Hot Sauce [Suncoast Society] (Siren Publishing Sensations Read online

  Dealing with contacting Tony’s work about his death had been bad enough. Vanessa had let her friend, Jenny, make the call to Kelly. Jenny had been texting and calling Vanessa multiple times a day since the funeral, checking in with her, but…

  It wasn’t the same. Jenny was her friend, a sweetheart, and someone she enjoyed spending time with. But Jenny also had a life of her own to live, a boyfriend.

  Ironically, Jenny and her boyfriend, Ken, had been friends of Tony’s first, which was how Vanessa had met and befriended them.

  Now she wondered if Jenny and her boyfriend knew more about Tony’s private side than she did.

  Tony had once specifically requested that if anything happened to him to let Kelly know as a courtesy more than anything, and to let her attend the private memorial if she wanted. Jenny hadn’t outright asked Vanessa if she was nuts when Vanessa asked her to make the call, but the implication from Jenny’s arched eyebrow had been there.

  And, of course, Kelly hadn’t shown up at the service, even though she had been invited.

  Again, invited as a courtesy. Had Tony never mentioned it, Vanessa wouldn’t have called the woman in the first place. He hadn’t even wanted his death mentioned in the paper, afraid that it might attract scam artists or identity fraudsters and cause Vanessa even more aggravation and grief.

  Fortunately for Vanessa, she knew the password to Tony’s laptop. He’d given that to her a while back when she’d needed to use his after her personal laptop had to go into the repair shop for a bad screen. From there, she knew she could get any passwords she didn’t have, because she had access to his e-mail.

  She started by scanning his e-mail, deleting spam, and looking for subscriber lists he was a member of and how to unsubscribe him. No use in that just pilling up, more busy work for her to remind her of his absence.

  There were only a couple of personal e-mails in there, including one from a day before he died, a guy she knew, and whom she knew had been at the funeral, so no reason to e-mail him.

  Then…

  Facebook.

  Fortunately, he’d saved the password in memory and she didn’t need to go through the recovery process to get a new one.

  He’d been very active on the site, had nearly maxed out his number of friends there. She’d asked people not to talk about his death on Facebook or post on his wall, and from the lack of postings apparently they’d honored her request. She had a Facebook account, but she rarely used it and only had a couple dozen friends—including Tony—on her account.

  After taking a deep breath she started composing her update.

  This is Vanessa Riddick, Tony’s sister. I’m sorry to have to break the news like this, and I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to do this sooner, but Tony died late last Friday night. Our parents flew in from Seattle for the funeral, which we had on Monday. He didn’t want a big service, and he was cremated. I’m sorry I didn’t make the announcement on here ahead of time, but that was by his request. His passing was very sudden and unexpected and has, honestly, torn my life apart. If you knew him personally, you knew how close we were, and this has shattered my world. Please, if you’re sick, don’t wait. Go to the doctor. He thought he had bronchitis or something, and it turned out it was pneumonia. By the time I finally forced him to let me take him to the ER, it was too late, and he died a few hours later.

  After reading through it several times and tweaking it, she finally hit the post button.

  Then she closed the laptop, curled up on her side with Carlo, and sobbed.

  * * * *

  An hour later, after a long walk with Carlo and more pressing chores like checking her own work e-mail, cleaning out dryer lint, and rearranging her pantry, she dared to open Tony’s laptop again and found over a hundred and rapidly growing comments to her post, including dozens of PMs to his account with messages of condolence and volunteering to organize a local get-together in his memory.

  Realizing there would be nothing but mass confusion unless she made a decision, she composed a second post.

  This is Vanessa again. Thank you for all the messages. Several people have asked about organizing a get-together. He did say in his instructions he was okay with his friends doing that after the fact, but he’d wanted his actual funeral service to be very small. Honestly, my brain is fried and I can’t do it. Please talk about it in this post and feel free to make the arrangements here and organize it. I’m sorry I’m not up for doing that, but I know you all will understand. And please let me know the plans, because I’d like to attend.

  She retrieved her own laptop and when she opened her Facebook account, she found she had several messages there, too, because Tony had her listed as family on his profile.

  They were mostly from people she actually knew in real life, or had heard about through Tony’s stories or discussions in passing, so she went ahead and approved all of them without bothering to check them out more thoroughly.

  They were a connection to her brother. No, she might not have much contact with any of them after the flurry of activity was over, but it was a tenuous thread she didn’t want to ignore.

  She’d once asked him why he spent so much time on Facebook, either on his laptop or phone or iPad.

  “I stay connected with my friends,” he’d said. “I can’t always get together with them, but I can keep up with them.”

  “But you have so many.”

  “I group them. People I know in real life, I sort them that way.”

  That jogged her memory. Back to his laptop, and sure enough, there she saw where he had done just that. That whittled the number of real-life “friends” down to less than two hundred.

  That she could understand.

  The sad fact didn’t escape her that she knew well over that many people, through the employees in the stores under her, but most of them weren’t even acquaintances, much less “friends.”

  I really am pitiful.

  * * * *

  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, fuck.” 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 n
o 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.”

  Chapter Six

  After recovering from dealing with Facebook, Vanessa forced herself to eat a little something and did several more pointless chores that were nothing but a delay tactic on her part.

  Around eight that evening, she settled on the couch again with Tony’s laptop and Carlo. Much to her relief, she’d discovered her brother had kept a Google spreadsheet with all his passwords. When she’d recovered his e-mail password via his phone, she was able to log into his account.

  There, in the list, a notation for an account at a site called FetLife.

  She suspected that had something to do with what she’d learned from reading his journal.

  Do I really want to do this?

  Finally, her personal hesitation was outweighed by the fact that her brother had a life apart from her and their family. Friends she had no idea existed. And if their positions were reversed, she’d want someone to notify those friends so they didn’t think she’d just dropped off the face of the planet.

  His login name for the site was Basco_SRQ. She smiled, knowing why he’d picked that. He’d been born with a cast-iron stomach and titanium taste buds.

  His nickname growing up—which she’d bestowed upon him—was Tabasco, shortened to Basco.

  While she and her parents had preferred mild food, Tony would readily slather his with hot sauce. She now had eight different bottles of the stuff in her fridge and she couldn’t bear to throw them out yet, even though she would never use them.

  When she logged into the site, it took her a moment to orient herself. On his profile there was a list of events he’d marked himself as going to, including one this coming Friday night, a shibari class, whatever that was.

  Clicking on it showed it was a class on bondage ropework, which jogged her memory. Yes, some of the erotic romance books on her Kindle involved BDSM, but she wouldn’t consider herself an expert in it.

  Far from it.

  According to the RSVP list, he was friends with twenty-one of the people listed as going and ten of the people listed as maybes. The venue was a place called Venture, in Sarasota. A quick search of the address listed for the location showed it was in an industrial complex just east of I-75.

  Hmm.

  She hadn’t liked the idea of posting a notification on Facebook, but it was the only way she could get the word out to the largest number of people. Had it been practical, she would have personally notified everyone on his friends list about his passing.

  Unfortunately, logistics made that impossible.

  Here, too, it would be impossible. He had over eight hundred friends. Surely not all of them were real-life friends.

  I could go on Friday.

  It had been billed as a beginner’s class. When she looked a little more closely, she thought she spotted something familiar on one of his friend’s avatars. She clicked on the person’s icon.

  Yep. If that wasn’t Jenny’s “necklace” that she always wore, Vanessa would eat Tony’s damn laptop. The distinctive heart-shaped locket on her friend’s necklace always caught Vanessa’s eye. There wasn’t a face shot of the person, just them wearing the necklace, but the user’s ID was listed as SRQtango_girl.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence that her friend also enjoyed ballroom dancing with her boyfriend, and had the exact same necklace.

  Vanessa picked up her phone and called her.

  Jenny answered. “Hey, sweetie. I was just about to text you. How you doing?”

  “Tell me about FetLife,” Vanessa responded without hesitation. She didn’t want her friend to have time to come up with a gentle lie. She wanted to catch her off-guard, take her totally by surprise, and get the absolute truth.

  Jenny hesitated for a moment before she replied. “Um, what?”

  “I’m looking at his FetLife account,” Vanessa said. “On his laptop. Tony. I read his journal, too. I know he was into BDSM and he was bi. It’s okay. I’m not upset, but I need to know about this.”

  Vanessa swallowed back the tears that threatened to erupt and forced herself to stay pragmatic. “I want to notify his friends. All of his friends. So please, tell me about this.”

  After a resigned sigh, Jenny did.

  When her friend finished blowing Vanessa’s mind, Jenny asked, “Are you really okay?”

  “I am,” she quietly said. “It explains a lot, really. It makes sense. I just wish he’d felt comfortable enough coming out to me.”

  “He didn’t want to worry you.”

  “So he denied that part of himself.”

  “Well, not really. He just kept it hidden from you and your parents. He still went to events and played with people. He didn’t want to stress you out and add worries to your plate.”

  Vanessa felt guilty
that her brother hadn’t thought he could open up to her about this. To the end he’d still been her big brother, looking after her to the exclusion of himself.

  “It wouldn’t have stressed me out,” she said.

  “I can’t speak to anything other than what he told me,” Jenny gently said. “He loved you so, so much. I don’t think it was because he thought you’d disown him. He was worried about you. He didn’t want you worrying about him.”

  “So are you still going to this thing on Friday night?”

  “What?”

  “This rope thing. I’m looking at the event listing right now. I’m assuming you’re SRQtango_girl.”

  Jenny laughed, but the sound didn’t hold most of her usual easy humor. “Yeah, that’s me. I was going to cancel and come over and spend time with you.”

  “How about I meet you there? Will they let me in?”

  A moment of silence almost had Vanessa checking the connection before Jenny spoke. “Yeah, anyone can attend a class as a guest. But…why?”

  “Because a lot of his friends are listed as going. At least I can give them the respect of telling them to their faces instead of just posting an impersonal message on a website that they might not see for days or weeks.”

  “What’s really going on here? Do you want me to tell them, or post a message about it for you?”

  “No. I want to meet them.” It poured out of her. “If these people were an important part of his life, I want to meet them and thank them in person for being friends with him. He was happier since the divorce than he’d been in years. I wish he hadn’t hid all of this from me, but I would have supported him had he told me.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you sooner,” she said.

  “No, I get it. But now I understand why he wanted a very tiny service for us.”

  “He was really afraid of someone accidentally outing him in front of you guys and shocking you,” Jenny said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I figured once I found this.” She took a deep breath. “So, you’ll be there Friday?”