Page 13 of Tough Guy
“Yes,” Fabian said. “It burns because your face sucks. It has to work extra hard to fix it.”
Tarek flipped him off.
“Oh!” Vanessa said suddenly. “I have something for you, Fabian.” She grabbed her messenger bag from the floor. It was covered in patches and buttons that loudly identified her as the queer, sex-positive feminist that she was.
“Does it vibrate?” As well as working at a sex shop, Vanessa also had a reasonably popular sex toy review blog. It wasn’t unusual for her coerce her friends into being product testers.
“Honey, it does so much more than that.” She produced a shiny purple box from her bag and handed it to him. “Be sure to tell me what you think.”
“Do I have to?” Fabian peeled his mask off, crumpled it into a ball, and set it on his empty waffle plate.
“Come on. I don’t have time to reviewallof these toys myself! And it’s not like I have a prostate!”
“You get bullet points,” he said. “If I even use the thing.”
“You’ll use it. It does all the stuff. And it’s purple!”
“Does that...make it better?”
“It makes itcuter. Be a better lover than Claude, probably.”
Fabian glared at her.
“More pleasant to talk to, for sure,” she added, grinning. “Better Instagram posts.”
“Anyway,” Fabian said, desperate to change the subject to anything else. “How was work last night, Marcus?”
He rolled his eyes dramatically. “Exhausting. I hate it when Halloween is a Thursday because it turns it into a week-long festival. The club was packed with barely legal kids in devil horns being sloppy all over the place. I was so done when we finally closed I couldn’t even be bothered to go home with the Ezra Miller-looking guy who’d been flirting with me all night.”
“Tragic,” Fabian said.
“No one looks like Ezra Miller except Ezra Miller, but okay,” added Tarek.
“He was hot, he was into me, I turned him down.” Marcus glowered at them. “Now I’m eating waffles with you assholes instead of sharing a morning shower with Ezra-light.”
“Mm,” Tarek said. “I was going to fuck Nick Jonas last night but I didn’t want to.”
“Fuck. You,” Marcus said. But he was laughing.
Fabianalmostmentioned running into Ryan to his friends, but it was too confusing to explain and too insignificant to bother with. He’d run into someone he hadn’t seen in over a decade, and now he would probably never see him again. The end.
It’s not like he’d been thinking about Ryan since running into him. It’s not like he had been secretly looking for him whenever he was walking around the Village.
God. Enough. Ryan was ahockey player. He wore one of those blue jerseys Fabian hated so much towork. And Fabian didn’t need any distractions right now, no matter how tall they were, or how adorable their smile was.
So he thanked his friends for yet another lovely time, grabbed his bag—now heavier, thanks to the dildo—and headed home to hopefully lose himself in music.
And, he supposed, if he got bored, he had a new toy to play with.
Chapter Five
Ryan wrapped his hand around the other man’s arm, pulling him close in a firm grip. He dipped his head, and brought his lips close to the man’s ear.
“You sure you wanna do this, kid?”
When Ryan pulled back, he could see the fear in the young man’s eyes. Hell, he couldsmellit coming off him in waves.
“F-fuck you,” the man spat out.
