Fic ~ A Touch Of Home
Title ~ A Touch of Home (The Brothel Series)
Pairing ~ Carlos Moya / Rafael Nadal
Rating ~ R
Warnings ~ Prostitution, AU
Notes ~ Quite some time ago, I made a few porn posters from some particularly suggestive photos of our tennis boys. Rafa’s movie was about a male prostitute…and you can imagine where that led me. It’s taken a while, but here is the first in what I imagine will be a series of stories, all centered around a brothel in Paris. To mion_mion and nastasie: I apologize for STILL not finishing the Gilles story, but he decided that he didn’t like it, and I’m doing some rewriting.
A Touch of Home
It was one of those old hotels that had been the height of fashion when it first opened. The foyer was all marble and glittering chandeliers. The rooms were wallpapered in silk, with matching lampshades and curtains. Even the beds were grand, headboards and footboards intricately carved by hand, no two alike.
Rafael should know. He’d seen most of them at one time or another.
Sure, the marble was cracked, the chandeliers were missing a quarter of their crystals, and the silk was faded and frayed, but Rafael still loved the beds.
“I love this place,” he said.
The man by the window, who’d introduced himself as Carlos, turned to look at him. “Do you come here a lot?”
Rafael was sprawled on the bed, enjoying the cool crispness of the sheets, but now he sat up. He knew the image he presented, hair mussed, eyes half-closed, skin smooth and warm in the sunlight that streamed through the yellow silk curtains. “Sometimes. When I’m meeting someone from out of town.”
Carlos nodded at that, and went back to looking out the window. Sighing, Rafael leaned back on his hands to study him. Very nice looking, quiet, Italian suit, Swiss watch, with an air of culture about him that Rafael could easily identify, even if he lacked real culture himself. Men like him saw boys like Rafael for two reasons, and Sebastien would have told him in advance if he’d been kinky.
That left lonely.
“So…” Rafael began, waiting for Carlos to look at him again before going on. “Do you come to Paris a lot?”
Carlos smiled, finally, a soft smile that told Rafael that he realized Rafael was trying to break the ice. Still, he just shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Rafael plucked at the sheets and tried not to roll his eyes. He was beginning to think this was going to be one of those difficult ones, where he would be required to convince the client that he really wanted what he’d already paid for. Then Carlos turned away from the window and reached up to pull loose his tie.
“I work in Geneva,” he said, still smiling. “But I travel a lot. I’m in Paris every couple of months, but usually only for a few hours at a time. I usually don’t have time to…enjoy myself.”
Rafael grinned, relaxing back onto the bed. “Do you get back to Spain much?”
“Not enough.”
“Is that why you wanted someone Spanish?”
Nodding, Carlos slipped his tie from around his neck and folded it into a pocket. “I didn’t know if…You’re from Mallorca, aren’t you?”
Rafael straightened, trying to hold his smile and not quite succeeding. If there was one lesson he’d learned since he’d begun in this business, it was never…never…tell a client anything personal. Most people probably wouldn’t consider where they were from personal, but for Rafael it was. Mallorca was more than a place. Mallorca was his home, his childhood, and his family. He wanted none of those things in this room right now.
“I’m sorry,” Carlos said then, as if he read the discomfort on Rafael’s face. “I know I shouldn’t ask questions. It’s just…do you speak Mallorquin?”
Nodding, Rafael forced himself to relax. This man was just looking for something familiar, something to keep him from feeling alone in the world. Speaking Mallorquin with him, that was nothing, no different than a client who wished him to wear certain clothes, to cry out a certain name.
“Do you mind, then, if we speak Mallorquin?” Carlos asked, in Mallorquin. “I can pay extra, if that is necessary.”
Rafael had the dimmest notion that hearing those words in the language that he grew up with, the language of his mother and father and little sister, should have made even more uncomfortable, but instead he found himself smiling. Smiling at this debonair man who looked at him now with his head tilted to one side, a crooked smile of his own playing across his mouth. “I do not mind,” he said, sliding to the edge of the bed so that his feet barely brushed the floor. “As for the cost, I think you are paying me well enough, no?”
“That is true,” Carlos said. “Though I suspect that I shall be more than satisfied with the service.”
Rafael ducked his head, letting the hair slide across his eyes so he could look up from under his bangs. “I will do my best.”
Carlos laughed at that, showing no sign of being embarrassed by the subject of money. In reality, he hadn’t paid Rafael at all. This meeting had been arranged and paid for in advance, through the house where Rafael worked. He would receive a fair share, though, and whatever other payment Carlos might decide to leave him with after they finished their time together.
“I must confess, you are not what I expected,” Carlos told him then. He still stood near the window, hands loosely in his pockets, making no move to approach the bed.
“Oh no? And what did you expect?”
“I’m not sure. Not someone so young.”
That was Rafael’s cue. Sliding off the bed, he went to stand in front of him. They were almost the same height, but Rafa was already broader across the shoulders, thicker in the arms and through the chest. He saw Carlos noting all these things, appreciating them, and smiled. “I am not so very young.”
“How old are you?”
“Does it really matter?”
Carlos seemed to hesitate, and then he looked away. “I don’t know.”
Rafael lifted both hands to slide them under his jacket, feeling the warmth of his skin through the fine cloth of his shirt. Carlos stood passively, looking down at him, but the uncertainty left his expression by degrees as Rafael eased the jacket back off his shoulders. Dropping the jacket into a chair next to them, Rafael pressed himself closer to Carlos. Carlos’s arms went around him, finally. The skim of his hands across Rafael’s skin made him shiver. Titling his head up, he brushed his lips across Carlos’s. Just a brush, just an invitation.
The time for words had passed, and Rafael was better without them anyhow.
The End
FURTHER NOTE: BECAUSE IT WAS ON AFTER MIDNIGHT, MY TIME, I HAVE NOT YET SEEN THE GILLES / RAFA QUARTERFINAL AND I DO NOT KNOW WHO WON. IF YOU COMMENT ON THIS STORY, PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL IT FOR ME!