Boy in the Club a boy & billionaire novel - Rachel Kane Page 0,2

to play.”

“They’re not…like…hookers,” says Hawk, and now that I’ve stopped laughing, I can see that I’ve worried him. Offended his dignity. Hawk takes things like dignity seriously.

“Do they get paid?”

“Nobody pays them,” insists Daniel. “They’re just guys. Cute guys.”

“I don’t want to have to pay to have someone sleep with me. It’s… It’s just so obvious.”

“Yeah, yeah, you only want to fuck boys who truly love you for your heart, right?” Daniel scoffs. “Dude, they’re not rentboys, okay? No money changes hands.”

“Then why are they here?”

“To fuck billionaires, clearly.”

“So that’s what it is. They want to land someone. They’re looking for sugar daddies.”

Daniel looks over at Hawk. “I told you this was a bad idea. You can’t get Colby to do anything useful, he’ll talk himself out of anything.”

Now Hawk’s hand is on my arm. “Just try it, okay? It’s not what you think it is.”

We’re at the atrium door.

In contrast to the bland exterior and the menacingly plain dressing room, this door is massive, ornately carved, the wood lacquered red. I find myself wanting to study the carvings, wanting to run my fingers over them, but maybe that’s just my hesitation, my fear.

Oh see, there’s an emotion. You can feel fear. Excellent start to your recovery.

“Are you sure about this?” I ask, my last words before they open the door.

The economy of an upscale club is fairly simple. The goal is to separate the whale—a foolish rich man—from his money, in the most efficient way possible, via marking up the liquor bill to astronomical heights. Surround a young prince or corporate baron with enough adoring models (and preferably a producer or movie star nearby, to ramp up the competition), and soon he’s running a six-figure bar tab. The owner gives some of that money to promoters—the guys who know the models, who train them, drive them around, make sure they know which rich guy likes what. It’s all a farce, and yet somewhere around the fourth bottle of champagne, if the music’s right and the promoters have picked just the right men for you, you can sink into it, and start to feel really special…and that’s when the spending really starts, as you try to impress everyone around you.

When they open the atrium doors, and the pounding bass nearly knocks me over, I feel oddly at home. Not because I like clubs, but because I understand how the money works.

It’s exactly what I feared. Bright strobes stabbing through the darkness, a DJ in the corner, artificial laughter from men with artificially white teeth.

This was a meat-market.

You could instantly see who the marks were. They were the men intently staring at the merchandise. Mostly guys older than me, men with country-club hair, boardroom hair, trying to look casual. Surrounding them, the beautiful boys, an endless ocean of male flesh.

Straight clubs have a bit of an advantage over gay clubs, really, in that when you pack in the women models, they can show off their figures while still being skimpily dressed, those figures bought by heavy doses of coke and Adderall. Harder with guys, really; the minute you put a shirt on a guy, you can’t see the hours and hours of work he has put into restricting his calories and doing reps at the gym. So there’s a lot of shirtlessness in here to show off trim, veiny abs.

It’s like an indoor football game, shirts versus skins.

I think I’d almost rather have the masks and tags.

One man, who I’m almost certain is wearing Spanx under his clothes to hide his bulk, is walking around the guys, poking and prodding them as though trying to find just the right combination of hardness and softness. He’s all but reaching down their pants to test their cocks. Gross.

There is no way I can be here. Somehow there’s a glass of champagne in my hand, and without thinking, I empty it.

“Isn’t it great?” shouts Hawk. “Look at the guys!”

“Oh yeah,” I say, looking for somewhere to get another glass. “It’s marvelous.”

It almost hurts. It’d hurt if I didn’t come pre-numbed. You know the whole thing is a sham for your enjoyment. You know it’s expected that you’ll take one or two guys home with you—not home, you understand, but a place nearby, your pied-a-terre, a hotel someone has booked for you maybe, or an island cabin—but the explicitly retail nature of these places really gets to me.

Daniel is already chatting up a man I think I recognize from that recent Calvin Klein ad campaign.