by Rick R. Reed
“Yes.”
“And there is nothing you are perhaps waiting for me to say to change your mind? While I cannot offer you more money or promise you a brighter future than I already have, I can assure you that now, especially in light of this recent tragedy, your safety is paramount to me. I will take every measure to ensure your personal safety.”
“I think it’s best that I leave,” Wren said softly but firmly.
“Well, it seems you have made up your mind. Far be it for me to have anyone in my employ that doesn’t want to be there. You have spoken of this with Rufus? Correct?”
“Yes.”
“I put him with you as your mentor, and I trust he has said all the appropriate things.”
Wren wasn’t sure what those were, but he felt this conversation was moving rapidly past its sell-by date. “He has.”
“Then I guess there’s little more for you and I to talk about. I need people in my employ I can trust.”
“Thank you, Dave. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”
“I’m sorry too, but this is not something you can return to, should this be your final decision. I don’t take quitters back.” A hint of bitterness had seeped into Chillingsworth’s voice. “You quit and it’s done.”
“I understand.”
“Then I need you to get your things together and get out of my studio. After an hour’s time, if you’re still there, you will be trespassing, and I will take appropriate measures.”
Before Wren even had a chance to reply, he heard the click of Dave hanging up.
Befuddled and his head swimming from the fact that it was all over so fast, he handed the cordless back to Rufus without a word. Wren wondered when it would fully sink in that his life had just undergone a seismic shift.
Again.
Just like that, he was all alone in the world once more. Just like that, he was wondering once again where he would lay his head tonight or from where breakfast would come when the sun rose tomorrow morning. Just like that, he needed to know how soon his next job would come and if it would pay enough to rent a room or a small studio or if he would need to go the roommate route.
Just like that, he was back where he was but a few days ago—a time that seemed much longer ago than it actually was.
“He kicked your ass to the curb, right?”
Wren nodded.
“I’m not surprised. Dave doesn’t suffer quitters gladly. You’re lucky he didn’t give you more of an earful. He got rid of you pretty quick.”
Their eyes met, and Wren searched, without much success, for some sympathy in Rufus’s stare. He so wanted the man to reach out and take him in his arms and tell him that everything was going to be all right.
Instead Rufus turned to the counter behind him and withdrew a couple of mugs from the cabinet and poured coffee into them. “You take cream? Sugar?”
“Both. Lots. I want it to taste like a mocha milkshake.” Wren thought, all at once, how he had elements of both child and adult coursing through him right now in equal measures.
Wren wondered if, behind his cool façade, Rufus wanted someone to hold him just as much, to let him know someone was on his side. Wren couldn’t imagine that he had found such comfort at À Louer.
But for now they were simply two men in a kitchen in a place neither of them could call home. They were little more, Wren surmised, than strangers, thrown together by a bizarre set of circumstances. They now had nothing, really, to bind them together.
He should just move on. Forget about Rufus. Wren was sure Rufus would forget him, perhaps as soon as he went out on a call from his next trick.
The practical thing was to get his stuff together and get out. He didn’t know where, but that was no longer any concern of Rufus’s.
His mentor.
He could think this way all he wanted, but his heart didn’t believe any of it. His heart wanted Wren to throw himself into Rufus’s arms, where he would declare his undying love and extol to him all the different ways their match would be one made, as the saying went, in heaven.
To be polite, Wren took a sip of the coffee. “That’s good,” he said. He set the cup back down on the counter. “I should get my things together and head on out. The clock’s ticking. Chillingsworth said I have an hour.”
“Dude doesn’t mess around. He means it too.”
Wren wondered if the phone would ring the very minute one hour had passed and it would be Chillingsworth on the other end, seeing if his “tenant” had vacated the premises.
Rufus stood, sipping hot coffee on a hot day, watching Wren as he threw the few belongings he had bothered to unpack into his bag. Wren kept hoping he would say something. You know, maybe something along the lines of “We’ll have to get together.” Or “Here, let me give you my cell so we can keep in touch.” Instead all he heard was the slurping sound Rufus made as he sipped the hot liquid and the little exhalation he made after each swallow.
In no time at all, Wren had his shoes on, his bag at the ready, and knew the time was right to say good-bye. But the word caught in his throat, stuck behind a sob he was trying with every ounce of his will to hold back.
“So, I guess I should head out.”
Rufus put down his mug and, finally, smiled. “Yeah. I guess you should.”
Wren scratched his earlobe. “So are you gonna stay here?”
“Nah. I was just here to keep an eye on you while you got started.” He snickered. “Turned out to be a much shorter assignment than I first planned.”
“Yeah. So, where’s home again?”
“Up in Edgewater, like I told you.”
“Yeah, that’s right. You’re not lookin’ for a roommate, are you?” Wren could have kicked himself for asking such a desperate question.
“Nah, dude. I need my privacy.”
“Sure.” Wren shifted his weight, put down his bag, hoisted it up again. “It’s weird.”
“What?”
“Leaving like this. We were just getting to know each other.”
“Yeah, well, little man, that was your choice.”
“Right.” Wren blew out a sigh. “I’m not sure where I’ll go now. Guess I’ll have to see if my mom can take me in after all.” He gave a laugh that came out more like he was starting to choke.
Rufus said nothing, simply regarding Wren over the rim of his mug, which he held to his lips.
Please say something. Anything. Ask me to have some dinner with you. Tell me it was good knowing me.
Rufus kept his own counsel.
Wren patted his pockets, unzipped his bag, glanced inside.
“Got everything?”
Wren nodded. He opened the door.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
Wren closed the door and turned, grinning, to Rufus. Finally! A kiss?
Rufus groped in the pocket of his jeans. “I’ll just front you now, and Chillingsworth will reimburse me. Make things easier.” He held out two one-hundred-dollar bills.
“Nice of you,” Wren said, voice barely above a whisper. He took the cash and transferred it to his own pocket. He turned back to the door, hand on knob, then turned back to Rufus. He figured he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by making a move. At least he could tell himself he had tried.
He set down his bag and said, “Got your phone handy?”
“Yeah, why?” Rufus pulled an iPhone out of his front pocket.
“Because I want to give you my number. So we can stay in touch, you know?”
Presumably, Rufus brought up the screen where he could add in contact information.
“Shoot.”
Wren announced a string of digits, hoping Rufus would return in kind.
But he didn’t. And when the two of them standing there, silently, grew uncomfortable, Wren made to leave again.
“773-555-8451.”
“What?”
“My number. I assume you want it.”
“Yeah, maybe if you’re lucky I’ll call you sometime.” Wren p
unched in the number, giving Rufus a lazy and nonchalant grin, wondering if Rufus could hear his hammering heart or see how much he wanted to actually jump for joy, a move Wren thought he had never literally contemplated until this very moment.
“I guess that’s it, then. You be careful. Okay, man?” Wren paused at the now open door.
“I will.”
“And use that number.”
Rufus only nodded. “You going or what?”
“Right.”
Wren started out the door and had just about closed it when he stopped, dropped his bag, whirled around, and poked his head back into the studio. Rufus glanced up expectantly.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Whatever.”
Wren paused for a moment, asking himself if this was something he actually wanted to do, to give voice to. In the end his desire to know was strong enough to outweigh any concerns about sounding like a lovesick teenage girl.
“Last night, when we made—when we were fucking, did you feel anything?”
Rufus laughed. “Yeah, you. You were tight. You felt great.”
Wren closed his eyes, shook his head. “No. I mean, did you feel like we shared something?” Wren felt heat rise to his face. But—damn it—he had to know.
“Yes.”
Wren looked up, hopeful. “What?”
“Money. We shared money.”
Rufus dumped what was left in his mug into the sink and busied himself rinsing it out. He didn’t look at Wren, who hurried out the door.
Wren leaned against the closed door, his heart pounding, breath coming faster, realizing how much a few simple words could cut through your heart like a knife.
What would he do now?
Chapter Thirteen
TWO WEEKS later Wren was on the Clark Street bus, on his way north to Howard Street, where he had secured a wonderfully promising job as a bagger at the Big C grocery store. Yes, it was quite the bold career move. Mentally he rolled his eyes, wondering for the hundredth time if he had done the right thing when he abandoned his barely started career as an escort.
He stared out the window at the storefronts, restaurants, and bars as the bus headed north, full of commuters just like himself this late summer morning. He felt like he had worked at the grocery store for a lot longer than the fourteen days he actually had, and the days—along with the customers, coworkers, the shelves and bins lined with food—all blurred into one another, seeming like an infinite eternity.
Would he never escape?
Early mornings were not Wren’s best time. His head felt thick, and the bus’s frigid air, in spite of being somewhat jarring when one stepped aboard from the early September heat and humidity outside, did little to wake him. No, this bus ride from the Near North Side of the city, where he was staying with his mom at her hotel apartment, was an exercise in grogginess and regret, a time for Wren to consider the hopelessness of his existence. Only the night before, he had voiced such dire thoughts to his mother, who smacked his leg and told him he was way too young to be thinking that way.
“You’ve got your whole frickin’ life before you,” Linda had said. “Anything could happen.”
And that was maybe what Wren feared—that anything, or nothing, could happen.
The “anything” he most wanted to happen was not happening. Rufus had never called him since their painful and awkward good-bye at the studio apartment on Lake Shore Drive. Wren had called Rufus a couple of times, well, more like a dozen times, leaving increasingly cheerful and what he thought of as carefree messages—so as not to sound desperate—but Rufus never called back.
Let it go, man. He, as the saying goes, was just not that into you. You had feelings, but they were not reciprocated. Move on. Go out after work. Get online. Get laid. Meet some other guys. Nothing removes the stain of a man on your heart like a new one, right?
Wren wasn’t so sure as he pressed his head against the cold glass of the bus window, shutting his eyes. The last two weeks had been kind of surreal; moving from a posh Lake Shore Drive address—where he had spent all of one night, but still—to his mother’s love seat had just seemed too jarring a transition. He had gotten the grocery store job quickly because jobs like that were always easy to come by—no one else wanted them.
The work wasn’t so bad. No stress. Easy. Nothing to learn. But it left his mind free all day to think about Rufus, which he knew was doing him no good, and the sad, pathetic fact that he was once again living with his mom, without even a room to call his own. Linda said she didn’t mind, especially now that she had broken up with her boss, Harry, whom she had caught, pants around his ankles, with a chambermaid in one of the hotel’s linen closets.
It might have been nice to commiserate together about the perfidy of men, but Wren had never told her about Rufus. Such an admission would entail too much confessing, too much explaining. And besides, sitting in front of the TV with your mom when you were in your twenties, comparing notes on how rotten men could be was, well, sad.
So he kept his frustration and hurt bottled up inside and did little beyond go to work, come home, eat, watch TV, and sleep.
He supposed this was what depression felt like. But he didn’t even care enough, nor have the energy, to Google the symptoms of that malady to find out if he was indeed suffering from it.
As the bus headed north, it would typically empty out as people got off to begin shifts along Clark and its cross streets. Wren sat up straighter, reminding himself he needed to stop wallowing in misery, to just try to look outside himself for five minutes—then maybe he could begin to move on.
A heavyset African American woman wearing too much perfume and a black dress that was too tight for her vacated the seat across the aisle from him, leaving behind a clumsily folded Chicago Tribune.
Snatch that paper up. See what’s going on outside your own little dramafest. Maybe there’s something in there that will take your mind off Rufus for the next ten minutes. Hell, maybe the classifieds is just twitching with dream jobs, just for you.
Right.
Wren did lean over and pluck the newspaper from the seat. He scooted back up against the window and opened it.
And his heart nearly stopped.
The front-page headline practically screamed at him, making his blood run cold and the world around him dissolve.
Second Murder on City’s North Side Believed to be Linked to Escort Service
Wren fought his way through the spare, journalistic prose to learn that a second young man had been “stabbed to death along Chicago’s lakefront.” The victim, whose name and details were being withheld pending notification of next of kin, was believed to have been associated with the same escort service, À Louer, that Evan Maple, who was murdered in a similar fashion two weeks ago, worked for.
Wren scanned the article for more, but there was nothing to identify who the victim had been. But Wren was suddenly certain it had to have been Rufus who’d been killed.
That was the reason he hadn’t called.
He was dead. And before that he was being stalked by some serial killer out to put an end to male escorts by picking them off one by one, stopping their hearts and their commerce with something like a sharp hunting knife.
Wren felt like he was going to be sick. Although he still had several blocks to go, he reached up and pulled the cord to alert the bus driver he needed to get off. When the bus had barely stopped at a corner, Wren dropped the paper to the floor and hurried out the back door of the bus.
Outside the air was thick with humidity and exhaust fumes, even this early in the morning. The sun, beating down harshly out of a dirty white sky, didn’t serve to make him feel any better. Wren sat down on the curb and then put his head between his legs, trying to slow his breathing and force back the bile burning the back of his throat.
He sat there for several long minutes, waiting for his heart rate and respiration to slow, telling himself over and over again that he needed to get ahold of himself and that À Louer
employed several young men, any one of which could have been the killer’s victim.
Including Rufus! And Wren felt sick all over again, unsure if he had the strength to ever get up from this curb. He drew in several deep breaths, never mind that the air felt like a dirty blanket soaked in Lake Michigan water, trying desperately to calm himself.
You’re being ridiculous. That was not Rufus. It couldn’t have been. He’s streetwise. Savvy. He knows how to protect himself. Still… what if it was? What if it was?
Wren glanced down at his watch, which told him he had only fifteen minutes to get to work. It was seven forty-five. What it also told him was that, if he called Rufus now, it was unlikely he’d be anyplace else but home. Early mornings were not an escort’s busiest times. Even Wren knew that much.
But Rufus could be sleeping. He could be dead. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Just call.
Wren pulled his cell from his pocket. Part of him told him not to call, because if Rufus didn’t answer, he would just spend the remainder of the day going slowly insane with anguish and regret. And that same part of himself told him that Rufus had yet to answer any of his calls, so how likely was he to pick up anyway?
All of this was moot. He had to call Rufus. He had to at least try.
He found his number and pressed the icon to connect him. The phone rang four times and went to voice mail.
“This is Rufus. You know what to do and when to do it.” Beep.
“Rufus, man, it’s Wren. I just read about the second killing in the paper, and that’s fucked up.” Wren paused. “I’m—I’m worried about you. If you’re there and you can hear this, pick up. Oh, what am I talking about? You can’t hear me on a fucking iPhone. God, I’m babbling. Please, Rufus, just give me a call the minute you get this and let me know you’re okay. Please.”
Wren ended the call and finally felt he had himself together enough to stand and walk the rest of the way to work. At least he wouldn’t be late. Thank heaven for small favors.
THE DAY passed in a blur of worry. As Wren bagged groceries, he barely spoke to Sophia or Chuck, the cashiers with whom he worked. He said, like a robot, “Thank you and have a nice day” and “Do you need any help out with that?” to all the customers who passed his way, never raising his eyes to meet theirs. They could have been elephants standing in front of him and Wren wouldn’t have noticed.
