Psychological Control

Chapter 28

"Come in and sit down, would you like something to drink?" After the shoot was over, I declined Jonathan's offer to join us for dinner on the pretext that I was afraid your lover would be jealous, and took Chris, who said he had nowhere else to go, back to the small flat I had rented in Pala Alto.

"No...no need..." said Chris, who had been a bit of a handful from the moment he stepped into the small flat. "Oh...a glass of water would be great!"

I put down the bag I was carrying and looked at him and smiled, then turned and grabbed a glass and filled it with some water and handed it over. As I handed it to him, my hand holding the glass couldn't help but tremble. Because I realised that this cleaned glass was the one David had used earlier, and the one he had washed and put there. And I hadn't been able to handle it.

"Thanks." Chris, his ears red from nervousness, didn't notice that something was wrong with me. He deliberately looked away taking the cup from me with a stern face.

"So you signed up for Survivor?" Chris asked, still a little incredulous, as he sat down.

On the way back, I told him what I was going to do next. But he was still a little confused about me rolling over and trying to throw myself into another reality show, after all, modeling was my career in his opinion.

I shrugged and sat across from him, face to face with him at the small dining table. "That's right, didn't I drop out of the America's Next Top Model competition for personal reasons? So participating in Survivor is the next step for me."

"Why?!" Chris pursued stubbornly.

"For visibility I guess, and for that million dollar prize at the end of Survivor." I replied, either truthfully or falsely. "Don't worry, I'll be taking on some magazine print shoots and such in the near future too. But because of school, I probably won't be able to run runway shows around the world like you do."

Chris had signed with a not too bad agency after America's Next Top Model, even though he hadn't been able to sign with next modeling agency. Lately he's been running shows and doing print magazine photos with the resources in the hands of the agent who brought him in.

"But I've heard that survivors are hard..." said Chris, a little torn, "contestants come back losing dozens of pounds all over the place, and it's too bad for your health."

"But I'd love to have an experience like that." I smiled and brought my face closer to Chris, gazing up close at his icy blue irises. "A wilderness survival that you can't experience in the modern city, but comes with the social laws of hooking up. This excites me more than those extreme sports."

I flicked my head sideways to a frozen Chris's ear, "Didn't you come back with me wanting to try something you've never experienced before too? ..." the trailing voice trailed off into a hushed silence.

I don't know what's wrong with me, maybe it's the stress of David, or other things like starting school or meeting Neil Caffrey, but I suddenly want to tease Chris like this.

If it was the old me, I would have been afraid to go further for fear of hurting our feelings for each other. I would probably have been careful to test the waters and wait until I was sure what the other person meant before I would say it explicitly.

But now, because of the influence of Brian's personality traits, I could care less about the other person's feelings and selfishly and egotistically want things to go my way.

I could hear Chris's increasingly rapid and heavy breathing, a bead of sweat on his temples in what was clearly not a very hot day. His eyes were slightly closed, his lashes fluttering from the strain, and he brought his left hand up slowly to my face, brushing it against my jaw and the side of my neck.