by Damon Suede
Inspecting the drawers, he lifted and lowered the socks, shirts, and briefs that hid… nothing.
Stuff had changed since he stopped boozing around, so maybe these feelings were jealousy of a life he couldn’t afford. He’d never been a bigot, but fuck if he’d ever expected to obsess over some guy’s hairy ass.
Except he knew Andy’s wasn’t; his ass was hard cream. And he wasn’t some sissy boy with no gag reflex either. He didn’t mesh with any experience Ruben had, which made the situation scarier.
There were wolves.
No surprises till Ruben went behind the hangers, where he found a small box of weed and rolling papers. Then some pretty intense porn in a shoebox on the second shelf: guy/girl stuff, mostly in the amateur or gonzo vein. Street Heat. Bottled-Up Babes. Nobody looked too glossy and made up. The women had real tits. The garish covers looked so out of place on Andy’s carved wool rug that Ruben could almost believe they were borrowed, but for Andy’s solitude. Underneath he found a couple thumbed issues of Penthouse.
So what? The porn didn’t tell him anything special. There was one “bi” title, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything these days. Some ladies loved that shit. There were a lot of swarthy dudes pictured, Hispanics and Italians with similar coloring to his, but then again, porn used plenty of working-class Latin lovers. That didn’t mean Andy had a thing for him.
Bottom line: no way for him to know what Andy thought or felt unless he spilled.
Ruben lifted the box of DVDs down to check behind it and that’s how he found the message. There, behind the box of porn, taped to the wall, a crisp calling card with three embossed words printed in Andy’s square capitals:
“GOOD JOB, RUBE.”
Cold dread made Ruben’s hands shake as he replaced the porn. Ha-ha, big joke.
Andy had expected him to dig around, which made it okay, right? Except he figured Ruben didn’t trust him, which wasn’t. Andy had no idea that this intense curiosity had turned personal. All this embarrassing shit didn’t embarrass Mr. Bauer in the least.
Ruben had found exactly what Andy had planted for him. Maybe the porn was a stupid prop. Maybe he’d left jizzed shorts as a gross guy joke? Har har. For the first time in weeks, Ruben felt as anxious as he had that first day. This entire job was bullshit. Fake conspiracies and danger that made everyone feel important. Andy was conning him and using him.
What difference did it make, really? Rich and poor fucked each other so much. He should be used to the friction between splendor and squalor by now. The grass is always meaner.
On autopilot, Ruben walked to the master bathroom to wash his hands though they didn’t feel dirty.
Still shaky, he walked down the upstairs hall, deciding that he’d say nothing about finding the card or Andy’s practical joke.
Water running in a sink below him. A cabinet closing. Knife sounds on the cutting board. Someone was cooking wee-hour breakfast in the kitchen.
Ashamed of himself, Ruben came down the spiral stair into the living room expecting to hear Andy’s voice. Hell, he’d probably watched Ruben tossing the apartment the past hour on his surveillance cameras. The kitchen was a bubble of light.
Instantly, Ruben’s irritation and shame melted.
Andy was humming to himself and bobbing to whatever music was playing through his iPod while he worked at the countertop, innocent and oblivious. The handsome face clean-shaven and flushed with pleasure. He’d finished shouting at the Londoners but hadn’t changed or gotten dressed yet. He wore a shirt ripped open on both sides that left his muscular ribs exposed and a pair of those shorts that made Ruben’s mouth go gummy.
Andy was dancing in the kitchen while he made some kind of sandwich, rocking out like a suburban dad who’d snuck into a Missy Elliot video: hip thrusting, shoulder popping, and head knocking as only a thirty-eight-year-old suburban white boy can.
Ruben grinned. The raw, goofy vulnerability made his chest go mushy and hot.
Part of him wanted to call out a hello, but he bit his tongue and stole warm eyefuls. He didn’t want to startle Andy or squelch the sweet moment, so he stood and spied.
Andy sang along under his breath, off-key, dorky in the extreme but painfully endearing. Sexy as he looked, the implication of him dancing like that overpowered his good looks. He trusted Ruben to keep him safe and happy in this ridiculous glass box.
Ruben felt protective, almost defensive about the need to defend Andy against all threats. Good job, Rube. He was the wolf and Andy didn’t know. Could never know.
How long could he afford to stand here spying before Andy spotted him? Would Andy even mind if he did?
Ruben kept silent as long as he dared.
He hated himself for snooping, but told himself he’d been doing his job. Maybe Andy would never know. Maybe the note had been a test. Maybe Andy had placed it there weeks ago before Ruben’s feelings had gotten loose, before any of this. Maybe it hadn’t been Andy at all.
Finally, Andy turned and saw and smiled right at him, a big blinding grin.
If you can’t lie to yourself, who can you lie to?
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN YOU dance with a gorilla, it is the gorilla who decides when to stop.
After rummaging through Andy’s things that morning, Ruben felt guilty enough to sit down and watch a movie. He kept to the other couch, obviously. He made appropriate noises and no comments about Andy’s drinking. That evening, Andy fell asleep on the couch, only this time, Ruben roused him and steered him upstairs.
Not roommates, he kept reminding himself. The thought of Andy sleepy and vulnerable put some crazy ideas in his head, so he sat on the terrace wishing for a cigarette until his hidden stash called him down to the thirty-third floor.
As expected, the pool deck was empty at eleven o’clock. The teenagers from nineteen weren’t out here killing a bottle of dad’s gin. After all his night swims, Ruben knew this terrace had a couple fans in the building, but no night owls except him. Thirty-three floors down he heard the slop of traffic, distant and dull as the tide.
Ruben leaned out to look at Park Avenue, and the damp, airless heat slid over his skin. The Upper East Side really was an island within the island of Manhattan. A few cars nosed sluggishly through the empty streets. Midnight now and Park Avenue was dead. These uptighty-whities kept everything so damn quiet. Presumably some of the Haves were dining or fucking the neighbor’s dog or whatever, but heaven forbid they make a peep after 10:00 p.m.
Ruben took another drag on the stolen cigarette, holding the smoke inside himself to churn around the truth.
You don’t belong here, Oso.
He exhaled in a hot rush. The muggy air held the smoke around his face till he flapped his hand. He’d have to shower upstairs or his hair’d smell like nicotine and he’d never hear the end of it from the resident Boy Scout.
Andy was right, cigarettes were no better than booze. Another stupid addiction he’d let creep up on him. He needed to quit. Like he needed to find an apartment, get a checkup, meet a chick, and eat a green vegetable a couple times a year.
He needed to do all kindsa shit. One fuckup at a time. Worse, he wanted to quit smoking because Andy thought he should. Some lame part of himself craved that approval from a nice guy who had it all together. Not quite obsession, but intense admiration that he needed to hide.
Still, the smoking thing was an easy place to start. Ruben could imagine the little relieved smile it would squeeze out of Mr. Bauer, and he wanted it worse than he wanted another lungful. Sick.
Maybe that was the deal. His life sucked and Andy’s didn’t. Yeah. Maybe he’d fallen for the zip code and a lifestyle he’d never seen up close. Like men on TV, handmade suits and girls with perfect bodies falling over themselves to gag on his dark meat.
He didn’t feel queer. He’d never messed around in school or anything. Some guys did. He knew a couple dudes who’d bent over and then gone on to get married and seed whole litters of kids.
This di
dn’t feel like fooling around. Not halfway fooling.
Ruben sucked another lungful of smoke into himself and tried to imagine sharing some chick with Andy. Their dicks smashed together inside her while she went out of her skull. Just as fast he could see the lie. The imaginary girl didn’t have a face, and the thing that got him boned up was the thought of Andy losing control and craning forward to kiss him hard and whisper to him in Spanish.
Something made him look up at Andy’s floor. Not a sound or a light, but a hankering. Jesus. The only thing wrong was that Andy was farther away than he had been for weeks. The only danger he faced was Ruben copping a feel.
Days later, and Ruben’s fingers could still remember the wet slip of Andy’s hip as he came out of the shower. Ruben’s palm remembered the firm handful of muscle and bone it had cupped for a heartbeat, then tasting his slick hand. Out of control.
He pulled at the cigarette again. A breeze shifted the muggy air and he wiped his damp chest absently. Playing cops and robbers and mooning over this guy wasn’t gonna make his job any easier.
And if he was, y’know, that way, gay or whatever… 880 Park was no place to find out, fuck knows.
What scared him was the familiarity of the feeling. The nagging sense that his life was a gray, muffled dustbowl unless he turned one direction or the other. Just a different kind of addiction. Andy deserved better and Ruben deserved worse.
Standing in his baggy underwears on the thirty-third floor looking out toward the East River, Ruben tried to calculate how long he’d last before a hard dick or a stray word forced him into some horrifying trespass. He had plenty of experience with impending disaster.
He hadn’t expected to like Andy Bauer, let alone respect him, admire him, and whatever the fuck else. He hadn’t felt this way about anyone since, well, ever. Those frantic stabs of affection and anger worried him because they came so fast and felt so good. Sweeter than bourbon.
He sat down with his feet dangling in the glowing pool.
His feelings had gone way past envy or curiosity. Even with Raggedy Andy dreaming of dividends fifty feet over his head, the impulse to go back upstairs got his heart thumping. The obedience and adoration embarrassed him. This must be what dogs felt like when they heard a key in the lock. Living that close had gotten to him is all. He couldn’t just chalk it up to loneliness, and the last thing he needed to do was put some nice guy at risk by queering out at the wrong moment.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and he glanced up, almost expecting Andy to be looking down from the terrace with a shameful crush of his own. Homo and Juliet. Wherefore art thou a bum?
Nothing. The penthouse was completely dark. His instincts playing tricks with him again. Most likely, Andy was smacking one out in his shower. All that wet pink skin and his mouth gasping at the floor while water sheeted off his lips.
Ruben’s plump, drowsy cock nudged awake inside his boxers. He dropped his gaze to the glowing pool and the slip-slap of the water around his hairy calves.
He’d leave in the morning. For real, this time. Charlie could move some other talentless goon into Andy’s life, and Ruben would find some nice girl with a round ass who’d help him get his head and dick on straight.
Pfff. A small sound made him turn his head. No one there. It had been a hushed impact, like a pillow on marble, but the pool deck was silent.
“The hell?”
Had he imagined it? He pulled his dark legs out of the phosphorescent water and rose slowly. The light caught and glittered on the deck at the shallow end of the pool.
A bull’s-eye scatter of splintered glass.
Mindful of his wet feet, he circled to get a better look. A piece of long crystal stem gleamed in the seam between two slabs.
Before he crouched, he knew immediately what it was: one of Andy’s fancy wine glasses from Prague.
He looked up again, craning and squinting up the sheer windows of the sleeping apartments to Andy’s terrace. No light. No movement. No signs of life. The utter stillness chilled him. The wineglass must have fallen from the open rail, but if he expected Andy’s face to be peering down at him, he was disappointed. The penthouse stayed silent as a coiled snake.
Gooseflesh puckered his torso. In his gut he knew: Andy wasn’t alone up there.
Ruben’s hairs stiffened, and he wiped his hands on his bare stomach. “In my shorts. In my fucking shorts.” Why had that seemed like a fine idea? Sneaking out nearly naked for a smoke seemed so idiotic now. He hadn’t been thinking straight. A cold fist squeezed his insides. Andy needed him.
He pivoted and jogged back inside. After the night sky, the uncanny gleam of the white hallways slammed into his eyes, making him blink. Like a rat in an expensive maze, he slipped quickly and quietly toward the hidden service elevator used by the building staff to perform repairs and collect garbage.
He pulled open the door beside the emergency stairs and jabbed the button. His balls shriveled. “Think.” He had no weapon, no protection, no shoes. Ruben forced himself to take long slow breaths and hold his lungs full and empty at the top and bottom of the cycle. Tactical breathing, the army called it. Any more adrenaline in his bloodstream and he’d start to go blind and deaf.
The elevator cranked into life below him, lumbering upward. Noisy. The button needed to be held to keep the elevator traveling, so he held it hard with one damp finger. Ruben scanned the little vestibule for some kind of artillery; the only things on offer were empty trashcans and a huge extinguisher. Hmm.
The elevator stopped and its doors opened. The car was loaded with clear recycling bags.
Was there anything he could use? He shifted the piles of recycling inside in search of anything useful or deadly. Slim pickings: stacks of bundled newspaper and bags of shredded bills. On one wall, a folded ironing board being put out to pasture and a cardboard box of wine bottles. Then he saw the body. In one corner, a man in a crumpled uniform: the elderly porter’s face cuddled hard by the heaps of clean garbage.
Barefoot on the cold metal, Ruben crouched beside him to check: a sluggish pulse. The poor guy was breathing, but out cold.
So much for exaggeration. Andy had tried to warn him, but Ruben had known better. Exactly like all the other times he’d known better even though he didn’t know a thing. Like every other dumbass drunk, he never learned that he’d never learn.
No. This was on him. The elevator would be noisy and he couldn’t risk the old man. The sweat on his skin felt chilly, but he went back to the stairs.
How could he help Andy? Right now he had a hill of paper and a few bottles. Maybe he could iron them to death. No time to waste thinking.
Ruben began climbing toward the deadly mess he’d made upstairs.
HE SWUNG the bookcase open, thanking Andy for this secret passage which had seemed so stupid on day one.
The library was dim, lit only by the screens on the wall. Hope’s desk had been flung back and papers scattered over the floor, but no blood or fire that Ruben could see in the dull green light.
A low yelp from Andy on the other side of the apartment pushed him into motion.
So Andy was still conscious at least. Maybe they wanted information, and that meant they needed him undamaged. That was something to work with.
Ruben couldn’t be sure how many there were, and right now it almost didn’t matter.
He looked down at his damp boxers and bare feet. His best bet to send them packing was to invite a few more folks to the party. Still, if he just banged on pots and pans, they’d just come in here and kill him. He needed to make a racket big enough to alert the building staff, at least, and the NYPD if he got lucky.
His pants, his cell, and his firearm were in his room and no way could he reach the door except in full view. With the elevator so exposed, he couldn’t run for help, and fuck if he was leaving Andy alone with them.
The terrace.
Ruben eased the glass door open and slid through carefully. Tiles cool under his feet, he hugged the sh
adowy corner and crept around the corner of his own room toward the bright windows. He couldn’t even activate the digital shades to give himself cover.
A few feet away, through the white brick and glass, he could see the dim outlines of his clothes and his weapons, but he had no way to get at them.
For a moment Ruben wished for a carving knife or a crowbar, then scolded himself. Macho action-hero bullshit. In the real world, these animals would mow him down before he got close enough to do any damage. They wouldn’t step up one at a time to get knocked down like Bruce Lee villains. All they needed to do was make enough holes in him before he could do likewise. Thugs weren’t gonna attack in single file and fall politely to the side so he could scoop Andy into his arms.
Not that he actually intended to scoop anything. Fuck you, Kevin Costner.
Maybe he could toss a chair into the street and someone would come up to investigate. He glanced over the edge and saw the pool below. No chance he’d be able to throw anything far enough to reach Park Avenue. With his luck, he’d only kill some kid walking their dog and be gunned down before he could get himself arrested.
A bright trapezoid fell onto the terrace from the dining room windows.
Inside, the big table had been pushed to one side and Andy sat sagging in a dining chair, strapped to it and blindfolded with black duct tape. Two men faced the chair talking calmly. They were Anglo and thirtyish, not particularly big or scary looking. The skinny one had a walrus ’stache, and the stockier one leaned against the sideboard saying something muted by the triple-paned windows. Chunk and Walrus rob a zillionaire.
If Ruben crossed the terrace to flank them from the south, they’d see him in the glare from the lights. For all he knew, there were more upstairs headed his way with box cutters and a duffel bag. He started to tremble in the hot night air. I know him.
Walrus was the guy who’d swiped Andy’s wallet on the day they’d met.