Chapter Two
“One, two, three, four…”
Lift, pansy. Lift or you’ll be stuck here for the rest of your fucking life.
Kid pushed the barbell up and lowered it as he took out one hundred sixty pounds of anger on his muscle-bound body.
He was the youngest guy in the workout room, hence his affectionate nickname.
Lift, you stupid fuck!
Mirrors lined the walls. Benches, medicine balls, mats, racks, and weights clustered between two rows of support beams. Guarding one of the doors to the workout room, Marzo, a beefy man with a walleye, folded his arms and stared forward (and to the side) blankly, as if trying to dissociate from boredom. He was rumored to have been not so honorably discharged from the army. At the door on the other side of the room, Clive, a twig of a man with stringy arms and a gaunt face, who appeared to be the poster boy for an anti-Meth ad campaign, stared at his feet as he kicked the doorframe.
Jerry stepped between a tray of dumbbells and a column near the wall. A pot-bellied boy nearly half his size, who couldn’t have been much older than Kid, walked alongside him. He scribbled frantically in a pocket-sized notebook. Jerry whispered something in his ear. Jerry had a stern, most-serious glare frozen on his spotty face. He and the pot-bellied scribe, who the boys knew as Robb, eyed a few guys doing sit-ups on mats on one side of the room. The Brazilians, as they were called. They were gorgeous, ripped guys who’d been lured to Jerry's under the pretense of working in adult films. Whoever had duped them had made a pretty penny off their asses. They were top of the line, except that they could hardly speak any English. Although, they seemed pretty good with “fuck” and “no” or a combination of the two.
One of the Brazilians did crunches, sweat sliding from his mountainous chest into the sharp hills that swelled across his abdomen. A patch of fat couldn’t be found anywhere on his tight body. Of everyone in the workout room, he was by far the prettiest, with flawless caramel skin and blue eyes that glistened under the fluorescent lights.
“Robb, keep our blue-eyed beauty on a high-protein diet. He needs more muscle. And get him on the bench press at least three times a week. I want a chest on him. Those abs are only gonna get him so far.”
Jerry and Robb approached Kid, mid-bench-press, breathing heavily as his biceps, shoulders, and pecs contracted with his violent movements.
Jerry’s serious glare transformed into a pleasant, even friendly, smile.
“How’s it going, Kid?” he asked.
Kid pumped away, sweat rushing like water through a canyon between his pecs.
“Mmmm…That’s good. Real good. Just keep right on with what you’re doing.”
Kid knew he was one of Jerry’s favorites. Not because he was particularly attractive or lucrative, but because he was obedient. Obedience meant almost as much to Jerry as money, so Kid's adherence to his rigid, oppressive rules made him one of the few recipients of Jerry's generosity—a decent meal and an occasional used book. Rare as they came, Kid would savor the books. Without access to TV or radio, they were the only opportunities that allowed him a moment of escape—to leave this cruel and unjust world behind.
He kept them stacked under a cot in his room. Over the years, he'd collected novels by Dickens, Shelley, Conrad, Hawthorne, and Golding. Every night before lights out, he'd fish one out and devour it page by page, imagining that he was somewhere else—anywhere else. He didn't care that the protagonists were usually living in the most unpleasant of worlds. Any heinous life was better than his.
At thirteen, Kid had wound up homeless on the streets of Atlanta. “Wanna fuck?” he would say to the pudgy, sad-faced geezers he’d catch leaving the nearest gay bar. He gave blowjobs and took it up the ass, sometimes for as little as twenty bucks. He didn’t need much. He just had to have money for meals. He didn't have to worry about shelter, because he squatted at an abandoned church with three other homeless guys. They were older and only one of them ever bothered him with sexual solicitations, which he'd endured on occasion to ensure he’d have a place to sleep.
Kid had been cruising the streets, looking for his next meal ticket, when he'd been knocked unconscious and had woken up in Jerry's place. That was what the other guys called it. None of them really knew where they were—or what kind of building they were in, though several of the guys assumed that it had been an old school.
Though he'd abducted Kid, Jerry was, in many ways, his guardian angel. Within the months that Kid had been on his own, he'd managed to pick up several STDs, which Jerry promptly treated, tending to Kid's health and providing him with reading material while he had recovered. Jerry had made it clear that Kid didn't have a choice but to stay there. In the beginning, Kid was fine with that. Better to have shelter and fuck under those conditions than to have to do it all on his own. However, he discovered there was a price to having so many things provided for him, and he grew to resent Jerry. More important than the security of his body was the security of his freedom, which he desperately longed for. He planned to have it again…one day.
Lift, you shit.
He built up his strength. One day, he'd have an opportunity to take on Marzo or Clive, and he'd crawl out of this dump and get the fuck out.
He had plans that didn’t involve spending the rest of his life on the streets. He was going to get a job as a waiter or a clerk at a store. He was going to be a normal person, and when he got enough money together, he'd even go to college. He didn’t know if he’d ever finish, but he could at least take some classes, make himself a little smarter.
Jerry and Robb continued their stroll through the workout room.
A bead of sweat dripped off Kid’s forehead onto the cement floor. His muscles locked and his face turned red, the veins in his neck protruding forward as he pushed his arms to their last possible rep. He forced the bar over his head and set it on the bar rest.
He sat up. Sweat drenched his light-brown hair and dripped onto the smooth flesh that dressed his rift-covered abs. He panted as he tried to catch his breath.
The other guys were far less into their workouts than he ever was. They fulfilled their daily requirements, but that was it. None were eager to make their bodies more pleasing to potential johns.
A man with vampire-white flesh, speckled with black and blue bruises, stepped through the entrance to the workout room.
Fresh meat.
Fresh Meat’s wavy, jet-black hair, in stark contrast with his skin, looked like a bird’s failed attempt at a nest. Sunken cheeks curved up swelling welts that made an already pronounced jawline stick out even farther. A cleft in his chin matched the divot above his upper lip, a groove at the tip of his nose, and even the severe cut dividing his bottom lip.
