Second in the lineup is Addicted to Disaster by Elizabeth Coldwell, a wry look at the very start of an apocalypse, from the point of view of some washed-up celebs stuck in a Big Brother style reality show:
Much to everyone’s surprise, including my own, it was Claire who walked out within the first couple of days. She could cope without cream cakes and kebabs, but she was so self-absorbed she drove the rest of us mad. Following a massive stand-up fight between her and Jake, when he’d dared her to use a sentence without the word “me” in it, she packed her bag and quit the cottage.
That was when the psychological torment began for the rest of us. Lights and loud noises keeping us awake; our food being reduced to nothing but unpleasant kale smoothies for days on end.
Though not all my personal torment was of the production company’s making. I was doing my best to hide a growing physical attraction to Jake Steele. I’d never officially admitted I was gay, but it was an open secret in the industry. No one was particularly surprised; after all, it was pretty much compulsory to have at least one gay member in every boy band. I just didn’t want my sexuality to be used as a marketing tool. And if the producers of Celebrity Cold Turkey knew I was into men, they would have used that as another weapon in their armoury against me.
Then, the morning after Claire made her sudden departure, I found myself sharing a shower with Jake. The disembodied voice that gave us our instructions told us we had ten minutes before the hot water was being switched off. “It might not come back on for a while,” the voice added. Not knowing how long it would be before we’d have the luxury of a hot shower again, Jake and I both dived for the small wet room. For once, his usual hostility thawed as we ducked and weaved under the shower head, lathering ourselves down. I tried to keep my eyes off his body, but it wasn’t easy. Unlike Graham, who tended to walk round in little more than a pair of shorts, I’d never seen Jake less than fully dressed. My eyes were drawn to the length of his back, the thin covering of dark hair on his pecs and his limp but undeniably meaty cock. I fought hard to prevent my own from stiffening as I admired it. Almost as if he knew what I was thinking, he started soaping his balls before taking his thick length in one hand and washing himself there, too. When Jake caught me staring, I made the excuse that I was looking at the Chinese character he’d had tattooed just above his pubic bush.
“It means ‘strength’,” he told me. “At least, I hope it does. For all I know, it could say ‘wanker’. I just liked the way it looked.”
“I was going to have a tattoo done,” I told him. “All the boys in the band were, as a publicity stunt. We were going to have ‘Together Forever’ on our arse cheeks. Two weeks later, I quit the band. Some forever that would have been…”
At that point, the spray from the shower head begin to run cold, and we knew it was time to get out. There was still plenty more I wanted to discuss with Jake, things I could only ask him while the water was muffling any chance of our conversation being picked up by the microphones dotted round the cottage. How was he coping without sex, if it really was so important for him to get laid once a day, every day? He didn’t seem to be as tetchy and disoriented as Graham and me, and he was having no problems sleeping. Was he scratching the itch by indulging in a crafty wank when he thought no one was looking? I couldn’t see it, somehow. The layout of the building had been deliberately designed to give us all the minimum of privacy. We even shared the same bedroom, Claire included. Perhaps Jake was somehow managing to pleasure himself under the covers, when the rest of us were asleep.
The image of him, hand wrapped round his shaft, trying not to make a sound as he brought himself off, had my cock twitching in frustrated desire. But the moment had passed, even if I pondered the question more than once over the next days and weeks, watching Jake moving around the cottage and wondering if he realised how I felt about him. I knew there was no chance of my feelings being reciprocated — Jake was all heterosexual, all the time, as he’d repeatedly told the press — but in quiet moments I could dream he might want to sample the delights on the other side of the divide.
For all his faults, it was Jake who first started to suspect things had somehow changed. “Is it me,” he asked as we were having breakfast, “or has there been a complete lack of new instructions for the last couple of days?”
Buy Lust in the Dust:
No comments:
Post a Comment