Frisk: A Novel (Cooper, Dennis) Read Online Free Page B

couldn't tell what time it was. Sometimes I'd be there for hours and not know. He'd yell, "Closing, twerp," which meant it was eight o'clock. I'd pedal home and tell my furious parents I liked the movie so much I'd stayed to see it a third or fourth time.

    I was having sex with other kids by this point. None let me tie them up, but I remember one boy would hold his ankles together, pretending I'd captured him. Then I could spank him extremely lightly until he confessed some sort of secret, such as ... Oh, who cares anymore.
    One day Pete asked if I liked the slapping and spanking parts of the magazines best. I said yeah (and I actually did), so he pulled out more violent things, with nipple clamps, handcuffs, and dildos being standard equipment. Normal sex acts had disappeared from these shots. Still, I didn't complain in case he was hoarding items that held some new, even sexier world of ... whatever.
    I don't think Pete was after me physically. He never barged in. If he needed something out of the storeroom, he'd stand outside and yell, "Entering," then give me a couple of seconds to zip up or wipe myself off before he lifted the curtain that separated our worlds.
    The last time I stopped by, Pete acted upset. Usually he'd make a few lame innuendos, pull out a new batch of stuff, and toss it over the counter to me. This time he started to say something, paused, muttered to himself. I didn't know what to do, so I wandered around the store seeing which magazines had been bought and which hadn't.
    Pete motioned me to return to the front. "I have something to show you," he said. "But I don't know if I should." He squinted. "How old are you?" He'd always told me to tell any customer who might ask that I was eighteen, so that's how I answered. "No, no," he said, "I mean really." I told him I was thirteen. He closed his eyes for a second, swore, then asked me very slowly, like someone was forcing him, "Do you want to see items that might scare you a little?" I'd just seen a creature from outer space tear apart buildings, etc., so I said sure.
    I followed him into the stockroom. I sat in the usual piss smelling armchair. He reached up on one of the shelves and brought down a small stack of photos. Before he handed them to me he said, "If you don't understand these, we can talk. I'll be . . ." He pointed at the curtain, dropped the photo set into my lap. I looked up. I was totally alone and the curtain was settling back into place.

    I didn't understand what was happening in the pictures at first, but after three or four I realized that the model was dead and not laughing or yelling like I'd originally thought. He was lying faceup on a bed. His wrists and ankles were tied with heavy rope, and there was a rope around his neck that I imagined had killed him. His eyes and his mouth were wide open. That's why I'd thought he was laughing. He was pale, cute, and had long, straight black hair. There was nobody else in the photos with him. -
- - - - - - - - -- - - - In the last couple of photos somebody had rolled the boy over, so we could see what he looked like on both sides, I guess. That's when I knew for sure he was dead because instead of an asscrack, he had a crater. It looked as if someone had set off a bomb in his rectum.
    I studied the crater calmly for a minute or two before it shocked me. Then I set down the photos extremely gently. I parted the curtain, walked down an aisle and out the front of the store without speaking to Pete, because I couldn't. I remember Pete came to the doorway and stood there fidgeting, watching me unchain my bike. I climbed on, pedaled off. When I was about a half block down the street, I heard him yell, "Wait," then, "Stop that boy," like he thought, or else wanted people to think, that I'd stolen something.
When I was seventeen ...
    My boyfriend Julian worked in a gay massage parlor called Selma's. For something like a hundred dollars plus tip he'd have sex with a client, the wilder or more complex