The Drunk Guy Ch. 05

I woke at 5:40 the following day, twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off. It was one of those utterly dark and quiet mornings when you could almost believe you were the only spark of consciousness in a slumbering universe. Yesterday’s drinking had taken its toll and my brain felt like a cannonball crashing around inside my skull. One of these days I should learn to avoid alcohol the night before an early shift. Right then, my finishing time of 2:30 that afternoon felt so distant it might as well have been on the far side of the sun.

As I lay there staring up into the dark, my thoughts inevitably turned to Nick.

Memories of the previous evening opened up like a field of flowers in my mind’s eye, every one a beautiful thing worthy of close consideration, but the one I remembered most clearly was the moment Nick had seemed about to stir and find me exploring his body. My dick swiftly hauled itself upright beneath the bedclothes as I imagined him responding with a slow smile and a nod to continue.

But there was another side to my feelings about him, a darker element that balanced the horniness with an equal measure of regret. I wanted to put it down to something obvious, namely missing yet another opportunity to play around with him whilst he was awake. That was in the mix, make no mistake, but there was more to it than that alone. I delved into my remorse and its origin quickly became clear.

I was annoyed at myself.

I’d let myself start hoping for more from Nick, and the realisation it was never going to happen had come as a crushing disappointment. In order to handle that and still keep the night on track, I’d reduced him back to nothing more than a two-dimensional fantasy figure, something of no real importance that I could use for my own ends and discard. That felt like a great disservice to him because… well, because I genuinely liked the guy. Against all expectations, he’d become one of the few people in this place I actually enjoyed spending time with. And while we would never amount to anything, there was something between us, an ill-defined interplay that was the newest and most exciting thing to happen to me in a long time. I regretted having cheapened it so readily simply to appease my blackmailer.

In turn, my thoughts moved on to Keith. Not only did I bear him ill will for all the fear and anger he’d caused me, but now I also held him personally responsible for my confusion and anguish over Nick. My feelings towards him were like boiling lava: red hot, unpredictable and lethal.

So thinking, I sprang from my bed and turned on my PC. I felt a sudden certainty that Keith would’ve already slipped into the guise of the one who sees and made contact with me.

Sure enough, an email awaited me, sent just before midnight last night. It was entitled ‘Wooohooohoooooooooo!!’ and featured the little paperclip symbol that had become such a sure sign of impending strife just lately. I opened it.

Three images appeared, one caught through each of the lounge windows at the Cottage. The first two, taken from my left and my right, clearly revealed my identity, and Nick’s, and the fact I was doing some very intimate things with him. Only the third photo, taken through the window at my back, did not explicitly reveal who I was or what I was up to, and I puzzled over its inclusion for a moment.

Then the penny dropped. In the first two pictures, you would be forgiven for thinking Nick had closed his eyes in appreciation of my oral skills and was a willing participant in the act. However, the final photo clearly demonstrated that was not the case. The camera phone had captured Nick face on and showed that he was quite obviously sleeping. The crook in his neck and his slack expression were unmistakable signs of a lack of consciousness, and they put my attentions in a different light altogether.

This was the critical photo.

And, as expected, there were further instructions.

Fuck yeah! That’s what I’m talking about! You’re such a good boy. Same again tonight but I want you to do something REALLY SPECIAL this time. Don’t disappoint me or you know what will happen!

I read the message several times over, struggling to comprehend the sheer fucking nerve of the guy. So assured of his anonymity! So easy with the demands! Just how far did he expect me to take things? I shuddered at how very serious the game had become and I felt sick with relief that I would put an end to it that very morning.

With renewed purpose, I got myself ready for work. The House was eerily quiet so early on a Sunday, and I made my way to my office through deserted hallways and down silent staircases. It was just before seven when I sat down at my desk, and for the next two hours time crept past at a reluctant pace. I tried to immerse myself in my work but I simply couldn’t engage. All I could think about was Keith.

At 9:05, I picked up my telephone and dialled the Maintenance Hub. I used the seldom required extension that put me through to the staff lounge. Pendik Escort At 9:12, on my fifth attempt, my nemesis answered.

“Yo!” he hollered down the line.

“Keith, it’s Dave.” I put calm I didn’t feel into my voice. I didn’t want to spook him. “I need you in my office straight away.”

“Um, yeah,” he drawled. “Give me ten minutes and I’ll head over.”

“Now please. This is urgent.” I hung up.

A few minutes later, there was a knock at my door and Keith poked his head into the office.

“You rang?” he joked.

I simply nodded to the chair at the side of my desk.

Keith sloped in and took a seat. His round face was flushed from the chilly morning air and his long hair was tucked behind ears that had turned bright red. Over the waft of musty workwear he brought with him, he even smelled cold.

For a long moment I simply stared at him. It was easy to imagine him concentrating as he took pictures of me and smirking while he composed his hateful emails. He chuffed a confused snort and shrugged his shoulders as if to say well?

“Blackmail,” I said, and added nothing more. I let the word hang in the air, waiting to see what he’d give me.

After a few seconds, he repeated the same easy chuff-and-shrug motion, adding in a wide-eyed shake of the head to convey a lack of comprehension. He had a good poker face, I’ll give him that.

“The thing about blackmail is this,” I continued at last. “For a while you might have the upper hand over someone and you can use it to manipulate them. But what do you think happens once you’ve played that hand, so to speak?”

Keith paused for a moment, looking baffled, then raised his open hands as if to say I don’t have a fucking clue what you’re talking about. I still hadn’t ruffled him.

“I’ll tell you. You might cost someone their career or their home or who knows what else, but after that there’s nothing to stop them exposing you for the blackmailer you are. What do they have to lose? And blackmail is an offence in its own right. So really, it’s not very bright.”

Keith listened attentively throughout this and held his thoughtful expression for a long moment after I’d finished speaking. He was coming to appreciate this meeting was not within the context of our normal working relationship. It was something new, something way off the record. Anything could happen. He turned that same bewildered expression on me, only this time it had an amused undertone, as if he believed himself to be a fish I could see but not catch. Well, if he wouldn’t take the bait, it was time to bring out the net.

“I don’t really like the term blackmail,” I said, and I turned the screen of my phone towards him. “I much prefer reaching a deal.”

The bored glance Keith cast at the image I’d presented him quickly became a concerned frown. His smug expression disappeared and, when he met my eyes again, his face was a picture of fearful disbelief. The image he’d seen was his open locker, of course, complete with its stash of stolen wine. His mouth worked ineffectually as he processed this turn of events, this sudden realisation that his future was quite literally in my hand. The fish had been landed.

Then he recalled the last thing I’d said and realised I was offering him a way out. All he had to do was come clean.

And he did.

“Okay,” he exclaimed in that oddly affronted way guilty people sometimes do, as if they are the ones being treated unreasonably. “I admit it. I did it.”

And with those words, I felt a weight lift off me. I had bested the one who sees! The stress of it all had made the last few days feel more like months, but it was finally over.

Keith ruined the moment by adding, “But I think the word blackmail is a bit strong.”

I gaped at him in amazement. “What the fuck would you call it then!?”

“Justice!” Keith assured me with a thump on my desk.

“Oh really? And what wrong have you been putting right exactly?”

“My whole life! It’s a misery thanks to Nick. The bloke’s a complete twat! He asked for it.”

So this whole thing was about Nick after all, not me. I’d never been able to tell with any certainty which one of us was the main target. Now I understood Keith had simply been manipulating me to get dirt on his ex-colleague.

“And what did he do that was so bad you had to resort to blackmail?” I asked.

Keith looked away, clearly uncomfortable. “He made a complete fool of me in front of the maintenance team. He gave me a nickname and the lads use to this day. They take the piss out of me all the fucking time, and it’s all down to him.”

“All this over a nickname? Really?” I was incredulous. “I’ve got to know, what is it?”

After a pause, “Queef,” said Keith.

The monicker wasn’t such a leap, especially when everyone, even he, referred to him as Keef. I’d never heard it said myself, but I had heard the maintenance guys refer to a Q before. It was plain to see that the term’s apparent popularity was a result Anadolu Yakası Escort of Keith’s sensitivity to it. Teasing him was no doubt so easy it was a great diversion for his colleagues.

When I really thought about it, though, I was furious. “So you think what you’ve done is in proportion to Nick calling you Queef!? Are you really that much of an idiot?”

“You don’t understand,” Keith mumbled. “I used to like it here but now I dread every day. I hate the place.”

“Then leave. Don’t steal things! Don’t go sneaking around, taking photos of people-“

“Photos?” Keith interrupted. “What photos?”

I glared at him, my expression a withering oh, come the fuck on!

“Honestly, what photos?” he insisted.

“The photos you’ve been taking during your little blackmail exercise, obviously,” I growled through gritted teeth.

Keith chuffed a baffled laugh.

“Why would I take photos of Nick at work?” He looked across the desk at me, a confused expression on his face.

Keith wasn’t the only one who was confused. He had been fessing up and cooperating just as I’d hoped, so why was he throwing this spanner in the works all of a sudden?

I leaned back in my chair, feeling just a touch less sure of myself. “Spell out for me exactly what you’ve been doing to get back at Nick.”

“Well,” Keith began hesitantly, not sure quite where I wanted him to start. “Back in the summer I caught Nick in an embarrassing situation, and ever since I’ve used it to make him do stuff for me here at work. I’d get him to swap with me if Alan put me on some shitty job, or I’d make him stay late to finish stuff I didn’t want to do. Oh, and he was doing my weekend shifts for me too but that’s finished now, obviously. It was payback. It made me feel better.”

I listened intently to this unexpected tale, trying to spot if he was misleading me. If he was, he did it well. He seemed to be telling the truth about offloading his work on to Nick, but was he seriously saying that was all he’d been doing?

“And that’s it?” I pressed.

He shrugged. “That’s it.”

“Okay then,” I said thoughtfully, then came at him from another angle. “Where were you Thursday night?”

He thought for a second, then, “At home.”

“Can you prove it?”

“No.”

“What about Friday night?”

“I was out with some mates.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Not right now, no,” he said, slightly exasperated.

“Where were you last night?”

“I was in town with my mates again.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Yes I can!” A triumphant smile spread across his face. “You can ask Sam. We bumped into her and her friends in Yates’s and ended up drinking with them.”

“What time was that?”

“I don’t know… Ten-ish onwards, I reckon.”

I slumped down in my chair. A queasy feeling had appeared in my stomach. This was not good. If Keith was telling the truth about his movements last night – and why would he lie about something I could so easily check? – he had not been outside the Cottage, snapping photos. That could only mean one thing.

Keith was not the one who sees at all!

He had been manipulating Nick for months now but he’d been doing so in other ways. Whoever was blackmailing me, it was not Keith.

That wonderful sense of having slipped out from under a guillotine was abruptly gone. I was still right there with the heavy blade poised above my neck, ready to drop at the slightest provocation. The one who sees was still out there, still pulling the strings, and I had already received my instructions for tonight …something REALLY SPECIAL… And worst of all, the thing that really made my heart drop through the floorboards, was that I had absolutely nothing more to go on. The trail to my blackmailer had gone completely cold.

“Dave?” The insistent way Keith spoke my name told me it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. “Why do you need to know where I was? And what are these bloody photos?”

I waved his questions away, too preoccupied to field them. “Never mind.”

“What about that?” he asked, gesturing towards the proof of his thievery on my phone.

“The stealing stops, right now. Then nobody needs to know about this meeting.”

“Okay,” he said, realising the wind had been knocked from my sails and sensing a chance to escape. “Anything else you want? Or…” he gestured over his shoulder at the door.

“We’re done. Just remember what I said. And stop taking yourself so seriously over a fucking nickname.”

Something stirred in my brain at that last sentiment and Keith was already halfway out the door by the time it came to me. I couldn’t believe I’d so nearly forgotten it. When I said it out loud, he stopped in his tracks.

“Gaybait.”

I watched his shoulders slump. He turned back to me and waited for me to say what I had to say.

“You paid Nick back by coming up with a name for him, too,” I said, warming to the subject now. “Care to explain that one to me?”

Keith İstanbul Escort stepped back into the office and closed the door behind him. He returned to his chair and sat stiffly.

“Sorry Dave. I’m not homophobic. I just call him that because I know it presses his buttons.” He was intensely uncomfortable at owning up to this terminology in front of me.

I didn’t let him off the hook. “Why does it press his buttons?”

“It all goes back to that… situation I caught him in back in the summer.”

I nodded. In spite of the predicament I was still in, I wanted to hear Keith’s story.

“Well, this goodly day, Nick was working over at Cell Block H and I went to find him. Only he wasn’t alone. He didn’t realise it at the time but there was someone spying on him and… playing with themself. It was a bloke. Hence, Gaybait.”

“Who was it?” I demanded, a little too hastily.

“I don’t know-” Keith began.

“How could you not know!? You just said you saw them.”

“I couldn’t see a face. To be honest, I thought for a minute it might be you,” Keith winced. “But after I left there I came by your office window and you were inside. So I really don’t know.”

I didn’t take offence. Let’s face it, I’ve done worse. “Who do you think it was then?”

“I honestly couldn’t say,” Keith said and rubbed his jaw distractedly, “but he had an eye for that ridiculous packet of Nick’s. He sure did love to watch!”

I sat bolt upright in my chair at that. Wasn’t that precisely what the one who sees had said? I just love to watch? Maybe I hadn’t lost his trail after all.

“Tell me what happened,” I urged Keith. “Don’t leave out one single detail.”

And he began.

It was a parched afternoon in August, one of those days when the sun glares down on you like a spotlight you can’t escape. The entire House was torpid in the heat and everything seemed to move at half its usual pace. Everything except the men of the maintenance crew, that is. For them work carried on as usual. Their boss Alan’s short fuse was legendary at the best of times but the scorching temperature had boiled him down to a pitbull in overalls. He expected no drop in work rate and the crew obliged him. Toiling in the sun was hard going but it was far better than being anywhere near Alan.

Keith had escaped his boss by trekking up into the woods that arced across the north end of the site. The guy who farmed the land above the House had called in some damage to the boundary fence and Keith had been assigned to set it straight. It was precisely the kind of job he loved: unchallenging, easily drawn out and, above all, solitary. Getting away from his colleagues was a high priority these days.

It hadn’t always been that way. For the last few years he’d fit in perfectly well; just one of the boys. But a few weeks ago, everything had changed the day that arsehole Nick had uttered his now legendary jibe. It had taken a full ten minutes for the other two guys within earshot to finally stop cackling, and less than an afternoon for the joke to spread throughout the entire team.

A nickname was born. He was Queef.

In his heart he knew he should’ve handled things differently. If only he’d laughed along the joke would’ve had no power and finished as quickly as it started. But he just hadn’t been able to stop his cheeks from flaming red, or make that woefully counterfeit grin stay on his face. The lads had finally seen that he couldn’t laugh at himself, that he was easily needled into a fluster. Since then, the ridicule had been subtle but relentless. Worse still, he felt it seeping out through the loose knit of the team and taking root around the House like an invasive weed. People looked at him differently. Girls looked at him differently, as if stifling smirks. It seemed everyone was getting in on the joke. Nick wasn’t one of the main offenders; in fact, he hadn’t said the Q word at all save for the initial off-the-cuff remark that started it; but Keith held him responsible for the torment all the same. Nick was that first hateful domino.

So Keith was perfectly content to leave the misery behind and saunter uphill beneath the canopy of the trees. The air was far cooler there and the harsh sunshine was sifted into a mellow green wash of light. The only whispers were those of leaves as they caressed each other in the gentlest of breezes. At that point, he wrongly assumed the trek would be the best thing to happen to him all day.

After a while he came upon the damaged section of fence. It really was not a big deal, just a couple of rails kicked and shoved until their rusty nails pulled from the posts and they dropped into the undergrowth. No doubt the handiwork of some bored teenagers. Keith had deduced from the farmer’s report that it was a simple job and, even dragging his heels, he repaired the fence in under twenty minutes.

But he didn’t feel like trotting obediently back to the lions’ den of the Maintenance Hub just yet. Instead he continued up the path, ostensibly to check the rest of the fence for damage but really just to kill time. All too soon, the path hooked left, levelled out and began to curve back downhill. Ten minutes later he emerged from the cover of the tree line and was back in the harshly-manicured heart of the House grounds.