TWO WEEKS after the party, Jamie was all set up on his new blog. I’d given him a company credit card and told him to go crazy. He’d gotten all of the technical stuff squared away and was now keeping abreast of the happenings in the MMA world and making daily posts.

He was gaining followers at a break-neck pace, probably due in part to our infamy in the community, but he didn’t care how or why he got them. He was just enjoying his new business. He seemed happy, and that made me happier, too.

I still had nagging worries about work, but I was trying to take things day by day. Maybe I could just run the Alcazar and pretend everything was normal, and if the police came to arrest me for tax evasion or some crazy shit I’d unwittingly been a part of, I’d deal with it then.

Some days it was easy to be flippant about it. Others, it consumed me.

Jamie and I had started doing our morning runs again, and that had relieved a lot of my stress. But sometimes it wasn’t so easy to ignore the doubts that plagued me. The anxiety attacks Dr. Tanner had helped to keep at bay had been threatening again, and I’d been having disturbing dreams. Ever since I’d received that eerie message.

Watch yourself.

I still hadn’t told Jamie about that, and I didn’t plan to, but I also couldn’t keep shutting him out of everything. It was starting to take a serious toll on our relationship. I didn’t want to lose him. I needed to share some of my problems with him.

Like Enzo said, my cart was his now, too. He ought to at least know some of the burdens he was going to be helping me lug around.

“I had a dream last night.” I slowed to a walk, embarrassed that I had to struggle to catch my breath enough to speak.

It had been years since a three-mile run had done that to me, but work had still been cutting into my training schedule. If the UFC called me for a championship fight at that moment, I’m not sure if I would have been able to go for five rounds. Of course, I’d finished everyone I had ever fought well before the last buzzer would have sounded. No way was I going to trust the outcome of my fight to a trio of judges and their biased scoring.

My fight against Anthony Rodriguez, which had ultimately not been canceled because of my coming out, would only be three rounds. A walk in the park. But I still had to focus more on my training. I’d never felt unprepared before.

Jamie stopped and rested his hands on his knees to catch his breath, clearly more winded than I was. I circled back and waited for him, and then we continued on toward the Alcazar, this time strolling like a couple of lovers in the park.

“What was your dream about?” he finally asked when his breathing had returned to normal.

“Evan called me on the phone.” I smiled at Jamie’s shocked expression. “I know, it’s weird. It was so real, though. My phone rang, and I grabbed it off of the night stand, wondering who could be calling me in the middle of the night. When I heard his voice, I knew it was him. The whole thing was so real, it took me a few minutes to convince myself it had been a dream.”

“What did he say?” Jamie asked, horrified.

“He said, Don’t trust anyone. They’re all out to get you.” My heart took a freefall within my chest as I repeated the words. It reminded me of the note: Watch yourself.

“Jesus, Kage.” Jamie pushed me toward the nearest bus bench and dragged me down to sit beside him. “You need to get away from this place. Let’s take a vacation or something, go down to Georgia and see my family, anything to get you away from here. I know this business has come to mean a lot to you, but I’m worried.”

“Calm down, baby. It was just a dream. My dead brother did not actually call my cell last night.” I chuckled, but there was nothing real about it.

I hadn’t been able to shake the dream or the feeling of foreboding it had brought with it, but I had to put Jamie’s mind at ease. I needed to get that look off of his face. God, why had I even told him about the dream?

Because you needed to, a voice in my head whispered. Evan’s voice. Tell him about the note.

I started counting in my mind like Dr. Tanner had taught me to do, trying to keep my anxiety at bay.

Jamie’s eyes leveled on mine. “I would be less worried if it really was Evan. The fact that it wasn’t means those words came out of your own mind, Kage. I hate to say this, but maybe you’re getting a little paranoid.”

“Fuck you, Jamie. You of all people should know that I have a lot to worry about. It’s not like we’re living a normal life here. Some bad shit has happened, and we were forced to leave our own lives behind. Never out of the woods, remember?”

“I know, but look how much time has passed. Aaron said everything would be fine, and it has been so far. Maybe we can really just relax now. I’ll admit some days it’s hard for me to look in the mirror, and I do get a little paranoid at times when I see a cop car, but I don’t want to live the rest of my life worrying about something that will probably never happen. We have to cut ourselves a break and live as normally as possible. I figure if this thing eventually comes back to get us, we’ll deal with it then. If we keep worrying about it now, I might as well already be in prison.”

“Shhh.” I put a hand over his mouth and glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot. “How many times do I have to tell you to watch what you say in public? There are certain things we only speak of in our apartment. Got it?”

“Fine. But I think you need to see somebody, Kage.”

“See somebody?”

“Like a therapist. Didn’t Dr. Tanner help you when you were seeing her?”

“She helped,” I admitted, feeling the bite of guilt and sorrow at hearing her name. Knowing she was probably dead because of me.

The police had questioned me briefly about her disappearance, but that was all. It had been too easy, really. I’d sent the family a big chunk of money, but it had done nothing to ease my guilty conscience, especially on the few nights her husband had called me in tears. I didn’t know what to do to find her any more than he did.

“At the time, I needed her,” I told Jamie. “She helped me a lot. But now I’m fine.”

“Maybe you’re not. You have a lot of stress on you right now.”

I threw my hands up and groaned. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you about the dream. I knew you’d overreact. I should have just kept it to myself.”

Jamie frowned and looked away.

“Okay, I’m not stupid,” I said. “I realize what I just said sounded paranoid, and you’re thinking I just proved your point, but I didn’t mean it that way. That was not paranoia.”

“Then what was it?”

“Irritation, dammit. I don’t want you telling me I need to see a therapist. It means you think I’m weak. I don’t want you to see me that way, Jamie. I’m supposed to be taking care of you and building an amazing life for us. What does it say about me if I have to go crying to some therapist because I can’t hold my shit together?”

He reached over and started rubbing my thigh. “It says you’re a human being who’s been through some hair-raising shit. There’s nothing wrong with needing to talk to someone about it.

A therapist could help you work through it, so that you can focus on the things you do best. Beating people up, being a badass businessman, running a multi-million dollar company, keeping your employees in line, and charming everybody in the world with that killer smile of yours.”

His absentminded massage of my thigh had morphed into a full-on grope as he talked, his fingers inching up under the edge of my shorts and finding that sensitive spot in the crease between my thigh and my groin. My dick was starting to notice.

I leaned back with a smirk, feeling better already. “Where you going with that hand, chief?”

He snatched it away, an adorable blush blooming on his face. “That’s the same thing you said to me the first night I slept in your bed, when Vanessa and I stayed over.”

“I haven’t forgotten. You started feeling me up and groping my abs like a drunk twink at last call. Some straight guy you turned out to be. And I’m still having to call you down about those wandering hands. Such a pervert.”

“That’s your fault. You told me to feel your abs to see what a real man felt like, you egomaniac.”

I laughed. “You were supposed to be straight, Jamie. I expected you to poke them with your finger or punch them or something, not start foreplay. God, I was so hot for you, it was impossible not to respond. Then you let me press my hard-on right up against that ass that had been driving me crazy for weeks, and you didn’t move. If Vanessa hadn’t been there that night, you would have been in big trouble. You know that, don’t you? I’m strong, but damn. You were running your hot little hands all over my body, those big brown eyes just begging me to fuck you. Practically letting me rub off on your ass. I thought, What a polite little straight boy I have in my bed. Wonder how far he’d let me go.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and pouted. He was so damn good at that. Could always get a rise out of me with that expressive mouth. I was beginning to suspect there was a string connecting his bottom lip to my dick, because the farther it poked out, the harder I got.

“You’re the one who made me that way,” he protested. “I was perfectly respectable before I met you, and now look how far I’ve fallen.”

He was playing of course, trying to be cute. And he was cute. Cute enough to fuck right there on that bus stop bench and worry about jail later. But his comment hurt me in a way I hadn’t expected, and certainly Jamie couldn’t have expected either. The mere suggestion that I had corrupted him woke the sleeping beast that always seemed to be with me now. The one that whispered that I was no good, that I was poison.

Had I corrupted Jamie? I knew I had snatched him out of his innocuous suburban life and made a murderer of him, but had I corrupted him sexually as well? I mean of course I had gotten him addicted to my dark brand of loving. That much was a given. But at the heart of it all, there was a possibility that I had misread the initial signs.

Blinded by my own attraction to him, maybe I had simply seen what I wanted to see and pushed him until he gave in. Jamie’s father had once suggested, to my great horror, that I had abused my professional power. That I had effectively engaged in quid pro quo sexual harassment of his son.

At the time, I had wanted to wring the man’s neck for even entertaining the notion, much less planting it in his son’s head. But now I found myself wondering if he had somehow been right, or at least partly right. It made me sick to my stomach that I might have been guilty of coercion. I wanted Jamie to have chosen me of his own free will.

“Jamie, do you think you would have been gay if you’d never met me?”

I couldn’t look at him, choosing instead to study the jagged lines of graffiti scratched into the surface of the bench near my thigh. Bobby B 2015. I traced the words over and over, barely registering what they said.

“That is a ridiculous question,” Jamie said. “Why would you even ask that?”

“Because I want to know.” I was stating the obvious.

“Well, I don’t know how to answer it. I had never thought of myself as gay or even bi before I met you, and I had never been with a guy. Only girls. I was supposed to have a girlfriend, right? And they were soft and pretty and yeah, I wanted them. If you have a pretty girlfriend, you get to make out a lot, and everybody thinks you’ve got it going on. But—”

I abandoned the tracing of the words on the bench and looked into Jamie’s face. “But what?”

He sighed. “There were times. Things that confused me a little. I tried not to notice guys in the locker room or the gym, or on the field. The way their bodies looked sometimes drew my eye in a way that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t look too long, though. It’s easy to just push those little things away and chalk them up to a glitch of the mind. Oh, Jamie, you’re being silly. Everyone has thoughts like that sometimes. Forget about it. It’s nothing.” He laughed. “The porn ads were slightly harder to make excuses for, but somehow I managed.”

“Porn ads?” I asked, intrigued.

He laughed again, and I was sure I saw the color from earlier return to his cheeks.

“I clicked on a gay porn ad once on one of those free sites, out of curiosity, and I think they put cookies on my computer or something. Then I saw a lot more of the ads. At first, they annoyed the hell out of me. The video clips flashed in the corner of my eye, and I didn’t dare look at them for too long. There was really nothing there for me anyway, until…” He paused, and I could see from the look on his face that we were drifting into really-fucking-personal territory. “One night I saw an ad that did get my interest. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was a tiny clip, maybe five seconds long, looped in with several other clips, but this one was something else entirely. God, this is embarrassing.”

“Jamie,” I said, giving him my sincerest look. “We’ve had our tongues in each other’s asses. I think we left the embarrassment thing in the dust a long time ago.”

That coaxed a real laugh out of him. Not one of the tentative shy ones he’d been giving me only seconds before, but a real gut buster that drew the attention of everyone within hearing distance.

“Okay, fine. It was this skinny baseball player on his knees, and there were several guys around him. All I could see of them were their big dicks, and this little guy was servicing them. And what really got me was the look on his face. He was loving it, Kage. In fact, he looked like he needed those big jocks to use him like that. To say it turned me on doesn’t really do it justice, but I don’t know how to describe what it did exactly. I guess it meant something to me, and that something made my stomach tickle and roll like ocean waves. I would come so damn fast when I watched that clip. Even worse, there were times when I thought about it when I was jerking off without porn, because it was a guaranteed quick finish. Then I’d just tell myself it was nothing and forget about it.”

“So you never went to the site, and you never saw the whole video.”

“Of course not. That would have been wrong. I mean, it seemed like it at the time.”

“And what did you tell yourself to rationalize it?”

He shrugged. “It was just taboo. Just one weird taboo thing that got me off for whatever reason. If some men can get off wearing women’s stockings or peeing in public, was it so shocking or strange that I had a thing for one little gay clip? How many people do you think like watching some odd little thing that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to do in real life? In real life I was attracted to girls, I dated girls, I fucked girls. Who cared if I had this one tiny little irrational fascination?”

“Pretty damn good rationalization. Too bad it was all bullshit.”

“I know, right?” He smiled. “I think the truth was that somewhere deep down inside me I knew that watching that whole video would open the floodgates, and I’d never be able to close them again.”

“And now how do you think of yourself? Bi? Gay?” I paused, and then just to fuck with him I added, “Straight?”

“Very funny.” His eyes went unfocused as he withdrew into his thoughts for a long moment, then sighed. “I don’t know, Kage. The truth is I’m too obsessed with you to think about anyone else, male or female. Sometimes I look at good-looking guys and think, Am I really attracted to him? Are guys my thing now? And I honestly don’t know, because all I’m doing is comparing them to you. They remind me of you because they’re guys, but they come up lacking every single time. No other man is even in the same universe of hotness. Maybe if I wasn’t so blinded by you I could gauge where I’m at on the scale, but as it is—” He shrugged.

“And Cameron?” I asked, the name like sour milk on my tongue. “How do you explain letting him kiss you and get you onto the bed with your shirt off?”

Thanks to my uncle, I had photographic evidence of the incident burned onto my retinas for all of eternity.

“Cameron is easy to explain. I had just seen that magazine with you and Vanessa on the cover, saying you were engaged, and that was the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I thought you had abandoned me. Then Cameron came onto me. He was a good-looking guy who was gay and into me, and that was the closest thing I had to you. But he wasn’t you, Kage. I was like one of those hardcore alcoholics who end up drinking rubbing alcohol when they can’t get their hands on any drink. He’s rubbing alcohol, and you’re Dom Perignon, and that’s why I couldn’t go through with it.”

“Cameron is rubbing alcohol?” His analogy struck my funny bone, and I started laughing. “Can I please tell him that if I ever see him again? It will make my life complete.”

“No, don’t be mean. He can’t help it that he’s being compared to you. He’s a good catch, and one of these days he’ll be someone’s Cuervo Gold.”

I scoffed. “Shirley Temple is more like it. He’s fucking weak, and if he ever flirts with you again— hell, if his breath rate even speeds up the slightest bit when he looks at you— I won’t be responsible for what I do to him.”

His eyes widened. “You’d be able to tell if his breath rate picked up, even just a little?”

“I’m trained to notice the slightest tells in the octagon, baby. Fear, distraction, over-confidence. Emotions can be used against your opponent, and they can use them against you, too. A fighter who is sensitive to the physical signs of emotional states has a distinct advantage over one who isn’t. So yeah, I can tell. And I will be watching.”

“Which brings me back to your worrying.”

“My paranoia, you mean,” I said bitterly.

“Whatever you want to call it, I think you should talk to someone about it.”

“I don’t need a therapist, Jamie.”

“Maybe you don’t need one, but it might be nice to get some stuff off of your chest.”

“I don’t want a therapist,” I ground out through clenched teeth, because this was getting old already. A therapist could help with emotional problems, but what I had were real problems. I had the Dissidents. I was shut out of half of my business. I had a boyfriend who could get hauled in for murder at any moment. I had threatening notes showing up on my desk. What the hell could a therapist do about any of that?

“Will you see one just to humor me?” Jamie asked. “I’m willing to trade sexual favors.”

“It’s a bad idea to try to bargain for sex,” I growled. “That ass belongs to me. If I want it, I’ll take it.”

“Well, maybe I won’t let you.”

“Mmmm…” Those six little words had me getting hard again. “You should test that theory out sometime. Sounds like it could get interesting.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and I knew he was imagining acting out that sexy power struggle just like I was. He would lose, of course, but that was half the fun.