I wouldn’t even have to try—if I wanted these girls, I could have one of them bouncing up and down on my dick and the other riding my face in under thirty minutes. All it would take is a smile.
I don’t smile. I take out my Ray Ban Wayfarers from the breast pocket of my button-down shirt and slide them on, aware that only an asshole wears sunglasses indoors. It’s not like they’ll conceal who I am; it’s very obvious that I’m the guy on the billboard behind me. The ink creeping up around my neck and cuffing my wrists makes me easy to identify, as does my closely shaved head. No, the sunglasses aren’t going to fool anyone, but they do make me feel protected. As if I’ve withdrawn into another room and I’m observing the people around me through a two-way mirror.
Heat creeps up the back of my neck as another couple realize that I’m the model on the goddamn billboard. I glare at the conveyor belt on carousel number 6, willing it to start spitting out bags. This is a fucking nightmare. I’m going to kill Hilary. My agent normally gives me a heads-up if one of the campaigns I’ve posed for goes live. I had no idea the execs had even chosen an image for this ad, let alone that I’d be fucking plastered all over JFK.
Just move, you fucking moron, I snap at myself. Can’t, though. It’ll look way worse if I slink away now. It already looks like I made a conscious decision to come and stand here, like some arrogant piece of shit with a god complex. I’ll only draw more attention to myself if I—
“Excuse me? Um…”
Fuuuuuck no. The sunglasses weren’t enough to deter the two blondes. My dick throbs again—a desperate plea for attention—which only irritates the hell out of me even more. The girls stand shoulder-to-shoulder, volleying nervous sidelong looks at each other. Jesus, where are the fucking bags?
“Sorry to bother you, but…are you…?”
The blonde on the left points to the display behind me. My lips are parted in the image, my head tilted back, like I’m baring my neck. My eyes are half-closed, and I’m looking right down the lens of the camera like I want to fuck the shit out of the person on the other side of it. I’m morbidly embarrassed by the fact that my dick looks huge in those boxer briefs. It’s probably just my perspective, standing right underneath the display, but it looks like my monster cock is ready to rip through the fabric, like when that Chest Burster exploded through John Hurt’s ribcage in Alien. Lord help me, I hope no one checks out my actual cock right now. The boner I’m rocking will not help matters.
I clench my jaw. “Not me. Sorry.”
“But…” She looks at her friend, frowning, but the other girl is just as perplexed.
I can’t really blame her. The elaborate angel on my neck, behind my left ear? The one who looks like she’s telling me a secret? She’s identical to the one you can see on the guy in the photo. Only the curled tail of the devil behind my right ear is visible in the ad campaign, but it’s an unmistakable tail. It couldn’t be confused for anything else. Neither can the coiled snake wrapped around my left forearm (her name is Bathsheba), peeking out from underneath the cuffed sleeve of my shirt, or the saints on my other arm. Saint Sebastian, Saint Moses the Black, and Joan of Arc, sitting around a poker table, a blunt hanging out of Joan’s mouth: a very specific tattoo by anyone’s standards. It’d be the coincidence of a lifetime if my doppelganger on the screen behind me bore the very same, bizarre ink, was identical to me in every other way, and was somehow not me.
The girl’s eyelids shutter. “Are you sure? ’Cause you…you do look just like the guy in that—”
“Look. I’m in med school. I don’t prance around in my underwear for money.” I’ve told some whoppers in the past and gotten away with my crimes, but this is such an outrageous falsehood, there’s just no way I’m getting away with it. The girls don’t know what to do with themselves. What can they do, though? Call me a liar to my face? Hah. Awkwardly, they communicate through a series of exaggerated looks and head jerks. The girl on the left is more insistent than the one on the right. She wants her friend to push the issue…
“Uhh. Okay,” the timid one mutters. “Well, we’re sorry to bother you. We know you must get approached by people all the time. We were just wondering if we could get a photo with you in front of the screen or something?”
I rip the sunglasses from my face, setting my jaw. “Why? Why would you want a photo with some random guy in front of some random billboard?”
The girls jump back, reaching for each other’s hands. “I don’t—we—we just thought—”
“I told you. I’m a med student. I have more self-respect than that.” I jab my finger at the ad, throwing an angry look over my shoulder at the editorial, but it’s gone now. The ad changed while I was talking, and now a doe-eyed brunette wearing the same doped, pouty look on her face that I was wearing a moment ago is posing seductively with a bottle of perfume, holding it up next to her face like it’s a dick that she’s about to deep throat.
People are really looking now. I slip the Wayfarers back onto the bridge of my nose, ducking my head. “Look. I had a shitty flight. I’m gonna get my bags and go the fuck home so I can sleep. Excuse me.”
The bags are starting to come out on the belt, emerging from a hole in the wall that looks like a yawning mouth. I skirt around the girls, moving to stand closer to the carousel, bouncing on the balls of my feet while I wait for my large suitcase to appear. Of course, it takes fucking forever; nearly everyone has cleared out and left by the time I snatch the handle of my case and beeline for the exit.
I’m sticky with sweat; I fucking hate that feeling. Outside, I eventually hail a taxi and climb onto the backseat.
“Where you going, kid?” the driver asks in a thick Bronx accent. I knuckle my forehead, contemplating the journey back to the academy. A five-hour drive in a cab. Four, if you have a lead foot and a knack for avoiding highway patrol. Either way, I can’t handle sitting down for that long after the cramped, miserable flight I just endured.
“Corner of West 59th and 5th. And I’ll tip you a hundred bucks if you get me there in under forty-five minutes.”
The taxi driver snorts. Ten-thirty on a Monday morning? We’ll be lucky to make it in twice that time. He knows he ain’t gonna see that money, so why bother bending over backwards for the spoiled shit sitting on the backseat?
He drives, button lipped. After a while, he puts the radio on, trawling from station to station, hunting for god only knows fucking what. Eventually he stops on an alt rock station and lets the music play, which is just fine by me…until the music breaks for the news.
“Detectives working the Bancroft murder case now believe that the man charged with the murder of Mara Bancroft, sixteen, may be responsible for a string of other killings across Texas, Connecticut, and New York State, spanning a timeframe of well over a decade. Thirty-eight-year-old Wesley Fitzpatrick, a former English professor at Wolf Hall Academy, an exclusive boarding school in the tiny town of Mountain Lakes, New Hampshire, is accused with the brutal assault and murder of one of his young students—”
I close my eyes.
I try not to listen.
I try not to seethe inside my own skin.