Eye Candy Read Free

son.”
    â€œYou watch cartoons, Jack?”
    He nodded excitedly. Eager to tell me his big Cat Chow idea. “I call it The Whisker Walk.”
    He raised two fingers on each hand to the sides of his face, like little cat whiskers, and he began moving the “whiskers” up and down in a little dance while he me-owed a little song.
    That’s when I faded out. Or rather, that’s when Jack faded out.
    I didn’t hear another word he said. I just kept picturing him meowing and doing his little Whisker Walk with his fingers. Would I ever be able to forget it? Where is a rewind button when you need it?
    O, America! O, America!
I had no idea the play would be the best part of the evening.
    How did I get into this? Why am I going out with guys I meet on the Internet? After all, Jack isn’t the first. Last week was Brad. And next week will be Colin. And here’s what I
don’t
know as I sit here pretending to listen to Jack . . . here’s a little detail I haven’t learned yet . . .
    One of the three guys is a murderer. One of them plans to murder
me
.
    I’ll find this out really soon. And then, here’s the punch line: The only way I’ll stay alive is to keep going out with all three of them.
    A nightmare? Yes, and it’s only beginning. How did I get myself into this mess? I’ll tell you. I guess it started the night Ben was killed.

3
    When Tommy Foster called to tell me Ben was killed in a car chase, shot like in the movies, his squad car spinning into a wall, I didn’t react at all. I held the phone to my ear, pressed it there with all my might, listening for more. Listening for something real.
    Things like that only happen to other people, right?
    Ben had this car-chase PlayStation game. He was so into it, playing it endlessly, almost as if his life depended on it. I’m not looking for irony or anything. It’s just when Lieutenant Foster, Ben’s partner, called with the news—long pauses between each word, his voice trembling, a sob escaping his throat—the first thing I thought about was that game.
    The game was real. But Ben dead? That
couldn’t
be real.
    Ben and I were a golden couple. It may sound immodest, but I’m being honest. People gasped when Ben and I walked into a room. He was tall and blond like me, and had a rolling walk and a trim, athletic body, and those blue eyes that reflected the sunlight.
    Golden.
    We had nearly a year. I met him at my gym, and we started goofing on each other and kidding around. One day we had a treadmill race, an intense competition until my heart pounded and my legs ached, and finally, we both collapsed into each other’s arms, laughing and sweating on each other, gasping for breath.
    We stayed in each other’s arms from then on.
    You could have cast us in a movie. A love story. I was the savvy New Yorker, spent my whole life in middle-class luxury in Manhattan, even college at NYU. He was a New Jersey guy, from a big Italian family, a family of cops for generations.
    But don’t get me wrong. There weren’t any clichés here. He was shrewd and funny, taught courses at John Jay, liked movies and plays, even the opera when we could scrounge up two tickets.
    No matter how long the line, dance club bouncers always held the rope aside when Ben and I appeared. Because we were golden.
    When Ben died, the light in my life went out. I lived in blues and grays, the colors of that dark video game where the cars squealed after each other, crashed and disintegrated.
    And now, nearly a year later, spring approaching, another lonely summer staring me in the face—another summer with the girls—and I was pacing back and forth in front of my roommates in the narrow livingroom of our apartment.
    Ann-Marie sat cross-legged on the carpet, punching in numbers on her new cell phone. She’d left the old one on the subway, and now it was like she had to start her life all over again.
    Luisa