Chase in Shadow Read online

  Donnie had taken a swig of his beer and run his hand through that champagne-colored hair and said, “Chase, man, I’m as gay as an Easter Parade. Are you going to give me shit about it, or is this the last time we sneak a beer?”

  I’m not surprised, Donnie, and I still love you.

  “Yeah, man, keep your hands away from my ass, and I think we can still be friends.”

  He knew. He’d caught Donnie checking out his ass, his cock, his build. He’d smiled once or twice and watched Donnie’s smile get all moony and sweet. He knew Donnie had a major crush on him. At least he hoped so, because he’d been having the most vivid, pornographic dreams featuring him, Donnie, and their bare cocks in each other’s fists and mouths, and if Donnie wasn’t the least bit gay, it would feel like sort of a violation.

  So now that Donnie had a boyfriend he adored—with an independently wealthy, very distant family—Chase was happy for him. Donnie had the courage to come out, the courage to pursue what he wanted, and, to hear Donnie tell it, the idiocy to strip naked in Alejandro’s bedroom while house-sitting, whack off, and fall asleep on the night Alejandro got back, two days earlier than expected, thus enticing the man of his dreams. But that didn’t matter—Donnie had the courage to be himself, and if that got him free room and board while he went through college, Chase was okay with that.

  So now, when Donnie heard him kidding, he knew it was kidding, and he turned a big technicolor grin on Chase, complete with slightly pointy canine teeth and lopsided twist on the left. “God, yes it is. Do you want more pizza, you itinerant hanger-on-er?”

  And because he knew Donnie was paying for it using his own money from his job waiting tables, he said yes.

  “So,” Kevin said, his mouth unrepentantly full of Donnie’s pizza, “how’re you going to pay for school this year?” Kevin had sort of a round, moony face and sandy-brown hair. Although his eyes were hazel, they were frequently almost crossed, like a puzzled Siamese cat.

  Chase groaned and thunked his head on the table. “I’ll worry about that after I’ve paid for rent,” he said honestly. “God, Mercy makes more than I do. Construction jobs suck in this economy, and I don’t even want to try to wait tables again.”

  Donnie winced. “Yeah, man, I’m sorry about that. I feel like that was my fault.”

  Chase grunted and had another bite of pizza, wondering if his pride would unbend enough to ask Donnie if he could take home the rest of it when they were done. Mercy would probably be happy with the lettuce and cheese in the fridge to make a salad, but he was starving. “No worries,” he said, still chewing. “That bitch had to be put down.”

  Donnie shook his head and laughed. “Yeah, well, she hasn’t been back since that night—I’m grateful!”

  Kevin shook his head. “I still don’t understand what happened there,” he muttered.

  I screamed in some bitch’s face when she called Donnie a fag.

  “I was rude to a customer.”

  Donnie made a sound that could not be interpreted, but when Chase looked up and met his eyes, they were sad. Chase could remember the first time he’d seen Donnie’s eyes sad. Donnie, smiling, happy Donnie, who had made high school bearable, and there he was, his hand on Chase’s cock, and Chase felt taken care of, cared for, for the first time since he was in kindergarten. Then it was over, and Chase was across the room, shouldering his way out, because touching his friend that way would make him gay. Donnie had looked at him just exactly like that.

  Kevin shook his head and wiped his mouth, contemplating the last four pieces of pizza. Suddenly he jerked back and glared at Donnie, and then slid his eyes sideways to Chase. “You’re always so nice,” he said, as though the realization had dawned on him with Donnie’s effort to feed Chase. “I’ve never seen you even get mad.”

  Chase just shrugged again, and nodded a quiet thanks when Donnie put the pizza in the takeout box and slid it in front of him. “Sometimes just takes the right trigger, I guess.”

  Kevin looked at him, actual reality permeating the rather thick gloss of oblivious that he usually wore. “What’re you going to do, man? I mean, you could get a job at a stop’n’go or a gas station or something, or maybe a job in a grocery store, but—”

  But it was either not enough money, or not enough flexibility around his school schedule. Yeah.

  Suddenly Kevin cracked a smirk. “Hey—I hear Johnnies is recruiting.”

  Donnie choked on his soda.

  “What in the fuck is Johnnies?” Chase snarled, pulling out napkins and mopping up the mess Donnie had just spit up in front of them.

  Donnie recovered after Chase pounded him on the back a few times, and glared at Kevin. Kevin returned his glare with a smirk on his round face, his light brown eyes dancing the same way Donnie’s did, except Kevin was a lot more likely to look confused. Chase had never dreamed about Kevin the way he had about Donnie.

  “That’s not funny,” Donnie said with surprising ferocity. Donnie getting mad was as rare as Chase getting mad.

  “What is it?” Chase asked, intrigued in spite of himself. He’d seen the booth on club day, right next to the LGBTQ booth, and was told they were “recruiting talent,” but he couldn’t figure out what sort of talent they were looking for.

  Kevin was so full of his own joke that he was almost dancing on the little bench seat in the Mountain Mike’s Pizza. “Dude! Gay for pay! You know! Straight guys boning each other! Man, I hear they pay hella fucking awesome!”

  Donnie stood up with their trash and scowled. “It’s not fucking funny, asshole,” and his look at Chase had so much pity in it that, for a moment, Chase felt his temper stir again. He was not a charity case. He was living with a girl, he was going to college for his degree, he could support his family. He could be a man.

  He stood up and helped Donnie with the cleanup, and then went to the fountain nearby and refilled his soda.

  He came back and managed his cockiest, most fuck-it-all grin, and said, “So, Kevin. You know everything about gay porn. Can you find these guys online?”

  Kevin chortled and pulled up the site on his cell phone. Chase looked at it just long enough to make note of it, feeling something thrumming in his blood, something excited, half strangled, and willing to chew its way out of Chase’s stomach to be free.

  Kevin left, because his folks appreciated it if he got home before midnight even on game nights, and Donnie and Chase remained, drinking as many free soda refills as Chase could stand.

  A companionable silence had just fallen between them when Donnie said, “Won’t your dad help?”

  Chase barely looked at him. “No. He thinks college is a waste of time. He told me if I wouldn’t take the training in the machine shop, he was done with me.”

  Donnie nodded and sucked moodily at his own straw. “I could ask ’Yandro—”

  “No!” Oh Christ. Chase was not taking money from Donnie’s rich boyfriend, and his voice was unapologetically sharp to show it. But Donnie didn’t get mad. Instead, he ran his hands through his white-blond hair and scrubbed his face with his hand and groaned.

  “God, Chase. You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

  I want I want I want I want I want!

  “Hell no!”

  Donnie shook his head, that high-cheekboned, cheerful, happy face suddenly lined with worry. “Man, do you remember that hella old movie we watched with my sister once? The one with that Mary Poppins girl in it?”

  Chase pulled up a corner of his mouth in thought. He and Donnie had gotten good grades in school (as opposed to Kevin, who had cheated off their homework—badly—a lot), and he tried not to be stupid.

  “Victor/Victoria? The one where the girl pretended to be a boy who was pretending to be a girl.”

  Donnie nodded. “Yeah. You know. So she could sing.”

  “So?”

  “So? Do you see any similarities here?”

  Yeah. I’d be gay, pretending to be straight, pretending to be gay. Nice catch, Donnie! You should chan
ge your major to literature!

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t give me that maybe bullshit. I’m gonna be an English major, you know that right?”

  “Well, not until now!”

  Donnie laughed humorlessly. “Chase—”

  “Hey, that worked out pretty well for Mary Poppins, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but first it crashed around her ears and caused her a whole big bucketful of pain.”

  Chase swallowed, and what he said next surprised him. “Yeah, Donnie, but in the meantime? At least she got to sing.”

  They left shortly after that, Chase buzzing so hard from all the soda that he could hardly sit still. He got home and Mercy was sitting on the couch, her feet tucked under her bottom, her hair back in one of those bun things that girls seemed to be born knowing how to do, the kind that left the blonde tips of her dark hair splaying over the top of her head like a fan. He thought of the website in his phone, of the men, smiling like they really loved being there, sitting together, bare-chested, on the same bed, and dropped his bag of baseball stuff inside the door and bent down to take Mercy’s mouth in his own.

  She dropped the book and followed him into the bedroom, and he made love to her with gentle enthusiasm, for once happy and excited with the touch of her skin.

  That night he filled in an application online. He took a picture of himself in the mirror while Mercy slept and made sure his cock was at half-mast so they could get a feel for what he knew was probably one of his best assets.

  The next week, he was called in for an initial interview.

  He reported to a rather bland-looking office building, one story only, with a small front office façade and what looked to be several larger offices branching out on the sides. From the shape of it, there seemed to be an outside courtyard, but Chase’s view of that was blocked by drawn shades.

  The man who greeted him and apologized for their receptionist being out also interviewed him. John—literally, John Carey—was the founder and owner of the company, and he filmed most of the opening interviews as well as quite a few of the videos.

  He was slender and fit, in his mid-thirties, with brown hair that was growing neatly past his collar and a sweetly interested expression on his thin face when he listened to Chase talk. He was just old enough for Chase to feel deference toward him, like toward a boss or a professor, but not old enough to feel intimidated. This man could be an older brother you confided in, but he was definitely, under no circumstances, Chase’s father.

  The questions were, well, unusual to say the least, and although some of them were scripted, some of them seemed to occur to John as he went.

  “So,” he said, looking at the answers he’d written down so far, “no family is going to see this, right? No funny uncle is going to stumble on this when you’re not looking? Your mom’s not into the gay porn thing, is she? A lot of our customers are women.”

  My mom committed suicide when I was six, and my dad would rather I be dead than a fag.

  “No one,” he said with a shrug. “I’m pretty safe from being found out. Is that a problem for some guys?”

  John looked at him with a faintly withdrawn expression. “Some of them, yeah. Some of them have girlfriends who know and approve; some of them have boyfriends who know and approve. We don’t want to pry here, but it’s good to know who we’re dealing with when we pair you up.”

  “’Kay.”

  “And you’re local—you drove over. I remember that, because we were all ready to get you a travel expense voucher. Is there anyone in town you’re not going to want to know?”

  Oh fuck. Everyone. There’s one person on the planet who’d know I’m even considering this and I can’t tell him….

  John nodded, just watching Chase’s expression. “Okay. There’s a place you can park in the back. There’s plenty of space, just take the spot.”

  Chase nodded like he understood, and John went on with the next question.

  “Have you had any same-sex encounters before?”

  And for a minute, Chase was going to lie, and then for another minute he was going to tell the truth, and the idea was so exciting his groin actually throbbed.

  John held up a hand. “No, no—I can tell by the look on your face, that’s something I want to hear on camera.”

  Chase nodded. “Yeah, okay. Anything else you want to know?”

  John looked him in the eyes. “Yeah. Do you think you’ll be able to do this, kid? Get it up, keep it up, on camera?”

  I can do anything as long as I’m being touched by another man. I could probably even fly. Coming on camera is going to be no big deal.

  Chase shrugged and cracked his gum. “I wanna give it a shot.”

  And that was it. He’d passed the interview.

  The next day, he got called in to meet a stylist who played with the hair on his head, pronounced the color good, and then proceeded to rip most of his body hair out by the roots. Oh sure, they called it waxing, but Chase was glad the hair on his thighs and calves was sparse and blond, because she left that alone, and he was stunned at how much hair he had in the crease of his ass, because that shit hurt when it was yanked.

  The day after that, John took him to the small courtyard behind the office building. The courtyard itself had a couple of lovely piazzas with really ritzy outdoor furniture and trees and what were they? Topiaries? Yeah. Those. Everything was designed to be soft. As they sat down and discussed the shoot, Chase realized the surface underneath the indoor/outdoor carpeting was that soft rubberized stuff they used for playgrounds. He was squishing his foot against the consistency when John looked up and smiled.

  “Concrete’s really hard on the knees,” he explained, and it wasn’t until Chase put that together in his head with what he was about to do that it hit him: this was a set piece for some of the videos. He was on a porn set. The thought made him partially erect even when the other members of the film crew—and two other men, standing bare-chested and casual in the thinning sun—came out to watch as he stood up in the sunshine and started answering John’s questions behind the camera.

  When he pulled his shorts down, and the late spring breeze brushed at his bare skin, the erection was no longer “partial.”

  And now, the next day, Chase watched himself masturbate on camera with complete fascination.

  “God, my cock really looks huge without the pubic hair, doesn’t it?”

  John laughed a little. “Baby, you could see that cock in a pubic jungle—that’s got to be one of the biggest we’ve got in the stable right now.” He consulted his stats. “8.5—yup. Ethan is a little shorter, but he’s wider, and Hunter is just about your size.”

  Chase grunted, still entranced by his face and body on the big-screen television in the little viewing room. Once he’d forgotten the camera was there, he’d tilted his head back, closed his eyes, and smiled. God. He looked like he was really enjoying himself.

  Except for those furtive moments getting jacked off by Donnie, he couldn’t remember sex ever giving him that much pleasure. But less than a day ago he’d dropped his pants in front of John and the sound guy and two other “models” and then masturbated in front of people, and he… God, he’d loved it.

  Mostly—and he could admit this to himself only here, only on the set, and only in the silence of his own head—because everybody watching had been male. And they’d been appreciative. And they’d thought his body was hot, and that they wanted to touch it.

  That had made all the difference.

  “Oooh… wait,” John said, his voice reverent. “Here it comes… here’s the money shot….”

  And Chase splooged all over his hand, thick and creamy and white, the camera zeroing in on it as he used it to lubricate his stroking, so he could milk the moment (and his cock) for everything it was worth.

  God, his cock was hard and sore in his pants just watching it.

  Chase, who had sex with his girlfriend maybe once a week, was horny again.

  John was loo
king at him now with definite approval, and Chase tried to get his attention out of his pants for a second.

  “Okay, man. Well done. I’m going to pair you up with Dex for your first time out. It’ll be a double jack-off scene, no worries. You need to save your load—it makes for better camera, okay? So no coming for at least three days before the shoot. I’ll call you and give you an exact time. You tell your girlfriend whatever you need to, but filming costs money, and we need the money shot, okay?”

  Chase nodded, thinking about the lowest-paying option on his contract, and that it was still a damned sight better than construction.

  A Few Observations

  About Porn

  THE boy in the video was in his early twenties and built like a Goliath, a Leviathan, a Greek god. He had dark hair and heavy Italian features, with a cocky, guileless smile that was charming from the first shot of him lying on the bed, casual-like, talking to the smaller blond man he was about to fuck.

  But the T-shirt and shorts had come off, and suddenly both of them were naked, waxed, stomach muscles ripped, tiny nipples puckered with repeated suckling, and every corded ligature in their bodies popping in the intensity of what they were doing. The veins in Ethan’s forearms stood out as he hauled the hips of the smaller, blond Cameron toward his own.

  His cock was just as long but fatter than Chase’s, and Cameron was screaming in a good way every time Ethan threw his hips forward.

  Chase was watching the video with intensity, thinking:

  That’s going to be me. That’s going to be ME ME ME ME ME!

  Look at the angle there, the way he opens himself up to the shot. Look at the way Cameron uses the far-camera hand to stroke off, or the way Ethan smacks his dick on Cameron’s stomach there to keep it hard as they’re changing positions. Look at the way that close-up is filmed, can they do that with the camera or can they….