The Experiment Continues
Justin
Last night was amazing. Well, the whole of the last week’s been pretty amazing, but last night felt really special. Like Brian was really trying to tell me something. It was hot, sex with Brian is always hot, but it was tender, too. Like we really connected. It’s happened before, or at least it’s felt that way, and then afterwards Brian would just roll over and go to sleep. Sometimes, if I was lucky, he’d fall asleep before he rolled over, and I’d get to drift off with my head on his shoulder, or his chest. But last night… last night it was him who snuggled up close to me and put his head on my chest and let me hold him. He never does that, and it felt … it felt good. It’s just ironic that it happened when it did; just when his “experiment” with not tricking was coming to an end, I mean.
Not that I’m complaining about how things are with Brian this time round. I meant what I said to him in his office. I do know what to expect from him, and I am absolutely okay with it. I don’t mind about the tricks or the orgies or the fact that he just doesn’t want to see himself as being in a relationship. I no longer take that personally or see it as meaning that I’m not enough or that he’s ashamed to be with me. I understand him a lot better now.
God only knows what possessed him to try out his experiment. In some ways I’d like to think it’s a sign that maybe he’s ready to start slowing down a little with the tricking, but that’s the way to drive myself crazy. It’s not like he’s suddenly going to jump into a “committed” relationship. He’d have himself committed first. And anyway, it’s not all that important. Not really. It’s not what has been most important to me these last few days.
What I do want to keep from the last week is the way we talked to each other about stuff … about hopes and dreams and how we’re going to handle the mess things are in at the moment. That’s what made the last week really special. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the sex was especially hot. The non-tricking itself was just icing on the cake.
But that doesn’t mean that after having him all to myself for a week, it’s not going to be hard to take when he goes off to the Baths or Babylon tonight and starts making up for everything he’s been missing out on while he was experimenting.
This morning we fucked in the shower, and I think Brian wanted me to stay, but I had to get going. I’d promised Daph that I would at least drop in today sometime, and I’ve promised Brian that I’ll contact Senator Baxter. I feel dumb about doing that. I don’t know what Brian thinks it can achieve. But he says that if PIFA are wavering and feeling a bit dumb post-election that maybe a gentle push is all they need to see the sense in letting me back in.
I wouldn’t bother except that there were a couple of subjects I was doing this semester that I felt were really helping me, ones where I really felt I was learning something useful to me, and given that unless some sort of miracle happens, this will be the last semester I’ll be able to attend – well, I just want to make the most of it. Not waste Brian’s money.
He’s insisting that it will be alright, talking about me going back as if the money for next semester will be there. But that’s not really likely right now. And I know that Brian knows that and feels bad, and that it’s going to be worse come next semester when we don’t have the money for the fees. But if I can at least get back in this semester, it might make it easier to defer for a year or so, and then go back when I’ve earned some money and can pay the fees myself. Maybe even part time if I can get a decent job in the meantime. But if I let them carry on as if my suspension’s permanent, then that won’t happen.
Shit! Damn! Fuck! All these homophobic arseholes who
are intent on taking away from me even the right to an education –
Brian
I was hoping he’d stay around this morning, but he insisted he had to get over to Daph’s and get some clean clothes. Hell! he could start leaving some things at least here so that he wouldn’t have to keep heading off just when …
It’s not like we have a car, even. He has to take the damn bus and it all takes so fucking long. It’s such a lot of fucking about. I don’t know why he doesn’t just move back in. Well, I haven’t exactly asked him, I guess, but …
I guess I’m scared that he’d say no. I think he would. Damn! I know he would. And I don’t want to hear that. Things are good right now. He’s probably right not to want us to fuck it up. Okay, well, me to fuck it up. Although last time around I had help. If he’d just been half as up front with me then as he’s prepared to be now … Well, that’s all shit anyway. It’s over. Been. Gone. Now is now. And now is pretty good.
I haven’t told him yet about extending the experiment. I guess I should. Or not. I just don’t know. I don’t even know why I’m doing it. Hell! I don’t know why I started it, let alone why I want to keep going.
That’s the really scary thing. I want to keep going. He’s not putting any pressure on me. Fuck! He doesn’t even seem to care. I care. I want to … I want to keep things the way they’ve been this last week. I want him here with me, and I want to be here with him, and I want … I want to go out with him, and know that we’ll be coming home together and that when we get back here we’ll fall into bed together and …
Well, that’s it then, isn’t it? Brian Kinney, official dickless fag. Dyke of the Year Award coming up. Hell, I might as well join the G.L.C.
Except, fuck that. No one knows. No one has to know. And it’s none of their goddam fucking business anyway.
Justin’s the only one whose opinion is worth shit, and he’s okay with it. Okay with however it goes. So it’s just up to me, right? I can do whatever the hell I like.
And if I decide that what I want to do is to see if I can go without tricking for, say, a month, then no one else’s candy-assed opinion is going to change my mind.
I just hope Justin heard what I was telling him last night. About how special it was. How special he is. How special we are, together.
Justin
Well, I called Senator Baxter’s office. She was in a meeting, or at a function or something, and I didn’t really want to “explain my problem briefly” to the voice on the phone, so I just left a message that I called. She’s so not going to remember who I am and if she does, she’ll probably think that I want something. Fancy that! Still at least I can tell Brian I called. I left the loft number and my cellphone.
I wanted to get rid of the phone - I don’t really need it. Brian will need his when he starts job hunting in earnest, but I could do without. But he talked me into keeping it. He says that if I’m traveling everywhere by public transport, he at least wants to know he can call me. What he means is, he wants to know I can call if there’s any trouble, but he doesn’t say that. We compromised. We both switched to a plan where you pay a really low monthly rate, but high for calls that you make. That way, as long as we don’t actually use it except in emergencies, we can still afford to be contactable.
The internet connection, however, goes at the end of this month. That will kill Brian. No more order-on-line sex partners. More importantly, he won’t be able to do the sort of research he’s been doing into possible job leads unless he goes down to the library or something.
Well, maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe one of us will find something that pays enough to at least keep food on the table and the internet connected.
I dropped in at Deb’s on the way back to the loft. Mainly to see Vic. I haven’t seen a lot of him since he started all the catering for Emmett’s business, but he said he’d be around today. We talked for a while and then Deb got back from the early shift at the diner and loaded me up with left overs out of her fridge. Two different types of pasta, and some cheesecake that’s a new recipe Vic was trying out.
Which means that at least we’ll get lunch. I’m joking, but it is a bit scary. At least with the money I get from the diner I can afford to pay my share of stuff at Daph’s, and still have some left for food, and the occasional night out.
Brian is supposed to be talking to someone today about some investments and stuff that he’s got. Now that Mikey’s back, he’s going to sell the corvette. And with the other stuff he sold, and the investments, that will get the debt down to manageable proportions. If he could just get a job, then he could mortgage the loft, or get a personal loan for the rest. It’s having it on those damned high interest credit cards that’s a killer.
Of course, the thing about Mikey being back is that now he and Ben need money to pay for some hot shot lawyer who Ben went to see while Michael was hiding out with Hunter. Of course, they could have talked to Mel, but Michael went apeshit about putting her under any stress because of the baby.
Laying stress on Brian by making him feel guilty about taking back his car so that he can sell it to clear some of the debt he incurred trying to save all our asses seems to be okay. Not to mention letting him feel bad that he’s not in a position to just pay for the damned lawyer. I was kind of hoping they’d throw dear Mikey’s ass in jail for a while. Well, okay, not really, but something. But all three of them (Michael, Ben and Hunter) just insisted that Hunter had run off when he’d heard his mother wanted him back and Michael had gone after him and had just taken a while to persuade him to come home. Like neither of them knew that his mother had involved the police. So that sort of went away.
Then the lawyer managed to get an injunction to stop Hunter’s mother taking the kid. And, amazingly, they’re even letting him stay with Michael and Ben while it gets sorted out. Provided that he stays in school and has a curfew, which he hasn’t stopped griping about. But I think he got a really big scare and he seems to be keeping to the deal. He knows when he’s on a good thing, and, apart from his so called mother, he doesn’t want to go back into the system, or wind up back on the streets. Brian says they’re only letting him stay there cos no one gives a shit, let alone wants to deal with a diseased gay kid. He might even be right. But if it’s discrimination at least it’s worked for once to get a good outcome.
Now if we can just get the money thing sorted, and preferably Brian into a decent job, then we’ll all have come out of this okay.
Brian
It’s fucking typical, that just when you need Ted, he’s in fucking rehab. Talking to some stranger about all the shit that’s gone on in the last few weeks was … well, it wasn’t pleasant, boys and girls.
He seems to think that I’d have a show of suing Vance over the way my contract was terminated. Seems that the clause in the contract relating to “behavior likely to bring the practice into disrepute” can’t be applied to political activities as long as they aren’t seditious. And no one would be game enough to argue that sticking up posters attacking someone with a reputation as shaky as Stockwell’s currently is, was seditious - freedom of expression, guaranteed under the constitution and all that. He says I should seek legal advice.
So I’ll have to consider that carefully. It might be worth it. It might just add major legal fees to the debt I’ve already got.
I could talk to Mel … Jesus! There’s an option! Fuck!
I’ll talk to Justin about it first. See what he thinks.
Which is another argument for having Justin around as much as possible that has nothing to do with his other attractions, many and various as they may be: he can actually think.
I know there are people (the list is probably headed by Deb, or Mel, but there’d be a fair few names on it) who believe that I only think with my dick. And I guess to some extent they’d be right. But maybe they believe that because I don’t waste a lot of time talking to them about stuff that they just wouldn’t get.
Justin gets it. I can talk to him about anything, because he’s as smart as he is sexy. Hell, it’s one of the things that makes him so sexy. I knew that the first night. I mean he babbled like a total twat when he first came into the loft, but that was just nerves. I didn’t have to be any sort of genius to figure out that he had more brains than most of the people I know put together. Just the fact that he was ready to stop me and insist on a condom told me he was smart.
Of course, by the time we got to the “1500 on my SATs speech” I really knew it. If I hadn’t, the way he sprung me over the news that he’d applied to out of state colleges would have laid it out for me in spades. Too damn smart for his own good, was the way I looked at it then. Too smart for my peace of mind is what I meant.
Now, I’m glad that he’s smart enough to see through me, most of the time. And stupid enough to keep coming back for more. Or not so stupid. Things have been better this time. For him, too, I hope.
Anyway, that’s not the only thing that we have to talk about.
Senator Baxter’s office called. They wanted to set up an appointment for him. Apparently the senator remembers him very well (damn right she does, it got her face on tv and in the papers) and she’d love to meet with him. He should call back and set a time.
Then there’s the money stuff. Seems things aren’t quite as bad as I thought. With the money from the “grand clearance sale”, and what I should get from the sale of the corvette, and the fact that I have full equity in the loft, the guy I saw today thinks I should be able to combine all the debt into one loan. I didn’t think I’d have a hope in hell of getting a loan while I’m currently unemployed, but he says all I have to do is become self employed. He reckons with my business record (the Stockwell incident aside), if I can sign just one decent client, then I won’t have any trouble in securing a loan to cover the whole hundred grand, and then some. So I could use that to pay off the cards, and use the rest of my capital to finance a small business.
It sounds crazy to me, but he talked about the tax breaks I could get from the government, who are keen to help develop businesses in Pitts, and from using the loft as my office. My head is spinning. He says that if I employ even one other person, that I get all sorts of subsidies, and if I offer a student an internship, I can get all sorts of others.
He’s checking out all the details for me, and I’ve got everything he said written down to go over with Justin.
Hell! yesterday I was on the scrapheap, and now I could be starting my own business. It’s crazy. But maybe …
And then I got home and there was a call from someone
I never thought I’d hear from again - Adam Lyons from that fucking firm
in
He quoted an hourly rate that I could hardly believe. Okay, it’s not what I was pulling in at Vanguard, but it sure as hell will keep the wolf from the door. And the real beauty of it is that precisely because I don’t get name credit means that I don’t have to deal with any of the clients. So I can do it all from here. They’ll send me the stuff, and I’ll just work on it and send it back. I guess we’ll have to keep the internet connection, but at least we’ll be able to pay for it.
Jesus! I wish Justin would get back.
Justin
Well, I got back to the loft with our left over lunch, and Brian was on the phone. He was talking to Michael. Of course. It sounded like they’d just started, so I put the stuff in the oven to heat, rather than the microwave. As long as you cover it properly, it’s a better way to reheat pasta cos the microwave makes it go a bit slimy.
But Brian hung up practically straight away. I looked at him a bit surprised, and he handed me the phone.
“You have to call the senator’s office. They want you to make an appointment to see her.”
Then he walked up into the bathroom.
I called the number, and they put me through to her. I’d sort of expected her secretary to make the appointment, so I was a bit rattled. I hadn’t had time to think about what I was going to say.
She was really nice. I know Brian says you can never trust politicians, and all that. But I do like her. I mean, I know that she’s likely to want to make political mileage out of stuff, but at least it’s the right mileage, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, she asked how I was going, and all that. I told her that there was a bit of a problem about PIFA and that I’d like the chance to talk to her about it, to get her advice. But then I got a real shock, because she already knew. Not just that I’d been suspended, but why. She said she’d just found out, because was involved in a senate hearing in Philadelphia over the election period and was a bit out of the loop, but that she’d really like the chance to talk to me about what happened. She even knew about Brian’s involvement. Not about the ad, I don’t think, but about him losing his job at Vanguard.
We talked for a couple of minutes about Stockwell, and she said that Pittsburgh had had a really lucky escape and that they should all be thanking whoever had put that ad on the air.
So I told her who did. I’m not sure that Brian won’t be pissed at me about that. Not a lot of people know, and he’s certainly not going around bragging about it, but I figured if she only knew half the story, she might think Brian was a total sell out. I needed her to know what he’s really like.
He came back then, so it was a good thing that I’d already got past that bit, and moved on to me needing to try to get PIFA to change their minds.
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say, but it wasn’t “I’d really like it if you and Brian could join me for dinner one night, Justin. I have tonight free. Or next Monday. Would one of those suit you?”
I could only stammer at her. Brian gave me the weirdest look, so I excused myself, and put my hand over the phone and said “She wants to have dinner with us!”
I’m sure my voice squeaked. I was so surprised. I was even more surprised when Brian just shrugged and said, “Sure. Why not?”
“Tonight?” As soon as I said it, I wanted to bite my tongue off. Of course he wasn’t going to want to have dinner with some straight female senator tonight, he was going to be out on the prowl. So I nearly fell over when he said, really calm, really casual. “Okay. Where and when?”
I sorted that out with the Senator and arranged to meet her at the Grand Concourse. More than a bit old fashioned and conservative, but the food’s okay. A good choice for dinner I suppose if you’re a senator having dinner with two gay guys. Sort of lends a feeling of respectability at least, till you see if there is any mileage in it. God! I’m getting as cynical as Brian.
Then I went over to the guy who was standing Brian’s loft, wearing Brian’s clothes and demanded, “Okay, who are you?’
He gave a funny sort of grin and hooked his elbow round my neck and dragged me close enough to kiss. Which he did. Thoroughly.
Then he pressed his forehead against mine. I slipped my arms around his waist, and he draped his over and loosely around my shoulders and sighed.
“I’m glad you’re home.”
I felt my breath catch in my throat. I didn’t know what to do or to say. I just tightened my grip a little because it felt so damned good to hear him say that. Even if it wasn’t absolutely true. I have no intention of moving back in right now. But in another way, it is my home. If home is where the heart is then it is absolutely my home as long as he’s in it, and to hear him acknowledge that …
I had to kiss him again quickly so that he wouldn’t get a chance to see the tears I felt stinging my eyes. Shit! I thought I’d gotten past this. Past the point where him saying things like that mattered so much to me.
So I kissed him and that took a while, long enough for my damned eyes to stop leaking anyway. But then he took my face in his hands and, looking down at me with this weird expression on his face, he brushed away the traces of the tears with his thumbs. Then he smiled a strange little smile and said, out of nowhere, “The experiment’s still on, you know.”
Brian
I hadn’t meant to say that. Hadn’t meant to tell him. But he was standing there looking so … so like he used to look, sometimes, when I’d done or said some stupid thing that he took to mean …
Okay, yeah, I’d say something like that, and he’d take it to mean that he meant something to me, that I had some place in his life, and then I’d freak out and say something cutting, or do something deliberately cruel just to let him know he was wrong. He wasn’t wrong, of course. But I had to make him believe he was. Make him believe he meant nothing.
By the end, by the time the fiddler came along, when I said something like that, he’d even stopped hoping it meant something, he’d just get this look in his eyes … fear, that was the look. He was afraid of what he knew was coming next.
And when I looked into his eyes today, it was there again. Just a trace, but enough. And I couldn’t bear it.
So this time I said something that maybe told him that it’s not like before. I hope so. I hope that’s what he heard. I hope that’s what he wanted to hear.
I think it was. I think he heard me, and I think it made a difference.
He smiled, anyway, and hugged me just a little.
Then he let go and turned away to go and get the plates out for lunch, and I was left following him into the kitchen.
“So what did the Senator have to say?” I’m not sure I was all that interested, but it was as good a subject as any to give us both time to get back our balance.
He scrunched his nose up the way he does when he’s really thinking hard about something that’s confusing him.
“She already knew about me being suspended.”
“Yeah?” For a moment I was surprised, then I shrugged. “Well, I guess when you called she might have got her staff to do some sort of check.”
“I guess. Anyway, we talked a bit about what had happened.”
He stopped and I knew there was more.
“She knew about you and what happened at Vanguard too.”
“Uh -huh.” For some reason I felt something else coming.
“And she mentioned the ad.”
No need to say which ad. Around here lately there’s only one ad. The Ad. The one that I just had to do, couldn’t just let go, couldn’t stand back and just say well, I tried. I had to throw everything, including Justin’s future, into that ad.
No regrets, I know. But maybe I can allow myself just that one. That it might be because of me that Justin has to give up his dream.
No. No. That’s not going to happen. As long as we can get him get accepted back in then I have till next semester to sort things out. And after today, that’s looking a lot more likely. I realise that I have all that still to share with him, and can’t help smiling and reaching for him again.
He holds me off a little and I can feel it coming. Whatever it is he’s worried about telling me, it’s about to come out.
“I told her you’d done it. All of it. How much it cost. What you had to sell. All of it.”
And I am pissed off with him. A bit.
But this isn’t the boy Justin who would have done the same thing but would have stood there all defiant waiting for me to cut him down, and then argued my ear off about it. This is Justin now. And he’s standing there waiting to hear what I have to say about it, but he’s not going to argue and he’s not going to back down. He’s just letting me know how it is.
Meeting those blue eyes, looking at me so earnestly from under the mop he calls a hair cut, suddenly my pride in him takes over and I can only grin at him like a fool and reach for him again.
This time he plasters himself against me and then his tongue’s stroking mine and I gladly forget all about the Senator and PIFA and everything except the reality of him, here, and as hungry for me as I am for him. I lift him, and his legs twine around my waist. Somehow we make it to the pile of cushions on the floor and it’s a good thing that he turned off the oven, because it’s quite a while before we even think about lunch.
Justin
I can not believe he said that.
Well, I can’t believe that he’s doing it at all - extending the experiment, I mean. Or that he told me that he’s doing it. But that he said it then …
I guess subconsciously I was waiting to get shot down in flames after the “glad you’re home” line. Because that’s what always used to happen. Always.
Just escaping that would have told me how much things have changed between us. But to have him offer even more … And that’s what he was doing. He did it deliberately. To make sure I knew that things have changed. That something in him has changed …
While I was trying to get my head around that, he asked me about the Senator. I told him what she’d said, that she knew about most of it already. I half expected him to throw a Kinney fit when I told him I’d spilled to her all about the ad. But the other half of me expected him to do exactly what he did, smile at me and pull me back into his arms. And that did it.
I just threw myself on him. Suddenly I didn’t want any more words. I just wanted him. Wanted to feel him against me. Over me. Inside me.
Holding me. Fucking me. Loving me.
I wanted to tell him how much I love him. So I did. In the way that we communicate best. Not just with words tripping off our tongues, but with our whole bodies. Every part of us touching, loving, joined.
Afterwards we just lay there, our sides touching all the way from our shoulders, down our arms, then from our thighs down to our heels, our fingers tangled together somewhere in the middle.
Then my stomach rumbled and he laughed and smacked my thigh. “Up and fetch me lunch, wench!”
I got up and wiggled my ass at him. “Who are you calling a wench?”
He came up behind me and snaked a hand down round my hip to stroke my cock. “Mmm, my mistake,” he purred using the deep sexy voice I love. I smacked his hand away though, and put the pasta in the microwave. We’ll just have to put up with the sliminess. If I put it back in the oven to heat, we’ll wind up getting distracted again and it will probably burn.
Once I’ve turned it on I manage to get past him to get my clothes. He just laughs and starts pulling his jeans on.
He seems so relaxed, I can hardly believe it. Things must have gone okay with the investment guy this morning.
I’d really like to know, but I don’t ask. If he wants me to know, he’ll tell me. Otherwise it’s not really my business. I try not to be like Michael, thinking he should tell me everything. I used to be like that, and between us we must have just about driven Brian crazy. No wonder he lashed out occasionally and tried to set some boundaries. Michael doesn’t seem to recognise any boundaries at all where Brian is concerned. Hell! even Deb doesn’t. And Brian of all people needs his privacy. I try now not to be so clingy and needy.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t care. Or that I’m not really happy when he says as soon as we sit down on the couch to eat, “Aside from the Senator’s call, there’s some other things I have to tell you about from this morning.”
He opens one of the bottles of vintage wine out of his “cellar” so I know the news must be good, and starts telling me all about what the investment guy had said. By the time he finishes we’re well into Deb’s pasta. And then he tells me about Adam Lyons’ call. I’m a little less pleased about that, because I’m pretty sure that Brian fucked him at least once, and I’ll bet that this Adam guy wants more. Who wouldn’t?
But we’ll worry about that later. In the meantime, it sounds as if things are looking up.
“So would that count as a job, then?” I ask.
Brian
Shit! He is smart. Because I missed that. I was so busy thinking that it was a really big risk to take on more debt on the strength of trying to start my own business, when he comes along with the obvious. It could count as a job, especially if I could get Adam to maybe put something in writing to indicate that there’d be regular income. And then I could use most of the sales money, including what I get for the car, to pay off most of the debt, and only have to borrow enough to finish paying off the cards. I probably wouldn’t even have to touch the investment money - which would be great. If nothing else, it would mean that was available for Justin’s tuition, if we need it.
So we eat our way through two lots of pasta discussing all the pros and cons of everything. Thank God my gym membership is paid up till the end of the year. I’ll have to spend some time there tomorrow, or by the time I get a fucking job I’ll have to buy a whole new wardrobe cos nothing will fit me any more.
In some ways I’d love to just say fuck it all and have a go at my own business. But this is not the time. Not until all the hoohah about the Stockwell thing has died down. And it’s not like I’d have to think of this offer of Adam’s as my new job. But it would give me breathing space to wait it out until the right job comes along.
And by the sound of the conversation that Justin had with the Senator, she may well be willing and able to help him with the PIFA situation. Hell, yes, now I come to think of it she must be, because otherwise there’s no way that she’d be inviting us to dinner. If she wasn’t ready to do something it would be all, “sorry but the senator’s very busy this week, perhaps if you send her a letter”, not personal phone calls and a dinner invitation.
I share that insight with Justin and he nods. I know that he prefers not to think about people, especially ones he likes, in those terms, but he needs to sometimes. Needs to be aware that everyone has their own agendas.
Then he surprises me.
“You’re right. I did think that. Actually, I’ve been trying to work out what she wants.”
I raise an eyebrow at him, reminded yet again that he’s no longer anybody’s little twink.
“Well, she could have just talked to me on the phone. Or got me to come into her office. It seemed to me …”
He broke off then, and looked at me with a bit of a frown, like he was trying to remember exactly what she’d said, and how he’d heard it at the time.
“I think that she wanted, really wanted, you to be there. She wants to talk to you.”
I look at him consideringly. Maybe I’m just making him paranoid. Maybe she was free for dinner and just felt like some pleasant company. And had to invite me to get him to agree to go.
Or maybe not. Justin’s smart and I need to listen and think about what he’s saying.
Then I shrug.
“Well,” I tell him, “either way we get a free meal.”
And his eyes sparkle amused mischief at me and I can hear something about “no such thing as a free …” without him saying a word.