Page 10 of Darling
“I’ll hang it in a room I don’t go into very much.”
He smiles, and then I do too. With purpose, he strides across the apartment to where a telephone hangs on a wall by the kitchen and unhooks a small notebook from its hook next to it. Then he lifts a pen from a bowl on the counter and shoves both out to me. Not a pen, I notice, an artist’s pencil. I take them both and scribble my number—my personal number—on the piece ofpaper, and hand both back to him.
“No promises,” he says. “Sometimes I destroy them in a fit of rage. Sometimes I drop them off at thrift stores, sometimes I jerk off over them and then set them on fire.”
My cock twitches with interest at the picture that last one paints in my twisted head. “I mean, it’s your art.”
“That’s a very loose term for it,” he replies. “Demon twinks jerking off onto canvasisn’t something they’re displaying at MoMA just yet.”
“More’s the pity.”
“One day though…”
I really need to go before my Uber drives off, but I’m finding it hard to make any move to leave his company.
“I’ll wait to hear from you then,” I say. “About the painting.”
“Sure thing.”
He says it in such a way that I doubt I’ll ever hear from him again as long as I live, though I hope I’m wrong. I give him my most hopeful, encouraging smile and back away, letting myself out of his apartment and into the early evening sunshine.
Four
Asher
“He’s definitely married,” Theo says before taking a large gulp of beer.
“No, he’s widowed, I told you: wife is dead. Do you ever listen?”
“I listen.” He can’t decide whether to be hurt or insulted. “You talk a lot, it’s hard to keep up.”
“I talk a normal amount, and rarely about men, so this should have been easy to keep up with.”
“That’s true,” says Amata. She is listening, too well. It’s giving CIA. “You never talk about men. I mean, except for the ones you sleep with for work and the nutcase who kept you in a fucking cage.”
I roll my eyes at her dramatics. “It was a lodging house for wayward boys.”
“With bars on the fucking window,” she points out.
“I think the walls would have to have bars too, for it to be considered a cage,” adds Theo unhelpfully.
“He locked them in at night, Theodore.” Amata glares terrifyingly.
“Can we leave my childhood trauma alone for tonight, please,” I sigh, signalling the waiter for another round of vodkabombs. He’s cute, and I’m sure he’s been giving me the eye since I came in. I’m sort of tempted, but I’ve a shoot tomorrow and I should save my sexual energy for that. I really shouldn’t be drinking either, but I decided about an hour ago that that was tomorrow Asher’s problem.
“So will you call him?” Amata asks, leaning in to suck her Sex on the Beach through the smallest straw known to mankind. “Tell him you finished it?”
I shrug. I want to call him. I’ve been staring at his number on my corkboard since I finished the painting. I’m not saying I finished it quicker than I needed to in order to have a reason to call him, but I’m also notnotsaying that. It’s been a month since he came back to my apartment and kissed me stupid in my kitchen. And I am fucking stupid. Because there’d been absolutely nothing to suggest he was waiting for me to call, or that he even wanted to see me again, except for the fact that he gave me his number. Which, for all I know, is just about the painting. Because every time I let myself think it could be about me, I remember that I’d offered myself to him on a silver platter last time and he’d basically turned me down flat.
I’m not that emotionally immature that I didn’t pick up on the fact that he’s clearly working through some stuff. But aren’t we all? I wasn’t asking him to get down on one knee and propose. It was a ‘no strings attached’ blow job from a hot younger guy on a Sunday afternoon he’d turned down, which suggests that maybe this whole thing is a lost cause. I don’t know anyone who’d have turned that down. I down the pink and orange vodka bomb the waiter puts in front of me with a slow, meaningful smile. He certainly wouldn’t have turned it down.
“I think you should call him,” declares Theo. “Because you’ll always just be wondering if you don’t, and like, who needs that shit, right? You’re Asher Foxxx, you’re the guy every guy wants to fuck right now, and if he doesn’t, then fuck him!”
“He already made it pretty clear he doesn’t want me to fuck him.” I will not address the other part of that ridiculous statement.Dazedmagazine might have suggested such a thing in their article, but it’s not a truth I’m ever gonna accept in my own head.
“Well, no, that’s not true, Ellen,” Amata interjects. “He simply did not want you to suck him off as payment for helping you out. Which could be interpreted by some”—she points at herself—“as him being a gentleman. Something you’re not too familiar with, so I don’t blame you for not recognising it. And he left you his number. So that, in my view, is a pretty solid invitation. He wants to see you again.”
“The girl has a point.” Theo knocks his beer against Amata’s glass.