Page 9 of Dead Serious with Benefits
I scoffed. “Just wishing I could hear the ice hit the glass.”
“Why?” she asked with a frown, which was understandable; it was a weird thing to say.
“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug, giving the glass a little wiggle and imagining the sound of the ice that I swore I almost heard, but it was just a trick of the brain...or maybe a trick of the other things I’d indulged in. “Just gives me this little tingle in my head, I guess.”
“I guess,” she repeated, and I wondered if she realized she’d done it...or even if it was significant. “Do you know the guy who’s running the party?”
“We’ve met,” I said with a smirk. “Why, is it not to your liking?”
“Weird with drinks and weird with words,” she said with a laugh, her nose wrinkling again. “And I like the party just fine, but I have to say, the guy hosting this has to be a little weird too.”
“Probably,” I agreed with a smirk. “But what makes you say that?”
“I mean, look around,” she said, and I did, even though I had a pretty good idea what was happening. I wasn’t diligent and paranoid about everything, but I was aware enough to know whether there was trouble...at least within eyesight. When you were hosting a bit of debauchery, it was always a good idea to make sure things didn’t go from bordering on degenerate right into an emergency.
The key was to make sure there were people with enough sense to sound the alarm when something went wrong. After that, it was just a case of taking care of whatever mess happened and keeping it as clean as possible.
Expecting a problem was the first step to knowing how to deal with it. I’d had to clean up my fair share of messes in the past, so I was good at dealing with them when they popped up. Not that I was looking forward to using that skill set again anytime soon.
“I’m looking,” I informed her as I looked around before turning my attention back to her. “What’s your point?”
She scoffed. “C’mon, you can’t have a bunch of people over to tear the place up without being a little weird.”
“It could just be that he has a lot of money and doesn’t worry about spending it.”
“Yeah, well, when you’ve got that kind of money, I guess you can be weird. Shit, it probably helps.”
“Now there’s an idea,” I said, meaning it. “A bit of the chicken and the egg.”
“What?” she asked, her nose wrinkling again, and I almost concluded she was the sort to turn her nose up at anything that might be ‘weird’ to her.
“It’s a philosophical question. What I was getting at was, do you think the owner of this place is weird because he has money? Or was he weird beforehand, and the money just lets him be his weird self?”
She rolled her eyes and put her hand on my thigh. “You’re still weird, want to find somewhere that doesn’t have people and uh...well, fuck?”
“I wish I could say your directness did you a service, but considering how many drinks and drugs you probably have in your system, it has less to do with your personality and more to do with several lines of coke,” I said, gently pushing her hand off. “But no, I’m okay for now, I’m sure there are plenty of takers.”
She scoffed. “Really? What are you, gay? You sound like it.”
“I’m suddenly curious why you think I sound gay,” I said with a raised brow. The classic ‘gay voice’ had been dug up, burned, and the ashes scattered years ago. My mother’s insistence on elocution lessons throughout my childhood oversaw that quite nicely. Those had been less fun than the other lessons I’d been given growing up, but learning how to speak clearly and ‘properly’ was far less interesting than the subjects tutors brought to my attention. What could I say? Math, science, and everything else were far more entertaining to a lonely, hungry mind than making sure you didn’t drop a ‘t’ because that was ‘lazy.’
“You know, fancy, smart, and you’re cute,” she said with a shrug.
Two decades into the twenty-first century, and there were apparently still people who thought sounding educated and thoughtful was a trait of homosexuality. Ignorance, both banal and baneful, was a state of the human condition I had accepted long before tonight.
“I’m not one to pick a side,” I told her with a shrug, setting my glass on the table and preparing to stand up. “But I appreciate the compliment, poorly delivered as it was.”
“What?” she asked with the same blank look, and I turned away before her nose could wrinkle again. There was bound to be something else at the party to hold my attention and improve my mood.
Not that I had any expectation of that happening anytime soon. Lately, it felt like everyone, whether friendly, antagonistic, or something in between, wasn’t enough to lift my spirits. In fact, the whole world was getting more and more gray as I grew older and experienced more. Once, that lack of color had been at the edge, but now it was creeping inward. It was slow at first, but its approach was constant, unstoppable.
It was...unsettling.
Until, of course, I’d found a way to inject color. It was just an injection at first, but it didn’t take long until I found ways to add explosions of color to my life that made everything suddenly...fascinating. With a flash of color, I could make out the gray dullness of the chains wrapped around me and holding me in place. That was back then, when I’d first seen the scope and depth of the life I’d been living, or more accurately, the life I had been forced to live.
Mainly by my parents. Or more specifically, my mother. She had been the one to arrange all my tutors and lessons and had made sure I was given the ‘best’ education. She’d wanted a child who could fit the exact criteria she had determined long before she’d ever had me.
For such an intelligent, capable, and worldly woman, she hadn’t taken into account that children were people—little, undeveloped people who needed to be taught and cared for. People weren’t sculptures; they weren’t unshaped clay that could be molded to one’s wishes, no matter how hard you tried. They could surprise you, in pleasing ways, and disappointing ones.
