Whatever the Cost (7 page)

The money is convincing, and for one reason only. Jacen doesn’t intend to be an escort forever. He wants to be able to live his life the way he wants to live it, without a nine-to-five job behind a desk, rotting away in an office chair, getting fat and lazy and not living life while he can. Willing to sacrifice a few years in the name of giving strangers pleasure, Jacen looks forward to many more years being free, living off his savings, being happy. That’s what he wants. And if it takes some pain and discomfort to accomplish that, then hey, he’s got the balls to handle it.

Patrick, though. Patrick complicates things. Sure, Jacen is taller than him, packed with more muscle than him, but Patrick’s presence is commanding and intimidating to say the least. He makes Jacen feel small, weak, vulnerable, even when he’s trying to keep his walls up and just be the persona that Patrick wants him to be, and not himself. Patrick wants Jacen to feel like he could take Jacen apart and turn him inside out if he wanted to, that he could reach inside to all of Jacen’s hidden places and trigger him in ways that Jacen never dreamed possible. And it works. Jacen’s kind of scared of Patrick. He’s like a perverted father figure, telling Jacen what to do, to take what he’s given and like it. Usually Jacen does. Patrick treats him well and Jacen reaps the benefits. Patrick always gets him off, makes it feel good, makes him happy. It lets Jacen walk away feeling proud of himself for a job well done.

Not today. Today, Patrick stripped Jacen, bent him over and saw the proof that Jacen had been messing around and letting other people touch Patrick’s things.

Usually Jacen tries to fuck Patrick face-to-face when he thinks the cover-up make-up won’t completely hide a bruise or welt. It’s not typically an issue. Patrick likes to kiss while he fucks, anyway, and it’s easier to do that if Jacen’s on his back, legs in the air, totally accessible.

But Patrick had been riled that morning. He’d had a streak of bad luck with his acting career. It had soured his mood. He needed an outlet, so Jacen complied. It was too late to reposition or reformulate his plan when Patrick shoved Jacen against the edge of the table and yanked his pants down. There was no room for finesse there. When Jacen apologized and tried to make an excuse about having an accident that caused the marks, it just made it worse. Patrick yanked Jacen’s head back by his hair almost hard enough to rip it right out by the roots. He’d spit in Jacen’s face, called him trash, a pig, filth, a dirty whore. He spun Jacen around, punched him with enough force to split his lip and then fucked him brutally, dry and with no prep until Jacen was biting the inside of his cheek just to keep quiet, tears running in rivers down his face.

He’d been seeing Patrick nearly every week for the past nine months. They weren’t strangers. It wasn’t just like getting a bad call and having to put up with a shitty client until Della could collect their fee and tell them to try going somewhere else, thank you very much. It was Patrick. Familiar, protective but tender Patrick.

You can’t have sex with someone regularly for that long without putting a little faith in how they see you, and getting hurt when they turn around and literally spit in your face. It doesn’t matter if it’s just a job, just money. Something like that leaves a mark that’s even harder to heal than welts from a bad date with a Dominant.

Jacen wipes off his arms, torso and legs, then wraps the towel around himself, hovering in the middle of the bathroom. There’s something about Liam’s reaction that upsets Jacen even more, and he had been pretty upset to begin with. Wanting out of there, to do anything to avoid a ‘talk,’ Jacen grits his teeth and forces himself to walk into the bedroom.

“You have to tell Della. You have to cut these fuckers loose,” Liam seethes as soon as Jacen is standing on carpet instead of tile. He moves to the bed and sits on it, hiding his face in his hands, mainly just so that he doesn’t have to see the way that Liam keeps looking at him.

“First of all,” Jacen argues tiredly, without much will left to fight this particular battle. “She knows already. Second, they’re my highest paying clients, next to Claudia. It’d be bad for business.”

“Fuck the business.”

“Well, that’d be ironic, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t you dare joke about this,” Liam snaps. “If you’d told Spencer to fuck off months ago, you wouldn’t have had this problem with Patrick in the first place, but clearly Patrick is too unbalanced to be trusted any more. That,” Liam growls, pointing at Jacen’s lip, “is assault.”

“...Of a whore. Assault of a whore, Lee. Finish the thought. Don’t fool yourself into thinking what he did was uncalled for.”

Liam reacts dramatically to Jacen’s words, coming at him almost exactly like Patrick did, grabbing his jaw with one hand, forcing his head back to get a better look at his eyes. It makes Jacen flinch away instinctively.

But then Liam’s face softens and he’s too close, Jacen thinks. Liam is
way
too close, their lips inches apart. He holds Jacen there, not letting him pull away.

“Don’t,” Jacen pleads, ashamed, embarrassed, spent.

“Stop saying shit like that,” Liam rasps at him, his large, improbably beautiful eyes searching Jacen’s face in a way that gets Jacen’s stomach to flip-flop.

“Make me. Go on, Lee. I dare you. Be like them. Tell me what to say, what not to say. Tell me where you wanna stick it, how you wanna hurt me, what you’re gonna do to me. Go on.”

Liam’s lips press together in a tight line, his brow creases with anguish.

“Why do you care? You don’t have to fight this battle for me. I’m dealing with it.”

“Bullshit,” Liam hisses, his voice wavering. “No you’re not. You’re letting them do whatever the hell they want and then falling apart as soon as you get home.”

“That’s what home is for, isn’t it? To let things out and vent and move on? Am I not supposed to do that here?”

“It’s not supposed to hurt like this. It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“Says who?”

“Says me. How far are you going to let this go? What if Patrick pulled a knife on you? What if Spencer decides it’d be sexy to try choking you?”

“How about you let
me
worry about that,” Jacen says quietly, wishing that Liam would let him go, hating the scrutiny, the care painted across his features. He grabs Liam’s arm in an attempt to pull his arm away from where it’s grasping his jaw, but all it does is remind Jacen how thickly muscled Liam’s forearms are, how good his warm skin feels under his palm, how much Jacen likes touching Liam. And then he can’t let go either.

“No,” Liam says simply, standing his ground.

“
No
?”

“No,” he repeats.

“I never asked for you to protect me. I’m a big boy, you know. You don’t owe me shit.”

“I’m your friend, and if you won’t stand up for yourself, I’ll do it for you, whether you like it or not. And if Della knows about this and isn’t doing something to correct the problem, I’m gonna be having some words with her, too.”

“Okay, hard-ass. You’ve proved your point. I seriously don’t know why you get so riled up about this when I just wanna forget it ever happened.”

Liam’s lips draw back and he growls through his teeth. Disturbingly, he even gets closer, so close that his lips almost brush against Jacen’s when he says, “
That
is exactly why I get riled up, dumbass.”

He lets Jacen go. Straightening, he takes a deep, rough breath and runs a hand over his face.

“No, c’mon. Keep comin’. Don’t quit now. Get just a little angrier with me and I bet you’ll be punching me in the mouth, too. And we all know what comes after that. Maybe you’ll even do what Patrick didn’t manage to and tear me up inside when you force-fuck me. Then I’ll be out of commission for weeks. You’ll get your wish.”

Liam’s hand claps over his mouth and he makes a small hurt sound. As if in slow motion, Jacen sees him move, but for some reason, can’t react or protest, even when he sees Liam coming. He moves to stand between Jacen’s legs, wraps him up in his arms, hugging Jacen to his body, his hands wind around behind Jacen’s head, against Jacen’s back. Liam’s fingers tangle in Jacen’s hair and graze over his bare skin. Breathing in Liam’s scent, Jacen’s lips press against Liam’s abs as his mouth works around a soundless cry. His hands ball up into fists that curl around behind Liam’s lower back.

It’s an awkward embrace that goes on long after Jacen has started praying for Liam to release him, before his hands disobey him and relax enough to touch and take hold of what’s right there for him, the definition of temptation.

“I don’t wanna fight with you anymore,” Liam says in a small voice.

Jacen turns his face, pressing it flat against Liam’s stomach, a thin, damp shirt the only thing separating them. Liam’s fingers slide against Jacen’s scalp, through his long hair almost in a caress. It sends a hard shiver racing down Jacen’s spine.

“This doesn’t feel like fighting,” Jacen observes.

“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”

That sunny afternoon after Liam and Jacen’s confrontation in the bedroom, Liam leaves to give the CFO of a prominent healthcare organization a wicked blowjob in the back of a stretch limo, dressed as a punk. He slicks his naturally blond hair up into a faux-hawk, spray paints it blue. From his collection of magnetic jewelry he puts on a few pairs of earrings and facial piercings, goes heavy on the eyeliner. For clothes he chooses a tight black tank top, some cargos, steel-toed boots, and lots of accessories like a dog collar, leather cuffs, and chunky silver rings. His nipples and penis are already pierced, and for some clients he takes that jewelry out, but for this one they stay in, though he replaces the plain titanium studs with more decorative ones.

When Liam heads out, he texts Jacen to let him know. Jacen is in a meeting with Della down at the main office over what happened, so Liam doesn’t see him or talk to him between their ‘fight’ and when he goes out on his call.

Liam is back within the hour and, since there was no way to clean up in the limo, he plans to head right for the bathroom. The messenger bag that he brought with him contains a bottle of mouthwash, which he has already used and spit out into the gutter. The pitiful hand release the client gave him left Liam scrounging up some sort of clean-up with baby wipes. All of this adds up to Liam feeling intensely gross. Jacen’s car is in the driveway, so Liam knows he’s home. He doesn’t see the motorcycle that is pulled around back until he gets through the front door, shouts for Jacen, gets no response and then finds him in the backyard. Yasha, an old friend of Jacen’s is there, with the motorcycle he rode in on. The two men are in heavy conversation, so Liam pops his head out to say, “Hey. I’m home. Hittin’ the showers.”

“Liam. Wow. That’s a good look for you,” Yasha says, giving Liam the full head-to-toe once-over but fixating on Liam’s lips when Liam’s hand goes, self-consciously, to his mouth, rubbing it like there might be evidence of what he did staining them.

Liam clams up, like he always does around Yasha. Yasha is one of Jacen’s best friends but Liam constantly feels like the outsider in his company. It’s not really due to any one thing, more a clash of personalities, one headstrong, one reserved. Some of it might also have to do with Yasha and Jacen’s past, that they’ve known each other—intimately—since before Liam and Jacen were ever introduced. At first, Liam couldn’t quite get a handle on what it was about Yasha and Jacen together that gave him a weird vibe, especially since Jacen told him that they’ve never dated or anything, since, well, Jacen doesn’t date guys and Yasha is married to a woman named Valery.

Slowly, though, facts began to slip out. Yasha used to work for The Company. He was an escort for ten years—the typical length of a contract with them—and met Jacen a little over two years earlier, through a mutual friend who was also a sex worker, before an overdose killed him. Jacen and Yasha met at the funeral.

Now Yasha is a private contractor, so to speak, picking and choosing his clients himself, mostly old regulars, and any new people are heavily screened before being considered. He also runs a counseling service specializing in sexual disorders out of his lush house down by the beach. Knowing all of this, things make more sense to Liam, like Yasha’s intense proclivity to flirt with anything that stands on two legs. It doesn’t explain everything, though. Jacen acts differently with Yasha than with anyone else, like Yasha has some sort of power over him, or holds some secret that Jacen doesn’t dare tell anyone else.

Only a few months ago, Liam found out why. When Jacen got into the business professionally and was preparing to sign on with The Company after learning of Yasha’s experience with them, he had gone to Yasha to ‘break him in.’ Jacen admitted that he hadn’t wanted his first experience on the receiving end of anal sex to be with a stranger. So he’d gone to someone trusted, someone who understood—Yasha. They spent a whole weekend together, alone, in Yasha’s house. Yasha had fucked Jacen every way he knew how, over and over again, for days, until some of the novelty had worn off and Jacen discovered how to really enjoy it. Just one friend to another, fucking his brains out.

In the doorway leading to the back patio, in a yard enclosed with tall trees and an abundant, well-tended garden, Liam balls his hands up into fists inside his cargo pants pockets and bites his tongue, ignoring the lingering looks he’s getting from Yasha. Conversely, the ones he’s also getting from Jacen don’t bother Liam at all, but he doesn’t quite consciously realize that.