escort

0.4

a/n: Lowkey want to unpublish this book :/

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Troye read something once about the different stages of grief. Not that he's grieving, but the rush of emotions he feels when he leaves Jacob's house kind of feels like he's lost something. Not just Jacob, which he'd get over eventually with enough time and aimless sex, or even what they could have been, which he won't let himself think about, but it's what Troye's lost of himself, the man Jacob thinks he is. That's what hurts most: that he's lost the chance to be anything other than the cocky prick who made fun of him. That he'll always be the cocky prick who made fun of him.

Troye knows the first stage is denial, he remembers that as his cab rolls back along Chelsea Embankment. It's not as bad as he thinks, he tells himself when he feels his cheeks flush again as he thinks of the way Jacob looked at him. Through him, actually, down to the bone. He can fix this, he tells himself when he gets home, when he's in the shower scrubbing himself until his skin is red. He'll go to Jacob's house in the morning, take croissants and coffee and tell him about the time he spent twenty minutes banging on about how overrated Kate Atkinson is in class, only to find out she's married to his professor. Tell him that he isn't a snob, that he watches The Real Housewives of Atlanta and mixes peanut M&Ms in with his popcorn when he goes to the cinema. He's a fucking idiot, but he's not a snob. He'd never look down at Jacob.

Never.

He can't sleep thinking about it, about the injustice of it. At 3 a.m. he gives up and looks it up. Kübler-Ross' five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Anger hits him about fifteen minutes later when he decides to do something useful and pack for his trip to Paris. He reaches for a suit - the charcoal grey one that's almost black but not quite - and thinks about how much Charles likes it, how his cheeks get a little pinker when he sees him in it and how, even if they're in a ballroom full of dignitaries, he can't help grazing the back of Troye's calf with his foot under the table.

Charles adores Troye. He'd never talk to him the way that Jacob talked to him tonight. Never treat him like that, as though he's nothing. No more than a mouth to fuck. The more Troye thinks about it, the angrier he gets. By 5 a.m. he's livid and by 6 a.m. he's seething. If he had Jacob's number he'd call him and tell him that he's the asshole, actually. Troye may be a prostitute (if that's what Jacob wants to think if it makes him feel better about leaving the club to meet him when the two girls he was with were clearly up for it), but he'd never deliberately hurt someone. If he hurt Jacob then he's sorry, but it wasn't on purpose. Jacob meant to hurt him, though. He took aim and fired.

So who's the asshole?

But Troye doesn't have Jacob's number, so all he can do is wait until his gym opens at 8 a.m. then run on the treadmill until his legs feel like they're about to give way. That usually helps, but when he leaves, his hair still wet from the shower, he catches himself gnawing at the corner of his mouth, and it's been a long time since he felt that, the sting of being misunderstood. It makes him feel fifteen again and hiding books from his father in case he throws them out. You read too much, kid, he used to tell him, like it was a bad thing. You should be at the park with your mates, drinking cider and fingering whatever slapper will have you. His mates agreed. They laughed at him when they were at a party and instead of getting off with a girl, he ended up holding her hair in the garden while she threw up. But then everyone thought he was weird and okay, he still is, but people laugh at his jokes now and they get his pretentious Nietzsche references. They get him, so when he sees a black cab approaching, he hails it.

'Cheyne Row,' he tells the driver when he climbs in the back and he's out of his mind, he knows, because this isn't a moment of weakness, a champagne-fuelled lapse in judgment, like last night. It's broad daylight and Troye is horribly, painfully sober. He's never felt more sober, in fact, as though there's nothing left inside him, only the anger burning through him, devouring everything else until he's shoving a £20 note at the driver and pressing the buzzer on Jacob's gate until he can feel the hum of it in his finger.