One Life to Lose

  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.

  One Life to Lose

  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 marketing@riptidepublishing.com.

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-439-8

  First edition

  December, 2016

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-440-4

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  Cameron Rheingold is the kind of guy who takes a book to a bar. He’s a loner by nature, but he has to engage with the community to keep his movie theater business afloat. When two young men stay after a Cary Grant film showing to chat, Cameron thinks he might have made some new friends—but their interest is more than friendly.

  Josh is charismatic, and every smile is a little bit seductive. Keith is sweet and kind, with a core of steel Cameron can sense even when Keith’s on his knees. Cameron is willing to be the couple’s kinky third, but that’s it. He refuses to risk complicating things with his growing devotion, even if being with Josh and Keith feels more right than anything else ever has.

  When the three of them are attacked by the killer roaming La Vista, Cameron must decide what’s more important: pretending the assault never happened and he’s the same loner he used to be, or coming clean to Josh and Keith about how much he loves them, even if they can never return his feelings.

  For all the Cameron Rheingolds. Love will find you. Be brave.

  About One Life to Lose

  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

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Kris Ripper

  About the Author

  More like this

  Three minutes until go time.

  I relaxed the death grip I had on my index cards and took another look at the computer screen currently showing four of the theater’s security cameras. The lobby was almost cleared out and the theater was almost full. I felt dizzy.

  I don’t experience anxiety as a jumpy heartbeat or damp palms. When I am most nervous, the color leeches out of the world, leaving me walking through a grainy black-and-white film. As a coping mechanism, it works well; I’m comfortable in that state, navigating the gray areas, finding a home between shadows and light.

  One final breath. I double-checked that the booth was locked, accepted nods of support from my ticket taker and concessions staff, and made my way to the stage.

  My earliest memory is standing on the stage between my parents on the night we opened the expanded concessions store, serving sandwiches and soups. I was four years old, holding my father’s hand, staring out at all the people. All I really remember is how high the stage felt and how loud the people were, but they told me later that I smiled and waved at the crowd. I can never be certain if my parents misremembered (projecting their general love of chaos on their young son), or if there was a time when my world did not drop into grayscale at the first moment of overwhelm.

  I knew An Affair to Remember backward and forward. It was the obvious choice to start the Cary Grant Film Festival. I probably knew my speech even without the index cards. And it was short, so there shouldn’t have been a problem.

  Then I tripped.

  I tripped walking from the stairs to the microphone. Four steps. I’d carefully put the podium off to the side where I wouldn’t have to move it and it wouldn’t be in the way. Four steps from the point where I reached the stage to the point where I turned toward the crowd.

  On the second step I tripped and my index cards flew everywhere.

  People gasped, giggled, made other sounds of commiseration and nerves and gentle mockery, a distant, muted soundtrack to the white noise buzz of my brain registering that even if I could pick up all the index cards, I hadn’t numbered them.

  It would be impossible to piece my speech back together.

  I closed my eyes for a split second, wishing my dad were there to hold my hand. He’d squeeze it and say, What would Cary do, Cameron?

  Cary would get off his knees and pick up the microphone. So I did.

  A great many people. The first night of the film series hadn’t sold out, but it had come closer than any event I’d done in years. I tried to blur my vision so I wouldn’t recognize anyone.

  “Hello. I seem to have had . . . technical difficulties with my teleprompter.”

  Laughter. No one turns to Cam Rheingold when they need a joke, but I can do dry. At least a little.

  “Welcome to the Cary Grant Film Festival. Each Saturday from now until mid-December we’ll show a film starring Cary Grant.” A few claps. I smiled, carefully not-looking at any of the faces. “Mr. Grant has been my absolute favorite actor since I was a child, and I’m so pleased to present to you Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember for our first film in the series.”

  I’d had a whole mini lecture planned—about how the film was a remake of McCarey’s earlier Love Affair, and how most people agreed the latter was the better movie—but if I launched into it without my notes, I’d fumble. The sequence would be wrong, and I might potentially misstate my facts. I couldn’t take the risk.

  “This is widely considered one of the greatest love stories of all time,” I said instead. “A story about how terrible timing is sometimes perfect timing, about the radical notion that two wealthy individuals might love one another so much they
’d decide to work for a living, and of course, about the power and intensity and endurance of romantic love.”

  More clapping this time. Perfect.

  “Please enjoy An Affair to Remember. And do join me in the lobby after for refreshments. If I don’t see you then, I hope to see you next week, when we’ll be watching North by Northwest.” I bowed to the lights, caught a disturbingly distinct view of eyes and smiles and hairstyles, and quickly walked down the steps and out the long hallway to the doors while the intro started to play.

  I pressed myself against the wall in the dark until the credits had finished and the picture really began. Then I escaped to my booth and watched it on the monitor instead of the big screen.

  I’d promised myself I wouldn’t hide, but I had failed to factor in dropping my index cards. I needed the security of the booth, at least until the next particularly gruesome act of this event would begin.

  Refreshments. Small talk. Perhaps I could redirect every conversation back to Mr. Grant. I’d certainly try.

  I didn’t know why I’d noticed them. I hadn’t right away; they intruded into my awareness gradually, like a sound in the distance that you only realized you’d been listening to all along. Their voices mingled with the familiar voices of people I knew—Zane Jaffe, who had recently shaved half her head, leaving only the half that was purple. Anderson Philpott, with whom I sometimes discussed books at Club Fred’s. Obie Magoveny, who’d made the necktie I was wearing that night: a classy, subtle reel of film print. Countless voices I recognized, and others I did not.

  First I saw them from the back, then their profiles as they stood beside each other, occasionally inclining their heads or brushing hands.

  My system was on overdrive, and despite the grayscale, certain things were in sharp focus. Alisha’s laughter at something Ed said, followed by the laughter of the two young men standing with them. Ed caught my eye and smiled, gesturing me over.

  It was simple to excuse myself, to approach, to ready my nerves for yet another handshake, another greeting.

  “Cam, you’ve met Josh and Keith, right? They run QYP down in the Harbor District.”

  I shook Josh’s hand while parsing QYP. “Is that the drop-in center?”

  “So you’ve heard of us.” He smiled. Handsome, African American, with a certain twinkle in his eye that I, veteran of so many old movies, immediately found attractive. Not that I betrayed my reaction. I was used to seeing that kind of charm transmitted via a screen at a safe distance away. It didn’t occur to me to respond to it.

  “I think I must have read an article in the paper.” I raised an eyebrow at Ed, who laughed.

  “Guilty. I wrote two, actually, though the second one was online only.”

  I reached for the other man’s hand. He looked far younger up close than he’d appeared from across the lobby. “I regret missing your open house. Sounds like it was interesting.”

  “You missed Josh giving a depressing speech and correcting an audience member about misquoting Gandhi.” Hard to gauge his age. Blond, blue-eyed young men had a certain quality about them sometimes that made them seem frozen in time. They were often the same men who one day woke up having aged twenty years overnight.

  In my line of work, you see people intermittently over a long period of time. You notice things like that.

  “I can’t judge. I just had to remind a woman nearly three times my age that it was Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, not Cary Grant. Very awkward.”

  Josh waved a hand in my direction, as if I’d proved some kind of point. “What’s the alternative, really? Let people wander around misquoting Gandhi and skewering film history?”

  “It was a great speech, anyway,” Alisha said. “Ed’s still mad he didn’t record it.”

  “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”

  “One of the kids took video,” Josh said. “Search YouTube.”

  “You’re on YouTube?” I was utterly fascinated by YouTube. I’d been raised to believe that narrative belonged to experts, and I was entranced by the idea that people simply took it for themselves, molding their own stories however they wished.

  “Only by accident.” Keith grinned at Josh, and their shared expression might as well have been a gesture for as tangible as it felt to me. It was only a smile between two men, but it seemed to me that they held hands in that smile, perhaps even kissed.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it of unwelcome images.

  “How’re you holding up?” Ed asked. “Is it as bad as you feared?”

  “I started the night off by tripping over my feet and losing all my index cards. It’s improved since then.”

  Keith cleared his throat, flushing pink, and reached into his little shoulder bag. “I, um, picked them up. At least, I think I got them all.” He produced my stack of cards and handed them over, but it took half a beat of silence for me to realize I actually had to stretch my arm out to take them.

  I was so captivated by the color in his cheeks. Sometimes people as pale as Keith blushed blotchy, but he glowed, rosy and sweet.

  “Thank you.” I didn’t mean to brush against his fingers, but it happened anyway. “I think I was attempting to forget that part of the show.”

  “You did all right without them.”

  “I hope so. I had all these notes about the film . . .” Now was not the time.

  “Can I ask you—what was your favorite part?”

  “My favorite part,” I repeated.

  Alisha clapped. “Oh, good question.”

  “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking,” Keith murmured.

  “Oh no. Not at all. Hm.” I should have said something obvious, but for whatever reason, perhaps because I could see how blue his eyes were, I told him the truth. “Ah, it’s a two-part answer. The first is the scene when Nickie goes to visit his grandmother and looks around her empty villa. I like that they allow all that space for his grief, for his pain.”

  “He touches her chair,” Josh said. “I cried.”

  This time Keith reached out and physically took his hand.

  “I hold out for my second favorite moment, which is when he hands over the stole to Terry and she knows that his grandmother is dead, without anyone using words or euphemisms, without any explanation. She just gets this . . . look on her face, this understanding.” I swallowed, trying to cover the intensity of my feelings. “That’s when I cry. Because she grieves, too.”

  Alisha hugged me, hard, and her hugs were comforting, even though I didn’t find hugging comfortable. We must have spoken more, but I was distracted, thinking about grief and loss and the empty spaces left by people I’d loved.

  I was hailed by a very old friend, and in the spirit of escape I made more excuses and went to say hello. The first words out of Hugh’s mouth were, “Your parents would be so proud of you, Cameron,” and I had to bite my tongue to keep the threads of my composure from unraveling.

  The beautiful thing about having an old friend around in a moment like this was in the way he changed the subject to the film series, asking me when Penny Serenade would play, and promising to return for it.

  Of course, the liability inherent in the presence of someone who remembered one as a fumbling, slightly besotted adolescent, is that when Hugh took my hand to say good night, I blushed.

  “You should be very satisfied with tonight.” His eyes, amused behind his glasses, glinted. “You might even consider being outright pleased.”

  “Next week is when we’ll know if it worked. And the week after.”

  He gestured to the room, full of happy movie-goers and laughter. “It worked, Cameron. I’ll see you soon.”

  “Good night.”

  I really had no idea how I made it through the rest of the evening. The reception in the lobby lasted only an hour and a half, and that was including the staff’s quick efforts at throwing everything away after, but it seemed like an epoch, or perhaps like the spinning of the earth; I could tell myself time passed, but my experience o
f it did not reflect that reality.

  When I finally locked the theater and walked up the steps to my apartment in the building next door, I felt exhausted and somehow violated. Not in a cheap way. Not in a way that trespassed on other uses of the word. But I’d taken a movie I felt intimately connected to, engaged with, and opened it up to La Vista, inviting everyone inside. It might have been a slip in judgment, to begin with a film I loved as much as I loved An Affair to Remember. Next week would be North by Northwest, a film about which it was possible to have a sense of humor, though my favorite anecdote about the movie was that Eva Marie Saint had to re-dub a line to avoid mentioning “making” love, which wasn’t a story I planned to share with a crowd largely made up of people my late grandparents’ age.

  I didn’t turn on the lights in my apartment. I toed off my shoes and walked in darkness. First to the bathroom to shower, lighting only a candle. Then to the bedroom. I didn’t have the energy to deal with shapes and colors, and my anxiety-infused silvers and grays had worn off, leaving me with oversaturated hues and too much definition.

  Far easier to feel my way by touch and familiarity, to slide into my sheets, to trust myself to textiles and the peaceful traffic on Mooney, which never truly went quiet.

  Into my pleasant darkness, their faces intruded, their eyes. Josh’s brown and twinkling. Keith’s blue and seeking. Why did I project so much on two men I hardly knew? I shouldn’t. I knew that. But I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  I hoped they’d come back next week. If only so I could see them more clearly and reassure myself that any pull I’d felt toward them was entirely misguided.

  A week. I had another week in which no one would expect me to leave the safety of my ticket booth. I inhaled and called upon the vague sense of God that thirteen years of Catholic school had not quite burned out of me. Thank you. I’ll try to need you a little less next week, but no promises.

  God, if such a being existed, seemed inclined to treat my gratitude with calm benevolence. I’d long ago realized that my internal God was probably just a wish for the man I longed to be, who greeted the present moment with wonder and acceptance. Maybe I would someday learn how to do that. Until then I allowed myself the comfort of my prayers, infused my dark bedroom with as much peace as I could manage, and fell asleep.