The Rent Boys

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Rent Boys-

A/N: pretty long chapter for you! It is, I do believe, the last chapter but there will be an epilogue so hold ya horses before you start celebrating haha. So for those of you who read the sequel preview back in one of the bonus chapters of TRB then you'll notice that I altered a bit (or maybe you won't I don't know haha) but that's because certain plots in the story were changed from what I originally planned but it's more or less the same. I hope you enjoy! <3

    It was a few months since we decided on the idea of moving out and I sat on the corner of a street called Grant Avenue, thinking about the murder that had happened there almost a year ago. It didn't feel how you'd expect it to feel, knowing that an old woman had been knifed and robbed a few metres away, just outside the gate of her house.

    I actually liked the place, and I think I liked the fact that despite the darkness of the murder, the place itself didn't darken with it but I realised that so much death surrounded the city I lived in and I wondered how I could wake up every day and not think about it; not think about how terrible it was and how terrible the people that lived in it were.

    I was a rent boy, and it had become so normal to me now that I hardly thought of it as an awful situation to be in. I sucked people off for a living. People made documentaries on the life I lived and talked about how horrific it was to be a rent boy or a prostitute. But it was so normal to me now that I almost found those documentaries funny.

    It was sick. I guess that made me sick. But I was going to change that, one way or another. I could feel it happening already. I didn't come to Grant Avenue often, only when I needed a reminder of what the city was really like. Nice to look at from afar, but the streets were stained with death that could only be seen by those that remembered it.

    I bet most of the people that lived on Grant Av. Street had forgotten about the little old lady that was stabbed outside of her green gate, the paint now chipped away to reveal the cheap wood beneath. I bet most of the people that went to school with that kid who had been run over by the supermarket van had forgotten about him, too.

    I forgot them quite often, but then I'd sit by the corner on Grant Avenue and remember them – remind myself that the city ain't so pretty when you looked at it up close. I guess what I was saying, was that I was going to get out. I needed to get out. Find a smaller city, a town, a village, get a nicer job and settle down in a nicer apartment, hell, maybe even a house if I could be so lucky.

    I shifted against the street lamp I was leaning against, the pavement cold under my jeans from where I sat with my legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. Finn's shoulder nudged against mine unintentionally as he bent forward and hugged his knees. He was cold, but he was trying not to show it as he bit his bottom lip and shivered in the gentle, but cold, wind with arched shoulders.

    “Who do you think lives there?” he said, nodding across the road to a council house that stood squashed between two other identical council houses, shabby and worn down with blue doors barely wide enough to fit myself through. “I mean, what kind of people do you think own that place?”

    I shrugged, clasping my hands together and pushing them between my thighs to shield them from the chill around us. “Probably a single mother with two kids, that got pregnant at sixteen, dropped out of school at seventeen, got married at eighteen and then divorced at nineteen. I don't know, just a guess but that's the usual story, isn't it?”

    Finn smirked beside me. “Sounds like my mum,”

    “Yeah but your mum works. She,” I nodded towards the house again, “in my mind, lives off benefits and is a stay-at-home mum cause the dad walked out after they got divorced and fucked off to some foreign country so that he didn't have to pay child tax.”