Thomas held up his hands and backed out of the room.
He closed the door.
Scott sighed and grabbed the phone off the mattress to film himself again. He tried different angles; he tried edging himself and jerking off fast and furious. He licked his hand clean every time, humming at the taste of his own cum, then he flopped back onto the bed, panting.
It didn’t feel the same as escorting.
It felt, in a word, humiliating.
Thousands of people had watched his first video, and rather than turn them on, he’d turned them off and they’d scrolled on to someone else.
He only had twenty likes on a video that had been seen 52,000 times.
Thomas knocked on the door again a few hours later. “Are you done masturbating?”
“Yes,” Scott said, dragging his disappointed gaze from his phone and thetwenty-onelikes.
“Then come upstairs and eat.”
Scott rolled out of bed and got dressed.
Thomas looked him up and down when he came out of the room.
“For a man who’s just had five orgasms, you don’t look very happy.”
“Six,” Scott corrected. “And the fun quickly fades when it’s your own hand and you’re distracted by man-eating deer and the waning consistency of your ejaculate.”
“Were the deer barking again?”
Scott shook his head. “And we’ve been over this. They don’t bark. They neigh.”
Thomas snorted as he led the way to the spiral staircase. He wore the key for the door on a chain around his neck, and the door unlocked with a clunk.
“It’s spaghetti bolognese,” Thomas said. “With olive bread and a lemon thyme and basil garnish.”
“That sounds…incredible.”
“It is,” Thomas said with a nod.
“Hey, remember that squash and lentil soup they served us inside?”
Thomas shuddered. “I remember the days afterwards. I remember how badly our wing stank and that inmates were trading weed for toilet paper.”
“And coke for Imodium.”
“You know it’s bad when people would rather a hard shit than a high.”
Scott wrapped his arms around himself and laughed. Thomas’s mouth twitched like he was trying not to smile, and he picked up the pace, walking in front of Scott.
Scott’s eyes widened when he stepped into the kitchen. Thomas had set the table.
“Wow.”
Thomas stiffened. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s…nice.”
“It’s cutlery, plates and napkins…”
