But no sense in freaking out Auntie and Uncle so soon. The year was young.
“What can I say? I’m a health nut.”
My aunt frowned. “But exercising at three in the morning? Is that…normal?”
“I’m not familiar with the term.”
They exchanged concerned glances, and a twinge of guilt nipped at me.
“I don’t sleep much,” I explained. “Racing thoughts, anxiety… Sometimes exercise is the only way to burn it out of my system.”
I didn’t add that obsessively working out was another piece of my armor. I honed my body into a temple of lean muscle for future lovers and because I’d be fucked if I let anyone overpower me again.
Reg smiled brightly. “Well, you’re free to use the gym however you like. It’s been gathering dust, quite honestly. Glad someone in the house is getting use out of it.”
I sipped my coffee.
“Are you excited for your first day of school?” Mags asked. “Senior year. That must be exciting.”
“We hear you’re quite the intellectual,” Reg chimed in. “In fact, the curriculum at Central might not be enough to challenge you.”
“I’ve beenchallengedquite enough already,” I said bitterly. “Don’t you think?”
Another unwarranted flash of guilt lanced through me at my aunt’s and uncle’s distressed expressions. They’d known perfectly well what my parents had planned for me in Alaska, and neither had said a damn word or lifted a finger to stop it.
I whipped my wrist to check my antique Patek Philippe. “I think we’ve played house enough for today. I’m going to be late for school.” My chair scraped the travertine tiles as I abruptly stood up. “Is James ready?”
“Uh, yes, he should be out front,” Reg said.
“Have a good first day,” Mags said.
“Yep.” I pushed in my chair, that stupid remorse nagging at me like a toothache. “Thanks for the coffee,” I mumbled. “And the gym and the guesthouse and…everything else.”
Their surprised, touched smiles made my chest tight, and I turned to make an escape before anyone said another word.
Beatriz stopped me, pressing a small brown paper bag into my hands.
“What’s this?”
She gave a confused smile, warm and gentle. “It is lunch, meu doce garoto.”
My sweet boy.
I stared. Beatriz had made me a sack lunch, like mothers had been doing for their kids since time immemorial. My heart clenched tighter,and my jaw worked soundlessly. For once, my chattering brain had nothing to say.
She patted my cheek. “Have a good day, Mr. Holden.”
“Right. Thanks.”
I hurried out of the kitchen, seeking the reassuring weight of the flask in my coat pocket. Before I reached the front door, I took a deep, fortifying pull. The unsettling feeling in my chest drowned in the vodka that burned a path down my throat, the sharp edges of reality blurring slightly.
That’s enough of that, thanks very much.
Kindness, I’d come to know in my seventeen and a half million years on this planet, had only ever been used as a tool to get something out of me. The docs at the sanitarium used it to encourage me to spill my guts in therapy, and my parents…
Charles and Estelle Parish had turned on the warmth just before sending me to conversion therapy. They shocked me with their sudden care and concern so that my naive fifteen-year-old self tearfully agreed to let a sadist who called himself Coach Braun take me to Alaska, where he and his “counselors” reached into my chest with cold hands and tried to rip out a fundamental piece of me. A part of me that was as essential as my blood and bones but a “reckless lifestyle choice” to my parents. That night, after they explained the camp, Mom actually cried and Dad touched me, right on the cheek, for the first time in years. So I agreed. Anything to have more ofthat.
“Fool me once,” I muttered as I walked down the driveway and away from that awful night.
