A/N: OMG, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL THE FEEDBACK, GUYS! I was totally drunk on all the comment love, I swear. WASTED, I tell you! Please give me another hangover? <3
Also, I forgot to thank my OTP-half,
rinmonsterer, for reading this fic through and giving me awesome input. Thank youuu!
[
Step 1 ]
Step 2: Find Compatibilities / Hello, New Context
Today, it was orange daisies, Gerbera. One could always hope.
They ate together, mostly in silence. The suspicious looks, the accusing stares usually spoke enough.
“I’d ask about Daphne, but I doubt I really want to hear it.”
“She’s fine,” Justin answered anyway.
“Fine, huh?”
A change of topic was still the easiest way. “I have an interview for a freelance job later today.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. With a pretty prestigious company, actually,” he said, fleshing the information out with shallow details.
“I thought… I thought the whole point of your little design thing was that you wouldn’t have to work for anybody.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “I am self-employed, remember? It just works a bit differently in our branch. We get inquiries from companies, and sometimes we apply for a particular project.”
Justin left twenty minutes later, when the daisies’ heads seemed to have a slight wilt to them already.
+
Brian had just finished his conference call when his intercom buzzed with Cynthia’s voice informing him of the arrival of Justin Taylor and that Jacob is already interviewing him in his office.
Brian was not very keen on doing this at that moment, but logic preceded and reminded him of the importance of staff decisions. He crossed his office and entered the conference room through the partition shields. Grabbing two of the boards that had landed him the Eaton Electronics account a couple of hours earlier, he stalked out of the room. He might as well test the guy for his competence.
After one quick symbolic knock, he entered Jacob’s office.
“Ah, Brian! This is Justin Taylor. Justin, meet Mr. Kinney.”
The guy stood and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you.” Justin Taylor tilted his head to the side. “Or have we already met?”
Papers from Ted, surprise party, rainy day. Your hair stuck to your forehead. “Not that I recall,” Brian lied and shook the offered hand.
“Oh, wait, my non-surprise surprise party? Remember? I wanted to let you in and I…”
Fiddled with your keys, had dropped your key chain, parked approximately four miles away. “Oh, yeah. Vaguely.”
Justin seemed to consider that answer but then responded with a smile, pulling his hand away.
“Justin was just showing me his portfolio,” Jacob said, resuming his flipping through the work samples.
Brian went to stand behind Jacob to catch a look himself while Justin sat back down. Somehow, he already knew Justin was good.
“You did that billboard for the Steelers?” Brian looked up, surprised. “That was pretty good.” It was brilliant, was what it was.
Justin seemed to know that for he replied with a confident “Yeah, thanks.”
“Did you come up with the idea yourself or were there specific guidelines?” Brian asked, turning the portfolio around, studying it some more. He knew the guy usually responsible for the Steelers’ marketing and his work sucked by default.
“I, um… well, it was pretty much a last-minute job, so they wanted us-my partner Jerry and me-to come up with some ideas, some concepts to choose from.”
Brian closed the portfolio, concentrating on not looking too impressed. How old was this kid? He looked about twelve but the work was of a quality you don’t see often. Brian cast a quick glance at Jacob, who grinned around the nearly chewed to death pen in his mouth. Fucker.
Jacob turned back to Justin and they started talking about different design programs, a topic that Brian admittedly didn’t know too much about anymore. Six years out of actually working with the design programs was like half a century in this business. So, instead of pretending to know what they were talking about, Brian busied himself leafing through a folder of references, diplomas and a résumé. Pretty impr-
“…while we were in college and yeah, it all went pretty well, so that when we both graduated, we had a humble assembly of clients.”
Jacob nodded appreciatively. “And Jerry, is he using InDesign for…”
Brian went back to looking through Justin Taylor’s résumé. No shit, the guy was 24. He graduated from PIFA two years ago. And his father was Craig Taylor?
“No interest in the electronics business, Mr. Taylor?” Brian asked out of the blue. Jacob and Justin just blinked at him. “Craig Taylor, your father. He still holding that fort?” Brian didn’t know what had gotten into him. Firstly, this information was absolutely and 100% none of his business and secondly, where the fuck did this inquisitory notion come from? He studied each line on the guy’s résumé.
“I suppose he is.”
Oh. “I see.” Still, the initial question remained unanswered.
Justin nodded, looking… kind of blank, Brian found.
The staring confused Brian and he sought a steadying point in the résumé. “I… um, see you switched your major from traditional arts to advertising and graphic design halfway through. How come you decided to abjure painterdom?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is making a living as an old-fashioned artist, Mr. Kinney?”
Brian thought he recognized an insincere half-smile on Justin’s face and wondered if that was his standardized reaction to that question. “I see your point,” he agreed. “I’m just wondering how someone would want to name their company BastArtDize. Sounds like a schoolboy joke to me.”
The guy just leaned back in his chair and smirked. “Not everyone can come up with a brilliant reference to physics, Mr. Kinney. Besides, got your attention, right?”
That he did.
Justin Taylor left Kinnetik ten minutes later, with a contract draft and a file on the Zamora account in his hands.
What stayed was Brian’s weird feeling of anxiety. He decided to overlook the fact that he forgot to test Justin. And when Jacob later brought by the boards Brian left in his office, Brian would deny ever carrying them around.
+
Having narrowed his strangely uneven moods down to exhaustion and horniness, Brian contemplated the rest of his day. It was times like these when he missed the baths. Go in, check your clothes, get steamed up, find a willing mouth or ass, have one or two orgasms wash over you, get your clothes, go home.
Brian tapped his pen against his desk, watching the ball pen point come out and duck back under its covering again. And again, and again.
Finally, his call was answered. “Yah, Mikey? I might meet you guys tonight, after all. Nine at Woody’s? ... Yeah, alright. Babylon afterwards? … Good.”
+
The guy wasn’t bad. His ass was tight and hot. The slutty moans were a little too much, though. Brian was good, but come on, this wasn’t a porn shoot.
Brian was getting close, nevertheless, and if the speed of the guy jerking his dick was any indication, he was, too. He pounded the orgasm out of him and braced his hand against the wall as he did. Moany Guy shot stream after stream against the dark wall and Brian welcomed the spasms around his dick. He drove deep into the guy’s ass and closed his eyes to the release he found there.
After a minute during which the trick panted like he was trying to fake a marathon run, Brian pulled out, tossed the condom into the nearby trashcan and zipped up. The blowjob he’d gotten earlier wasn’t half bad either, so this should have done it for now and allow him to head home decently satiated.
The guy shouted something after him, but Brian walked on and found his friends at the bar, sipping their respective drinks and cackling. He decided to leave no fifteen minutes later, having found the short-lived dance floor endeavor not half as entertaining as Michael or Emmett.
+
Brian got home feeling frustrated and he didn’t know why. He’d come twice - nothing earth-shattering, but still. He’d had a successful day, landed Eaton Electronics even though the rep was a bitch, but whom he sent home his dazzled new fan anyway because he was brilliant.
All in all, life was good. Pretty great, actually.
He rolled the heavy door to his home shut. The sound of his keys hitting the counter pissed him off, as did the fucking bowl with the avocados and lemons. It just… stood there. So annoying. Rolling his eyes at the coat whose zipper had the nerve to clink against the metal part of the bar chair, Brian headed for the bathroom.
Leaning against the cold tile, with the hot water chasing down his body, Brian’s hand automatically reached for his dick. That pissed him off, too.
It was a habit that had established over the course of the past couple of months. Brian got up early, jumped under the scalding hot spray and saluted the day with a quick self-hand job. After an average twelve to fourteen-hour work day, he came home and beat off while taking a quick shower before his food was delivered. It was about efficiency. It was quick and a far cry from hot.
Sanjib, the Indian guy who - strangely enough - delivered his Thai food, was always there within 20 minutes to receive a 50 percent tip. By the time Brian was done unpacking the containers and snagging a beer from the fridge, the computer was booted and logged into the company network.
Afterwards, usually having spent one or two more hours on work, Brian would have just enough energy to camp on his sofa and flick through TV channels for an hour, maybe even take advantage of the paid-for porn channels.
Tonight it was too late for Thai food and Brian actually too exhausted for an encore jack-off that would be more routine than pleasure anyway. He silently promised his dick to hire more people and engage in more quality fucking again once he had time capacities.
Brian threw himself on the sofa and randomly hit the buttons on his remote. He stopped on a porn channel.
Adjusting his jeans, he thought he might not be too tired for jacking off, after all. The awful elevator-like porn music resounded through the open space, but Brian only heard the moans of the guy bottoming.
He opened his pants and stroked himself to images of a blond, non-hunky guy getting pounded into the table.
[
Step 3 ]