Enough to Stay Out All Night

“Say my name. Tell me you love me.”

A soft laugh. “I thought I was the one who gets to make the demands.”

“Do it, please?”

There were a few moments of silence. His heart was racing in his chest, but not because of the physical activity. He may have been the one being paid for it, but he needed this just as much as they did. He heard plenty of stories of other boys who felt dirty and used afterward, but not him; he went home feeling loved.

It was a rush and it was never enough. He had to go back out again every night, not just to earn his living but to feel wanted. He asked the same of each one, and when they whispered in his ear he closed his eyes and didn't think of them.

“I love you, Chris.”

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The bus was nearly empty as it always was at this time of day. Most people were at work now, their children at school. Chris probably should have been at home, sleeping, but he ignored his fatigue for the chance at another rush, an indescribable rush better than any other. He quickly checked his cellphone – it was one-thirty.

Only a minute later the bus stopped and a man with a dark green cap got on. Chris knew him well, stared as the man sat down on the other side of the bus, taking in all the details he was already familiar with. He wasn't sure how long it would be before the man noticed him.

///////////////////////////////

There was a giant mirror in the middle of the room. With nothing better to do, Chris stood in front of it and examined his reflection.

He started down at his feet, his least favorite feature. He made sure to wear shoes as often as possible, and when he wasn't wearing shoes he wore thick socks so that he would never have to see his own feet. The skin was always dry and cracked and was not a fair representation of his beauty.

He liked his legs, though. They were long and slender, and even though his thighs could have been slimmer he thought they still looked appealing. His jeans hung low on his hips and his shirt rode up a bit if he held his shoulders square enough. The bit of skin the movement exposed was pale, but smooth, much better than the skin on his feet.

His stomach and chest were flat. He wasn't muscular at all, but at least he was lean. His arms were fairly thin, and his collarbone was prominent. He had a scar on his throat from a surgery he'd had as a child. He used to think it looked ugly, but in time he had grown accustomed to it and was able to appreciate it well enough. He liked to make up gruesome stories about it whenever one of them inquired, which always earned him a bit of their sympathy.

His eyes fell over his own visage. Despite the small gap in between his two front teeth, he had always thought he had a nice smile (it was a shame that he smiled too infrequently) and had been told so on several occasions. His hair was growing a bit too long for his liking, the ends starting to curl enough to form actual ringlets. He would have to get it cut soon.

His eyes were always the last thing he liked to see. Sure, they were a rather pretty blue and had earned him plenty of compliments in his lifetime, but there was just something unsettling about looking into his own eyes. He had heard once that blue eyes were supposedly equated with innocence – every time he thought about it now he bit back a laugh. He imagined that the bluer the eyes, the more innocent their owner, and so he would ask himself how he ever ended up with such a color. He never felt bad about what he did, but he knew he was far from virtuous.

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Chris stared for approximately thirty seconds before Jonny noticed him. He had been in the middle of slipping an earphone over his right ear when he looked up and saw Chris. He smiled and waved with his free hand, saying, “Hi,” in that quiet voice of his.

Chris waved back and echoed, “Hi.” Jonny went back to sandwiching the hook of the earphone in between his earlobe and the thick fabric of his cap. While Jonny was distracted, Chris had taken the liberty of grabbing his bag and moving to the empty seat on Jonny's left. He watched Jonny for another few seconds, then nervously glanced around the rest of the bus.

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A pair of hands crept over his hips and up his sides, fingers slipping under the hem of his shirt and slowly lifting the fabric. He was always relieved that he was not as ticklish as some of his other family members were, though he was sure that if he started giggling now it would only be welcomed. Instead, he stood with a blank face and an imagination that replaced almost all of the factual details of that moment:

He wasn't in another unfamiliar hotel room at midnight. He couldn't smell the stench of alcohol in the hot breath gliding across his neck. The hands that touched him weren't the hands of a stranger.

He was loved.

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Abruptly, Jonny removed his left headphone and asked, “Are you doing anything Friday?”

Chris had no reason to doubt that Jonny was talking to him, because there was no one else on the bus except the driver. His heart beat a little faster. “I was thinking about going out,” he coolly replied with a casual shrug of his right shoulder. “Why?”

Jonny dug into his backpack and retrieved a slightly crumpled piece of paper, which he then handed to Chris. It was a neon green flyer.

“There's this open mic at the coffee shop Friday night,” Jonny told him. “I'm gonna play for a bit. You should come.”

Chris saw the excitement in Jonny's eyes. He knew how much Jonny loved performing, especially in front of his friends. “Maybe,” he said, looking down at the flyer and tilting his head to the side. “I'll have to think about it.”

///////////////////////////////

“What's your name?”

“John.”

Chris smirked. He always used his real name – he needed to use his real name – but he knew that no one else ever did. John was such a common name, such an easy choice. “Can I call you Jonny?”

The man hesitated at first, wondering if he was being serious, and then smiled back and winked at him. “You can do whatever you like.”

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Chris wrapped a piece of tape around his finger with the adhesive side facing out and stuck it to the back of the flyer. He did this another three times, one for each corner of the paper. Then he carefully held the flyer up to the wall and made sure it was parallel to the other papers he had taped up in the past. He pressed his hand firmly on the paper until he was certain that it would not fall.

He stood back and admired his work. He had at least twenty other flyers on his wall, all of which he had received from Jonny. There were also a few small slips of paper from the gigs Jonny had done which had not been important enough for an entire sheaf.

The wall was the same one that his bed was pushed up against. He stood on the mattress whenever he needed to add another flyer to the collection. After sticking the newest one up there, he looked down at his sock-covered feet and tried to avoid stepping on the guitar that he always kept on his bed.

He jumped down to the floor, but almost immediately went back to the mattress, this time lying down and slipping under the blanket. He reached his hand out and placed it gently on the neck of the guitar. The strings always made a weird, scratchy sound when he ran his fingers over them, never actually strumming. He didn't know the first thing about playing the guitar, but it had never been his intention to use the instrument the way it was meant to be used.

///////////////////////////////

“I've been trying to sell my one guitar for the past month,” Jonny was telling him as they sat in the coffee shop one rainy afternoon, “but it seems like no one wants to buy it.”

“How much do you want for it?” Chris asked. He absentmindedly swirled the coffee stirrer around in his cup. Jonny threw him an intrigued look.

“Why, are you gonna buy it?”

“That depends. How much do you want for it?” Chris repeated with slight emphasis. He could tell that Jonny was unsure of his reaction to what was probably just an attempt at making conversation, not money.

After the pause, Jonny answered, “A hundred.”

Chris smiled and held out his hand. “Deal.”

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The song was halfway finished when Chris walked into the coffee shop. At first he was afraid that it was Jonny up on stage and that he had arrived late, but he looked and was relieved to find that a woman actually stood in front of the crowd. He spotted Jonny off to the side of the stage, but did not wave; Jonny wasn't even looking at anyone in the shop, his attention focused on the guitar in his hands. He bent over and fiddled with the tuning pegs, then gently strummed a few of the strings. Chris took a seat somewhere in the middle of the audience.

He liked to sit in the middle, because it showed that he was supportive without seeming too supportive. He often thought about purposely coming into a performance of Jonny's a bit late just to act like it wasn't the only thing he thought of the entire day, not even close – but it really was the only thing his mind could focus on and he didn't want to miss even a second of seeing Jonny play. So, he settled for sitting a few tables back from the stage.

Jonny was an instrumentalist and not a lyricist or singer, but his songs always felt complete regardless, like a few vocals here and there would add almost nothing to the experience. Chris liked to watch Jonny concentrate while he played – his eyebrows drawn but the rest of his face appearing relaxed – but the music itself put him in some sort of trance. Chris was almost jealous of how easy it was to admire Jonny's talent, his art.

///////////////////////////////

Chris stood in the doorway while he waited for Jonny to fetch his guitar. He looked around, but was far too nervous to actually walk into the room – Jonny's room. He was standing in the doorway of Jonny's room, something he had only dreamed about for ages. There were many little posters taped to the walls of people who Chris guessed were musicians. All the pictures had the glossy look that meant they had been torn from various magazines.

There was little else in the room. Jonny had a small desk next to the window which had no drapes or blinds. Chris wondered if the light pouring in ever bothered Jonny.

Jonny's bed was against the wall opposite the window. Jonny was off to the side of it now, digging in his closet for the guitar case. The guitar itself rested on Jonny's bed; Chris stared at the guitar, but didn't see it, too busy taking in the image of that bed – the sheets ruffled just a bit – and committing it to memory for the next time he had a client. If only the memory could be more than just an image...

Chris pulled himself back to the present and tried to subside the longing he felt deep in his chest as Jonny gently set the guitar down in its case. He very briefly thought about bustling across the room, dragging Jonny down onto the bed and learning the feel of those sheets (and why not? He couldn't be sure if he would ever be this close to the room again), but he didn't, because it couldn't happen like that.

While Jonny closed the guitar case and traveled across the room, Chris pulled out his wallet and extracted a wad of bills. He and Jonny traded, case for money, and Chris held the handle of the case with both hands and watched as Jonny looked at the bills with some confusion. Jonny had counted what was there, his fingers stuck in the middle of the pile.

Jonny lifted his eyes to Chris. “I thought we agreed on a hundred.”

“Well,” Chris began, realizing that the guitar and case were far heavier than he had assumed they would be, “we did...”

“You gave me two hundred,” Jonny blankly said.

Chris refrained from blinking. “It's worth two.”

“Actually, I only bought it for-”

“It's worth two,” Chris said again. Jonny stared at him for a while with a dumbfounded look, then seemed to give up the fight and pocketed the money.

“Thanks,” Jonny told him in a quiet voice.

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“Are you planning on watching the rest of these people or do you want to get out of here?” Jonny softly asked. His voice had come out of nowhere and startled Chris, nearly forcing him to spill the cup of coffee in his hand.

After recovering from his near heart attack, Chris turned to find Jonny standing only a foot away and leaning his elbow on the table. Chris quickly looked back at the stage before answering. “Well, I'm sure the other people would appreciate the attention, but,” he glanced at Jonny, “I suppose there are better things to do with my ti-”

“Good. Come on,” Jonny interjected, firmly grasping Chris's arm and yanking him out of his seat. Chris was surprised by Jonny's strength, as he was sure that Jonny was surprised by Chris's fragility. He let himself be dragged across the shop to the outside world and decided that in the darkness it was all right to let out a quick smile.

///////////////////////////////

He remembered the first time it had happened more clearly than he could remember any other time, which made sense, at least to him, since that first time was extremely significant. It was what started everything, what caused him to live his life the way he did now.

He had been sitting at the bar, just waiting for someone to come up to him. He had heard that this was how that sort of thing was done and he felt that his source was reliable enough to actually listen to. He waited for quite a long time, but eventually a man did start talking to him.

“You're a pretty little thing, aren't you?” The man rested his hand on Chris's arm as Chris glanced up at him. The man looked startlingly young, yet he still managed to have a creepy air about him. Chris didn't really care what he looked like, though. “I'll bet you do all sorts of stuff.”

“Anything you want.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred an hour.”

The man gave him a knowing smirk. “You're new at this, aren't you?”

Chris stood up and tried to make himself look superior. “Do I look like I'm new at this?”

The man thought for a few moments, considering the question. He looked far less certain than he had ten seconds ago. “I guess not.”

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There was a tree in the park so huge that both he and Jonny could lean up against it side by side, still leaving just enough room for a third person. The distance between them now was approximately one human body, but that was just because Jonny had his guitar out, and if Chris sat too close he would get hit by the neck.

Jonny had just started playing out of nowhere several minutes prior. There was no real lighting around them, but Chris still watched him anyway, and could still clearly see the meticulous expression he wore. He didn't even care that the bark of the tree was scraping against and digging into his back; Jonny and his guitar were beautiful and that was all that mattered.

///////////////////////////////

He closed his eyes, because he didn't think it made much of a difference whether or not he was really in the moment. The room was pitch-black anyway, and he was sure the other man wouldn't mind too terribly.

There was a shift of the other body and then hot air was being quickly exhaled around his ear. Chris kept his eyes shut tight and wondered what wouldn't be weird for him to think of (this being the first time, and he had been working for several months before he had known the dark green cap), because if he didn't think of something else then he may as well have had his eyes open.

Then there came a whisper in his ear, deep and wanting. “God, you really are beautiful.”

And something in the back of his mind lit up.

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“Jonny, how much do you like me?” Chris asked while simultaneously trying to prevent his slightly melted ice cream from dripping down the cone and onto his hand. If he hadn't been so tired, he would not have asked the question; alas, the sun was rising over the horizon and Chris couldn't remember the last time he had slept for more than three hours in a row.

Jonny sounded just as tired as he did. “Enough to stay out all night,” he answered with a slight, fatigued slur in his speech.

“How much is that?”

Chris turned to Jonny. Jonny was doing the same thing he had been doing, trying to keep his hands free of ice cream, except that Jonny looked a lot better than he must have. Chris caught glimpses of Jonny's, tongue every few seconds and in his tiredness thought that he himself felt quite like melted ice cream.

Jonny stopped to look up at Chris. Chris could see that, as with most things he did, he had caused Jonny a bit of confusion. “A rather generous amount. You know... We're really good friends.”

Even though Jonny was clearly greatly affected by fatigue, Chris still believed what he said – after all, it wasn't as if Jonny was drunk or anything along those lines. They just were both in desperate need of some shut-eye.

“Well,” Chris began, importantly, looking out once more at the sunrise, “I'm really good friends with a lot of people.”

“Ah. Then I guess I don't feel so special anymore.”

Like with everything else, Chris didn't show it, but at that moment he felt like he'd lost a battle.