Weston’s deleted scene from Dirty Sexy Bastard/Dirty Sexy Player

This scene originally was included in Dirty Sexy Bastard, the prequel to Dirty Sexy Player. It takes place the day after Sabrina left his apartment when she spent the weekend with him in New York City. I didn’t end up using it because Weston seemed a bit mopey to me. It does give a fun look at Nate and Weston together, though! Enjoy!

Weston

I groaned at the knock on my door. A glance at the clock said it was a quarter after six. At this time of night, without the doorman ringing that I had a visitor, it was either one of the neighbor women who wanted to get in my pants or one of the neighbor men complaining about the neighbor women wanting to get in my pants.

If I were them, I’d likely assume I was the problem as well. I usually am. Except, I practiced the adage of don’t shit where you eat. And vice versa. Sex equaled eating, in this situation. And since I lived here, it was obviously where I shit. In other words, no banging women in the apartment building. Ever.

More knocking now, strong and persistent.

I paused the show I was watching, pulled myself off the couch where I’d planted myself a full twenty-four hours before, and headed to answer it. For half a second, I considered throwing on a shirt, but that seemed like too much work.

Thank god, I hadn’t bothered.

A peek out the peephole brought me eye-to-face with one of my business partners, Nate Sinclair. Day old sweats were suitable to greet him.

“You look terrible,” he said, when I opened the door to him.

“And I still look better than you. How the fuck did you get past security?” I stepped aside to let him in.

“Eh, I know Pedro.”

I raised my eyebrows. Really? Pedro, the baby-faced doorman who I’d caught more than once praying the rosary when the lobby wasn’t busy? Everyone Nate “knew” outside of the ad agency we ran together was either someone he’d met through his past (mostly illegal) art dealings or through his routine gangbangs.

“From one of your sex parties?” I was too curious not to ask.

Nate had headed to my fridge and was now grabbing a beer. “Now you know I can’t divulge who participates at The Open Door.”    

Which meant yes.

“Huh.” I ran my hand over my stubbled jaw. What I’d gathered from Nate’s stories was that those parties were out-of-hand kinky and frequented primarily by rich snobs. If my doorman had gotten in, it meant he had a Sugar Mama. Or Daddy. “Way to go Pedro.”

“Man, you really need a maid. This place is a sty. Is this the only shit you have in the house?” He was obviously already sure of the answer since he’d popped the top of the Guinness before he even asked.

“Yes, it is. You know I don’t drink your microbrew piss water. Why would I keep it stocked.” Especially since Nate very rarely popped in for a visit. “Guinness tastes better in a glass, by the way.”

“Glasses are for pussies.” His grin faded. “What’s wrong with you anyway?”

“I’m sick.” Wasn’t it obvious? I headed back to my warm, comfortable spot on the couch.

Nate followed. “Hungover?”

“No. Asshole.”

“Man-flu?”

I glared at him standing above me. “I don’t know what the fuck it is. I’m just sick.” I unpaused the show and directed my focus on the TV set. Hopefully he’d get the hint that I wanted to be alone.

He didn’t. Instead, he sat on the end of the sofa, forcing me to curl my feet up out of his way.

Dickstain.

I had an armchair he could have sat in, but no. Nate was a friend--a good friend--which meant he was excellent at pushing my buttons.

“It’s weird, though,” he said now.

I’d meant to ignore him, but he’d made me curious. “What’s weird?”

“You’re rarely sick. And even when you are, you still show up to work. Remember when you had that hundred and four temp and Roxie had to call an ambulance to get you to go to the ER so you could get some fluids?”

Of course I remembered. I’d been irked with my assistant at the time, but I got over it when the hot doctor who’d assessed me let me play doctor in her bed a few days later. I’d ended up giving Roxie a bonus. She was my right-hand man, even if she didn’t know that she was occasionally my wingman as well.

“What’s your point?” I asked, without taking my eyes from the screen.

“My point is that I expected to come here and find you on your deathbed. And yet you seem pretty fine. Scruffy and with bad taste, maybe, but clean up a bit and you’ll be back to normal.”

“Guinness is not in bad taste,” I retorted.

“I was referring to your choice of viewing material. What is this anyway? Grown up Pokemon?”

“Oh, fuck you. Full-Metal Alchemist is nothing like Pokemon.” The man might know art, but he was woefully lacking in the genres of graphic novels and anime. Perhaps that was a generational thing. He was over a decade older than me, after all.

He was silent for a moment, and I’d just started to get into my show again when he piped up again. “Then you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong?”

I rolled my eyes. Not even because he’d said anything that annoying or ridiculous but because how was I supposed to tell him what was wrong when I wasn’t sure myself?

“It’s complicated.” That was the only answer I had. He’d have to live with it.

“Of course it’s complicated. What isn’t?” When I didn’t respond, he tried a different tactic. “See, if I had to guess, based on the leftover containers of take-out strewn around the room and the mopey look on your face that you’re ‘sickness’ is female-oriented.”

I sat up to face him. “Those are fighting words. Take it back.” Yes, I spent an awful lot of time with the opposite gender. Yes, that time was primarily occupied with various forms of sex. But I did not, had not ever (since high school, anyway) gotten mopey over a girl.

And I wasn’t mopey over a girl now, either.

Probably.

But there was something bothering me. Something unnameable and abstract, an empty space in my chest. A hollowness. And maybe it had worsened yesterday when the last woman to cross my threshold had left, but it wasn’t caused by her. Sabrina’s presence over the weekend had just made it easier to forget the hole existed in the first place.

Nate shrugged. “I’m up for a good fight, if that’s what it takes. I certainly can’t take it back. You haven’t given me a reason to think it’s anything different. Want to try to convince me otherwise?”

I sighed and hit pause on the remote. “Honestly? I don’t know what’s wrong. Nothing, probably. Boredom maybe. Disillusionment. A wanting of something more.” Maybe it all stemmed from the unresolved trouble with my parents. Or maybe it was because it was beginning to feel like I’d never be able to really take a claim in the business because the whole thing had been our other partner Donovan Kincaid’s brainchild.

It could have been a thousand things. It could have been nothing at all.

“You’re finally tired of round after round of meaningless sex?”

“Asshole.”

He laughed. “What did I say? The truth?”

“You talk about my sexlife as though you don’t have one that’s just as excessive.” I couldn’t believe I had to spell it out for him. We were the same. He banged anonymous women through his sex club, and I banged girls I met in bars and airports and restaurants and grocery stores, etc. Same habits, only different venues.

“Sure, I’m into sex. And I go about it in a somewhat kinky fashion, but it doesn’t consume my life. My parties are once a week on Saturday night. The rest of the time I’m focused on work and art and living. Sex isn’t a distraction to me like it is to you. If I were going to an Open Door gathering every night, it would definitely lose its meaning.”

“Sex isn’t a distraction to me,” I grumbled. That might not have been completely honest. When was the last time I met a woman that sex hadn’t crossed my mind? When was the last time I wasn’t looking for someone to take home?

Thinking about it now, it was a wonder I got anything done at all.

“You’re lying to yourself, kid,” he said, and I’d forgotten until that moment that Nate and I were not the same. He was much more developed on a human level than I was.

It didn’t mean I wanted to let him know that.

Besides, I was sure that my frequent sex wasn’t behind this feeling. This lack of feeling, actually. Sex was practically the only thing that made it better.

“I’m not lying to anyone.” I stood up and crossed to the fridge to get a beer for myself. “For example, I spent this entire past weekend in bed with an intelligent, creative, fuck-hot woman I used to know in college. Sabrina Lind. I was just as wrapped up in her as I’ve been in anyone, and yet I still managed to get those reports done and sent over for the new Avida campaign.”

Nate thought for a moment. Long enough for me to pop the top on my Guinness and take a swig. “But when she left, you felt bored again, right? She was a bandaid while she was here, and now that she’s gone, the wound is there again.”

God, it was fucked up how he could see right inside my soul.

Even more fucked up was how I continued to deny it. “Sabrina is not a bandaid. She’s an incredible person.” I’d even offered her a job at Reach, the company we owned. She’d turned me down, but the idea still sounded like a good one to me. “In fact, I’m going to bring her back. Get her at the ad agency. See her more often.”

“Ah, yes. I see. That’s what I thought.”

“What?” I didn’t want to sound so interested, but if he had the answer to my restlessness, then, hell, I wanted to hear it ASAP.

“You’re tired of the game. Sex might still be a favorite pastime, but the introductions, the seduction, the same women with different names, different faces--it’s all a dull, monotonous cycle. You’re ready to settle down.”

I spit out the beer I’d just poured into my mouth. “What? No. Hell, no.”

“You just said you wanted to see this girl from the weekend more! That’s settling down.”

He had this all wrong. I rushed to correct him. “No, no. No. I want to see the same woman, consistently, that’s all. I want to do the same amount of banging, but with the same woman.”

“Yeah. I get you,” Nate laughed. “That’s called a relationship.”

I shook my head, vehemently. “Relationships involve feelings and commitments and life goals. I’m just talking about screwing someone, repeatedly, without all the drama of the hook-up part.”

“That’s what you really want?” He stood up and crossed to me. “Then you hire a call girl. If you want to be with one particular woman, then you have to include the relationship part. The feelings, the commitments, possibly children, and so on.”

Again, I protested. “No children. No commitments.” The thought of either of those C words made me nauseated.

But I didn’t want a call girl either.

I didn’t know what I wanted.

Except, I did know I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. I glanced at the clock on the microwave. It was nearly seven. “Hey, I hate to be rude, but I’m going to have to cut this fun time short. I’m supposed to have a date at eight, and, as you so dickishly pointed out, I need a shower first.”

His brows creased, obviously taken aback. “You have a date? After everything you just said? After you called in sick for work today?”

“Who knows? This woman might be my cure.” I headed to the couch to pick up the empty containers of Chinese so I could throw them away before getting myself ready.

“And you’re cleaning up in case she comes over afterward?” He seemed truly surprised.

“She’ll come over afterward. Unless I go to her place. Why is this so strange to you?”

He gave an incredulous chuckle. “No reason, I guess. I just wonder if you actually hear anything you say. You lamented about being bored with your routine, and, yet, here you are falling back into it.”

I dumped the take-out in the trash and faced my friend. “I’m not falling into anything. I’m doing what I do best. Picking up girls and collecting panties. Whatever is wrong with me, it’s not that. Got it?”

“What I get is that you’re a real bastard.”

We called each other shitty names all the time. This time, his insult stung. Not because of the word, but the intent behind it. Because he really meant it. He meant that I was a bastard, an asshole, for how I lived my life.

Was that who I wanted to be?

Did it even matter what I wanted if that was just who I was?