Perry’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline. “Really?”
“I know you don’t have a reason to believe me, but it doesn’t bother me.”
“What if we were really boyfriends? Would me sleeping with other men bother you then?”
“In a word, no. If you’re having sex with them at work, in a controlled environment where it’s clearly work, then no. Now if you were sneaking around trying to hide things and keeping secrets, then yes. Because the first scenario is work and the second is cheating.”
He leaned back in his seat and narrowed his eyes at me. “It sounds almost too good to be true, you know. A man modern enough to have a porn star for a boyfriend who is cool with the part about him having sex with other men.”
“In college, I was in a throuple. It didn’t work out for a lot of reasons, but we had a lot of talks about jealousy, and I learned a lot about myself through that experience.”
He whistled. “I bet. What did you learn?” Perry asked, hanging off my every word.
“Well, for starters, I learned what kinds of things I’m okay with in a relationship.”
“And that’s your partner having sex with other people?”
“If I know about it, yeah. If it’s something previously discussed and agreed on, sure. If it’s some kind of clandestine thing that is kept from me, no.”
“Don’t you get jealous?”
“Yeah, but everyone gets jealous. That doesn’t mean that I have to act like a fool because of it.”
Perry leaned forward, putting his chin on the palm of his hand, and gave me a dreamy smile. “I have an amazing boyfriend.”
“So do I,” I said, returning the compliment. I smiled at him and tried to hide the fact that I liked it far too much when he said that.
SIX
PERRY
Our first datewasn’t until the weekend, which gave me plenty of time to prepare. And overthink. And destroy my closet. But it was fine.
Eventually I settled on something on the dressier side of casual. I couldn’t help but want to look good for this man. Pretending to be his boyfriend was no hardship on my part. Rex was hot. He had to be pushing forty, and he had those sexy crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes when he smiled. His hair was a dark blonde, but I definitely caught sight of a couple of grays in there.
Though the whole boyfriend thing was fake, which meant the dates were fake, I was still giddy about the whole thing. For our first date, Rex wanted to meet downtown and take me to an art show at the community center. The local art scene had grown over the past couple of years, and they’d held a few shows at the community center now.
As far as first dates went, it sounded a lot better than sitting in a restaurant and pushing food around a plate and trying tomove past the small-talk stage. Though Rex and I seemed to have hit it off enough to have already accomplished that. I mean, he’d already sent me pictures of his pets. That had to count for something.
Gumball walked into the room as if I’d summoned him by merely thinking of another cat, and he jumped up on the bathroom counter, his tail straight up in the air.
“You are the reason I have to keep my toothbrush in a travel case, you hairy beast.” I sank my fingers into his fur and gave him a scratch. In response to my attention, Gumball decided that he simply must lie in the sink. He flopped over in the basin and looked at me, then hung his mouth open and started to pant.
“You’re a menace. I need to finish getting ready. I have a date.”
He just blinked at me, his stare vacant. Gumball cared about few things, and my love life definitely wasn’t on the list. He cared about head scratches, having a place on the bed to curl up and sleep, wet food, and enjoying the sun-warmed floor in the afternoons.
After a ten-minute sink battle, Gumball was eventually defeated by me locking him out of the bathroom. At which point, he suddenly remembered that he was a cat with cat lungs and cat vocals, and he yodeled at me until I was finished and opened the bathroom door.
“You’re so dramatic,” I told him as I breezed past, grabbing my jacket off the bed. I wasn’t worried about cat hair sticking to the thin leather, but I gave it a quick inspection before slipping it on.
“Don’t wait up for me.”
Gumball meowed in response, flopping over on the floor of my bedroom, abandoning the sink completely. Fickle beast.
We decided to meet at a park near the community center and walk over. And it might have been an impractical thing to do, butI stopped on the way and bought him flowers. I’d always wanted to get flowers from someone and until now I didn’t really feel like I had a proper opportunity to get them for someone else. Roses weren’t exactly the kind of thing someone you met on Grindr would be expecting you to rock up to the front door with.
I tried not to overthink the flowers too, like I’d overthought my outfit and what cologne to wear and literally everything else from my socks to my jock. Roses seemed like a safe bet, but I went with pink instead of red. Red seemed like something you’d get a lover. Something you’d get someone who meant something to you. Red roses were for someone you loved. Besides, I thought the pink ones were prettier.
