Author: Alexa Land
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/alexa-land/page,14,529414-all_in.html
“You’re a natural. If you ever want a job waiting tables, I’ll put in a good word for you. Jamie would hire you in an instant.”
He smiled at me. “That was really subtle. Nice work.”
“What was?”
“Your little suggestion, trying to show the rent boy there’s a way out of his seamy, depressing existence.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” Ok, I kind of had.
He took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I don’t need saving, Charlie. But I appreciate the thought.”
“I just…I don’t get why you’re in that line of work,” I told him honestly.
“Sutherlin costs fifty five thousand dollars a year. I have three years left, one for my B.A., then two more for my M.F.A. And until I finish school, I’m going to keep turning tricks. Because nothing else pays the kind of money I need.”
“Have you looked into financial aid?”
He gave me a ‘duh’ expression and said, “Yeah.”
“Your art would pay the bills. You’re insanely talented.”
“I’m also a total unknown, a student. I don’t have any connections in the art world, at least not yet. But next year, I’ll be eligible to intern at a couple of the local galleries. I’ll be able to build a network, and that’s the first step in hopefully being able to make a living from my art in the future. But I’m just not there yet.”
“I worry about your safety, Christopher Robin. You’re in such a dangerous line of work.”
He looked at the floor and said, “Yeah, I know. It’s safer now, though. Up until thirteen months ago I worked the street, and that really was dangerous. But now that I’m working for an escort service, it’s not so bad. The clients are more upscale. Sure, the agency takes a big portion of my earnings. But still, it is safer, so it’s worth the cut in pay.”
“I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to lecture,” I told him.
“I know. You’re such a good guy, Charlie. I knew it was just a matter of time before you tried to intervene.” He smiled at me fondly.
“I’m not done meddling. I want you to move in with me, be my roommate. Whatever you’re paying in rent now, I’ll charge you less. You need to stop living in hell.”
“You have a one bedroom apartment,” he pointed out.
“You can have the bedroom, I’ll take the living room. I’ll even throw in the Dante Collection of Fine Furnishings to sweeten the deal.”
“Mr. Dombruso bought you your furniture?”
“Yeah. The first time he came to my apartment, it was almost totally empty. That didn’t sit well with him.”
Christopher beamed delightedly. “He’s taking care of you. That’s so sweet.”
“Will you consider being my roommate?”
“It’s a little bit crazy, you know. Asking a hooker you’ve known for a day to move into your home.”
“I like you and I trust you, Christopher. And I already know you’re incredibly easy to get along with. So please say yes.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said with a grin. “And thank you for the offer.”
Dmitri came into the employee dressing room and said, “Ok, spill. What exactly was Dante trying to accomplish by chaining you two together?”
“It’s a kinky sex thing. Just like I told Jamie,” I said.
Dmitri chuckled at that. “Liar. Is this some kind of punishment? And do you not want to tell me because I’ll tell Jamie, and then he’ll distrust Dante even more?”
“It’s not a punishment. But you’re right about the rest. Speaking of Dante, have you been in touch with him since he’s been out of the country?” I asked Dmitri. “Do you know if he’s doing ok?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t heard from him.”
“He’s fine,” Christopher said.
I turned to look at the blonde at the end of my arm. “Has Dante been in contact with you?”
“Yup. He’s texted me about every two hours since his plane landed. He feels terribly guilty for doing this to you, and keeps checking to see if you’re ok. I wasn’t supposed to tell you,” Christopher said with a big smile.
Jamie stuck his head in the locker room and asked his husband, “Has Charlie told you why he’s handcuffed to a twink?” To Christopher he said, “No offense.”
“That’s not an insult, so much as a simple statement of fact,” Christopher told him.
I sighed and decided to (sort of) come clean, going with Christopher’s earlier pared down explanation that he’d given Mrs. Dombruso. “Dante chained us together. He wants me to think he’s a terrible person, so I don’t try to get back together with him.” Obviously, I omitted the fact that Christopher was supposed to be freaking me out this entire time by going into detail about Dante’s sex life.
“Well, I’m convinced,” Jamie said, and left the dressing room just as Cole was coming in. Dmitri grinned and followed him.
“Dude, I’m so sorry I left you short-handed at the beginning of the lunch shift,” I told him.
“It’s fine. Who knew we’d actually busy?” He was looking at Christopher closely. He’d already asked about the cuffs earlier, and when I’d told him it was complicated, he just accepted that answer and moved on. Cole told him, “You remind me so much of my ex-boyfriend. But I won’t hold that against you.”
“You’ve never mentioned your ex,” I said. I’d actually never even been sure Cole was gay until now.
My coworker sighed and said, “I know. He broke my heart. We moved here from Idaho, with plans of building a life together. But three weeks after we got here, he dumped me. San Francisco seduced him hard and fast. I couldn’t compete with every guy in every club fawning over him. These days, he’s actually a big star in the porn industry, goes by the name Hunter Storm.” He rolled his eyes at that, then added, “So apparently, my baby is now everybody’s baby. And how bitter does that sound?”
“I’m sorry, Cole.”
“It’s been almost two years. I keep expecting it to stop hurting, but somehow it just never does.” He forced a smile and said, “And on that upbeat note, I’m outta here. See you tomorrow.” He grabbed his backpack and left the dressing room.
“You know,” Christopher said after Cole left, “I actually get a lot of work from clients calling up and asking the agency for a Hunter Storm type.”
We were still doing the public transit thing, so when we left work we boarded a bus for home. After dropping off Christopher’s art supplies and wrestling the dog onto his leash and out for a walk, we got in my truck and drove to the Safeway.
I pushed a cart around, grabbing a couple things I’d run out of, and Christopher carried a little basket. He didn’t pick up a thing, until we came to those little packs of bright orange snack crackers with peanut butter. And then he took every package off the shelf and filled his basket. “It really is the only thing I eat,” he explained, when he saw my surprised expression.
“How have you not developed scurvy or something?”
“It’s a mystery.”
He grabbed a six-pack of bottled water as well, and I decided I wanted some ice cream, so we headed to the frozen foods aisle. But I stopped short, tugging Christopher to a stop with me. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
I didn’t answer for a moment. And then I pointed at the tall, middle aged man down at the far end of the aisle and murmured, “That’s my father. He disowned me last week when I came out to him, and then my mother left him. I’ve never in my life seen him buying groceries, my mom used to do all the shopping and cooking.” My dad looked incredibly lost. He was pulling frozen dinners out of the freezer case and squinting at the back of them. Some went in his cart, some back into the case. The cart was full of nothing but frozen dinners.
Walter Connolly was a big guy, six foot two and heavy set. He was a former Marine, who still wore his graying hair in a buzz cut. He was a blue collar man, a Teamster who worked at a big newspaper printing facility. I’d never once in my life seen even a trace of vulnerability
in him. Until now.
“I actually feel like going over there and helping him, but then I know he’d just call me a queer and tell me to get away from him,” I said quietly. Christopher laced his fingers with mine and held my hand, and I sighed and left the aisle without my father seeing me.
Christopher and I spent the evening in my apartment, Peaches penned back up temporarily so we could move around unmolested. I tackled the project of going through the garbage bags I’d brought from my former home, sorting my possessions into piles along the living room wall with Christopher’s help.
He and I were both quiet, introspective. Seeing my dad had been jarring, and I was still trying to process it. And going through all my things, including every photo and memento from my childhood, was hard to take. I remembered how I’d broken down and cried when I first discovered all this stuff, and how Dante had held me and comforted me. God I missed him.
I took a break after a while and got a beer, and offered one to Christopher, which he declined. Instead, he got a packet of his crackers and ate them one by one as we sat on the couch, leaning against each other. Eventually he said, “Ok.”
“Ok?”
“If you were serious about me moving in here as your roommate, then I accept.”
“Of course I was serious.”
“I think it’d be really good to live with you,” Christopher said. “I’ll take the living room, though. You keep the bedroom.”
“We’ll flip a coin for it,” I said.
He put his head on my shoulder. “It’s going to be really nice to move out of that residence motel.”
“We can go get your stuff tomorrow, after I work the lunch shift.”
He looked up at me. “You want me to move in that soon?”
“Yeah. I don’t want you spending even one more night in that other place. Besides,” I added with a grin, “we’re never going to figure out the trick to these cuffs, so we’ll be living together permanently anyway.” I took another look at them, and was baffled as ever.
Christopher’s phone beeped and he pulled it out of his pocket to read the text, then sent a quick reply and set it on the end table.
“Not to be incredibly nosy, but was that Dante?” I asked.
“It was. Still checking up on you.” He smiled happily.
“He didn’t actually tell you how to open these manacles, did he?”
“Nope.”
“Has he found Natori yet?”
“No. He’s beginning to wonder if they’re on a wild goose chase. They’ve been driving all over Sicily following leads, but he hasn’t turned up.”
“It scares me to death, this thing he’s doing. I’m so afraid he won’t come back.”
“You have to think positive, believe he’s going to survive this,” he told me emphatically, and I nodded in agreement.
“I can’t really begin to process the whole mafia thing, even though I understand why he feels he has to do what he’s doing right now. But as for the rest of it, I just don’t even have a frame of reference for it, apart from the movies. And I kind of doubt The Godfather was meant to be taken as a totally factual documentary.” I glanced at Christopher. “Do you know what he’s involved in?”
“I only know a little about what he does, but none of the illegal stuff. I know he owns some restaurants, a couple nightclubs, a few shops. He owns a whole strip mall on the peninsula. I’ve gotten the impression,” Christopher said, “that he’s been slowly moving his family from criminal activity to legitimate sources of revenue. But I really don’t know that for sure.”
After a while I sighed and said, “Ok, I’m going to keep sorting through the wreckage of my former life. I’ll drag a bag over here to the couch so we can be comfortable while I bum myself out.”
That night, after taking turns in the shower and trying our best to respect each other’s privacy while using the restroom (awkward!), Christopher and I lay facing each other in bed, our joined hands between us. Christopher was holding my bound hand between both of his, his eyelids lowered.
There was something in that gesture, something in the way he held on to me that made me want to protect him, take care of him. He put on a good show, acted like he took everything in stride. But Christopher was a lot more vulnerable than he let on. I wondered, remembering him talking about the fact that he didn’t date, if he was lonely.
After a while I asked, “Are you named for the character in the children’s books?” It was a random question. I just wanted to get him talking.
He grinned a little and looked up at me through his thick, dark lashes, still holding my hand in both of his. “Yeah. My mom loved those books. She read them to me over and over when I was little.”
I just had to ask. “Does she know what you do for a living?”
“She killed herself when I was five.” He said it quietly, but kept his voice steady.
“Oh God. I’m so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” He let go of my hand, rolling onto his back and closing his eyes.
“I can be so insensitive. I apologize for prying into your personal business.”
He turned his head to look at me, and offered me a little smile. “You didn’t. My past is full of landmines like that one, it’s sometimes hard to avoid them.”
Christopher looked back up at the ceiling and said, “And I might as well go ahead and clear away this landmine before you stumble across it by accident and then feel bad about it.” After a long moment he said, “You’ve noticed my weird food thing. Well…it started thirteen months ago. This was when I was still working the street. I always thought I had good instincts, I thought they’d protect me. Turns out I was wrong.”
He took a deep breath and said, “So, this trick bought me for an hour and took me back to his hotel room. It was right around dinnertime. He had a little cooler in the room, and he offered me a sandwich. No red flags went off. He just seemed so normal, and took one of the sandwiches for himself and started eating it. I thought, why not? I was so hungry, and it was a free meal, why pass it up?”
Christopher fell silent for a long time before beginning again, his voice quiet and level. “To this day, I have no idea what he used to drug me. I couldn’t taste anything odd about that sandwich. Once I was unconscious, the man raped me and beat me almost to death, then left my body in a dumpster, presumably to die. It didn’t quite work out as he’d hoped. I somehow survived. And when I got out of the hospital, I stopped working the streets and went to work for the escort service.”
“Did the police catch him?” My voice was a ragged whisper.
“No. I doubt they looked very hard. I mean, what’s one raped and beaten prostitute?”
“Oh God,” I whispered.
He went on, “That’s when I stopped eating. Food started to freak me out. I’d try to eat something and I’d just start gagging, I couldn’t make myself swallow anything. Eventually, I stumbled upon those crackers by chance, and found that for some reason, I could tolerate them. They don’t trigger my gag reflex, so I can actually swallow them. I don’t know why.”
Christopher sighed and sat up, looking down at me. “So that’s the long, pathetic story of my food phobia. In short, I’m a fucking mess. But I’m managing to survive, managing not to starve myself to death. And for right now…well, for right now that’s all I’m really shooting for.”
I sat up and tried to hug him, totally overcome with emotion, but he stopped me with a raised palm. “Don’t be nice to me right now, Charlie. If you do, I’m just going to start crying. And that’s something I generally avoid at all costs.”
We both lay back down, staring up at the ceiling in the semi-darkness. After a long time like that, Christopher rolled over so he was facing me and slid close and rested his head on my chest. Wordlessly, I put my free arm around him and held him until he fell asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
Lunchtime at Nolan’s was apparently starting to catch on. The next day at work, I’d been going nonstop for a couple
hours and was right in the middle of the dining room, juggling an armload of dirty plates, when my cell phone rang. “Want me to get that for you?” Christopher asked.
“Yeah, it might be important. Mrs. Dombruso might need something.”
Christopher fished the phone out of my pocket and showed me Dante’s name on the screen before hitting the speaker phone icon and holding it up to me. “Hi, Dante!” I said cheerfully.
Dante’s weak, shaking voice sent a jolt of panic through me. “Charlie,” he whispered. “My angel. I’m so sorry.”
“Dante, what’s wrong? And why are you apologizing?”
“I’m so sorry I broke up with you, Charlie. I wanted to be with you more than anything. But I thought it was for your own good.” I heard him shift slightly and gasp in pain.
Fear slammed into me so hard that I couldn’t draw a breath. “Dante, what’s happened?”
He spoke slowly, in short, choppy sentences. “I got him. I got the man that killed my family. But he got me, too. He shot me. I’m not gonna survive this.”
“Where are you? Are there people around? Can you get help?” I was vaguely aware of someone taking the dishes from me, and I grabbed the phone from Christopher.
“No one’s here. I’m all alone.” His breathing was becoming labored, and I clutched the phone with both hands. I barely noticed as Christopher reached up and did something to the manacle, releasing it from my wrist. “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you that I love you, Charlie. I need you to know that. I love you so much.”
“I love you too Dante, and I can’t lose you! You have to get help!” My body shook as Christopher hugged me tightly.
“You love me?” His voice was barely a whisper.
“Yes. God I love you.”
“Oh angel.”
“Dante, you have to hang up and dial nine-one-one. Or whatever nine-one-one is in Sicily. You have to do that now!”
He sounded so young as he said, “I don’t want to die alone. Please Charlie, stay on the phone with me. I want to hear your voice. Every moment that I have left, I need it to be with you.”