Yeah. My life wasn’t exactly black and white, and that was exactly how I wanted it.
“Oh, Rex, that’s it. Wow, holy shit.” Scott’s eyes rolled back. I moved onto the bed, the memory foam mattress barely shifting under our combined weight.
“Jesus, you’re so fucking sexy,” Scott said, looking up at me with wide green eyes. He licked his lips and leaned up, his hands rubbing my body, squeezing and kneading and massaging. “I love how much of a bear you are.” The way Scott’s cock leaked proved he wasn’t lying.
I let him rub me up and down, worshiping the curves and hair and chest.
I fucking loved it. Years ago, this would have made me self-conscious about a hundred times over. There’d been a long period in my life when my weight had become my biggest issue. Something I obsessed over and was constantly bullied over, constantly reminded about. The snide comments only enforced the view I’d see whenever I looked in the mirror.
Not anymore. These days, I embraced my bear-ness.
Some might say overweight, others would say fluffy, but of the people I really cared about, most would say fucking perfect. It took me a second to figure out what being a bear meant, considering I was so deep in the closet I might as well have turned into a coat hanger.
Being a bear means being a bigger man with a chest of curly hair and ample amount of options to grab during sex.
Being a bear does not mean having the barest layer of fat, which was something I recently heard that made me roll my eyes back into the dawn of time.
Tonight, Scott was in the “fucking perfect” camp, rubbing my body with a hunger in his gaze. He rubbed and sucked and kissed and licked. His breath felt warm against my stomach as he nibbled on me, gyrating his hips onto the bed, pushing my legs further apart. I throbbed against his chest, his heartbeat matching the pulse of my cock.
“Fuck,” I hissed, letting my head fall back onto the pillow. Penelope was sitting on the leather chair against the window, her legs open and her eyes drinking us up, the way she bit her lip, revealing just how much pleasure coursed through her.
The lights of the city were bright enough to shine into the dark room, one hundred and one stories above the ground. This was one of the tallest buildings in the city, and I currently lived in the penthouse next door. Francisco was a wild neighbor to have, that was for sure. An heir to some oil fortune and an addict to lavish parties dripping wall to wall with supermodels of all genders, it really helped justify the crazy amount of rent I paid.
A red light stuck out from the sea of blinking, artificial stars. It seemed to be floating. Like a UFO or something. It blinked on and off. It reminded me of something…
Wait a fucking second.
I looked to the opposite side of the room, at a bookshelf that took up an entire wall. Filled with random bullshit, it would have been real easy to miss the blinking red light.
I was looking for it, though.
And I found it.
“What the fuck is that?” I pushed Scott off me, his lips leaving a wet circle on my neck.
Scott and Penelope both followed my gaze. “What’s what?” Penelope asked.
“That blinking red light. Between the globe and the lockbox.”
I stood, my face flushing with blood. Closer inspection wasn’t needed, but still, I had to see it for myself.
Had to know how truly fucked things were.
Behind the antique globe and scratched-up bronze lockbox was a tiny camera, the blinking light coming from above the lens. Everything had been recorded. Everything.
I snatched the camera off the shelf, the globe dropping to the floor and breaking in half. The camera flew through the air, cracking against the window. It fell to the floor in pieces. Penelope and Scott both looked shocked, their faces turning paper pale, their jaws dropping in unison.
“Did either of you do this?” I felt a fury welling inside me like the tide being yanked by a full moon.
Scott shook his head while Penelope uttered a “hell no.”
“Tell me the fucking truth.”
Scott spoke up. “We didn’t. I didn’t— Why would we?” Penelope was picking up the pieces of the camera, shock playing out on her face.
I rubbed a hand over my face, hoping that the entire world would have disappeared by the time I opened my eyes.
It didn’t.
“I need to go.” Everything moved in slow motion and on fast forward at the same time. It felt like my limbs didn’t belong to me. Like I was watching someone else tug on their jeans and shirt, except I was watching it through their eyes. This moment didn’t feel real. Like I was drowning in oil and burning from the inside all at once.
I threw the door open. The sounds of the party echoed the beating of my pulse inside my skull. Dodging offers of drinks and conversation, I made it down the packed hall and into the main living room.
I was looking for Francisco, scanning the writhing room of bodies and disco lights. Instead, I found Maverick Gold, my best friend and probably the one person I needed most in that moment.
He must have seen the expression on my face. He crossed through the room, his charismatic smile quickly flipping into a worried frown the closer he got to me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, speaking over the thumping music.
“Everything.” I had to sit down. My knees felt like giving out. “Everything’s wrong. Everything’s over.”
3
Benjamin Gold
“Oh what the hell, bro.” I turned and walked off.
“Why are you briskly running away?” Dusty asked, catching up to me.
I realized he had to catch up to me, so I slowed it down. “I’m not running away. I just remembered I have something else to do, and it’s uh, somewhere else.”
We didn’t need our twin-ception powers for Dusty to see that I was full of complete shit.
“He seemed surprised to see you?”
“He did?” I caught my heart skipping a beat, making me want to bang my head against a nearby tree stump. “Well, that’s stupid, considering this is my family’s sanctuary he decided to show up at like some kind of stray.”
“Whoa,” Dusty said, looking over at me. He wore his thick-framed Ray-Ban glasses, his eyes magnified underneath the lenses. “I didn’t realize he’d bring up so much emotion.”
“Yeah. Me either.”
We had walked all the way to the stables, which were dusted over with a gentle blanket of snow. There were hoof prints in the pasture, leading toward the covered trough of hay. There, four of my mom’s new rescue horses munched away on their lunch. They were a mixture of grays and whites and browns, all four of them found abandoned in the same manure-filled pen.
I had already spent the morning grooming all four of them and instead led my brother down the path to the right, where another stable linked up to a separate pen. This was where Electra lived, a grumpy old thing that fought anyone who wasn’t a Gold, horses included. My mom had put a pink-and-blue-dotted birthday hat on her, which looked comically small on her massive head.
I smiled, a genuine smile that almost caught me off guard. “Hey there, lady.” I reached into a nearby bag and pulled out an apple.
Dusty leaned on a post as Electra whinnied her big gray head over the rail of her stable. She shook her head and bared her teeth in a hungry smile.