Page 76 of The Influencer

“I can’t show you all my tricks in one night. Now come on. I want to make you a sandwich. I bought bread.”

“You did not.”

“I did.” He rolls off me, landing gracefully on the floor, while I lumber up, adjusting my erection in my jeans. I grab my button-down off the floor and put it on, but don’t bother with the buttons.

“Will you have one, too?” I ask.

“If you’ll share. I’m only making one.”

While Jade moves around the kitchen in his t-shirt and bare legs making a roast beef sandwich, he asks me about my other food preferences, allergies, and whether his hands look too feminine. Before I’m allowed to take a bite of the sandwich, he takes about two dozen pictures of it from various angles, and then several of himself with the sandwich, including a few where he’s got his shirt shoved up to expose his nipples. Since the angles are impossible, I offer to take the pictures myself.

I think he’d been waiting for the offer, because his behavior deteriorates from there. He’s got a thumb in his briefs, pulling them down far enough to show what little pubic hair he’s got, and eventually winds up shirtless and vamping until I’m ready to bend him over the counter and fuck him again.

“Enough,” I say, sliding the phone back over to him.

He laughs and flips through the pictures while I grab half of the sandwich and take a huge bite. “You’re not half bad at this,” he says, regarding the photos I took.

“You’ve got good lighting in here. Which I’m sure you’re aware of.”

“Life is literally all about the lighting. How’s the beef?”

I give his sandwich a thumbs up.

“I have a tiny eating disorder,” he tells me, holding up his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart. “Bread is a little terrifying to me.”

“Where’d that come from?” I ask.

“The words or the disorder?”

“Either. Both.” The fact that he told me that at all.

He puts his shirt back on and leans across the counter on his elbows, hands clasped. “I was a fat kid.”

Relatable. “So was I. From day one. I was a fat adult, too. Pretty much lived off pizza and beer for seven years.”

“I can’t picture it,” he says.

“Neither can I for you,” I tell him.

“You’ll have to trust me because I burned all the evidence.”

I reach into my back pocket, pull out my wallet, retrieve my driver’s license, and hand it to him.

“Look at those chubby cheeks,” he says fondly. “Why are you so pasty in this?”

“Wasn’t getting out much at the time.”

He stares at the picture a moment longer then hands it back. “We’re so shallow, aren’t we? I don’t mean you and me, I mean everyone. Including you and me.”

“I guess so.”

“It’s just been since I started doing collabs that I started liking myself,” he says.

I polish off my half of the sandwich, ready to tackle the other half, but I figure I’ll give him a chance at it first. “Say more,” I tell him.

“It’s like sometimes I watch myself in a video or see myself in a picture, and I can’t believe it’s me. Like… that I’m beautiful.”

“You are beautiful.” He actually needs a new word invented for how beautiful he is.

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