“Where’d you go?” he says to me a little while later. I’m in the kitchen mixing up some noxious blend of Tabasco sauce, agave, and lemon, also known as “lunch.”
“Lucia was having an eyebrow crisis. She over tweezed. I had to assure her that she was still as beautiful as ever, and they would grow back. But between you and me, yikes.”
He circles the kitchen island, still in his clingy, practically transparent workout clothes, glistening from sweat and bright-eyed from starvation. The real question for me is, how could any casting director possibly pass him up? Even if all he did was stand in a lineup of hot, menacing frat boys or do a keg stand in the background of a wild party or fist bump the male lead and say “yeah, bruh.” These Hollywood types are fools! Why, they should be dousing him with a garden hose, making him run shirtless on the beach in slow motion, bend him over the popped-up hood of a broken-down muscle car with a grease rag in his back pocket and—
“You smell like a cheeseburger,” Adam says. He comes right up and sniffs me like a dog.
“It’s probably just your voracious appetite manifesting it.” If I use big enough words, he won’t question it.
“Have you been cheating?” He looks at me with a wounded expression and I simply cannot have that.
“Adam,” I exclaim and turn sideways to show him my trim torso. “I think I’ve lost two pounds already. How about you?”
“Nothing,” he says miserably.
“How about we scrap lunch and go get some fro-yo? I’ll take you to the batting cages afterward.”
He sighs morosely but nods. “Yeah, okay.”
We stop by the yogurt shop, and I get Adam his favorite, grape and bubblegum swirl, which is just vomitous, but he loves it. Then I take him to the batting cages and film him thwacking baseballs one after another with deadly precision. To watch him in motion is an erotic experience, as Adam is not only a beautiful man but an exceptional athlete. Something he didn’t tell me initially was that his baseball team regularly won state championships, and several of his teammates went on to play in the major and minor leagues, so he is actually very good. The motion of his hips and torso when he swings the bat makes me think he has definite top potential. That will come later, of course. Bottom training is next on my agenda.
After the cages, I show him the video of himself and convince him that he could be cast as any number of teenaged jocksifhe raises his target weight a few pounds.
“I’ll think about it,” he says, still eying me with suspicion.
At home we shower, and I make Adam stand perfectly still while I soap him up, groping his pecs and his ass and all his delicious muscles. I can’t wait to make these juicy cheeks clap around my dick, but wooing Beautiful Adam is a process, so for now, I make do with his mouth. “You may stroke yourself to get off,” I tell him imperiously, and he scrambles to do so while sucking the cum from my balls like a good little slut.
We end the evening by watching a couple episodes ofSunset Cove, another of his obsessions that I’m happy to indulge.
“I wish I’d known her,” Adam says as we watch my mother in a luxurious gown being swept across a moody candlelit room by one of her many lovers. The man is little more than a prop used to accentuate her grace. Adam’s eyes hold the same idealized hero-worship of so many of her rabid fans.
“She was one-of-a-kind,” I agree. A great actress but a terrible mother.
“What was she like? In real life?”
“Glamorous,” I tell him, which is true. “Never a hair out of place, in full makeup whenever we went out of the house.” It was somewhat necessary too, as she was always in a race against time. The media never knew her true age and neither did I until she passed away, another of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets.
“That must be where you get it from,” Adam says because I can be quite fussy about appearances, both his and my own. “Was she nice?”
Definitely not.“She was capricious,” I say and Adam’s brow furrows because he doesn’t know what that word means. “Whimsical, flighty. She had an artist’s soul.” She was also addicted to painkillers and barbiturates and could be terribly moody when off her meds. There’s a scar on my shoulder from when she got pissed at me during a formal dinner and threw a steak knife at me. She didn’t expect it to hit its mark, so there’s that. “She gave wonderful gifts,” I tell him, also true because she had a hell of a lot to make up for. “She made sure I always wore the newest fashions and gave me the toys and electronics everyone else wanted.” My mother passed away before social media was really a thing, but she would have been absolutely savage on Twitter. The thought of it makes me smile.
“What would she have thought of me?” Adam asks with a sweet pining in his eyes. The truth is that my mother would have eaten Adam for breakfast and spit him out like an owl pellet, would have wheedled and criticized him until he doubted every single last decision he made. And she wouldn’t have manipulated him for his own benefit, as I am, but to crush his very soul. She detested anything more beautiful than herself. Thank God I was born plain.
“She would have thought you are very beautiful,” I tell him and stroke the knuckles on his fine hand. “She’d want to cast you as her grown son, I’m sure. You’re far more attractive than me.”
“Cassius,” he says, soft-eyed and lovely. He grabs my hand and rubs it against his smooth cheek. “I think we would have been best friends,” he says with so much misplaced confidence.
“I’m sure you would have.”
* * *
White lies arepart of every healthy, thriving relationship. If you don’t agree with me, then you’re probably alone.
Am I fat? Am I good in bed? Does this shirt make me look stupid? Do you like my cooking? What do you think of my new haircut?
We lie to our loved ones all the time, to make them feel better or to avoid an argument or because we’ve said these lines so many times before that we know exactly what they want to hear. Every time you sayI love you, do you truly mean it, or is it simply a conditioned response?
I learn after a few weeks of living with Adam that he’s being bullied online. Not stalked or harassed by a crazed anonymous fan, but truly bullied by a kid he went to high school with. Apparently, it started in ninth grade and never really stopped. I notice the same handle vomiting hateful things while I’m liking all of Adam’s posts—if he doesn’t see my hearts, it sends him into a tizzy.
