Callboys Read online

  Money. Nate hadn’t thought about money. He tries not to ask, but it tumbles out like vomit: “What’s the ceiling? You know, money-wise?”

  “There isn’t one,” Ryan smirks.

  “There isn’t?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Ryan says. “One of our boys who started working six months ago just bought a used Aston Martin. In cash.”

  Nate feels his eyes bulge out of his head. As a kid he’d skimmed through enough car magazines left around by his mother’s various boyfriends to know that even a used Aston Martin required a boatload of money.

  But it didn’t matter, he reminded himself. Because this was ridiculous. A joke.

  “This is stupid. And illegal,” Nate says after a moment. “I’m not gonna get locked up for ten years so I can buy some dumb car.”

  “Not so fast,” Ryan says. “Every stone has been turned in the quest to keep our employees safe. After all, these women are only paying for company, which is perfectly legal. The choice of whether or not to take them to bed is completely up to you, although we would strongly prefer it if you did, obviously. We haven’t had any problems yet, and we don’t expect to.”

  “What about, like, STDs and stuff?” Nate asks.

  “Every woman, or man, is screened. And you’re perfectly welcome to use your own methods of protection, if you wish.”

  “Man?”

  “Well, that’s totally up to you, too, but the pay is a little higher.”

  Nate shakes his head. “That’s a definite no. Forever.”

  “Whatever you say. You’re in charge, boss.”

  Nate reaches up and presses his hands against his forehead. Suddenly he sees a set of blue-gray eyes staring at him from the dark: his grandmother’s, the only decent person to have ever been in his life after his parents decided that they cared more about drugs than their children. She was everything that was graceful and elegant in the world, God rest her soul, and Nate knew she would be devastated that he was even still sitting here, entertaining this crazy idea.

  He grabs his phone from the table and gets up. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “What?” Ryan asks. “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Seriously? You’re really going to let your convictions get in the way of the biggest chance of your life?”

  Nate turns back to face Ryan, his voice a whisper, but a deadly one. “You really wanna talk about convictions? What about the ‘conviction’ I’ll be dealing with if I get caught by the police being a male hooker?

  Ryan stares up at him blankly.

  “That’s what I thought,” Nate says. “I was raised better than this. I’ll let myself out.”

  “Fine, but let us pay for your dinner, at least,” Ryan sighs as he reaches for his wallet.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nate answers as he tosses two of his last twenties down on the table. “I don’t want your money. Thanks. Goodbye.”

  Nate pushes his chair aside and marches out of the restaurant, one sentence crashing through his mind again and again as he bursts through the door and feels the cool December air hit his cheeks like water from a cold shower:

  What the hell was that?

  III

  Ghosts

  Marissa’s sister Amy answers her phone after barely half a ring.

  “Oh my God, Amy, did you-”

  “Yes,” Amy interrupts. “I heard.”

  “So you know about-”

  “The money,” she says. “Yes. I got the same amount as you. I’m still in shock, Mare.”

  “Six million dollars!” Marissa cries. “What are we gonna do, Amy?”

  “Get really fucking drunk. Or I am, at least. I’m heading out to the clubs now. First things first.”

  Ugh, Marissa thinks, her glee momentarily punctured. Amy lived in New York with all her best girlfriends, and Marissa had no one in Atlanta besides a few college friends she saw whenever they weren’t busy with their boyfriends or fiancés or husbands.

  “Fine, rub it in,” Marissa says. “I don’t even know what I’m gonna do tonight, but I am gonna start by going home and drinking a bottle of wine. Or seventeen.”

  “Huh? Don’t you have any friends you can call down there? You’re a millionaire, Mare! This isn’t something you can rationalize, or turn into a problem. This is big! And fun!”

  “Yeah, um, I do have some friends here,” Marissa lies, “but they’re all at some event I wasn’t invited to. Some bridesmaid thing or whatever. You know the drill.”

  There were no friends, and no bridesmaid thing, and the loaded silence on the line told Marissa she wasn’t the only one who knew it.

  “Oh, that sucks,” Amy says after a long pause.

  “Yeah. Anyway, don’t tell too many people about this just yet,” Marissa tells her older sister, who actually felt more like a daughter sometimes. “You’ll get kidnapped or something.”

  “Whatever, I’ll try.” Marissa hears the clatter of Amy getting ready in the background and it makes her strangely wistful. “Gotta go,” Amy says, “my studio apartment suddenly feels a lot smaller now. Call you tomorrow. Go out, have fun, get laid. Love ya.”

  Marissa hangs up and sets down her phone. As she waits for Mr. Cohen to return from the bathroom, she starts to feel dizzy, and she puts her hands down flat on the table and forces herself to slow her breathing as her mind runs wild with the news.

  Six million dollars. Oh my God.

  Marissa couldn’t even begin to imagine the possibilities. Clothes. Cars. Vacations. A house. A real house, not the shitty townhouse she had just moved out of, with the leak in the bathroom ceiling and the cranky old neighbor Mrs. McMahon who filed a complaint with the landlord every time she played her music louder than half a decibel. If she played her cards right, she might never have to worry about money, or people like Mrs. McMahon, again.

  But still, under all the excitement, the dull aching in her chest reminded her of the one thing she desired above all. And sadly, she feared she’d probably never get it.

  A boy suddenly storms past her and exits the restaurant. But not just any boy- a Boy, with a capital B. Clean-cut golden hair, big biceps, good height, and a jawline a Greek statue would kill for. And the kind of boy who would have barked at me if he passed me in the halls back in middle school, she thought with a frown.

  “Sorry I took so long,” Mr. Cohen says as he returns to his seat and puts his napkin back in his lap. “Just hammering out some last-minute details with the accountants on the phone. Everything should be ready to transfer by morning. Miss Frost, you just became a multimillionaire. I think this calls for a toast.”

  He pours champagne for them, the expensive kind, with flowers on the label. Marissa reaches up and clinks her glass with his, in a daze all the while. His words had just smacked cold, hard reality into her: she was a millionaire. A real-life millionaire. She was rich. Her life would never be the same.

  “Oh, and earning such a big slice of your father’s company’s stock automatically makes you a member of its board of directors,” Mr. Cohen says after taking a sip. “They’re officially welcoming you onboard at their end-of-year party at the Four Seasons on Friday night. Isn’t that just wonderful?”

  “Friday?” Marissa asks, her awe quickly giving way to horror. “But that’s…that’s in two days!”

  “I know!” Mr. Cohen beams. “They’ve got the most exclusive banquet room at the Four Seasons and everything. Isn’t it exciting?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have a d-”

  Marissa stops herself. She didn’t want everyone and their mothers knowing how pathetically single she was.

  “I just don’t have a dress, that’s all,” she corrects, and Mr. Cohen smiles.

  “Well, honey, you just got six and a half million reasons to go buy one.”

  Twenty minutes later Marissa pulls out into traffic and bites at her thumbnail. So the best news of her life had quickly been ruined by the news tha
t she was going to have to sashay around without a date in front of hundreds of people in only two days. She couldn’t think of a single prospect, not even her best gay friend, who was off in Europe with his boyfriend for a week. She’d been trying to ignore it, but lately the loneliness had really started to creep in. Some nights it would roll in like a cold fog, and no matter how many blankets she wrapped herself up in, she couldn’t ward it off. But between finishing grad school and trying to turn her internship into a real job, she barely had time to breathe, much less look for someone. And the signs that she was alone were all around her, surrounding her like surveillance cameras in an airport. Worst of all were the Facebook Hijackers, the girls who posted supposedly “innocent” Facebook updates about their lives and then twisted them around into opportunities to passive-aggressively boast about how sublimely happy and in love they were. “Hey, here’s a status about how excited I am for good weather this weekend- BY THE WAY, MY HUSBAND IS EXCITED TOO! HAVE I MENTIONED ENOUGH TIMES TODAY THAT I AM HAPPILY MARRIED?” Or, “Hi, everyone, the season finale of my favorite show is on TV later and I’m so excited! I can’t stop twisting my engagement ring out of nervousness! THAT’S RIGHT, BITCHES, I’M ENGAGED, WHEREAS YOU LIKELY NEVER WILL BE.” And even worse were the Bombers, the girls who not only bragged on their own profiles, but crept onto other people’s pages as well just to drop Wedding Bombs onto unsuspecting comment threads. “Oh, you posted a status about how you need coffee because you’re exhausted from this weekend? LET ME USE THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO TRANSPARENTLY TRUMPET MY STATUS AS AN ENGAGED WOMAN BY LEAVING A COMMENT ABOUT HOW MY FIANCE BRINGS ME COFFEE EVERY MORNING AT EIGHT. BASK IN THE GLOW OF MY HAPPINESS, BITCHES!” Marissa would see these posts and think, Honestly, are you Beyoncé doing an interview with People magazine about your relationship with Jay Z or something? Because if not, then STFU because no one asked for all this information. She felt like she was drowning in Wedding and Baby News, and the only way out of it was to either jump a bridge or find someone for herself and then start bragging about him.

  It wasn’t that Marissa hadn’t looked for someone, or hadn’t gone on any dates. It was just that they had all been completely disastrous. In fact, modern dating in general was a train wreck on par with the Titanic’s maiden voyage. Social media was like a hammer that had come along and banged everything apart, and people were still wading through the pieces, trying to make sense of it all. Marissa had never done Match or eHarmony, as making a profile on those sites was basically announcing that you were making one last ditch effort before giving up and resigned yourself to a lifetime of Lifetime movies. But this new app called Tinder was different- more casual, less embarrassing. Around Halloween Marissa finally gave in and downloaded the app, which matches you with local single people. Through GPS it finds guys who live near you and displays their photos along with minimal information imported from Facebook, and you “swipe” through them judging by their photos whether you want them to contact you or not. If one of your picks happens to like your photo, too, you can start a message thread. Before long Marissa was embarrassed to admit that it was almost exhilarating to wait and see who, if anyone, chose her. If dating was a game, then Tinder had made it fun – just in all the wrong ways, she soon figured out. The guys she matched with seemed normal enough at first, if maybe a little lackluster. But things went downhill from there. Tinder dates always ended in one of two scenarios: the guy who showed up looked absolutely nothing like his photos and Marissa tried to leave as fast as she could, or if she did like him, he’d never talk to her again. And when the dates were bad, they were bad. One boy had met her at Starbucks and ordered some vanilla mocha nonsense before spilling it everywhere when a lizard jumped onto his chair and scared him, and another had drunkenly made out with her in the back of a movie theater before crying hysterically at the end of the film, which made things more than a bit awkward when the lights came on. Somewhere between Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Ryan Seacrest’s frosted tips, it seemed like men had forgotten how to be men, and Marissa hated it. All she wanted was one guy to come along and manhandle her a little bit, make her feel like a woman.

  As she merged onto the highway, she decided to do something crazy. Fuck loneliness. She was going to call Scott, the last, and only, guy she had ever dated, and ask him to the party. Maybe it was the champagne, but she decided she was going to share her news with someone and find a date, and that was it.

  Scott answers just before the call goes to voicemail. Marissa’s stomach boils and churns when she hears his voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Scott, it’s me.”

  He pauses. “Who?”

  Marissa winces like a football had just hit her squarely in the chest. How could the only boyfriend she’d ever had not recognize her own voice?

  “Oh, um, it’s me, Marissa.”

  “Marissa….?”

  “Fr…Frost,” she croaks, wiping away tears.

  “Oh, hey, girl. What’s up?”

  She takes a breath and tries to gather what little sanity she has left. “Well, I knew things didn’t work out between us, but I just got good news and I wanted to share it with someone and…wait, is someone with you?”

  Marissa hears a female voice murmuring in the background, along with the ruffling of bed sheets. Oh my God, she thinks. He has a girl in bed with him.

  “Are you in bed with someone?” Marissa asks, her voice rising, a bubble of something wide and wet forming in her throat.

  “Nope, uh, that was just my dog. Anyway, what’s up, doll?”

  The anguish falls away and suddenly every ounce of Marissa fills with hatred and disgust- but not for Scott, for herself. What was she even doing, sharing anything with this dick? He didn’t give a shit about her and never had.

  “What’s up?” Marissa repeats. “Certainly not your dick. Be sure to tell your new girl that it takes you about thirty minutes to get it up, and then once you do it’s still like a floppy hot dog after you take it out of the pot of water. Your new girl might need a head’s up, since you can’t get your head up and all. See ya.”

  Marissa throws her phone onto the passenger’s seat and grips the steering wheel.

  I am such an idiot. I am such an idiot. I am such an idiot.

  How typical. She had thrown herself out there and come up empty handed. She’d met Scott during her freshman year of college, and they became fast friends. She was drawn to him because he was all the things she wanted to be, but wasn’t: easygoing and confident and happy without trying to be happy. They only dated on and off, and she was always into it way more than he was. But that didn’t matter, because Marissa knew that someone doesn’t have to love you back in order to gain the power to break you. Love doesn’t have to be mutual to ruin someone. Heartbreak is a slut that way; she doesn’t care who she visits. Sometimes someone sinks into your soul without you even realizing it, and by the time you figure out what’s happened, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. And then one of two things happens: one, they decide to love you back. Marissa didn’t know how that felt. Or two, they play dumb; they act like they don’t know they’re the reason you’re drowning. Then they start to drift from you, and there’s no point in chasing after them, Marissa had learned that the hard way. And then you end up with the ghost of them in you forever, and if you do succeed in getting the ghost out, some pieces of you get caught up in the mess and you end up losing some of yourself. Recently Marissa had seen someone post a quote on Instagram saying that it was better to have loved and lost than to have never have loved at all. Fuck that, she thought as she closed out the app and threw her phone across the room. To find love, true love, real and rare, that kind that burns, the kind that bathes your soul and body alike in golden rays of serenity and strength, and then have it snatched away from you again? Marissa would rather run a thousand marathons in Iceland than go through that special kind of hell again.

  But heartbreak is a slut, after all, and all you can hope is that the bastard gets v
isited by her, too, for sending her to your doorstep in the first place.

  Marissa bites her lip, trying not to cry, and glances out the window. A billboard lords over the road reading “LONELY? WANT A WIFE? WE’RE HOLDING A CONFERENCE FULL OF GOLD-DIGGING RUSSIAN BABES! BE THERE THIS SUNDAY, TEN MILES OFF I-485!”

  She rolls her eyes and looks back at the road. It wasn’t fair. A girl is single, and she’s a sad, desperate sad sack who probably spends all her time weeping into a pint of Rocky Road on her bed while watching soap operas. A guy is single, and he just goes out and finds a new girl, or goes to a skank convention and buys a mail order bride. Why couldn’t Marissa do something like that? She certainly had the money. If she couldn’t have that asshole Scott, why not just use her new money to land someone better? Someone way, way better?

  Suddenly Marissa gasps and realizes that she wasn’t just thinking hypothetically. She was serious.

  The thought haunts her all the way home.

  IV

  A Life So Grand

  Nate roars down the street on his motorcycle, the cool evening air blowing through his dark-gold hair serving only to fan the flames of rage burning in his mind. Who the hell did that ManCard guy think he was, asking him to be a male hooker? And he’d even researched girls Nate had hooked up with? How creepy is that? So what if they were right, and his performances got high marks across the board. With so much pent-up anger from being beaten down by the world for so long, finding the occasional girl from the bar and taking her home was Nate’s only surefire way to get out some aggression and clear his head. But the girls would usually latch on after one hangout session, and he’d learned to give them only his first name and enter the wrong number into their phones if they asked. There was also another, bigger reason he pushed them away- he would always develop feelings for them if they hung out more than once, and it was easier to avoid the jungle altogether than to risk walking through and sinking into the quicksand- but that was a different story. How had Ryan even found that waitress girl in the first place?