A Shot at Living

Fifty minutes later, Brian had checked and fidgeted with each of the rose bouquets scattered around the apartment at least three times, made sure wine and water were chilling along with a tray of fruit and cheese, wiped the counters again, re-dusted the mantel over the built-in and partially locked cabinet, cleaned a smudge off the playroom’s triple-width, full-length mirror, and listened to two sets of phone messages twice.

Marley sauntered into the new playroom and began an inspection, disapproving as big orange cats tend to do, then gave up and sat down to stare at his human. Brian had just that moment arranged — again — the new cock-ring he’d picked up on another impromptu shopping spree, setting it jauntily alongside the vase of Black Baccara roses and the opened box containing the new collar he hoped to put on Jackie soon — maybe even within hours. He’d chosen the collar carefully, after much deliberation purchasing a rich, pliable, black leather adorned with a silver lock and trim and a stylized Triskelia inset with iridescent labradorite. He situated the box just so, sighed, and ran exasperated hands through his hair.

Legitimately, he had no more preparation to accomplish before Jackie’s arrival, but he fidgeted, knowing he wouldn’t succeed if he tried to do anything important and unrelated. He was full of nervous energy — more so the later it got, so he turned his mind to a minor mystery he’d discovered the day he’d moved in. The playroom had a built-in cabinet, something like a bureau but mostly recessed into the walls, with a narrow counter stretching across the top instead of a mantel and a mirror. Brian had opened, inspected, and cleaned seven of the eight small drawers and found nothing.

But he hadn’t been able to open the eighth drawer. The pull was missing, and at first he thought it was fake — just a façade like the double cabinet door in the center. But why only one fake drawer out of eight? Those doors looked to be painted shut, their front recessed from the rest of the structure. But the mystery drawer had a thin strip of metal set unobtrusively — almost but not quite invisibly — along its side between it and the neighboring wood. He bent and peered closely at it, shining the flashlight on his phone into the narrow space. A space in the middle of the inch-long strip looked like it called for a key.

Brian had always been driven to solve a mystery, and this one was no different. He stood with his hands on his hips, squinting, as if that would provide answers. The locked drawer bothered him enough, and it was enough of a welcome distraction from Jackie’s lateness, that he decided to try his hand at lock-picking. He went decisively to the other bedroom closet where he rummaged through a still-packed box and came up with a few paperclips.

He understood the basics of lock-picking, but had never had much call to apply the skill, which might have been why he failed miserably. That added to his frustration with the way things were going in general. Already, things had slid downhill from his perfect plan — starting with the fact that Jackie was late. He wasn’t taking “no” as an answer from the damned drawer. He lined a butter knife up with the lock and gave it three sharp blows with a hammer, successfully knocking the lock through the wood. Brian sighed, left with mixed feelings — tension relieved, gratified, victorious, but angry as hell and disappointed in himself for ruining the perfection of the setting for tonight’s planned scene. The front of the drawer was a splintery mess. He moved the roses, collar, and cock ring to the other end of the shelf for the sake of aesthetics.

Inside the drawer, he found a small notebook and nothing else. About half the pages were filled with what looked to Brian like scribbling. A few repeated things, like a circle around a capital B followed by numbers and certain other letters that seemed to be abbreviations. The arrangement of entries looked haphazard, completely disorganized, and — to his eye — meaningless. Yet someone had found it necessary to lock it up all by itself. The someone likely to have done that would be the now-disappeared Espen, as he was the last person to occupy the apartment.

Something seemed deeply troubling about that.

But, mystifying as that was, and as much as he knew he’d have to come back to the mystery at some point, Jackie was a much more present concern, and his mind returned there insistently. With no one else to bounce things off, Brian turned and asked his audience, the former alley tom, “Where’s my boyfriend, Marley?”