The Losing Game (18 page)

“Um, I suppose this is more or less typical. If I was out dancing, I’d probably wear a T-shirt.” Lucas’s eyes twinkled above the candlelight. “I needn’t tell you I’ve never been out with anyone who dresses as well as you. Do you ever do denim?”

He was teasing. The unguarded affection was disarming. Dante felt the back of his neck getting warm.

“Now and again. Mainly in the summer.”

Lucas didn’t seem to have an opinion about Dante’s answer. He launched straight into his next question. “What else can I tell you about myself that you don’t already know?”

Blindsided, Dante’s stomach turned a double—no, triple—somersault followed by a back handspring and a roundoff.

Lucas clarified, “I assume you’ve done your research. Doesn’t everyone these days, before they go on a date? Make sure I’m not married or have a criminal record. Or bonkers.”

“Well… I….”

“Don’t worry. I tried checking you out too. Though I must say it wasn’t easy. Don’t you ever go online?”

Dante hoped Lucas couldn’t see the sweat breaking out on his temples. Not for the first time, he was thankful his skin was too dark for Lucas to see him blushing, particularly in this Grinch-like light.

“I do go online. I just don’t leave a trail.”

“Then perhaps you’ll indulge me, since from your lack of response, you have indeed been checking up on me.” No chagrin, only an irresistible playfulness. “What was it like, growing up over a sex shop?”

Dante could answer this. He’d been asked dozens of times before. “It didn’t turn me into a nymphomaniac.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” His expression changed, to something more serious. “It says on your website, family owned for three generations.”

The building had been owned for three generations by the Okoro family, though it was Gabriel who turned it into a sex shop. But that was a story for another time.

Dante ate his soup, silently berating himself for giving Lucas less credit than he was due. He might have appeared unsophisticated on their first meeting—an open book—but it seemed to Dante that every time they met, Lucas was open on a different page. Each only intrigued Dante more. Made him want to keep reading.

“When I was very young, I had no idea what was in the shop. It was out of bounds. By the time I was eleven or twelve, it afforded me some kudos I hadn’t earned. So long as I kept the boys at school stocked in porn and later, condoms.”

Dante had mixed feelings. A scholarship boy at a school populated almost exclusively by wealthy white boys was a hard place to fit in. Never mind how his father made his living. Being gay, and knowing it, amongst all that testosterone and a pecking order that could have been lifted from
Lord of the Flies
? Dante shuddered.

“Didn’t you ever get caught?”

“By my father? No.” Dante warmed at the memory. “I think he knew but turned a blind eye.”

Lucas considered Dante’s answers with the same care and attention he paid to his food—slowly sipping and savoring. Nonetheless, he asked the next question before Dante could ask him something in return.

“Do you think it spoiled sex for you, learning about it so young?”

“No. On the contrary. Having that understanding long before I was sexually active prepared me. If anything, I think I waited longer to experiment with intimacy because it didn’t hold any—”

“Mystery?”

“No, it was mysterious. It still is, in many ways.” Dante wasn’t saying that to appear more enticing or adventurous than he was. He marveled at what some men could so easily share of their flesh, yet when it came to what was in their hearts and minds…. “No, I waited to become sexually active because I understood from the very beginning that for me there was no taboo. No element of anything being forbidden.”

“You like that, don’t you?” Lucas’s eyes lit up like he’d unlocked one of the secrets of the universe.

“Yes. When my partner is of the same mind.”

It was Lucas’s turn to blush. His soup fell from his spoon, and his Adam’s apple danced a jig in his neck. “You’ll have to be patient with me. This is new ground.”

“Then we should take the slow road.”

As Dante finished his soup, it occurred to him that he had unintentionally made a commitment to Lucas. Lucas wasn’t so stupid not to have recognized it. He had, in fact, invited it, whether he’d intended to or not. That, too, was apparently neither here nor there. Dante’s pledge, and Lucas’s affirmation, sat comfortably between them.

The mood changed from there on. Less push and pull. More pausing to rest and digest. All was well, apart from the elephant in the corner—a Richard-Shaw-shaped elephant with a flashing GPS signal on its handset and a camera around its neck wearing a pair of running trainers and a rainproof coat.

Dante chose not to look at it. They spent the rest of the evening talking about the more mundane aspects of Lucas’s and Dante’s jobs. Lucas’s hands worked nimbly, plucking at the grapes served with their cheese. His eyes fluttered closed, fleetingly, when he tasted the Dolcelatte.

Dante imagined the future. Conversations with Lucas, talking about everything and anything. Lucas arguing with Dante. Going red in the face when he didn’t agree—and when he did.

“Am I boring you?” Lucas said, tugging off another grape.

“Sorry?”

“You were miles away.”

“I’m sorry. This is such a busy time of year for me, with the shop. I’m exhausted.”

“We could go. If I eat any more cheese, I’m going to explode.”

Dante folded his serviette and tucked it under the side of his dessert plate. “I’ll ask for the bill.”

When they reached Lucas’s house, Dante waited momentarily for an invitation that didn’t come. He got out of the car and opened the passenger door, hoping Lucas hadn’t noticed the pregnant pause.

Lucas put one foot on the floor and leaned out. “Seriously? You’re going to walk me the ten feet to my front door?”

“How else am I going to kiss you?”

They stood under the porch light. Lucas met Dante halfway, to close the space between them, tilting his face and taking Dante’s mouth. His nose was cold against Dante’s cheek, but his tongue was warm and hungry.

Lucas had been making up his mind. That was all. Dante was out of practice—he hadn’t read the signs.

When Lucas asked Dante in, Dante would confess everything. He would challenge him over his night sorties and beg him to stop. He would do it now before they invested any more in each other. Before they had more to lose.

Lucas pulled back first and said, “Do you mind if I don’t ask you in? I know what I did, after Avery’s funeral…. But it was different then. I was trying too hard to forget. Now I want to remember everything, and remember it well. I’m not sure I’m ready yet.”

Dante put his fingers to Lucas’s lips. “You don’t have to give me a reason.”

“I’d like to see you again.” Lucas leaned in and took another kiss. He said against Dante’s lips, “I like you very much.”

“I’ll text you tomorrow.”

Lucas hung onto the door as Dante returned to his car, smiling and relaxed. Too relaxed. Dante could buy his hesitance about having Dante come inside. It was the insipid smile that he didn’t believe.

He drove his car two streets along, diverted to a cul-de-sac that Lucas wouldn’t enter should he decide to go out, and parked beneath a broken streetlight. He changed his jacket and shoes on his passenger seat, and decided to give it an hour. While he waited, he logged into the live video feed to Shaw’s house.

It was almost eleven. Lois would still be up. Probably on the third
Iron Man
movie by now.

“Lois?”

“Yes? Everything okay?”

“I think so. But I have a bad feeling. Can you go into my office and check the video feed on Richard Shaw’s house? Go back about four hours.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Hopefully, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Okay. I’ll call you back.”

Did Lucas have a means of tracking Shaw that Dante didn’t know about? He couldn’t imagine he’d been able to get close enough to him to install a tracker or software. Most remote (legal) tracks required consent. As a business owner, Dante didn’t imagine Shaw to be the kind of man to be slack with personal security.

The temperature in the car quickly dropped with the engine off. What Dante wouldn’t have given for a blanket and a flask of something to ward off the chill. He really was getting old.

Ten long minutes later, Lois called. “Okay, I checked the cameras on the front and the sides of the property. Shaw and his wife went out at about eight this evening. There was nothing on the house until ten.”

“What happened at ten?”

“Mrs. Shaw pulled their car onto their drive, got out, and stormed up to their front door.” She paused. “Hang on. I’m rewinding. Yep. The way their mouths are moving, they’re having some sort of row. After Mrs. Shaw gets out, Mr. Shaw follows, she pushes him away, and he falls flat on his arse.” Lois made a long, whistling sound. “Man, she’s pissed off. I’d say they didn’t have a nice evening out.”

“Then what?”

“She goes in the house, and he kicks the car tire, gets out his handset, makes a call, and walks off somewhere. So far, wherever he went, he’s not come home yet.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Are you coming home?”

“Yes. Within the hour.”

“Good. I’ll keep my eye on the cameras until you get back. So no more than an hour. Okay?”

“Of course.”

Dante’s forearms had broken out in goose bumps. He started his car. He was too late for last orders at the Blue Bell. Anyway, Richard Shaw might not have gone there even if his friend Denny was… yes, Dante checked Facebook and Twitter again. He was there.

Lucas, as far as his handset was concerned, was still inside his house.

Dante would just do a drive-by of the Blue Bell. To check what was what. That way, if Lucas went for another late night sortie, Dante would be there ahead of him, ready to intercept.

LUCAS TOOK
a long hard look in the mirror. He pulled down the lower lids of his eyes. “Nope. Not drunk. Definitely not drunk.”

He’d only had a couple of glasses of wine, over three hours, and plenty of water. The cheese overdose was another matter. He rubbed at his protesting stomach.

God, Lucas liked Dante. Past the good looks and the sharp clothes, he was attentive, intelligent, and sensitive. He noticed things. He’d noticed Lucas, that was for sure.

“But he didn’t see my secret, did he?”

Lucas didn’t feel quite as pleased with himself as he thought he would. Maybe a part of him had wanted Dante to see it. Had wanted him to tell Lucas to stop.

Let it be, Lucas. Forget Shaw. Why not fall in love instead?

Lucas wanted to see Dante again and again and maybe fall in love. Now there was a possibility. Only, if he didn’t finish his business with Shaw, he’d always have that regret, that guilt, that he chickened out for a bit of romance.

“Chickened out for a life. For life. To make up for the one you didn’t get to have, Gracie.”

The words sounded bitter and mean. He hadn’t meant them that way.

Grace might have managed to fit in some traveling and a few more boyfriends, but they’d both lost their twenties to their parents. They’d both lost their parents. Then Grace had lost everything.

No, that was the wrong way to look at it. Losing was a passive choice of word—implying that there was no blame. Grace had been
robbed
of her life. It had been stolen from her by Richard Shaw.

It happened so automatically that Lucas didn’t remember going down the stairs and opening his laptop feed to Facebook, to Denny. He was on Twitter and Instagram—a fully paid-up member of the “post it and like it” generation, too busy seeking the world’s approval to realize no one cared. People like Denny clicked the “like” button so that someone would “like” them back—an endless round of shoulder slapping that served no purpose whatsoever.

Lucas was glad, though. Denny didn’t care who knew his business or that he looked like a prick in that Santa hat.

As did Richard Shaw.

Richard Shaw.

Lucas looked again. Posted thirty minutes ago. Shaw was at the Blue Bell. With his wife? Was that where they’d gone? What did it matter? This might be the chance Lucas had been waiting for.

As he had the night before, Lucas changed into his running gear. He took out his gun, loaded the magazine, and slotted it inside the handle, then went through the ritual of turning off the lights.

He checked his handset. Quarter past eleven. If he was quick through the park and Milton, he could be in his hiding spot behind the tree in twenty-five minutes.

Outside, at the back, the neighboring houses and gardens were dark and quiet. Lucas had always loved how quiet this street was, populated with families wanting a bit of peace and privacy. He jumped the fence and hit the ground running. He had a good feeling.

Doing the run to the Blue Bell didn’t feel as long tonight. Lucas fell into a quick and easy rhythm. His stomach settled, and he felt that rare lightness that came only when he ran. The cold air snapped at his face and down his throat, trying and failing to bruise his lungs. He’d hardened against that, got used to the burn. Once his body warmed, the cold air was refreshing.

The tide was in. Lucas heard the tumble and pull of the waves as he slipped through the hedge on Hare’s Lane. By the time he reached his tree, the only sounds were his breathing and the wind catching in the twigs and hedgerow.

By the looks of things, the Blue Bell had extended its closing time. Orange light spilled from the windows, and the car park was half-full. Lucas prepared for a long wait.

The night didn’t feel as cold as the one before, even as the minutes ticked by. Maybe the meal with Dante and the burning light of hope, was keeping him warm.

Lots of people were in the pub. Maybe Shaw was amongst them. Over the next half an hour, several taxis came. Revelers piled in. Taxis went. People left on foot or got into their own cars.

As the car park emptied and the lights in the pub windows dimmed, Lucas found himself edging ever closer into the hedgerow. A stray branch scratched at his face. His heart beat faster.