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Just then, my phone buzzes with a new text, scaring me for a second. While the others explode into laughter at some joke Elijah shares that I obviously missed, I glance down at the screen.
It comes from a blocked number, but in reading the text, I need no hints as to who it’s from:
I believe you, Trevor.
We were just two men that night.
You had no ill intentions.
It was wrong and unfair of me to make such an assumption, and for that, I apologize.
This will be the last time I speak to you in such a personal manner.
We will keep things professional from here on out.
Thanks for your understanding.
14
Benjamin plays by the rules.
With my feet kicked up on the ottoman and Lance asleep on the couch by my side, I stare at the text I just sent.
Worry spears through me.
He wouldn’t be vindictive and run around tomorrow showing all the other interns my message, would he?
Stop being paranoid. Stop thinking so little of people.
But I work with the world’s worst for a living. The privileged princes and princesses of Beverly Hills. The filthy rich and entitled celebrities of the highest standard. The asswipes of humanity who shit diamonds and eat gold-flecked pigeon mousse for dessert.
I can’t help but sometimes suspect the worst in people. I’m paid to seek that worst part of them and minimize it, hide it, kill it, twist it into some safe lie to feed the public.
Essentially, the central tether of my whole existence is lying.
Maybe my parents were right to admonish me for my choice in a career. What am I giving the world, really? What value am I adding to a world already so full of pretention, falsehoods, and gimmicks? If people like me keep perpetuating the social media lie, it’s only a matter of time before the world’s lined from one end to the other with nothing but tweets, cat memes, and Ray-Ban ads.
In my endgame, there will be nothing real left in the world.
I stare down at the text.
Trevor was real.
And I just told him it’s over in a word or two—over before anything had a chance to even begin. That’s like stopping halfway through a hand job. Who’s the cock tease now?
I set my phone down on the couch next to me, forcing myself to feel satisfied with my decision. It’s the only way to go, if we want to really be adults about this. He is an adult, after all.
A young adult. Youngish.
Why is he so worried about being professional? I own the damned company. Fuck professionalism. I can schedule an orgy day and let everyone climb each other naked if I wanted to.
Well, maybe not. Unless I care to also add the lawsuits that’ll follow to my bar tab.
Am I seriously discussing office orgies with myself?
No, of course not. Because it’s not what I want. None of those other interns are what I want. Trevor is the only one I have my eye on. Ever since that moment in the nightclub and all of the tasty, perfect, nuanced moments that followed, Trevor has consumed my mind in every way.
What is it about him? What does he have that all the other hot young men Rebekah shoves at me don’t?
He’s innocent, yet smart. He looks up at me with big, curious eyes, but behind them is a fiery furnace of thought. He cares. He’s aware. He sees more than what’s on the surface—which is what I feel whenever he looks my way: he sees beneath my surface.
I can’t even shake him off when I masturbate, which is pretty much as pathetic as someone of my stature can get. No matter the fantasy I try to generate that doesn’t have him in it, there’s Trevor and his crystalline eyes, popping in somewhere.
His crystalline, stubborn eyes.
When I’m trying to picture some hot hunk bent over a desk awaiting my dick, he’ll look back at me with Trevor’s face.
Trevor’s possessed me.
Am I stuck on him because I didn’t quite have him? Did he hook me like a big hearty bass, then toss me back into the lake without a damned care? Or maybe the better analogy is that he’s keeping me trapped in his aquarium, and I’m the idiot swimming around it in endless laps, pouting my lips every time I pass that tiny castle with the bubbles wiggling out of it.
My world is so cold like that aquarium.
I need someone like Trevor to heat it right up.
“No, you don’t,” I state out loud, startling Lance out of his dream as he lifts his head, alarmed. “You don’t need him to heat anything up except a seat at your office where he’s firmly planted and working. Like a good worker. Completely professional.” I turn to my dog. “Am I right, or am I right?”
Lance swipes his tongue over his snout once, then drops his head back onto his paws and shuts his eyes.
