“Oh my God, man. How much money have you given to the hooker?” he asked, enunciating each word.
“Just the twenty for the scotch because he was bartending.”
“You’re telling me you’ve spent three nights with a sex worker, and you haven’t touched him or paid him for his company?”
“Precisely.” Jensen didn’t understand why it took Wyatt so long to get on the same page.
“Like pulling teeth sometimes,” Wyatt said under his breath, and Jensen couldn’t agree more. “Honestly, yeah, it is a bit weird.”
Disappointment slugged him in the gut as he frowned down at his shoes. He liked spending time with Daniel. Their conversations made him happy, which was a rare occurrence. Instead of him feeling anxious at the prospect that they might talk again that night, anxiety had riddled him at the thought that Daniel might not be working. He was worried they wouldn’t see each other again before he checked out. But if Wyatt said it was weird, Daniel could think so as well. Jensen didn’t want to make the man uncomfortable. He certainly didn’t want to embarrass himself by being the idiot that couldn’t take a hint. Daniel probably had men fawning over him all the time. And maybe that was all Jensen was. Another man pulled in by his beauty that wouldn’t leave him alone. Just the thought had his breakfastchurning in his stomach. Had he imagined the connection they seemed to have?
Jensen shifted his weight and chewed on the inside of his cheek.
“I don’t know much about sex workers, but they’re supposed to charge for their time, right?” Wyatt continued. “It’s really weird that he’s spending all this time with you pro bono. You better check that they aren’t billing it to your room.”
Jensen used the hand holding his takeaway cup to push his glasses up his nose, managing to get a splash of its hot liquid on his cheek. His frown deepened as he wiped the coffee off with the side of his finger. “Do you think it’s sad I’ve sought him out? Do you think he wants me to stop?”
“No, man, I don’t think it’s sad,” Wyatt said softly. “Listen, you’ll never see him after this weekend. Even if it was sad, who cares? I say go for it if it makes you happy. I’m sure he’d tell you if he wanted you to go away.”
“Okay,” he said, feeling a bit better and less shameful about the whole situation. “I should get ready for my speech.”
“Are you nervous?”
Jensen laughed and started walking again. “Why would I be? I don’t care about it. If I do horribly, Mendes won’t force me to give a speech ever again.”
Wyatt laughed with him before wishing him luck and clicking off the call.
It only took a few minutes to make it back into the large entrance hall of the convention center and the loud fray of conversation. With a second, then third check of his emailed itinerary, Jensen wandered through the halls until he happened upon the ballroom where he was set to present. Employees from the venue and the conference were scattered around the room, rearranging chairs, checking sound, and setting up an obnoxiously huge video camera. He’d been made aware thatthe speech would be recorded and uploaded to the conference’s website when he finally gave in and agreed to do it, but he wasn’t exactly excited that it would be immortalized on the internet.
Not that he cared about the speech. He wasn’t lying when he told his assistant he wasn’t nervous about it. Jensen was only doing it because his boss had figuratively forced his hand. Once he was done with his current project and back from Sevier, he would be assigned to something he actually cared about. Mendes wasn’t specific on what the new project would be, but Jensen didn’t want to ask too many questions and ruin it before it began. Or worse, piss his boss off so much that he found himself without employment. While he didn’t particularly enjoy his job designing the newest and most modern office spaces, it did pay for his lifestyle.
But all that didn’t mean he wasn’t anxious about embarrassing himself. Jensen excelled at embarrassing himself. Which was another reason he’d skipped the panel before this one.
In the weeks leading up to this trip, he’d gone through each worst-case scenario, occasionally waking up in the middle of a nightmare to call his mother about a new one. With his luck and track record, he’d have some horrendous Freudian slip in the middle of his speech he couldn’t recover from. Or he might not make it that far before going into an allergy attack and passing out in front of everyone. Sure, he was only allergic to horses and beestings, but stranger things had happened than a spontaneous fatal allergy development. Really, it was a miracle he hadn’t already developed hives under his clothes from just the possibility of what could go wrong.
Jensen blew out a breath and tried to stop his thoughts. Just to be safe, he put his coffee on the nearest surface and popped two antacids out of the blister pack he kept in his pocket for times like these. Chewing the chalky tablets, he picked hiscoffee back up, removed his shoulders from his ears, and looked around the room for someone that didn’t seem too busy.
As kindly as possible, he asked the sound technicians to leave whatever important work they were doing to go through a check with him no less than three times. He then circled the room and stage, sat in several different chairs to get vantage points, and went through his notes of anything that could be seen as humiliating or shameful to the audience.
By the time everyone started filling in the rows of cushioned chairs, Jensen had gone to the bathroom four times to check his hair, teeth, and clothing. He’d also thrown away his coffee before finishing it so the caffeine wouldn’t cause him to be jittery and attempted to wring his bladder out so he didn’t have to run offstage in the middle of his speech.
There was simply nothing more he could do to prepare, and it was best to distract himself until it was time for the panel to start. Usually, he’d space out and think about his current fixation or his job. It was always easy to get lost in his thoughts, but as he sat on a red cushioned chair, they went in a new, but not unwelcome, direction.
What was Daniel doing at the moment? Was he still sleeping? It was only midmorning, and Jensen wasn’t sure what time the bar closed. He’d left at an appropriate hour, with more than enough time to breeze through his nightly routine and sit in bed staring at his phone for an hour before turning off the lights. Given the hotel was a brothel, the bar probably stayed open until the late hours of the night. But did Daniel even go home after working? Or did he continue to work, just from the hotel room of some other man?
Jensen wasn’t sure how he felt about that possibility. If anyone was going to be spending time with Daniel, Jensen wanted it to be him. But that was a childish thing to expect. Daniel had a job, one that required him to give random menthe addictive attention he’d blessed Jensen with the past couple days.
And anyway, what did Jensen expect to happen? For Daniel to knock on his door after his shift? And then what? Jensen would get out of bed and let him in. Then Daniel might put his warm hands on Jensen’s body again and smile at him. And they’d both be tired, and Jensen would be too out of it to feel insecure, so he’d take Daniel’s hand and lead them to the bed. And Daniel might ask him again if he wanted to fuck him, and this time Jensen would give him the right answer. They’d start by?—
A person sat down next to him, startling him out of his thoughts. His cheeks were warm from the way his mind was swirling down the gutter at what he and Daniel could get up to in the cozy hotel room. But it was all a fantasy. If Daniel had knocked on Jensen’s door last night, he probably wouldn’t have heard it over the white noise he played on full blast to help him sleep. Even if he had, it was more likely Jensen would have subjected him to another speech, not sucked his dick. That was Jensen, seminars over seminal fluids.
Which was why his company had paid for his trip. He was here to impress the now seated crowd with his expertise and make his firm look good. He was not here to monopolize the time of sex workers. He really needed to stop thinking about Daniel before he popped wood while talking about wood. Everyone already thought he was strange; he didn’t need them thinking he had a weird perversion about building materials.
The first five minutes of the panel’s scheduled time were absolute torture. He had to sit in the front row, feeling hundreds of eyes on him as the host introduced him, boasting accolades and awards that only meant something to people without them. While everyone politely clapped, Jensen stood from his seat and walked up the six stairs to the stage that was fortunately the onlything erected in the vicinity. Not that he could have maintained any sort of inopportune blood flow in his pants with all the anxiety sloshing in his stomach. Only twenty more steps had him standing in front of the podium, giving a perfunctory smile and handshake to the man waiting for him.
Fluorescents rained down on the top of his head as sun streamed through the windows to his left and glinted off his glasses. The elevation from his seat to there seemed to have cranked up the temperature by ten rancid degrees. A bottle of water had been set out for him, and Jensen was more than tempted to chug the entire thing. Instead, he curled his fingers around the edge of the wood lectern and took a deep breath.
“The organizers asked that I talk about energy-efficient light bulbs, new processes for using steel, and earthquake-proof floor plates. More importantly, they wanted me to explain how all these elements can be thrown together to make buildings that will cost millions and make you even more.” He took a pause to allow for the polite laughter that pinged across the room.
