Carter considered the RA job for about fifteen seconds—housing and meals included, a little bit of cash, but also no privacy and constant interruptions by teenagers—before turning it down. He sells his Jeep instead uses a chunk of the money to put a security deposit on a tiny shoebox of an apartment a twenty minute walk from the hospital. He can skate by on his savings and the rest of the Jeep money for at least a couple months, and maybe by then Kerry will have changed her mind about finding a way to pay him.
Only, two months pass, and she doesn’t, and he doesn’t have time for another job because he’s at the hospital fourteen hours or more most days, and on his few days off all he can manage is to shovel a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his face, go for a quick run, and if he’s lucky, jack off in the shower before collapsing into bed. He sells his possessions one by one, paying the rent via sold-off designer coats and fountain pens and heavy silver jewelry.
He thinks about Anna a lot—not while jerking off in the shower, usually (although sometimes. maybe.)—when he’s struggling with the half-broken lock, or unfolding the futon that’s both his bed and his couch, or the one time one of his neighbors said something about cockroaches, remembers that this is the way most of his classmates and fellow residents have been struggling through all along.
He does find a loose floorboard that squeaks, and when he pries it up to see if he can fix it somehow before the noise drives him crazy, he finds a tiny treasure trove of porn.
It’s all gay porn, but really, beggars can’t be choosers, and John’s open-minded and it’s the new millennium, after all—and some of the stories are even better than the spread-out, oiled up men in the photos.
There’s one he keeps coming back to, thinking about when he’s got his hand around his dick in the shower: it’s not even one of the really explicit ones, no dick or hole or anything, just a guy with his hand between his legs, obscured by the thick thigh of his raised leg, as he stares right into the camera.
He’s got intense gold-green eyes, broad shoulders, and John had expected another sexy little story about a bartender or chef or, god forbid, a doctor, but instead, the caption read The new face of pornography: How Greg is paying his way through college with his on-demand videos.
There’s something about it that really gets John going, is the thing. Something about the confidence in his gaze and his gorgeous body, sure, but more... It’s the idea that it’s not just readers of this magazine who see him and get off. It’s that anybody could stumble across him on the internet, on his website. That he’s in control of it, but also... the people on the other side of the camera could be anyone.
And then, when he looks at his bank account a few days before the first and has a little panic attack about the number he sees he thinks—maybe.
He’s got a webcam already, leftover from when he’d had a short-lived romance last year with a woman who’d been visiting Chicago from Boston and she’d wanted to keep in touch (instead, she’d dumped him before the package even arrived).
He does a little research—pauses the research to jerk off, kind of a lot—and finds a whole new side of the internet. He’d known about internet porn, obviously, even if he hasn’t explored it much, but now he dives in, spending what little free time he has scrolling sites with thumbnails like college guy gets railed - HARD and 24 hours of my feet and get ready with me - ass edition.
He’s not into the idea of filming himself and putting it up online for anyone, anytime—he respects the actors, of course, sex work is work, pornography is art, et cetera, but it feels a little much for him. Instead, he finds himself focusing more on the live cameras.
Greg—the guy from the magazine—is long gone from the internet, but John finds his legacy in plenty of other sites: people on sites with schedules and countdowns. He likes that better, and it seems to be a tipping economy, too. John’s got great patient satisfaction scores, after all, a few disasters notwithstanding. And he knows he’s a good looking guy who knows how to stage a good scene, too.
He can jerk off on camera for money, if it means he can keep his apartment and make it through his residency.
