BEYOND THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

CHAPTER 19-FIDELITY

BRIAN’S POV

I’ve got your memory
or has it got me?

The hardest thing about the last six years had been not knowing when or if he’d come home. There was a part of you that told yourself that he would, but there was a larger part of you that wouldn’t let yourself believe that. Perhaps you survived those six years because when it came to Justin, that feeling was uncomfortably familiar . . .

You waited for him to finish getting ready in the morning, to finish his damn cereal, to pack his backpack, listened to his entertaining critique of every subject on the planet (including you) on the way to school. You waited for him to realize what a complete ass you really were and to stop drooling over you, humoring you, rolling over for you. You waited on that bench in the hospital after he was bashed, waited and waited for someone to come and reassure you that you hadn’t been dressed to kill.

You waited for him to leave you, to find someone that better represented his point of view in matters of the heart, and then for him to come back, willingly, insatiable, and for good.

You waited for him to return from California, and then for the inevitable, dramatic walk-out when the Brian he came home to wasn’t the Brian he wanted. You waited for what seemed like an hour to find him in the rubble of Babylon, cursing yourself all the while for allowing him to be compromised once again. You waited for him to accept your first proposal and then your second, for him to step back into your arms where he belonged, where you so desperately needed him to be.

You waited for him to admit to himself that there were things he wanted out of life besides you, for him to leave again, those last agonizing seconds of his warm body underneath you—the first time you’d fucked him truly believing it would be the last.

You waited for him to call, to ask your opinion on something, to need you to get through his day. You’d anticipated the day that he wouldn’t need you anymore, tried to prepare yourself, drank a lot when the pain was worse than the anticipation. You were so proud of him, it hurt.

Like hell.

You weren’t waiting for his phone call that night in the fall of 2010. You never expected it.

For once, the instincts of Brian Kinney, the man who made his millions predicting people’s reactions to stimulate the economy, were wrong.

Dead wrong.

And being wrong had never felt so fucking fantastic.

******************
oh, mercy mercy me

The first time you let yourself realize that you loved him came when you tried to give him back, when watching the intolerance and disgust on his father’s face mirrored the way you knew you would’ve been treated had you come out to your family. It was then that you realized that Justin wasn’t just an expensive pair of jeans that didn’t fit right and could be returned on a whim. He was an investment of some sort, an investment who would ultimately have his own side of the bed.

And that night, back in your room at The Rockford, you realized that you loved the man you always knew he’d become.

The man whose hands moved confidently in the moonlight after he’d pulled you up the stairs, whose fingers unbuttoned your shirt, roamed down your chest, and then slid underneath the waistband of your pants as you stood by the bed pressing against him.

There had never been a time when his appetite hadn’t matched yours. It had always been a perfect fit.

He looked up at you as he stroked you, and you found yourself staring almost helplessly into his eyes wondering how you got there, trying to piece together the random acts of passion that had hosted your spontaneous wedding, haphazard honeymoon, and impromptu reception. Never had you unwittingly given up so much control and not fought to get it back.

You wanted him to touch you, wanted to feel the arousing peacefulness that overcame you when he took over. And you didn’t have to direct him. He knew--by the sound of your breathing, by the way there was no space between you, by the way you closed your eyes and rested your head on top of his, by the quiet moan that you gave him when he loosened your belt and unzipped your pants. There were times when you let him seduce you, and then there were times when you wanted to be the object of his desire, when you craved it.

He kissed you, and your grip on him tightened when his tongue parted your lips, when he pulled back and whispered to you as his thumb gently ringed the head of your cock, ”That was nice, downstairs, dancing with you like that.”

“Yeah, it was.” His right hand rose off of your body and slid open the drawer on the nightstand. Your eyes followed his hand as it reached inside the drawer, smiling when you saw what he was reaching for, informing him, “You’ve been snooping.” The new rope you’d bought had been cut into two pieces; you glanced over your shoulder as he tossed them on the bed. “That’s why you were gone for so long.” You were talking to yourself, his only answer was a sigh as he ran his hand down your arm, stopping at your wrist.

“What’d you cut it with?” you asked him.

“Your knife,” he answered matter-of-factly.

He’d been snooping all right. Apparently, matrimony trumped privacy.

He nudged you and you sat back on the bed, watching him quietly as he unbuckled the cuff. He laid it down on the comforter and picked up the other one and did the same thing. And then he turned his attention back to you, letting your shirt fall off your shoulders. You were completely undressed, unlike him. You slid one of your fantasies into your imaginary ViewMaster and watched the images flip through your mind one by one, telling him, “I want you to ride me.”

“I will.” And then he kissed you, right beside your ear, “Lie down.” You sunk back into the pillows, pleased when he sat beside you. You placed your hand in his lap and he held it, his fingers warm inside yours. You squeezed his hand as he leaned forward, his hand on the side of your face when he spoke, his voice soft and smooth, “It’s been a long time since I’ve tied you up.”

“Or tied me down.”

He laughed at your remark. His hand left your face and wandered to your inner thigh. You bent your knee and moaned, pressing it against the side of his body.

“You’re so fucking horny,” he told you, a mischievous grin on his face.

“Affirmative.”

……

At this point in your memory of that night, you always want to fast forward, to get to the part where he’s rimming you, fucking you, riding you, but your mind won’t take a shortcut. It prefers to remember the rope chafing your hands as you held on, it seems to skip and repeat the images of him tying you down…

Your hand rested on his knee as he slid one of the pieces of rope through his fingers, studying it. He laid it over his leg, the bright white of the threads contrasting sharply with his black pants. And then he picked up your lighter from the nightstand and lit the candle held by a beady little gnome. He turned it around and you watched the light flicker on the wall as he leaned over the side of the bed, one strand of rope disappearing for a second and then reappearing after being looped through the bed frame.

In the wake of impending restraint, you began to admit things to yourself as if you had some sort of immunity in that particular situation. Indeed, it was almost as if the bizarre occurrences leading up to that exact moment had been cosmically planned by someone with much more foresight than you…

The night that Gus was born, the night that you were accosted with the realities of your perpetual lineage, you were aware of Justin in the hospital room, aware that he was seeing the unselfish side of you. Never before had you cared what a trick thought about you, as long as they were sufficiently in awe of your dick and its agenda. But that first night, there was a reason you looked back over your shoulder, a reason you wanted him to see you with your son, with your friends, with a smile on your face as you asked for his opinion.

Perhaps it was because he wasn’t jaded, because he knew nothing of your reputation, because you saw another birth in that room that night that no one else could see, one that you fought to deny thinking that it would be your undoing. And despite your best efforts, it was.

In much the same way that you’d conned people for decades into spending their hard earned money on things they didn’t need, to become people they really weren’t, you’d been the victim of pervasive, blond, subliminal advertising. You’d been your own unsuspecting focus group.

…..

“Hold this,” Justin told you, placing the ends of the looped rope in your hand. You closed your fingers around the rope, aware of the low moan that was escaping from you as he wrapped the leather cuff around your wrist and buckled it. You loved to watch his fingers work. “Pull,” he said, after tying the rope to the rings on the cuff, “Is it strong enough?”

You yanked it hard, “Perfect,” and then you turned your head and watched him walk to the other side of the bed where he repeated the entire process again. “I don’t know who taught you to do this, but you’re very good,” you teased him.

“You’d be amazed what they teach in scouts these days.”

“I’m sure.”

He climbed onto the bed when he was finished, after you tested that side for him, and then laid beside you, running his hand down your back, “Comfortable?”

“Extremely.”

“Good.”

…..

It dawned on you right then that he was about the age you were when the two of you met, and you flashed on your intent that evening as he kissed your shoulder, laying his head on your outstretched arm. His fingers combed through your hair, and you took a deep breath, closing your eyes as he touched your face, as his palm smoothed over your shoulder blades and down your back again.

“Don’t come when I fuck you,” he whispered, “I want you inside me when you come.”

You agreed quietly with no concept of exactly how you were supposed to manage that. (When you’re married, information is dispensed to you on a need-to-know basis.)

It probably would’ve surprised him if he’d been inside your head at that moment, if he could feel how relieved you felt that the waiting was over, that the two of you had fit back together like the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, that the thought of him wanting to fuck you, to please you, was zooming through your body like Ecstasy.

……

You held your breath when you felt him move and start kissing his way down your back, his fingers just ahead of his lips on the same path. When you felt them between your legs, you wrapped your fingers around the rope and began to hold on.

……

Justin was always undeniably beautiful when he was self-possessed.

……

You wanted to tell him what this was doing to you, how the thought of fighting off your orgasm set off fireworks in your mind, how feeling his body on top of yours made those fireworks echo over and over in your mind.

But an explanation was unnecessary because Justin was fully aware that you were a successful, ungodly gorgeous, gay businessman who had a deep (no pun intended) respect for the many pleasures he could offer your ass.

……

“Please,” you begged, fractions of a second before you felt his face between your thighs, his thumbs parting you as you dug your head into the sheets. His tongue was so warm, so soft, so possessive that you wanted to grab him, touch him, everywhere, all at once. Your upper back flexed as you let your face rub against the sheets, an outlet for the sensations that were damming up beneath your skin.

Taking advantage of the slight bit of leverage you had by pressing against the sides of the headboard, you rocked back into his mouth, and then sunk back down, steeling yourself when you heard him unzip his pants. You opened your eyes all the way and saw them slide off the side of the bed.

He teased you before he started to fuck you, making you unable to stop thrusting back against his cock, so hard between your legs. You took what he gave you, but it did nothing but make you want him more.

“I love when you grunt like that, Brian,” he said, right as he filled you, his body covering you as he let his arms stretch along the length of yours.

“Uh.”

He moved slowly at first, but the pleasure of it all overtook him, his hands pulling back against your body, his forehead burrowing into your back. He was beginning to sweat.

“Don’t come,” he warned you, forcing you down as you stared at the cuff on your wrist, feeling your heartbeat in your hands.

“God. Christ, Justin.”

He let loose the most beautiful sound the second before he came, his right hand running up the back of your neck and into your hair, “Oh, god, Brian. Oh, god. Oh, god.”

“Fuck.”

“Yes.” he almost hissed, and you felt the warmth spill inside you, filling you completely.

…..

He laid like that for about a minute, kissing the side of your face, reaching for your wrists to unbuckle the cuffs. You were free and still clinging to the rope. “Roll over,” he encouraged you after he pulled out, so you released the strands and flipped over, the heady mix of exhaustion and desire blanketing you as he buckled you back to the bed.

“Ride me,” you reminded him, raising your head to watch as he climbed on top of you, your dick disappearing into his ass. He peeled his clinging, white shirt off, letting it join his pants on the floor. You relaxed your neck when you were inside him, the sheets wet and slippery beneath the two of you as he rode your cock, an ecstatic concentration on his face.

And then you felt the prelude to his orgasm begin, felt his ass get even tighter, making your orgasm rise up out of you like a charmed snake. It made you twist like crazy inside to come like that, unable to hold onto him, to control any of it, the back of your hands pressed hard into the mattress, your back arching as your release came. There was nothing as wonderful as watching the intense pleasure on his face, the moments of being inside him after you’d come, of watching him jerk off on your chest, accompanied by a soundtrack of your pounding heartbeat and his hard breathing.

……

Time passed and your felt him unbuckle the cuffs again, felt him physically pry your almost-numb fingers off the rope, felt the comforter heavy over both of you as he laid down beside you.

Your body curled around his and he pulled your arm around him, pressing your hand against his stomach as he held it.

“Was it too tight?” he asked you, his question interrupted by a yawn.

“What? Your ass?”

He slapped your hand and laughed, “No, stupid, the cuffs.”

“Nope. Just right.”

He laughed when he felt you laughing, pulling the comforter almost over his head. The tree outside your window rustled in the wind, a random branch snapping off, hitting the side of the building on the way down. Your hand slid out of his, moved lower, and wrapped around the inside of his thigh.

“Mmm.” And then he reached back, letting his fingers brush over your face, “I love you.” You urged him to tilt back a little and kissed him, and then he spoke again, “I hope you realize that my mother’s going to kill me for getting married without her knowledge.”

You smiled, “I know. It’s every mother’s dream to see her gay son get married to a fiercely handsome millionaire who’s twelve years his senior.”

“Who’s great in the sack.”

“Even better.”

He turned around in your arms, “If you tell anybody that I spent my wedding reception lying on top of a piano while people put cash by my head that I had to donate to charity, I’ll kill you.”

“If I accidentally fuck up and tell someone that, then you can tell them that you tied me to the bed and fucked my brains out.”

He seemed to be giving it some thought before he said, “Yeah, no one will believe that either.”

…..

He turned back around, both of you staring out the window; you kissed the back of his neck. Minutes passed in silence before he spoke again, “I never thought that this would happen.”

“What?” You were focusing on his shoulder then, specifically the curve precipitating it.

“That you’d wait for me. That you’d really be here when I wanted to come home.”

You ran your lips along the length of his neck, right behind his ear, and asked in a quiet, low voice, “Where else did you think I’d be?”

******************
ZEEK ZIRROLLI’S POV

but he can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me

back in Atlantic City…

You didn’t know why you thought that this was going to be a kick ass evening when you were partying with Betty Crocker, Time Warp, and Emma Honeydewnot. And it was beyond you, so, so, far beyond you, why you were standing in a giant storage unit filled with nothing but vintage Members Only jackets. Racks, and racks, and racks—as far as the eye could see.

And the fact that while the four of you were strolling through this storage unit, Ruben had five thousand dollars that he won stuffed in his front left pocket, was really grating on you. You hadn’t even gotten your dick sucked.

The situation had unfolded as such:

The first thing you’d noticed when you and Gabe strolled back into the casino, was that Ruben had vacated the roulette wheel and had moved on to poker. Somehow he’d gotten himself into a game with the former mogul of the Members Only patent. You watched as Emmett kept feeding Ruben one Hawaiian Punch after another, which Ruben had asked him to insinuate was Hawaiian Punch with vodka so that his hero across the table would think he wasn’t on top of his game. As far as you were concerned, if that dumb ass really believed that anybody would drink Hawaiian Punch and vodka, he deserved to lose all his money. Period.

Why anyone, Kinney included, would hire a bartender that didn’t drink made no fucking sense to you. To you, a bartender that didn’t drink was like a prostitute who was celibate in her off hours. Fucked up.

Emmett was getting more and more excited as it became apparent that Time Warp was going to win, and watching Emmett try to curtail said excitement was like trapping a mud-colored hoppy toad in a long neck Coca-Cola bottle and watching it jump itself to death.

Good times.

Ultimately, the mogul (who was now a force to be reckoned with on Ebay and needed a haircut worse than Rube) didn’t have as much money as he needed to stay in the game, so he began to bargain with Ruben, dangling his nearby storage unit of every vintage Members Only jacket that had died a much deserved, but early, death.

When you brought Ruben to Atlantic City and told him he was going to score, no matter what, this was not what you meant.

And Ruben’s excitement only offset Gabe’s existential angst as he stood against the wall of the storage unit with his hands stuffed in his pockets and a blank, empty look on his face.

“What the fuck’s your problem?” you asked him, talking to your brother because you were tired of listening to Emmett’s ‘101 Ideas for Reviving the Members Only Jacket as a Hot, Homosexual Couture Item.’

“Nothing.”

“Bull-fucking-shit.”

“Fuck off.”

Gabe’s mood swings were as predictable as Kinney’s twenty-something, blond trick selection every Saturday night at the club. You knew what Gabe’s problem was. And there was no way in hell you were going to listen to him whine about the one night stand he’d just had when, once again, you hadn’t even gotten your dick sucked.

“Look, you did it; it’s over. Get over it,” you told him. Be a man.

“His cologne made me nauseous.”

“Poor baby. His dick didn’t.”

…..

“I’m going outside,” Gabe declared.

“Me, too,” you added, falling into step behind him, “This place smells like pleather.”

“No, by myself,” he snapped back at you.

“You don’t own the outside, asshole,” you reminded him.

“Whatever.”

You yelled to Ruben who was knee deep in a rack of some extremely rare, dark teal colored jackets. Apparently, it was the one he’d always wanted. “Rube! We’re going outside. Gotta smoke.”

“Okay.”

Em followed the two of you with an overly concerned look on his face that made you want to smack him. So you stood there while Emmett probed Gabe for the cause of his melancholy mood, and Gabe finally quit being a total bitch and told him, “I just let some guy fuck me, and he was disgusting.”

“Most men are disgusting,” you interrupted, “They’re men. If you want to fuck something hot and hygienic, fuck a chick, ‘Cakes.”

“I don’t believe that,” Emmett said to you, with an offended look on his face, “I’m extremely hygienic.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” you told him, lighting your cigarette. “But you’re a girl anyway,” you added, blowing your smoke rather acutely in their direction.

******************
and you knew who you were then,
girls were girls, and men were men

Your mother always told you that you were just like your father, and in your family, being compared to another family member wasn’t an insult.

“You’re bullheaded and stubborn,” she would tell you, especially in your teens. “You’re just like your father.”

“Huh?” you father would yell from the kitchen of the restaurant or the living room, depending on your family’s locale at that particular moment.

“Mama, those are synonyms and therefore redundant,” Gabe would add, and then you’d witness one of the few times your mother pelted your baby brother with a dish towel.

Good times.

“And you can’t focus on anything,” she’d continue, “Why do you need so many jobs?”

“I need money, Mama.”

“For beer.” She’d stare off into space for the rest of her lecture, absently washing the same pot over and over, “You know, your father was just like you. He had to do everything all the time--"

“Huh?”

“SHUT UP, I’M NOT TALKING TO YOU. Anyway, your father was just go, go, go,” and then she’d pause and then finish with a dreamy smile on her face, “Until he met me.”

You’d usually tune out at this point because the stories of ‘Mama the Miracle Worker’ tended to wear on you after a while. But the final result of years of these stories made you realize that you were just like your father; you were hard working, determined, outgoing, stubborn, and unable to concentrate on anything that didn’t bring you some sort of gratification in the next five minutes.

Gabe, on the other hand, was just like your mother—committed, dependable, single-minded, sensitive, and a sucker for even a whiff of romance. Once in grade school, a girl gave Gabe a valentine, and he’d practically swooned from the gesture—not the girl. Both of your parents quite egregiously adored Gabe, and you found yourself looking out for him sometimes just to stay in their favor. It was strange at times, but it was how you were wired.

When report cards came out, you’d stand behind him and a little to the right watching your parents revel in the pleasure their handsome, well-behaved son brought them with his excellent grades and glowing words from every teacher he had. You’d suck a little of this praise out of the air while this was going on, breathe it in, and hold it while it was your turn, nodding in agreement to, “These aren’t bad, Zeek. But you can do better.”

Then you’d regale your parents with two or three, “’I had to save Gabe’s life again today’ stories,” to impress them and your brother knew what you were doing and never corrected your liberal embellishment of the truth.

“You’re a good boy to look after your brother, Zeek,” your mother would always chime in, with that same dreamy look on her face as when she spoke of your father.

In your family, how you spoke of someone and how you spoke to them we’re wholly different, but somehow the good and the bad seemed to balance out in the end.

……

So, you stood there smoking and half-listening to Emmett’s encouraging, but pointless, words to your brother, and waited for Rube to re-emerge, trying to figure out a way to talk him into using some of that five thousand dollars to get a couple hookers.

A decent blow job couldn’t cost that much.

******************
NATE ROCKFORD’S POV

never judge a book by it’s cover

You grew up in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, and every once in a while your mother would get tired of The Rockford and everybody knowing how she spent every day of her life. When that happened, she’d load you and your older brother, Michael, into your environment-destroying Cadillac and take you shopping. In keeping with your heterosexual male upbringing, you hated shopping, but you loved those trips with your mother because of Sidney’s.

Sidney’s was a restaurant at the far end of the shopping center that constantly reaffirmed your belief in the sheer joy life had to offer. When you walked into the restaurant, you were flooded with sensations—the deep red décor, the player piano that was always playing The Entertainer, and the floor to ceiling bins of every type of candy you could ever imagine. A meal at Sidney’s was always your reward for behaving on your mother’s outings and not ever telling your father how much money she spent.

And while the visual stimulation in Sidney’s was fantastic, you really wanted to go there because of their ice cream sundaes. Sidney’s advertised fifty flavors of ice cream and you could design any kind of sundae you wanted, as big as you wanted; the choices alone boggled your mind. And once your sundae had arrived, there was always the delicious task of trying to figure out exactly where the whip cream ended and the ice cream began. You’d always beg your mother to let you order the large sundae because they put two sugar wafers in the large one, and sugar wafers were unbelievable when they were just barely sticking out of the whip cream. It was a feast for your eyes and your stomach.

On your way out of the restaurant, your mother would let you and your brother pick out one type of candy, and you both nearly always got bubble gum cigarettes. You and Michael would spend the entire trip home blowing powered sugar in each other’s faces and sneezing. Your mother always insisted that bubble gum cigarettes were much better than real ones, “Don’t forget that, boys.”

……

Fucking Sarah was like being back in Sidney’s with so many choices; it made your head spin. The only difference was that fucking Sarah didn’t give you a stomach ache afterwards. If someone had been so nosy as to peek through your keyhole that night in your suite, they would’ve seen the new collar and leash Sarah bought you dangling from your neck and her fingers like the black licorice that was wound in the containers at Sidney’s.

Delicious.

You’d tried to talk Sarah into buying a candy leash once, but she decided it defeated her purpose if you could eat your way free.

She teased you from her position overtop you wearing the other new thing she’d recently bought, a very sexy, black teddy. Her shoes had finally been discarded when she sat on top of you, and you rubbed the leather straps while she rode you. If there’d just been a player piano in the background, you’d have died and gone to heaven.

You watched her hair slide backwards off her shoulders when she came, squeezing her knees as you added your orgasm to hers. She was so intoxicating to watch when she on top of you that you forgot all about the clamps on your nipples until she tugged the chain when her second orgasm overtook her.

The numbing pressure you’d been enjoying turned into pain, and you pulled her down on top of you, kissing her, and begging her to let you go. She did—eventually.

“The only nice thing about you being gone for two weeks,” she told you, lying in your arms, “Is that you’re such a good boy when you come back.”

“I should be rewarded with a licorice leash.”

She laughed, “No.”

******************
BRIAN’S POV

I was dreaming when I wrote this,
forgive me if it goes astray

Morning came awfully quickly that Saturday morning, your body waking up at its usual time, although your brain wasn’t quite as perky. You rolled on your side away from Justin and toward the television, your hand skimming the sheets for the remote. When you turned on the news, you muted it so as not to wake him and found you could read closed captioning so much easier from far away. The financial report would be on at six-o-five a.m.

That night you’d dreamed about Justin’s side of the bed, about how it became official after he’d been bashed. The two of you had gone to bed one night ten years ago with Justin on your right side. Your eyes were closed as his hand ran over your chest; you got butterflies in your stomach as it moved lower. You were hard, your body calling for his attention. You smiled when you felt him touch you, stroke you, but then he stopped.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

You thought he was freaking out again and opened your eyes, “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t,” he repeated, glancing down at his hand. It was shaking.

“It’s okay,” you told him, “It’s okay. I’ll help you.”

You wrapped your hand around his, jerking off while he laid his head on your shoulder and watched, “It feels weird. My muscles feel like they’ve gone limp.”

“Just relax. You’re doing fine.”

You came seconds later, and then he laid his hand on your chest. You covered it and fell asleep. The next night, he took the other side of the bed, burying his right hand under his pillow, stroking you with his left. You never said anything else about it, knowing that sooner or later, it would work itself out.

The next time he jerked you off with his right hand was after he returned from being with Ethan.

A bastardized version of that night recurs often in your dreams, and that night at The Rockford you dreamed that he was trying again with his right hand, only he wasn’t a teenager anymore. He was a grown man, wearing the clothes he had on your first night on your honeymoon. You held his hand again, even though it wasn’t shaking, he wasn’t having trouble, and then looked at his face.

His expression woke you up.

There was enough light in the room that morning to see enough of his face, peaceful as it lay on his pillow. He was back on your right side, his right hand buried underneath his pillow, his left, ring and all, laying on his pillow beside his face.

******************
but something touched me deep inside

The market report didn’t start as it usually did that morning, a blue screen with various graphs and arrows designed to inform and fascinate you at the same time, to make the data look far more interesting than it ever was. The report started that morning with an anchorwoman, who reminded you of Erica, making an announcement. You read it as it scrolled up the screen:

THE ATHLETIC APPAREL WORLD IS MOURNING THE
DEATH OF LEO BROWN THIS MORNING.

BROWN DIED OVERNIGHT OF CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE AT HIS HOME

IN CHICAGO.
MANY THOUGHT OF BROWN AS ONE OF THE TRUE ARCHITECTS
OF THE AMERICAN DREAM. HIS MODEST,

CHICAGO BASED COMPANY TOOK OFF IN 2004 AND SOON BECAME A GLOBAL
NAME IN SPORTSWEAR. BROWN ATHLETICS

IS KNOWN FOR ITS INNOVATIVE, OFTEN DARING, ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS
THAT RAISED
EYEBROWS AS WELL AS PROFIT MARGINS. RUMOR HAS IT THAT NATHANIEL ROCKFORD,
BROWN ATHLETICS’ OPERATIONS MANAGER,

WILL ASSUME CONTROL OF THE COMPANY IMMEDIATELY. NO WORD YET ON WHEN BROWN’S
FUNERAL WILL BE. AND NOW, ON TO OUR WEEKLY RECAP OF THE
MARKET WITH OUR OWN RICK FORESTER

RICK?

THANK YOU, LESLIE. AND GOOD MORNING
TO YOU

You turned off the television and reached over Justin to get your cell phone off of his nightstand.

“I don’t wanna fuck right now,” he mumbled.

“I’m not trying to fuck you. I need my phone.”

His hand reached out from under the covers, picked it up, and handed it to you over his shoulder, “Here.”

You took it from him and were beginning to cue Nate’s number when Justin rolled over, snuggled up to you, and laid his head on your chest. “How come you don’t wanna fuck me?” he asked, still half asleep.

“Leo died last night.”

He stopped running his hand between your legs and ran it through his hair instead, “Oh god, Brian. Shit.”

……

“Nate? It’s Brian.”