Beautiful Adam
Chapter1
Cassius
“Boring. Fugly. Desperate. Last season.Solast season.”
I scroll through my Instagram feed and take another sip of my mimosa while my best friend Lucia tsks at me. We’re brunching outdoors today at a café in Beverly Hills where the L.A. smog is less a gray cloud and more of a warm buttery shimmer.
“Cassius, your standards are impossibly high,” she says with a husky chortle that is the result of drinking nearly a full bottle of champagne between hits from her vape. “Not all of us can be such stunning beauties like you.”
“I’m not beautiful, Lucia darling, I’m glamorous. Please don’t conflate the two.”
She rolls her winged eyes and puckers her puffy collagen lips. Lucia is beautiful in a young, half-Dominican Sophia Loren sort of way, and to anyone who hasn’t nursed her through a post-op recovery, they might think it’s natural too.
“You’re such a twat when you’re like this,” she grouses.
“Like what?”
“So fucking judgy. Like the world is your personal theater and we’re all just actors playing our parts for your enjoyment.”
“Or derision,” I add.
She tips her champagne flute in my direction. “You need to get laid. You’re always so bitchy when your balls get stopped up.”
The nerve…
“You absolute witch. Is it wrong of me to expect the bar to be set just a little bit higher? These people are making their entire livelihoods off their appearance alone, and nothing I’ve seen impresses me.” I scroll a little more and then pause, recalibrate, and swipe up. Zoom in, zoom out, zoom in again. And then, dear reader, I gasp.
“What is it?” Lucia asks, attuned to my dramatics.
Who’s this? Whoisthis enchanting man?
#BeautifulAdam
#NoFilter
#AngelBoy
#OleBlueEyes
#SPGLAfinest
SPG is Style Poise Grace modeling agency, L.A. branch. He must be new, this #BeautifulAdam with no last name. Fresh faced and young to the point of tender. Stunning—exquisite in fact. Gilded blond curls crown his bust-worthy face. With eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean on a sunny day fringed with long, curling lashes, he’s a cross between an Abercrombie model and an androgynous Disney Princess—Sleeping Beauty with shorter hair. His prominent cheekbones and razor-sharp jaw speak to a certain hollowed-out starvation that typifies young models, and his scarlet-hued mouth pouts naturally, as if inviting the viewer to make use of his wet lips. WET LIPS. His dress shirt is opened just enough to reveal a hint of taut abs and a collarbone that’s begging to be licked. No nips though. Pity that. Christ, Lucia might be right. I’m getting hard just looking at his photo.
“Who’s this beauty?” I direct my phone screen toward her. Her eyes narrow to scrutinize the photo.
“I’ve never seen him before. But he looks like Ronan Farrow if he cut out the carbs and sodium. Have you seen him lately? So much bloat.” She blows out her cheeks to illustrate her point.
“You don’t know him? He’s local.”
“Cash, that boy isnotlocal. He was probably kidnapped from some potato farm in Idaho and brought here to sell...” She studies the picture again. “Cucumber seltzer? Blech. Puke in a can.”
I find Adam’s personal handle and scroll through his feed, searching for a common link between us and getting distracted by the sheer beauty of him—untainted, pure. Newly arrived, which means not yet corrupted by the L.A. lifestyle or spouting off the benefits of a kombucha cleanse like an Evangelical or a cultist.
Not yet.
“Aha,” I exclaim, having my eureka moment. “Elliot Anderson photographed him for an upcoming show.” We’re three degrees of separation out here, the moneyed ones at least. And the hangers-on, of which Elliot qualifies. I pop over to Elliot’s feed to see what he’s been up to lately. Nothing of interest, except… “Here we are,” I purr, infused with a heady rush of dopamine. God bless social media. “Elliot Anderson is having an art show and guess whose portrait he’s made his centerpiece?”
