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God. After only a few days as a landlord, he was already sounding like one.
There was a sudden thumping noise in the walls, as though someone was playing the drums.
“What’s that?” Leo asked.
“Nothing!” Harry said.
Jack sighed. “It’s the pipes. They make that noise when the shower’s on.”
“Oh, my God!” He eyed the walls suspiciously. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they caved in any second now. “Is that…?” He squinted at the corner of the ceiling above the refrigerator. “Is that black mould? Can’t that kill you?”
“It’s just regular mould,” Harry said. “Right? Because none of us are dead yet.”
“I don’t think ‘none of us are dead yet’ is a ringing endorsement!”
“It’s regular mould,” Jack said. “There’s a leak, that’s all.”
Leo pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay, look. I’m not going to evict you unless the building inspector literally condemns the place—which, let’s be real, might be a possibility. But I’m getting an electrician and a plumber in straight away, and everything else? Well, I guess I’ll have to see how bad it is before I make any decisions. But this is…I can’t believe how bad this place is. I can’t believe Uncle Jimmy didn’t fix any of it.”
“He wasn’t a slumlord,” Harry said. “He was just an old guy who let us pay cheap rent. Do you know how much I was paying before me and Ambrose got this place? Like, okay, it’s not very nice, but at least he didn’t crack the shits if we put in a picture hook or there was mildew in the tile grout when he came around.” His nose wrinkled. “Jack got rid of the mildew once, but it just…keeps coming back.”
“The mildew may be the only thing holding the bathroom together,” Jack said. “That, and the remains of Tristan’s hair product.”
Leo swallowed at the reminder of Tristan’s gorgeous hair. God, it was mesmerising. He was struck by a sudden urge to see that messy bun undone and golden locks cascading down Tristan’s body like a waterfall, while another, more pragmatic part of him wondered if that was something Tristan charged extra for and how that even all worked.
Focus, he scolded himself. You’re a professional.
“…that leave us, though?” Harry’s voice pulled Leo’s attention back to the matter at hand.
“Sorry?”
“I said, if we do have to move out, where does that leave us?” Harry pushed his glasses up his nose, his brow crinkled with concern.
“We’ll figure something out,” Jack said, throwing a comforting arm over Harry’s shoulder and giving him a peck on the cheek. They were kind of adorable, and Leo was vaguely jealous. He wasn’t jealous of their possible impending homelessness, though, and he didn’t want them to think he didn’t care.
“I, um, think Uncle Jimmy had other properties. I haven’t got through the entire list yet, but I know there’s a flat over”—he squinted at his clipboard—“a shop called…Pleasure Party? And I don’t think it had tenants. I’d need to look into it.”
“Mr. Erskine had a party supplies shop?” Harry asked, nose crinkling in confusion. “That doesn’t seem like him.”
“That’s because they’re not that sort of party supplies, precious,” Tristan said, gliding gracefully into the kitchen fresh from the shower, propping himself up on his elbows against the kitchen bench. His hair, still damp, hung over one shoulder in a mass of loose waves, and it looked exactly as Leo had imagined. He’d gotten dressed, but his shirt was unbuttoned, leaving his lean, smooth chest and piercing on display, and his shorts were, well, short. Really, he wasn’t any more covered than he had been in his kimono. “Pleasure Party is a sex shop. Congratulations. Your new business makes a lot of people very happy.”
Leo’s mouth dropped open. “It’s a what?”
Tristan rolled his eyes. “A sex shop. You know, where people with a sense of adventure go to have a good time, or at least get the things they’ll use later to have a good time.” Tristan raised one eyebrow and looked Leo up and down. “I’m guessing you’ve never been to one.”
“That’s really none of your business.” Leo flushed and fixed his gaze on his clipboard. What did it matter if Tristan thought Leo was some sort of prude or a stick in the mud? But Tristan’s assessment stung, for reasons Leo couldn’t quite articulate—except that when he thought about it, he knew exactly why it stung. It was because Tristan was right, and Leo hated that he was.
Leo wasn’t intentionally boring, okay? He was just…sensible. And maybe he hadn’t had a chance to branch out, but then again, he hadn’t felt like he’d needed to. He thought of the gift voucher Uncle Jimmy had sent him, the one he’d never used. He’d been tempted, sure, but his temptation had been outweighed by the fear that someone he knew would see him going into the shop—or even worse, coming out of it. And he hadn’t thought he’d been missing much. He’d had boyfriends before. But now, even with the small amount of time he’d spent with Jimmy’s cohorts, he was beginning to realise that maybe his parents and their insistence on being respectable were wrong, and there was a whole other side of himself that he’d been missing out on exploring.
When he looked up from his clipboard, it was to find Tristan watching him, his head tilted and wearing a pensive look. “Hey,” he said, “I was only teasing, okay? And sometimes I get carried away. Just ask the puppies. Jack’s forever telling me to fuck off.”
“He can be a bit of an arsehole,” Jack confirmed, and Harry nodded his agreement.
“Fuck you both very much,” Tristan shot back with a grin, before turning his attention back to Leo. “Look, it’s okay if you’re a vanilla boy, I promise. No judgement”—which Leo personally thought was a bit rich, coming from someone in Tristan’s line of work—“but I’ll tell you what.” He leaned back against the kitchen bench, his impossibly long legs crossed at the ankles. “Pleasure Party doesn’t just sell kinky shit. I can take you there later and show you around, explain the products on offer, and introduce you to Wei and Orlando who work there. And after, we can check out that flat, if you want?”
His mouth curved up into a gorgeous smile, his utterly perfect teeth gleaming more brightly than the freshly bleached kitchen sink, his eyes sparkling. All Leo could think was that no wonder Tristan could get people to pay to sleep with him, because when he stopped being a dick for two minutes, he fairly oozed charm—and he oozed it in the warm, chocolate-fudge-sauce-that-he-wanted-to-lick kind of way, and not the nameless-nasty-green-sludge-in-the-bottom-of-his-fridge way. His smile was practically incandescent.
Leo found himself utterly transfixed, helpless in the face of the almost ethereal beauty in front of him, and before he knew it, he was stuttering out, “That—yes, thanks, I’d like that.”
