Chapter Text
Shane couldn’t place where he had borrowed this face.
It had come together slowly.
A word shouted in the midst of an argument overheard in a noisy school corridor when he was age ten. It made friends around him laugh, and he felt the need to join them. He’d never heard that word before, but what he inferred from the laughs was that it was something you said when you wanted to humiliate, debilitate, and emasculate. The way those same boys talked, casually and constantly, about what they found disgusting, and the way Shane quietly added to their list. The way they grew up and started explicitly talking about what they wanted to do to this and that girl, once again he joined in. Unenthusiastically.
He was twelve when one of his mother’s favourite hockey players came out. He remembered the moment precisely, her sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper open, and he caught the headline of the article when he walked past her to the fridge. An odd quality of her silence, and then a soft exhale, something almost mournful, and she’d said quietly, more to herself than to him: oh god, he’s going to have it hard.
And Shane had stood there against the kitchen counter and understood, in the wordless way children understand things that are never said outright, that this was something people sighed about. This was something that would make even the people who loved you most look at the floor, and sigh in disappointment or pity.
The magazine came from the living room stack at fourteen, a men’s health publication, innocuous enough. Except for the ad page he’d turned to and stayed on. A male model sprawled across a bed, hands behind his head, in nothing but underwear, eyes squinting at the lens. Shane had looked at it for a long time, at the ripples of muscles, the smooth plane of the abdomen, the angular jaw. The bulge in the underwear.
The man looked like a statue he’d seen in a museum on vacation years prior. Isn’t it amazing— the detail? It almost looks soft, right? even though it’s a big slab of rock his dad had commented with glee, when he’d noticed him gaping at the marbled figure with intense interest. His dad had leaned in, reading the small description of the statue. Hermes Farnese, he tried to pronounce the name with an accent meant to make Shane laugh. He’d turned to him with a dumbfounded look instead, why is he naked?
He’d kept the magazine under his mattress for two weeks, until the particular page stuck to another page, and he was unable to tear them apart without ripping. Then one night he’d waited until the house was completely dark and crept out to the garden bare footed and buried it under handfuls of his mother’s flowerbed dirt.
At seventeen he was at a house party, nursing a can of beer, while a stranger chatted to him. Shane engaged in the conversation, matched the other’s smile. He could feel something weird between them, as if they were toying with words and circling around playfulness. He didn’t know when he had been approached by this stranger, or how long they had been chatting, just that he vaguely recognised him from school, and that this was something he would never do sober.
It was dissipated instantly as an arm slung around his shoulder from behind— his friend gave the stranger a look, and the stranger stepped back. You know this faggot, Hollander? Shane felt the words land somewhere below his ribs.
Maybe that’s where and why he'd borrowed it— the face. He just asked about the game last week. The stranger quietly left, and Shane’s friend started cackling, he joined in with practiced laughter. How was I supposed to know?
In college, he dated a few women. He found he could love them in a way that was real, while also somehow not quite giving even half of himself— like he was always keeping one hand conspicuously behind his back. They never said so, but after a few months they would quietly disappear from his life, and he would let them.
—
Shane was thirty-two years old, and the pretence started to come apart at the seams.
Rose was on her side facing away from him, one hand curled loosely beneath her jaw, her breathing slow and even. Outside a car moved through the street below, headlights sliding across the wall and gone.
They’d tried again that evening. He didn’t like to think about it in those terms, but they had been trying from time to time for the past two years. Shane had genuinely been trying. He’d been in the bathroom before, volume low, images of nude men with bulging muscles, flashing across his screen. Shane was hard, achingly so, he didn’t touch himself, closed the tabs quickly, and rushed back to the bedroom where Rose sat waiting with a book in hand, cocking an intrigued brow as her gaze fell to his boxers.
When she had her mouth around him, his eyes were clamped shut, his hands were balled into fists at his sides, not even attempting to reach out and touch. The images from his phone appeared behind his eyelids in sequence. And she was trying, but something dulled him almost as soon as she knelt in front of him. He tried and tried to let his mind wander somewhere that would lead to success.
He drifted out of the bedroom, into a different room, with someone else entirely, someone larger, someone who would simply hold him down and take what they wanted. Then, back to his childhood bedroom,the picture of the underwear model— it used to work in the earlier days of their relationship. Defeatedly, he turned limp, unfinished, unable to offer any semblance of pleasure to Rose or himself. Sorry, I don’t know, just— I’m sorry, I’m always too stressed.
She’d been gentle about it, as always of course, which was somehow worse than if she hadn’t been. She’d said it was fine and she wholeheartedly meant it. He’d lain there in the dark after and felt her fall asleep and thought about nothing, for a long time. It looked like there was a small crack in the ceiling, he would have to get it looked at later this week. He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand, and sighed deeply. There was simply no way he would be able to make it through a six hour deposition, with merely four hours of sleep.
Still, Shane picked his phone from the nightstand. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he found it the way you find things you’ve been not-looking-for. Through a door that had resided in his mind, left slightly ajar, and tonight, he was standing right in front of it.
His fingers stilled at the search bar. Just what did he want to know? His thumbs hovered, and he typed.
i can't stay hard
A flurry of Viagra ads. Forums with men discussing their dysfunction, offering advice on an entirely different problem.
He tried again:
how to stay turned on during sex?
Women’s health websites mostly showed up no matter how far down he scrolled, he needed to be specific, declare what he’d never said out loud. With a deep breath, as if he was preparing to dive into a boundless ocean, he finally typed.
married to a woman attracted to men
gay but married to a woman
i love my wife but im gay what should i do
All of them led to the same answers in different levels of gentleness. Accept yourself. Be honest with your wife. You can never truly be happy if you are living a lie. He turned his phone away from the sleeping Rose, and dimmed the light of the screen.
But he was? He was happy.
Rose. The house. The child she wanted, and that part of him was willing to give her, though it proved to be impossible. The placemats her mother had given them, along the baby onesie with grandma's favourite written in cursive. It was tucked somewhere in her part of the closet.
Rose’s robe billowing behind her in the mornings when she cooked breakfast. Her beaming smile when he arrived home late carrying a bouquet of flowers— white camellias, sweet peas, and sometimes chrysanthemums. He thought of the unimpressed look she’d given when he brought a dozen roses to their first date. Very original, Shane. The same look stuck, more fondly now coloured by nostalgia, he still brought her roses on their anniversary every year.
Being unhappy was something he hadn’t consented to consider.
He typed again, slower this time, more carefully, as if the phone might wake Rose of its own accord and expose him
The search results page loaded and he skimmed it without reading, because what he’d seen in the two seconds before closing it was a Reddit thread titled.
How long did you know, before you did something about it?
Rose made a small sound in her sleep, a barely-there exhale, and he turned his head and watched for movement in the dark. His heart did something irregular in his chest, Not quite dread, something with a current to it, preemptive guilt. He turned off his phone and placed it back into the nightstand, slumped back onto the pillows and shut his eyes.
—
Shane’s leg was bouncing underneath his expansive mahogany desk, likely a cause of the five cups of coffee he’d gulped down. A frantic thrumming that he hadn’t been able to switch off. He chewed on the cap of a pen mindlessly, deforming the plastic to an unrecognisable battered shape. The scatter of files and papers from the earlier deposition was still laid out in front of him. A knock on the glass door caused him to place the pen back down to the desk, as if he’d been caught.
His assistant entered and placed another file, a new case, atop the pile of existing ones.
“Mr. Smith is on the line, says it’s urgent,” She said, cutting through the hum of the air conditioner. “Something about the injunction.”
Shane sighed, leaning back into his chair, and glanced down at the blinking red light of his desk phone. “ Tell him I’ll take it after lunch.”
"He also mentioned the billing for last month," she added, pausing. "He wants to know why the junior associates are clocking so many hours on discovery. I told him you’d walk him through it."
“Thanks, Jackie.”
With a small smile she moved out of the room, and let the glass door click shut. He looked down at the new file Jackie had dropped. It was thick, heavy with the weight of someone else’s disaster, the red light on the office phone still blinking, His personal phone rested by the side of the computer monitor, screen dark.
He was not reaching for his phone because he wanted to, it was the shapeless pull of what had been unable to leave him since the dark of night, it had decided to take him to where he was least equipped to handle with an ounce of rationality. Not the question of how long he had known, which had no useful answer, but the question of what he was going to do about it.
Obviously, Shane knew— just as his clients —unresolved things were expensive, the longer you let something sit, the more it cost you. And this particular thing had been sitting for longer than last night. It drifted past him before, on many late nights, in other browser tabs closed before they fully loaded.
male escort services
The website he landed on after a few taps, consisted of a simple grid of photographs on a black background, the whole thing designed with a discretion that was far from tasteful, almost grimy. He was just looking, anyway.
He scrolled through the grid of pictures, then came to a sudden halt.
The photograph was a mirror shot, taken in what looked like a small bathroom, the background blurry. The man in it was shirtless, holding the camera at his side the shot low, slightly angled up, which enhanced the frame of his shoulders, the line of his chest, the rippled plane of his abdomen. Small tufts of brownish hair made a path, dipping past the waistband of his jeans. Dark curls pushed back from his angular face, one escaping onto his temple. Sharp blue-green eyes, looking directly into the lens with an expression that was not performing anything in particular, almost bored.
Below the photograph, the physical description.
Roz: Selective. Rates available on request
Height: 6’3, Build: Athletic, Nationality: Russian.
He was built in a way that the photograph confirmed without requiring elaboration.
Women & men. 9inches. Uncut.
Which must have been exaggerated, just for the allure. The listed preferences and specialities were explicit enough that Shane’s face went hot reading them, he had to glance up at the windowed entrance of his office, to make sure no one was approaching.
His timidity was threaded with something else. Curiosity, carnal attraction— Shane didn’t name it. Just looked at the photograph for a long time. The high of the man’s cheekbones, the curve of his cupid's bow.
The request form was simple. He put a single letter in the name box preserving complete anonymity, filled in his phone number. It asked for preferred dates and a brief message. He was stuck at the message field for a moment.
Then he typed. Discretion essential. Please advise on availability, submitted it before he could change his mind, and placed the phone on the desk face down. He glanced over at the picture of Rose propped on top of the mahogany desk, and turned it face down as well.
Shane picked up the pen again, tapping it against the desk. He felt he could hear the rush of blood soaring to his ears. The air conditioning hummed on. Beyond the glass door Jackie was returning to her desk, fixing her hair into a loose pony tail as she dropped into her chair, then vigorously started to shake a plastic container of salad.
The afternoon was behaving as if nothing significant was happening, which was unreasonable of it. Shane placed an elbow on his desk, just then, his phone buzzed. He did not pick it up immediately, which was a small performance for an audience of no one.
After a few reasonable seconds, he picked it up— a message
Unknown Number: S?
He wasn’t sure what he had expected, maybe, something administrative, an automated confirmation, and this was neither.
Yes. He sent the answer instantly.
Unknown Number: Send picture.
Shane stared blankly at the message. Then he understood, or rather, the word selective came back to him. The transaction had a qualifier he hadn’t accounted for, he could be turned down. This person could look at a picture and decide he wasn’t worth the hour, it made him uneasy.
He opened his camera roll.
The most recent photographs were from a client dinner two weeks ago, group shots, Shane in a dark suit looking professionally pleasant. He scrolled past those. A photograph of a document he’d needed to reference. Anniversary in March, a restaurant she’d chosen, candles on a table. He scrolled past that faster.
A hike from last month, a Saturday, somewhere Hayden had seen on Instagram. He’d taken several photographs. In most of them Shane was either squinting or looking somewhere off to the side, caught mid-sentence, mid-step. But there was one where he was grinning at the camera, hand tucked into the pockets of his jacket. He attached it to the message thread and sent it off, awaiting his assessment. Which came just a beat after the picture was marked as seen.
Unknown Number: When do you have time?
This wasn’t something that could wait, linger or stew within for a moment longer.
Shane: I finish work at 6pm.
Unknown Number: 7pm. Room will be under the name Rozanov. Ask the desk people.
—
He thought about cancelling three times. First, after he’d hung up after listening to the unsatisfied prattle of Mr. Smith. Then after he finally received the message containing the address of the hotel. And finally when he was standing in the elevator of that very hotel, watching the numbers climb, wiping his hands against the material of his charcoal suit.
By that point he understood that he was not going to cancel, that the cancellations had never been real, that they were something he performed for no reason, small negotiations with something he’d subconsciously decided on already.
The elevator reached the sixth floor, dinged, and the doors pushed open. He stepped out and walked down the hallway, reading door numbers, and stopped when he found the right one.
Shane checked his wrist watch once. Exactly 7pm. He knocked with a half curled fist.
The door opened and Rozanov was standing in it, and Shane’s first thought was that the photograph had been accurate in every detail, yet still somehow, failed him entirely.
He was taller than Shane had calibrated for, broader in a way the camera had flattened. A baggy hoodie, and dark sweatpants, and he leaned in the doorframe with the casual ease. He was completely incongruous against the tastefully lit hotel room behind him, the type of person who made expensive surroundings look like they simply were trying too hard. His eyes moved over Shane once, taking in the suit and the loosened tie, and returned to his face.
“Mr. Businessman,” Rozanov commented, humour lacing his words, the corner of his mouth lifting. He pushed himself off the doorframe, and stepped aside. “Want to come in or just stand here and waste time?”
“Uh. Sorry, yeah,” He stumbled over the two simple words, and stepped forward into the room, hearing the door click shut behind him.
Rozanov moved past him without ceremony and dropped onto the edge of the bed with a sigh, leaning back on both hands, looking towards Shane, who stood near the door with nowhere obvious to put himself.
“You can take that off,” Rozanov said, nodding at the jacket.
Shane shrugged it off, looked around briefly for somewhere to put it, landing on the chair by the windows, he draped it over the back. Now he stood pinned under the gaze of Rozanov, whose grin had reappeared, like he was enjoying being close range witness to Shane’s awkward disposition.
“The tie.”
Shane loosened it. Pulled it off, placing it over the arm of the chair. He swallowed hard as he turned to look for, what. Instruction?
“First time,” Not as much a question as an observation, “Come sit,” He patted the spot on the edge of the bed beside him.
A nervous tiny smile made an appearance for the briefest moment before Shane killed it, swallowing down the realisation that he genuinely had no idea what to do, maybe this was too far out of his depth, a stupid idiotic thing to do on impulse.
He sat on the bed with a bit of distance from Rozanov.
“How is this.. How does this work?” His voice came out meek and timid, far from what he’d intended,stripped of every competence he’d earned in life thus far. It earned a genuine surprised laugh from the man, he moved closer, till their knees touched, and placed a large hand just at the centre of Shane’s thigh.
“Is simple,” The hand slowly started travelling further up, Shane’s breath caught in his throat, his skin burning under the fabric where the touch lingered. “Want me to touch you? Suck you?” The hand came to rest at the junction of his thigh and groin, “Or you want me to fuck you so hard, you forget boring life you probably have?”
All of it. The words appeared so quickly in his mind, that they danced on the tip of his tongue, and nearly escaped.
“I don’t know,” Shane breathed.
Rozanov studied him silently. Then his hand moved, with more intention, and Shane’s breath left him entirely. “You want me to decide?”
He nodded carefully. Rozanov reached up and undid the top button of Shane’s dress shirt. Then the second. Shane sat completely still, like moving might break the architecture of whatever was going to happen. The hand returned to his thigh, higher this time, fingers pressing into the muscle through the wool of his pants,, and Shane’s jaw tight with the effort of not making a sound. He was already tremendously hard— just from this, the proximity and the weight of the hand.
“Relax, I will not kill you.”
Shane exhaled something that wasn’t quite a laugh. The hand moved higher, settling over the hardened shape of him through the barrier, and the heat of another man’s palm there was so foreign and so precisely what he had imagined. Through the cotton material he felt the heat radiating. Shane’s fingers curled into the duvet, and his breath came out shaking.
“Look at this,” Rozanov murmured, quietly amused. His palm pressed lightly over the bulge, “I have not even started yet.”
Shane’s head dropped, watched the hand resting there, large and unhurried, and felt completely outside of himself , in a way he couldn’t comprehend. As though he were watching this from the far corner of the room, watching himself partially undressed on the edge of a hotel bed, coming apart from almost nothing.
“Eyes on me.”
Shane looked up, which was worse, he felt like he was fourteen once more, staring at that page he would later bury. Except he couldn’t do that, this was not a page— The physical reality of it, a man this close and this deliberate, rearranged something within completely.
His cock gave a hard twitch of interest, as if the other picked up on it, he unzipped him with one hand, no preamble. When his hand slipped inside, untucking his shirt, and pushed down his boxers just down past his length, Shane’s entire body went rigid and then, completely boneless. He was painfully hard, and pinned by Rozanov’s gaze— his eyes had grown darker, engulfed by the black of his pupils.
“I told you. Relax,” Ilya hummed. He leaned in close, pressing his lips at the side of his neck, and started tracing the pad of his index finger along the underside of his aching member, “Now, tell me what you want me to do.”
“I really- I don’t know,” Shane barely managed, his body felt as though he was on fire. A calloused hand wrapped around him, while soft lips gently placed kisses along the column of his throat.
“Fine. I will take my time with you,” he muttered, low, against Shane’s skin. “Find out what you like.”
Then he started, his hand moved up the length slowly, his thumb circling the tip with a patience that bordered on cruelty, and Shane’s hips stuttered forward involuntarily, his mouth falling open, air was robbed from his lungs.
“Feels good, yes?”
“Yes, yes, fuck,” The hand moved with a knowing that came from experience, stroking faster now, and Shane’s vision was already blurring.
“Hmm. Let me think what I do with you,” Rozanov said against his skin, half teasing, half something else. Shane shuddered, “Should I fuck your throat?”
Rozanov’s free hand came up to settle at the back of Shane’s neck. His fingers found the pulse point and pressed there, lightly. The other hand moved steadily, twisting at the wrist for a better angle, and Shane’s head was spinning, he hadn’t even registered the trembling in his legs.
“I think you will love that,” He continued, Shane could feel the shape of a smile at the side of his neck before it disappeared. Now, the warm breath hovered just over the shell of his ear, “Or should I just turn you over and fuck you?”
Words like that had never ever been spoken to him, never. The accent, the tone leaking with unfiltered confidence, sent static to his brain. Shane made a sound that had no shape to it, not an answer, just something that came from the back of his throat akin to a desperate whine, the hand quickened, the grip squeezed around him— and then his whole body seized.
Rozanov pulled back just enough to look down between them, at his hand wrapped around Shane’s flushed reddened member.
“Your pretty cock is leaking all over my hand,“ he said, low, almost appreciative. His thumb dragged through the slick at the tip. He glanced back up at Shane’s face, at whatever wrecked expression he found there, “Very cute.”
“Fuck, no wait, stop, I-I’m gonna—“
There was nothing he could do. His head fell back, a breathless whimper escaped from him as he spilled on his shirt and into Rozanov’s hand, which had gone still. It was completely, catastrophically over. He sat there with his chest heaving, not yet understanding the scope of the embarrassment. That came about twenty seconds later, arriving like a second ripple.
“Wow,” Rozanov started, just in complete surprise. Shane kept his eyes shut, trying to reassemble his breathing, his face heating past anything he’d previously thought possible. “You are.. fast. Maybe I am too good.”
“That doesn’t — I don’t usually—” The sentence collapsed, he didn’t know what to say. Shane uncurled his fingers from the duvets.
“Is okay. You enjoyed yourself, yes?” He could hear the smile in Rozanov’s voice. The hand squeezed his softening cock one final time, before it withdrew. Shane turned to watch Rozanov stand, retrieve a towel from the nightstand, and wipe his hand. He handed him the towel, and he took it, eyes dropping to the evidence of what had just occurred. He cleaned his shirt as best he could. Tucked himself back in, zipped up.
“You still have fifty-four minutes left,” Rozanov stated plainly. Shane turned to look at him, and for a moment didn’t understand. Then it arrived. Where he was, what he’d done, and on what terms. The need to leave became physical, a sudden compression in his chest, the urge to bolt, and stand under scalding water at home until his skin turned raw.
He rose from the bed, tucked his shirt in with unsteady hands, and crossed to the chair. He pulled his jacket on hurriedly, aware of being watched with what could only be described as disinterested interest.
He was reaching for his tie on the armrest when he noticed the backpack leaning against the side of the chair.
Black nylon, scuffed at the corners, one zipper half-open. The mouth of the bag unzipped just enough that Shane could see the spiral edge of a notebook inside, its cover creased and bent, the kind of wear that came from being shoved into bags and pulled out too many times.
On the floor behind the bag sat a pair of worn sneakers, the soles dirt-streaked, the mesh sides fraying slightly where the fabric had been rubbed thin. One lace had been knotted twice, clumsily.
His fingers stilled around the silk of the tie, he turned towards the bed, inclining his head to the side in what he hoped landed as an attempt at casual conversation.
“How old are you?”
Rozanov was watching him with a languid half-lidded look, stretched out against the pillows with one arm bent behind his head.
“Nineteen.” A playful grin bloomed across Rozanov’s features, when he noted the slight confusion and the scowl forming on his face.
“What?” He wasn’t sure he heard correctly.
“You can see my ID if you do not believe me.”
Shane held out his hand without speaking.
Rozanov rolled his eyes, but pushed himself off the bed and fished a wallet from the pocket of his sweatpants. He stepped closer, flipping it open and sliding out a plastic card before placing it in Shane’s waiting palm.
A student ID. His eyes scanned over it automatically, as he would when he read documents at work. Name, year of admission, department, then date of birth. This man was barely a man at all, although he looked every bit of it.
“Christ,” Shane muttered quietly to himself, he handed the card back to Ilya.
“Okay?” The half smile still hadn’t faded. There was something so strange, almost calamitous about his beauty, Shane thought. “Money, please.”
Ilya was now holding his hand out. Shane reached into the pocket of his jacket, and pulled out an envelope he’d prepared with cash, handing it to him.
This was just another thing. A terrible and selfish thing— but much like a lot of things, he could tuck away, file it somewhere in the back of his mind, and hope to forget the existence of it, snuff it out by keeping himself prodigiously busy.
“So,” Shane offered, fingers fumbling at his collar, reknotting the tie with the concentration of someone defusing a wire. “That was. Yeah, I need to go. I have this work dinner thing, in like fifteen minutes, and I can’t get out of it—“
“Why are you explaining to me?” Ilya cut in, he’d already sauntered back to the bed, lowering himself onto it with the envelope still in hand, arms stretching above his head “I think you set a record. Out of everyone, you are the fastest.”
Shane’s face burned. He pulled his jacket tighter across his front, as though it could undo something. “Have a nice life with your school. And this.” With the absolute conviction of a man who would never return, he gestured vaguely around the room.
He was already at the door when he stopped. His hand closed around the iron handle and the wedding band struck it with a small, bright sound. Only then did he realise he had forgotten to remove it. He had meant to, of course, before coming here. Though the thought of doing that now seemed oddly more sanctimonious than the act he had just committed.
With hesitation, Shane turned his head back to the hotel room. Ilya was watching him from the bed with the look of someone who had seen this type of hesitation many times over.
“You know, you could— you shouldn’t be doing this. You could get a normal job, I mean, you’re young, work at a—” He stopped and winced, hearing himself. The sentence hung there, absurd and clunky, grotesque in its presumption, his own cum still drying on his shirt while he was dispensing career advice to the person who just undid him with minimal effort. Ilya’s expression didn’t change.
“Oh, really. I did not know that,” Ilya deadpanned. He tore open the envelope without ceremony and pulled out the cash, counting it out shamelessly. “Maybe you should also not pay people to fuck you when you cum as fast as virgin.”
“I told you I don’t usually—“
“Whatever. Come back, anytime,” He teased lightly, hands resting behind his head against the pillows, after he accounted that all the money was there. “It was pleasure doing business for you.”
—
Shane sat in his car in the parking lot, fingers clenched around the steering wheel, staring blankly at the hotel. He became aware, with a dawning clarity, that he had just paid five hundred dollars for a four minute hand job. From a man more than a decade his junior. He went over the sequence of events over and over, how did his day end up like this.
His nervous system was flooded with unfamiliar sensations. He sat with it for a long moment, then felt bile rise in his throat and unrolled the window. Underneath the nausea, something else, steady, insistent, and entirely new. Shane felt like he was vibrating out of his skin.
Rose would probably be arriving home just about now— probably already jiggling her key into the door, with a paper bag of organic produce tucked at her side. When he would arrive they would cook dinner together as they usually did. Maybe watch a movie, then sleep in the same bed. If he wasn’t living a perverse cliche before, he certainly was now.
—
Unknown Number: Next time last longer. I will give you free extra 54minute. You’re welcome ;)