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On the other hand, the fact that I can get it up at all is encouraging. It’s hard to be too mad at her. While her motives are questionable, she deserves to get laid. Fuck, now I feel bad she didn’t finish. I scrub my face with my hands, trying to rub the residual sleepiness away. What the fuck ever. Add it to the list of all the ways I’ve fucked up.
I get out of bed, find a clean pair of underwear, and take a few minutes in the bathroom to clean up, piss, and brush my teeth.
Jericho’s still naked on the bed, vaping, when I leave my room to see what Christian wants.
My roommate is on his bed, which doubles as the couch when we have company. I shouldn’t say his bed, really. The sleeping arrangements in our two-bedroom apartment are flexible depending on who needs one of the bedrooms since there are four of us living here. Me, Christian, Silas, and Eric. Eric is the only one who isn’t a doorman on the Upper East Side. He’s a bartender at a restaurant up there where the rest of us sometimes meet up for drinks. That’s how we met him. He’s the college boy, working on his master’s at Columbia.
I check the time. It’s four in the afternoon, which means I slept enough, though not as much as I would have wanted to.
Working nights was cool at first. I thought I’d have plenty of time to go to go-sees during the day. But I quickly learned that doing full-time nights requires way more sleep than a day job. I’ve been late for appointments more times than I can count due to oversleeping, and my reputation in the modeling world is shit. My original good agency dropped me two years ago. I managed to sign with a new one, but it’s huge and I’ve gotten lost in the shuffle of newer, fresher faces.
All this to say my circadian rhythms are jacked. I’m tired all the time. I have trouble stringing thoughts together, and since it’s winter, I barely ever see daylight, which doesn’t help my depression at all. “What’s up?” I ask Chris as I head for the Keurig.
“Oh, hey. Bad news.”
“Perfect,” I mumble. I don’t even bother to brace myself. My life lately is the equivalent of being in front of a firing squad. Why resist? It’s going to end badly no matter what.
“Eric’s moving out.”
I pause, pod in hand, and turn to look at him while he stares over his shoulder at me from the couch. Christian is a quiet guy, a poet. He’s tall and blonde with a cleft chin and deep-set blue eyes. He’s bisexual, which I only mention because it’s one of the first things he tells people about himself. He’s shy and socially awkward, with no clue how beautiful he is. He’s got one of those faces that shouldn’t work but does. As a model always sizing up the competition, I notice things like that.
But what he just told me is not only bad, it’s disastrous.
“When?”
“Like this week, but he paid up through February.”
“Fuck.”
No, but seriously—FUCK.
Here’s the thing—I have this one sister—she’s not my only sister, but she’s the oldest of my sisters—Peggy—and she’s a bitch. A snide, bitter little bitch who married her high school boyfriend, the one who knocked her up at eighteen, and she hasn’t been in a good mood since. She’s an emergency room nurse who works in the city, but commutes from Connecticut where she lives with her husband and three kids. And for some reason, she hates the fuck out of me.
My parents aren’t old—early sixties, but my dad had a quadruple bypass last year. Peggy decided it was her problem, and she’s bitter beyond belief about it. To be clear, my dad’s doing fine. He’s graduated from cardiac rehab, and he’s taking care of himself, but according to Peggy—that’s only because she’s making sure of it.
My three other younger sisters all live in the same town as my parents, where I grew up. Hell, my youngest sister still lives with them, but Peggy drags her ass from Connecticut to New Hampshire on all her days off to make sure my dad’s drinking his fucking V-8 or whatever.
Like it’s all on her.
And I’m the scapegoat for her self-imposed burden.
She’s succeeded in making me feel guilty, by the way. So guilty, in fact, that a few months ago, I took out a loan to finance a bathroom remodel to make it more “Dad-accessible” even though he’s fucking fine. However, while Peggy is momentarily appeased, I am in severe debt, living paycheck to paycheck just like my parents always did. I’m also no closer to breaking through in modeling than I was when I first showed up in New York with my shiny young face and inkless skin. Back then I was considered too “boy-next-door.”
Long story short, I can’t fucking win, and I cannot afford to lose a roommate. My job pays well enough—I can feed myself and have the occasional night out, but I absolutely can’t spare another dime without risking defaulting on the loan.
“You know anybody wanting to rent a room?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level.
Christian snorts. “What room? You think anybody’s gonna wanna rotate beds like we do? Hey—at least this way no one has to share a bed.”
“I don’t mind sharing,” I mumble. “If that’s what it takes.”
“It’s just an extra five hundred a month,” Chris says.
I turn my back on him, my stomach sick as I pop the pod into the coffeemaker.
Forgetting the mug entirely, I make a huge mess until I scramble to find a container to catch the remainder of the boiling hot liquid now dripping onto the floor. Jericho comes to my rescue, wearing red panties and one of my t-shirts. She grabs a dirty dish towel and cleans up the mess I made while I rub my face and try to think.
She’s a great girlfriend. The best, really. I wonder, not for the first time, why she’s wasting her time with me when she could have anyone she wants. Growing overwhelmed and too exhausted to explain, I excuse myself from the kitchen to get ready for work.
