Shipwreck Bay Read online

  Truly, I didn’t want to visualize Kiria Marazeries cavorting around in her underpants.

  I wonder if Steve Lewis wore underpants. And what kind?

  The bouzouki player stopped the music and let out a string of Greek expletives somewhere across the crescent-shaped mountain.

  I almost gagged in an effort not to laugh, but Mrs Marazeries looked scandalized and crossed herself three times. Boy, did she remind me of my late yaya, my grandmother. She would be having fits right now with everything that had been going on. But then again, had she lived long enough to learn that I was gay, that would have unglued her. Period.

  But that was another story.

  Inside the cave house, Marek was moving around and I hoped he was going to come out here with something adorning his toned but slim frame.

  “Kali oreksi, good eating.” The old lady seemed to sense my need for space. She left fresh towels beside the tray and took off at a rapid clip, like a nimble mountain goat, down the rocky terrain. I turned to see my husband watching me from the doorway.

  “I see you’ve found a friend.” He came toward me and I thought my heart would break. We were both so unhappy. Was it really in our best interests to be taking a romantic vacation like this? I kept asking myself, did I come here with him to prove that I am still lovable? Did I do it so that Steve would know that Marek had taken me, his husband, on a romantic Greek vacation?

  Even now I could see in my mind’s eye the moment he chose to tell me about Steve. When his cellphone had been ringing off the hook and I imagined it was one of his pesky clients. Marek’s clients all fell in love with him. Men and women. The women, oddly, were more aggressive. One lady had recently discovered our home number and had even called on the landline.

  She told me she needed to see Marek that night. It was an emergency.

  “An architectural emergency?” I’d asked. She’d actually amused me.

  Marek was a hot architect, but I’d put up with a lot of crap, paying his way through college and his first year as an intern. Now, all these years later I thought we were on to good times.

  Damn. I had to stop it.

  ‘I never meant to hurt you, ever,’ he’d told me repeatedly. ‘I did something very stupid and I know I will spend the rest of my life regretting it.’

  He moved beside me, resting his hand on my shoulder. “You okay?” he asked.

  My cellphone rang. I could hear it from outside.

  I rushed in to answer it. The bouzouki player had busted out with his scale practice again. It was beginning to get on my nerves.

  My mother sounded so worried, so anxious.

  “Are you on the island?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said and began to weep. I couldn’t help it. I kept seeing Marek and that bastard Steve Lewis in the hotel room. That creep had sent me a couple of photos of him and Marek, not believing that Marek had confessed it all to me.

  Oh, it had turned ugly. Marek shut down his Facebook account and now kept only a professional one that he rigorously monitored so nobody could befriend him and start any trouble.

  No more architectural emergencies.

  Except that Steve had posted one more picture on my Facebook wall. He wouldn’t anymore. I’d blocked him. I still had no idea how he’d infiltrated my account. I’d deleted almost all my friends…

  “Don’t cry,” Mom said and started to sob too. I closed myself in the bathroom so Marek wouldn’t hear me, but it was too late. He began knocking at the door.

  “Let me in!” he shouted. Even from inside the bathroom I could hear that the bouzouki player had stopped strumming. The whole island would be aware that we were fighting at this rate.

  “Please,” Marek begged. He said it over and over, until his voice became hoarse with emotion.

  He was falling apart too.

  Marek began to shoulder the door at my end the same moment my father asked my mother on her end what was wrong.

  Dad grabbed the phone. “Dragan, is everything all right? What’s he done now? I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”

  “Nothing,” I managed to get out. I opened the door to stop Marek from breaking it down.

  It was hard for me to let go of my anger, my fear that I was going to get trampled again.

  He tried to hold me, but I moved away from him. I paced the room trying to convince my mom I was okay.

  Mom and I ended the call, both of us unhappy. I looked outside and saw Marek facing the ocean, shoulders slumped.

  “You’ve got to let me make it up to you,” he said. “It’s the only way this will work.” He turned and glanced at me. I stayed in the house, feeling safer away from him, even though the doorway was an open one and the windows contained no glass. There was no real barrier between us. “Dragan, we must be sweet to each other.”

  How could he make it up to me? I wasn’t sure he ever could.

  I took a deep breath, turned and made the bed, making sure the folds were smooth. I felt like Emma Thompson’s character in Love Actually, when she does the same thing, irons out the wrinkled bedspread on her marital bed with her hands at the same moment she’s realized her husband’s screwing another woman.

  When I watched the movie the moment stuck with me. Yes, it was a mundane thing to focus on. And, I realized now, mundane things, ritual, habits, these were the things that kept a person sane. Perhaps we’d moved too fast in taking a break from all that was familiar.

  I studied the wall slots that operated the electrical fixtures. Neither of us had ever seen anything like these before. We’d learned upon our arrival that we had to use a key card to operate every single electrical thing in the house. We had to slide in the card and keep it there to turn on lights, boil water…whatever we had in mind.

  Kiria Marazeries had told us a credit card would work too, but urged us to be sure not to leave them there. Apparently a lot of people left the island with their personal credit cards still left inside the slots. I could see why. She’d given us one key card and that meant that as we went from room to room or task to task, we lost the use of power.

  Marek turned to watch me. I could tell from the corner of my eye. His attention on me was a powerful aphrodisiac. Damn it. I was still aware of him, still magnetically drawn to him.

  I took another deep breath. Emma Thompson would have been proud of me. I walked outside to our now cooling coffee. I poured out and handed him one of the small blue cups, and our fingers touched. His eyes conveyed fear and apprehension. I looked across the water, and his finger touched my cheek.

  “Dragan… I miss you so much.”

  “I miss you too.”

  I heard his sharp intake of breath.

  “Can we please go back to bed…and sort this out the old-fashioned way?”

  “Not yet. Please.” This was my standard response these days. I needed time. I needed his patience.

  “I guess I could have predicted that answer.” He banged the cup down on the table and walked over to the low stone wall.

  Not ready to reassure him with love and affection, I let him go. I’d been the perfect partner, or so I thought. I must have done something terribly wrong to make him reach out for a stranger on the Internet, meeting him secretly in hotel rooms all over San Francisco.

  He’d even faked a business trip to spend the night at Steve’s house a little over a month ago. Then, apparently, he’d tried to break things off and Steve’s inner bunny boiler became unhinged.

  Stop it. Don’t think about that anymore. You tortured yourself going over the credit card bills. You wept over the hotel receipts, the room service charges. Massages, champagne, lobster, and all the while Marek’s voice shrieking like a boiling kettle’s whistle —‘ I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ You said you’d give him a chance. You said you would stop tormenting yourself, Dragan. Try.

  “Please come and have some coffee, Marek. The cakes are still warm.”

  I wanted to shout at him that we were supposed to be sweet to each other. He came back toward me, and
watching the way he moved, like a frustrated cougar denied its prey, I realized he was still the most handsome man I’d ever met.

  He sat next to me. I put the coffee back in his hands and held a pastry to his lips. He took a bite, the custard oozing over my fingers. He licked it off, finishing the pastry in one bite. I saw the glimmer of desire in his eyes, knew he was holding himself back.

  “She makes coffee almost as good as you do.” He kissed me. It was a tempting kiss, stirring up the embers that choked my throat now.

  “You want to take a swim?” I asked. Intimacy with him made me so jumpy these days.

  “No. I want to look at you.”

  His words inflamed my cheeks. He picked up a bougatsa and held it to my mouth. I had hardly been able to swallow a bite of food even on the plane.

  He’d done everything I asked. Changed his cellphone numbers, changed his email address. As the full weight of his betrayal began to sink in, he’d shown genuine, increasing remorse and extreme fear.

  Marek had agreed to the Steve sting, though at first the idea of it horrified him. “What if he’s not convicted and he comes after us? I’m afraid of what he’ll do. I don’t want him to hurt Dragan.”

  That was when I knew we might just turn the corner on our mutual despair. We weren’t there yet, but, finally, Marek was thinking about me and not about massaging his ego.

  I’d expected some kind of fallout when his career took off. But I hadn’t expected him to act out. Ever since the intelligentsia, as he put it, began feting him for his enviro-friendly designs, Marek had changed. It had been subtle at first but then one night he made a remark and it still shocked me.

  “I can’t believe how popular I’ve become,” he’d said.

  Several of Marek’s houses had featured on the covers of Architectural Digest. I attended every house-warming, every photo session, each and every event he’d been invited to, but I guess he needed more…adoration.

  He’d come back to earth with a thud when Steve demanded money and became aggressive doing so. We’d turned to Paul, who suggested that Marek wasn’t big enough for Steve’s stunt to wreck his career. He’d even joked that it might give him some free publicity, but, he’d stressed, we had to stop Steve from attacking us.

  And he was attacking us.

  “You said I was the best lover you ever had.”

  Marek told me he’d said that. He admitted it. He’d said it because, according to him, ‘ Everyone wants to believe they’re the best in the sack. That their cock is the biggest and the best.’

  “Where are you?” Marek asked.

  “I’m right here.” I chewed the pastry. In our eight years together, we’d honestly never had many arguments. I thought we were rock solid, then once our ground shifted, the insecurity I felt affected Marek, who panicked if he couldn’t find me or if I didn’t answer the phone. A few days before we’d left for Athens, he’d called from his office, but I’d gone for a walk, listening to an audio book on my iPod. I returned home to find him hysterical, opening every closet, making sure my things were still there.

  Ironically, I’d purchased and downloaded City of Bones, the first book in The Mortal Instruments series. I say ironic because the heroine, a teenage girl, suddenly wakes up one morning and discovers she comes from a long line of demon hunters.

  That was how my life had been feeling lately. Like the world was spinning around me and I had been thrown headfirst into a hell I wanted no part of.

  “I was thinking about City of Bones,” I said.

  My response surprised Marek. Over the last few weeks, it had become clear he’d been increasingly disinterested in my life, my passions, and wholly interested in his. And his popularity.

  “That’s the book you’ve been reading, right?”

  I nodded, impressed. I was an avid reader and my assistant, Chloe, had suggested the book. She said I needed, as an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house, to read the hot genres and not just the middle-aged gay male authors who’d been my bread and butter.

  Damn that Chloe. I was now so hooked on City of Bones that she said she’d find other books, unpublished ones, that we could maybe snap up for the company.

  “What were you thinking about it?” He picked up another pastry and bit into it.

  For a moment, I allowed myself to wallow in the pleasure of knowing we had plenty of time. He didn’t have to rush off anywhere and my edits could wait. Though I mainly acquired books these days, I had three authors with whom I still worked as an editor.

  I didn’t want Marek to think all my thoughts were about him, even though they mostly were.

  Damn it. “I was just thinking that I love the book and I’m addicted, but it’s astonishing to me that it’s supposed to be young adult. It has such grown-up themes.”

  “That makes sense. Harry Potter was supposed to be a kid’s book too.”

  “Exactly. But there are things in this that are very disturbing.”

  “Such as?”

  Now that I came to think of it, it had been a long time since Marek and I had had a conversation like this.

  “Well, the whole notion of unseen worlds, betrayal, death, being marked for life. Can you ever really run from the past? Can you ever hide from it successfully?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but his iPhone vibrated on the table, stopping all attempts at further conversation. He checked the readout. “It’s Paul.” His face took on the tense look it always did whenever it was our attorney.

  I nodded. I saw the flicker of anxiety in his eyes, heard his murmured responses. “I’ve got a call on the other line,” he said to Paul and clicked over.

  Marek was a man who traveled constantly, so it rankled that he chose to screw around in our hometown and now he was having a conversation that clearly was not business. Man, this guy was too much. He was lying to me again.

  “You know… I can’t talk right now, but that sounds good,” he was saying.

  Oh geez… Don’t tell me. Does he have some other guy stashed on the island? What if Steve isn’t the only guy he’s been boning? Next thing you know he’s going to tell me he has to run to the Internet café in the town square.

  I couldn’t stay around for this. In our room, our spacious wonderful room I would never get to enjoy, I rifled through my suitcase, pulling out the first pair of shorts and T-shirt I could find. Hands automatically stowing everything I owned that was not already packed, I blinked back furious tears.

  I knew this was a mistake.

  “What…what the hell are you doing?” Marek covered the space between us in seconds, yanking the suitcase out of my grip. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I was…coming here. I’m going home, Marek. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “Dragan. Please… You have to believe me. That was not him.”

  “Who was it then? Some other guy?”

  He tore at his hair, a new gesture since we hadn’t been having sex, since our relationship, our lives together were hanging by a single thread. He was twitching and burning in his own skin. He blocked my efforts to grab my suitcase.

  “Please…baby. Please. I’ve gone to so much trouble. I planned something special.”

  “Something special.” I echoed his words, folding my arms across my chest.

  “Dragan, I…I booked a cruise. I…” I thought he was going to fall apart then and I saw the emotion in his face. Damn… He’s telling the truth.

  “But we just got here. I feel…safe here.”

  “We’ll come back here, I promise. I’ll make you feel safe again. Please. I love you so much.”

  He dropped the bag, and for the first time in three weeks, I let him hold me in his arms without resistance, without filling my head with ugly thoughts.

  “Trust me, please trust me.” His arms tightened around me and I felt his cock hardening against me.

  “Do you feel how badly I want you?”

  “Please,” I said again. “I’m not ready. Stop pushing. You promised.”
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  “I can’t help it, Dragan. You’re killing me. I’m dying here. “

  And then I heard a honking sound.

  He looked out the window. “Aw shit. Somebody’s got bad timing. That’s our boat, baby, come on.”

  His face was alight with secrets and schemes, but I sputtered, “I haven’t even finished my coffee.”

  “So finish your coffee and let me show you a beautiful dream.”

  “I’m not ready.” It had become my mantra lately. I was on the verge of tears again.

  He looked at me. “If I reschedule it for tomorrow, can we spend a nice day together? Will you trust me when I tell you that I love you and I need you more than anyone or anything? “

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll call the boat captain,” he said. “Don’t go away.” He eyed the suitcase. “I’ll be right back.”

  For a couple of minutes I sat on the bed, trying to figure out how I felt. We hadn’t made many plans, hardly any. My meticulous architect had struggled with my desire for a free-form vacation. Now I’d learned that he’d planned something special. What exactly had he meant by he wanted to show me a beautiful dream?

  It wasn’t until he returned and sat beside me that I really felt his wretchedness. He always got antsy when his plans became derailed.

  His mom once told me that as a child, he took great pains to line up his pencils from his case each afternoon when he came home from school. Each item had to align exactly. Each pencil had to have the same point. He’d sharpen them until just so. If not, he couldn’t do his homework.

  Marek was still like that. He kept the hangers on his side of the closet at precise distance from one another. Towels, toilet paper, floor rugs, even flowers in vases had to have symmetry. This attention to detail made him a brilliant architect but a pain in the ass for me, his husband.

  It took me a second to realize he was watching me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nothing calamitous. Not really, anyway. I just thought you should know Paul called to say that Steve Lewis has been using an alias. His real name is Stanley Lawson and he has a fairly lengthy criminal history. He’s apparently blackmailed several other prominent gay businessmen with his little schemes.” He swallowed. Hard. “All across the US.”