Page 37 of Filthy Little Secret

I don’t want to call him a drug dealer anymore. I don’t like it. He’s more than that to me.

“How did I end up a drug dealer? Is that what you want to know? Yeah, I guess I could ask you: How does a guy end up the son of a governor? The same sort of luck only a shittier direction,” he says. “I had a crap job a few years ago that I was using to try and help Nanna pay off some debt she was in because of her dickhead ex-husband. Thought it was the least I could do because of all she’d done for me. While she was working as an English teacher at a school in Buckhead, I bartended at a nightclub—a gay club in Midtown. I was good at it too, but I became friends with a guy who was dealing. We hooked up occasionally, and he asked me if I’d be interested in a little money-making opportunity. He wanted to get in on the Emory campus scene because he knew there was a high demand, but he knew he was too old to walk around campus without people being on to him. He thought I could infiltrate because I looked young and like I belonged in school. I agreed to help him out, and we’d crash frat parties together. When things were getting pretty good, he got a better offer to help a friend out in California. So I took on our clients here. Since then, though, Nanna had all the shit with cancer, which made things even worse. She had to quit her job to start her treatment, and on top of that, the industry hasn’t been as good. Market’s slimming down with online competition and shit. That said, the money’s a hell of a lot better than what I made bartending. I can cover the bills. I don’t have crazy expendable income afterward, but I get by.”

All to help his nanna with her bills? I knew the money certainly helped, but didn’t understand that’s why he got into the industry to begin with.

“You like…doing this?” Another question I’ve never bothered to ask.

“It pays the bills.”

“But if you didn’t have to—”

“It’d drive me crazy if I thought like that, because the reality is, right now I do, so what does anything else matter?”

I quiet. I shouldn’t press any further.

He leans in to me and kisses me on the cheek.

It’s the first time he’s ever done something like that, but I keep my cool.

“It’s cute when you worry,” he says.

My face is warm where he kissed.

“That didn’t go against any rules?” I ask, calling him out on the kiss.

He smirks. “Rules are made to be broken,” he says with a shrug.

Again, I’m left wondering if that’s the kind of shit he’d say around Keith, but I don’t want to make too big a deal out of it since I liked it.

These past few days in particular have felt like we’ve played right on the line, bending the rules.

Not necessarily breaking them, but I like being around him.

Maybe more than I should.

12

TIM

Itake another bite of Froot Loops, thinking about how shitty life can be.

Wish he hadn’t brought up the business. Makes me think about the roads I’ve walked. The choices I’ve made because of those roads. I’m not proud of what I’ve done, and it’s not like there wasn’t a better way, but I made my choices.…Now I live with them every day.

“How can you fucking eat like that and have that body?” Mark asks, and I can tell he’s trying to lighten the mood.

“Just lucky, I guess,” I say before devouring another spoonful.

The way he looks me up and down takes my mind off all that other crap. Because I can see his interest, his desire—and I like it.

He’s not like Keith. He could walk away from this. Most of the guys I’m used to couldn’t have gone on this long without getting clingy. Those guys don’t understand what it means to just fuck around. They think in terms of finding a man. Of having someone in their lives who they can depend on. And they want to believe that somehow the bad boy and the good little schoolboy can work. Part of some fantasy they’ve conjured up—something I guess they learned from watching too much TV.

Mark, on the other hand, gets where the line is. Hell, the sex is incredible as fuck, and so is the talking, but he gets that what we have isn’t a relationship. He understands what fuck buddies are. And if anything, I’m the one who’s having a good time hanging around with him. More than I have with other guys in the past. It’s one of the reasons I don’t mind sticking around his place after we mess around. I can joke with him. Talk to him about shit and not feel like he’s steadily wrapping his octopus tentacles around me.

He eyes my bowl and says, “You could share a little bit of that, you know?”

He reaches for it, but I pull it away.

“Get your own.”

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