But I know you go to them. I know you “examine” them and “train” them, when you leave me.
I know.
I wish I didn’t, but I do. And I cannot un-know it. I’ve tried that, too.
You slip the second-from-the-top button of your crisp, never-wrinkled button-down shirt through the loop, tuck and blouse it just so, align the silver buckle of your slim black leather belt with the line of buttons and the zipper. You roll the sleeves to your elbow in precise fourths, brush your hand through your dark hair, and then you leave. Not a word of good-bye, not a hint of where you’re going or when you might return.
Just a glance at me, a moment of intimacy, that thumb through my hair, sweeping it back around my ear. And then you’re gone.
And I know where you go.
You don’t go to broker a deal. You don’t go to negotiate terms with other businessmen. You don’t go to sign a contract, or to scout a new location, or investigate potential real estate investments. These are all things a businessman would do—I know, I’ve researched it. You’re president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Indigo Services, LLC, as well as a dozen other businesses both private and publicly traded. You should be sitting in a corner office, with a landline phone pressed to your ear, a computer monitor in front of you, discussing P-and-L statements—profit and loss, that means—and quarterly returns, and who isn’t performing up to par.
Par is a golf term, meaning minimum number of strokes to complete a hole, but it often is used colloquially to mean a minimum standard; I’m always learning new things, now that I have access to the Internet.
You should be doing these things. I’ve learned what a CEO does, what a businessman does. From TV, from books, from the Internet.
And I don’t think you do any of those things. Or, at least, not when I would expect you to do them.
You answer e-mails at four in the morning. You wake me at six for sex, exercise from six thirty or so until eight thirty, shower, eat a quick breakfast, and then you go to sleep at nine and wake at noon. Wake, answer e-mails, return phone calls, do things involving spreadsheets and graphs, and then you leave.
Or, sometimes, after sex with me in the morning, you skip the shower, and just leave.
And when you return, you avoid me. You work out. Shower. Avoid me. Work. Avoid me.
Finally, you might sit with me, eat with me, take me to dinner or to the theater.
And Caleb?
I know what you do when you leave, why you avoid me.
You’re “training” your “apprentices.”
Translated, that means fucking.
Teaching ex-prostitutes and ex-drug addicts and ex-homeless girls how to pleasure a man. How to give a proper blow job. How to take anal. How to take a come-shot to the face and look sexy and grateful and seductive while doing it. How to beg for sex without actually saying a word.
You teach them this by showing them.
By fucking them.
They put their mouths on your cock, and you instruct them on proper fellatio technique.
You bend them forward over the bed and put your cock in their bottom, and you tell them how to make sure they don’t get hurt in the process, how to make sure it feels good for them.
You pull your cock out of their mouths and you come all over their faces, and claim it’s for their sake, because some clients like that, although you don’t. Oh no.
How do I know all this?
I am friends with Rachel. Down on the third floor, in apartment three. Rachel, formerly known as Apprentice Number Six-nine-seven-one-three, or just Three for short. An apprentice in your street-to-Bride program. After you’ve left for the day, after your three hours of sleep, after I watch your sleek white Maybach slide elegantly toward Fifth Avenue, I take the elevator to the third floor and knock on door number three, a bottle of white wine in one hand.
Rachel pours the entire bottle into two glasses—not wineglasses, because she doesn’t own any of those, but rather into large cylindrical juice glasses—and we drink it sitting on her bed, and we talk. She tells me things. About her former life, which she isn’t allowed to talk about but does with me for some reason. About her current life as a Bride-in-training. She tells me everything. Sometimes too much.
“Sorry, TMI?” she often asks.
TMI: too much information.
Yes, I tell her. That you were just there—in the very bed upon which I sit—fucking her in the ass, that is too much information. That you pulled out and came on her back is also too much information.
Yet still she tells me. As if I am her priest, her confessor. It’s girl talk, I think she thinks.
Education for me, is how I see it. It’s how I learn terms like come-shot, which I probably would have been better off not knowing.
I find it strange, however, that you do none of these things with me. That you never have.