I look up and find my face staring back at me from the mirror. “What are you doing?” But the girl on the other side doesn’t answer. Instead there’s a knock at the door. “Come in,” I say.
Ark pushes it open and stands at the threshold holding his camera. JD is behind him. Neither of them say anything and I’m immediately ticked off at this. “What?”
Ark opens his mouth, but JD is the one who answers. “Never mind our bitching, Blue. We do this all the time.”
But I know somehow, deep inside me, that isn’t true. I think that before I came, nothing upset these two. I think before I came, they hadn’t had an argument in months. Maybe years.
But fuck it. If they want to lie, I’ve got enough lies of my own I need to keep telling. So whatever. “Wanna join me in the tub?” I say instead. “It’s huge. We can probably all three fit.” Ark walks past me and peers inside the tub. He looks back at me and JD, then the tub again. Like he’s calculating the volume or something. “My God, do you always overthink things?”
“Pfffft,” he says, placing the camera on the counter facing the tub, and then unbuttoning his jeans. “I never overthink anything.”
I look over at JD, who’s watching us with a bemused smirk on his face. He pulls his shirt over his head and kicks off his boots. “Let’s fuck in the tub then.”
“No,” I say, exasperated. “I don’t want to fuck in the tub. I just want to relax in the tub. If you two want to relax with me, then OK. Otherwise—” I stop. Because they are looking at me with frowns and scrunched-up eyebrows. I’m being bitchy. “Otherwise”—I soften my tone—“just let me wash and I’ll be right out.”
“We’ll relax with you,” Ark says in his no-nonsense manner. And then he takes off his jeans and walks towards me and extends his hand. “I’ll hold your hand while you step in.”
I take a deep breath and smile at the gesture. And then I take his hand and step over the rim of the tub. The hot water presses against my legs and when I lower my butt down, I look up and hiss from the sting.
Ark lets go of my hand and then JD dumps some shampoo in the water to make bubbles. “Scoot over,” Ark says, stepping in on one side of me. JD steps in on the other, and then they simultaneously lean back, stretching their legs out as much as they can on either side of my body.
“We don’t really fit, do we?” I laugh.
“We’ll make do,” JD says, grabbing my shoulders and turning me around so my back is resting against his chest. When I look up at Ark, he’s amused. Which is nice, since he seems to be the jealous type. “You know how long it’s been since I sat in a bathtub before you came, Blue?” JD asks.
Ark’s smile creeps up as he thinks about this.
“I must’ve been like ten years old,” JD continues. “We had an old ugly claw-foot in our house. Not something vintage and cool, but rusted and shit. I hated that thing. It took forever to fill.”
“Did you grow up in Denver, JD?” I ask.
“Yup. Born and raised.”
“How about you, Ark?”
Ark shakes his head at me, but doesn’t offer up a place.
“Ark grew up in Iowa or some shit.”
“City or farm?” I keep it going.
Ark just stares at me with that smile. His arms are draped across the rim of the tub on either side of him and his knees are drawn up because JD is taking up most of the room with his legs.
My toes wiggle and I can feel Ark’s hard cock press against them. He gives me another smirk.
God, I’d love for him to fuck me. Not with JD, but alone.
“If you’re from Montreal,” Ark says, putting me on high alert, “why don’t you have a French accent?”
“I went to school in the States.” And I did. That’s not even a lie.
“Where?” JD asks. And now I feel like they are tag-teaming me for info.
“The East Coast. And that’s all I’m gonna say about it, if that’s OK.” I wait for an objection, but JD is silent and Ark just shrugs. “What about you guys?”
I’m looking at Ark, of course, since I’m facing him, but JD is the one who answers. “I went to North. But I dropped out in eleventh grade.”
“Really?” I turn my head to look at him. “I’d never have guessed.”
“Really,” he affirms with a smile. “It’s pretty cool to say that, and know it never made a difference. I’m a millionaire high-school dropout. But, if I could do it over, I’d have stuck it out. Maybe gone to college instead.”
“How come?”
“Because all I do is act. And really, you can’t call what I do acting. I stand there and let girls suck me off.”
“JD,” Arks says, annoyed with the talk of work.
JD shrugs behind me. “It’s true.”
“It’s not true,” Ark says. “He’s a natural salesman. Not many people could charm strange girls into doing what we need them to do.”
“What will you do tonight?” I ask.
Ark takes in a breath, holds it for a second, and then lets it out. “Meet the girl at the club. Wait for the show to get going. Let people get nice and drunk. Rowdy. Then take her on the floor, put her on her knees, and say action.”
“Don’t people say anything? Like try to stop you?”
“We have verbal contracts with the club owners. Management, security, the bands—they’re all in on it.”
“So you pay them to let you film there?”
“Yup. Every palm gets greased.”
JD grabs the soap and starts rubbing it up and down my arm. I look back and him and smile. “That feels good.”
“It’s supposed to,” he says.
“So, if you won’t talk about school growing up, let’s talk about college,” Ark says.
I squint my eyes at him. “OK. You first. Where’d you go?”
“I didn’t. How about you?”
“Me either.” I’m lying, but so is he. So fuck it.
JD’s chest rumbles with a laugh behind me. “You two are something else. Why waste so much energy being hostile?”
“We’re not hostile,” I say, feeling very hostile.
“Whatever.”
“OK, then,” Ark continues. “I’m a Gator. University of Florida. Your turn.”