by Tinnean
Wills had the weekend off for a change. The evening before, after an early dinner at Raphael’s and then taking in a concert, where I’d bought him the group’s T-shirt, we’d come home and fucked like bunnies. I was looking forward to a long, lazy Saturday in bed, where eventually we’d do more of the same.
I was drifting in and out of a dream where instead of meeting Franky the day my father had thrown me out, I’d looked up to see Wills standing there, smiling at me and holding his hand out for me to take.
But when I reached out for it, suddenly it was gone—he was gone—and I was alone.
“Wills? Wills?” I woke up to realize I was alone. I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
Where was he?
I clambered out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and went looking for him.
I found him standing outside our front door. He did look good, shirtless, his treasure trail disappearing beneath the waistband of the low-slung sweats he wore.
I blinked. “Wills, what the fuck…?” Tucked into the back of his sweatpants was his gun. I couldn’t tell if it was Butch or Sundance, one of the two guns he sometimes carried. For that matter, I’d never been sure if he was serious about naming his guns after the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.
“Mr. Vincent is grinding his coffee.”
“Huh?” What did that have to do with Wills having his gun on him? I looked past him to where Vince sat on the stairs leading up to the attic and offered him a confused smile. “How come?”
“I have no idea. You want to ask him?”
I scrubbed my scalp and blinked. It was too freaking early for this. “Vince? Why are you grinding coffee on the stairs?”
“I have a houseguest. I didn’t want the noise to wake him.”
Okay. That made sense. I still hadn’t met the man, but Wills had run into him on the stairs once or twice when Vince had been taking him up to the attic apartment he rented from me.
“What does he look like, babe?” I’d asked, curious as to what kind of man Mark Vincent would actually bring to his own home.
Wills had gotten that blank look and then shrugged. “Oh, just your average, everyday-looking kind of guy.”
Before I could press for more details, like height, weight, age, eye and hair color, and whether it seemed as if this guy cared about Vince, Wills’s lips had curled into the half grin that made me weak in the knees—I’d always thought that was a bunch of bullshit until the first time he’d turned it on me and my knees had become like jelly—and he’d given me an actual come-hither look and sauntered into the bedroom, lazily stripping off one article of clothing at a time. My cock had hardened, my tongue hung out, and I’d forgotten all about Vince’s friend.
Now Vince set aside the grinder, his expression thoughtful. “Theo, I need a favor.”
“You’ve got it.” I still felt I owed him for what he’d done for Paul.
Vince claimed he’d had nothing to do with the death of the bastard who’d put Paul in the hospital last spring, but either way, Shaw, or whatever the fuck his name really was, was dead, blown up when he’d tried to get into Vince’s apartment, which was why Vince was back in the attic apartment.
There was also the matter of the fee Paul had been rooked out of. An envelope addressed to him had come in the mail while he was still in the hospital. It contained a cashier’s check for fifteen hundred dollars. I’d had the feeling that Vince was behind it, but he’d denied it when I’d asked him, and I’d dropped the subject. If he didn’t want anyone to know he was a sweetheart of a guy, his secret was safe with us.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’ve bought a condo in Aspen Reach. The woman who used to own it liked pink, and—”
“Jesus! Don’t tell me you bought Delilah Carson’s place!” I’d heard through the grapevine that it was on the market. I could have talked to the other rent boys and come up with a down payment for it, because Delilah had been well-liked by all of us, but her next of kin were real sleazes. They’d descended like vultures, turned their noses up at her possessions, and put the condo up for sale for three quarters of a million dollars.
But a condo where a vicious murder had been committed? No one seemed to want it, and they’d had to keep dropping the price. I hoped Vince hadn’t been taken to the cleaners.
“You’re familiar with it?” Vince asked.
“Are you kidding? I was there!” I still felt bad when I thought about how Delilah’s life had been snuffed out. She’d deserved better than that.
“You were there, babe?” Wills had been lounging against the wall, looking amused, but at that, he straightened, his expression abruptly unamused.
“Well, we’d tricked with her once or twice, and she called to ask if we’d mind working a threesome with her.” I wasn’t thrilled about what I’d done to support myself, but that was part of me. I would never deny it.
“When was this?” His voice was as cold as the look on his face.
“Oh, around the beginning of the year. Maybe a little earlier. So?”
Wills spat a curse under his breath. He rarely swore.
I felt my gut clench.
I’d known it was going to happen sooner or later. I’d known it. Living with him was everything I’d always dreamed having a lover—a partner—would be. The sex was great, but it was the little things he did for me… making repairs around the house, bringing home takeout when he knew I didn’t feel like cooking, going grocery shopping with me when I did, rubbing my feet when I complained they hurt….
Having someone this special wasn’t supposed to happen to someone like me, though, someone who, while it turned out I wasn’t a murderer, had spent almost half my life peddling my ass. So I’d kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It seemed the other shoe had just dropped.
“Oh, what? You’re worried I might have been fucked?” I wanted to strike back at him for making me believe he didn’t care about what I had done. “That was my job, smart guy! But just to set your mind at ease, I wasn’t fucked. That time.” I emphasized the fact that other times I had been fucked, and Wills turned pale. That’s right, bleed a little, asshole! The way I was bleeding. “I was in her crawl space, and I filmed it. Spike got to fuck this gorgeous babe’s ass while she deep-throated Pretty Boy, and the two of them kissed while the john jerked off. Hot stuff, I wanna tell you! I made them a copy. They took it with them, but if you want me to look for the original…. You could take it with you on one of your troubleshooting trips out of town and jerk off.”
“Don’t bother.” Just two words, but it was like having a bucket of ice water tossed in my face. “Mr. Vincent.” He nodded to his boss, then went back into the apartment. I could tell from the way he was walking that he was more than pissed.
Well, what the fuck did he have to be pissed about? And what right did he have to be… to be….
“Y’see, Vince?” My throat felt clogged with tears. “I knew he was living in a dream world! It’s dawning on him what I did, and he can’t deal with it!”
“You think so?”
“What else am I supposed to think?” I wasn’t going to cry. I wasn’t going to cry.
“Bascopolis, her murder was all over the front page of every newspaper in town around the beginning of the year.” Vincent sounded impatient. “You think maybe he was worried you could have been in her condo at the same time she was killed? That maybe it could have been your body found there as well?”
“Yeah, but—”
“You said you were up in the crawl space? How come?”
“He was a new client. Delilah said she was a little unsure of him. After he left, she laughed and said she felt really silly about at how nervous the setup beforehand had made her, but I could see she was still nervous. I asked her if she wanted me to make copies of the tape. She said yes, and Spike begged me to make one for him and Pretty Boy too.” I tore at a cuticle. “She was dead before I had the chance to give her the original and the other copies.”
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br /> About the Author
TINNEAN has been writing since the third grade, where she was inspired to try her hand at epic poetry. Fortunately, that epic poem didn’t survive the passage of time; however, her love of writing not only survived but thrived, and in high school she became a member of the magazine staff, where she contributed a number of stories.
It was with the advent of the family’s second computer—the first intimidated everyone—that her writing took off, enhanced in part by fanfiction, but mostly by the wonder that is copy and paste. While involved in fandom, she was nominated for both Rerun and Light My Fire Awards. Now she concentrates on her original characters.
A New Yorker at heart, she resides in southwest Florida with her husband and two computers.
Ernest Hemingway’s words reflect Tinnean’s devotion to her craft: “Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.”
She can be contacted at [email protected], and can be found on LiveJournal at http://tinnean.livejournal.com/ and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Tinnean.
If you’d like to sample her earlier works, they can be found at http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/tinnssinns/Welcome1.html.
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