Bellingham Mysteries 3: Black Cat Ink by Nicole Kimberling Page A

but you don’t know. I’ve never asked a guy out on a date.”
    Peter blinked. How was that even possible? Granted, Nick was handsome enough that he’d probably had customers lined up all his life, but still…
    “Never?”
    “Never.”
    “You haven’t, even once, asked anyone out ever?” Peter could not conceal the incredulity in his voice.
    “That’s not what I said. I’ve never asked a guy out. I’ve asked out plenty of girls just fine. It’s easy to ask someone out when you don’t really care if they say no.” As if too embarrassed to look him in the eye, Nick grabbed the shoelace and tugged gently at it. Gigi went into a sharklike killing frenzy.
    Peter considered Nick’s words. “I guess I forget that you weren’t out for a long time.”
    “No, I wasn’t.”
    “Not till you met Walter, I guess.”
    “Not even then.” Nick caught Gigi just as she was about to fall off the sofa, plunking her back on her tiny feet. She hopped down and went to stare fixedly at a spot on the carpet.
    “I don’t get it. I thought everybody knew about you two, and that’s why you were involved in the investigation into Walter’s death.” It was a subject Peter hated to bring up but couldn’t make himself give up on either.
    De Kamp had been nearly forty years Nick’s senior. After he had developed pancreatic cancer, Nick had allegedly assisted in his suicide, an act of compassion that had made him, for a time, a suspect in a murder investigation.
    “I guess it depends on what you mean by the word ‘everyone.’ Everyone didn’t include Walter’s family or anyone outside of his inner circle in Manhattan.”
    “But you lived with him. Didn’t his wife know?”
    “His wife lived in the Hamptons because she felt the city was unsafe. His sons are both older than me, so they were living their own lives elsewhere. Walter stayed at his studio in the city to work. I’m sure Walter’s wife knew he had a lover, but not that it was me,” Nick said. “I’m fairly certain she thought it was his agent, Felicity.”
    “And his wife didn’t wonder why he was building a huge, expensive house out on the west coast?”
    Nick smiled ruefully. “I think it’s fair to assume that she didn’t know he was building the Castle.”
    “How is that even possible? Didn’t she look at the bank account and think to herself, ‘Now, that’s odd…’”
    “Well, first, not everyone in the world is as nosy as you are.”
    “I prefer to think of myself as inveterately curious,” Peter interrupted primly. “Especially about what other people are doing and why.”
    Nick cracked a wide smile at that, but the smile soon became tinged with a sort of sadness that Peter didn’t comprehend. More than that, it hurt him to see Nick smile that way. He focused on Gigi, who had decided to lie down in order to stare at the carpet spot in a more relaxed, long-term manner. When he looked back to Nick, his lover seemed far away. Probably lost in some melancholy, sepia-tinged memory of the good times. And seeing Nick look like that, Peter found that his curiosity suddenly left him. He didn’t want to hear about those good times when he hadn’t needed to think about money or the damage incurred by somebody else’s highly destructive cat.
    Peter’s internal monologue became morbid.
    Years after the death of Walter De Kamp, Nick Olson was forced once more to confront the deep and everlasting internal pain of being cruelly separated from his one true love. Shacking up with broke reporter Peter Fontaine was not enough to ease him. No amount of consistent sex and reliable light dinner conversation could match the true communication one artist could have with another.
    Blinking, Peter forced himself to stop this morose internal typing. Maybe he should just find a reason to get out, get some space. Maybe go to Evangeline’s house and drink a bottle of pinot grigio. He was about to propose this very action when Nick said, “I was going to leave