Welcome to Gaia! ::

Reed sang along, waving at a few people he recognized in their more modest vehicles and motorcycles as he went to his apartment. Some did a double-take as they saw someone new in his passenger seat, squinting to see if it was anyone they knew. The fact that they didn't recognize Jon made a few of Reed's friends wolf whistle. Reed laughed, shook his head, and waved them off.

"Get out," Reed laughed, waving off a friend. "Embarrassing me, man," he muttered with a wide grin. For a moment his cheeks flushed red, but with his hair on pale skin, it looked like it could possibly be a trick of evening light and street lamps.

It was a few moments of the radio's mindless advertisements in no particular order, addressing no particular target audience, when he drove up to the gated fence of his apartment. It didn't require a code punched in, or a card slid, instead he put the car in park and got out to open the door manually. No alarms went off and no security lights even came on. Every night he thanked the gods of Catmen that he was born equipped with night vision. In another handful of minutes he was parked near his apartment, the sound of other people's radios playing loudly and some incoherent shouting off in the distance was the lullaby of every night.

"Don't wander too far, nobody knows you here and you look rich enough to be dragged away to one of the apartment parties," Reed laughed. "There's always someone partying with the doors open, they don't mean any real harm but the cops show up and bust them for drugs all the time. If you were caught there, I think it'd make the papers if they found out who you were. Wouldn't your Vader-man just love that?"

Reed took his groceries out from the back seat and motioned for Jon to follow him up some steps. The place was so lit it was a wonder if anyone could actually get any restful sleep. It was usually exhaustion or really good headphones that kept some from going mad. To Reed, living in a home full of boys, he was used to noise. Quiet actually unnerved him some days. If he couldn't hear the sounds of "life", then he would wonder what's wrong.

"Up the steps we go, don't fall on these. They're pure concrete and wrought iron," Reed noted, sifting through his keyring for the apartment key. "Some doofus on his rollerblades thought it'd be fun to attempt these steps and he fell, broke his arm, and lost two front teeth. Idiot, I think there are still blood stains on it somewhere."

Reed unlocked the door to his apartment and pushed the door open with a groan. The place smelled of bad incense, like the kind you'd use the mask the smell of pot. He didn't smoke, but he thought the smell of burning perfumed sticks smelled better than stale air from an old air conditioning unit. Besides, the little old lady who sold it to him was very nice to him and mailed him bags of her daughter's experimental scents to test them on him once every month or so. Reed thought secretly the old woman was trying for grandchildren, but he assumed most grandmothers were.

"This month's scent is what they're calling 'Spring and Evergreen'," Reed noted, setting down the grocery bag to twist on the lamp light.

The room was small, consisting of a kitchenette-slash-living room, and a bedroom with a tiny bathroom in it. The sound of water constantly leaking from the toilet's inner workings hissed along serenely. Sometimes Reed slept in the bathroom on those really hot summers because the floor was cooler there than in the bedroom.

Already he was eager to get his damn work clothes off, as though it had been burning his body. In seconds he was shirtless and getting a glass of water from the tiny sink. He had left his television on and between the flickers of static it was playing something in Spanish. His secret passion was watching Spanish novellas, ever since an old girlfriend used to come to his house to watch them every week.

He stood in front of the air conditioner for a time, letting his skin cool off a moment as he drank from his glass.

"Don't kill my television, I sold my graduation watch at the pawn to get that damn thing and the toaster," Reed laughed. "If you want to kill my appliances, kill the toaster."

Reed set his glass down on a mismatched end table and started pulling a pile of laundry off the covered sofa. He did have a sofa, after all, although it was frequently either a place to nap before work or where he threw his laundry after and before work. Two week's worth of sleepwear was scattered all over it, along with...

"Oh, s**t," Reed laughed, pulling out a red leather collar. "I thought I lost you, honey."

He inspected his collar and put it in his pocket before picking up the rest of his laundry. His leather things were expensive, most of his paycheck that didn't go into his rent and utilities went towards his leather straps. Leather was as good as diamonds to him, he couldn't explain to anyone why. But lately his friends would bring him leather catalogs frequently intermixed in with western wear. It was from that that he had gotten his leather wallet. He was saving next for some black and red boots. Sans the spurs, the spurs would take any illusion of sexiness and just throw that sucker out the door.

He threw said catalogs on the other end table in a random stack before throwing all his clothes into a stray hamper. He'd have to inspect the spare change ashtray for quarters. Laundry Day seemed imminent.

"There, now you can sit and watch my Mexican soap operas," Reed laughed. "You want bad love stories that you can't look away from, let your Darth Vader guy take a look at those from time to time. You don't even have to understand what they're saying to see what's going on half the time."

"Aaaaaard... vark," Reed teased, messing with Jon in his plastered state. He took the red collar into the bedroom and threw it into the first drawer of his dresser. "Are you hungry, at all? I can't order out, the last pizza guy someone called out to this place never made it back to his store. And no Chinese food guy in his right mind would come out here without some concealed throwing stars or something."

He undid his belt in the semi-privacy of his bedroom and pulled off his shoes with his feet as he got into a pair of cut-off pajamas that were turned into shorts. The faint traces of their pattern that was left revealed some Saturday morning cartoon. Reed got out an old jersey one jock or another from a bicurious one night stand left, never to be seen again. The poor guy probably felt ashamed and never returned for his shirt. Reed smiled a little and pulled it on. The guy's last name and number was clearly marked on it. It was so damn comfortable, he was glad the guy had left it.

Reed wandered back into the living room and impulsively started pushing bachelor's detritus off the center of the floor and back towards the wall. In the dim of the living room, his bare cat's claw on the end of his foot clicked on a tiny, half empty bottle. His ears perked forward and he leaned over to pick it up.

It was a bottle of personal lubricant. He calmly picked it up off the floor and went to put daddy's little helper back into the nightstand. Every man surely must've had one of those around the house. Right...? Every single man, surely... he started wondering if Jon would start asking any questions.

Reed tried to keep poker faced, he didn't know whether Jon was asking about kink or the obvious practical uses for a collar. He wandered to the bedroom to put the bottle back while Jon wasn't paying that much attention.

"Well, it did," Reed replied. Then he took a gamble. "But I lost it at a Christmas party," he tried not to sound happy or sad.

Funny thing, Christmas parties. Intended to celebrate family and the birth of Christ and all that religious rot... but the truth of it is that it's always an excuse to destroy every thread of morals you had. Reed knew of at least three people at that party who destroyed their relationships with their lovers (and family and probably their church) because of that damn Christmas party. There were photos made on cellphones and cameras for blackmail later, people made sure to get plenty of those.

Reed always wondered if his photos would ever stir any controversy. To be famous like that sounded thrilling. But all he'd ever gotten were calls and voice mails saying "Oh, god, you and I didn't do anything last night, did we?"

"What a party," he said wistfully.

"Nope," Reed sounded proud as a peacock just then. "I was Santa's Little Helper."

He gave a strange, broad smile and emptied the contents of his grocery bag item by item on the small card table that was his dining table. He'd bought several cups of ramen noodles, a pack of gum, an air freshener for his car that seemed to be shaped like a flip-flop, and a new lighter for his incense. With that he used the empty paper bag as a new liner for his trash can and pulled a portable electric range from a cabinet.

In fact, it was the only cabinet. It held a few stray boxes of crackers, cereal... and that was about it. He took a metal tea kettle from its place on the counter and started filling it with water.

"Do you want some tea? Coffee, if you don't mind crystals instead of ground?"

He didn't drink or smoke, there wasn't even a stray empty beer can. He was nothing if not free of any real vices other than his current fetishes and a strong addiction to friendly company.