January 11, 2027

I met Shawn Miller through Brandon Ellis, a client who hired both of us on two separate occasions to watch us role-play and fuck in front of him.

He loved creating erotic scenarios with specific lines to deliver, and watch us act them out. One of his turn-ons was to make us wear his suits and underwear and observe us undress each other, ripping the shirts off and wild fuck. He’d masturbate in front of us as we went at it. 

Shawn has two totally different sides to him. In the bedroom, he’s domineering, aggressive and in total control whereas when we’re hanging out outside in public, he’s always calm and soft spoken. Him and I clicked almost immediately and became close friends. It’s hard to get a sense of who he is which I think makes him extremely intriguing. The ties got even closer when I got to know him and noticed that, just like me, he was a troubled soul as well. His past is one no one wishes to go through. I’m surprised he managed to survive it. Although he suffers from anger management issues, his life seems to be stable for the most part.  He asked me to come over to his place last week and it wasn’t to have sex. He wanted to talk. 

His new apartment was still barely furnished. All he had was a bed, a couch and a TV that he set on the floor right in front. In his fridge, there was only a bottle of vodka and a leftover sandwich he bought earlier. I took my shoes off and sat on the couch and he asked me if I minded if he smoked weed which I didn’t. He sat down next to me and I could tell he was already high and drunk. He tilted his head backwards and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, and that’s when the endless talking started.

Shawn grew up in backwoods Kansas City. His stepfather, Nathan, was physically and emotionally abusive, and after separate waves of violence over the course of five years, things spiraled into something much darker when his mother, Brenda, threatened to leave him. He said if she attempted to flee, he’d kill both her and Shawn. Frightened, she decided to stay. Nathan became a mentally unhinged alcoholic shortly after and started suffering from paranoid delusions. He believed Brenda was poisoning his food when he developed chronic symptoms including breathing trouble and vomiting. When the situation became too much to bear, she finally decided to change both her and her son’s fates by taking matters into her own hands. 

One day, Nathan and Brenda were having a heated argument over their finances in the kitchen when Shawn came back home from school. He was wielding a baseball bat at her. Nathan ordered him to go up to his bedroom, but Shawn didn’t move. His stepfather then pointed the baseball bat in his direction, intending to beat him. That’s when Brenda reached for a kitchen knife and stabbed him in the left side of his abdomen. Shocked by what she had done, she dropped the knife and reached for the baseball bat, intending to separate the weapon from him. Nathan got up and tried to snatch it from her but she succeeded in pushing him away, and out of reflex, hit him across the face before totally snapping and bludgeoning him to death. Shawn remembers the incident very vividly. 

“It’s not something you forget”, he said.

Stuck and in despair, Brenda dumped the body in a mineshaft, and told Shawn that if someone asks about Nathan’s whereabouts, he should lie and say he abruptly left the house after they fought and that they’ve never heard from him since. Back home, she started planning a getaway plan. The next morning, she intentionally burned their house down to collect the insurance money. It was the first time Shawn witnessed his mother, loving housewife and dedicated christian, do something so atrocious and out of character. And it didn’t stop there. After doing so, her and Shawn drove to Indianapolis where they stayed in motels. Brenda experienced a fall of personality as she started fleecing people of money and expensive merchandise through forgery or outright theft. At some point, as her crimes became bigger and harder to execute, she’d involve her son and lean on him to help her out. 

And I thought my childhood was bad.

As they jumped from one motel to the other, Brenda and Shawn ran across a nice, exclusive bed and breakfast operated by a rich woman. They began hatching a plot to swindle her out of her property. Brenda’s goal was to assume her identity and become the owner of her business. In order for the plan to work, the pair had to get as close to the woman as they possibly could and gain her trust. Shawn, however, went a bit too far. His mother’s harshness pushed him away, and he soon found himself attached to her. When Brenda decided it was time to execute her plan and kill her, Shawn warned her about his mother’s intentions and she ended up calling the police. Somehow, Brenda knew and ran away. She was found dead the following week, passed out and drunk in a blizzard.

Shawn then became a vagrant. He didn’t have a place to call home and couldn’t keep a job for more than two weeks. He decided to give his big dream a shot. He wanted to model. 

“Since I was five, people loved watching me” He said. 

And he’s right. Although he could be a bit too self-absorbed and naïve, Shawn has the looks, the charm and the marketability. He said he heavily relied on his physical appearance, totally ignoring whether he was likable or not, to move forward in that direction without much luck. After working a couple of bad jobs, he used the money he saved to fly to LA. 

“The entertainment business is very ugly and most people go there with a lot of optimism but end up not making it.” 

They don’t call it the land of broken dreams for nothing, especially when expectations are set too high. After a couple of failed auditions, he ended up in Atlanta where he eked out a living working as a bartender at a gay sports bar. He had to wear very minimal clothing, sometimes just a jockstrap which made him feel vulnerable when older men would walk in, stare at him or make him feel uncomfortable while he worked. At some point, he even had to tolerate unwanted physical contact by his male manager, Clint, before getting fired for no apparent reason.

Refusing to be tossed away, he showed up at the bar a week later and assaulted the bar’s owner, punching him in the face then fleeing before police arrived. He was tracked down and sent to prison soon after. Shawn said that before that happened, he had filed a complaint alleging that he was fired after Clint forced him to have sex with him. Clint responded by saying Shawn was the one making sexual advances through sexting and sending partially nude photos of himself and that the reason for firing him was because he was smoking marijuana at the bar during his shift.

“I’m not a perfect individual but it really is a lot to deal with from a psychological perspective. I’m being antagonized simply because I’m standing up for myself,” Shawn said. “I pretty much got hated by all the staff at the bar the moment I started working there because I was the new hot guy in town. After that incident, I couldn’t walk into a bar without getting taunted and having dirty looks thrown in my direction. Some people went as far as stirring up my past and making me look like a bad human being. Atlanta is not used to honesty and that is why I clash with this city,” Shawn concluded.

The night felt long as Shawn kept on talking about his life as he gazed at the ceiling. He eventually got too tired and decided to go to bed. I got up to leave, but he asked me to stay. We laid in bed next to each other in total silence I could hear his breathing. It sounded weird. It sounded like the breathing of someone who’s been through a lot. Someone who’s ready to give up on life. I felt a wave of sadness wash over us as I watched him slowly drift away into a deep sleep. This experience of emotional closeness tempted me to touch and feel his face, but I didn’t. I think I’ve lost my sense of intimacy. I can’t take the risk of being close to anyone anymore.

Walking back to my apartment, I thought about cruelty and how we’re all capable of it even when we don’t necessarily mean to cause harm. It’s not about the action itself but more about the reason behind it. Just like me, Shawn has grown into an unlovable adult. A person people end up turning away from. As if we’ve decided to be that way. If only they’d learn to be more understanding.