Too early by half, but Iris doesn't exactly operating on a normal human timescale. The thudding on his front door is loud enough to wake the dead, the first time she did it he thought it was the cops.
"The hell took you so long, Orange?" She laughs as the door falls open, pushing past him with a bag full of fresh pastries from the French bakery down the street.
Freddy glowers after her. "It's eleven in the fucking morning!"
"Practically afternoon!"
"I didn't hit the hay till six."
"Jeez." Iris winces in sympathy, making a beeline for the coffee pot and snatching a couple of plates from the woefully inadequate draining board. Not that it matters, Freddy is the worst at doing his own washing. He probably wouldn't get it done at all most days if he didn't know she was gonna come over a bust his balls about it, it's not like the customers pay a blind bit of attention to what the apartment looks like.
It's a studio with just enough of an attempt made to pinch the kitchen off from everything else that you can trick yourself into believing it has two rooms. The toilet and shower are stuffed together like an over-compressed sleeping bag and he's only got a hob to cook on but the bed is big and comfortable. Rent's taken care of, so all he has to do is keep the place clean and keep himself fed. The decor is all reds and yellows, all the furniture perfectly muted to stop it becoming too much. There's a blind over his window that barely ever gets drawn and the bedspread is in a rich brown. He's been allowed to put up a few personal touches, a couple of framed comics that he particularly liked the cover art of and the Iron Man toy Sport had bought him as a treat after he lured his first customer in off the street.
"You been working hard, then?" Iris asks, tucking into something sweet and layers, oozing jam out of the side.
Freddy drops into the second chair - the only other chair that will fit around this pathetically tiny table - and snatches up the pain au chocolat she bought him. This is the third day in a row she's gotten breakfast. He's gotta get ahead of her or she'll be breathing down his neck for the rest of the month.
April. It's fucking April. He's been in this apartment for just shy of three weeks, it's starting to grow on him.
"Sure have." He nods towards the bed, but they both know he's really nodding to the locked box underneath. "Haven't seen Sport in more than a week though. You know when he might be by to pick up his money?"
Iris shrugs. "Who knows? He's been all over the place this past week."
"You been going with him?"
"Sometimes."
Freddy nods, slowly. The coffee passes over their shared minimum brewing requirements and they sit in silence, throwing it down. Iris pours enough sugar into hers to satisfy an ants' nest.
He clicks his tongue. "How long did you have to wait before he let you out?"
"Let me out." Iris snorts. "You talk about it like he's got you trapped."
"Doesn't he?"
"Sure he doesn't. You can go anytime you like, you'll just get your ass kicked for it."
"He ever kicked your ass?"
"Nah."
Freddy doesn't know how long Iris has been with Sport but from the way she talks about it, it's been a while. Sometimes he tries to trick himself into believing that she approaches the matter with a degree of relativism that he's not privy to, so that the six months, the year, the however fucking long it's been are represented as a proportion of her life rather than a finite span of time. Then he looks at the difference in age between the two of them and decides that that can't possibly be what's going on here.
He hasn't told her that he left Sport's apartment with a deep dark bruise blooming just above his naval, that it had allowed Sport to charge less for his services for a full week till it started to go down.
"He'll ask you to head out soon." Iris assures him.
Freddy doesn't believe her. Sometime around midday, they hear the rumble of feet coming up the stairs and Iris goes dashing back to her own room just down the hall, ready for whatever gets sent their way.
-----------------------------
Not being allowed to walk the streets isn't the same thing as being cooped up in doors all day. Freddy takes the handful of customers that make it up to him of their own accord, either familiar faces or guys that have come recommended directly by Sport. He's supposed to be an attraction of some kind but he doesn't have the guts to ask why. He's sure that at the core of it, he doesn't want to know.
The rain still comes down in irregular showers, washing them all half way down the street. It's more of an issue for the girls than it is for him, seeing as he's not expected to wear makeup or shirts so thin they dissolve in the rain.
He's the only one of them who's not a girl. Apparently Sport has a couple of other guys dotted around town, but this comes to him as heresay.
Gemima is twenty three years old, pretty as a peach and foulmouthed as a sailor. Her long raven hair is always done up in some complex knot that has the other girls asking how the hell she does it. Her lipstick is a fierce shade of purple and the cigarette dangling from her left hand never seems to go out.
"So I says, honey, you put that thing anywhere near me you're gonna lose it. And he thinks that I'm kidding right up until I hit the buzzer and Matthew shows up behind me. All macho like, you know how he is."
This prompts a round of giggles. It seems most of the girls like Sport, a lot. Every time he tries to ask about it he get a spiel about job security, the tenacity of the housing market and a strange look like he should consider himself lucky to be here.
Lucky. Standing on a street corner in the pouring rain, keeping his eyes down whenever a cab crawls past because he can't stand to accidentally recognise someone.
"What about you, Orange?" Gemima calls over the heads of the giggling girls. The nickname was passed around by Iris before he showed up and has more or less stuck against his will. He hates it, the way he keeps expecting to see Brown looking down at him from over the back of the couch, demanding that he get off his ass and get to work.
Freddy shrugs. He hasn't learned the art of turning bad customers into funny stories just yet. "Not much to report. Guy wound up crying on me for so long the other night he had to pay double to get what he came for but what else is new?"
Everyone cackles. It's a good story, something they can all relate to. Despite himself, Freddy smiles and takes the cigarette that Margo offers him.
None of them go by their real names, even if they all more or less know what each others real names are. It causes less fuss, less paperwork. And it makes it harder for the police to find them.
Over the course of the next half hour, they all get picked off by guys heading up to ninety second street to see their needs met. Iris first, because it's always Iris first, but the others fall in soon enough. Some days, Freddy is snapped up first thing, but today he's left to linger, till it's just him and Gemima. She's attractive as all hell but Sport keeps telling her she's too assertive to make real money. She reads like a girl you gotta take out on a date.
Sometimes the girls get to go on dates. It costs a whole bunch extra and is considered a special privilege born of trust. Like walking the streets, it takes time to get there.
"Hey." Gemima digs Freddy in the ribs and nods towards the shiny black Audi pulling up outside the tenement block. "You reckon he's come to the right place?"
A door swings open and a short, chubby guy with over wide eyes, curly blonde hair and a hideous blue tracksuit pops out. His shoulders are hunched, and he looks back over his shoulder as soon as he's taken a step, trying not to be seen. He's definitely trying not to be seen.
Upon seeing the street more or less empty, he approaches Freddy and Gemima cautiously. "Yo, psst! How much?"
"Depends." Gemima drawls around a long toke of her cigarette. "Which one of us do you want?"
He hesitates, so it's real fucking obvious what he's after. When he manages to stutter out that he's interested in Freddy, his face blushes bright pink.
Freddy is a long way from picking up enough grace to comfort a guy who's just now realising that he wants to stick his dick in something that doesn't have tits. Sport hasn't been by all day, so Gemima plays pimp and runs through the rules while Freddy sits back and doesn't say a word. Why should he? He's a rarity out here.
Carl at the bottom of the stairs runs his usual scam, asking ten dollars for the room like the rent ain't paid. The building echoes with the slap of their feet heading up the stairs.
"In here." Freddy directs the guy before he can wander off.
The guy pauses, arms folded over his chest, then follows. He stands in the middle of Freddy's room, at odds with the colour scheme and clearly trying to decide if this place is worth ten dollars for half an hour. "So, uh, how does this work?"
"However you want it to." Freddy moves towards him, pulling his arms open without ceremony. "You gotta pay up front though."
Twenty five dollars is pushed into his hands. No more undercharging, though once Sport has taken his cut you'd be forgiven for thinking that Freddy wasn't putting enough effort into selling his ass.
"What do I call you?" The guy asks, brusquely. "How old are you?"
"You can call me Orange." Freddy says slowly, fiddling with the draw string at the front of his trousers to try to get them down. "And I'm as old as you want me to be."
A wince, not what the guy wanted to hear. "That young, huh?"
He sure as shit didn't hear Sport's sales pitch.
"What do I call you?" Freddy counters, so he doesn't have to answer.
"Ed- I mean, call me Nice Guy." Hands come up to steady Freddy's, urging him to stop. "You know what, I don't think-"
"Just relax." Freddy urges him, steering him back towards the bed. The words sound flat, even to him. He doesn't have the energy to make a show of flirtation. Why the fuck does it matter when he's already got their money.
A hand below the belt, if you know what you're doing you can shut them up in a matter of seconds.
Nice Guy's eyes blow wide, arching up off the bed. "Oh shit."
There you go.
"I don't- God, Orange, keep doing that right there- I don't normally do this but-"
"It's fine." Freddy assures him, not trying to get his life story. "This ok? You want something else?"
"This is fucking great." Nice Guy hisses between his teeth. "God. I don't normally do this shit but my boyfriend got taken in my the cops a couple of months back and I'm getting real tired of my right hand."
"That's rough." Freddy nods. He's decided that he would like to keep this exact level of intimacy up for the next half an hour. Far be it for him to complain but he doesn't think he has it in him to let Nice Guy fuck him.
Nice Guy bites back a laugh that tapers to a grown. "Nah, he didn't get taken in...get taken in for queer shit. He never woulda let them catch him at that..."
Freddy tunes it out. This job is as much about how you let people treat you like a comfort blanket as anything else.
Nice Guy tenses and grunts. Easy as pie. He's still got shit to say, but at least he ain't fucking crying.
Re: Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 23/?
This is getting very long and has entirely gotten away from me...
-----------------------------------------------------
Too early by half, but Iris doesn't exactly operating on a normal human timescale. The thudding on his front door is loud enough to wake the dead, the first time she did it he thought it was the cops.
"The hell took you so long, Orange?" She laughs as the door falls open, pushing past him with a bag full of fresh pastries from the French bakery down the street.
Freddy glowers after her. "It's eleven in the fucking morning!"
"Practically afternoon!"
"I didn't hit the hay till six."
"Jeez." Iris winces in sympathy, making a beeline for the coffee pot and snatching a couple of plates from the woefully inadequate draining board. Not that it matters, Freddy is the worst at doing his own washing. He probably wouldn't get it done at all most days if he didn't know she was gonna come over a bust his balls about it, it's not like the customers pay a blind bit of attention to what the apartment looks like.
It's a studio with just enough of an attempt made to pinch the kitchen off from everything else that you can trick yourself into believing it has two rooms. The toilet and shower are stuffed together like an over-compressed sleeping bag and he's only got a hob to cook on but the bed is big and comfortable. Rent's taken care of, so all he has to do is keep the place clean and keep himself fed. The decor is all reds and yellows, all the furniture perfectly muted to stop it becoming too much. There's a blind over his window that barely ever gets drawn and the bedspread is in a rich brown. He's been allowed to put up a few personal touches, a couple of framed comics that he particularly liked the cover art of and the Iron Man toy Sport had bought him as a treat after he lured his first customer in off the street.
"You been working hard, then?" Iris asks, tucking into something sweet and layers, oozing jam out of the side.
Freddy drops into the second chair - the only other chair that will fit around this pathetically tiny table - and snatches up the pain au chocolat she bought him. This is the third day in a row she's gotten breakfast. He's gotta get ahead of her or she'll be breathing down his neck for the rest of the month.
April. It's fucking April. He's been in this apartment for just shy of three weeks, it's starting to grow on him.
"Sure have." He nods towards the bed, but they both know he's really nodding to the locked box underneath. "Haven't seen Sport in more than a week though. You know when he might be by to pick up his money?"
Iris shrugs. "Who knows? He's been all over the place this past week."
"You been going with him?"
"Sometimes."
Freddy nods, slowly. The coffee passes over their shared minimum brewing requirements and they sit in silence, throwing it down. Iris pours enough sugar into hers to satisfy an ants' nest.
He clicks his tongue. "How long did you have to wait before he let you out?"
"Let me out." Iris snorts. "You talk about it like he's got you trapped."
"Doesn't he?"
"Sure he doesn't. You can go anytime you like, you'll just get your ass kicked for it."
"He ever kicked your ass?"
"Nah."
Freddy doesn't know how long Iris has been with Sport but from the way she talks about it, it's been a while. Sometimes he tries to trick himself into believing that she approaches the matter with a degree of relativism that he's not privy to, so that the six months, the year, the however fucking long it's been are represented as a proportion of her life rather than a finite span of time. Then he looks at the difference in age between the two of them and decides that that can't possibly be what's going on here.
He hasn't told her that he left Sport's apartment with a deep dark bruise blooming just above his naval, that it had allowed Sport to charge less for his services for a full week till it started to go down.
"He'll ask you to head out soon." Iris assures him.
Freddy doesn't believe her. Sometime around midday, they hear the rumble of feet coming up the stairs and Iris goes dashing back to her own room just down the hall, ready for whatever gets sent their way.
-----------------------------
Not being allowed to walk the streets isn't the same thing as being cooped up in doors all day. Freddy takes the handful of customers that make it up to him of their own accord, either familiar faces or guys that have come recommended directly by Sport. He's supposed to be an attraction of some kind but he doesn't have the guts to ask why. He's sure that at the core of it, he doesn't want to know.
The rain still comes down in irregular showers, washing them all half way down the street. It's more of an issue for the girls than it is for him, seeing as he's not expected to wear makeup or shirts so thin they dissolve in the rain.
He's the only one of them who's not a girl. Apparently Sport has a couple of other guys dotted around town, but this comes to him as heresay.
Gemima is twenty three years old, pretty as a peach and foulmouthed as a sailor. Her long raven hair is always done up in some complex knot that has the other girls asking how the hell she does it. Her lipstick is a fierce shade of purple and the cigarette dangling from her left hand never seems to go out.
"So I says, honey, you put that thing anywhere near me you're gonna lose it. And he thinks that I'm kidding right up until I hit the buzzer and Matthew shows up behind me. All macho like, you know how he is."
This prompts a round of giggles. It seems most of the girls like Sport, a lot. Every time he tries to ask about it he get a spiel about job security, the tenacity of the housing market and a strange look like he should consider himself lucky to be here.
Lucky. Standing on a street corner in the pouring rain, keeping his eyes down whenever a cab crawls past because he can't stand to accidentally recognise someone.
"What about you, Orange?" Gemima calls over the heads of the giggling girls. The nickname was passed around by Iris before he showed up and has more or less stuck against his will. He hates it, the way he keeps expecting to see Brown looking down at him from over the back of the couch, demanding that he get off his ass and get to work.
Freddy shrugs. He hasn't learned the art of turning bad customers into funny stories just yet. "Not much to report. Guy wound up crying on me for so long the other night he had to pay double to get what he came for but what else is new?"
Everyone cackles. It's a good story, something they can all relate to. Despite himself, Freddy smiles and takes the cigarette that Margo offers him.
None of them go by their real names, even if they all more or less know what each others real names are. It causes less fuss, less paperwork. And it makes it harder for the police to find them.
Over the course of the next half hour, they all get picked off by guys heading up to ninety second street to see their needs met. Iris first, because it's always Iris first, but the others fall in soon enough. Some days, Freddy is snapped up first thing, but today he's left to linger, till it's just him and Gemima. She's attractive as all hell but Sport keeps telling her she's too assertive to make real money. She reads like a girl you gotta take out on a date.
Sometimes the girls get to go on dates. It costs a whole bunch extra and is considered a special privilege born of trust. Like walking the streets, it takes time to get there.
"Hey." Gemima digs Freddy in the ribs and nods towards the shiny black Audi pulling up outside the tenement block. "You reckon he's come to the right place?"
A door swings open and a short, chubby guy with over wide eyes, curly blonde hair and a hideous blue tracksuit pops out. His shoulders are hunched, and he looks back over his shoulder as soon as he's taken a step, trying not to be seen. He's definitely trying not to be seen.
Upon seeing the street more or less empty, he approaches Freddy and Gemima cautiously. "Yo, psst! How much?"
"Depends." Gemima drawls around a long toke of her cigarette. "Which one of us do you want?"
He hesitates, so it's real fucking obvious what he's after. When he manages to stutter out that he's interested in Freddy, his face blushes bright pink.
Freddy is a long way from picking up enough grace to comfort a guy who's just now realising that he wants to stick his dick in something that doesn't have tits. Sport hasn't been by all day, so Gemima plays pimp and runs through the rules while Freddy sits back and doesn't say a word. Why should he? He's a rarity out here.
Carl at the bottom of the stairs runs his usual scam, asking ten dollars for the room like the rent ain't paid. The building echoes with the slap of their feet heading up the stairs.
"In here." Freddy directs the guy before he can wander off.
The guy pauses, arms folded over his chest, then follows. He stands in the middle of Freddy's room, at odds with the colour scheme and clearly trying to decide if this place is worth ten dollars for half an hour. "So, uh, how does this work?"
"However you want it to." Freddy moves towards him, pulling his arms open without ceremony. "You gotta pay up front though."
Twenty five dollars is pushed into his hands. No more undercharging, though once Sport has taken his cut you'd be forgiven for thinking that Freddy wasn't putting enough effort into selling his ass.
"What do I call you?" The guy asks, brusquely. "How old are you?"
"You can call me Orange." Freddy says slowly, fiddling with the draw string at the front of his trousers to try to get them down. "And I'm as old as you want me to be."
A wince, not what the guy wanted to hear. "That young, huh?"
He sure as shit didn't hear Sport's sales pitch.
"What do I call you?" Freddy counters, so he doesn't have to answer.
"Ed- I mean, call me Nice Guy." Hands come up to steady Freddy's, urging him to stop. "You know what, I don't think-"
"Just relax." Freddy urges him, steering him back towards the bed. The words sound flat, even to him. He doesn't have the energy to make a show of flirtation. Why the fuck does it matter when he's already got their money.
A hand below the belt, if you know what you're doing you can shut them up in a matter of seconds.
Nice Guy's eyes blow wide, arching up off the bed. "Oh shit."
There you go.
"I don't- God, Orange, keep doing that right there- I don't normally do this but-"
"It's fine." Freddy assures him, not trying to get his life story. "This ok? You want something else?"
"This is fucking great." Nice Guy hisses between his teeth. "God. I don't normally do this shit but my boyfriend got taken in my the cops a couple of months back and I'm getting real tired of my right hand."
"That's rough." Freddy nods. He's decided that he would like to keep this exact level of intimacy up for the next half an hour. Far be it for him to complain but he doesn't think he has it in him to let Nice Guy fuck him.
Nice Guy bites back a laugh that tapers to a grown. "Nah, he didn't get taken in...get taken in for queer shit. He never woulda let them catch him at that..."
Freddy tunes it out. This job is as much about how you let people treat you like a comfort blanket as anything else.
Nice Guy tenses and grunts. Easy as pie. He's still got shit to say, but at least he ain't fucking crying.