Fic: Gentleman Caller [Super Junior RPS]
Title: Gentleman Caller
Fandom: Super Junior
Pairing: Zhou Mi/Sungmin
Rating: R
Summary: Zhou Mi spends his evenings talking dirty, but really he just wants someone to listen.
Notes: For congruencies as part of sujuexchange. The prompt was: Zhou Mi: Sporadically employed F-list Asian popstar by day, phone sex operator by night.
Gentleman Caller
What he doesn’t know about sex isn’t worth knowing. At least that’s what Zhou Mi tells himself as he gets ready for his first night at his new job. He’s prepared for this. No, he’s over-prepared. He’s consumed more porn in the last week than Hyukjae has watched in his entire life. There are images seared into his brain that he wishes he could erase. He knows the clinical terms for desires he can’t even begin to comprehend. His head is stuffed with conflicting ideas of eroticism.
He can’t even imagine having sex with someone ever again. But that’s okay, because he’s only going to pretend to have sex with someone, and maybe if he’s good at it, he’ll be able to talk dirty and do something more interesting instead, like moisturising his face or buffing his nails.
The open page of his contacts book taunts him with the information it contains. He knows the numbers off by heart already, but still he follows each digit with care as he calls the company number. He waits, enters his ID and password when prompted, then hangs up and waits again.
He seems to spend most of his life waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting for love, waiting for fame, waiting for acceptance, waiting for the end of Super Junior’s promotions so Super Junior-M can make a new album, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Candlelight flickers around the room. The stereo is turned down low, the music just enough to block out the noise bleeding through from the rest of the dorm. Zhou Mi sits on the edge of his bed and fiddles with the hem of his pyjama shirt. He’s wearing black satin, the fabric cool and slithery against his skin. For this first night on the job, he wanted to set the appropriate mood. Instead he just feels self-conscious.
He reclines on the bed, strikes a seductive pose, and tries to summon sexy thoughts, but all he can think of is an unpleasant scene from a porno involving farmyard animals and a pool of slurry.
He has never wanted sex less than he does right now.
His ringtone blares out. Zhou Mi jumps up as if scalded, then closes his hand around the phone, lifts it, and before he can think better of his decision, he hits the answer button.
“This is Talk Is Cheap,” says the switchboard operator in soothing tones. “The caller has requested a strict headmaster.”
There’s only way to beat stage fright. He takes the call.
* * *
They have a lot of downtime while the rest of Super Junior make the rounds of live stages and fan events. Henry claims it’s like a holiday for him, but Zhou Mi always feels like a country cousin to be brought out and brushed down and paraded for a few months every year in the hope of enticing suitors.
Henry spends his time lolling around the dorms and making eyes at Ryeowook. Occasionally he play virtuoso pieces on the violin or piano that make Zhou Mi want to simultaneously strangle him and sob with envy because he is just that good, whereas Zhou Mi knows he only has his voice, and his voice sometimes fails him, and he always seems to have a throat infection these days.
He feels pretty much useless when the rest of the group doesn’t need him, so he sits and writes lyrics instead.
Henry keeps him company, sprawled at the kitchen table with a big mug of milky coffee while Zhou Mi sips ginger tea. “I want to write music,” Henry says, “write songs about love and Thursday afternoons and rain against the sidewalk and the way people move when they’re in love, but if I write anything, anything at all, it belongs to the company. So I’ll only write what they tell me to write, and the rest I’ll keep in my head.”
Zhou Mi draws a line through the lyrics his pen had been chasing across the page of his notebook. “That’s a shame.”
“Yeah.” Henry opens a big bag of potato chips and feels his way right to the bottom before taking a handful. He munches on the chips, crumbs dropping onto his Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie. “Wish we could have some sort of paid side-job, y’know? Just to pass the time. Just so I’d feel like less of a spare part.”
Zhou Mi hasn’t the heart to scold him for talking with his mouth full. “Look at how well that worked for our ex-upstairs neighbours.”
Henry laughs. “I’m not talking about some dodgy cosmetics shit. I dunno, man, something small. Putting library books back on the shelves. Copying audio transcripts. That sort of thing. Like, there was this girl I knew back home, she put herself through college doing one of those phone sex lines.”
Zhou Mi looks up. “Phone sex?”
“Yeah.” Henry grabs more chips. “You know, all that ‘Baby, you’re so big! So hard! Uh, uh, ride me big boy!’ crap for losers who can’t get laid for real. Kinda lame, but yo, it paid the bills.” He frowns, wrinkles his nose. “Though I kinda heard too that she was a hooker. But I dunno. She was a real good singer.”
The non-sequitur sticks in Zhou Mi’s mind. Even later, when he goes out shopping with his extra-long scarf wrapped around his neck to protect his throat, Henry’s inadvertent suggestion trails after him. The idea plants itself, grows roots, and when he gets back to the dorms, when he’s glancing through the newspaper someone’s left on the kitchen table, when his attention is caught by a small ad in the classifieds section, he finds himself considering it as a possibility.
Later still, when he calls a friend in Beijing, he finds himself lowering his voice to something between a purr and laryngitis, just to see if he can do it.
“What’s wrong?” his friend asks thirty seconds into the call. “Are you sick?”
* * *
He almost abandons the idea. It’s not like Henry was being serious, after all. It was just idle chitchat. But Zhou Mi can never just forget about things, and three days after their conversation, he retrieves the folded newspaper from beneath his mattress and places a call to the offices of Talk Is Cheap.
“You done this before?” the secretary, or switchboard operator, or maybe she’s the company boss, asks in a brisk tone.
“No,” says Zhou Mi. “But I like to talk.”
“You ever work in the adult entertainment industry?”
He pauses, wonders if boyband skinship would fall under that description, then answers, “I don’t think so.”
The woman chuckles. “A sense of humour. You’ll need it.”
“I’m not Korean.” Zhou Mi thinks he should be honest. “I’m Chinese.”
She tuts. “Honey, they can’t see you. Believe me, they’re not gonna care. And your Korean sounds good enough to me. You run into language problems, make like you’re coming hard.”
Zhou Mi catches a glimpse of himself in the dressing table mirror. His face is flushed. He can’t hold his own gaze. Heat crawls over every inch of his body. “Do you, uh, do you want me to, er, audition?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Training, then.” He’s sweating, palm slippery around the phone. “Do you provide training for the job?”
She laughs. “This is your training, honey. There’s no script, either. Don’t worry about it. Just talk. If the guy on the other end doesn’t like what you’re saying, he’ll hang up. If he does like it, he’ll hang up a little later. It’s as simple as that.”
It sounds easy. He listens while she outlines how the call system works and how he gets paid, and he thinks, yeah, this is going to be really easy. He’s good at talking, he knows how to fill awkward silences, and he knows how to use his voice to good effect.
“So,” the woman asks, “when can you start?”
* * *
Two weeks later, Zhou Mi thinks he’s getting the hang of it. The first call seemed to drag on forever, though when he looked at the phone display afterwards he found it had lasted all of four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. It had been painful, too, as awkward and fumbling as any first time. He’d talked too fast, giggled too much. Since then he’s slowed down, doesn’t ask complicated questions, and is learning to read the garbled noises that reach him down the phone line.
He’s also stopped dressing for the occasion. It’s a lot easier to sprawl on the bed in jeans and a t-shirt while he constructs masturbatory flights of fancy. He stares at the ceiling while he does it. The bland expanse of white paint seems to inspire him. It’s not that he particularly enjoys listening to strangers get off to the sound of his voice, but he likes the freedom to be creative, and he supposes there’s a certain kind of power to it, the knowledge that what he says matters, even if only as stroke fodder.
He’s just had time to drink his now lukewarm ginger tea when his phone rings again. It’s his sixth call of the night, and Zhou Mi answers it by rote. He’s not even curious any more. Most of his clients lack imagination. He’s been a college twink for the past four calls, and he’s just about to drop into that persona again when he realises he didn’t pay attention to the caller’s request. A brief clutch of panic goes through him, but he knows he can bluff his way into the caller’s fantasy. Talking dirty is a lot less problematic than herding his bandmates on live television in three different languages.
“Hi,” he murmurs, “what would you like from me?”
There’s an indrawn breath from his caller. “Um. Hello?”
The guy sounds nervous. He also sounds a little familiar, but that’s something Zhou Mi has got used to over the last couple of weeks. Every caller sounds like someone he knows. It’s normal, the switchboard operator, or his boss, or whatever she was, told him. Something to do with the way telephones can distort voices, or maybe it was to do with residual guilt for taking on a job as a sex worker or some such shit. Whatever, Zhou Mi can handle it. He drops his voice a little lower. “Hey there. Don’t be shy. Tell me what you really want.”
“Uh. I, uh.”
There’s a noise from the other end of the phone, a burst of laughter in the background, and Zhou Mi releases a sigh. Just some idiots ringing up for a joke. Not that it matters. He still gets paid, even if all he does is listen to some drunken high school kids giving him some abuse. Their phone bill, their problem.
Weird noises reach him, scuffling and clacking, and then the laughter stops and a door slams and the caller comes back on the line. “Sorry.” He sounds flustered. How sweet. “Really sorry. My friend is a dick. I thought- He told me he was calling for pizza and then he asked me to place the order.” A breathless laugh. “I didn’t know it was one of, um, those calls.”
Zhou Mi is amused. “That’s cute. I don’t think anyone’s been tricked into talking to me before. Anyway, how do you know I’m not the pizza place?”
A pause. “Your voice sounds sexy.”
It’s the first time in two weeks that anyone’s told him that. A totally misplaced burst of happiness lights Zhou Mi’s mood. “You think my voice is sexy?”
“Yeah.” The caller hesitates, then gives a self-conscious laugh. “Sorry. I should hang up. You must have other calls waiting. People who actually want to...”
“Use my services?” Zhou Mi regrets his arch tone as soon as the words leave his mouth. He can almost feel the caller’s embarrassment, and it makes him somehow want to make amends. “Actually, I don’t have anyone waiting. We can chat some more, if you like the sound of my voice so much. Or I can pretend to be the pizza delivery guy bringing you something tasty and hot.”
There’s a short, startled silence, and then the caller snort-laughs. “Oh God. Oh, you did not just say that. That-that’s bad.”
Zhou Mi stifles his own laughter and adopts a playful, over the top growl. “You’d be surprised how good it feels to be bad.”
The caller cracks up. There’s a clunk on the end of the line and the sound is muffled for a while, but distantly Zhou Mi can hear rapid, uncontrollable giggles. A few moments later, the guy picks up the phone again. “Are you for real? I mean, d’you have a script or something?”
“No script.” This is a source of pride now rather than trauma.
“So you’re improvising.” The caller’s voice softens. “That must be difficult.”
“Sometimes. If I have a call from someone impossible.”
“You mean someone like me?”
Zhou Mi shakes his head, not that his caller can see him. “No. Some guys really are impossible. They change their fantasies halfway through and expect me to read their minds. And I don’t particularly like it when they want me to humiliate myself. Just because I like to suck cock doesn’t mean I should give myself abuse for it just so some closeted homophobic wanker can get off to it.”
There’s a long silence. “Wow,” the caller says. “People are strange, huh.”
“Yeah.” Zhou Mi pauses. The conversation is kind of surreal, and he’s in danger of enjoying it a little too much. His caller has a nice voice, soft and low and naturally sultry, the kind of voice that Zhou Mi appreciates most about a man. “I should let you go,” he says reluctantly. “Your friend is probably waiting for you to call for pizza for real.”
“I told you, my friend’s a dick. But yeah. I should go.” The caller hesitates again, then asks in a rush, “Can I talk to you again, maybe? When my dick friend isn’t around. Are you allowed to do that?”
The request throws him. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and Zhou Mi flounders a bit before he answers. “Sure. It’s allowed.”
“Great.” The caller’s eagerness is adorable. “Do I ask for you by name, or...”
“By operator number,” Zhou Mi says quickly. “I’m 554. Just ask for 554 and they’ll put you through if I’m free.”
“You don’t have a name?” The caller sounds disappointed.
Zhou Mi stops himself in time. “Make one up for me,” he says. “Give me a name. I’ll be whoever you want.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” the caller asks, but now he sounds amused. “I’ll give you a name if you give me a name, how about that.”
It seems like a fair deal. “Okay. Call me again.”
The caller chuckles, the sound warm and sexy. “I look forwards to it.”
“Me, too,” Zhou Mi says, and for once he’s not pretending.
* * *
“So, what’s my name?” Zhou Mi asks when the same guy rings up the next day.
“I haven’t decided yet,” the caller says. “What about me?”
Zhou Mi stretches out on the bed. “Usually I give my clients nicknames in my head while we’re talking. Descriptors, really. Like ‘cop fantasist’ or ‘farmyard pervert’ or ‘vibe fan’.”
“Vibe fan?” The caller sounds startled. “Um, you use toys on the phone?”
“Sure.” Zhou Mi lets himself get all throaty. “Wanna hear me play?”
“Ah,” says the caller, but he doesn’t say no.
“Let me just get one out.” Zhou Mi swaps the phone from one hand to the other, then yanks open the bedside drawer and spends a moment rummaging around.
“One?” the caller echoes. “You have more than one?”
“Of course.” Zhou Mi is lying, but there’s no harm in that. “I have three, each one bigger than the last. Six inches-that’s the vibrator-and then I have two dildos. There’s the ten inch, and the biggest is fifteen inches, and it’s really thick, so when I put it inside me I’m stretched all the way open.”
The caller makes a sound halfway between a cough and a squeak. “You can take something that big?”
Zhou Mi rolls onto his back and cradles the vibrator to his chest, dances his fingers along the sleek, slippery plastic shaft. “I can take a lot. How big are you?”
“I-I’m...” The caller stops, draws in a deep breath. “That’s not... I just want to talk to you. Hear your voice.”
“You like it, hmm?” Zhou Mi heaves a sexy little sigh. “If you think my voice sounds hot now, just imagine how much better it sounds when I’m being fucked. I get all breathless and excited. I get really loud. Make me horny enough and I’ll scream until my throat is raw. I bet you could do that to me. Would you like that?”
There’s a shuddery exhalation, and then the line goes dead.
* * *
“I’m sorry about last time,” the caller says two days later. “It was... unexpected.”
Zhou Mi laughs. “This is a phone sex line. It’s my moral duty to get you off.”
“You have a strange sense of morality.” A playful thread tickles through the caller’s voice. “Did you think of a name for me yet?”
“After yesterday I should call you Shy Guy.” Zhou Mi slides just enough of a coquettish tease into his voice. “But on second thoughts, I’m going to call you... Gentleman Caller.”
“I like that,” Gentleman Caller says. “It’s so old-fashioned.”
“Polite and well-mannered,” Zhou Mi says. “Makes me think of you dressed in a suit and tie and shiny, polished shoes.”
Gentleman Caller makes an amused sound. “You like men in suits?”
“Baby,” Zhou Mi purrs, “I just like men.”
He expects laughter, but Gentleman Caller stays quiet for a moment, then says with a strange intensity, “I love your voice. You always sound happy and passionate, even when you’re not. You have a voice that gives so much. Conceals so much.”
Zhou Mi is silenced. He summons back his wits. “Gentleman Caller, have you been drinking?”
Soft laughter drifts from the other end of the line. “No. But maybe I should, huh?”
“Maybe.” Zhou Mi sits up. “Honestly, I’m flattered by this, I really am. I’m glad you like my voice so much. I just wish you’d let me use it to give you more pleasure. Wouldn’t you like to hear me moan and beg for you to take me hard against the wall or over a desk? Wouldn’t you like to gag me with your big, thick cock and hear the muffled, desperate sounds I make as you drive into my hungry mouth?”
Gentleman Caller sighs, wistful and perhaps also a little lustful. “You don’t need to exercise your moral imperative with me.”
“Oh, let me.” Zhou Mi drops his voice to a husky growl that triggers orgasms in about sixty percent of his clientele. “Let me be good to you.”
Silence. It goes on for so long that Zhou Mi starts to worry. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.” Gentleman Caller sounds thoughtful. “I have a name for you.”
Zhou Mi clings to the phone. A thrill of anticipation goes through him. “What?”
“Honey,” Gentleman Caller says. “Because that’s what you sound like.”
* * *
They talk every day after that. Gentleman Caller is punctual, always ringing at the same time, except for the few occasions when he doesn’t, but that’s okay because he always lets Zhou Mi know in advance when he’s going to be late.
They talk every day, and whenever Zhou Mi tries to bring the conversation around to sex, Gentleman Caller goes quiet or changes the subject.
They talk, and Zhou Mi opens up to him, tells him secrets, tells him truths, gives himself over more honestly and completely than he would to a lover. It helps that Gentleman Caller is on the end of a phone line. It helps that Zhou Mi can’t see his face.
Anonymity is a wonderful thing. In the spaces between real life, across empty bursts of static, they can be friends.
* * *
Their conversations lengthen. The longest lasts one hundred and twenty-three minutes, fifteen seconds. Zhou Mi is the one who ends it. “Talk is cheap, but this call is not.”
“I don’t care,” says Gentleman Caller. “I just want to hear your voice.”
* * *
One day, Gentleman Caller is late. Zhou Mi frets. He pounces on his phone when it rings and chokes back the slam of disappointment when it’s someone else. He fumbles his way through the call, unable to drop into the necessary headspace. It takes eleven minutes and fifty-two seconds for his client to reach orgasm. By the time it’s over, Zhou Mi has a headache. He almost logs out of the system, but he waits just a little longer, fingers curled around the phone, his face buried against a pillow.
He falls asleep. When the phone rings, the sound shocks him into wakefulness, and he’s so disorientated that he snaps, “Where were you?” as soon as the call comes through.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Gentleman Caller says. “Honey, forgive me.”
“Don’t you want to talk to me?” Zhou Mi knows he sounds plaintive. He can hear the need in his voice and he doesn’t like it, so he takes refuge in humour. “Did you get your phone bill?”
“Honey.” Gentleman Caller says the word softly, stretches it out like warm toffee. “Honey, I dreamed of you last night.”
Zhou Mi sits up, headache forgotten. “You did?”
“Yeah.” Gentleman Caller sighs, sad and regretful. “This will sound weird. I don’t even know if I should be telling you. It seems a bit...”
“Backwards?” Zhou Mi suggests. His heart is beating just a little too fast. “It’s okay. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”
Silence, drawn-out and heated. “I want to.” There’s a catch in Gentleman Caller’s voice, a quiver of longing, and Zhou Mi responds to it, unfurls like a flower in the sun.
“Tell me,” he says, coaxes, wanting to hear more. “Tell me your dream.”
Gentleman Caller gives an embarrassed laugh. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no logic to it. Just a scene. An image. You and me.”
Zhou Mi trembles at the thought. “What do I look like, in your dream?
“Beautiful,” Gentleman Caller says on a sigh. “You’re beautiful. Tall and slender with legs that go on forever.”
Zhou Mi moves to the edge of the bed and stares at his reflection, half-glimpsed in the dressing table mirror. “I can be beautiful for you.”
“Honey, I know you’re beautiful. I saw you. Every inch of you.” Gentleman Caller sounds passionate, as if he really believes in his fantasy.
Zhou Mi feels heady with the backlash of desire. “What did you do to me?”
“With you,” Gentleman Caller corrects, voice sliding into an intimate purr. “We did it together. You wanted me as much as I wanted you.”
“Oh,” says Zhou Mi. Mutuality has never entered into the equation before. Not during other dialogues of this nature. He’s not sure what to say. “Oh,” he whispers again, then pulls himself together and tries to take charge. “Did you fuck me? Did you make me scream?”
“Not scream, no. I made you whimper. Very, very soft whimpers, like you didn’t want me to know how excited you were. The kind of whimpers you’re making now.”
Zhou Mi catches himself. “Am I whimpering?”
“Yes,” says Gentleman Caller, and then, “Don’t stop.” His breathing flutters, and behind it there’s a stealthy sound, a slick noise, skin on skin.
Zhou Mi knows he should be sophisticated and casual about this, but he’s nervous and hungry and thrilled, and he blurts out, “Are you jerking off?”
Gentleman Caller chuckles, rich and sweet. “Yes.”
“After all this time. I’m flattered.” Zhou Mi is blushing. He thinks Gentleman Caller can hear it in his voice. He lies back down on the bed and stretches out on the duvet. Excitement warms him, weaves through his body, bringing happiness in its wake. “What did I feel like, in your dream?”
“Good. Hard and soft at the same time. Like you might break if I didn’t please you. Like you could take everything I gave you and more and more and more.”
Zhou Mi can’t help it. He whimpers again.
Gentleman Caller sucks in a breath. “God, Honey, that noise. Make it again. I want to taste it. Want to kiss that noise right out of your beautiful mouth.”
Another whimper slips free. Zhou Mi bites the back of his forefinger to stifle the sound. He makes a little keening noise.
“Are you hard, Honey?” Gentleman Caller asks, his voice dark and compelling and so luscious that Zhou Mi can’t resist.
“Yes,” he moans, and it’s true, he’s hard, and now he wants to touch himself, but that’s what he’d do if this was all scripted, and he doesn’t want to be so obvious. Instead he flattens his palm against his chest and runs it down his body, harder and rougher than he usually likes, and it’s different enough that it shocks him and makes him squirm and he makes another noise, needy and gasping.
“Oh, Honey,” Gentleman Caller says, his voice hard-edged and twisted with lust, “I want to stroke you. Want you in my lap. I want your legs around me. I want you over my mouth. I want to suck you while you blow me. I want you everywhere.”
Zhou Mi pops the button on his fly, drags down the zipper. “I’d like that. I’d like it a lot.”
“So would I.” The sound is hoarse against his skin, Gentleman Caller’s voice rough like sandpaper rubbing him all over, and Zhou Mi aches with want. “Honey,” Gentleman Caller says, “Honey, I want to fuck you until you come.”
“Fuck,” Zhou Mi breathes in echo, his hand on his cock now, his hips arching off the bed as he gives himself one long, delicious pull. He drops back down, the bedsprings squeaking. “Yes. Fuck me. Make me come.”
Gentleman Caller groans. “I want to taste you. Want to bite you. Would you let me, Honey? Turn your head and let me bite your neck. Let me dig my nails into your thighs, your ass. Let me spread you open so I can see every part of you. I want to pull your hair and make you look at me while I fuck you. I want your hair between my fingers, soft like silk, red silk. I want you to have red hair, Honey.”
“I do,” Zhou Mi gasps, his hand moving faster. “I do, I do.”
“I want you to be mine. All mine.” Gentleman Caller’s breathing is harsh and rapid, his voice gruff. “I want to watch you. I want you on top of me so I know what you look like when you come. I want to make you come. Can you feel me, Honey? I want to fill you up. Want to make you come long and hard and now, Honey.”
“Almost.” The word explodes out of him, frustrated and desperate. Zhou Mi can barely keep hold of the phone. “Almost almost almost-”
Pleasure breaks him, spreads him liquid and brilliant all over the bed. His body hums with it for a long time afterwards, a string well-plucked, a call with multiple echoes. He’s trying to process it, struggling to come down from the high, when Gentleman Caller says, “I think I love you.”
Zhou Mi gasps. “What?”
Silence, agonising silence; and then Gentleman Caller says, “Goodnight, Honey,” and hangs up.
* * *
He doesn’t call again. Not the next day, nor the day after that, or even the day after that. Zhou Mi logs on every night and asks the switchboard operator to hold all calls except the one from Gentleman Caller.
“You and he got something goin’ on, honey?” she asks, and Zhou Mi flinches from her casual endearment.
“Yes,” he says, then, “no.”
“Make your mind up.” He hears the tap of her fingernails against the phone. “I can get you his name and number, if you want. Against company policy, you understand, but since you’ve made us a small fortune these past few weeks, I’d be willing to overlook the rules.”
Zhou Mi considers the offer. Considers what he’d do with the information. He can’t imagine telephoning Gentleman Caller on his own initiative. It would spoil the dynamic, ruin the illusion. “No,” he says, voice very small. “It wouldn’t be right.”
“No, it wouldn’t, would it,” she says, amused now. “You’re a funny one.”
She hangs up. Zhou Mi lies back on the bed. He’s not waiting. He’s not.
* * *
Four days after they had sex, Gentleman Caller finally rings.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he says before Zhou Mi can speak. “It’s too much. It’s... it’s not what I want. Not what I intended.” He pauses. “I never meant to hurt you.”
Zhou Mi’s emotions are staging a riot, but he hopes he sounds cool and in control. “How do you know you hurt me?”
“Your voice,” Gentleman Caller says. “It’s different.”
“Yes. Well.” Zhou Mi swallows. His throat is dry. “It’s not like it matters, anyway. You don’t owe me anything. I get paid whatever we talk about. And actually, it’s much easier to talk about my life than to make up fantasies on demand.”
“Is it?” Gentleman Caller asks, softly, so softly. “Is it, Honey?”
Zhou Mi shuts his eyes. “Please don’t call me that.”
“Then what can I call you?”
“Nothing.” He feels hot. His eyes sting. Zhou Mi doesn’t want to cry over this, for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t want to think about how fucking sad and meaningless his life has become if he’s ready to start sobbing over the fact that some faceless guy on the other end of the phone is dumping him for-for-he doesn’t even know why. Dumping him for not being real enough, he supposes. The fucking irony of it. Their conversations made him feel real, and now it’s over and he’s a mess and he can’t even tell anyone about it.
His unhappiness must somehow translate itself down the phone. “Honey,” Gentleman Caller says, sounding helpless. “Oh, Honey...”
“Don’t.” Zhou Mi bites out the word. “Just don’t. Don’t call me that. Don’t call me at all. I don’t want to hear from you ever again.”
“It’s not like that.” Gentleman Caller sounds desperate. “Don’t hang up on me. Please listen. I want to do this differently. Not on the phone.”
“Not-” Zhou Mi almost chokes. “What?”
Gentleman Caller exhales. “I want us to meet for real.”
“I can’t.” This isn’t happening, can’t be happening, but all the same he wants it to be true. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Shhh, Honey, shhh.” Gentleman Caller softens his voice, concern and affection pouring through the phone line. “Just once. Meet me. See how much I want you.”
“I...” Zhou Mi curls his toes. “Maybe we could-”
“Oh my God!” Suddenly there’s another voice in the background, a loud, brash voice that rises to a triumphant yelp. “Oh my fucking God!”
Zhou Mi frowns. The second voice is familiar. He reminds himself that all voices over the phone are familiar, but no, this voice is really familiar, and the voice is speaking a garbled mix of English and Korean, and the accent is familiar, too, and then the voice shrieks, “Jesus fucking Christ, Sungmin, are you using Siwon’s actual phone to call Mimi’s sex line? He will totally kill you, dude! That’s premium fucking rate, man!”
Reality crashes over Zhou Mi with all the panache of a high-speed train derailing. “Sungmin?”
“Shit,” says Sungmin, and it really is Sungmin, that’s why he sounded so familiar all this time, and Zhou Mi hates him, absolutely hates him, and now his heart is breaking, and he has a million furious things to say and he can’t speak, can’t get a single word out, so he cuts the call, sobs, throws the phone across the room so it hits the wall.
Ten seconds later, Henry is banging on his door and howling with laughter. “Dude, what the fuck! Get out here! I can’t believe this shit, oh my God!”
Zhou Mi wants to hide. Hibernate for the rest of the year in his room. Maybe he can climb out of the window or something. Maybe he’ll slip and fall and hit the ground and nothing will matter anymore. He covers his ears to block out the sound of Henry pummelling the door.
Then he pulls himself together, the way he always does. He has to face it. He has nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not like any of it was real. All the things he said, all the things they shared, it wasn’t real. It was phoned in; it was just pretend.
Zhou Mi keeps on telling himself that right up until he opens the door.
Henry almost bounces in at him. “Sungmin is, like, dead meat. He borrowed Siwon’s phone and called you. Those things are like eighty cents a minute at home. Or so I’ve been told. Oh man! I can’t wait until Siwon finds out. He is going to freak.”
Zhou Mi looks past Henry at Sungmin, who’s standing in the corridor with Siwon’s iPhone still clutched tight in his hand. “You knew it was me all along?”
“Of course we did!” Henry sounds inappropriately cheerful. “That Talk Is Cheap place, it was a start-up, right? So it’s not like they had that many guys on staff. I tried to get a job there myself, but they told me I talked like a pre-schooler and there’s a rule about no children and animals-”
The words clatter off him. Zhou Mi barely listens, still staring at Sungmin, beautiful, silent Sungmin; his Gentleman Caller who’d made him come so hard four nights ago.
“I totally left that newspaper lying around so you’d find it,” Henry’s still babbling away, “I was going to, like, circle the ad in red pen or something, but I thought that’d be too obvious, and I really hoped you’d go for it, ‘cos that’s, like, totally hilarious, and it only took me three tries to get put through to you and-”
Zhou Mi interrupts. “Why did you make Sungmin talk to me?”
Henry blinks. “Cos, dude, you’d have known it was me right away. It was only meant to be a one-off! I totally didn’t tell him to borrow Siwon’s phone just now, but...” He stops, realisation dawning, his expression comical. “Oh wow!” He spins around to face Sungmin. “Yo, like, how many times did you call him?”
Sungmin is still staring at Zhou Mi. “Every night.”
“Almost every night,” Zhou Mi corrects.
Henry looks between them, his eyes shining as he puts two and two together and comes up with some unbelievable sum. He makes gleeful windmilling motions with his arms. “This is so cool! It’s like... I don’t know what it’s like! But it’s cool anyway! And the best bit is-you used Siwon’s phone!”
Sungmin flicks him an amused look. “Go away, Henry.”
“Huh? Oh! Okay, sure.” Obedient despite his enthusiasm, Henry leaves the corridor with exaggerated slowness, making sure to turn back every other step to give encouraging smiles and a double thumbs up.
Sungmin waits until the door to Henry’s room has closed with a somewhat obvious slam before he steps forward. Hemming Zhou Mi in against the doorframe, he tilts his head and smiles that bewitching foxy smile and says, “So.”
Zhou Mi feels outmanoeuvred and out of control. He kind of likes it. “So,” he echoes, “maybe we should talk about this.”
“We’ve done enough talking.” Sungmin splays his fingertips against Zhou Mi’s chest and pushes him back into the room. He closes the door behind them, still smiling. “It’s time we made our connection real.”
Fandom: Super Junior
Pairing: Zhou Mi/Sungmin
Rating: R
Summary: Zhou Mi spends his evenings talking dirty, but really he just wants someone to listen.
Notes: For congruencies as part of sujuexchange. The prompt was: Zhou Mi: Sporadically employed F-list Asian popstar by day, phone sex operator by night.
Gentleman Caller
What he doesn’t know about sex isn’t worth knowing. At least that’s what Zhou Mi tells himself as he gets ready for his first night at his new job. He’s prepared for this. No, he’s over-prepared. He’s consumed more porn in the last week than Hyukjae has watched in his entire life. There are images seared into his brain that he wishes he could erase. He knows the clinical terms for desires he can’t even begin to comprehend. His head is stuffed with conflicting ideas of eroticism.
He can’t even imagine having sex with someone ever again. But that’s okay, because he’s only going to pretend to have sex with someone, and maybe if he’s good at it, he’ll be able to talk dirty and do something more interesting instead, like moisturising his face or buffing his nails.
The open page of his contacts book taunts him with the information it contains. He knows the numbers off by heart already, but still he follows each digit with care as he calls the company number. He waits, enters his ID and password when prompted, then hangs up and waits again.
He seems to spend most of his life waiting. Waiting to grow up, waiting for love, waiting for fame, waiting for acceptance, waiting for the end of Super Junior’s promotions so Super Junior-M can make a new album, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Candlelight flickers around the room. The stereo is turned down low, the music just enough to block out the noise bleeding through from the rest of the dorm. Zhou Mi sits on the edge of his bed and fiddles with the hem of his pyjama shirt. He’s wearing black satin, the fabric cool and slithery against his skin. For this first night on the job, he wanted to set the appropriate mood. Instead he just feels self-conscious.
He reclines on the bed, strikes a seductive pose, and tries to summon sexy thoughts, but all he can think of is an unpleasant scene from a porno involving farmyard animals and a pool of slurry.
He has never wanted sex less than he does right now.
His ringtone blares out. Zhou Mi jumps up as if scalded, then closes his hand around the phone, lifts it, and before he can think better of his decision, he hits the answer button.
“This is Talk Is Cheap,” says the switchboard operator in soothing tones. “The caller has requested a strict headmaster.”
There’s only way to beat stage fright. He takes the call.
* * *
They have a lot of downtime while the rest of Super Junior make the rounds of live stages and fan events. Henry claims it’s like a holiday for him, but Zhou Mi always feels like a country cousin to be brought out and brushed down and paraded for a few months every year in the hope of enticing suitors.
Henry spends his time lolling around the dorms and making eyes at Ryeowook. Occasionally he play virtuoso pieces on the violin or piano that make Zhou Mi want to simultaneously strangle him and sob with envy because he is just that good, whereas Zhou Mi knows he only has his voice, and his voice sometimes fails him, and he always seems to have a throat infection these days.
He feels pretty much useless when the rest of the group doesn’t need him, so he sits and writes lyrics instead.
Henry keeps him company, sprawled at the kitchen table with a big mug of milky coffee while Zhou Mi sips ginger tea. “I want to write music,” Henry says, “write songs about love and Thursday afternoons and rain against the sidewalk and the way people move when they’re in love, but if I write anything, anything at all, it belongs to the company. So I’ll only write what they tell me to write, and the rest I’ll keep in my head.”
Zhou Mi draws a line through the lyrics his pen had been chasing across the page of his notebook. “That’s a shame.”
“Yeah.” Henry opens a big bag of potato chips and feels his way right to the bottom before taking a handful. He munches on the chips, crumbs dropping onto his Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie. “Wish we could have some sort of paid side-job, y’know? Just to pass the time. Just so I’d feel like less of a spare part.”
Zhou Mi hasn’t the heart to scold him for talking with his mouth full. “Look at how well that worked for our ex-upstairs neighbours.”
Henry laughs. “I’m not talking about some dodgy cosmetics shit. I dunno, man, something small. Putting library books back on the shelves. Copying audio transcripts. That sort of thing. Like, there was this girl I knew back home, she put herself through college doing one of those phone sex lines.”
Zhou Mi looks up. “Phone sex?”
“Yeah.” Henry grabs more chips. “You know, all that ‘Baby, you’re so big! So hard! Uh, uh, ride me big boy!’ crap for losers who can’t get laid for real. Kinda lame, but yo, it paid the bills.” He frowns, wrinkles his nose. “Though I kinda heard too that she was a hooker. But I dunno. She was a real good singer.”
The non-sequitur sticks in Zhou Mi’s mind. Even later, when he goes out shopping with his extra-long scarf wrapped around his neck to protect his throat, Henry’s inadvertent suggestion trails after him. The idea plants itself, grows roots, and when he gets back to the dorms, when he’s glancing through the newspaper someone’s left on the kitchen table, when his attention is caught by a small ad in the classifieds section, he finds himself considering it as a possibility.
Later still, when he calls a friend in Beijing, he finds himself lowering his voice to something between a purr and laryngitis, just to see if he can do it.
“What’s wrong?” his friend asks thirty seconds into the call. “Are you sick?”
* * *
He almost abandons the idea. It’s not like Henry was being serious, after all. It was just idle chitchat. But Zhou Mi can never just forget about things, and three days after their conversation, he retrieves the folded newspaper from beneath his mattress and places a call to the offices of Talk Is Cheap.
“You done this before?” the secretary, or switchboard operator, or maybe she’s the company boss, asks in a brisk tone.
“No,” says Zhou Mi. “But I like to talk.”
“You ever work in the adult entertainment industry?”
He pauses, wonders if boyband skinship would fall under that description, then answers, “I don’t think so.”
The woman chuckles. “A sense of humour. You’ll need it.”
“I’m not Korean.” Zhou Mi thinks he should be honest. “I’m Chinese.”
She tuts. “Honey, they can’t see you. Believe me, they’re not gonna care. And your Korean sounds good enough to me. You run into language problems, make like you’re coming hard.”
Zhou Mi catches a glimpse of himself in the dressing table mirror. His face is flushed. He can’t hold his own gaze. Heat crawls over every inch of his body. “Do you, uh, do you want me to, er, audition?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Training, then.” He’s sweating, palm slippery around the phone. “Do you provide training for the job?”
She laughs. “This is your training, honey. There’s no script, either. Don’t worry about it. Just talk. If the guy on the other end doesn’t like what you’re saying, he’ll hang up. If he does like it, he’ll hang up a little later. It’s as simple as that.”
It sounds easy. He listens while she outlines how the call system works and how he gets paid, and he thinks, yeah, this is going to be really easy. He’s good at talking, he knows how to fill awkward silences, and he knows how to use his voice to good effect.
“So,” the woman asks, “when can you start?”
* * *
Two weeks later, Zhou Mi thinks he’s getting the hang of it. The first call seemed to drag on forever, though when he looked at the phone display afterwards he found it had lasted all of four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. It had been painful, too, as awkward and fumbling as any first time. He’d talked too fast, giggled too much. Since then he’s slowed down, doesn’t ask complicated questions, and is learning to read the garbled noises that reach him down the phone line.
He’s also stopped dressing for the occasion. It’s a lot easier to sprawl on the bed in jeans and a t-shirt while he constructs masturbatory flights of fancy. He stares at the ceiling while he does it. The bland expanse of white paint seems to inspire him. It’s not that he particularly enjoys listening to strangers get off to the sound of his voice, but he likes the freedom to be creative, and he supposes there’s a certain kind of power to it, the knowledge that what he says matters, even if only as stroke fodder.
He’s just had time to drink his now lukewarm ginger tea when his phone rings again. It’s his sixth call of the night, and Zhou Mi answers it by rote. He’s not even curious any more. Most of his clients lack imagination. He’s been a college twink for the past four calls, and he’s just about to drop into that persona again when he realises he didn’t pay attention to the caller’s request. A brief clutch of panic goes through him, but he knows he can bluff his way into the caller’s fantasy. Talking dirty is a lot less problematic than herding his bandmates on live television in three different languages.
“Hi,” he murmurs, “what would you like from me?”
There’s an indrawn breath from his caller. “Um. Hello?”
The guy sounds nervous. He also sounds a little familiar, but that’s something Zhou Mi has got used to over the last couple of weeks. Every caller sounds like someone he knows. It’s normal, the switchboard operator, or his boss, or whatever she was, told him. Something to do with the way telephones can distort voices, or maybe it was to do with residual guilt for taking on a job as a sex worker or some such shit. Whatever, Zhou Mi can handle it. He drops his voice a little lower. “Hey there. Don’t be shy. Tell me what you really want.”
“Uh. I, uh.”
There’s a noise from the other end of the phone, a burst of laughter in the background, and Zhou Mi releases a sigh. Just some idiots ringing up for a joke. Not that it matters. He still gets paid, even if all he does is listen to some drunken high school kids giving him some abuse. Their phone bill, their problem.
Weird noises reach him, scuffling and clacking, and then the laughter stops and a door slams and the caller comes back on the line. “Sorry.” He sounds flustered. How sweet. “Really sorry. My friend is a dick. I thought- He told me he was calling for pizza and then he asked me to place the order.” A breathless laugh. “I didn’t know it was one of, um, those calls.”
Zhou Mi is amused. “That’s cute. I don’t think anyone’s been tricked into talking to me before. Anyway, how do you know I’m not the pizza place?”
A pause. “Your voice sounds sexy.”
It’s the first time in two weeks that anyone’s told him that. A totally misplaced burst of happiness lights Zhou Mi’s mood. “You think my voice is sexy?”
“Yeah.” The caller hesitates, then gives a self-conscious laugh. “Sorry. I should hang up. You must have other calls waiting. People who actually want to...”
“Use my services?” Zhou Mi regrets his arch tone as soon as the words leave his mouth. He can almost feel the caller’s embarrassment, and it makes him somehow want to make amends. “Actually, I don’t have anyone waiting. We can chat some more, if you like the sound of my voice so much. Or I can pretend to be the pizza delivery guy bringing you something tasty and hot.”
There’s a short, startled silence, and then the caller snort-laughs. “Oh God. Oh, you did not just say that. That-that’s bad.”
Zhou Mi stifles his own laughter and adopts a playful, over the top growl. “You’d be surprised how good it feels to be bad.”
The caller cracks up. There’s a clunk on the end of the line and the sound is muffled for a while, but distantly Zhou Mi can hear rapid, uncontrollable giggles. A few moments later, the guy picks up the phone again. “Are you for real? I mean, d’you have a script or something?”
“No script.” This is a source of pride now rather than trauma.
“So you’re improvising.” The caller’s voice softens. “That must be difficult.”
“Sometimes. If I have a call from someone impossible.”
“You mean someone like me?”
Zhou Mi shakes his head, not that his caller can see him. “No. Some guys really are impossible. They change their fantasies halfway through and expect me to read their minds. And I don’t particularly like it when they want me to humiliate myself. Just because I like to suck cock doesn’t mean I should give myself abuse for it just so some closeted homophobic wanker can get off to it.”
There’s a long silence. “Wow,” the caller says. “People are strange, huh.”
“Yeah.” Zhou Mi pauses. The conversation is kind of surreal, and he’s in danger of enjoying it a little too much. His caller has a nice voice, soft and low and naturally sultry, the kind of voice that Zhou Mi appreciates most about a man. “I should let you go,” he says reluctantly. “Your friend is probably waiting for you to call for pizza for real.”
“I told you, my friend’s a dick. But yeah. I should go.” The caller hesitates again, then asks in a rush, “Can I talk to you again, maybe? When my dick friend isn’t around. Are you allowed to do that?”
The request throws him. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and Zhou Mi flounders a bit before he answers. “Sure. It’s allowed.”
“Great.” The caller’s eagerness is adorable. “Do I ask for you by name, or...”
“By operator number,” Zhou Mi says quickly. “I’m 554. Just ask for 554 and they’ll put you through if I’m free.”
“You don’t have a name?” The caller sounds disappointed.
Zhou Mi stops himself in time. “Make one up for me,” he says. “Give me a name. I’ll be whoever you want.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” the caller asks, but now he sounds amused. “I’ll give you a name if you give me a name, how about that.”
It seems like a fair deal. “Okay. Call me again.”
The caller chuckles, the sound warm and sexy. “I look forwards to it.”
“Me, too,” Zhou Mi says, and for once he’s not pretending.
* * *
“So, what’s my name?” Zhou Mi asks when the same guy rings up the next day.
“I haven’t decided yet,” the caller says. “What about me?”
Zhou Mi stretches out on the bed. “Usually I give my clients nicknames in my head while we’re talking. Descriptors, really. Like ‘cop fantasist’ or ‘farmyard pervert’ or ‘vibe fan’.”
“Vibe fan?” The caller sounds startled. “Um, you use toys on the phone?”
“Sure.” Zhou Mi lets himself get all throaty. “Wanna hear me play?”
“Ah,” says the caller, but he doesn’t say no.
“Let me just get one out.” Zhou Mi swaps the phone from one hand to the other, then yanks open the bedside drawer and spends a moment rummaging around.
“One?” the caller echoes. “You have more than one?”
“Of course.” Zhou Mi is lying, but there’s no harm in that. “I have three, each one bigger than the last. Six inches-that’s the vibrator-and then I have two dildos. There’s the ten inch, and the biggest is fifteen inches, and it’s really thick, so when I put it inside me I’m stretched all the way open.”
The caller makes a sound halfway between a cough and a squeak. “You can take something that big?”
Zhou Mi rolls onto his back and cradles the vibrator to his chest, dances his fingers along the sleek, slippery plastic shaft. “I can take a lot. How big are you?”
“I-I’m...” The caller stops, draws in a deep breath. “That’s not... I just want to talk to you. Hear your voice.”
“You like it, hmm?” Zhou Mi heaves a sexy little sigh. “If you think my voice sounds hot now, just imagine how much better it sounds when I’m being fucked. I get all breathless and excited. I get really loud. Make me horny enough and I’ll scream until my throat is raw. I bet you could do that to me. Would you like that?”
There’s a shuddery exhalation, and then the line goes dead.
* * *
“I’m sorry about last time,” the caller says two days later. “It was... unexpected.”
Zhou Mi laughs. “This is a phone sex line. It’s my moral duty to get you off.”
“You have a strange sense of morality.” A playful thread tickles through the caller’s voice. “Did you think of a name for me yet?”
“After yesterday I should call you Shy Guy.” Zhou Mi slides just enough of a coquettish tease into his voice. “But on second thoughts, I’m going to call you... Gentleman Caller.”
“I like that,” Gentleman Caller says. “It’s so old-fashioned.”
“Polite and well-mannered,” Zhou Mi says. “Makes me think of you dressed in a suit and tie and shiny, polished shoes.”
Gentleman Caller makes an amused sound. “You like men in suits?”
“Baby,” Zhou Mi purrs, “I just like men.”
He expects laughter, but Gentleman Caller stays quiet for a moment, then says with a strange intensity, “I love your voice. You always sound happy and passionate, even when you’re not. You have a voice that gives so much. Conceals so much.”
Zhou Mi is silenced. He summons back his wits. “Gentleman Caller, have you been drinking?”
Soft laughter drifts from the other end of the line. “No. But maybe I should, huh?”
“Maybe.” Zhou Mi sits up. “Honestly, I’m flattered by this, I really am. I’m glad you like my voice so much. I just wish you’d let me use it to give you more pleasure. Wouldn’t you like to hear me moan and beg for you to take me hard against the wall or over a desk? Wouldn’t you like to gag me with your big, thick cock and hear the muffled, desperate sounds I make as you drive into my hungry mouth?”
Gentleman Caller sighs, wistful and perhaps also a little lustful. “You don’t need to exercise your moral imperative with me.”
“Oh, let me.” Zhou Mi drops his voice to a husky growl that triggers orgasms in about sixty percent of his clientele. “Let me be good to you.”
Silence. It goes on for so long that Zhou Mi starts to worry. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.” Gentleman Caller sounds thoughtful. “I have a name for you.”
Zhou Mi clings to the phone. A thrill of anticipation goes through him. “What?”
“Honey,” Gentleman Caller says. “Because that’s what you sound like.”
* * *
They talk every day after that. Gentleman Caller is punctual, always ringing at the same time, except for the few occasions when he doesn’t, but that’s okay because he always lets Zhou Mi know in advance when he’s going to be late.
They talk every day, and whenever Zhou Mi tries to bring the conversation around to sex, Gentleman Caller goes quiet or changes the subject.
They talk, and Zhou Mi opens up to him, tells him secrets, tells him truths, gives himself over more honestly and completely than he would to a lover. It helps that Gentleman Caller is on the end of a phone line. It helps that Zhou Mi can’t see his face.
Anonymity is a wonderful thing. In the spaces between real life, across empty bursts of static, they can be friends.
* * *
Their conversations lengthen. The longest lasts one hundred and twenty-three minutes, fifteen seconds. Zhou Mi is the one who ends it. “Talk is cheap, but this call is not.”
“I don’t care,” says Gentleman Caller. “I just want to hear your voice.”
* * *
One day, Gentleman Caller is late. Zhou Mi frets. He pounces on his phone when it rings and chokes back the slam of disappointment when it’s someone else. He fumbles his way through the call, unable to drop into the necessary headspace. It takes eleven minutes and fifty-two seconds for his client to reach orgasm. By the time it’s over, Zhou Mi has a headache. He almost logs out of the system, but he waits just a little longer, fingers curled around the phone, his face buried against a pillow.
He falls asleep. When the phone rings, the sound shocks him into wakefulness, and he’s so disorientated that he snaps, “Where were you?” as soon as the call comes through.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Gentleman Caller says. “Honey, forgive me.”
“Don’t you want to talk to me?” Zhou Mi knows he sounds plaintive. He can hear the need in his voice and he doesn’t like it, so he takes refuge in humour. “Did you get your phone bill?”
“Honey.” Gentleman Caller says the word softly, stretches it out like warm toffee. “Honey, I dreamed of you last night.”
Zhou Mi sits up, headache forgotten. “You did?”
“Yeah.” Gentleman Caller sighs, sad and regretful. “This will sound weird. I don’t even know if I should be telling you. It seems a bit...”
“Backwards?” Zhou Mi suggests. His heart is beating just a little too fast. “It’s okay. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”
Silence, drawn-out and heated. “I want to.” There’s a catch in Gentleman Caller’s voice, a quiver of longing, and Zhou Mi responds to it, unfurls like a flower in the sun.
“Tell me,” he says, coaxes, wanting to hear more. “Tell me your dream.”
Gentleman Caller gives an embarrassed laugh. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no logic to it. Just a scene. An image. You and me.”
Zhou Mi trembles at the thought. “What do I look like, in your dream?
“Beautiful,” Gentleman Caller says on a sigh. “You’re beautiful. Tall and slender with legs that go on forever.”
Zhou Mi moves to the edge of the bed and stares at his reflection, half-glimpsed in the dressing table mirror. “I can be beautiful for you.”
“Honey, I know you’re beautiful. I saw you. Every inch of you.” Gentleman Caller sounds passionate, as if he really believes in his fantasy.
Zhou Mi feels heady with the backlash of desire. “What did you do to me?”
“With you,” Gentleman Caller corrects, voice sliding into an intimate purr. “We did it together. You wanted me as much as I wanted you.”
“Oh,” says Zhou Mi. Mutuality has never entered into the equation before. Not during other dialogues of this nature. He’s not sure what to say. “Oh,” he whispers again, then pulls himself together and tries to take charge. “Did you fuck me? Did you make me scream?”
“Not scream, no. I made you whimper. Very, very soft whimpers, like you didn’t want me to know how excited you were. The kind of whimpers you’re making now.”
Zhou Mi catches himself. “Am I whimpering?”
“Yes,” says Gentleman Caller, and then, “Don’t stop.” His breathing flutters, and behind it there’s a stealthy sound, a slick noise, skin on skin.
Zhou Mi knows he should be sophisticated and casual about this, but he’s nervous and hungry and thrilled, and he blurts out, “Are you jerking off?”
Gentleman Caller chuckles, rich and sweet. “Yes.”
“After all this time. I’m flattered.” Zhou Mi is blushing. He thinks Gentleman Caller can hear it in his voice. He lies back down on the bed and stretches out on the duvet. Excitement warms him, weaves through his body, bringing happiness in its wake. “What did I feel like, in your dream?”
“Good. Hard and soft at the same time. Like you might break if I didn’t please you. Like you could take everything I gave you and more and more and more.”
Zhou Mi can’t help it. He whimpers again.
Gentleman Caller sucks in a breath. “God, Honey, that noise. Make it again. I want to taste it. Want to kiss that noise right out of your beautiful mouth.”
Another whimper slips free. Zhou Mi bites the back of his forefinger to stifle the sound. He makes a little keening noise.
“Are you hard, Honey?” Gentleman Caller asks, his voice dark and compelling and so luscious that Zhou Mi can’t resist.
“Yes,” he moans, and it’s true, he’s hard, and now he wants to touch himself, but that’s what he’d do if this was all scripted, and he doesn’t want to be so obvious. Instead he flattens his palm against his chest and runs it down his body, harder and rougher than he usually likes, and it’s different enough that it shocks him and makes him squirm and he makes another noise, needy and gasping.
“Oh, Honey,” Gentleman Caller says, his voice hard-edged and twisted with lust, “I want to stroke you. Want you in my lap. I want your legs around me. I want you over my mouth. I want to suck you while you blow me. I want you everywhere.”
Zhou Mi pops the button on his fly, drags down the zipper. “I’d like that. I’d like it a lot.”
“So would I.” The sound is hoarse against his skin, Gentleman Caller’s voice rough like sandpaper rubbing him all over, and Zhou Mi aches with want. “Honey,” Gentleman Caller says, “Honey, I want to fuck you until you come.”
“Fuck,” Zhou Mi breathes in echo, his hand on his cock now, his hips arching off the bed as he gives himself one long, delicious pull. He drops back down, the bedsprings squeaking. “Yes. Fuck me. Make me come.”
Gentleman Caller groans. “I want to taste you. Want to bite you. Would you let me, Honey? Turn your head and let me bite your neck. Let me dig my nails into your thighs, your ass. Let me spread you open so I can see every part of you. I want to pull your hair and make you look at me while I fuck you. I want your hair between my fingers, soft like silk, red silk. I want you to have red hair, Honey.”
“I do,” Zhou Mi gasps, his hand moving faster. “I do, I do.”
“I want you to be mine. All mine.” Gentleman Caller’s breathing is harsh and rapid, his voice gruff. “I want to watch you. I want you on top of me so I know what you look like when you come. I want to make you come. Can you feel me, Honey? I want to fill you up. Want to make you come long and hard and now, Honey.”
“Almost.” The word explodes out of him, frustrated and desperate. Zhou Mi can barely keep hold of the phone. “Almost almost almost-”
Pleasure breaks him, spreads him liquid and brilliant all over the bed. His body hums with it for a long time afterwards, a string well-plucked, a call with multiple echoes. He’s trying to process it, struggling to come down from the high, when Gentleman Caller says, “I think I love you.”
Zhou Mi gasps. “What?”
Silence, agonising silence; and then Gentleman Caller says, “Goodnight, Honey,” and hangs up.
* * *
He doesn’t call again. Not the next day, nor the day after that, or even the day after that. Zhou Mi logs on every night and asks the switchboard operator to hold all calls except the one from Gentleman Caller.
“You and he got something goin’ on, honey?” she asks, and Zhou Mi flinches from her casual endearment.
“Yes,” he says, then, “no.”
“Make your mind up.” He hears the tap of her fingernails against the phone. “I can get you his name and number, if you want. Against company policy, you understand, but since you’ve made us a small fortune these past few weeks, I’d be willing to overlook the rules.”
Zhou Mi considers the offer. Considers what he’d do with the information. He can’t imagine telephoning Gentleman Caller on his own initiative. It would spoil the dynamic, ruin the illusion. “No,” he says, voice very small. “It wouldn’t be right.”
“No, it wouldn’t, would it,” she says, amused now. “You’re a funny one.”
She hangs up. Zhou Mi lies back on the bed. He’s not waiting. He’s not.
* * *
Four days after they had sex, Gentleman Caller finally rings.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he says before Zhou Mi can speak. “It’s too much. It’s... it’s not what I want. Not what I intended.” He pauses. “I never meant to hurt you.”
Zhou Mi’s emotions are staging a riot, but he hopes he sounds cool and in control. “How do you know you hurt me?”
“Your voice,” Gentleman Caller says. “It’s different.”
“Yes. Well.” Zhou Mi swallows. His throat is dry. “It’s not like it matters, anyway. You don’t owe me anything. I get paid whatever we talk about. And actually, it’s much easier to talk about my life than to make up fantasies on demand.”
“Is it?” Gentleman Caller asks, softly, so softly. “Is it, Honey?”
Zhou Mi shuts his eyes. “Please don’t call me that.”
“Then what can I call you?”
“Nothing.” He feels hot. His eyes sting. Zhou Mi doesn’t want to cry over this, for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t want to think about how fucking sad and meaningless his life has become if he’s ready to start sobbing over the fact that some faceless guy on the other end of the phone is dumping him for-for-he doesn’t even know why. Dumping him for not being real enough, he supposes. The fucking irony of it. Their conversations made him feel real, and now it’s over and he’s a mess and he can’t even tell anyone about it.
His unhappiness must somehow translate itself down the phone. “Honey,” Gentleman Caller says, sounding helpless. “Oh, Honey...”
“Don’t.” Zhou Mi bites out the word. “Just don’t. Don’t call me that. Don’t call me at all. I don’t want to hear from you ever again.”
“It’s not like that.” Gentleman Caller sounds desperate. “Don’t hang up on me. Please listen. I want to do this differently. Not on the phone.”
“Not-” Zhou Mi almost chokes. “What?”
Gentleman Caller exhales. “I want us to meet for real.”
“I can’t.” This isn’t happening, can’t be happening, but all the same he wants it to be true. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Shhh, Honey, shhh.” Gentleman Caller softens his voice, concern and affection pouring through the phone line. “Just once. Meet me. See how much I want you.”
“I...” Zhou Mi curls his toes. “Maybe we could-”
“Oh my God!” Suddenly there’s another voice in the background, a loud, brash voice that rises to a triumphant yelp. “Oh my fucking God!”
Zhou Mi frowns. The second voice is familiar. He reminds himself that all voices over the phone are familiar, but no, this voice is really familiar, and the voice is speaking a garbled mix of English and Korean, and the accent is familiar, too, and then the voice shrieks, “Jesus fucking Christ, Sungmin, are you using Siwon’s actual phone to call Mimi’s sex line? He will totally kill you, dude! That’s premium fucking rate, man!”
Reality crashes over Zhou Mi with all the panache of a high-speed train derailing. “Sungmin?”
“Shit,” says Sungmin, and it really is Sungmin, that’s why he sounded so familiar all this time, and Zhou Mi hates him, absolutely hates him, and now his heart is breaking, and he has a million furious things to say and he can’t speak, can’t get a single word out, so he cuts the call, sobs, throws the phone across the room so it hits the wall.
Ten seconds later, Henry is banging on his door and howling with laughter. “Dude, what the fuck! Get out here! I can’t believe this shit, oh my God!”
Zhou Mi wants to hide. Hibernate for the rest of the year in his room. Maybe he can climb out of the window or something. Maybe he’ll slip and fall and hit the ground and nothing will matter anymore. He covers his ears to block out the sound of Henry pummelling the door.
Then he pulls himself together, the way he always does. He has to face it. He has nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not like any of it was real. All the things he said, all the things they shared, it wasn’t real. It was phoned in; it was just pretend.
Zhou Mi keeps on telling himself that right up until he opens the door.
Henry almost bounces in at him. “Sungmin is, like, dead meat. He borrowed Siwon’s phone and called you. Those things are like eighty cents a minute at home. Or so I’ve been told. Oh man! I can’t wait until Siwon finds out. He is going to freak.”
Zhou Mi looks past Henry at Sungmin, who’s standing in the corridor with Siwon’s iPhone still clutched tight in his hand. “You knew it was me all along?”
“Of course we did!” Henry sounds inappropriately cheerful. “That Talk Is Cheap place, it was a start-up, right? So it’s not like they had that many guys on staff. I tried to get a job there myself, but they told me I talked like a pre-schooler and there’s a rule about no children and animals-”
The words clatter off him. Zhou Mi barely listens, still staring at Sungmin, beautiful, silent Sungmin; his Gentleman Caller who’d made him come so hard four nights ago.
“I totally left that newspaper lying around so you’d find it,” Henry’s still babbling away, “I was going to, like, circle the ad in red pen or something, but I thought that’d be too obvious, and I really hoped you’d go for it, ‘cos that’s, like, totally hilarious, and it only took me three tries to get put through to you and-”
Zhou Mi interrupts. “Why did you make Sungmin talk to me?”
Henry blinks. “Cos, dude, you’d have known it was me right away. It was only meant to be a one-off! I totally didn’t tell him to borrow Siwon’s phone just now, but...” He stops, realisation dawning, his expression comical. “Oh wow!” He spins around to face Sungmin. “Yo, like, how many times did you call him?”
Sungmin is still staring at Zhou Mi. “Every night.”
“Almost every night,” Zhou Mi corrects.
Henry looks between them, his eyes shining as he puts two and two together and comes up with some unbelievable sum. He makes gleeful windmilling motions with his arms. “This is so cool! It’s like... I don’t know what it’s like! But it’s cool anyway! And the best bit is-you used Siwon’s phone!”
Sungmin flicks him an amused look. “Go away, Henry.”
“Huh? Oh! Okay, sure.” Obedient despite his enthusiasm, Henry leaves the corridor with exaggerated slowness, making sure to turn back every other step to give encouraging smiles and a double thumbs up.
Sungmin waits until the door to Henry’s room has closed with a somewhat obvious slam before he steps forward. Hemming Zhou Mi in against the doorframe, he tilts his head and smiles that bewitching foxy smile and says, “So.”
Zhou Mi feels outmanoeuvred and out of control. He kind of likes it. “So,” he echoes, “maybe we should talk about this.”
“We’ve done enough talking.” Sungmin splays his fingertips against Zhou Mi’s chest and pushes him back into the room. He closes the door behind them, still smiling. “It’s time we made our connection real.”