Chasing Death Metal Dreams (31 page)

He frowned. “For what?”
Spell it out.

“You need a list?” The little tentative curve of Nate’s mouth was so familiar, the pain of having lost it slid into Carlos’s chest like a knife.

“Maybe I do.” He made his tone cool, bored, uncaring.

He saw Nate’s chin tremble, but his voice steadied. “For not believing you, then. For assuming that, because every other guy I got serious about lied to me, you probably would too. For not giving you the benefit of the doubt?”

That stung. “So that’s what you’re doing? Giving me the benefit of whatever little doubt you have?”

“I—” Nate bit his lip. “Crap. No. That’s not what I meant. I spent the whole night bitching to myself about how you weren’t who I’d thought you were, how I had one-hundred-percent crappy judgment in men, how you were no better than Darryl or Garrett or the rest. But around morning I realized how stupid that was. I
know
you better than that.”

It’s evening now.
Carlos managed kind of grunt of encouragement.

“I don’t have any doubts. I was letting some lying bastard call you names, when I
know
they can’t be true. You’re not a thief. You’re not a cheat.”

“It’s only been a few weeks,” Carlos said perversely. “Maybe you
don’t
know me.”

Nate put his hand out tentatively and brushed Carlos’s bare chest, right above one scar. “You’ve
bled
to be exactly who you are.”

Carlos stepped back. “Don’t make it about that. There are transmen who would cut your throat. It doesn’t make me anything special.”

“Okay. But the guy I’ve spent the last month with wouldn’t ever have stolen lyrics. You respect, um, art, and you love the music; you don’t just use it to get somewhere. Besides.” Nate looked up with a shaky smile. “You don’t have to steal anything.”

Carlos beat down a small thread of hope and said, “That’s not what Eli thinks.”

“I’m not Eli. Despite ‘
Your love makes me itch
’, I know how well you can write. I’ve seen you doing it. I read that fucking blog end to end, and it’s mostly crap, except for your stuff. You couldn’t ever steal anything half as good as your own lyrics.”

Carlos’s chest felt tight, like he couldn’t catch his breath. His skin burned where Nate’s fingers still brushed against him. He took another step back.

Nate’s face fell. “Carlos? Did I screw up too bad for apologies? Can I say I’m sorry a few more times? Grovel a bit? Hit my knees?”

“I might let you grovel.” His voice broke in the middle. He rubbed his knuckles across his mouth.

“Out here? It would be more comfortable to grovel in there, and while I was kneeling, we might find a use for me.”

Carlos pulled the door wider. Nate said softly, “Thanks. Listen, Eli hasn’t reached the lawyer yet. I told him to wait, till I could talk to you. There has to be a way to prove this is a hoax, right? There has to be a law about it.”

Behind Carlos, Tía Lisa said, “There is. Fraud, plagiarism and maybe extortion.”

Nate froze, then looked around Carlos’s shoulder. “Um. Hi?”

Tía Lisa nodded to him, her expression forbidding. Carlos put a hand on Nate’s elbow, to tug him further inside and shut the door. “Tía Lisa, this is Nate.”

“I gathered.” Her glare didn’t soften.

Nate said in a stage whisper to Carlos, “Who should I grovel to first? She looks tougher than you.”

“She is,” Carlos said, fighting down the bubble of amusement in his chest.

“Right.” Nate took a step forward and dropped dramatically to his knees, raising his eyes to hers. “Ouch. Hard floor. Um. Carlos’s Aunt Lisa, I throw myself on your gentle mercy. My only excuse for doubting your nephew was that I’ve been screwed over enough that I thought no man could possibly be as good as he seemed.” He hesitated, then straightened his shoulders. “Um. That was supposed to be funny. But I do mean it.”

Tía Lisa’s dubious expression relaxed slightly. She glanced at Carlos. “Your call.”

Carlos liked it better when he was on the side watching, but he said, “Nate. You want to do that without the Shakespeare?”

Nate stood and turned to him. “Um, yeah. Okay. I should never have let some stranger make me think you were a liar. I’m crappy at trusting people, but you’re you.” Carlos heard him take a short breath. “I should’ve believed you from the start. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”

“Wow.” Carlos crossed his arms, trying to find words. “That’s—”

When he didn’t go on, Tía Lisa said, “That’s impressive, is what it is. I have a husband I love dearly who still apologizes with, ‘
I don’t think I was really that wrong, but anyway I’d rather apologize than fight about it.
’ Actually saying you’re sorry takes guts, but saying you were wrong takes more.”

Nate shrugged. His gaze was still fixed on Carlos. “My mother trained me. Plus, I, um, spent a lot of time wishing I could get a real apology from other people, dreaming about it, even. I wanted to make mine count.”

Carlos said, “Thanks. Yeah. It did.”

Nate turned to Tía Lisa. “I don’t know what he told you, but someone’s messing with him. I
know
it’s a fraud, but I don’t know how to prove it.”

“Luckily, I have some ideas about that.”

“Oh. Great!” Nate glanced at Carlos. “You called in reinforcements. I like that.”

“She just came. I didn’t send for her.”

Tía Lisa said, “Hon, that phone call was like sending up the bat signal. I don’t ever want to hear you that miserable again.”

Nate took a step toward Carlos. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I’ll keep saying that. If it helps, I was miserable too.”

“It helps,” Carlos admitted softly.

“I think I was just waiting for you to screw up somehow,” Nate mused, low enough to be for Carlos’s ears only. “My first really serious boyfriend said, ‘
Oh no, I’m not sleeping around
’
while he was fucking at least two other guys. The next one said, ‘
If you don’t like it, I’ll untie you right away.
’ My high school boyfriend decided he wasn’t really gay after all, as soon as our senior calculus class was done with and he didn’t need my homework. It turned out he’d been dating a girl at the same time and girls were easier than being with me. A bunch of guys have said, ‘
I want more than just a hookup too,
’ and never called again. I think I expected to be lied to.”

“I don’t lie,” Carlos said through the ache in his throat.

“I know. I believe that.” Nate stepped closer. “I really do.”

If he’d excused himself some more, if he’d tried to weasel out of it, if he’d acted like it was Carlos’s fault, it would have been easy to hold onto the pain and anger. But Nate just said softly, “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

Until finally Carlos kissed the word off his lips. “Stop.”

Nate leaned into him, arms locked around his back. “I don’t want to lose you. Last night was like the suckiest night of my life.”

Carlos deepened the hug, the warmth of Nate’s hands on his bare back soothing the ragged edges inside him. “You haven’t lost me.”

“Yet,” Tía Lisa put in. “You’re on probation, Nathaniel. It is Nathaniel?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. You hurt Carlos so badly—”

“Tía Lisa!” Carlos squirmed in embarrassment. He straightened but kept an arm around Nate.

“Let me finish. I drove ten hours nonstop to get here, because I don’t
ever
want to hear that tone in your voice again. Now your man has apologized nicely. We’ll see if he can put his money where his mouth is.”

Nate said, “You want me to stuff some bills in Carlos’s jockstrap?”

Tía Lisa stared at him for a moment, then actually laughed. “TMI, Nathaniel.”

“Well, you said money where my mouth goes.”

“I know what I said. The two of you, come on over to the table, and let’s take a look at the problem. Carlos, put a shirt on or your boyfriend is going to keep on being distracted.”

Nate laughed and stopped stroking Carlos’s shoulder. Carlos dug in a drawer for a clean T-shirt and then seated himself between Tía Lisa and Nate. Nate’s hand landed on his thigh under the cover of the table. He covered that hand with his own. Tía Lisa sighed but just turned the computer a bit, so they could both see.

“Now, I did a bunch of checking around this blog and its links,” she said. “Trying to find out who owns it, and whether there was any easy way to prove the content had changed recently.”

“Is there?” Nate asked.

“Not off the bat. Some sites have a content management system that records edits, keeping track of the diff and the IP address of the editor. Like Wikipedia, you can follow the changes back. I don’t know enough about this blog host to know if it does that. You might be able to petition the SysAdmin to tell you whether there’s been a recent change.” She smiled evilly. “Sometimes you can spoof the blog owner back, contact the site and tell them, ‘
I think my blog was hacked, man. I think someone stuck this dumb poetry right in the middle of my old posts. Can you verify that for me?
’ If they’re careful, the SysAdmin should ask you to verify your password first, but some of them are careless.”

“So we might get them to say, ‘
Yes, it was changed two days ago
’?” Nate asked.

“Maybe. If they have that kind of record and can be tricked into telling you. A lawyer might also send a strongly worded letter to the owner, alleging criminal use of the blog, and they might even boot it off their service. Sometimes they just don’t want to risk the bad publicity.”

“Cool.” Nate bumped his shoulder against Carlos’s. “See. You come from a smart family.”

“I
know
that.” Carlos bumped him back, feeling better than he had all day.

“You could also check the Wayback Machine.”

“Check what?” Nate asked.

“It’s an archive site.” Tía Lisa clicked on a window. “Here. They have a huge database of snapshots of Web content, back as far as ’96. I haven’t done a search for this blog yet, but you might find it. Not everything is there, of course. But if they have a snapshot of that post sometime in the past without the lyrics, that would be proof of editing.”

“You didn’t look?”

“Not yet.” Tía Lisa turned to Carlos. “I thought it was more important to figure out who this guy is. The blog alone won’t stand up in any court anyway. But someone who’d try one kind of extortion might try another. If we can figure out who it is, and tell him we know, that should stop the problem. Assuming you haven’t robbed a bank or anything blackmail-worthy.”

“Not this week,” Carlos said.

“So you told me he emailed this Eli guy. Emails can potentially be traced. In the meantime, I tried the social engineering route. I looked at the blog. His poetry is different from yours, and I didn’t see lyrics like yours anywhere other than a few posts that one summer, which makes the whole thing even more fishy-looking.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yeah. Now, the blog was aimed at getting marijuana legalized, and since it was started back in 1999, praising the wonder of the weed when it was illegal, there are no real names on it.”

“I guess that makes sense.” Watching Tía Lisa in problem-solving mode felt warmly familiar. He let his knee brush up against Nate’s and gave her a tentative smile. “You found other ways to get there?”

“Maybe. There are links to other blogs, and even Facebook. From those, and comments, I was able to find the pages of some of the people who’ve been active there. A couple of these might be the owner, but most are people who hung out and commented a lot. The blog was abandoned about a year ago.”

“Now that weed is legal and all,” Nate said.

“Yeah, probably.” Tía Lisa pushed the computer closer to them. “Up there along the top are tabs for the Facebook pages of the people I could identify. That last one is a list of the usernames of a few I couldn’t get more of a handle on, in case you know someone who goes by ‘
Smokey the Dragon
’ or whatever.”

“Okay. What should we do?” Carlos turned the screen toward Nate.

“Well, you might ask Eli to come help out,” Tía Lisa suggested. “He’s the one whose band was targeted, so it might be someone he knows. Someone with a grudge or a band who lost out to his.”

Carlos looked at Nate, who shrugged but looked uncertain. Nate didn’t leap to say Eli also wanted to grovel for forgiveness, and Carlos wasn’t sure he could talk calmly to Eli. “Not now,” he decided. “Let’s us just look first, okay?”

“Okay. If you see someone you recognize, we’ll go from there.” Tía Lisa stood and stretched. “Man, my back is stiff. I’m going to make myself coffee. Either of you want some?”

They both shook their heads. Carlos clicked on the first tab, while Nate leaned over closer to him. The tabs opened to eight different Facebook pages and several websites. Carlos did a quick click through them, hoping it would be easy. Maybe someone would have an arrow with “
blackmailer
”
pointing at their chest. None of the names were familiar to him, though, and Nate shook his head too.

Tía Lisa sat down on the couch and leaned back, inhaling the steam from her coffee. Carlos could smell the hint of fresh-brewed cinnamon water in the aroma and the mix was so sweetly familiar he actually felt it relax his taut muscles. He kind of wished he’d asked for a cup, done his tío’s family way. Tía Lisa said, “Search through their photos, and the music they like, the bands, groups they’re in. Maybe you’ll see something useful.”

Only they didn’t. An hour later, Carlos pushed his chair back. “This is dumb. I really should ask Eli to come look.”

“I could talk to him,” Nate offered. “Tell him what Aunt Lisa said.”

“I just— fuck, I want to march up to Eli and say, ‘
Here, look. This is the lying liar who sent you that email.
’
Shove it back in his face. I want to smack him with absolute proof. Stupid, huh?” Carlos blew out a breath.

“We can look a bit longer.”

“I guess.” He stood and stretched. “Want a beer?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

As he brought one over and passed it to Nate, a thought struck him. “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be working tonight?”

“I called in sick.” Nate dropped his gaze to the bottle in his hands, messing around with the cap. “I had to see you. I
was
sick, thinking about what I’d said. I actually sat outside your building for, like, two hours, waiting for you to get home from work so I could follow you in and apologize. And hope you might take me back.”