Of course he didn’t actually just want you. No one ever really does. You’re good on camera, but that’s the end of it.
For fuck’s sake, I had felt like I was falling back in love with Red when he had taken care of me like that.
Or maybe I was realizing that I’d never really felt true love for anyone but him.
Which, of course, was completely foolish.
After an hour had passed, I transferred the raw footage to my computer and tried to begin the process of editing the video. But every second of looking at Red’s face and body and cock on camera felt like another nail in my heart.
I ached as I watched him jerk off, over and over again, as I replayed the footage. I started to picture thousands of people seeing it online, wanting Red, and probably demanding more videos.
And for the first time in my life, I actually felt uncomfortable with the idea of all those eyes. Red wasn’t mine, but… this video felt like it was mine. It represented so much more to me than just a “hot jerk off vid.”
It was a piece of my stupid heart. How could I possibly put it up for so many people to gawk at?
I turned off the computer and walked away, heading back outside to my garden. By now, the sun was setting, and the light quality was way too dim to do any real work. But I didn’t care. I had to do something physical. For the next hour, I finished digging up the holes in the ground and I retrieved the rest of the Gallica bushes that I’d gotten from the store earlier today. I placed them carefully, packing new soil around them, saying a little prayer that no more storms would come our way anytime soon.
The empty feeling was still there after I’d finished, though. Now it was nighttime—the time when I always wanted a drink—and I felt like I was going to crawl up my own walls if I didn’t distract myself somehow. My head was swirling. I plopped down on the couch and Bandit sidled up next to me, licking my shin.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the only person I ever dialed.
“Liam,” Katie said when she answered. “I thought I was never going to hear from you again.”
Just the sound of her voice was enough to lighten my heart, just enough.
“Oh, please, we texted about your Eggs Benedict just this morning,” I said.
“Well, I texted you a picture of my glorious Eggs Benedict, but you didn’t respond,” she said. I could hear the smile in her voice, and already it relaxed me.
“I was too busy exchanging blow jobs with the one person I really shouldn’t have done that with,” I said.
“Oh no,” Katie said. “Red?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Liam…”
“You don’t need to get mad at me, I know I did a bad thing.”
“I’m not mad at all,” Katie said. “I get it. You didn’t do a bad thing, but... you might have done a stupid thing.”
“Definitely stupid,” I said. “And the worst part is that we filmed a video and now I don’t know if I can release it.”
“Why?”
I let out a long sigh, turning on the couch and scratching Bandit’s neck. “Because I keep looking at the footage and… feeling things. Things I didn’t even knew I could feel anymore. Katie, I started getting jealous even thinking about people jerking off to Red.”
“Don’t people already jerk off to Red, like, all the time?” she asked. “You said there’s an old video of you two online.”
“That’s different,” I said. “First of all, I was tipsy when we filmed that one. Secondly, we’re… in it together. It’s a video of me blowing him, and him coming all over my face. And his own hat.”
“TMI,” Katie said.
“You know I don’t believe in TMI.”
She laughed.
“I fucked up today, too. I turned off the camera, and then he blew me, but he didn’t realize I’d stopped filming. He was doing it all just for the video, and I… wasn’t.”
“Oh fuck,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“That explains a lot. Are you all right?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “I really want a drink, actually,” I said.
“I can understand that,” she said kindly, her voice softening. “But you and I both know that deep down, that isn’t what you really crave. Right?”
“I mean, I definitely am craving a few shots of whiskey right now,” I said.
“There’s always something deeper. You want the whiskey to escape right now. You want it because…”
“Because… what I really am craving is Red,” I said. “God, it hurts to even admit that.”
“Why?”
“He’s made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want a relationship of any kind, outside of business needs.”
“You think that’s true? He solely did this for the money?”
“I don’t think he minds being sexual with me, necessarily. But I know it didn’t mean anything to him the way it did to me. It shouldn’t mean anything to me.”