Chapter 1
“Give it to me, man!”
“You like that, do ‘ya?”
“Oh yeah!”
Danny scowled at his bedroom door.
The grunting and swearing and hollering got so loud he had to turn the
volume all the way up on his computer.
No use. His industrial-strength
headphones couldn’t block out that noise—and even if they could, how was he
supposed to concentrate when his roommates were making gay porn in the next
room?
Not that Danny was gay or
anything. They called him “the straight
roommate.” And, really, he couldn’t complain about the racket. He knew from the get-go Sean and Miku made
amateur porn for a living. It perplexed
Danny that they considered themselves amateurs even though they got paid for
it. Didn’t that make them professionals? Not that the details made much of a
difference. Amateur or professional,
they distracted the hell out of him.
“You want me to come all
down your ass crack?”
“Yeah, come on my asshole,
man!”
“You want me to come on
your asshole?”
“Fuck, yeah!”
With a sigh, Danny paused
the recording that needed to be transcribed, formatted, and proofed by
Monday. Hell of a weekend he was going
to have, listening to gay porn’s mighty creation through spectacularly thin
walls while medical mumbo-jumbo blasted through his headphones. Danny called himself a medical transcriber,
but that wasn’t the ultimate truth. Real
medical transcribers worked for hospitals and GPs’ offices, typing up doctors’
reports on patients. Danny was a sell-out.
He worked for Big Pharma, typing medical marketing materials for drug
companies. The money was good, but mainly he did it because he didn’t have any
other job to fall back on in the city.
Nanette did. Lucky
bit…
No, Danny stopped that
thought in its tracks. He refused to
become one of those divorcés, the
ones who went around bad-mouthing the ex.
Nobody wanted to be around a guy like that. More importantly, Nanette was the mother of
his child. How on earth would Laura grow up happy and well-adjusted if her
parents were constantly bullying each other?
They’d spent long enough at one another’s throats. Time to move on.
Besides, Danny was indebted
to Nanette for the typing work. Not that
he particularly wanted to be a medical transcriber. Listening to doctors and pharmaceutical representatives
discussing the latest silver bullet cure—a cure that inevitably falls flat on
its ass three years later—wasn’t Danny’s idea of fun work, but having fun was
never really the point of working, for him.
Work pays the bills. He hadn’t
taken his first job at the crayon factory in Bessborough for the love of
crayons, that’s for damn sure. The smell
of wax still made his muscles hurt.
“Fuck, I can’t stop
it. I’m gonna come!”
“Come, man! Come all over my asshole!”
“Aww, fuck yeah! Fuck yeah!
Fuck yeah!”
As much as he wanted to
block out what was going on in the next room, Danny couldn’t help picturing
Miku’s swollen dickhead shooting cream down Sean’s crack. Gay porn wasn’t really his thing—in fact,
Danny wasn’t all that tempted by any kind of porn—but he had nothing against
what these guys did for a living, and even less against who they were as
individuals. They could laugh about it
now, but in their initial interview Sean and Miku had been anxious about
telling this “small-town boy” they were gay.
Like they could possibly
have hidden the fact! Miku was a
baby-faced bear, but Sean was a twink of the highest order. They’d both been so surprised Danny knew
those words—twink, bear—that he had to assure them gay people existed in small
towns, too. Not that he was gay. He made sure to let them know he was
straight, but he didn’t push the issue too hard. He didn’t want them thinking he had anything
to prove.
Even if it did disrupt his
work, it was pretty exciting living in a porn den, especially after eleven
years of straight-laced marriage. Yes,
he got his fill with Nanette, in the same way heaping bowls of oatmeal would
satiate a person, but he’d realized early on there was more to sex than
fucking.
Nanette wouldn’t give a
blowjob if her life depended on it. It’s
not that she was a religious nut or anything.
She didn’t give him the whole “seed is meant for ovum” spiel he’d heard
touted by some churchy prig on an episode of Law & Order. Nanette’s revulsion was, to quote her
directly, “You piss out of that thing. I
don’t want it anywhere near my mouth.”
Danny shook his head. He didn’t have time to dwell on the
past. Too much work to do, and the guys
in the next bedroom had finally quieted down.
Clicking on his computer’s audio player, he dragged the timeline back
about half a minute, turned the volume down to a reasonable level, and played
the track.
…uses a different mechanism
of action, the IL-6 blocker instead of TNF or B cells…
“It’s all Greek to me,”
Danny sighed, adding the words into his ongoing project file. What did any of this mean? He wasn’t a doctor; he had no clue.
…shows superiority over methotrexate, which no other
biologic has been able to do…
His job was simply to type
what was said, but at least it forced him to think about something, otherwise
his mind dwelled on all that was missing from his life.