LUKI VASQUEZ paced through rooms replete with luxury in his uptown Chicago home. Everything sparkled. While he’d been elsewhere, his housekeeper, Gerald, had taken excellent care of the condo, as well as the fortune in furniture that took up just enough of the floor space. Well, usually just enough. Now, the place would feel too big, too empty even if it was stuffed with Victorian plush and had a party going on. Not that Luki would ever have either one.

One thing occupied his mind, and it—he—stood about six two, had rich earth-brown hair and everything else Luki had ever wanted. Before he met Sonny James, Luki had not the slightest inkling that he wanted anyone at all. Now, his attachment had gone well beyond wanting. He stopped his pacing to lean against the wall of block glass that distorted Chicago’s lights into replicas of Van Gogh’s stars.

“Sonny,” he said aloud, needing him, and the sound of his stressed, scratchy voice traveled through the bare rooms of his house, repeating. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed the echo before.

Since coming back to Chicago from the Northwest coast, Luki had kept himself busy. He read. He had some new suits tailored. He ran. He worked out at least two hours every day, not needing to go anywhere to do it—he had a well-equipped gym in the condo’s largest room, complete with attached sauna. Sometimes Luki did go out, though, to one of the rattiest gyms in town to practice his Tai Chi and other martial arts under the eye of his grizzled, long-time teacher. He sparred with his detectives too, or worked with his junior staff–nearly all of whom dreaded the encounters but oh-so-badly needed to study up.

And Luki threw himself into his business, pestering his incomparable admin, Jude, who mostly ignored him—as efficiently as she did everything else—and ran things as usual.

“Vasquez,” she’d say because she watched too many tacky TV shows, “take your hands off the keyboard and back away, and no one will get hurt.”

So, to get out of her way and safe from her evil eye, Luki took on some of the jobs his staff could have easily handled, at times leaving them to get paid for twiddling their thumbs. And he annoyed people in general by telling them things they already knew. His most experienced staff particularly resented his stepping in. Kim, for instance.

“Get out of here, Luki. Take some leave time.”

“I’m the boss, Kim. I get to say that. You don’t.” But he knew she was right; he even knew she cared.

His increased involvement—or interference, depending on your point of view—couldn’t hurt his business. It was, after all, his reputation as a detective, a former ATF special agent, that had driven his small security agency to the top of the heap in a matter of a few years. The wealth that success yielded was why he could pay his employees well—very well by industry standards—and hire only the best. That wealth was why last summer when some ugly hate crimes had been directed at Sonny—or so they thought—Luki had been able to drop everything else in pursuit of that one criminal. The chase had been terrifying even for Luki, even as cold, heartless, and hard-assed as he’d been before Sonny. It involved a truly sick perp, unthinkable cruelty, and a bomb. Brave and beautiful and seeming as different from Luki as the limits of possibility would allow, Sonny had matched him step for step in the chase and had surprised him at every turn. Not just in the crisis, everywhere. Weaving in his studio, walking gracefully in flipflops, even making love… especially making love.

Now, no amount of activity, violent or not, could drive away the big Sonny-shaped shadow that dogged along beside him. So as he wandered through his bare rooms, Luki traded the perfect, flawlessly tailored clothing he usually wore even at leisure and donned tattered jeans and a faded flannel shirt. Just what Sonny would have worn, and it helped keep Sonny alive in his mind, a man rather than a thin shade. He’d look a lot better than me wearing this, he told himself, padding over the hardwood floor to the only room in the house he ever smoked in, wondering on the way when the floor had become so cold. Once he got there, he switched on the silent fans and the omnidirectional heat, sank into the leather of the only easy chair in the house, and lit up. In his mind, he could hear Sonny clearly, as if his lover stood right next to him. Or sat by him on their love seat. Or sat on the floor at his knees making drawings for a tapestry he would weave
so resplendent the world would probably weep. “You should quit,”he’d say.

Luki knew he should quit. Knew that cigarettes… cigarettes and hamburgers were the only flaws in his otherwise perfect health regime. Smoking would someday, probably soon, take a toll. Perversely, when he met Sonny he’d started smoking more than ever before, just because Sonny’s existence in the world nudged him off his solitary perch, the place where he seemingly rose above the world of emotion and let other men into his life only occasionally to practice his skills at cold but perfectly executed sex. With Sonny? Anything but cold. Although still close to perfect. He smiled at the memory of Sonny’s surprised looks when Luki showed him something new, something that, in all his gay years, he’d never felt.

“Luki, please,” he’d say.

Yet, Sonny had sent Luki away. When Delsyn lay impossibly still in that room at the rehab with tubes exchanging his fluids and instruments ticking off the seconds of his life, surely Sonny must have been glad for Luki’s love, his arms, his hand to hold. Yet just when Luki thought Sonny needed him most, that’s when he’d pulled back inside himself to be alone with his grief and fear. He’d sent Luki packing from the rainy Northwest forest and sea—to Chicago, of all places. Funny that Luki had never known how much he didn’t like Chicago until he’d lived for a few months in Sonny’s surprising and isolated home. Tasted the salt in the morning air, blown inland by the ever-present wind over the Juan de Fuca Strait. Watched Sonny dip naked into the frigid waters and rise up, sunlight flashing off his smooth, wet, brown skin like an aura of jewels. Sat before a yellow fire built of wood Sonny had cut and split, Sonny’s head on his shoulder, Sonny’s long hair falling over Luki’s bare chest—tickling, teasing, a promise.

And that promise had not been, could not have been, broken. Sonny loved him, even believed that he was beautiful, had woven that belief into an incredible tapestry, with the sky and the straits the same pale, pale blue as Luki’s eyes, with his skin the same dark tone as the wet sand on the shore. When Luki looked at it, he could almost believe that he was the beautiful man Sonny’s flawless art portrayed. That the long scar that sliced down the left side of his face—the scar that had shaped his life–had no more weight than any other piece of him—less, perhaps.

“I’m not beautiful,” Luki had said after he’d seen that weaving. Crying. Actually crying!

“You are,” Sonny had answered, more angry, more hurt, than Luki could have imagined. “I see what’s there. I always, only, ever see what’s there, and that’s what I weave.”

Now, when his forgotten cigarette had transformed into a precarious cylinder of ash, Luki squashed it in the smokeless ashtray Gerald had nagged him to get.

“I’ll try again,” he said, just as if someone would hear, as if he wasn’t alone… utterly alone. For the fourth time in the last two hours, he dialed Sonny’s number. It rang… it rang… it rang and Luki left another message. He went to bed in Sonnylike fashion, wearing all the same clothes except the flannel shirt.

DARKNESS, a river, a cruel boy’s voice on the riverbank. A dream Luki had dreamed a thousand times before. But this time….

“Luki!” Another, sweeter voice calling and a hand reaching out, impossibly reaching all the way to the water from the bridge overhead. He’s come for me, Luki thought, he’s come to help me! But then he heard the voice again, not offering help but needing it, pleading. Luki would have died in the river if it meant he could help the man behind that voice. “Sonny,” he yelled. “Sonny, hang on, just hang on, baby, and I’ll be there.” But try as he might, he could not reach that empty hand before it started to rise, and then he couldn’t reach high enough to grasp it before it disappeared into the blind, black dark above.

“No! You can’t take him!”

“You can’t take him!” Luki woke himself up with the scream. Got out of bed, drank some water, lit a cigarette even though he wasn’t in the right room. He picked up the phone and somehow punched in Sonny’s number despite shaking like a drunk in detox. “Pick up, Sonny. Please pick up.” The pleas were of no use, and after he left one more begging message, he planned a course of action. At last. He was good at action.

First, a shower. Then as the mid-March dawn broke over the windy city, he called Margie. Margie was up, and she didn’t seem at all surprised to get a phone call at 4:00 a.m. Pacific time.

“Luki,” she said. From the hollow sound, he could tell she was already downstairs from her apartment, in the street-level coffee shop she ran, and from which, it seemed, she ruled the small town of Port Clifton. “I thought you’d call sooner.”

It drove Luki nuts that she always had him figured out before he did, but this was no time to quibble about it. “Margie, I can’t get hold of Sonny. Is he okay? Do you know what’s up?”

She must have put her hand over the phone in the mistaken belief that it kept him from hearing what she said. He could hear it just fine, though the muffling annoyed him. “Ladd,” she said, speaking to the man that used to be Luki’s best detective before he struck up this late-in-life romance. “I don’t think he knows.”

Ladd’s voice came on then. “Hey, Luki. Listen, it’s about Delsyn. He’s been… he died, and Sonny’s pretty much out of it, if you know what I me—”

“I’m coming. Have Jude book me a flight leaving in the next ninety minutes and a car from SeaTac.” Luki belatedly remembered Ladd didn’t work for him anymore and added, “Please.”