Page 90 of Say It Again
“Shh.” Aaron glanced around the store. “I don’t know. It was high school.”
“You nailed five high school girls!”
“Daniel, shh!” Aaron waved at a glaring old woman.
“Well, how was it? What do you say to a girl in bed? ‘Hey, cool boobs’ or something?”
“I can’t think of a worse thing to say to a girl in bed, and it was fine. Fun, I guess. They’re just soft, is all.” Aaron’s eyes dripped the length of Daniel’s body and settled on his lips. “I prefer hard if that makes sense.”
“No, that makes no sense.” He leaned over the cart and giggled like the Drunken Goat girl. “Please, mister, do break it down for me.”
The mister, suddenly distracted by his phone, did not break it down for him but responded to a text instead.
Daniel flopped his body over the handle of the shopping cart and sighed with his total lung capacity. When Aaron didn’t acknowledge him, he moaned. Then again. “I love having meaningful conversations with my boyfriend.”
Aaron tapped away on his phone. “‘Hey, cool boobs’ is not a meaningful conversation.”
“Okay, then what about this—how’d you get into escorting?”
Aaron’s eyes zoomed up.
“When did you start doing it?”
“You want to talk about it?” Aaron asked, his attention hooked as he worked his phone into his pocket. “Here? In a grocery store.”
Daniel bit the inside of his cheek and shrugged. He was maybe already regretting it, but he’d started something.
“What is happening? Is this a good sign?” Aaron’s smile was cautious, but his tone had strayed halfway to excitement. “Are you maybe getting more approving of it?”
“You can settle all the way down, sir.”
“Sorry.” Aaron held up his palms, but the smile was growing. “I’m just proud of you. Can I not be a smidgen proud?”
Daniel sighed, tapping his foot as loud as he could.
“Okay, so how’d I get started? When I was nineteen, in college, I met this boy out one night.”
“Name?”
“Chase Garland. A little older than me. Exciting, super charming, wild as hell. And he lived this lifestyle that no one could figure out how. Like, he’d buy everyone dinner, he spent really big, especially on shoes and suits. And every time I tried to ask what he did for a living, he’d say something like ‘Nosey isn’t cute on you,’ then buy me a shot.” Aaron bounced on his heels, lost in a reminiscent chuckle. “We hit it off. He liked me.”
“Okay, so boy meets boy. What’d he look like?”
“What’d he look like? Sexy.” Aaron gazed off into the distance at a colorful bell pepper display, which couldn’t help but mimic a romantic sunset with the orange, yellow, and red. Not cool. “Way sexy. Hair color about like yours, eye color about the same too. About your height. Only he had some, you know, pigment to his skin. Not as ivory.”
Oh, good for him! Daniel fought the urge to chuck a grape at Aaron’s face. It wasn’t that he was jealous of Tan Chase. He just wished he didn’t exist at all. There was a difference. “So, you guys were a thing?”
“We weren’t not a thing, I guess.” Aaron waved the thought away. “But nothing serious. So, one day, we’re hanging out, doing something stupid. Oh! We’d made a fort in his living room and were goofing off in it—think we were kinda stoned—when he gets a text. He looks over at me with a smile and says, ‘Hey, Silva, wanna make a quick couple hundred bucks?’”
Daniel pictured Chase, the nonpasty version of himself, as twiddling his paper-thin mustache with lots of maniacal cackling as he asked that question.
“And all I had to do for a couple hundred dollars was—”
“Nope.” Daniel spun on his heels and darted toward the exit. “If you need me, I’ll be in the car.” He balked, goose bumps covering his arms. “Don’t say I didn’t try.”
LATER THAT evening, Aaron was mother-henning around as Daniel sat curled in an armchair, holding his hands over his eyes. “What are you doing back there?”
“Stop asking questions,” Aaron called out from somewhere behind him, clanking around. “Meddlesome. Meddlesome is what you are.”