Double Blind (44 page)

“A demon,” Ethan replied.

Sam’s eyes went wide. “Any one in particular?”

“A marble one. With horns. And a big fig leaf.” He paused. “I think it was gold.”

“Huh. Have you asked Randy? Because he’s just downstairs in the poker room—”

“No,” Ethan said. “Randy is not a part of this. In fact, don’t even tell him I looked for it, please.”

“Okay,” Sam agreed.

In the end they got Sarah’s number by bribing several waitresses and a janitor, who went to a bellhop who sent yet another waitress back to a high roller who knew it and gave it to them. She didn’t seem bothered by their call at all. In fact, she seemed apologetic.

“I’m sorry Mr. Ellison. I should have given you my home number myself,” she said to Ethan. “How can I help you?”

“Do you know where the statue of the demon is?” he asked.

She laughed. “I do. It’s in that cupboard I showed you, behind the towels. Did you need it for something?”

“Yes,” Ethan said. “I need to get it installed right away, right back in the place where it was.” He held his breath and waited for her to tell him that was impossible.

“Of course. I’ve always missed the fountain. Would you like me to make some calls for you?”

Ethan smiled. “That would be lovely,” he said, and once they’d hung up, he grinned triumphantly at the ceiling.

“Find it?” Sam asked.

“I think so,” Ethan said. “Come on.”

They went back up the stairs again, moved the plant, and opened the secret door. They moved the towels. Then they moved some more towels.

There were a lot of towels.

“How far back does this thing go?” Sam asked, once twenty-five or so towels were teetering on Ms. Reynolds’s desk.

“It used to be a room,” Ethan said, remembering. “I don’t see any statue, though. Unless it’s really small?”

Sam was leaning far into the shelf, and then he was crawling inside a little ways. “There’s a light switch in here,” he called out, and then Ethan heard a click. And then Sam gasped.

“You okay?” Ethan called out, worried.

“Holy. Shit,” Sam said, his voice muffled by the shelving. Then he slid farther in, and then he was gone.

“Sam?” Ethan called again, and crawled in after him.

And then he saw the light, and the room, and his jaw went slack.

Sam was standing in the middle of a small but significant room, in the middle of which was a ten-foot tall golden demon with three-foot long horns and—

Yes. A fig leaf.

A big, big fig leaf.

Sam lifted it up and whistled. “He’s happy to see us.”

Ethan looked up at the demon’s face. It had no pupils in its eyes, just golden sockets. It had a snout, too, making it look almost like a cow, and it even had a ring in its nose. But beyond this, he was all male: broad chest, huge, sculpted muscles and a flat stomach that tapered to his fig leaf. He was terrifying and beautiful at once.

Ethan studied the fig leaf a moment. Then he nodded at Sam. “Let me see it.”

Sam grinned, then slid the green silk covering aside, revealing the full majesty and slight grotesqueness of the beast’s huge, half-erect and gleaming golden cock.

And for some reason, as Ethan leaned over the edge of the shelf and into the room that shouldn’t have been there, at the statue that had been taken away and had always been cloaked in a fig leaf, as he looked at it, he knew. He could see it, could see how it could all work, could see even Sam’s Butterfly working, weird as the name was. That was maybe even
why
it was going to work. A Butterfly extravaganza with drag queens and a raging horn-dog of a demon in a fountain.
Touch his cock and you’ll win big.
It would be a crock of shit, but people would buy it. And once they bought it, they’d believe it. It wouldn’t always work, but neither did craps or roulette. It would be part of the story. Part of the mystique.

So would Butterfly, and so would Herod’s. They’d come to see it, if the bluff was good enough. And if enough of them came, so long as no one asked to see his hand, he’d win.

He could see it. He could really, really see it.

Ethan grinned. And then he laughed.

“Come on, Sam,” he said. “Let’s go downstairs, and I’ll buy you a drink.”

Ethan
deliberately kept them away from the poker room. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see Randy, but rather that he didn’t want to see him just yet. He wanted to keep spinning this out with Sam, to solidify their plans so that when he told Randy, he’d be amazed.

“Would you be willing to help me this week?” Ethan asked Sam as they sat together, Sam with a strawberry margarita and he with his gin and tonic. “I don’t want to pull you away from starting at the hospital early, though, if that’s what you want to do.”

“No, I want to help,” Sam said. “I do need to do orientation, and it’d be a good idea to do a few shifts next week to sort of wade in, but I’m loving this. It’s like planning a huge party. I’m totally in.” He stirred his drink and studied Ethan for a minute. “I’ve been meaning to ask you—how exactly did you and Randy hook up? I mean—I know you’re living with him, but you seem like you’re kind of just getting started.”

Ethan considered a moment how to answer, and decided that he would give Sam the truth, but edit a bit. He didn’t really want Sam to know quite how dark he’d been. Though thinking that made him pause even more. He wasn’t dark anymore, was he? He was more of a gray, and sometimes… sometimes he was whatever color normal was.

Randy did that to you,
he admitted to himself.
Randy’s the one who helped lead you back to normal.
Maybe even closer to normal than he’d ever been.

Sam’s cheeks pinked. “Sorry. I don’t mean to butt in, but I was just wondering.”

“No,” Ethan said quickly. “It’s fine. Just… complicated.” He thought a little longer, then sighed. “All right. He picked me up at the roulette table, just over there, just after I lost my last five dollars on black.”

Sam was sipping at his drink, and he paused, the straw still in his mouth, his eyes wide. “Like, your last at all?”

“The only thing I had left was my car,” Ethan admitted.
And a gun.
He wondered, for the first time, what had happened to that. Then he shook the thought off.
Later.
“I didn’t have a tip, so I left a ring, and somehow Randy got the dealer to bet against it, and the next thing I knew we were in here, at the River. And it just sort of took off on its own after that.”

“Cool.” Sam grinned. Then frowned. “Why did you do that, though?”

Now it was Ethan’s turn to stir his drink and stare into it as the ice swirled around. “Because a long-term affair of mine ended very badly.”

“Oh.” Sam was quiet a moment. “Like, love affair? A guy?”

Ethan nodded. “We were together for a long time. But he’s married, and—” He shook his head. “I just realized that he was never truly going to be with me, not in the way I wanted. And I realized how much of my life I’d thrown away for him, how much I’d lived in shadow, all so I could be with him a few times a month and a week or so a year. It just….” He stirred the drink a little more aggressively. “It made me a little upset.”

Sam was quiet a minute. “You mean, he was married to a woman, right? Like a beard?”

“Still is married. And yes, to a woman.” He gave Sam an arch look. “Because back in the olden days we didn’t even dream of marrying each other.”

Sam didn’t smile, though. In fact, he looked downright grim. “They could take it away in Iowa. It’s harder because of the way the constitution is written, but they can vote to change it like they did in California. And then Mitch and I won’t be married anymore.” He looked down angrily into his drink. “I just hate that. I hate it so much that sometimes I just want to go to the Statehouse in Des Moines and go right up to all the assholes who want to take my marriage away and make them say it to my face. It doesn’t
matter
, except to me and to other gay and lesbian people. They carry on like it’s going to change something, and it
hasn’t,
and it
won’t.
It just means that I get to be married to Mitch. But only in Iowa, and only for now.” He glared at the margarita for a minute, then seemed to remember himself and blushed again. “Sorry. You were telling me about you?”

But Ethan had to soak all that in for a few minutes, that passion, that anger. That insistence that he, Sam, should have every right his peers did. And Ethan had to wonder exactly when it was that he had lost that kind of self-respect for himself, when and where and why he had given it away, trading it for stolen moments with Nick.

He didn’t know. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said again, blushing harder. “I just get so mad.”

“No,” Ethan said, firmly. “It’s fine.
You
are fine.” He reached over and took Sam’s hand. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know you, Sam. Both you and Mitch. But you especially.”

Sam gave him a wry smile. “Even though I molested you before I even said hello?”

Ethan matched his smile back. “Maybe especially because of that.”

They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, and then, out of nowhere, a cricket chirped.

“Oh! That’s my phone—maybe it’s Mitch!” Sam pulled his iPhone out, and his whole face lit up when he saw the screen. “It is! He’s at Blythe, and he said he was going to hit ‘send’ and then hit the hay.”

He looked so relieved. So bright. So happy.

I want that,
Ethan admitted to himself.
I want exactly that
. And then, feeling brave, he added,
I deserve that
.

Sam texted his husband back, but just as he was finishing up, there was a loud feedback screech, and then a woman was standing at the microphone on a small stage on the other end of the room.

“Hello everyone,” she said brightly to Sam, Ethan, and the four other people in the room. “It’s Monday night, and you know what that means: karaoke!”

Sam had turned around to look at her, but at this announcement, he turned back to Ethan, his eyebrows in his hair, his grin a mile wide.

Ethan grinned too, and he rose. “You coming?” he asked Sam as he started around the table.

“Oh, I am so there,” Sam agreed, took his hand, and went with him to the stage.