressed, but his shirt was unbuttoned, leaving his lean, smooth chest and piercing on display, and his shorts were, well, short . Really, he wasn't any more covered than he had been in his kimono. "Pleasure Party is a sex shop. Congratulations. Your new business makes a lot of people very happy."

Leo's mouth dropped open. "It's a what ?"

Tristan rolled his eyes. "A sex shop. You know, where people with a sense of adventure go to have a good time, or at least get the things they'll use later to have a good time." Tristan raised one eyebrow and looked Leo up and down. "I'm guessing you've never been to one. "

"That's really none of your business." Leo flushed and fixed his gaze on his clipboard. What did it matter if Tristan thought Leo was some sort of prude or a stick in the mud? But Tristan's assessment stung, for reasons Leo couldn't quite articulate—except that when he thought about it, he knew exactly why it stung. It was because Tristan was right , and Leo hated that he was.

Leo wasn't intentionally boring, okay? He was just…sensible. And maybe he hadn't had a chance to branch out, but then again, he hadn't felt like he'd needed to. He thought of the gift voucher Uncle Jimmy had sent him, the one he'd never used. He'd been tempted, sure, but his temptation had been outweighed by the fear that someone he knew would see him going into the shop—or even worse, coming out of it. And he hadn't thought he'd been missing much. He'd had boyfriends before. But now, even with the small amount of time he'd spent with Jimmy's cohorts, he was beginning to realise that maybe his parents and their insistence on being respectable were wrong, and there was a whole other side of himself that he'd been missing out on exploring.

When he looked up from his clipboard, it was to find Tristan watching him, his head tilted and wearing a pensive look. "Hey," he said, "I was only teasing, okay? And sometimes I get carried away. Just ask the puppies. Jack's forever telling me to fuck off."

"He can be a bit of an arsehole," Jack confirmed, and Harry nodded his agreement.

"Fuck you both very much," Tristan shot back with a grin, before turning his attention back to Leo. "Look, it's okay if you're a vanilla boy, I promise. No judgement"—which Leo personally thought was a bit rich, coming from someone in Tristan's line of work—"but I'll tell you what." He leaned back against the kitchen bench, his impossibly long legs crossed at the ankles. "Pleasure Party doesn't just sell kinky shit. I can take you there later and show you around, explain the products on offer, and introduce you to Wei and Orlando who work there. And after, we can check out that flat, if you want?"

His mouth curved up into a gorgeous smile, his utterly perfect teeth gleaming more brightly than the freshly bleached kitchen sink, his eyes sparkling. All Leo could think was that no wonder Tristan could get people to pay to sleep with him, because when he stopped being a dick for two minutes, he fairly oozed charm—and he oozed it in the warm, chocolate-fudge-sauce-that-he-wanted-to-lick kind of way, and not the nameless-nasty-green-sludge-in-the-bottom-of-his-fridge way. His smile was practically incandescent.

Leo found himself utterly transfixed, helpless in the face of the almost ethereal beauty in front of him, and before he knew it, he was stuttering out, "That—yes, thanks, I'd like that."

Tristan's smile widened and he said, "Great. It can't be today though. I'm too tired to leave the house. Pick me up around three tomorrow. I have back-to-back lunch dates, but I should be done by then."

Dates . He called them dates . Leo wondered briefly if it was just because it made Tristan feel better about what he did, or if it was some sort of quasi-legal thing to avoid arrest. Would it be rude to ask? Then he wondered what the hell he was thinking, because if he was questioning if it was rude to ask, then obviously it was.

And at that moment all thoughts left his head entirely, because Tristan swanned over to the fridge, opened it, and bent at the waist to pull a yoghurt off the bottom shelf, giving Leo an uninterrupted view of what seemed to be miles of leg. When Tristan stood and stretched, then peeled back the foil lid of the tub and licked at it with a deep, sensual groan of pleasure, Leo had never wanted to be a tub of yoghurt so badly in his life. All he could think was Holy shit. No wonder people are willing to pay him.

Hell, Leo was almost tempted himself.