Then I stiffen up all over again, flinching hard and then freezing solid, as Young-gi leans into my space. Into my space and then practically ontop of me, as he takes the seatbelt and pulls it across my body for me, clicking me in. The snap of it locking into place shouldn’t make my dick twitch, but it does.
Goddamn, what the fuck even ARE my kinks?!
I swallow hard and barely breathe while Young-gi alternates between working on his phone and staring at me. And, oddly enough, instead of being relieved during those times his eyes are on his phone, I’m kind of…
Kind of…
Antsy? Restless? A mix of things. Horny, disappointed, waiting for his stare again.
This isn’t like me. I don’t get all hung up on some guy’s attention and care, on his opinion of me and the way he treats me. I don’t.
************
Young-gi’s office is shiny and big, but at this point, I expect nothing less. We get a huge swath of some upper floor all to ourselves, and he has Yosef grab a table from somewhere and bring it into the room, with a chair, so I can sit down while Young-gi sits at his desk.
But I don’t sit there yet, because I’m too busy investigating every corner of this office. He’s got a conference room and a waiting room and a storage closet up here, too, all empty and waiting for him to use. But the main attraction is the wall of windows that his desk faces; the panoramic view of the city is unreal. I can see Central Park from here!
I look over my shoulder and see that Young-gi is sitting at his desk, documents and his laptop in front of him, but his eyes are on me. His intense stare and the predatory stillness of himreminds me of the first time I met him. The first time I realized the rumors about him were probably true.
“You ever kill anybody in here?” I ask, trotting back over to the desk to press my hands against it and lean over it, facing him down from across the tabletop. I become immediately aware that if this is my version of flirting, then firstly it’s abysmal and secondly I shouldn’t be doing it with him. But I just can’t seem to stop myself.
He raises one of those silently eloquent eyebrows at me and I roll my eyes, annoyed that I think even his eyebrows are sexy.
“You everfuckanybody in here?” I ask teasingly, looking around for good spots. I grin and pat the desk underneath my palms. “This is sturdy enough, I’d think. And that conference room table was the right height. You could have all kinds of fun in here.”
“Are you trying to be provocative or are you just bored and rambling?” He leans elegantly on one fist, the other hand drumming a single finger on the desktop in a lazy, unhurried rhythm. “Do you need something to do while you sit? A coloring book, maybe?”
I huff at him, then pause. Narrow-eyed and annoyed, I concede. “I know you’re being a dick and implying that I’m acting childish, but yeah, I’d like something to do. Not a coloring book. But I like to draw, so maybe pens. Paper. A book. Just not nothing.”
“Yosef,” he says immediately, flicking his eyes over my shoulder to the sentry at the door. “Pens and paper. And a puzzle or something similar. Quickly.”
Yosef hustles out the door and I lean back and straighten up, a little startled. “You’re really getting me stuff to do?”
“You asked. Did you expect me to say no?”
“...Maybe?” I shrug. “I don’t know, I figured you’d tell me to stop whining and to get out of your face or something.”
And that would’ve made sense. It would’ve been expected, understandable, and commonplace. I would feel a lot more comfortable and steady if he just… If he just stops acting like I matter. Because I don’t, not to him or to anyone, and he needs to stop being weird about everything because it’s confusing me.
He hums thoughtfully. “Why would I set you up to fail, Tommy? If you tell me that you need help sitting still, if you tell me you need helpbeing good–” he emphasizes that, and I squirm, wondering if maybehe’sthe one flirting now, but of course he isn’t, that would be ridiculous, “--then I’ll help you. There’s no… no honesty, no trust, in telling you to behave only to set you up for failure. That’s not how it’s going to be between us.”
“Trust?” I balk, both verbally and physically, going back to the windows for some space. “We don’t need trust. This is a business arrangement. A deal. That’s it.”
“As someone who is intimately familiar with business arrangements, I’ll have to disagree. Trust is necessary for a solid deal.”
For some reason, his words have my hackles raising, and I feel my temper rising. He’s being stupid. Young-gi is too smart to believe such bullshit, so he’s just… What, making fun of me? Lying to me? Maybe he thinks I’m an idiot, and he can just be a blatant liar and I wouldn’t know. But he’s wrong. I know the truth.
“We don’t trust each other.” I deny his words and stare at the ant-sized cars below me. He’s watching me, I can feel it between my shoulder blades, but I don’t look. “That’s stupid. We’re nothing to each other. I’m gonna be long gone before you know it, and we’ll both move on and forget each other. No trust needed. I’ve dealt with plenty of people and didn’t trust them as far as I could throw them, but I still got what I needed from them, and they got what they wanted from me. Stop bullshittingme. Trust has nothing to do with business. People just use each other, trade one thing for another, and that’s all there is to it.”
His silences are always heavy, always full of pressure and meaning, and this one is no different. I fist my hands at my sides and finally whirl to glare at him. He looks… thoughtful. Like he’s trying to puzzle something out. And suddenly I realize that heknowsabout my time as a prostitute, heknowsbecause Joshy just outed me, and I just made some vague statements about my time as a whore, and heknows.
I hadn’t meant to bare my soul like that, to evenimplythat I have any kind of baggage about it, but he draws these things out of me without even trying and that pisses me off.
“What?” I grit my teeth. “Spit it out. Say what you want to say.”
My tone is combative, but instead of snapping at me or lashing out, he just settles in his chair and beckons me closer. “Come here, Tommy.”
“Fuck you.”
