The Queer and the Restless Read online

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 1537

  Burnsville, NC 28714

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  The Queer and the Restless

  Copyright © 2016 by Kris Ripper

  Cover art: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  Editor: May Peterson

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-437-4

  First edition

  October, 2016

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-438-1

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  Ed Masiello has been on testosterone for a year, is working his dream job as a reporter, and is finally passing as a man (so long as you don’t ask his abuela). But the investigation of a murder case is starting to take over his life. Afraid he’s becoming obsessed, he goes to the local club to relax, and meets the flighty, whimsical Alisha.

  Alisha is a free spirit who’s tossed aside ambition for travel and adventure. Her approach to life is a far cry from Ed’s, and while Ed has always assumed that meeting his goals would make him happy, Alisha is much more content than him—despite all the plans she can’t yet fulfill.

  As their relationship heats up, so does the murder case. Alisha thinks Ed needs a break, but someone’s got to find this killer, and he wants to be there when it all goes down. Besides, taking off into the great unknown with Alisha is crazy. But opting for what’s safe is just another way of living in fear, and Ed vowed to stop living like that a long time ago.

  About The Queer and the Restless

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Kris Ripper

  About the Author

  More like this

  I sat in my chair on the day after the Fourth of July holiday, drinking coffee and staring at the wall. Since I didn’t have the energy to actually start writing, I switched the calendar over my desk to July: a picture of a massive cruise ship on a spectacularly blue sea with the words Find the destination of your heart in script below it.

  It was one of those times when I really wished I had darts. One in the hull of the ship. One in the benevolently shining sun. The rest in that perfect ocean, taunting me with its blue depths.

  Caspar, my desk-mate (and by “desk” I mean “table with delusions of grandeur”), snorted. “The fuck does that even mean?”

  “No idea. My heart’s just fine where it is.”

  “Ha. Funny, Masiello.”

  It wasn’t meant to be funny. But oh well. Caspar was forty-five and didn’t give a fuck about anything. I knew this because he found a way to put DGAF in every email he sent me. Potter’s on the warpath. Too bad I DGAF. Alder is lurking, saw him in the coffee room. DGAF myself, but you might try to look enterprising. Which was stupid, because I actually worked. I didn’t have to look like I was working. You’d think he might know that after a year and a half sitting next to me, but no. Mostly because he didn’t give a fuck.

  “Ed! How’s the blind cat story coming?”

  Speaking of Potter. I rolled my chair out until I had a line of sight to my editor’s office doorway. “You mean, the blind cat that can sense when people are dying? Actually, it’s weirdly interesting. You’d think the cat wouldn’t be so popular, since it’s basically a death omen, but the residents all seem to relish the idea they might be next.”

  Potter—who was tall and probably had been good-looking at some point in the past, before the long hours in a desk chair and weekends steeped in beer got the better of him—shook his head. “I want a nice story, Ed. Can you do that for me? No death, no dying, no clever euphemisms for death and dying. Give me twelve inches on the nice blind cat and the little old lady who brings it to visit the seniors. Okay?”

  Sure. Take everything interesting out of this story completely.

  “Got it.” Arguing wouldn’t get me anywhere. Plus, I could write twelve feel-good inches about the nice blind cat if I had to. I rolled back to my half of the table.

  Caspar snickered. “‘Just write a nice story, Ed.’ What a fucking stooge.”

  I packed up my notebooks. “I’m gonna go see what the blind cat’s up to.”

  “Oh, I bet. Hey, if this gig doesn’t work out for you, maybe you can get a job ferrying handicapped pets around making old people happy.”

  “No one uses ‘handicapped’ anymore,” I muttered, aggressively zipping my bag shut.

  “I just did.” He laughed, this kind of guffaw he does when he’s bored and poking people for fun.

  “That’s a great idea, Caspar. I’ll definitely take it into consideration.”

  He was still laughing when I slipped out the back of the conference room, which had a fire door that wasn’t wired into the security system. I’d go see the blind cat. Maybe it would make me feel better about having landed the reporter job I’d always wanted only to discover that “general assignment” mostly meant “a bunch of crap that reporters who’ve been here longer don’t want to waste their time on.”

  This was not the destination of my heart.

  I texted Cameron on my way out of the assisted-living center, wiping wet hands on my pants. The blind cat was nice enough, but it shed like crazy, and even washing didn’t make me feel clean. Obviously the thing I ought to do now was go back to work and write my twelve inches. But I thought I’d take a chance that Cameron had a lunch movie on and could hang out for a few minutes.

  The Rhein dominated the north side of Mooney Bou
levard in downtown La Vista. Big florid arches and molding, scrollwork around the more modern theater signs, and a red carpet Cameron replaced every five years, just like his parents and grandparents and great-grandmother before him. The Rheingolds had opened the theater in 1936, and it’d been La Vista’s favorite movie theater since then, though it’d been steadily losing business since the Cinema 18 opened in the big shopping center out in the suburbs.

  Today’s lunch movie was Jurassic Park, and I settled into the ticket booth with Cameron right around the time the T-Rex escaped its pen. I angled for a view of the tiny monitor that always ran the current movie as it played. “Not your usual lunch movie.”

  “I have a soft spot for it. It was the first PG-13 movie I ever saw.” He stretched his legs in one direction and leaned over to reach for the minifridge in the other. “I was six.”

  “Did it scare the hell out of you? I don’t think I saw it until I was older.”

  “Yeah. I had dinosaur nightmares for months. But after that I wanted to be a paleontologist for a few years, so I guess it ends up being a good memory. I have carrots and hummus?”

  “You don’t have to feed me, Cam.”

  He pulled out the carrots and hummus, spreading an honest-to-god handkerchief on the counter between us. “Of course I do. You’re my guest.”

  He was three years older than me, and he’d gone to the Catholic school instead of La Vista High, so we hadn’t met until I covered the premier he’d hosted for a local indie filmmaker. I’d liked him immediately. Cam was one of those guys that I had conflicted feelings about, one of the guys who’d confused the hell out of me when I was younger, and a lesbian: did I have a crush on him? But it hadn’t been a crush. I didn’t want to kiss Cameron; I wanted to be him.

  Case in point: brown wool trousers, crisp white shirt with a club collar (that didn’t make him look like an English boarding school boy), embroidered vest in deep blue and burnt umber, and oxfords that looked both worn-in and cared-for.

  Okay. I’ve been on testosterone for a little over a year, I actually feel all right in my clothes on most days, but I still kind of want to be Cameron.

  He picked up a carrot. “Eat. Tell me what story you’re dodging today. Any time you’re not working in the middle of the day, I know it’s a good one.”

  So I told him about the blind cat and its psychic powers. And how I wasn’t allowed to report on anything interesting about it.

  “You’re saying the residents aren’t afraid of the cat?” He propped his long legs on the counter behind me.

  “It’s more like they look forward to their turn. Cam, I watched it happen last week. The cat sort of . . . flirted with everyone, winding between their legs, scratching its head on their wheelchairs. And they all held their breath waiting to see what would happen next.”

  “What happened next?”

  “It—he—finally jumped up into the lap of this little old man, curled up, and fell asleep purring as the man petted him. The guy . . . looked so peaceful. Petting the cat, talking to it. There was this audible sigh among the other residents, but no one was disturbed. It was the strangest thing.”

  “And the old man died?”

  “I didn’t follow up. I guess I didn’t think about it. It seemed like a foregone conclusion.” I hadn’t seen the old man earlier today, but he could have just been in his room or something. That was bad reporting. If the old man lived—well, it didn’t erase the cat’s history of having selected out the people who were going to die, but it made it a little less compelling. “You’re right. Maybe he didn’t.”

  “I’m not sure it matters.” Cameron crunched a carrot thoughtfully. “If the residents all believe the blind cat tells them when they’re going to die, the effect is still the same. That’s really interesting, Ed.”

  “I know. But for the paper I’m writing a human-interest story about a nice little old lady and her blind cat, which she takes to the nursing home every day.”

  “Wouldn’t a human-interest story about people reclaiming a fear of death and making it into something peaceful be a much more powerful story?”

  “Exactly.”

  He pushed the hummus toward me. “How’s everything else? Your parents still being difficult?”

  I ate a carrot, thinking about that one. Cameron, being Cameron, didn’t fill the silence with words. He ate a carrot too, without fiddling with his phone or shuffling papers.

  “They’re okay. As long as I avoid my dad, things are all right. I try to go see Abuela before he gets home.”

  “And your mom? Tell me she’s at least getting your name right.”

  I shrugged. “She tries to avoid calling me anything. Kind of the bitch about Spanish, you know? All those gendered nouns. So now she just doesn’t address me at all.” I didn’t tell him that sometimes, in the middle of the night, I tried to manufacture my mother’s voice calling me mijo, that I’d done it so many times I could almost make it real: my boy, my son.

  “I guess it’ll take time.” His voice was low and even.

  If I were attracted to men, I think there could be something between us. I think Cameron wouldn’t balk at the fact that my dick doesn’t look like other guys’ dicks, or that once I take my binder off I have breasts again. He’s gay, but he’s seen me as a man since the first time I introduced myself, and when I went on T he was one of the only people I told. We weren’t that close at the time, but I’d just needed to tell someone, and I’d been at the theater interviewing him about a fund-raiser he was doing for the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. (An assignment dropped on me because who else would bother covering the story? Potter had as good as said, “Go interface with your people and give me ten inches about local business owners supporting the youth.”)

  Cam was still looking at me. “If you need anything, let me know.”

  “Sure.” I grabbed another carrot. “I should go back to work.”

  He checked the monitor showing Jurassic Park. “Did I tell you about my Cary Grant series?”

  “No. What’re you doing?”

  “Well. You know about my love for Cary Grant.”

  “You have a love for Cary Grant?”

  “Ed. Mr. Grant and I go back a long time.” He flashed a playful smile.

  “I had no idea, though it makes sense. You are very Cary Grant.”

  “Why thank you. In any case, I’m holding a Cary Grant film series in the fall. Starting in October, running through December. Spend Saturday night with Cary Grant! Then snacks and fruit juice after, something like that.”

  “Really? That sounds great. I’ll totally come.”

  “I’m hoping to generate some, ah, habit-forming behavior. Follow up with movies of the same era, at the same time. We always play It’s a Wonderful Life near Christmas, which is right after the end of the series. Really, I’m trying to . . . engage, I guess.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “That’s . . . good.”

  “It sounds awful. Part of me is dreading it. But I think if I want the Rhein to stay important to people, I have to do more than hide here in the booth. I’m the only Rheingold who hides in the booth, Ed.”

  He was the only Rheingold still breathing, but I took his point; both of his parents had known me on sight when I was a kid because I’d scraped money together to go to the movies whenever I could. “It was always good, walking up to the window when your folks were selling tickets. It meant something that they knew my name and the kinds of movies I liked.”

  He nodded. “That’s exactly it. And it’s the thing we have that the big theaters don’t have. I don’t know why it took me so long to see it, though I guess I was . . . hoping it wouldn’t come to that.”

  “Is the Rhein in financial trouble?”

  “Nothing I can’t think of at least a dozen ways to turn around. Just gotta make myself do it. So I’m starting with Cary Grant, but I’m trying to seed the audience with people I know, so when I’m attempting to make small talk I won’t feel quite so ridiculous.”
>
  “You can make small talk, Cameron.”

  “It is not my strength, like it was Mom and Dad’s. But I’ll try.” He reached for the lid to the hummus and packed it and the carrots away.

  That was probably my cue. I waited until he stood, tugging his vest down as he did so—two sharp tugs on both sides, effortless masculinity and grace.

  “Thanks for letting me crash your lunch,” I said.

  “Anytime. Good luck with your blind cat story.”

  “Thanks.”

  I drove back to work thinking about the ways I was different than my parents expected, thinking about the ways Cameron was probably different than his parents expected. I looked at him and saw my quirky friend, who wore clothes eclectically, who never seemed to lack for confidence. How much of that was something he did intentionally, the way Cary Grant had changed his mannerisms and his accent to be who he wanted to be? How much of any of us was real, versus what we projected for the benefit of other people?

  The blind cat would probably know the answers to all these questions. If it weren’t a cat.

  After work, I went by to see my abuela. Not just because I was avoiding my roommates, though avoiding my roommates was always a good idea. There was nothing really wrong with them. And I thought I passed enough so they hadn’t twigged to me being trans yet, but my policy of avoidance had worked pretty well so far, so I went with it.

  And I love Abuela. She’s the only person I miss. She’s definitely the only reason I ever visit the house.

  Abuela is my mother’s mother. My dad is completely estranged from his huge Italian-American family because of some fight he had with his parents when he was in college. They’ve tried to reconcile over the years, but he’s too much of a pigheaded jerk. Once, when my mother told him she thought it would be more healthy if he maintained a connection to them, he told her that he’d sworn he would never speak to them again and he never will.

  The last time he spoke to me he said I could be his daughter or I could be dead to him. I couldn’t be his daughter, so that didn’t leave a lot of other options. He never got home before six, though, so I had a little time to visit before I had to get out.