Page 46 of Home Grown Talent

For the rest of the week, Owen ended up being crazily busy and barely saw Mason.

The new job, the complete redesign of a huge garden surrounding a detached house in Greenwich, was sucking up most of his time. Not that it wasn’t interesting work, and lucrative, but the client was demanding, and on top of Owen’s regular contract work, and two smaller design projects already underway, it was putting pressure on his resources. He’d been forced to split his crew between all three jobs and put in a bunch of extra hours himself. He managed to make time for lunch with Mason one day, but otherwise, they only spoke on the phone. Well, that and flirted on Instagram, which seemed to be Mason’s favourite method of communication.

Owen was… still getting his head around Instagram. He’d set up an account for the business a few years ago but hadn’t really had the time—or the inclination—to get to grips with it. After a couple of weeks, he’d just sort of forgotten about it.

Mason seemed genuinely shocked by Owen's paltry twenty-nine followers—which was hardly surprising given that Mason had over 80,000 of them—but then Mason was a professional influencer who made actual money off the platform. He clearly understood the ins and outs of how to make it work in way more depth than Owen ever would.

Mason had tried to explain it to Owen. How to create a brand, how to use hashtags, how to build a following. A whole bunch of stuff that Owen would never use. Even so, it was interesting to see how much time and work went into creating the profile of someone who, on the face of it, appeared to be living a pretty carefree life.

By contrast, Owen felt like a total amateur. Hell, he couldn’t even manage to take a half-decent selfie—which was what he found himself messaging Mason about from his living room sofa, the night before their first day of filming.

Mason was trying to get him to post a pic of himself on Instagram, arguing that Owen couldn’t just keep commenting on Mason’s posts without having posted anything recent himself.

“What about when people click to see who you are?” he asked, clearly expecting Owen to immediately see his point.

“Why would they do that?”

“Because we’re posting flirty comments at each other on my posts that make it obvious we’re spending time together,” Mason had pointed out patiently. “And some of my followers are getting curious about you. But when they click on your account, all they see is a handful of photos of gardens that you worked on three years ago. You have literally no pictures of yourself on the account.”

“It’s a business account.”

“So what? You think people don’t want to see who owns a business? Hell, most people expect that these days. And don’t you want to connect with new customers? Why would you not use everything you’ve got to sell your services?”

“It’s not the same for me as for you,” Owen had said. “You get hired based on the way you look—I don’t.”

Mason had frowned, eyes dipping briefly to the table before saying, “Look, forget the business angle. Just put a photo up for me, will you?” Then he’d batted his lashes shamelessly. “It will help with Operation 100K.”

And, of course, Owen had agreed.

Mason had even given him the text and hashtags for the post. It was to say “Big day tomorrow with @masonisamodel” and the hashtags were #bigday, #nervousandexcited, #instapic, and #followme. Apparently, this was “keeping it simple”. When Owen had asked how that could be simple when the hashtags took up more characters than the message, Mason had just shaken his head in despair.

Well, Owen had said he’d do it. So… now it was selfie time.

He stretched out on his couch, leaned back and angled his phone, squinting at the screen. He was wearing a faded black t-shirt and PJ bottoms—both Mason-approved—and his hair was messy, which, weirdly, Mason seemed to like. He forced himself to smile and took a bunch of pictures, then scrolled through them, frowning. Why could he never seem to get a photo that didn’t make him look like a moose? Picking out the best of a bad bunch, he sent it off to Mason with a quick message. How about this one?

You look constipated, Mason messaged back half a minute later, complete with laughing-crying emojis.

Cheeky sod, Owen thought, chuckling.

He sent another.

Nope.

Another.

Jesus. No.

A thought occurred to him then, and he grinned, shoving down his loose PJ bottoms and taking his cock in hand, stroking it a few times till it was fully hard before snapping a quick pic.

This any better?

Bubbles appeared, then, Yum. Then more bubbles. But no dick pics on Insta. Sorry.

Owen laughed again. Aw, come on!

Nope.

I don’t have any more!