I leaned back against the wall, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes. Was it okay to find someone else attractive when you were in a committed relationship? It’d been a while since anyone but Neil had made my cock ache as bad as it had at Bond Antiques, and it usually required a bit of effort on Neil’s part to get me there.
Just thinking of sex in the same breath as Calvin made me reach down to touch myself. That was not good. It was not healthy, right? Fantasizing about another guy, and definitely not one I could have, because I was dating Neil. More or less. And because Calvin was not into guys. I didn’t get the homophobe vibe Neil did, but I certainly wasn’t getting fellow gay man either.
But by then I was hard again, and it didn’t fucking matter if Calvin was gay or straight. I closed my eyes and imagined his hand instead of mine. Big and muscular, with callused palms able to give just the exact amount of pressure and speed I needed. I thought about what it must be like to be naked with him. His strong form surrounding me. His entire body nothing but solid muscle, chest dusted with light hair, and freckles all over.
All over.
Jesus, I’d never been so turned on by freckles in my life.
A little harder, a little faster. I was vaguely aware of my own heavy breathing. In my fantasy Calvin was pressed roughly against me, my cock between us as he stroked. He dipped his mouth close to my ear, then bit and sucked the lobe. He wanted to fuck me, and I wanted it bad.
I opened my eyes when I came suddenly.
Well, then.So there was that little truth. Maybe Calvin had no interest in fucking me for real, but that didn’t change the fact that I would have bent over for him in a heartbeat. I cleared my throat in anI’m embarrassed by myselfmanner, washed once more, and turned off the water.
Dried and changed into a third set of clothes for the day, I walked into the front room and sat on the couch before turning on the television.
It was still snowing, I was being told. Stellar news reporting.
“There is another storm front on the tail of this, which is expected to hit New York City within forty-eight hours. There will be a small window when citizens can go out and unbury cars and get shopping done before they can expect to be blanketed by another ten to fifteen inches,” the weatherman said.
“Awesome.”
I stood back up, went into the kitchen, and searched the cupboards for food while convincing myself I hadn’t just jacked off to fantasies about a cop who had been almost ready to handcuff me this morning. Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. Calvin said I wasn’t a suspect, but that threat to stay in the city told me I was definitely at the top of their person of interests list. I shuddered. Not a place I wanted to be.
I popped the top off a soup can and poured the New England clam chowder into a pot. I watched the contents bubble. Something about that crime scene had been weird. What had Mike been attacked with? A butcher knife? It was such a massive slice in his head….
I swallowed the sour taste coming up my throat.
No, weirder than that. It had been—
“The cat,” I said suddenly. The poor animal that had been hanging from a rope around its neck. What had that been, a warning perhaps? Had Mike gotten mixed up with the wrong sort of people and walked in on someone leaving it?
What struck me as more bizarre than the cat itself was that that story was familiar.
I ran out of the kitchen and shoved aside a few boxes of the estate winnings I was hoarding to get to the bookshelf in the front room. The news anchors were discussing alternate side of the street parking rules being suspended for the next day while I knocked several stacked books off the cramped shelves. One too many mystery novels starring an English spinster and her cat; I had long ago run out of places to put them all. Near the bottom was a well-worn and battered copy ofThe Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
Growing up with a parent like my father, literature was important in our home. To my Pop’s horror, I had never been one for the likes of Faulkner or Hemingway as a kid, but I had at least loved Poe. A depressed man with a twisted, tortured soul and mind. He made more money after his death than he had his entire life as a writer.
I snatched the book, holding it close to my face while reading the table of contents. There it was, page 387, “The Black Cat.” I hurried to the table, sat, and grabbed the magnifying glass to help with the fine print. I now remembered reading this in junior high and how profoundly disturbed I had been by it. The details of the story had faded with the years that I refused to reread it. Everything but the death of the cat.
Pluto. That was his name.
“One morning,” I read, “in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree.”
And there it was. A cat hanged to death.
What were the chances the cat left in Mike’s shop was black?
I looked back down at the pages, shaking my head. This was weird.
No. This was fucked up. Maybe I was reading too much into it, but why did short stories of Poe come to mind in both this situation and at my shop yesterday? I kept reading, refreshing myself with the disturbing story that involved a man lost to madness after becoming an alcoholic. He had killed his wife with an axe—
“To the head.”
Something was burning.
I looked away from the book before jumping up and running into the kitchen. So much for lunch. I wasn’t that hungry anyway. I turned off the burner and yanked open the blinds of the small kitchen window. I winced and squinted slightly, fumbling with the latch before thrusting the window up and using a potholder to guide the smoke out.
