1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Present Day

Emil

“Hey, boo.”

“Hi, Alex,” I mutter, too preoccupied by my phone to raise my head and give my coworker a proper greeting. Specifically, preoccupied by the text on my phone.

C: Did you know when you wake up, you stretch your arms above your head and knead the air like a cat?

Me: I do not.

C: You do! Every time. It’s cute.

A smile quirks my lips, and I shake my head, typing out a response.

Me: Did you know it’s creepy to watch people sleep?

C: Pft. You love it, Specs. Don’t pretend otherwise.

They’ve got me there.

“Who ya texting?” Alex asks, startling me as he plops onto the bench beside me in our locker room at Elite 8 Studios. He swipes his floppy blonde hair off his forehead, giving me a grin. The guy goes by Tink on set, considering he looks like the Peter Pan fairy.

“Oh, uh…”

I scramble for a suitable response.

My secret pen pal of three months who watches me masturbate through the windows of our respective apartment buildings and who texts me randomly throughout the day to chat about everything and nothing in particular?

Yeah, no. Not telling my coworker that.

“My sister,” I lie, slipping my phone away.

Alex narrows his eyes. “Mm. Which sister?”

“Younger?” I answer unsurely.

“Uh-huh,” he says, crossing his leg over his knee and bouncing it. “And doesn’t Rebecca have a no phones policy at her school that would be in effect this time of day?”

I open and close my mouth. Christ , try to cover up a simple quasi-friendship-with-voyeuristic-benefits sorta situation and the guy turns into Sherlock freaking Holmes.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, Kent,” Alex says slowly.

I straighten my black-rimmed glasses, huffing a laugh at the nickname. Never mind Sherlock. Lois Lane is on my tail. “You caught me, Lois. Saw the signal light up, so I’ll be on my way to save the world and stuff.”

“That’s Batman, not Superman,” he points out, squinting at me. “Everything all right?”

“Of course,” I tell him, standing and grabbing my bookbag.

He hums, looking like he doesn’t believe me. “For what it’s worth, it was nice. The smile you had when I walked in.”

I don’t know what to say to that—how to explain the source of said smile—so I keep my mouth shut. Luckily, Alex goes on.

“Watch out in the halls, boo. Jerome has a few guys by the private rooms waiting on auditions.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Alex.”

He nods, and I slip out the door, releasing a breath. Bag over my shoulder, I head down the hall.

I’ve worked at Elite 8 Studios—a producer of gay porn—for a little over two years, so this building and the people in it are familiar to me. A comfort, even, despite the well-intentioned snooping from certain coworkers. I might keep some things close to my chest, but the guys here, Alex included, have my back. And I appreciate that.

As Alex noted, the hall leading to the private suites is dotted with a few unfamiliar men hoping to land a job via the studio’s most recent casting call. Nathaniel, the assistant producer and second-in-command to our boss Jerome, is standing near them, a clipboard in hand as he calls for a Mitchel.

I hurry past, keeping my head down and passing the large Elite 8 Studios sign lit up in bright yellow neon. That’s Vegas for ya . Outside, the day is bright, and I hitch my bag more securely over my shoulder as I walk toward my car. Seeing as I filmed a scene late this morning with Trevor, named Bruiser on set, I have a few days before I’ll be back.

We all have nicknames, or porn aliases , here at the studio. There’s Tink. Bruiser. Dixon, aka Dix, who’s worked here far longer than I have. He’s dating Niko, also known as Adonis. And Teddy, of course, the resident teddy bear who drunk-married Niko’s friend Kipp. We lost some of the other regulars, who quit for one reason or another, hence the call for new talent. But there are a handful of guys who film part-time, too. And me? Well…

I go by Felix.

That piece of me gets left behind as I slide into my car and shift focus. I have a different sort of work to do this afternoon, one where my companions only know me as Emil. The lab where I’m a research aide is inside one of the psych buildings on campus. I’m a first-year master’s student, which means I’m well acquainted with these buildings, but my unpaid job as an aide is new.

“Hey, Emil,” Lucy says as I enter the space. Like me, she’s working on this graduate study. We met just last week.

“Hi, Lucy. How’s it going?”

“Good. I talked to Nicole.” The project lead. “She asked us to go through these forms and add the approved candidates to the electronic database. We’re supposed to transfer all the info over and assign each a number.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

Lucy nods, and I pull up a chair next to her in front of the computer. I look through the forms as Lucy opens the program where we need to input the candidates.

“Are they all from the same nursing home?” I ask, flipping through the papers.

“Um, not sure. It should say, though?”

“Yeah, it does. Sorry, I have a tendency to speak my thoughts aloud,” I admit. “It’s a chronic problem.”

Lucy shoots me a smile. “No worries.”

“What’s this?” I ask, pointing to a line on the form that says study eligibility . “This one indicates ‘N-D.’”

“Oh, uh… Non-dementia. For the control group, maybe?”

“Nicole said it’s a blind study, though. So the participants should all have some degree of dementia, including those in the control group.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, it comes to me. “Oh, a baseline? The non-dementia participants would provide a comparative baseline for the cognitive training.”

“Wouldn’t the control group do that?” Lucy counters.

“For immediate effectiveness of the training, yeah. But not for long-term impact, right? We’re trying to determine whether these cognitive games help with memory retention, so comparing the results to a group without dementia would provide an indicator into what’s considered a ‘normal’ degree of memory loss after the fact.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Lucy says, huffing a small laugh. “You know, I feel bad for saying I love this stuff when our study is focused on dementia, but I really do love this stuff. It’s fascinating.”

“I know what you mean,” I reply, nudging my glasses into place. “It’s like a puzzle, except we don’t know the picture. We have all the pieces, but we have no clue how they’re going to come together or into what shape. And, at the end of the day, it might not even make a recognizable whole. But that doesn’t matter. Our job isn’t to force the pieces to be something they’re not. We just stand back and interpret whatever we’ve created.”

Lucy shakes her head. “Shit, I think you might be a bigger nerd than me when it comes to this stuff.”

I chuckle. “Guilty as charged.”

“Come on,” Lucy says, a smile on her face. “Let’s get these candidates in the system.”

It takes about an hour to work through the thirty-two forms Nicole left for us. It’s not the entirety of the study group, but it’s a good start. Once done, Lucy and I head our separate ways. I don’t have classes today, but I do have plenty of coursework to get done, so I drive straight home to dig in. I just make a quick stop at the convenience store down the street first, seeing as I’m low on energy drinks—a bad habit I can’t quite bring myself to quit.

As I’m stepping out of the store, admittedly distracted by thoughts of the paper I have to write, I bump into someone.

“Sorry,” I mumble, regaining my balance, only to nearly fall on my ass when I see the guy I stumbled into.

He’s tall. Like, really tall for how lean he is. He looks like a damn model or maybe even a K-pop star, with fine features, dark eyes winged with equally dark liner, and black hair falling messily above his shoulders in an artful, layered style. He’s about my age, if I had to guess, and for the briefest of moments, he stares at me in shock. Then his expression smooths out, and he smiles .

“I, uh…sorry,” I say again, jolting when my phone rings. I shoot the guy an apologetic wince before turning away and fishing the device out of my pocket. When I reach the corner, I glance back, expecting him to be gone. He’s still watching me. I walk out of sight, putting the phone to my ear. “Um, hello?”

“Hey, bro.”

“Bec?” I ask, checking the time on my phone. I guess school is out. “Something wrong?”

“No,” Rebecca says quickly. “I just… Ugh, don’t tell Mom and Dad, but I miss you guys. I wanted to hear a familiar voice.”

My shoulders come down, and I let myself into my building, heading toward my apartment door. “I’m happy to be in your ear whenever you need it, Bec. Are you settling in okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s just different.”

I bet. Rebecca started at a boarding school this term. Our parents were worried about her moving out at only sixteen, but my younger sister is a bit of a violin virtuoso. She was adamant she wanted to attend a high school dedicated to fine arts, and our parents—after much discussion—relented and let her go.

I’m not surprised Rebecca doesn’t want to admit to them that she’s having difficulty with the transition. She’s stubborn like that.

All us kids are, in our own way.

“I’m sure you’ll be used to things in no time,” I say, trying to reassure her. “But call whenever you want, okay? Just not during school hours.”

She snorts. “I’m well aware of the rules. Would you tell me a story?”

“Seriously?” I ask, bending down to check on Arthur now that I’m inside my place. “I thought you said you were too mature for stories these days.”

“Just this once. Please? But don’t tell Jules or I’ll blab about that poster of his you ripped.”

My mouth falls open. “Blackmail, Bec? Really? That was over ten years ago.”

“And he’s never forgotten. Neither have I,” she sing-songs.

“All right, cool your conniving little jets,” I grumble, setting my bag of energy drinks on the coffee table and sitting down. My paper can wait a while longer. “I’ll tell you a story.”

“Yay,” she cheers, sounding so much younger than the angst-ridden teenager she is these days.

Smile on my face, I start out, pitching my voice theatrically. “Once upon a time, there was this mean ogre named Julian who terrorized the town.”

“Oh, God,” Rebecca says, chuckling. “This is gonna be good.”

As I spin an impromptu tale for my younger sister, I feel as if I’ve fallen back in time. I used to do this for both Rebecca and Henry, the baby of the bunch, when I lived back home. Most days, I don’t miss the mayhem of my childhood. As one of five children, it was always loud, messy, and chaotic around our house. I was the quiet, middle child who blended into the wallpaper. And I liked it that way. Mostly.

But I’ll admit there are times, like now, when I feel a fond pang of nostalgia for those days now long gone.

But that’s life. And, if anything, I’m self-aware enough to recognize the way I live now is in direct opposition to that lifestyle for a reason. It was hard falling by the wayside all the time. Feeling unheard. Unseen.

I never want my siblings to feel that way, which is why I do my best to be there should any of them need it. Like now, with Rebecca.

When we end our call—Julian the ogre having succumbed to a gruesome death neither of us would wish on our real brother—I set my phone beside me on the couch. It’s late enough that I should probably start some dinner. And then I really do need to make progress on that paper. But I can’t quite help snatching up my phone again and opening my text thread to C.

Our recent exchanges are full of a mishmash of things. Talk about what I’m studying. Psychology. TV shows we’re both watching. BBC’s Life , mostly. The damn weather, even. And then there’s C’s commentary on my… performances , those particular texts making me blush now that I’m not in the heat of the moment.

This stranger outside my window knows more about me than most people in my life these days. And yet, apart from their love of David Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries, I know almost nothing about them. For all I do know, they could be an eighty-year-old grandma. I sure hope not. It would be truly mortifying to find out I’ve been semi-flirting with an octogenarian, let alone flashing my asshole their way. Yikes .

Yet I can’t shake the feeling that my mystery voyeur is younger than that. And male, even though I don’t have any evidence to prove it. It’s a gut feeling. An educated guess based on what I have learned.

Of course, I could simply ask and see what they say. But, by unspoken agreement, neither of us has broached the topic of C’s identity. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it would ruin this game we play and the stupid smile I seem to have over a person I’ve never met.

Maybe I’d feel compelled to close my curtains, and I don’t want to do that.

Even so, I can’t help but wonder…

“Who are you?”