“Are you sure that’s the same envelope?” Luis asked.
“I can’t imagine why he’d do something like that. It makes no sense.”
Josh hit a button and replayed the scene. He even froze it at one point to prove, without a doubt, it was the same envelope containing Roland’s proposal. Luis’s eyes grew wide and he leaned forward. Then he stood up and walked over to the screen and stared for a minute. There was no mistake about it: the envelope was the proposal Jase had asked Luis to hold for him. The title was clearly written in large bold print.
“He must have taken it from the table when I went inside with Hillary,” Luis said, still staring at the screen. “But I can’t imagine why he’d do such a thing.” Suddenly he started thinking about all the other weird things that had happened since Darius had come into their lives: the bag on the stove catching fire, the missing proposal, the emergency brake on the car, and the door left wide open last night.
Roland sighed. “I’m sorry we had to show it to you.
But we thought you’d like to see it. We don’t want to get the guy in trouble. But it is what it is.”
Luis crossed back to the chair and sat down. “I’m glad you showed me. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise. And I’m so sorry. I can’t apologize enough for what he did to your proposal. I know how hard you worked on it. At least now I know I wasn’t the one who lost it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since the party.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” Roland said, placing his palm on Luis’s shoulder. “It obviously wasn’t your fault and I’ve already written up another proposal. We thought it was peculiar Darius would act that way. There didn’t seem to be a reason.”
Peculiar wasn’t the word. Then, when Luis looked up at the screen and saw the next shot, he pressed his palm to his chest and gasped. The video had jumped from the stall to the sinks. Darius was now in the main part of the bathroom, sitting on the sink counter with his pants off and his legs in the air. Josh was fucking Darius’s brains out, pounding him into the mirror, splitting him wide open without pausing for a breath. And Darius was holding Josh’s shoulders taking all he could get, with a great big smile on his face.
Josh pressed the remote button hard twice and nothing happened. Then he hit it a third time with two fingers and the screen went blank. “I didn’t want you to see that. I’m sorry. I tried to stop it but this remote isn’t working right. That only happened once with Darius, a quickie.” He turned to Roland and frowned. “I told you we needed new batteries in this remote. It doesn’t stop when I want it to stop if the batteries are weak.”
Luis stood up and took a quick breath. “Don’t be sorry.
I’m glad I saw everything. I can’t thank you both enough.” He considered it ironic the two people who had always made him feel uncomfortable with their kinky open sex lives, with their three-ways and multiple partners and bathroom sex, had enlightened him about Darius thanks to their hidden bathroom cameras. After all, who else did Luis know who had creepy hidden cameras in their bathrooms? Evidently, though, Darius wasn’t the innocent young guy Luis and Jase had thought he was, especially in the scene where Josh had been nailing him to the bathroom counter. But more than that, Darius had allowed Josh to fuck him so casually, as if nothing had happened, after he’d destroyed Roland’s important proposal.
This part bothered Luis more than anything. There wasn’t an ounce of remorse on Darius’s face, just a great big smile.
“Can I get you anything?” Roland asked.
Luis smiled and started walking toward the front door.
“No, I’m fine. I was on my way to the hospital to see Cory.
They are weaning him off the ventilator today. If he responds well, they might even remove it.”
Josh remained in the media room, fooling with the remote. Roland followed him to the door. “Well, that’s good news. How is Cory otherwise?”
Luis kissed Roland on the cheek and said, “He’s doing very well. I’ll talk to you soon. And thanks for showing me the video. I can’t apologize enough.”
Luis jogged to his car without looking back. His trip to the hospital would have to wait until later. He knew Darius had gone out grocery shopping and he wanted to go back home and talk to Jase before Darius returned. But when he arrived at the house and overheard Jase talking on the telephone to one of his plant managers in Alaska, it sounded too important to interrupt. So Luis quietly walked to the back of the house and opened Darius’s bedroom door. He opened the drawers first and found nothing but clothing. He searched the closet and found nothing unusual there either. But in the nightstand beside the bed, he found a drawer filled with dildos in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Darius had hidden them beneath a pile of Architectural Digest magazines and a tube of lubricant. In the drawer below, he found cock rings, anal beads, a pair of pink feather earrings, nipple clamps, and a Fleshlight jacking device.
Luis started to feel a little guilty. He couldn’t blame the guy for owning sex toys. Maybe wearing feather earrings and nipple clamps got him off. Before Luis had married Jase, when he’d been living alone in New York in a rented apartment and escorting older men, he’d often resorted to harmless sex toys to satisfy his intense need for a man on cold lonely nights. But then Luis looked under the bed and he found three pairs of Jase’s boxer briefs, unwashed. He knew they belonged to Jase by glancing at them, and Jase had mentioned he’d been missing a few pairs of briefs. Luis placed the dirty briefs back under the bed and lifted the mattress. He gaped at a small photo in a gold frame and pulled it out from between the mattress and box spring. He looked down and held his breath.
It was a photo of Leck Schneider.
Luis kept the photo of Leck and put the bed back the way he’d found it. Then he went upstairs to his bedroom and opened his laptop. He did a few searches on the Internet for the name Darius Denby and found nothing. But when he did a search for older all male porn films by Leck Schneider he came up with a sample trailer for a porn film made ten years earlier by Leck’s company. Luis played it over and over, and there was no mistake. The young guy in the film with long blond hair, though no older than sixteen, was Darius Denby, going by the German stage name Jack Meinoff.
Luis did a few more searches with Leck’s name and found photos of Leck and Darius at various public events in Los Angeles. There was a photo of them outside a movie theater standing on a red carpet, a photo of them standing at an award ceremony for some kind of porn industry event, and another photo of them driving away in a very expensive red sports car. But the photo that truly made Luis sit back and glare wasn’t a social event. It was a recent photo of Darius Denby wearing a black suit with his head bowed down.