Page 31 of Steam

“Sure,” Logan says. “Let’s do it.”

He immediately regrets his choice of words. Eric doesn’t seem to notice.

“I look forward to working with you, Mr. Miller.”

* * *

What does one do in the interim between hiring a sex worker and the sex worker’s arrival,Logan wonders.

Normally if he were waiting for a friend or a date, he’d pour himself a bourbon—but he’s going to abide by Eric’s request that he be sober for his first appointment.

He sits on the edge of a couch in his living room, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin on top of his laced fingers, peering out at the skyline. The mountains look starkly beautiful in the evening, the lights of downtown Reno twinkling in the foreground and offsetting the rolling, snow-capped peaks in the distance. It’s a clear night, cold.

Logan has been missing Oliver this week. More than usual. The burn of rye bourbon isn’t helping. Work isn’t helping.

He still talks to the other man online plenty, but they’re only back to their camaraderie from before. Logan had suggested phone sex and Oliver had only laughed it off. Looked like the kid was getting along fine without him.

November in Reno seems colder than Logan remembers it, and for the first time in a long time he’s been lonely. His misery is compounded by the fact that he’s aware of being unhappy, aware that it’s because of someone else and out of his control.

That’s not him—that’s not his life. He doesn’t mope. And the fact that he can’t snap out of it is simply making every aspect of it worse.

“I don’t like it when I can’t be self-sufficient,” he’d said to Wyatt earlier, over lunch.

“Never thought I’d see you lovesick, Logan,” Wyatt had teased him.

“Fuck lovesick, I’m not lovesick,” Logan had balked. “I’m lonely and horny and it sucks.”

Wyatt had shrugged.

“There’s always Eric and his guys,” Wyatt suggested. “If nothing else, a session could be a nice distraction.”

It had taken Logan a moment to even remember what Wyatt was talking about, but when it did hit him, the idea of calling Wyatt’s escort service seemed much less shocking than it had a few years ago.

Logan had mulled it over all afternoon before coming home and, without telling Wyatt, without giving himself time to change his mind, calling Eric.

It’s still hard to fill the blanks in between being an upstanding citizen—as Logan had been this morning—and paying five hundred hard-earned bucks to spend the night with a call boy as he had done tonight.

He weighs whether he should read more into his decision or just chalk it up to the pleasant efficiency he’d always striven for in his life.

Logan stares out into the night.

His condo has an unobstructed view with two floor-to-ceiling windows converging in a corner to face the mountains. It’s the reason above all other reasons Logan had chosen the condo building and the unit in particular.

It didn’t hurt, of course, that the building was steeped in Reno’s history—a former hotel and casino converted into condos, making it the centerpiece of the downtown resurgence.

There was something vaguely thrilling about living inside the 60 year old bones of the old Virginia Street Casino.

Growing up in Apopka, Logan had always lived in new construction homes. That’s all there was in central Florida. Everything else either gave in to the swamp after a few decades or was bulldozed in the name of new developments. The homes there had no soul. Zero humanity.

The Virginia Street Casino, though—now the Montage condos—had that secret, silent hum of mankind in its atoms. Fortunes had been won and lost here. People had fallen into and out of love. And Logan’s escort certainly wouldn’t be the first or last sex worker to set foot on the property.

Reno, divorce capital of the ‘40s and ‘50s. The biggest little city. It feels good to Logan to tuck himself into the thrum of history and civilization, to lose himself in the anonymity of it without being totally isolated.

The buzzer rings and Logan jumps to life. He has no idea how long his thoughts had been drifting, and he’s done nothing to prepare himself. Logan rushes to answer the buzzer.

“Come on up,” he says into the receiver, pressing the button to allow entry.

A few tense moments tick by as Logan waits. Finally, a knock at the door. Logan peers through the peephole, but all he can see is the fish-eyed expanse of someone’s back, clothed in a dark, heavy jacket. He opens the door.

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