Page 82 of Play Dirty

He walks across the room and takes a seat in the chair opposite the couch. I sit up, rubbing a hand down my face to wake myself up.

“Did she tell you?” I ask. “About the house?”

“What house?”

“My house.”

“What about it?”

“She found out what happened to the family who used to live there.”

“OK.” He waits for me to explain, so when I don’t, he continues. “Well, what happened to them?”

“We decided not to tell you.”

This make him grin, rake his fingers through his tousled hair, and then chuckle. “So why bring it up?”

“Because that’s why I’m here, I guess.”

He gets serious then. Props his foot on his opposite knee to wait me out.

“You remember that time I came up here with my dad to go… hunting?”

“Which time?” he asks. But I can tell by the expression on his face, just after the words come out of his mouth, that he knows which time.

I nod. Then swallow hard and lean forward, head in my hands, and stare at my feet. I still have my shoes on. I still have my suit on. I must look like a total fucking mess. “It wasn’t hunting.”

“No?” Ix asks. Cautious now. “I mean… I figured something bad happened since, you know, what you did that night I stayed over was kinda… drastic.”

I nod again, then lift my head a little so I can look at him from underneath my tumbling hair. “He had a prostitute waiting for me up here.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He left me with her and then… then she told me why. He wanted her to fix me.”

Ixion shakes his head, not understanding. “Fix you? How?”

“I guess… I guess he was afraid I was gay?” I shrug.

“What?” Ix whispers.

“Yeah. So he hired this girl. She was young, like probably not even eighteen. He hired her to… I dunno.”

“Fuck you, obviously,” Ix offers.

“No,” I say. “I mean, yeah. That. But it was more than that, Ixion. It was weird. Very, very weird shit. Like BDSM shit.”

He just stares at me. “Why? I mean, OK. I’ve heard of this kind of shit from other kids when we were in high school. Other boys who got this kind of gift. A kinda get-it-out-of-your-system type thing. But you were like…”

“Twelve,” I say. “I was twelve.”

“That’s the year…” But then he pauses. Thinks about that for a second.

And I wonder, is he putting two and two together now? Because twelve… that’s the year I started using the cameras to find out people’s secrets. That’s the year I talked him into doing it too. That’s the year we figured out his father had a mistress and his mother knew about it, and… yeah. Kinda shattered his perfect illusion of love and family.

“That’s the year I got weird,” I finish for him.

“That’s why you wanted to kill yourself that night?”