One Life to Lose

by Kris Ripper

  “Get a load of Cam right now,” Josh said, voice low. “He’s gonna explode if he doesn’t start talking.”

  “I think we freaked him out.”

  “I am not freaked out,” I said (sounding freaked out). “I’m really not. But you two— I’ve been— For the last few weeks I’ve been telling myself that you’re—that you’re nice and polite. That I shouldn’t read anything into it. And now we’re having this conversation, which is so unexpected to me that I have no rehearsed way of coping.”

  They stared at me. Then Josh said, “Shit.”

  “I told you we were being weird!”

  “But— I thought we were— I mean, okay, dinner was a little much, but everything else was—” He broke off. “God, we’re such fucking cockteases.”

  I opened my mouth to disagree, but Keith spoke before I could.

  “Sorry, Cam. Just, we think you’re so fucking sexy that even though we were trying not to be overly flirtatious, we probably failed.”

  My heart stuttered. I replayed his words, but it had only been a moment ago. I was sexy? Since when?

  “Ha. Okay, us being teases might be worth Cam looking shocked,” Josh said. “You still with us, man?”

  “I . . .” I what? “Um.”

  Keith sat up. “Oh my god. Cameron. You really didn’t know. Holy shit. Hey, it’s okay. Don’t, like, hyperventilate or anything.”

  My breathing was fine. I was shocked, but my breathing was fine.

  “Cam.”

  I looked at Josh.

  “We like you a lot. It’s not casual for us, either.”

  Keith studied me a minute, then turned to Josh. “I know we said we wouldn’t do anything, but do you think maybe we could show him?”

  “You can’t stand him being so uncomfortable right now, can you?”

  “It’s awful. And we can fix it.”

  Josh reached out, fingers grazing his face. “On your knees, angel.”

  My entire body froze as Keith slid to the floor in front of Josh’s feet, facing him. A second later he began unbuttoning his shirt.

  I had no idea what was going on. Josh was watching Keith and I was watching both of them and dear god, Keith was pulling off his dress shirt, then tugging his T-shirt over his head.

  My toes curled and my balls pulsed and I ignored my prick entirely except to cross my legs so it wouldn’t betray me.

  Of course, I liked Keith a great deal, and was attracted to him, and an attractive man stripping his shirt off in my living room wasn’t exactly a common event. Never mind that he was also on his knees.

  Never mind that his back was covered in pink marks, mostly concentrated at the top, by his shoulders.

  I was breathing through my mouth, a little raggedly, staring at Keith’s skin. Peripherally I registered Josh’s hand in his hair again, and the way Keith pushed into it.

  Dear god. He is so beautiful. I mustn’t say that or he’ll think I’m laughing, but I’m not. So help me, I’m not laughing at all.

  “You can touch,” Keith whispered. “If you want to.”

  He was facing away from me, but I glanced up and found Josh’s eyes already on mine.

  “Touch him, Cam.”

  It would be rude not to, having been invited. I shifted forward, leaning over my legs, giving up on having them crossed, and hoping they’d be too polite to mention how obviously aroused I was.

  Reaching out seemed incredibly difficult, but pressing my fingertips to Keith’s skin was the most natural thing in the world.

  He was hot and he breathed deeply, and I might have been imagining it, but he seemed to push into my fingers as he had Josh’s hand. Blood and breath and bone, under a tight sheath marked thickly with pink.

  “How did you do this?” I asked, my tone library-ish, as if I was afraid to disturb us.

  “A flogger and a single-tail whip. I can show you how to use them.”

  My fingers, still pressed to Keith’s back, trembled. “You’d trust me to do this? You don’t mind that it hurts?”

  This time he definitely pressed back. “I like it. It’s almost like Josh gives me something that is pain, and I take it into myself, and play with it, and make it into something else. Like, figuratively. It’s not suffering. It’s just pain.”

  “It looks like kind of a lot of pain from here.”

  “Oh, no. Those are love taps, mainly. He went so fucking slowly I kind of wanted to cry.” After a pause, he added, “In a good way.”

  “I can show you how to do that, too,” Josh said. “That’s where we’d start.”

  “So I would—I would cause you pain, because you wanted to take it and transform it into pleasure?”

  “Sometimes pleasure, sometimes satisfaction, sometimes sex. Sort of depends. Sometimes it’s for Josh, because he likes hurting me.”

  I looked up, raising my eyebrows, waiting for Josh to rephrase.

  Instead, he shrugged. “Yeah. I do. I like it when he begs me to stop and I keep going because he trusts me to not take it too far.”

  “I trust you to take it too far,” Keith said. “There’s a difference.”

  “Good point. Are you cold?”

  “Cam’s warm. You can use your whole hand, you know. I won’t break.”

  I flattened my hand against him and he sighed. “No, I can see that you are . . . strong. Incredibly strong.”

  “I knew this was a good idea,” Josh said. “I knew you’d get it.”

  I couldn’t say whether I got anything except that Keith was beautiful and Josh was tender and I found myself wanting to get lost inside them, just for a moment. I pulled away, marveling at the loss of his heat. “You want me to make your back look like that?”

  “I like it.” He reached for his T-shirt and sat back on the couch. After a second, he grabbed his wine. “I like it. And I always— It was always kind of a fantasy of mine that there would be two guys with me, focused on me. That I’d sort of be the center of the world. That’s totally self-absorbed, right?”

  “I always thought sex was a pretty self-absorbed thing. Even when you’re pleasing someone else, you’re pleasing yourself.”

  They glanced at each other.

  Josh took a sip of Keith’s wine and handed it back to him. “So right now we’re only talking about a scene, you know, to see how it goes. We’re not ruling out sex, but one thing at a time.”

  “Is that all right?” Keith asked.

  “Oh. Of course.” Right, yes. I’d taken it too far, despite the fact that they’d been clear from the start. I covered the miserable blush by fumbling to refill our glasses, and would have followed it up by saying something ridiculous, about the weather maybe, if Josh hadn’t touched my hand, a brief touch, the way I’d seen him do with Keith out in public.

  “Listen, we think you’re hot as hell or we wouldn’t be here. But sex is a whole other dimension and we’re trying to take it slowly this time. And Keith is the one who’s more vulnerable, so we—you and I—have to make sure every step is on totally solid ground before we go forward.”

  “Hey,” Keith murmured.

  “Babe, come on. You know what I’m saying.”

  Keith leaned forward and took my hands. “It’s, like, limiting our risk. We’re starting out with a really simple plan, but we’ve already built in scalable expansion, and as long as we pay close attention to our returns in the meantime, there’s no reason we can’t get there.”

  Josh fanned himself. “You’re so sexy when you talk business.”

  “The twisted thing is he’s not joking.” Keith squeezed. I belatedly squeezed back. “You can think about everything. You’re totally not obligated to answer right now. Or ever. If you want to pretend this never happened, we will totally play along.”

  “I don’t want to do that. I’m not sure I can do any of this, but I’d like to try.” Which was true, even though it frightened me to think about. And turned me on.

  “Are you going to Scream Night at Club Fred’s on Friday?” Josh asked.


  “I imagine I’ll end up there. I arranged the schedule so I would have the opportunity.”

  “Good. Then we’ll see you there. And if you want, you can come home with us after. And Cam, we can do this slowly. Keith and I aren’t in a hurry.”

  “Hey, you can come on the Ghost Tour with us! We’re doing that before going to Scream Night.”

  “Sorry, I’m working until nine. But I can commit to going to Fred’s.”

  “Good. Then we’ll see you there.” Keith smiled and squeezed my hands again before letting them go. He looked younger in just a T-shirt, as if I’d scratched the surface of put-together QYP-cofounder Keith and found a teenager with bright eyes and warm smiles underneath. “Thanks for not kicking us out.”

  “I wouldn’t have. Thank you for dinner.”

  “Sure thing.”

  As if they knew we couldn’t leave it there, they started talking about the Ghost Tour, and all their memories of years past. Josh had gone as a child. Keith’s parents hadn’t been into it, but when he was ten he’d gone with a babysitter (who’d been secretly visiting her tour guide boyfriend; Keith confided he’d watched them kiss and been confused by how much more intriguing he found the boyfriend than the babysitter). I had gone with my parents every year. They loved the drama of walking the cemetery at night, knowing that volunteers in creepy costumes might be lurking behind every grave and around every mausoleum.

  Once we’d established conversational baselines again, all of us relaxed. We drained the wine, laughed a lot, and the two of them touched more frequently, ending up with Keith half in Josh’s lap, talking about some fundraising debacle early in QYP’s history, during which someone had taken Keith for an at-risk youth brought by Josh for demonstration purposes.

  “And he hasn’t left the house without a tie since!” Josh finished the story, poking his boyfriend in the side.

  “I don’t wear a tie to the gym,” Keith said primly.

  Both of them dissolved into giggles. After a second, I joined them.

  Of course I tried very hard not to obsess over Friday night, and of course I mostly failed. I couldn’t get the image of Keith’s back out of my mind, or his soft whisper inviting me to touch him, or Josh’s voice calling him “angel” in a tone I couldn’t reference except that it reminded me of my father speaking to my mother when they didn’t know I was just around the corner. He’d called her “my lilac” for reasons they never explained to me, and only when they thought they were alone.

  I didn’t want to parse that one too deeply, actually. But it had clearly been a private nickname, a sweet word exchanged between them with meanings that stretched deep into the ground like roots, all the way back through their lives.

  Like “angel” in Josh’s voice, which he’d allowed me to hear. He would not have said that in front of the stranger they’d attempted to seduce (if that’s what it had been). Not that I was in competition with some stranger they hadn’t even liked, obviously, but if I had been, I’d’ve won.

  Maybe it was creepy to associate that moment with my parents, but I found it cemented something about Josh and Keith for me, some quality of permanence they exuded, which I found hopelessly attractive.

  Thus, my thoughts ran after each other in endless circles as I contemplated what Friday would bring. The idea of actually holding a whip in my hand, of hitting Keith with it, was disturbing—up to a point. Past which it sounded intriguing and almost painfully intimate. The kind of intimacy I didn’t dare hope would lead to more than what it was.

  The other thing that occasionally intruded, pushing thoughts of Josh and Keith aside, was the notion of Scream Night. Even if Club Fred’s decided at the last moment to cancel it, even if Fred’s decided to close, there was a very real possibility that someone would die this week, and with no way to address it, or prevent it, we were essentially playing a waiting game.

  Zane had come to a mid-day family showing of Inside Out with a woman I knew to be Mildred—though I didn’t know her well—and Mildred’s son, James, whom I saw more frequently with Obie and Emerson. They’d made it through half of the movie before bringing James out to crawl around like a small madman.

  “I can’t decide if I want to stay home or not,” Zane said. “Not that I’m worried for myself, but that morning after Honey died, when we’d all seen her the night before . . .” She shook her head. “That was awful. More awful than just remembering her at knitting or something.”

  Mildred rattled some kind of toy for James and he zoomed across the carpet to grab it. “I know Obie’s planning to be there, though I don’t know if he’ll drag Emerson or not. I worry for Obe a little. If someone asked for his help, even knowing there’s a serial killer out there, he’d try to help. I think I’ll tell them to go together or not at all.”

  “Yeah. I might get a ride with Jaq and Hannah. It’s all about safety in numbers. You, Cameron?”

  I swallowed. “I think I’ll be there. I believe I’m meeting up with Josh and Keith.”

  “The QYP boys, nice. I like them. They’re clever, and I like the way they’re heading with their business.” She nudged Mildred lightly. “You should go down to the center with me one day. I’ve been thinking of maybe knitting them blankets and donating them.”

  “Do they have childcare?” Mildred asked dryly.

  “That’s brilliant! I bet they’d find a way to do childcare if there was a need for it.”

  We talked awhile longer (yes, Zane was going on the Ghost Tour, and yes, she was bringing Baby James, whether his mother wanted to go or not, and yes, she’d already asked Ed when he was working so she could snag him for a tour guide). They disappeared back into the movie for the last twenty minutes and left with the rest of the families, and I wondered at my brain slotting them into that role. I had no reason to believe they were together; undoubtedly I was only turning people into couples because I had the idea on my mind lately.

  The day progressed, the evening, the night. Everything seemed so perfectly ordinary. That’s always what they say, isn’t it? Dramatic events are rarely preceded by a foreboding omen we recognize at the time, and that Wednesday morning’s news hadn’t been preceded by anything even approaching a warning. Later we’d be no more wise, considering it, than we were in the moment.

  Late Tuesday night another murder occurred. The first not on a Friday. The first not after a theme night. It could have almost been unconnected, except for the method, and the victim.

  My phone rang and rang and rang. I squinted in the darkness of my bedroom and picked it up, finally, grumbling “Hello” without looking at the number.

  “Cam, it’s me. Ed.”

  I sat up. “Are you all right?” Because no one called before 6 a.m. unless they weren’t all right.

  “I’m fine, Alisha’s fine, but I have to ask you something. Do you know Anderson Philpott?”

  “Sure. At least, a little. Why?”

  “He’s dead. He’s dead like the others, Cam, and there’s something else, too.”

  Philpott was dead?

  “He was Togg. Philpott was freaking Togg, Cam, can you believe that?”

  “Togg? The website guy? With the blog everyone reads?” Everyone but me, though I stopped by maybe once a week to scan through his headlines to see if I’d missed anything. He’d been doing a number on La Vista PD lately, for not catching this killer.

  Oh. God.

  I rubbed my temple, grateful for the lack of light in the room. No colors. “Are you saying the same—the same person killed him as killed the others?”

  “I know. It doesn’t make sense, it’s the wrong day, there was no theme night, but maybe things were heating up for him and he couldn’t cope with it, so he had to change up his MO. I don’t know.” A burst of static hit the line, and I winced. “Sorry, it’s really windy out here.”

  Out here. “Are you at the waterfront?”

  “Yeah. Shit. I—I saw him. Togg. Philpott. I saw his body. He was so messed up, Cam. More than Honey. Hi
s legs—his legs were so—” He cleared his throat. “They said it looked like he fought back, that whoever killed him is probably pretty messed up, too.”

  “Do you need a ride home or anything?” I asked, since he sounded awful.

  “No. I’m going to stay here and see what happens.”

  “How do they know Philpott is Togg?”

  “They looked at his phone. He was logged in to his site, and after that all they had to do was call the host to get a billing name and address. Which matched. He’s freaking Togg.” He sounded shocked, but also almost excited. As if the reality of another murder hadn’t quite penetrated the fascinating reveal of Philpott’s secret identity.

  I hadn’t known Philpott well, but I knew he stayed a little detached from people, and that he liked to get into long discussions about politics and social change. Maybe it had been obvious he was Togg all along, but we’d all built up Togg to be someone who couldn’t have a beer at Club Fred’s and talk about books, or Hitchcock.

  Notorious. It was his favorite Hitchcock/Grant collaboration. He’d said he would come see it. And now he was dead.

  I swallowed, throat tight, mouth dry. “You okay, Ed?”

  “I’m okay. I mean, this is fucking terrible, and I can’t believe he’s dead twice over, but I’m okay. This is a crappy time for Alisha to have started the new job, though, or I would have gone over to her place and just sat there for a little while.”

  “Well, feel free to come to the theater later if you want to.”

  “I’ll think about it. But you know, now that Togg’s dead? There’s no one to report on his murder. He was always the first person to get information up. I want to make sure we have something on the Times-Record site before the end of the day. It’s the least I can do.”

  I nodded, then realized I was on the phone and said, “I understand.”

  “Will you come to Fred’s later? I think we’ll probably be doing something, though we might only be sitting around weeping into our beers.”

  “I’m closing tonight,” I said, somewhat relieved.