Dirty Secret (15 page)

M
ONDAY
veiled the city in a chilly early morning fog, cloaking the neighborhood with a fine, opaque mist. The threat of rain hung in the air, a heavy water taint with a hint of asphalt rising up from the roads. I tossed one of my leather jackets at Jae before he headed out the front door. He caught it and quirked an eyebrow at me.

“I’m not a little kid,” he said, tossing the motorcycle jacket back at me.

“It’s cold,” I replied, opening the door enough to let in a whip of wind. “’Sides, I like knowing you’re out there with something of mine wrapped around you.”

That earned me a skeptical look and a derisive snort. Some people get a good-bye kiss from their lovers before they go off to work. I get disdain, and if I’m lucky, a wet hairball in my shoe.

“Humor me.” I held the jacket up, and after a moment, Jae slid his arms into the sleeves. Despite his broad shoulders, I was still bigger than he was, so the black leather hung loose on him. He looked young, a delectable study in black, ivory, and glittering brown eyes. I kissed him, bringing color to his full lips, and he let me fix the collar around his neck.

“You’re silly.” He leaned over to grab his camera case from the table by the front door. “I’ve got to go. I want this light.”

We’d spent Sunday buying a bed, and then testing it out, finally admitting defeat at staying in bed all day in favor of Thai food. After the stress of Helena’s death and being indoors for hours, Jae was ready to prowl through some abandoned buildings with nothing but his camera to keep him company. Checking his pack one last time, he snagged his keys from the hook on the wall and said good-bye to his cat lazing on the landing of the stairs. I followed him out, locking the door behind me, and spent a few moments admiring his ass as he loaded up his Explorer with his gear.

“Cole-ah, about tonight.” Jae stopped and grabbed my T-shirt to pull me close. “At your brother’s….”

“I’ll tell him you can’t come,” I said, letting him off the hook. “You’ve had a crap weekend.”

“No,” He said, shaking his head. “Tell Mike I’ll be there. I want to come to dinner.”

“Babe, the last thing you need in your life is my father,” I replied. “Really, it’s going to be fucking shitty. He’s going to be shitty. Fuck, I can’t even promise he won’t be shitty to
you
.”

He looked at me with that odd look he sometimes got on his face. It was a look that made me doubt my age, because it was like staring down into a stone’s soul.

“I’m not going for him,” he murmured, tugging on my shirt. “I’m going because you want me to. I’m going because you need me. If you’re going to stand in front of your father, I should be there next to you. It’s only right. It’s what you’d do for me. Call Mike. Tell him I’m coming.”

The kiss he gave me guaranteed my coffee wouldn’t need to be sweetened, and I stood there, numb and more than a little bit giddy, as he climbed into his SUV and backed out of the driveway. I got a wave. Then Jae was lost in the creeping fog, his car’s rear lights disappearing in a slow red fade.

It was early, too early for Claudia to be in the office, so I spent a few minutes making coffee and checking the thermostat. The short walk from my front door to the office chilled me down to the bone, and the scars along my belly twisted and ached. I waited for the coffee machine to spit out its love for me, then filled a mug to take back to my desk.

I shot off a quick text to Mike’s cell phone, telling him Jae would be at Maddy’s dinner, and shoved aside my misgivings of taking Jae with me into the lion’s den. I didn’t pray. My connection with God mostly had to do with thanking Him for letting me find a cold beer in my fridge, or a parking space near the door during Christmas time, so I wasn’t on any formal standing by any means. Still, I sent a heartfelt
Dude, don’t let my Dad fuck this up
plea, and got to work.

Spreading Dae-Hoon’s family pictures out on the desk, I compared the images of a smiling Korean man with his children against the lascivious images he’d taken of gay men having sex. Jae and I debated on whether to give Scarlet the pictures of Seong, eventually deciding to bury them as deep as we could. The youth in the picture appeared to be a young Scarlet, and despite Jae’s assurances he could handle what he saw, his cheeks turned pink at the sight of his beloved
nuna
engaged in blurry carnal relations with her lover.

Still, even without knowing the men in the photos, I felt dirty looking through them. I was looking at someone’s deepest fears and secrets. Even after all these years, the men in the photos still probably lived dual existences, jumping from one shadowed moment to the next to scratch an itch inside of them they hated.

I reached for the baseball I kept on my desk. It wasn’t a remarkable ball, unsigned and insignificant. Rick, in some strange quirk of his nature, adored baseball. More importantly, he loved the Dodgers. He wasn’t even from Los Angeles, or further back in the team’s history, Brooklyn, but ever since he’d been a little boy living in Boonfuck Somewhere Else, he’d loved the Dodgers.

Couldn’t tell you anything about the players, and sometimes got the rules wrong, but he loved that fucking team.

I’d sprung a few bucks, hard-earned bucks at the time, to get third base line tickets. As luck would have it, a foul ball popped up and straight into Rick’s hands. His green eyes widened, a perfect match for his open mouth, and he held the ball up for me to see. Then complained loudly about how his hands stung from the ball hitting his palms.

It was one of the few things I had of Rick’s life with me. His conservative family stripped our place of anything that remotely resembled him, including his dust-mop dog. Still, after all of that, I could say we’d lived our lives out in the open. Something neither Dae-Hoon nor his blackmail victims were able to do.

I still missed Rick. Some part of me would always miss him. I still absently bought Sweet’n Low when I went to the grocery store, even though no one I knew used it. I had four boxes of the stuff before I finally came to my senses and threw them out. I hadn’t yet gotten out of the habit of buying creamy peanut butter, because Rick hated the type with nuts, and I still skimmed the airfare prices to Bora Bora for a fantasy vacation to a place I’d never had a desire to visit but was always somewhere he’d dreamed of going.

“Definitely not how I wanted us to end up, but we were okay, weren’t we?” I said to the baseball in my hand. “With Jae, I’ve got to make some compromises. It’s different from being with you. Not… you two are different. Wherever the heck you are, honey, I hope to God it’s someplace you’re happy.”

Claudia came in while I was working on my second cup of coffee and a stack of Dae-Hoon’s finances. It was a confusing mess of numbers, and one I was about to toss out the window. I’m sure the look of disgust on my face was comical, but not as funny as Claudia’s double take when she saw me sitting at my desk.

“You look like you’ve been a busy boy this weekend. Is that your bed lying broken against the dumpster?” Her outfit that morning was a nod to the fifties housewife, a smartly pressed chartreuse number with large white buttons running up her generous bosom. If it was anyone else, I’d have said it was a great retro find. Knowing Claudia, she’d bought it new from Kress stores, or sewed it herself while fighting off zombie alligators with a butter knife.

“That color’s nice on you,” I said instead, and she smiled at the compliment. “And yes, that’s my bed. We had… an accident.”

“Last time I had that kind of accident,” she remarked over her shoulder as she filled her own coffee cup. “I wound up pregnant with Malcolm.”

“Yeah, as hard as I try, I don’t think I’ll be able to get Jae pregnant.” I leered at her when she rolled her eyes at me. “Not like I’m not willing to try.”

“You are a nasty thing this early in the morning.” Sitting down at her desk, she fired up her computer and brought her cup up to her bright red lips. “Why are you here already? Got into a fight with your boy?”

“Nah, Jae got squirrelly. It’s been a rough weekend.” I told her about the shooting at the rehearsal celebration, and then discovering Dae-Hoon’s blackmail empire. “So he woke up needing to go take pictures of old buildings. The fog made him happy. Something about the light.”

“That poor kid.” Claudia tsked. “Not Jae. Well, poor Jae for being there, but that David boy.”

“Yeah, he looked shattered. Going to be rough for a bit. He’ll do okay once he gives it some time.” She gave me a sidelong look, and I raised my eyebrows at her. “What?”

“It’s good to see you coming out of your funk,” she told me over the rim of her cup. “Just saying, Jae’s been good for you. First time I met you, I thought you were just waiting for Death to come for you.”

“And still you decided to work for me,” I replied dryly.

“You paid, and I was bored,” Claudia pointed out. “You’re better now. You even wake up before noon, and here you are in the office, and coffee made before I hit the porch.”

“Don’t get too used to it,” I warned. “I’m lazy. I like sleeping in.”

“I never denied you’re lazy,” she sniped back with a satisfied smile. “You just do more living now when you’re awake.”

I was spared the humiliating task of coming up with something snappy to say by my cell phone ringing for my attention. Scarlet’s number flashed on the screen, and panic hit me. If anyone hated to get up before noon, it was Jae’s
nuna
. Her calling me before the morning hit double digits would make a stone crack with worry.

“Morning, Scarlet,” I said. “Whatcha doing up so early? Or haven’t you been to bed?”

“It’s not
nuna
.” Jae’s voice hit me harder than I expected. I must have made a noise, something shocked or panicked, because he quickly cut me off before I could form words. “She’s fine. I’m calling on hers because I forgot to charge mine. It died right after I got here.”

“What’s wrong?” I swallowed the lump in my throat and waved away Claudia’s offer for a refill. She frowned at me when she heard me speak, caught halfway between desks with the steaming coffee pot. “Are
you
okay? Where are you?”

“I’m fine,” Jae said. A loudspeaker echoed near him, and the sound crackled over the phone line. “I’m at Cedars.”

“What are you doing there?” I stopped to take a breath. He probably could get more out if I shut up and let him talk.

“Hold on, I’m outside.” The chatter around him subsided, and I could hear his deep sigh. “Shin-Cho went out… looking for company last night.”

“Did someone get a hold of him?” It was still dangerous for single gay men to be out on the streets at night. All it took was one or two assholes to scream obscenities, and the cops would be called to pick up the pieces of some unlucky guy who’d only gone out to get his rocks off.

“Yeah, kind of. He’s been shot,” Jae murmured. “What was he thinking? Helena
died
the day before, and he goes and does this.”

“Everyone deals with stress differently, babe,” I reminded him. “We were kind of doing the same thing ourselves.”

“We didn’t go out looking for it at a bar.” Jae was more of a street kid than I liked to admit. He had no patience for people putting themselves into dangerous situations they couldn’t handle.

Of course, he generally put me squarely in the no-street-smarts and stupid-situation category, but where Shin-Cho was concerned, I wasn’t going to argue the point.

“What happened? How is he?” My stomach sank. “Is he okay?”

“He’s still in surgery.” It sounded like he was exhaling from a cigarette drag. “From what the cops said, he and some guy were behind the bar, and someone shot them. No one knows if it was a drive-by, or if the guy walked by. One of the guys working there found them when he went to take out the trash.”

“Fuck. How’s the other guy?” I was trying not to think of the night Ben shot us, but it was creeping in on me. The smell of blood clung to my memories, edging away the safe little life I’d built up since then.

“He was dead when the cops got there. I think
hyung
’s going to see if he can help his family.” Jae’s voice thickened with anger. “Why would Shin-Cho do something so stupid?”

“Because….” How did I explain desperation and emptiness to someone who’d been willing to go through life alone rather than be ostracized by his family? Jae liked sex. He seemed to love it with me, but we’d had to strike a balance with our time together and the feral independence he needed. “Because sometimes when you hurt, you don’t want to be alone. Even if it’s something as stupid as a back alley blow job. It’s something.”

“Could have gotten him into Dorthi Ki Seu,” Jae grumbled.

“Sure, hook him up with a guy he’s going to have to pay at a place where
nuna
works,” I said. Sometimes, Jae’s thinking jumped the rail, and I couldn’t make sense of where it went.

“No one would have said anything,” he shot back. “It’s private, and they wouldn’t be picking bullets out of him right now. And that other guy would still be alive.”

“When did this happen?” I asked, changing the subject. “It’s kind of late for a hookup.”

“This morning. Early,” Jae replied. “Like, three? I don’t know. What time do normal bars close? I don’t even know where it was.”

“What do you need me to do? Does
nuna
need anything?”

“She’s upset.
Hyung
’s here too.” A siren popped loudly near Jae, and he waited a moment for it to die down. “Shin-Cho’s mother is here. She came as soon as
hyung
called her.”

“How’s he holding up? David,” I clarified. “First Helena, and now his brother.”

“He’s why I called you,” Jae said. “He wants to talk to you. I guess Shin-Cho told him about their dad. Can you come up?”

“Now? Sure.”

“David
really
wants to talk to you.” I could imagine him giving one of his helpless people-are-crazy shrugs. “I think he needs to be able to… control something? Right now, everything is bad, so he needs to do something. Maybe he wants to tell you to stop looking for Dae-Hoon.”

“Can’t do that,” I replied. “Scarlet and Shin-Cho hired me.”

“I don’t know, then,” Jae admitted. “All I know is he’s pacing back and forth.
Nuna
’s upset because Shin-Cho went out and got himself shot, and
hyung
’s grumbling because his sister’s… well, it’s hard being around them.”