Blood on My Hands

Chapter 1 October. I couldn’t get enough of the month because it was a strong farewell to summer and the seething heat. I favored autumn, particularly Halloween. And the three major holidays just around the corner weren’t so bad: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. One of my exceeding pleasures about October had to be the drop in temperature. I enjoyed cold mornings and how the sun set early. Truth be told, I’ve always liked the dark, winter months, and I’ve always hated springtime and summer, although the rain and lightning storms offered during April through September genuinely warm my soul. Enough rambling about time. Let’s talk about place: Bitter, Pennsylvania. The small town of 1300 residents sat next to Lake Erie. Sister towns included Erie to the west, Templeton to the east, and West End to the south. Bitter felt like a charming nook and cranny in northwestern Pennsylvania. Two candle shops. Hades Bookstore. Cupcakes Bakery. A stationary store called Write On This. Two antique stores, the Ashwald and Tinker Things. An art store that sold everything from paint to canvas sheers. A small winery. Three bars. Five restaurants. One gas station that sold soda pop and chips more than gas. Honestly, people didn’t think Bitter a McDonald’s kind of place. You couldn’t find fast food restaurants there. Nor could you find a Target or Wal-Mart. I wouldn’t say Bitter was upscale, but most would agree it was pretty damn close, sort of high-end but not quite. Now, about me. But just a little bit of information for now. I’m Jonathon Splinter. Blond, military crew cut, but I’ve never been a serviceman. Thirty-seven. Chris Pine blue-colored eyes. Five feet and eleven inches tall, and 165 pounds of firm muscle. No fat around the corners and edges like other middle-aged men. No hair on my chest. No facial hair. Twelve-inch feet. And a d**k the size of King Kong’s; I’m not too humble to keep this a secret. I’m a beautiful man. Ask anyone who knows me. While living in Bitter, I was a talented novelist: pencil on paper, never did I use a laptop. But that wasn’t true. My talent turned limited, and fame escaped me. I did sometimes jot stories down. Very few were published. I wanted to be semi-famous, of course, one of those author types who wrote paperback mysteries about a numbers series, letters series, or a funny and odd cat-sitter who solved crimes of the heart. But that never happened. I wanted total strangers to know that I designed deathly scenes regarding allegoric messages, mysterious gardens, and secret tunnels in city backyards filled with corpses. But writing had never taken off for me. Instead, I dabbled. Had I worked at it harder, longer, it may have. May is a strong word in any language, though; we all know this. Don’t be foolish to think not. Truth here. The real deal. Honestly, I was a financial investments advisor: stocks, bonds, insurance decisions, education expenses, retirement planning, and financial law. Not really a tough job. It paid superiorly well, with excellent benefits. I worked from home. I traveled some, mostly to wealthy homes and expensive resorts, all by the profitable hands of my clients. Always for business. I provided financial advice when needed. If you had millions of dollars, I could tell you how to gain millions more, investing in certain companies and affiliates. That’s what I did. It was how I earned a buck. Not by writing. Because I liked October so much, every year, I took a week off work near Halloween and enjoyed a staycation—a vacation spent at home. The things I wanted to accomplish were simple: read a long book by Stephen King or his son Joe Hill, visit some friends, and maybe meet a nice guy or two to share a romance with. So the cat’s out of the bag about my s****l preference. What can I say? I’m real, honest, and try not to beat around the bush about things. I’ve always liked the company of men over women: steel-beam shoulders, arched and muscular backs, big pecs, ladder-like stomachs, thick thighs covered in veins from daily workouts, overpowering stares, and aggressive natures. I’ve enjoyed the scruff on their cheeks and chins, strong aromas of perspiration, and everything about their junk when they take their clothes off. As you’ve guessed, I wasn’t married while living in Bitter. I wasn’t shy then, or now, and kept looking for Mr. Right. Unfortunately, one hadn’t come around yet, even if I expected him to. I wanted a beautiful man, nothing fancy. Didn’t matter what color of hair or eyes, skin color, whether he was chubby or fit, intellectual or a fool. I wasn’t a slut, but nor was I picky. I just wanted him to be beautiful, on the inside and out. Frankly, I thought it surprising Prince Charming hadn’t already come along and asked me to marry him. Strangely surprising. Another reason why I took a week in October off…I had a small cottage in the woods, along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Sometimes, I would take a man there and enjoy his company for a few days. Sometimes, I went alone. Sometimes, I didn’t go at all, staying in Bitter. Whatever my mood entailed. The one-bedroom cottage had been in my family for years. It sat along a manmade lake called Willowbean. It didn’t look fabulous and high-end, but it did have some extraordinary niceties about it: the sloped yard that led to the lake, the view from the bedroom overlooking the autumn forest, the cedar aroma wafting about the place, and many other things that might make a man fall in love with another man during a three- or four-day trip into the deep woods. I planned my trip to the cabin later in the week. Maybe Thursday through Sunday. For now, I had a few days to myself to relax, enjoy life, and do absolutely nothing. I did have a vice, of course. Not smoking. Not drinking. Not drugs. Something questionably sinister and darkly perfect. I liked books. And I liked to shop for books. Paperback mysteries. Horror hardbacks from the 1980s. Oversized coffee table books on cults, cannibalism, and various religions. I liked books on Cuba, art, skyscrapers, cats, WWII, and southern plantations. I enjoyed cheesy romances, best-selling novelists, and books of short stories. You name it, and I relished it. Any kind of book. Any size. Any topic, almost. Books were my thing. As well as reading them, devouring them page by page, evening after evening slipping by. I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t enjoying four at once, keeping them in different rooms of my almost-paid-for Tudor. Books were my life when I wasn’t assisting wealthy clients with their money. My primal need, craving. My world. The blood that moved steadily through my veins.