The Hardest Thing

towel around my waist, maneuvered my cock into an unobtrusive two o’clock position, and opened the door a couple of inches.
    “Who is it?”
    “Dan Stagg?” A man’s voice, local accent.
    “Who wants him?”
    “Ferrari. Enrico Ferrari.”
    I nearly said like the car? but thought better of it. “What do you want, Ferrari?”
    “Got a proposition for you.”
    “Yeah?” He was well dressed in a clean white shirt and charcoal grey pants, thick black hair combed into a perfect side parting. He looked like a movie star. I opened the door a little more.
    “Can I come in?” His head tilted enough to see what I was (or wasn’t) wearing. “Or you wanna come out?”
    “What kind of proposition?”
    “A lucrative one.” Another inch. “Interested?”
    “Come in.”
    He took in the apartment—the filthy clothes on
the floor, the unmade bed and unwashed cups and plates—and my unwashed body—in one swift glance. “Thanks,” he said, nodding.
    “Let me get dressed.” I picked a grey T-shirt off the back of a chair and pulled it over my head. There were gym shorts at the foot of the bed, and I wriggled them on under the towel. Ferrari watched the performance with a cocked eyebrow. My dick was still half hard, and the thin fabric of the shorts did little to conceal it.
    “Okay, Stagg,” he said, putting one shiny black shoe on the chair and leaning on his knee. “You’re out of work, right?”
    “What’s that to you?”
    “We’re looking for someone to do a job for us.”
    “And who are ‘we’?”
    “I represent a prominent individual.” Was it my imagination, or did he glance at the front of my shorts?
    “Yeah, right.”
    “A very wealthy businessman.”
    Perhaps Scott had been spreading the word along Wall Street. “Okay, Ferrari, who are you and how did you find me?”
    “You’re not difficult to find, Mr. Stagg. You’re in the newspapers.”
    “They didn’t print my address.”
    “Your employer…sorry, your former employer, was quite happy to provide that.” He smiled. “For a price.”
    “Right.” Those bastards at the Panther. “You’ve got two minutes before I ask you to leave.”
    “What are you going to do, throw me down the stairs?”
    “If that’s what you want.”

    “Okay.” He nodded, and looked satisfied. “Tough guy.”
    “And that’s what you’re looking for, right?”
    “Right.”
    He had a handsome mug, and my dick wanted to get into it. “So what’s the deal?”
    “Bodyguard job. Think you can handle that?”
    “Depends whose body I’m guarding.”
    “My client’s secretary.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Someone tried to kill him.”
    “Who tries to kill a secretary?”
    He waggled his hand in the air. The nails were neatly trimmed, the back of the hand hairy and tanned. It would look so nice wrapped around my cock. “My client has enemies.”
    “No shit. Take it to the cops.”
    “It’s a sensitive situation.”
    “I see.” Enough blood was flowing back into my brain to allow me to analyze the situation. “You want me to do something illegal?”
    “Let’s just say we don’t want to involve the authorities at this time.”
    I shrugged. “Sorry, Ferrari. You got the wrong guy.”
    “I’m sorry, too.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a thick brown envelope. “My client hoped that he could count on your cooperation.” He slapped the packet against his palm; it sounded heavy. There could be a thousand dollars in there, maybe two. Two grand would answer a lot of the questions I’d been asking myself.

    “Why me?”
    “You can take care of yourself. And you have a good service record.”
    “You checked me out?”
    “Sure.” He smiled. “My client wants a professional.”
    “Sit down, Ferrari.” He sat, carefully hitching up his pants legs to keep them out of the dust.
    “We need to get the secretary out of town. Discreetly, understand?”
    “I can be discreet.” After all those years hiding in the closet, I’m a fucking genius at it.
    “But if there’s trouble, we need to deal with it.”
    “Damsel in distress, right?”
    Ferrari raised an eyebrow. “The damsel is a dude.”
    “Can’t he look after himself?”
    “Have you ever met the children of the rich, Stagg?”
    “Enough said.”
    “You get the first payment straight off, the second when you reach your destination and the rest when you get him back.”
    “How much?” I was in no position to haggle, but I don’t like to seem easy.
    “That