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  Kyle

  I’d once thought Rose’s former bedroom at our pce was the most sterile, lifeless thing I’d ever seen. Looking at Mallory’s study, it seemed my fiance came by it honestly. It was all so aggressively beige: the wallpaper, the bedspread, the carpet. The bed was a cot like you’d see at a summer camp, and the rest of the pce was filing cabinets. Legit, I’d never seen so many filing cabinets in one location. Tall steel columns lined the walls on all sides- the closet was filled with clothes, a series of identical gray pantsuits- but beyond that and the bed, it was nothing but cabinets.

  It was more than a little disturbing, but it did give me hope that I’d find something resembling what I was looking for.

  I fastened my bck leather gloves to my hands, and I picked a cabinet near the bed. I didn’t know how Mallory’s warped brain worked, but it made a certain kind of sense to keep the more personal stuff within reach of where you slept. I yanked one open and started parsing through. Most of it was… Bckmail material, by the look of it. Incriminating photos of people in the corporate sector, presumably of people Mallory worked with. Records of fraud, insider trading, embezzlement… Jesus, Mallory. And she was just sitting on all this! I followed enough news around the business sector to recognize most of these names, and I knew for a fact none of these people had faced any charges.

  Which meant Mallory had the power to put some legitimately bad people away… And chose not to, because that would be inconvenient for her.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  I kept digging. This was big, but it wasn’t what I was here for. Needed something more personal. This cabinet was all business, so I moved on to the one next to it. Still more corporate bckmail material. Look, given I was here to find bckmail material, I probably shouldn’t judge, but the sheer amount of white colr crimes this woman had records of was insane.

  Two more cabinets ter, however, I finally found something useful: family photos. Leave it to this woman to keep baby pictures in a filing cabinet, but she had one of each of her kids on the day they were born, plus pictures of each of them for every year until they were thirteen. Above it was something very interesting indeed: a wedding album.

  Mallory with long hair, cd in a white dress, was almost surreal to look at. She really did look exactly like Sarah when she was younger, though. It was uncanny. And she and Caleb looked… Happy, at the wedding. She was smiling, draped over her spouse, shoving a piece of cake into her face. What the hell happened?

  The bottom section of the cabinet, however, was the most damning of all: a file beled ‘false bill of goods’, containing pictures of Caleb done up en femme. The resembnce to Rose was staggering, especially with the long auburn wig Caleb wore in the photos. Rose was her mother’s spitting image in every way. But in every photo where Caleb was her true self, Mallory looked furious.

  I took out my phone and snapped pictures of every piece of evidence, every photo of Rose’s mother as her true self, alongside Mallory with death in her eyes. Good. I had what I came for. Now to make a hasty retreat.

  I turned around… And saw someone I didn’t recognize standing in the doorway. He had gray hair sparked with small bursts of brown, a clean-shaven face that bore the weight of a number of years (somewhere between forty-five and fifty, if I had to guess), and a lean, tight frame wrapped inside an expensive tuxedo. He came up to my chin, so he wasn’t short, but I was still bigger. That was good- I could realistically take this guy if it escated into an actual fight, but if he was who I thought he was, he’d probably sue me into oblivion regardless of if I won or lost. “You must be the side-ho,” he said, a smug smirk on his face that looked like he’d practiced it in the mirror every day since he was in high school. “What was your name again? Kevin? Kenneth? Konstantin?” “Does it matter?” I gred. “You won’t remember it. People like you never do.”

  He took a step forward, hands in his pockets. A light accent glossed his words: European Spanish, if I had to guess. “And what kind of person am I, then?”

  I stood my ground, fists bunched. “You’re Sarah’s husband. Sam Vasquez.”

  “Ding ding ding, we have a winner,” he said. God, I wanted to break his face. “So. I gotta ask. How was it?”

  My eyes narrowed. “How was what?”

  “My sloppy seconds,” he said, ughing at his own terrible joke.

  “Does Sarah ask that to your mistresses?” I fired back.

  “No, my asset knows that’s not her pce,” he chuckled. “I allow her indulgences with men and women alike, but she knows to pay the price for each. With men, she has to tell me their names and all that she knows about them.”

  “And with women?” I raised an eyebrow, dreading the answer.

  “She has to let me watch,” he mugged.

  “You’re fucking gross,” I said.

  He threw his head back and ughed. “You would think that, wouldn’t you? Boys like you always do.”

  “I’m thirty-one,” I rolled my eyes.

  “Yes, but you haven’t taken your proper pce as a man,” he said, a hint of incredulity in his condescending voice. “Did nobody teach you how to control your assets? How to keep them where they belong? For fuck’s sake, Sarah told me you let her orgasm- a man doesn’t do that. Don’t you know how much control you’re giving up when you let her enjoy it?”

  “I’m not dignifying that with a response.” “And that’s why you’re a boy and I’m a man,” he said. “You still haven’t answered my question: how was my sloppy seconds? Did you even finish? Or were you so busy worrying about my little asset’s pleasure to bother with your own like some sort of homosexual?”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw myself knocking out each and every one of this man’s teeth and flushing them down the toilet. I breathed in through my nose, out through my mouth. I had what I needed. The smart thing to do was grab Rose and get out of here. Do the smart thing, Kyle. Do the smart thing. “Pretty sure having sex with a woman is like, the least gay thing a man can do, but alright, guy. You tell yourself that.”

  “You would think that. You’re just a-”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Do not interrupt me! I am your better!” he said, half-whisper and half-scream.

  “We can agree to disagree on that.”

  “No, we cannot. You will recognize me as your better and then I will let you leave so you can go back to cavorting around with your pet faggot. That is your only option right now.”

  I raised my hands. I reached towards him. And I… Smoothed the wrinkles on the shoulders of his tux. “My guy. You do not want to ride this train.” He put his hands around my wrists and bared his teeth. “I am not your guy. You may call me ‘sir.’ And you will recognize me and my status, and then you may leave. Now tell me: how was my asset in the bedroom? Was she as joyless with you as she is with me?”

  If I threw the first punch, he won. He could and would sue. And I couldn’t afford two wsuits at once, even if I had Rose and Ruth and Nathan helping me. But if I provoked him, I could threaten to sue for assault. It would be my word against his, but as long as I didn’t hit back too much, had more bruises on me than he had on him, I could argue self-defense. Still not optimal, not without any witnesses, but it could work.

  All I had to do was piss him off. I looked at this disgusting maggot of a man, practically foaming at the mouth with misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and cssism, and an idea hatched inside my mind. Something I’d seen my brother do when bigoted assholes tried to give him shit for being gay. He was a big dude like me, so most people weren’t a physical threat to him, and he realized pretty quickly that as long as he didn’t start the fight he wouldn’t get in nearly as much trouble. Guys like the one in front of me couldn’t stand to have one specific accusation leveled at them. Small-minded clowns that they were, they considered it the most offensive thing you could possibly say to them. “Are you coming on to me?”

  “What?!” he spat, his face contorting.

  “I’m just saying, you’re asking me to call you sir, and that’s what my woman calls me when we’re in the sack. So that’s a little gay, bro.”

  “How dare you-”

  “And like, that’s cool and all, you do you, but I don’t really swing that way.”

  “I am not-”

  “Plus, you keep trying to find out what it was like for me when I was fucking your wife-”

  “My asset-”

  “And you won’t even call her your wife like a normal person. Is this like a cuckoldry thing? I’m not one to kink-shame, but it seems to me that you’re projecting some serious stuff here, guy.”

  “Stop calling me-”

  “I already told you, I’m not calling you sir. And given that you’re already stepping out on your wife-”

  “Asset!”

  “And you’re convinced it’s gay to care about whether your girl gets off, yeah, it really comes off like you’re projecting something.”

  He squeezed my wrists extra tight. “You do not get to insult me like this!”

  “Yeah, also, the fact that you think being gay is an insult says more about you then me. My brother’s gay. I love and support him very much.”

  “That is just further proof of your degeneracy.” I ripped my hands out of his and folded them behind my back. Then, a new thought occurred. I reached into my back pocket where my phone was, and I dialed 9-1-1.

  “So what if it is?” I said. “What are you going to do about it!”

  He struck me, a bare-knuckle hook across my jaw. “I’ll do to you what I do to Sarah! That is what I’ll do.”

  “You’ll hit me like you do your wife? Is that what you’re saying!”

  “I’ll show you your proper pce, just like I do with Sarah. Just like you’re making me have to do her. She’s straying, I can tell. You’ve confused her, and it’s up to me to beat some sense into her, as is my right as her husband!”

  I took one hand and held it to my jaw. Admittedly, it hurt a lot. But I used my other hand to retrieve my phone from behind me, and then put it on speaker. “Hi, yes, I’m at 77 Adams Boulevard, and I’d like to report a case of domestic abuse. As you no doubt heard, the culprit, Sam Vasquez, just confessed.”

  “Sending our people over now,” the dispatcher said.

  I clicked the phone off, and I grinned at the waste of carbon standing before me.

  He looked ready to pop a vein. All I could do in that moment was flip him off.

  He lunged at me, swinging his fist again.