(Based on Cris Kane's story of the same name at Metabods)
"So, do you want to go to Sage Winslow’s party tonight?”
Jace Ericsson rolled over on his chaise in order to keep his tan even. “Who the fuck is Sage Winslow? He’s not related to Stanley Winslow, is he?” Jace said “Stanley” with a mockingly nasal quality.
“He is Stanley Winslow,” replied Jace’s best – and some might say, only – friend, Thomas Laporte, who was reclining on the chaise beside him poolside. “Apparently, ever since his folks croaked and he got all their money, he’s been calling himself Sage.”
“What a fag. Hey, can you put some more sunscreen on my back?”
“Sure thing,” said Thomas, sitting up and squirting a thick stream of SPF 30 onto Jace's bronzed skin. “But I wouldn’t call him a fag. From what I hear, he’s been banging every hot chick in sight.”
“That lardass? You gotta be joking,” said Jace as Tom's palms smeared the cool sunscreen across his well-defined traps. “Well, chicks dig money. And the fastest way to a man’s wallet is through his dick. Still…” He pushed himself off his chaise and walked poolside where he dove elegantly into the deep end, immediately washing away Tom's efforts at sunscreening and leaving his hands coated in slick white lotion. Tom wiped the residue on his own much paler skin, which was turning pink in the afternoon sun. While he had never been blessed with a body like Jace's, he had been in much better shape in high school and college. Now that he was a working stiff, he no longer had the free time to devote to exercise that Jace did. When he had a free weekend afternoon like this, he liked to just lounge by Jace's pool.
Bennett returned to the edge of the pool after a single round-trip, propping himself on the edge with his taut muscular arms. This Sage Winslow news had really gotten under his skin. “So you’re seriously telling me that women, actual women, are having sexual intercourse with Stanley Winslow? On purpose?”
As was often the case in their conversations, Tom merely shrugged his narrow shoulders, with Jace speaking again before Tom got a chance.
“This I gotta see,” Jace declared, then shot his way elegantly through the water, propelled by his perfectly toned legs. He was a natural athlete but had never focused on any one sport. He didn’t care for team sports, because so much depended on the abilities other people who might not live up to his high standards, and he disliked individual sports, because he knew there was always the chance that, by some fluke, someone might defeat him one-on-one. He now stuck to solo activities like swimming, jogging and weight training which kept his body in such enviable shape, but even those were only done when the whim hit him. It didn’t take much maintenance to keep Jace looking great.
From a very early age, people had remarked upon what a handsome lad Jace was, and he only became more stunning as he grew. The elegant bone structure that he inherited from his former-model mother was apparent from childhood and became more refined post-puberty. That, combined with wavy wheat-colored hair and riveting pale-blue eyes, got him a series of modeling gigs when he was in college. At one point, a black-and-white photo of Jace, shirtless, covered ten stories of a skyscraper in Times Square, advertising some god-awful cologne, a dozen free cases of which were still piled in a corner of his four-car garage, probably decomposing into high explosives. Jace felt conflicted about the whole experience. He got off on the recognition at first, but he knew it was his good looks and not the quality of the product that were boosting sales of the shitty toilet water. It’s not like he was actually wearing the putrid stuff during the photo shoot, and even if he had been, no one looking at the billboard could smell it. He soon became bored with the hours and the travel and the infighting among the other models, not to mention all the fashion-industry queers that were constantly hitting on him.
Following his modeling experiment, he fled back to Southern California and loafed his way through school after school, drifting from one major to another and counting on his father’s wealth and reputation to rescue him from any jam, a strategy which consistently worked. His parents both hoped he would find some direction and focus, but they had spoiled their golden child too much to start laying down harsh demands now. As a result, Jace was now an unemployed 25-year-old playboy, good at nothing in particular besides looking incredible, living rent-free in one of his family’s beach houses north of San Diego.
If you’re sensing a pattern here, Jace abhorred effort.
This applied in all aspects of his life, but particularly in the romance department. Jace was such a stunner that he easily attracted attention from the ladies without ever having to go in pursuit of it. He never had to be kind or sensitive or funny or in any way interested in their lives. He certainly had no interest in putting in the effort it would take to sustain an ongoing relationship. In his mind, a second date was a privilege which must be earned and was only doled out on the rarest of occasions. Jace was more likely to donate you a kidney than ask you for a second date.
The longest relationship in Jace's life was his friendship with Tom, the son of Jace's father’s business partner. Tom was born three days before Jace but was firmly delegated to the “little brother” role in their friendship. Although Tom had grown into a slender darkly-handsome gentleman who attracted his fair share of lustful stares, he was introspective and shy, content to bask in the glow that Jace emitted rather than creating a glow of his own. He attempted to mimic Jace's laissez-faire attitude toward life, but was more of a worrier at heart. He was also far more aware of and concerned about the feelings of others than Jace was, but then that was true of practically everyone on planet Earth. As Jace's one-man entourage, Tom got to tag along on adventures he would never have experienced on his own, although he usually felt that he had witnessed them rather than participated in them. Jace kept Tom around because he didn’t mind Tom's company and because Tom was willing to do things for Jace that Jace couldn’t be bothered to do for himself.