My new home was apparently in Los Angeles. The chances of meeting Cedric again went down to zero. I wasn't delusional, though, I knew the chances were already low considering how large California was. It would have been nice, he was nice.
Dorian's new place—or should I say our—was located in a gated community, a three story apartment building in the color beige, surrounded by patches of dead grass and sad looking flowers. It wasn't that bad, I had seen worse.
"What if they don't let me stay?" I asked for the billionth time.
"I'm gonna bitch slap you," Dorian said.
"Do it! Wake me up from this dream and tell me I didn't just fucking travel across the United States to come to California."
"I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but we're here." He gave my back a strong pat as we stared up at our apartment building among the many others. "But just in case, let me go in first. You wait out here and start unloading the car."
"That's reassuring," I said as he walked away.
One by one, I removed each box from the trunk and set it down on the pavement. Most were heavy, but small in size. Dorian kept his clothes in the backseat, next to more boxes; these larger and weighing less. I pulled out the heavy suitcases stuffed with his clothes and shoes. By the time he was back, all of the boxes were neatly stacked and ready to be moved.
"Lucian!" Dorian shouted, being followed by two people who I assumed were the two other roommates. "Meet Sonam and Eric."
Sonam sneaked around Dorian, eagerly approaching me with both hands behind her back in a cute way. She was a tiny girl, dark-brown skin, long black hair twisted in a really cool braid, and these big brown eyes painted with black eyeliner.
"Hi, Lucian!" The way she smiled made my fears evaporate. She had a genuinely kind and friendly smile. "It's very nice to meet you."
"He's gay," Dorian whispered, loud enough for Sonam to hear.
She paid no attention to him.
"Nice to meet you too," I said back.
"Dorian told us about you, but we didn't think you'd be joining too." She must have seen my Adam's apple move when I tried to swallow my nerves, because she stopped smiling and looked apologetic immediately. "It's okay! You are welcome here! Dorian is our friend and that means you are our friend too!"
Eric stepped forward and grabbed my hand before I could even offer it. Eric was wearing a sports hat and black sunglasses. He was around the same height as me, black hair sticking out from under the hat and glowing tan skin.
"May the fourth be with you," he said, letting go of my hand after shaking it roughly.
"What?"
"It's May 4th?" he said, as if I was supposed to know what that meant.
"He's not a nerd, you idiot," Dorian told him.
"Since when does liking Star Wars make you a nerd?"
"Since always," Sonam said.
"Whatever." I imagined Eric rolling his eyes right about now. He looked done with all three of us. He bent down and grabbed the least heavy box and walked back to the apartments.
"Let me help as well!" Sonam grabbed three of the suitcases and struggled to drag them at the same time, almost tripping over one as she tried to push it with her pelvis.
"See?" Dorian said after they were both out of sight. "Nothing to worry about. They're nice."
I slapped his arm playfully. "Why'd you have to say I'm gay? What if they kill me because they're secretly homophobic?"
"Because Sonam has a thing for really really really . . . really . . . really cute boys. A strong thing. A very strong thing."
I huffed. "That doesn't bother me."
"It will when she suddenly has seventeen posters of you on her wall."
"I'd take it as a compliment."
"If you say so." He smirked.
"If you say so," I mocked stupidly like he had done to me before, with facial expressions and everything.
"Let's see where we'll be masturbating together, shall we?"
"Maybe it was a mistake to come," I muttered.
"Hehe."
"Stop it."
Luckily for us we didn't have to carry the boxes far, the apartment was on the ground floor. It was also close to a pool and gym, which was even better. The apartment had three rooms, one master and the other two regular. The master bedroom belonged to Sonam and she had her own master bathroom, and a walk-in closet. The other two rooms were the same regular size with a bathroom separating them, which Eric called "The Pissing Station." The name made me never want to use it, ever. Our room was the furthest away from the front door, next to the dining area.
"You got me a bed?!" Dorian exclaimed when the two roommates opened the bedroom door.
Sonam smiled. "We set it up all by ourselves. It's a gift from us to you." She glanced at me momentarily before setting back her eyes on the bed clearly made for one person. "If I knew there were going to be two, I would have gotten a bigger one, I'm sorry."
"No, don't be sorry!" Dorian walked in first and dropped a few boxes next to the bed. "It's big enough for the two of us, don't worry. Besides, I love cuddling up next to Lucian, he's so warm and soft, like a hairless teddy bear." He shuddered at the thought. "Okay, maybe not a hairless teddy bear. I've seen hairless bears and they are not cute."
Sonam let out a quiet whine.
Okay, maybe Dorian was right.
My phone began to ring and everyone looked at me like I had just exposed our location to a home invader. I took it out of my pocket and sighed long.
"Can I go outside?" I asked.
"We're not your parents," Eric said.
"Use the balcony," Sonam suggested kindly.
I hurried past the dining area and living room. The phone seemed to ring louder in my head like it was becoming impatient. I struggled to open the screen door, it was jammed or something. Eric came over and placed his hands on the glass, pushed the glass upwards and moved it to the side.
"Thanks," I said, stepping outside, answering the phone when the door was closed behind me. "Hello?"
"Lucian? Lucian, where are you?" Chance asked, his tone like a mother scolding her child for running across the street without permission.
"Somewhere," I mumbled.
"Somewhere? I've stopped by your place five times since I noticed you weren't happy with my gift. It's still there."
Of course it was still there. Management didn't give a fuck about what went on in that building. It could be set on fire and they'd go down with it. If they never cared about our things being stolen from inside, they wouldn't care about what went on outside either.
"Yeah, well, you don't seem to take hints," I said.
The balcony wasn't too small, but because we were on the ground floor, it gave me no satisfaction to lean over the rail and admire the scenery. There was no scenery. Just grass and a line of ants making their way through. With the balcony screen being broken, I wondered how easily it would be to get inside and rob us. At least our room was the furthest away.
"What do you mean? Can we talk?"
"We're talking."
"In person."
"No, we can't."
"Lucian, please. I'm sorry for pushing our relationship. I'm sorry for being clingy. I'll apologize for everything and mean it, but I won't apologize for being in love with you."
"I'm not there, Chance."
"Okay, where are you? I'll pick you up."
"I'm in California," I said.
I waited for his reaction, but it never came. The call was silent. I double checked to see if he had hung up, but the timer kept ticking. Chance was processing it.
"Oh my god." He was at the verge of tears. "You really are done with me. So done that you moved away."
"My best-friend was moving away, possibly forever," I explained. "He gave me the opportunity to leave with him and start a new life. I took it because it's what I need. I can't rot away in that town. It's depressing."
"I would have moved with you to Alaska."
"Chance," I said, sighing when the sobbing began. "You need to find a way to move on. If you need someone to talk to, I'll always be there for you, you know that. But we are not good together."
"FINE! I don't care anymore! I'm done trying for someone who CLEARLY doesn't give a shit!"
He hung up.
That was definitely not the last time I would hear from him. I could only imagine the hundreds of text messages I'd get for this month alone. Chance wasn't one to give up. Because of his parents, whatever Chance wanted, he got. He didn't understand what 'no' meant, so handling rejection was not one of his qualities.
I stood outside for a couple of minutes. I wanted to breathe in the new air. It was hotter than what I was used to. Would I miss the cold? Maybe in the winter. California had a unique feel, and as we got closer to the summer, that feel would soon start to roast me live.
When I returned back inside, all of our things were in our room. The lack of furniture made the room feel bigger than it really was. It might be a problem if Dorian bought a lot of things. And at the same time, it could not. I didn't have a lot of things with me. I only took the important things. My desk, my bed, my television, my lamps, everything big stayed behind. Dorian had the great idea to sell everything and have Gwen send me the money. I could luckily end up with a few hundred dollars.
"Hey, how much do you trust me?" Dorian asked. He was sitting on the new bed, bouncing up and down.
"The fact that you're asking that, zero."
"Eric is going to take you to get that job," he said.
"What does that have to do with me trusting you?"
"Because you're going alone, with him."
I leaned against the frame of the door, half-way inside the room and half-way out. "Wouldn't that require me to trust him and not you?"
"Yeah, but I trust him. So if you trust me, you trust him."
"I don't think that's how it works."
"I am not going to be the husband who takes care of his wife. It's 2019, get a job!"
Both of my eyes blinked at different times. "First of all, you are not my husband. Second, who says I have to be the wife?"
Dorian raised his head up high, stretching his neck as far as he could. "I am clearly the most dominant, the most masculine, the toughest, the greatest, and above all, the one with the larger penis."
"It's 2019, a woman can have all of those things!" I retorted.
"Fuck. Fine, you win this time, bitch."
I grinned at him. "You are a very rude wife."
"Jebus Crust! Just go knock on Eric's room and tell him you're ready!"
"Wait, now? I'm going now?"
"Yes!" He waved for me to go.
"But we just got here. How am I supposed to get a job when I haven't even settled down and accepted I'm in a new land?"
"GO!" Dorian shouted, causing me to jump into the air and dash away to knock at the door across from ours.
"WHAT?" Eric shouted inside.
"STOP SHOUTING!" Sonam shouted from her room.
"Uh, it's me, Lucian," I said awkwardly. "Dorian said you're going to help me get a job?"
His door flung open. He was chewing gum, wearing different sunglasses, and a cowboy hat this time.
"Let's go," he ordered, pointing to the front door.
Everything felt like it was happening in a dream. These people couldn't be real. This must be some kind of simulation and I was stuck in a ridiculous one.
Eric lead the way to his car and stopped me behind the trunk. Yes, I was expecting to be thrown into it and kidnapped, but Eric instead lifted my arms so I was T-posing like an idiot. He squeezed my bicep and pulled back my shirt to examine my muscles.
"What are you doing?"
"Do you work out?"
"No."
"On a scale from one to ten, how strong would you say you are?"
"Six on a good day."
"I can easily get you the job, I just have to suck all of their cocks at once, but you're going to have to work out. This job requires you to be physically active and carry a certain amount of weight."
"Did you just say—"
"We're gonna go to the warehouse, where you'll be working at. The boss is there right now, so we're gonna drive really fast—to be on time, not because I like driving fast." How was he saying all of this with such a casual tone and straight face? "You'll watch a training video, but it's pretty useless. Most guys there don't even speak English and do a better job than those who can understand the video. You'll sign some paperwork, get a uniform, and a schedule."
"Why does this seem too easy?"
"Because it is easy. Nobody gives a fuck, okay, Lucian? Just do your job right and don't fuck up." He pushed my arms down when he was done inspecting me. "Eventually you'll be able to use a forklift, but as a starter you'll stack products, load and unload trucks, etcetera."
"That's it? It really is that easy? I don't have to go through any training except the video?"
"What else do you expect from a place that sells crack in the back?"
"Crack . . . in the back?" I questioned, my head slowly tilting to the side.
"Yeah, wack crack in the back next to some sacks."
"Oh, okay."
"Don't worry, you won't get into trouble. That whole mess is a different side, you'll just do your work and if they ever get caught, you won't go down with them, you're just an innocent worker like everyone else in there."
His car was a total mess and I wouldn't even be surprised if animals lived in it. It was a struggle just to move my legs. The floor was covered in torn boxes, plastic, food wrappers, empty fast food drinks, and somewhere deep below the piles of porn magazines, an egg.
The drive was thirty minutes long. It would have been less but traffic was high today. The ride gave me a good opportunity to see the city and where I'd be living from now on. It was a lot more active than my little town, or hectic I should say. The amount of crazy people on the streets was far more than I'd have ever seen, and like I said, the drive was only thirty minutes.
When we got there, Eric introduced me to the boss and practically lied to him about me for ten whole minutes. He said my name was Felipe and I was an army veteran who fought in the war and saved many people, including a high ranking officer. I apparently defused a bomb at one point and saved a whole village from becoming dust. I starred in one porn movie when I returned to pay my rent, because according to him, the government wasn't paying me for my duties in the fields, and that America was clearly going downhill if we weren't taking care of our veterans.
The boss was sympathetic and believed every word. Never in my life would I ever understand what just happened and how that man thought that a pale, high-school looking, five-foot nine, weak boy could ever do all of that.
I got the job easily. The boss, a muscular bald-headed fifty year old, asked me some questions in a brightly lit room, almost like I was being interrogated. Eric watched me from behind a glass wall and squinted his eyes at me like he was expecting me to fail the questionnaire. The boss was nice and made me watch a VHS tape on a VCR and I didn't even ask why the hell he still used them. Mostly because everything in this place smelled sketchy, so an old device was nothing.
With my new job, I got a yellow vest, a yellow helmet, a new schedule and a lollipop. Eric took the lollipop. He could have it, he did help me get this job. It wasn't a complicated one, but I could see how it was going to be tough on my physical limits. The warehouse was massive and had hundreds of aisles stacked with so much shit that it almost seemed endless. Either way, I was excited to begin my new job, right across the street from my best-friend.
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[Author's Message]: Let me know if you guys ever spot any mistakes or if something doesn't seem right. It helps me as a writer and I can go in and rewrite whatever is wrong. <3 Hope you enjoyed the new chapter. Next chapter you will be meeting the next boi, ELIJAH. This boy is gonna drive you guys crazy lmao. I dont want to give anything away so I will leave you with that. I am honestly so excited about everything I'm gonna bring to this story. It hasn't even begun, like BINCH this is just the beginning OOF. YALL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT'S COMING LMAOOOOOOOOOO. Okay, ty for voting and commenting, love u all mwah.