Kept Man: Firsts and Forever Stories

A voice from the doorway startled me. “This place is like a fucking time capsule.”

I turned to Micah and said, “I hope I didn’t overstep by coming in there.”

“Nah, it’s all good. Like I said, this is your home for the next six months. That means nothing’s off limits.”

“Okay. Just wanted to make sure.” I gestured at the guitars and asked, “Do you still play them sometimes?”

“I haven’t in years.” Micah joined me and hesitated before crouching down in front of the acoustic guitar. He stared at it for a long moment, lost in his memories. Finally, he muttered, “I should gut this room and make it into something fun. It’s not like I’ll ever use it again.”

“What would you turn it into?”

He thought about that as he straightened up again. It seemed very deliberate when he tried to make a joke out of it, as if he wanted to push whatever he’d been thinking about out of his mind. “A ping pong parlor? A racquetball court? Or I could pad the whole thing and install one of those mechanical bull riding machines. Even better, I could turn it into a giant ball pit, like the ones at those indoor playgrounds.”

“You could combine the bull riding machine and the ball pit. They’d give you a nice, cushioned, and very festive place to land.”

“You’re a genius.”

I grinned and said, “Seems a shame to waste this excellent soundproofing though, so what about a sex dungeon? You could moan your head off in here without disturbing the neighborhood.”

He grinned, too. “I already have a sex dungeon, so that would be redundant.”

“And you didn’t show me?” I clicked my tongue.

“I figured that was a bit much for the first twenty-four hours.”

“Where is it?”

“Behind a hidden panel in my bedroom.”

I nodded in approval. “A secret sex dungeon. Epic! Being rich wasn’t wasted on you, my friend.”

He chuckled at that, and then he said, “Let’s get out of here. I’m about two seconds from a massive allergy attack with all this dust.” It made me sad when he took one last, wistful look at that guitar, then left it behind.

On our way downstairs, I told him which room I’d selected, and he said, “You chose the smallest bedroom in the house.”

“It’s cute, and I like the nautical theme. What’s with the porthole, though? It seems like it was meant to serve a purpose.”

“It used to be a window into a fish tank, but I can’t be trusted to keep anything alive. Case in point, I’ve replaced the plants on my patio three times in two months, because I keep forgetting to water them.”

“There are places that deliver plants?”

“There are places that deliver everything,” he told me. “If the newest ones die though, that’s it. I’m not sentencing anything else to death.”

“Why don’t you hire a gardener? The front yard could use some help, and they’d keep the potted plants alive, too.”

“Same reason I don’t have a housekeeper,” he said. “I don’t like having strangers around.”

“And yet, you invited me to stay here.”

“I was so sick of my own company that it outweighed my antisocial tendencies.” When we reached the foyer, he indicated my bags and asked, “Want me to take those upstairs for you?”

“No thanks, I’ll get them later. What are you planning to do the rest of the day?”

“Before I hired you, I had a standing engagement every afternoon. It consisted of lying on the floor in my office and staring at the ceiling. Now I suppose I’m open to suggestions.”

I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. “Let’s unpack these boxes and see what you impulse bought online.” I picked up one of the packages from the porch and gave it a shake.

“Might as well.”

He brought us two pairs of scissors, and we went to work. Among the first things we unpacked were five cookbooks, a tortilla press, and a rice cooker. Micah immediately got distracted by a book on Japanese cooking. While he flipped through the pages and provided a running commentary on the recipes, I sliced open another box with the tip of the scissors. Then a grin spread across my face.

As I made a tidy display with the lube and several dildos I unpacked, I joked, “Looks like I got here just in time.”

He glanced up from the cookbook, and his eyebrows shot toward his hairline when he spotted the sex toys. “Oh shit, I totally forgot about that stuff,” he muttered, as his face turned pink. I would’ve thought it’d be tough to embarrass a thirty-eight-year-old rock star who must have seen and done it all by now, but apparently I would have been wrong. “I was really horny one night a couple of weeks ago, and I guess I got a little carried away.”

I lifted the flap on a box containing a jack sleeve and took a peek inside. It was basically a plastic tube fitted with a silicon insert that had a small opening at the top. “No need to be embarrassed,” I told him. “This all looks like fun.”