Unexpected

 He was very nervous. Samuel gave him a cigarette and told him to go smoke it outside, by the bushes that covered a large part of the house. As they filmed inside with another guy, he was smoking, his hands shaking and even his lips turning a very bright pink. He had been chosen just of the street, after one of the producers had just loved the way he looked. He wasn’t a very hipster boy or anything like that, he was just naturally beautiful and that was something they really needed in their movies.

 There was a market for those who liked guys like him, the kind that looks very young but that’s old enough to sign a contract and win a decent amount of money for working in the adult industry. Of course, there was always the problem of him never having done anything like that. The producer had told him it was something very safe and very private or at least as private as it could be when the video could be seen by, at least, a million people online. The point was that it was a very lucrative business.

 And the guy needed it. His name was Phillip and he had no money to go to college. He lived with his single mom and a little sister. She was being sent to public school, so her mom had no money worries there. But she just couldn’t do anything for her son. Her advice for him was to just get a job and start making money, in order to avoid giving his future family a life like that one. He was saddened by those words but, at the same time, it was funny that his mom had no idea he had no interest in women or families.

 He accepted the offer by calling the producer the night he talked with his mother. They agreed to do a screen test, with a video camera and taking some pictures. For him, that was no problem. He just did what they asked from him and, not surprisingly, he was all that they could wish for in a guy and maybe even more. He looked exactly like what their audience was asking for. He was very flattered when they told him this, not really understanding the whole dimension of the matter. The important thing was he was going to get paid.

 However, the morning of the first shooting he realized that, although he had sexual experience, he had never done it in front of so many people. There was a camera guy and his assistant, a makeup person, the sound guys, the director, a producer and, of course, the other guy that would be having sex with him. It was al a bit overwhelming when he first saw it all and that’s when Samuel the sound guy gave him a cigarette and told him to go outside and chill for a bit. It was a good advice. Phillip tried to calm down but he wasn’t fully calmed when he was called inside, in order to begin.

 To his surprise, he had neglected to realize he was going to have sex with only one person. So when they started touching and kissing, the others just seemed to disappear. Of course, every now and then, they would say some direction or tell them to move in a certain way. It would break the moment for a bit, but he would go on doing what they were paying him to do. When it was all done, everyone congratulated the pair. The director looked very happy and the producer told Phillip he could be the next big star.

 He got paid right then and there and took the bus straight home to go and stash the bills inside a can he had in his room. He would have loved to tell his mother he was going to make good money, but he realized he had to lie first. He just couldn’t tell her what he was actually doing. Not because it was bad or wrong, his mother was not that kind of person. He just didn’t have any intention to tell her that he was gay. It didn’t seem like the right time to do it. So he had to come up with something else to cover for it.

 Phillip announced her, the next day that he was going to work in a comic book store. He said it was one of those big stores in the fancy side of town, where many men would pay hundreds of dollars for a vintage version of their favorite comic book. She was very surprised but pleased and, as expected, she didn’t ask anything else. Not how he had gotten the job or when or how much did it pay. She was just happy to know her son could take care of himself. Besides, he knew that once he made more money, he would try to help her a bit with it, by buying groceries or paying some of the home bills.

 Time passed and the producers came through with their promises. Some weeks, Phillip had to go and perform for at least four movies. Some were done for the same production company and others would be done by foreign people that would pay to have Phillip in one of their pictures. At the beginning, he was only portrayed as a young innocent boy. But he eventually got into more specific genres within the industry. Of course, nothing too violent or dangerous. He was a pretty boy but not a stupid one.

 More than once, some man somewhere would try to touch him without permission or do crude jokes about him in front of him. At first he tried to just shrug it off, but once he realized he had some weight in the conversations, he started to talk back to people and to let them know exactly what the rules were. One thing was the performances he gave and another, very different, was his intent to be with someone, if there was any intent at all. This made him lose a few jobs but it made others fall in love with him and inviting him to do more work and even a few side things.

 He would do silly videos with some of his costars, in order to raise money for different things, or he would model clothes and accessories for many brands catering to the gay community. The moment he felt he had made it, in some way, was when they asked him to go to the other side of the country to promote some of his movies and also some of the clothes that he had been modeling for. He would make a ton of money doing that and he would also gain much needed exposure that was never a bad thing for anyone.

 His mother thought he was going on a trip to buy rare vintage comic books for the store. It was around then when he felt she knew something, maybe not the whole picture but maybe parts of it. She looked at him differently and would seem to be careful with her words when she spoke to him. He would have liked to ask her what was going on but it would be pushing a little bit too much and it wasn’t worth it, not in that moment that seem to be going so good for her. That part of his personal life could wait.

 However, life never really agrees with anyone. She just takes her own course. On his trip, he met a photographer for a new brand that wanted him as a model. He posed for him and talked a lot during the photo-shoot and at an event where they ran into each other. He realized he really liked that guy, and the guy seemed to really care about him, beyond the pornography and the pictures. Luckily, he too lived on the other side of the country, so they even went back together, talking and talking during the five-hour flight.

 It was about three months into them dating, when Phillips mother told him he was proud of him, no matter what he did. He was confused by that and had no idea what to say. She then grabbed her tablet and showed him an advertisement she had seen online for men’s underwear. It was him. She told him she investigated a little bit more and realized what other business he was working in. Before he could say a word, she assured him it was all fine, because he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was just different.

 Weeks later, Phillip introduced her to Jonathan, the photographer he had been dating for a while. He really hit it off with her and with his little sister. They would even go to the movies or the park, enjoying the weekends together as a big family. It was a very strange feeling but a good one.

 Phillip kept doing his jobs. Eventually, he moved on more into the modeling aspect of the whole thing, but still loving to work for some brands that let him get in touch with that side of him that gave him a chance in life. It was strange, but he owed it all to pornography. Who would have thought?

One kind of Christmas

   Last Christmas, he came out of the bathroom disguised as Santa Claus. I laughed at first but then realized it was supposed to be a sexy thing between the two of us. He did a striptease for me and then began to pull some presents of a big red bag he had brought out of our bedroom with him. A couple were sex toys, intended for both of use whenever we wanted to spice things up in the bedroom, not that we ever needed that. But one of the gifts was something else, something I wasn’t expecting.

 It was a little red box with only a simple ring inside. It had a smooth surface, resembling a little donut made of silver. When I saw it closer the next day, I smiled thinking he had been a very smart man by buying the one that I liked and then he would keep the gold one. Each ring was unique, as according to them we were different and that made us a better couple, but inside each little piece of jewelry, there was the name of the other one, the other person forming the relationship.

 That way, he would always be close to me and I would always be close to him. I changed from been excited and, frankly, very horny, to being on the edge of my seat, crying in silence, as I had never thought such a gift would come my way. I mean, yes, we had talked about it before but it had never been serious at all. I had no stable job, living from one thing to the next and his salary was just enough to survive for a month. His bank account was always empty by the time he received his next paycheck.

So marriage or whatever one would call it, wasn’t precisely something we had been planning on. We didn’t even lived together, not exactly at least. He would spend a couple of weeks in my place and then I would spend some time in his place. He always left socks or underwear in my place, in my drawers and on the washing machine. And my favorite sweater always had a certain tendency to end up in his closet, although I was certain that had to do with him loving it as much as I did.

 We wore different sizes of clothing but we sometimes shared, especially in the morning when it was difficult to find what one had wore the night before. I had answered phone calls or the door many times wearing only one of his work shirts. He always told me not to do that because then he would need to either iron them or send them to the cleaners, and none was a choice he enjoyed. But then he gave me mixed signals when he had sex on the couch just because he had seen me wearing nothing but that. It was funny and exciting, two words that described what we had together.

 The reason why I didn’t accept his proposal right away was the fact that his company was sending him far away, to a symposium or something like that in a city with beaches and many beautiful people to watch. He tried to convince me to go and I needed no convincing at all, the problem was the money, as I had no savings to just take a short holiday. I had to look for work everyday and there was no option for me to stop doing that, unless I won the lottery or something as insane as that.

 So I asked him to give me some time to think about it, because he wasn’t going to be there for a while and I had to be sure I wanted to change our relationship in such a way. I made it very clear that I didn’t wanted to end the relationship and that my decision wasn’t motivated by me not loving him anymore or something of the sorts. It was exactly the opposite: I loved him so much that I really wanted to make the best choice for us both, as marrying would be a huge thing for the both of us.

 He left for his symposium the day after Christmas. We had been in bed for hours before that, making love but also kissing, holding each other and enjoying each other’s silence. I loved him deeply and wanted the best for him, I really did. And I knew he had asked me to marry him because he was in love with me and he wanted, in a way, to make sure what we had together was never going to change. It was understandable so that’s why we tried not to talk about it too much, until I told him one-way or the other.

 Oddly enough, I felt devastated when the taxi came and he left in it, smiling to me, trying to cheer me up. But it was right then when I realized my mind had been made up for a while. Who was I kidding? Yes, money and all that stuff is always a problem but, there are some things that you just have to do, no matter what and being sure to stay with the person that you love forever, is one of those things. So I went up the stairs, running to my apartment, and I wrote him I would be happy to marry him.

 He didn’t say a word to me until two hours later when he made a bunch of people on his plane dance and cheer because of our engagement. He told me he would have a glass of wine and celebrate in his hotel room jumping around. Sure enough, he did call me later that night, while I was getting to go to bed. He was so happy and looked even more beautiful than always. It was contagious to see him smile so much, asking all sorts of silly questions and wishing me to dream with angels and with him. And I did have a dream about him, a really good one.

 One week passed and we tried to write each other everyday but it was very difficult. His office had decided to stay a while there after the symposium, as their whole goal had been to open an office in that city. In order to do that, they proposed him a raise in exchange for more work and a lot of effort put into making the whole new office thing work. According to his estimates, which he told me half asleep, the whole thing would take at least a month, maybe even a little more.

 He tried to make smile after telling me the bad news but I just couldn’t. Deciding had seemed easy once I knew hat I felt but then I realized I actually needed him to be around in order for the whole thing to work. He had asked me to look at restaurants to reserve in order for us and our parents to celebrate after getting formally married, but it all seemed pointless with him so far away. Besides, he always looked too tired or too distracted to talk about anything related to the wedding. So why bother?

 Then, the unthinkable happened. As his stay on the beach city turned into its third week, I received a phone call that changed my life. A company had been looking for me because they had an interest in new talent to come work with them. Apparently, they had gotten a copy of my resume and that had been enough for them to call me and schedule an appointment. I was very nervous throughout the whole thing but the people seemed very nice and comprehensive of everything I told them.

 Strangely, the day he decided to call and tell me his office had asked him to stay there to head the new office, the people from the interview had called me to offer me a full-time job which paid more than I would ever imagine someone would pay to a creative person. I almost didn’t have the courage to tell him, but I did. We had to talk about it; we had to make a choice. Either he stayed in his old job, something that made him mad and depressed, or I would stay jobless for longer, maybe forever.

 We decided to think about it and talk another day. Three days passed until we got the chance to talk again. He had been busy and, frankly, me too. He told me he had decided to accept the job and I told him my first day was already scheduled.

 Nothing was heard in either end of the call, for a while. His face was grim and so was mine. We did not want to day what we knew had already happened, because it would mean it was a fact. We didn’t wanted to accept things had already changed, and that was too late for us.

The president

   In the kitchen, everyone was working at full capacity. There was not a single person standing by, doing nothing. Every single worker was doing something, even if they were just apprentices or the chef himself. All hands were needed for the banquet to go exactly as planned and one of the most important parts of the whole experience was, of course, the food. It wasn’t possible to do a proper banquet without a great menu and the one for that event had been checked at least a hundred times and by a diverse group of people, all with different tastes.

 Of course, the most important person in the whole gala was the president, as he had been the one to organize the event. It wasn’t one of those planned things that took place every single year but an impromptu kind of thing that had arisen from the fact that the president wanted to do a benefit for a cause he thought had not been helped enough in recent years. Public opinion was really divided on the subject but most people admired what he had done and how he had done it. After all, it was very uncommon for a president to stop his work to do something else.

 Some papers were criticizing every single aspect of the event, from the price of the food and the flower arrangements, to the list of guests. Some said it was too big and others too small. Some said he had invited people from the wrong countries and organizations and others praised him exactly for that. It wasn’t new that the press was not in agreement completely; they had always been very divided on the presidency from day one, which had taken place a little more than a year ago, after a very uncommon period of transition.

 Awkward was the better word because the new president had asked the old one to give him an office in the presidential headquarters, as he wanted to check on everything as it happened. Such a thing had never been attempted and a certain distance was thought to be the wisest thing when dealing with such a moment. But from the first moment of him been the president elect of the country, it was very clear he wasn’t going to be like any other president, in the country’s past or in other countries. He was, for lack of a better word, uncommon.

 Very uncommon indeed as he had won in the most unexpected way, when many people had decided it was the best to make a change at the very last minute. Polls had never granted him the presidency and he thought, the morning of the election itself, that he was going to lose for sure but he wanted to go away gracefully so he did something unexpected: he shared the day with people around his city, visiting tourist spots and taking random pictures. Apparently people loved that because in the afternoon, polling stations were filled with voters.

 By the end of the night, he had been declared the winner with over five percent of the vote over the other candidate; a woman everyone had predicted would be the next president. She was the very opposite of him, someone who seemed to have fire in her eyes, always talking with an amount of passion that seemed to much for such a small woman. Millions adored her and, of course, by the big conglomerates that actually controlled the country. She loved to speak about economics and foreign affairs and all such things.

 However, the new president had never really been passionate for anything. To be perfectly honest, he had been chosen out of nowhere by the third most important party in the country. It was predicted that the two most voted parties in the last election would hold the same spots in the new election but that didn’t happen. People were tired of the game between those two parties that, at the end of the day, were exactly the same party if you were to compare their policies on several key elements of people’s lives. They just had slight differences.

 Studies on those elections would last for years, as never had predicted that surge of a third option. And now that third option was organizing an impromptu dinner in honor of a cause many thought wasn’t “attractive” enough. In this day and age, people still thought some subjects were best not spoken out loud, in the open, much less in a fancy dinner table with expensive Champaign and a band playing music from eighty years ago. The president was known by now for his odd choices and that was also reflected on his choice of food.

 The people in the kitchen had elaborated a menu that mixed very high cuisine with foods that everyone loved. The dishes were particularly successful among the special guests of the evening. In other words, the people that were directly affected by the charity they were raising money form. After all, they were all normal people that did not really have experience in fancy dinners and strange food, so the combination of high cuisine experiments with almost fast food, was a success among them and many presidential supporters.

 Of course, the richest people in the event weren’t very thrilled to be eating what were basically hamburgers, hot dogs and fried chicken, in a very old hall that had a long history of elegant banquets to celebrate the riches of the rich, instead of charitable efforts. However, the rich were never shy when it came to donating, as it was the perfect way to pay fewer taxes and to be seen as some kind of savior by the people that were benefitted by that money they didn’t need.

 It was incredible to see how the people, the same that had voted for the president, supported him again on that decision and thought the choices overall were just excellent. Some thought they were funny enough but everyone agreed that it was the necessary shake up that needed to happen in such a stiff political environment. Everyone took things too seriously sometimes and it was nice to see that the president had a sense of humor or at least the capacity to be different. People admired him for that, long before he was a president.

 It was never really clear if he did those things on purpose or if everything was kind of a “happy accident”. Whatever it was, it always seemed to work. It was the same thing when he worked for a large software conglomerate where most of the workers were younger than him and he wasn’t even that old. At first they mistrusted him because they didn’t thought it was possible he would even know about what they did in the company, but after a while he showed everyone how interested and invested he was on the company, surprising them in many ways.

 Of course, he was always nervous. He had even joked that he would love to have a first lady by his side to have someone to hold hands with in the most tense and difficult moments. He even joked he would settle for a first gentleman and some of the journalists laughed out loud that day. He was something very unexpected and was attacked because he wasn’t the same kind of politician everyone had seen once and again for the last hundred years. But that’s exactly why so many people supported him; he was very different from them all.

 Some of his supporters had even organized meetings to help him with some subjects and to get him to talk about things that people felt were important in that moment. And he was gracious enough to hear them, after the meetings he had to attend about the economy or foreign trade or who knows what. He always had time for everyone and he seemed to be happier when talking and sharing with actual people. That’s why some said he was the best president in the world and others said he was a disaster waiting to happen.

 After the gala, he sent the millions won for the charity to the proper people and many were able to find some kind of solace in the fact that he had remembered them as victims. Rumors of a second term were already in the air. But when asked about it, he always laughed loudly and said he would rather end the one he was in first to see if he was successful enough to deserve more time. Of course, three years later, he won by a landslide, another unexpected win.

Louis's party

It had not been love at first sight. That would have been impossible, as they had met in a place were no one could actually see the other person’s face. Of course, that party was a very secret one and only people that knew other people could have been invited. But the point is that both Rémy and Luc had been invited that night and they had both participated in one of the largest secret parties to take place in all of France and probably all of Europe too. No one knew for sure how big the whole thing was, as one of the most powerful people in the country had organized it.

 The party took place in an actual palace, where other such parties had taken place, maybe three hundred years ago or more. Of course, in those times people did things like crazy, like animals, and they had no rules to make everyone feel their best and leave without any concern. This modern party had many rules and one of the most important ones, the first one in fact, was that it was forbidden for anyone to remove the mask they had been provided by the organized via mail. All masks were identical and there laid one of the key features of the party.

 Technically, every single person was the same. And, according to the rules, they were all the same to the eyes of the organizer and also each other. Of course, they were women and men but, as large as the palace was, there were lots of smaller parties within the big one. Some of those were gender exclusive, some others completely forbid clothes and there was even one where clothes were actually mandatory. It could be said that there was something for everyone and the statement would be true because Louis had made that happen.

 Louis was not his real name but it was the name he liked to be called. He was obsessed by everything that had to do with the reign of Louis the XIVth, so he had chosen that name as his secret identity for everyone to know in order to organize those parties. Of course, no one in the country knew that those gatherings actually existed but there were many rumors and people all around thought it wasn’t that farfetched as rich people tend to have things that no one thinks anyone would need. And a lot of something is always in the mix.

 The location of the party changed every year and after it had happened everything was returned in the most perfect of conditions, in the case the place was rented which happened a lot. Louis was smart enough not to use his own estates, although he was always tempted to do so. He was obsessed with everything being perfect and interior designing was one of his many obsessions. He had houses and flats all over the place and he loved to make them look their best. So he did exactly that with the rentals for his parties, everything had to be perfect.

 Luc was not as rich as Louis but one could say they ran the same circuit. It wasn’t difficult to see him in all “must” parties in the cities, always showing his face in all kinds of events. Luc’s parents had died ten years ago and had left him with a very large fortune. Now his uncle managed the company that his father had built and he let his nephew do whatever he wanted to do. Having been rich from such an early age, Luc had gone crazy in all sorts of predictable ways. His uncle had done a lot to avoid the press trying to destroy him with pictures and other “evidence”.

 He had done a lot of drugs when he was around sixteen years old. He had dated publicly both men and women. He was one of those jetsetters that travel around the world just showing their money to anyone who was willing to watch him. But the interesting thing about him was that he was the most charming young man ever to be found. He never seemed to be showing off and he even had a very caring heart that made him make big donations to many charities and institutions that really help people around the globe.

 Luc was a very weird mix and that’s why some loved him and others loathed him. Of course that happened because of how rich he was and we all know people love to hate people that are out of their reach. But even so that was the case, he didn’t care at all about how people perceived him. He really knew how to live a life where the first thing was to be himself, his original self. That’s how he met Louis, at a party where Luc was being exactly the same guy he always was. And that was very interesting to Louis who loved authentic people.

 Right away, having met him only minutes before, Louis invited Luc to his party and Luc accepted. Of course, he had been to many other parties like that one before, but never one so exclusive and lavish. His normal parties were much raunchier and he didn’t even care if it wasn’t as private as it could be. Of course, that had been a headache for his uncle for many years but now it was him that knew how to handle the press and all other people that the only thing they wanted was a big piece of his wealth or a fragment of his fame.

 It was there, in the annual party thrown by Louis, where Luc met the first person in the world that made him feel something he had never felt before. He wasn’t ready for it, not at all. He had never thought that he would actually fall in love one day. But he did. Not at the party of course, or right away, but it happened in the following months and he suffered, as he had never felt something like it before. It was almost torture but bearable and worth the pain.

 Rémy was the son of a baker and a housewife. He had been raised in one of the more modest neighborhoods in all of Paris. From a very young age, he had realized he liked other men. The day he realized it was one of the few anecdotes he liked to tell his lovers right after having sex and he didn’t really know the reason for it. He just liked to tell them how he looked at all the other boys in his class when he was fourteen years old, in the classroom, in the yard and in the bathroom. He stared and was very attentive of everything they did.

 Some lovers lasted for a few days, even one night. Others lasted much more, even as long as two years. That one was the hardest thing for him because he became numb after that relationship ended. It had been both toxic and ideal, beautiful and a disaster. He never wanted to go through that again so that’s why, every single Friday and Saturday after work, he would go to his small flat, change clothes and then leave for many hours, to visit his favorite places in the city. Some were sex clubs, some were dancing clubs, and some were bars.

 The choice of the day depended on how his week had gone for him. He worked two jobs: one in a magazine were he was practically a delivery boy, even if his parents had sacrificed themselves to give him the best education ever, including an university degree, and another job working as a barista in of the many cafés in the city. He left the second job late at night and he had two hours to prepare for his night out. It was then, in the dark, when he could finally be himself. In time, he heard about Louis’s parties and he really wanted in.

 However, money was needed to enter one of those. Not that the actual entry had a fee but that only people with lots of money could enter one of those meetings. So he did something he had never done before and that was using his sexuality to convince another man to get him invited. Of course, the trick work because, as Remy said himself, there’s nothing easier than convincing a man of doing anything when you have him by the balls, sometimes literally. So he got to the annual party and was surprised to see how others lived a life like his own.

 There, he met Luc. At first it was all about sex, which was fun even with those white masks. But then Luc found him in the “real world” and they began to talk between more sexual encounters. After some time, they stopped with the sex but kept seeing each other, getting to know one another in a way none of the two had ever thought possible. Rémy was very scared of it all as he had never felt like he could be loved, he felt himself too ugly and awful for that. He didn’t know, but Luc felt exactly the same.