Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)(14)

Wednesday evening, Reed had returned home, handed over the fileted snapper he’d brought home for dinner, and headed to the bathroom to get a shower. Once he finished that, he took his laptop out to the couch to check for e-mails from clients, bookings, and to goof off on Facebook.

Then, he saw it.

“Oh, f*ck.” In shock, Reed stared at his Facebook feed.

“What?” Lyle called from the kitchen, where he was making them dinner.

Reed sat back, stunned. “Now I know why Basco didn’t make it last weekend like he said he would.”

Lyle stuck his head out the kitchen doorway. “Why?”

He couldn’t say it. Rather than saying it, he picked up his laptop, carried it into the kitchen, sat it on the counter, and pointed to the post from their friend’s sister.

“Oh, shit,” Lyle whispered. “Sonofabitch.”

“I know, right?” Reed walked over to the fridge and pulled out a beer, holding it up to Lyle. Lyle shook his head, so Reed closed the fridge and popped the cap off it, draining a third of it in several long swallows.

Lyle stood in front of the laptop. “Wow. I wonder if she knows.”

Reed knew what Lyle meant. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

Reed knew Tony had a sister, but from what the man had said, while they were close and lived together, Tony had kept the kinky part of himself closely closeted from her. Very few people in their kinky group of friends actually knew him as Tony. The only people from the BDSM community he’d friended on Facebook were ones he knew only engaged in vanilla interactions on the site. Both to keep it a secret from his sister and family, and because of work.

Everyone locally in the kink community knew him as Basco, which was fine, because it saved them confusion trying to tell him apart from Tony Daniels, who frequently volunteered at the club as well as helped host the Suncoast Society munches.

Lyle let out a long, deep sigh. Reed slipped an arm around his waist. “We’ll go when they announce the arrangements,” he said. “And since no one’s mentioned this on Fet yet, I’d be willing to bet no one else knows about it, unless they’re on his Facebook account, too.”

“Should we say something on Fet?”

“I don’t know. Let’s see what happens. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. I also don’t want a bunch of kinksters showing up at his vanilla memorial. Maybe we’d be better off having one of our own for him at the club.”

“Good point.” Lyle stared at the post as if still unable to process the emotional blow. “This sucks.”

“Yes, it does. Unfortunately, life is fatal one-hundred percent of the time, for one-hundred percent of the population.” He took another swallow of his beer.

“He was so…nice.” Lyle sounded grieved.

Reed got it. They’d started to bandy between them the possibility of talking to Basco about more than just a play relationship. Maybe bringing him home for private play of a more sexual nature. There weren’t many men they were both into enough to want to get sexy with them.

Play partners, absolutely. But in bed, when they had a third, it was almost always a woman. Playing with men was different than sex with men, and while it was easy for the two men to find a woman they were both into for sex or sexy play, it was more difficult to find a guy they both were into enough to want to take that next step, who was also into both of them as well. And even if they were both into the guy, it was difficult for the guy to meet their very exacting parameters in regards to monogamy within their triad, if they took things to that level.

Reed set down his beer, turned Lyle to face him, and put his arms around him. “It’s okay. We’ll get through this.”

“Fuck.” He rested his head on Reed’s shoulder. “I’m just…stunned. I can’t believe it. It doesn’t feel real.”

“That’s usually the first reaction.”

Poor Lyle. Reed had ruthlessly downsized his life—his wife, his possessions, his career, his earnings—in search of an authentic life. In a way, he’d felt a kindred spirit with Basco, who’d done something similar.

Lyle, on the other hand, hadn’t had to do that. He’d never been divorced, hadn’t gone through the drama of that. Lyle had known for years that he was bi and kinky and had decided early on not to settle for less than what he felt was a lifetime commitment with someone who could handle every facet of him. While it might have been slightly more lonely for him romantically through some of those years, it also meant he’d had it easy in other ways.

“I wish we’d known he was sick,” Lyle said, still sounding morose. “I would have been bugging him to get himself checked out by a doctor.”

“Don’t do this to yourself. If his own sister didn’t realize how bad off he was, what makes you think we could be mind readers when we only saw him a couple of times a month?” He tightly hugged him. “Let’s use this as a learning experience to make sure we don’t do something like that ourselves.”

“Deal. I don’t want to lose you.” He looked up into Reed’s eyes, his brown eyes full of tears. “I can’t lose you. You’re my life.”

Reed kissed him, slowly, deeply. “You won’t lose me, buddy.” He rested his forehead against Lyle’s. At five eleven, Lyle was four perfect inches shorter than Reed. “You’ve got me forever.”