Page 10 of Mad for Madison

I wanted to be like him more than I could put into words. I wanted to know what it was like to wear that sculpted body for a day, to be seen by strangers, to be so indulgent in all that pleased me, yet it was a life I’d only ever gotten to observe from afar.

I shrugged. “It’s not that important.”

“But you want to,” Madison said.

When I was free, I had Lily. Gran deserved some free time, too. And Lily deserved to grow up with at least one good parent to enrich her memories. She was six years old, and this was the time for her to look up at the person holding her hand and know they were there.

“Sex isn’t everything,” I said, my tone dropping from casual to warning before I could control it.

Madison nodded curtly. “I didn’t say it was.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Madison,” I said, seeing pity unfold in his eyes. “If you do, they’ll smell it on you. The whole charade’s gonna fall apart the moment we walk in.”

“I’m not feeling sorry for you,” Madison protested.

“That’s a lie. We both know it. We’re different, that’s all. We couldn’t be more different if we tried.” I looked away. On the other side of the restaurant’s glass walls, the sidewalks of New York were covered in a thick layer of old snow. People wearing coats, beanies, and boots hurried along, cars clogged and congested in the streets, and the afternoon twilight gave way to the early evening.

“It’s not a lie, Bradley,” Madison said. “If anything, I admire you. And I don’t think we’re so different at all. We do what we need to do.”

It was a romanticized way of looking at things. It was also flawed because our situations couldn’t be further apart.

“Shouldn’t we be going?” I asked.

Madison nodded, although it wasn’t a reply to my question but an acknowledgment that the conversation was over. I wished I could be more casual about it, but it was a raw topic. It was a painful one, too. As a teenager in school, I had seen boys and girls discover attraction, hand-holding, and kissing. I had watched them grow aware of their and each other’s bodies. And in all that time, I had known that I couldn’t have that.

Moving to the city to live with Gran opened my eyes to all the possibilities that I had never had. And raising a little princess-farmer-astronaut mattered far more than indulging in my unfulfilled teenage wants.

Madison proposed touring a few high-end stores where I’d never before walked in. I knew they existed, but they existed for other people. To me, they were just windows with pretty exhibitions of custom-made garments that I occasionally passed by.

“We should probably wear something that goes well together,” Madison mused when we entered a tailor shop. “Something appropriate for an evening gala, but modern, you know? Something that says, ‘New York.’”

The tailor seemed to understand exactly what Madison was talking about, so I surrendered myself to a lengthy process of being measured. It would have been fine except for the fact that Madison and I were having our measurements taken simultaneously. The older man who ran the shop had two apprentices who instructed us to undress down to our underwear, and that was the start of my problems.

For all my talk of not being interested in men, I knew how big of a lie it all was. And having told the tailor we were a couple, we were sent behind a screen together.

In the small space with little privacy, Madison seemed to have no reservations about undoing the buttons of his shirt. He wore an undershirt that hugged his torso tightly, and untucking the shirt he’d been wearing tugged on the undershirt’s lower hem. For the briefest of moments, the undershirt lifted above the waist of his pants and revealed an inch of his flesh, skin smooth and tanned, taut over his muscles, entirely unlike mine.

I took off my shirt carefully, making sure Madison didn’t get to see the softness that padded my muscles. And when Madison pulled out the belt from around his waist, his biceps tensed hard, and the move reminded me of the many times I had seen him do a very similar thing on the small screen of my phone.

Air hitched in my throat as Madison undid the button and the zipper on his pants, pulling them down his legs and stepping out of them with care, folding them over the back of a chair, and stepping aside to give me space to undress.

I did it quickly and methodically, pretending I wasn’t in his view. Not that a guy like Madison would ever look at me twice. I was plain, unremarkable, and clearly no longer as fit as I had been a year ago. What was there for him to look at? My ass wasn’t particularly big, and neither was my dick. My torso had been defined once when I’d had the time to put in the effort, but I’d softened with time.

I didn’t look at Madison when I stepped out. Despite looking everywhere but at him, I saw that he wore branded black boxer briefs and that no tricks had been used for the camera to make him appear as anything other than what he was like.

The apprentices measured us thoroughly, and the tailor directed us to dress again after testing a few fabrics and getting Madison’s approval.

After we left, we walked down the street as if this hadn’t been the strangest experience of my recent years. “Um, how much does all this…?”

“Don’t think about it,” Madison said. “It’s all covered.” He smiled when he glanced at me. “I’d never put that burden on you. You’re doing me a huge favor.”

“Well,” I huffed, not sure how to act. “I’ll make sure I don’t spill something on it.”

Madison laughed. “Do whatever you want, Bradley. It’s yours.” And before I could protest, he went on. “But I’d like to express my gratitude somehow. This really is a big deal for me.”

“You don’t need to do that,” I assured him.

I wasn’t certain that he’d accepted my answer as final. Instead, he moved the conversation elsewhere. “I’ll pick you up in a limo around six, and we’ll head back here to dress, then join the party. Just make sure you’re ready to leave when I call. And let me think about the rest.”

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