The Secrets We Keep

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  More from Rick R. Reed

  Readers love Rick R. Reed

  About the Author

  By Rick R. Reed

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  The Secrets We Keep

  By Rick R. Reed

  Jasper Warren is a happy-go-lucky young man in spite of the tragedy that’s marred his life. He’s on a road to nowhere with his roommate, Lacy, whom he adores, and a dead-end retail job in Chicago.

  But everything changes in a single night. Though Jasper doesn’t know it, his road is going somewhere after all. This time when tragedy strikes, it brings with it Lacy’s older, wealthy, sexy uncle Rob. Despite the heart-wrenching circumstances, an immediate connection forms between the two men.

  But the secrets between them test their attraction. Will their revelations destroy the bloom of new love… or encourage it to grow?

  For Bruce, again….

  I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter—they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

  —Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

  Prologue

  “HEY! I don’t think you should go through that,” Rob said, barely audible because he didn’t want his fear to show. He sucked in a breath and clutched his suitcase close to him, as though it were a child—or a flotation device. Or a boy he loved and didn’t want to lose….

  The water spread out on the road under the overpass like a black mirror. It could have been a few inches deep or a few feet. From just a visual, there was no way to gauge how deep it was. No person with any sense would drive into it.

  His Uber driver, a sallow-complexioned man in his forties wearing a black baseball cap, gave out a low whistle. “We’ll be okay,” he said cheerfully, with a confidence Rob simply didn’t have. “Just sit back and let me worry. We’ll be fine.”

  Rob wished he had the nerve to speak up, to command, “No! Don’t! Just turn around.” After all, this driver was putting them both in danger. But he felt like protesting would make him seem insane or, at the very least, silly. So what’s worse, he wondered, seeming crazy or drowning? He cursed himself for the ridiculous lengths he went to so as to avoid confrontation.

  A thunderclap as loud as an explosion sounded then, and Rob swore the black Lincoln Continental shuddered under its vibration. Lightning turned the dark, cloud-choked dawn skies bright white for an instant, as though day had peeked in, seen the weather, and then ducked back out.

  “This baby can get through it,” the driver said, giving the car a little more gas.

  Rob tightened his lips to a single line and furrowed his brows as his driver set off into the small lake stretching out before them. As the driver moved completely under the overpass, the drumming sound of the rain on the roof suddenly ceased, and the silence was like the intake of a breath.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” the driver urged almost under his breath as he sallied farther into the water, giving the car more gas.

  Even before the engine started to whine in protest, Rob knew they were in trouble by the way the water parted to admit the Lincoln. Waves sloshed by on either side.

  Rob thought again he should speak up—like maybe to suggest that the driver could attempt to back up—but held his tongue. The guy was a professional, right? He knew what he was doing.

  They’d be okay.

  And the driver continued, deeper and deeper into the water standing so treacherously beneath the overpass.

  The engine made a lowing sound, like a cow’s moo, as the flood rose up the sides of the vehicle.

  Rob gasped as brackish, foul-smelling water covered his loafered feet, pouring in through the small spaces around the doors.

  The driver eyed him in the rearview mirror. There was a defeat in his voice as he said, “You better open your door and get out while you can.”

  Rob wondered, for only a moment, why he would want to. Then it struck him with the adrenaline-fueled clarity born of panic that if he didn’t open his door now, he might never get another chance. The rising water and its pressure would make it impossible to open the door.

  If it wasn’t already too late….

  Rob leaned over and pressed against the door. The engine stalled at that moment, and his driver reached for his own door handle up front.

  For a brief moment that caused his heart to drum fast, Rob feared his door wouldn’t open. He slid over and leaned against it with his shoulder pressed against the black leather, grunting.

  The door held and then suddenly gave way.

  Granted access, water rushed into the vehicle. The icy current rose up, covering his ankles and his calves. It was almost over his knees when he managed to slide from the Lincoln.

  Outside the car, he stood. The water rose up almost to his neck. He felt nothing, only a kind of numbness and wonder. His driver was already sloshing forward toward the pearly light at the other side of the overpass. He didn’t give Rob so much as a backward glance.

  Rob started moving against the water, wondering what might be swimming in it.

  Thunder grumbled and then cracked again. The lightning flared, brilliant white, once more. And the rain poured down even harder.

  He looked back for a moment at the Lincoln Continental, thinking about his Tumi bag on the seat. There was no hope for that now!

  He slogged through the water and progressed steadily forward, feeling like a refugee in some third-world country, bound for freedom. In his head he heard the swell of inspirational music.

  After what seemed like an hour, but was really only about five minutes, Rob reached dry land at the end of the overpass, where the entrance ramp veered upward toward the highway. Cars whizzed by, sending up sprays of water, the motorists oblivious.

  His driver eyed him but said nothing. He was out of breath.

  Rob stood in the rain and remembered his iPhone in the front pocket of his khakis. He pulled it out, thinking to call for help. But when he pressed the Home button, the screen briefly illuminated and then blinked out, the picture of an ocean wave crashing toward the shore first skewing weirdly, then vanishing.

  “Shit,” he whispered and then replaced the phone in his soaking-wet pants pocket.

  He needn’t have worried about calling for help, however, because it seemed the universe had done it for him. On the other side of the overpass, a fire truck, lights on but no siren, pulled up to the water’s edge. Then two police cruisers. And finally, surprisingly, a news van with a satellite antenna on top brought up the rear.

  The rest was kind of a blur. Through a bullhorn, one of the firemen advised them to come back toward them but to use the median instead of slogging through the flood. The concrete divider was only a few inches above the sloshing water.

  Somehow, Rob and his driver managed a tightrope walk across the lake the underpass had become, balancing on the concrete divider.

  When they reached the other side, one of the newscasters, a guy in a red rain slicker, stuck a microphone in his face and asked him to tell him what happened. Was he afraid? Stunned, Rob shook his head and moved toward the cop cars. Behind him, he could hear the driver talking to the reporter.

  At the first police car, a uniformed officer got out from behind the steering wheel. She shut the door behind her and held a hand above the bill of her cap to further shield her from the rain. She was young, maybe midtwenties, with short black hair and a stout and sturdy build.

  “You okay, sir?”

  Rob nodded. “Yeah, I guess.” He smiled. “Didn’t expect a swim this early in the morning.”

  The officer didn’t laugh. “Where were you headed? We might be able to take you, or at the very least, we can summon a taxi for you.”

  And Rob opened his mouth to say, “To the airport” and then shut it again.

  One thought stood out in his head. I could have drowned. He looked toward the Lincoln, which was filled now with water up to the middle of the windshield.

  “Sir? You need us to get you somewhere?”

  Rob debated, thinking of a young man, perhaps out in this same rain, getting almost as drenched as he was. He opened his mouth again to speak, unsure of how he could or should answer her question.

  What he said now could very well determine the course of the rest of his life.

  Chapter 1

  “THIS ONE time, my dad and I were fighting. This was when I was, oh, about sixteen, I guess, and we were going round and round about some damn thing—who remembers now?—but I very clearly recall getting exasperated with him and asking, ‘What do you want from me?’

  “And you know what he said? He smiled very sweetly, and for a moment I was taken in by it. See, Dad was pret
ty stingy with the smiles. So I smiled back, completely innocent. And then he says, without ever losing that sweet smile, ‘What do I want from you? Your absence.’

  “And then he turned and walked out of the room. Three weeks later, I was out of there.” Jasper poured another cosmopolitan for Lacy from the pitcher on the glass coffee table.

  “Whoa!” She cautioned him as he filled the tumbler higher and higher. “I want to be able to walk out of here tonight.” Lacy flipped a curtain of black hair back from her face and took a sip. “Ah, you do have a kind of magic touch. I put the same ingredients together and I swear, it’ll come out nothing like this.” She took another sip and closed her eyes in ecstasy. “Damn.” After a short pause, she asked, “Now, tell me for real. Is that story even true? Was your father really that mean?”

  It was Jasper’s turn to close his eyes. What rose up behind his eyelids was an image of his father—dark wavy hair, pale blue-gray eyes, and perfect teeth—smiling so kindly, so lovingly. Jasper had hardly ever been the beneficiary of a smile like that growing up, and its effect was powerful, almost jarring, bringing for the tiniest of moments a certain joy. And then Dad said what he did.

  How Jasper wished he could say it was all made-up, an attention-getting fiction, a melodramatic tale of family dysfunction.

  A lump formed in Jasper’s throat, and his eyes began to well. He told himself, No, I’m not giving the man that power. I won’t. He took a big gulp of his cocktail and swallowed. When he opened his eyes, he drew in a big breath and smiled at his best friend and roommate, Lacy, and said, “I’m just being dramatic.” He snorted with laughter that wasn’t really real and then told her, “My dad never got over what happened in our family. So it was always kind of hard for him, I think, to give me the love I wanted so bad. I think of him now as someone swimming in grief and never able to rise up from it, you know?”

  Lacy smiled—and her smile was truly kind and loving, so Jasper had no fear that her next words would be anything other than supportive and sympathetic. “That poor man.”

  “Yeah, that poor man.” Jasper turned his gaze to the big flat-screen in front of them. People always felt sorry for his dad when Jasper was growing up alone under his care. In fact, many of them said those very words, “That poor man, left to raise that little boy all alone.” And it was sad, but was Jasper wrong to feel that he had somehow gotten lost in the shuffle, nothing more than an excess coda in the story of his family’s tragedy? “Sh,” he hushed Lacy. “It’s starting.”

  As one, they both set down their drinks to watch the series finale of Ryan Murphy’s FX series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Jasper and Lacy had been recording the series since it began a few weeks ago and would sit down every Tuesday, the only night they both had off at the same time, to watch the latest edition of Murphy’s American Crime Story opus.

  It was no secret that Jasper had a huge crush on series star and portrayer of murderer Andrew Cunanan, Darren Criss.

  When Lacy found out about Jasper’s pining for the former Glee star, she’d joked, “Isn’t that kind of masturbatory?”

  “What do you mean?” Jasper asked, batting his lashes innocently.

  “Oh, don’t pretend. You can beat off to a picture of Darren Criss, or you can look in a mirror. Same difference, just about.”

  They’d both laughed. Inside, Jasper was thrilled that Lacy thought he looked like the TV star. Even though Criss was Asian American and Jasper himself was Italian American, he conceded that maybe there was a passing resemblance.

  They both put down their drinks as the show began. For the next forty-five minutes or so, the living room of their shared one-bedroom in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago was quiet.

  When the show ended and the pitcher of cosmos was empty, Lacy looked over at Jasper. “It’s such a sad story, really.”

  “What? You feel sorry for Cunanan?”

  “I feel sorry for everybody. But yeah, maybe a little bit. He was batshit crazy. He wanted the things we all want—love, security, a home. He just didn’t know how to go about getting them.”

  Jasper shrugged. “I guess. Though I think Versace’s sister, Donatella, would beg to differ.”

  “Yeah, she probably sees him as a murderous wannabe, a hanger-on, a ruiner of lives.”

  “Which he was. All of those things.”

  Lacy sighed and stood. She was a little shaky and had to grab the arm of the couch for support. “I should probably start getting ready.”

  It was their custom, after a little TV on Tuesdays, to head out to a couple of the gay bars a bit farther south in the Andersonville neighborhood. Lacy was Jasper’s trusty wingwoman, and sometimes he felt sorry for her. She never complained about always being at Jasper’s side, helping him vet and judge the young men on offer at the bars on a Tuesday night with nary a chance for her to meet someone, unless she wanted to go the lesbian route, which she’d tried once or twice without, according to her, much success or satisfaction. “I like dick as much as you do,” she’d confided to Jasper.

  “Is that even possible?” Jasper had responded, laughing.

  WHEN THE TV was turned off, the magazines arranged on the coffee table, the dishes stacked in the sink, and the apartment looking okay in case a visitor should come back later, Jasper and Lacy stood in the small entryway of their vintage one-bedroom apartment, appraising each other’s looks in the mirror in the front closet door.

  Jasper wished Lacy would stop with the goth-chick crap. For one, she was past thirty by a couple of years. Take away the black dye job, the thick eyeliner, the violet lipstick, the black taffeta, leather, and lace of her ensemble, and you’d have a soccer mom, one with mousy brown hair, wide hips, and a flat chest. The description, Jasper knew, wasn’t kind, but it was on target. And it wasn’t that he advocated she go for the soccer-mom look. Not at all. He knew she could cut her long hair, let it go back to its natural brown, amp it up with some golden highlights, and she’d look great. Throw on some skinny jeans, low boots, and a blousy top. With the right makeup and jewelry, she’d probably look a good decade younger.

  The goth business was so over. It had been over since Jasper was a kid.

  “You put so little effort into it,” Lacy said, her gaze affixed to Jasper’s green eyes in the mirror. She applied her purple lipstick and blotted it with a Kleenex.

  “What do you mean?” Jasper knew, but he wanted to hear. He could always use a little extra confidence before setting out into the jungle of gay bars in Chicago, where there was always someone a little better waiting around a corner.

  “Look at you. You take a shower, throw on a pair of Levi’s and a white T-shirt, a pair of Cons, and you’re good to go. You look like you just got off work from a GQ fashion shoot.”

  Jasper laughed. “Oh come on, sister. You’re too kind.”

  “I am not and you know it.”

  Jasper looked at himself in the mirror—the wavy dark hair, the pale green eyes, the slight but strong build. He wondered how many more years past his current age of twenty-five he’d be able to enjoy such effortless handsomeness. He wasn’t being vain—he knew nothing lasted forever. If he could pull a Dorian Gray, he would, right this very moment, freezing this look in place. “Ah.” He waved Lacy’s praise away. “You and I both know nothing lasts forever.”

  Lacy opened the front door, hoisting her bag up to her shoulder. “Which is why you should make the most of it.” She giggled and raised her eyebrows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Old Andrew Cunanan had the right idea, He just had poor, if you’ll pardon the pun, execution.”

  “Oh, you’re terrible, Muriel,” Jasper said, echoing Toni Collette in a favorite movie of theirs, Muriel’s Wedding.

  “Seriously, though, you should see if you can’t find yourself a nice sugar daddy. Someone who will get you out of this shithole—”

  “—and into the palace I deserve?”

  “Exactly. Why not? Do it right and you can have all your dreams come true and never have to lift a finger. You’re good-looking enough, Jazz, and you know it.”

  He didn’t know if he did know it, but the idea had occurred to him watching the Cunanan movie. If Andrew hadn’t been such a fucked-up loon, maybe he’d be doing fine today, sipping a glass of expensive wine while watching the sun set from some fabulous mansion in the tropics or on the Riviera coast.