Free Blowing It by Kate Aaron Page B

same thing,” I growled.
    “It’s all sex , Owen. And given you write for
adolescents, any hint of sex is firmly off the table.”
    “Would holding hands with a woman be okay?” I
asked.
    “Owen—”
    “Seriously. What does holding hands have to do with
sex? We weren’t even kissing.”
    “You kissed him? In public?”
    I debated letting him suffer but decided it
wouldn’t be worth the hassle. “No. I’m not entirely stupid.”
    “Good.”
    I sighed. “I’ll be more careful, okay? I just
wanted to be myself for once.”
    Max grimaced sympathetically. “Not in public,
kiddo. You’re smarter than that.”
    I grinned. “It would have been an awful lot of
effort to dress like that to stay in.”
    “Where did you get that top, anyway? I thought I
cleared everything out.”
    “A year ago. I do buy new clothes occasionally.”
    “Well, stop it. No more of your gender-bending
shit.”
    “It’s who I am, Max.”
    “No it isn’t, it’s what you wear.” He pinched the
bridge of his nose. “I’m not saying change. I’m just saying help me do my job,
okay? I thought you were savvier.”
    “I only wanted to be sure he liked me for who I
was, not what you’d turned me into.”
    “So he’s new, is he?”
    I nodded.
    “Seeing him again?”
    “I hope so.”
    “Well, do it in private, okay? Keep the pictures
off the internet.”
    “Yeah, sure. Shall I tell him I’m ashamed of him
now and get it over with?”
    Max refused to be baited. “Do whatever you have to
do, Owen. Just don’t put me in this position again.”
     
     
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
    The journey home seemed to last days. I studied my
fellow passengers on the tube, wondering what their lives were like. The young
punk couple sitting opposite, did they tie their hair back and remove their
piercings for work? Forsake leather and silver studs for corporate severity?
Then again, it was midday on a Monday, and if they weren’t at work now, they
probably waited tables or lived off student loans, unbeholden to a boss who
cared about company image.
    Was that what I was now, a corporate entity? A
product in my own right? I’d always known, sort of, that when people bought my
books, they were buying a little piece of me, too. I had a part to play in the
grubby business of parting consumers from their cash. And really, what had I
been doing on Friday? Acting out like a spoilt child, testing the limits of
what I could get away with?
    I pulled my coat closer around myself. The truth
was, I liked Magnus. Liked him enough I wanted him to see who I really was
before I let myself get attached. I needed to know I could trust him. But who
was he, really? I’d known him barely three weeks, only been on a couple of
dates. Why was I jeopardising everything I’d worked so hard to achieve? Say
that picture had made the papers. Say Squire decided it was a problem. Then say
Magnus and I broke up or drifted apart, or for one of a hundred other reasons,
we stopped seeing each other. What would I do then? Wouldn’t I feel like an
idiot, having thrown it all away for a man I barely knew?
    Magnus was brand new, and maybe I’d let the shiny
distract me. Or maybe… maybe he was something different, something special. Maybe
that little flutter I felt in my belly whenever I thought about him, whenever
my phone lit up with a new text message, was an instinct I should trust.
    I snorted. My instincts had long proved themselves
untrustworthy, and I’d had gonorrhoea to prove it. I’d been blind to Carl
playing around behind my back when we’d been together six months—what made me
think Magnus was trustworthy after three dates?
    This was why I hadn’t dated in so long, why I’d
agreed to Max’s terms with barely a grumble. The truth was, I didn’t trust
myself to trust a man again. I was too keen, too eager to believe their lies.
Not that I thought Magnus had lied to me, but I couldn’t tell. That was the
point.
    For someone who made a living portraying people,
getting