Sunset Park (10 page)

Raymond set the pipe on the arm of the sofa, and I climbed over his knees, straddling his lap. He was schooling his features to not look nervous, but his body was tense.

“Are you ready?” I asked, furrowing my brow to make it seem more serious than it was.

“Yeah. It ain’t like I never kissed someone before.”

“Okay….”

I was acutely aware of how unyielding he was—how his posture was ramrod straight, and then… the slight twitching of his lips just before I touched them. He burst out laughing, and I couldn’t contain a chuckle in response.

“Raymond!”

“Fuck, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just weird.”

We tried again, twice more, and each time he dissolved into nervous laughter. He couldn’t take it seriously. It was too staged. We decided to smoke again, relax more, and a brilliant idea sprang to mind—I asked him to shotgun a hit so I wouldn’t pull too hard from the pipe and have another coughing fit. Raymond agreed. This time when our faces neared, he didn’t laugh. He was too busy holding the smoke inside.

Our lips sealed together, then parted, and smoke billowed from his mouth into mine. I sucked it in, wondering if this could even get me high, and slid forward on his lap. Our crotches pressed together and his hand rose to hold on to my hip. While smoke escaped the seam of our mouths, I flicked my tongue to his. His fingers tightened against my hip, and I delved my tongue inside less tentatively. He was so still that it was hard to get excited. It felt like I was molesting him. Or at least it did until his large hand moved up my back and his fingers delved into the hair at the nape of my neck. He cupped my head, pulled me closer, and kissed me the way I knew he kissed the beautiful girls who followed him around. Gave me a taste of what had kept them coming back for more.

It wasn’t aggressive or violent; there was no frantic thirst to find out what I was made of or what made me different from anyone else. Raymond kissed me like he wanted to explore me, his tongue slowly twining with mine, and it was so sensual that my heart sped. I closed my eyes, tilted my face to the side, and the illusion of a shotgun disappeared. His hand massaged my scalp in movements so slight it could have been my imagination, and I reached up to fan my fingers out along his cheek. His skin was satin-soft, and I couldn’t help but caress him.

The kiss slowed, and I thought he would pull away, but then he gripped me with renewed vigor. Both of our breathing patterns stuttered, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop kissing him. He tasted too good, felt too good, and when a soft moan escaped his throat, I was undone. My hands were shaking, my heart was galloping, and I was so hard I wanted to grind against him. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to ruin the moment. This wasn’t an impatient, tongue-dueling lead-up to a quick, dirty fuck. This was… different. Real. A real kiss. And my heart fluttered in a frightening way.

I pulled back when the butterfly feeling grew. My hands dropped to his shoulders, and I clutched them for support. I wanted to tilt my head forward and catch my breath while our swollen lips continued to brush, but that was too intimate. That wasn’t what this was for. Even if Raymond was still lightly massaging me as his heart slammed against his chest.

“Wha—” I cleared my throat, meeting his eyes—so intense and dilated. “So what did you think?”

Raymond was still focusing on my mouth. “I liked it. It was… nice.”

“Yeah. You’re a good kisser. Some guys aren’t. A lot of guys aren’t.”

“Oh.” He licked his lips. “Thank you. For the compliment and for letting me use you.”

“Such a hardship.” I scooted off his lap before I gave in to temptation. My hands were still trembling ever so slightly, and my stomach was doing backflips. I was the nervous one now. It was hard not to touch my lips, to replay the entire kiss in my head just so I could hear that faint sound he’d made. “It’s not a big deal. Anytime you want to talk about things, or try something, I’ll help if you want me to.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

I could feel his gaze burning into the side of my face. My blush was likely darkening and spreading, but I avoided looking at him. He would see through me in a minute.

We sat that way for a short while, him staring, me examining the buds in his airtight container, and my mind cycling the sense memory of our kiss.

“I’m going to load another bowl,” he said finally.

I nodded, glad for the distraction. “Good idea.”

Raymond

LEXIS LANGUAGE
Solutions was one of two jobs that called me back. They paid the most, despite offering the position I wanted the least.

Office clerk.

I showed up for orientation with all the enthusiasm of a guy about to get his nuts waxed. Michael said I was being a brat. David called me ungrateful. Nunzio agreed that the job was lame but cheered me on by saying it would be insanely easy.

Not expecting to land a full-time position within the first month of my job hunt, I didn’t have much to wear. The office was business casual, but Michael insisted I borrow clothes from Nunzio so I didn’t go into work wearing jeans and sneakers like a jibaro. Before my first day, I’d snagged some items that would tide me over for a couple of weeks, and now I was trying not to tug at the collar of my button-down as the HR assistant showed me around the office.

It was, simply speaking, a stereotype.

“It’s not the fanciest space,” Sandra confided.

No shit. The walls were varying shades of gray, puke-green, and off-white. No ornamentation, artwork, or plant life. Even the cubicles were undecorated by their owners. Everything was the same.

“Viktor plans to remodel next year.”

Judging by the vacant looks on the faces of the office drones, I was willing to wager that LLS’s CEO wasn’t the type to spend money to make his people feel anything less than self-loathing about where they’d landed in life. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe those glazed looks of indifference masked people who were super gung ho about their wack jobs.

“Uh-huh.”

“This is the Individuals Department.” Sandra paused at the back of the office. I always imagined departments to have their own offices, but at LLS, they were denoted by a separate row of depressing cubicles. “This is where the cool kids are at. Everyone wants to get in this department.”

I stared dubiously at the seven people manning Individuals. They didn’t look more upbeat than anyone else in the office, but they had at least decorated their crappy row. There were some random scenic posters on the wall, and a tired-looking cowboy hat hanging from the ceiling light. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to signify.

“Why?”

“Because we keep it interesting,” one of the seven piped up—a woman with long black hair and a red dress. It looked like she was going to a party instead of communicating with freelance translators for small-time translation jobs. “Maybe you’ll find out how.”

I didn’t care, but I smiled. Hopefully it passed muster. I was working hard on not looking like an asshole. David had nagged me all morning about my too-serious face as he fussed over my outfit. It would have been endearing if it wasn’t so annoying, and I’d interrupted his mother hen routine by demanding a kiss good-bye. It hadn’t happened, but the startled look on his face had made it worth it. And for just a fraction of a second, I’d considered doing it anyway. It would have given me something to think about on my new, boring commute. Not that our short make-out session the other day had ever left my mind.

The taste of him was imprinted on my tongue, and I relived that kiss every time I jerked off. The memory was seared into my frontal lobe. Even now, my body tingled as I stood in front of this band of miserable office drudges and thought about the sensation of David’s crotch aligned with my own. As an experiment, our trial kiss had gone pretty damn well.

Blinking, I stared down at the lady in the red dress. Getting hard while doing the introductory rounds would get me fired—though I wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing.

“Rosalie, this is Raymond,” Sandra said. “He’s our new Phillip.”

“Ohh….” Rosalie nodded, looking pensive. “That was fast.”

“Is that the guy I replaced?” I asked.

“Yeah. He was our other jack-of-all-trades,” Sandra said, leaning against the sandpaper-like wall of the cubicle. “Very sweet guy.”

I groped around in my bag of canned responses to find one that might be applicable. “Did he work here long?”

“Yes, for about a year.”

I didn’t have a ton of experience in professional environments, but I was almost positive that
about a year
didn’t constitute a long time to have been employed at a company. Even a drudge factory like LLS.

“Come by after work,” Rosalie said as Sandra started away. “We’ll give you the lowdown on our happy hour schedule and events.”

“Uh. Okay. I’ll come get the… lowdown.”

We bypassed more cubicles and approached an empty office separated by a glass wall. Inside were outdated computers with box monitors and various pieces of clunky audio equipment. The wires were tangled together in a knot beside the desk, and binders were haphazardly stowed away on a beat-up tan shelf. An ideal work environment.

“This is the fishbowl. When we have a transcription job for you, you’ll be working in here.”

“Will I be doing a lot of transcribing?”

“Maybe a couple of times a week. Most of your energy will be spent with the facilities team and in the mailroom. That’s why I keep calling you the jack-of-all-trades. Your primary role is to keep this office running smoothly in different capacities, but you will also pick up the slack for various departments when it’s needed. We may even have you look at Spanish translations from time to time.”

I was tempted to tell her I couldn’t read or write well in Spanish but knew the information would lower my value by half. Maybe it wouldn’t come up. If they didn’t have a billion Spanish-speaking translators on their list, they had problems that I couldn’t fix by pretending to proofread an English-to-Spanish public service announcement.

Sandra introduced me to the IT team—composed primarily of guys who seemed more awake and energetic than anyone I’d met so far—and finally led me to the area that would be my new base of operations. To my surprise, it was less of a drag than the rest of the place. It was an open area near the break room and kitchen, but several yards away from the majority of the other staff. Instead of cubicles, there were regular desks facing a window. It afforded a good view of One World Trade Center, but I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Ground Zero creeped me out, and the new skyscraper looked like a chrome torpedo.

“You’ll be working here with Eugene and Karina. Eugene is out sick, and Karina is messengering something across town for Viktor.”

I looked at the desk that would be mine—metal, dented, but with a dope dual-screen computer. I wondered if it could run
Borderlands
. “I thought I was supposed to be trained by Eugene today?”

“Karina will start training you as soon as she returns,” Sandra reassured me. “For now, just settle in and get yourself acclimated. Someone from IT will come set up your computer and get you onto the network.”

Getting myself acclimated to an empty desk meant sitting my ass down and powering up the computer. It booted in under a minute, and I started poking around to see what kind of goods they had installed in the bad boy. There was an impressive amount of RAM, but a shitty onboard graphics card. Definitely not gaming material.

When the guy from IT didn’t show his face in the first ten minutes of me dividing time between staring out the window and clicking randomly at the computer, I decided to nose around the hard drive. For whatever reason, they hadn’t wiped the machine or the browser history after what’s-his-face quit or got fired. Going through his e-mails in Outlook wasn’t a big thrill, but I got a clearer idea of what the hell he’d done—ordering and distributing supplies, contacting vendors and maintenance staff, and transcribing documents a few times a week. Nothing too intimidating. Or interesting.

His browser history was more fun. I found the guy’s Facebook and his Twitter, and it didn’t take much backtracking to realize he’d quit within the last month or so.

@philinnyc: so glad to be out of that fucking hell hole

@philinnyc: LLS peeps should know that unless you ride V’s dick, you’re on the shit list and he WILL find a way to ruin you

Looked promising. And sadly that was the most exciting part of my day.

At four o’clock, I vacated the office, forced myself to say good-bye to people I didn’t care about and had nothing in common with, and rode the train to my new apartment with a head full of doubts. Getting a job had been a relief for all of a week, but now it felt like a mistake I couldn’t undo without looking like an asshole. It was drudgery, pure and simple. Maybe being on the docks wasn’t glamorous, but I’d never felt like the odd man out when working on a shipment with a gang of dudes a lot like me. To the point, gruff, blue-collar, and none of the fake office personas that I’d already sniffed out after a single day.

On the docks, I hadn’t felt weird for sounding a little hood. I hadn’t stumbled over attempts to code-switch from my typical way of speaking so I could sound proper to the folks in Manhattan. It was a skill Michael and Nunzio had mastered by the time they were out of high school and entering college. But I’d never even considered there would come a day when I’d have to pretend I was anyone other than myself. And I had never stressed so much over my tats. Now, I kept my sleeves rolled down even when sweating at my desk while the central air didn’t do more than rattle the vents.

If being an adult amounted to spending my life doing miserable shit just to get by, I wanted a rain check. One day of working for Viktor, and I already felt like everything about my life that was interesting and enjoyable would be quarantined to specific boxes that could only be opened at certain times and occasions. The outlook was pretty fucking grim.