Free Orient by Christopher Bollen

or calculate his distance from the door. They remained on Mills’s face, as if worried that his guest had found his home unsatisfactory, not as warm and welcoming as its owner.
    “You’re probably exhausted. Of course you are. Your bedroom’s upstairs, but first let me show you what I had in mind.”
    Paul was not a man Mills would describe as handsome. He was short, with bristled, brown hair that reddened and silvered under ceiling bulbs. His complexion was as white as liquid soap, but he had a strong jaw and a broom-shaped mustache, the head of a lion whose mane had been shaved, and, Mills guessed, underneath his wool sweater, a gourdlike body of muscles and chest hair. Take a decade off Paul Benchley, and he would have been a man of harder substance. He had thick wrists, a neck etched with skin lines, and the beginning of a lump at his waist. If Paul’s eyes were closed, he would have appeared old, a taker of too much space. Peering through his wire-rimmed glasses, though, his eyes were alert and pensive and mostly unwilling to see the worst. They had not seen the worst in Mills, and it was because of those eyes that Mills followed him down the hallway into the recesses of the house.
    Mills had been duped before. Even two of his foster dads had seen something to like in him and tried to get what they could. They had sprung on him in his sleep, groping with reckless hands, probably not meaning to be so brutal, but then going slowly, attempting a seductive line of attack, might have triggered the standstill of fear, the same way a moment’s hesitation can stop a person from running full throttle into the ocean. Mills had thrown the right amount of punches to protect himself.
    The truth was, most of his “parents” had been rather uninterested in his growing body, obsessed more by how to clean the stains he left on their blankets than by how those stains got there in the first place. Mills understood that his preferred method of masturbation—and at nineteen he had only recently felt able to control that all-consuming urge—was embarrassingly infantile. He would lie on a bed or on the floor with a blanket wedged against his erection, rubbing against the bundled fabric, effectively humping the ground, until he came, usually on the blanket or across the carpet, no matter how strategically he had placed a wad of tissue. He’d never learned the art of self-gratification while seated on a toilet. It seemed one of the many lessons that had eluded him as he passed into adulthood—like shaving or using the correct fork or catching a football with the crutch of his shoulder. Thoughts of masturbation felt unnecessary to the point of derangement right here in Paul Benchley’s house, but nevertheless the worry was there, triggering his anxiety the way thoughts of cigarettes provoke chain-smokers.
    Paul turned around before opening the door at the end of the hall. “I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable about being here,” he said, placing his hand lightly on Mills’s shoulder, as if he didn’t want to trouble it with weight. “You’ve had a hard time in New York, and you should be focusing on getting away from that. So if this seems too much for you, we don’t have to start tomorrow. Little by little. Whatever you’re okay with. Just promise me one thing. No drugs find their way into this house.”
    “I promise,” he said.
    Even though Paul had seen him at his absolute lowest, scrounging his last dollars for the tiniest tinfoil of powder to snort, Mills didn’t consider himself an addict. He would prove to Paul that he could accomplish any task asked of him, to pay him back for saving him. Mills could still be living another future in New York right now, slumped in a hallway, begging for change on the street, entering the apartments of strange men to perform his embarrassing floor ritual in front of them for fifty bucks. One of his first friends in thecity had bragged about earning fifty bucks sampling the food