How did it get this far?
Except I knew how. I’d let my own life—my own self—slip out of my grasp the first time I lied to my dad. I didn’t want to repair his broken dreams of a future in the NFL, using my life as a kind of do-over. But that ship had sailed, leaving me stranded on an island of my own making.
And now Mom was sick, and that island felt even more remote. Isolated.
I needed relief. I needed a feeling that was all mine, even if it only lasted a few moments.
I grabbed my phone and pulled up a porn site. My thumbs hovered over the categories, lingering over one in particular, and then quickly moving on.
I picked something vanilla and the video snippet started. As usual, my eyes drifted from the raw act with the woman to the guy’s face. I concentrated on his reactions and movements, telling myself that was okay. What I truly needed wasn’t physical anyway. I needed eye contact. The connection.
I watched for a few minutes, then shut it off and slid my hand into my underwear. I was already hard. I gripped myself, stroking fast, filling my mind’s eye with the guy’s expression, the way he moved, how he gazed into the woman’s eyes with intensity. In my fevered imagination, the woman vanished altogether, and it was just the guy, stroking himself to finish while I watched…
I came so fast I nearly didn’t have time to grab a tissue.
Breathing hard, I lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling. My release faded quickly, washed away by guilt and shame.
What is wrong with me?
Sleep started to drag me down. My hand reached across the empty space of my bed for something—or someone—to hold on to and found nothing.
Chapter Two
“The first day of school,” I muttered, regarding myself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom. “What a joke.”
What did anyone at a pitiful little high school tucked in a redwood forest think they could possibly teach me? I’d been to the edge of the abyss and back. There was nothing left for me to learn but how to survive with the scars it gave me.
Everything—and everyone else—could go to hell.
Do you want the money or not?
“On the other hand…”
I drew on Gucci jeans, a long sleeve black button down, and black Balenciaga boots as morning sunlight streamed in from the bay windows and spilled across the cedar floors of the guesthouse Mags and Reg set me up in.
Admittedly, they’d done good. I had a mini-living room, bathroom, king-sized bed, an ocean view, and built-in bookshelves that ran the length of one wall. I’d already begun filling the shelves with the dozens of books I’d bought over the last few weeks and my own journals.
Though the view outside my window forecast a sun-drenched day, I put on a heavy black pea coat and looped an emerald green scarf with gold paisley swirls around my neck. My armor.
“You’re not physically cold,” said the Ghost of Therapy Sessions Past. “It’s a psychological manifestation of the trauma you endured during the conversion therapy.”
I’d had an entire year’s worth of round-the-clock treatment and that “false cold” still felt pretty fucking real to me.
A soft knock came at the front door of the guesthouse.
“Mr. Holden? You will be late for school.”
Beatriz Alves, the Brazilian housekeeper, was the only person in this house I could tolerate, including myself.
“Bom dia, Beatriz. Estou indo.”
“Muito bem, senhor.”
On my way out, I closed my journal—the black-and-white speckled kind you could find anywhere—and set it on the stack of others like it on my mahogany desk. More journals filled a locked trunk I kept under the window. My life story. A story I’d been writing since I was ten years old and desperate for an outlet for the clamoring voices in my mind.
Loud voices that told me to be bold and live life fully and never give a fuck what anyone thought of me.
Quieter voices that whispered sinister things in my ear; that I was broken, that my mind a labyrinth that I’d never map.
Writing was my map.
Someday, I’d write something official. I’d distill my life through fiction. Pile the pain on a hapless character and make him suffer. Maybe he’d get a happy ending.
Hell, one of us should.
I dropped my Djarum Blacks into one pocket of my coat and a silver flask filled with Ducasse vodka into the other, then took the path through the backyard, past the pool I’d never swim in, to Mags and Reggie’s huge beachside Craftsman.
Because they had more money than God and not a shred of imagination, the house was slathered in nautical décor. Blue and white striped everything, anchor-themed art on the walls, and glass bowls of seashells for days.
In the depressingly cheery kitchen, Mags and Reginald lounged over breakfast, their mugs filled with steaming coffee. Beatriz, small but spry for a woman pushing seventy, maneuvered around the white and chrome kitchen.
“There he is,” Reginald exclaimed, then frowned. “You look quite…elegant, Holden.”
I could hear today’s weather report behind his words, but over the past three weeks, my aunt and uncle had learned not to question my winter wardrobe choices. Not unless they wanted an earful of Alaska.
“Thanks, Reg,” I said, pouring myself a cup of black coffee from the French press. I stifled a yawn and joined them at the table, stretching my long legs.
“You’re something of a night owl, eh?” Reginald ventured. “I heard some activity late last night down in the basement gym.”
And before that, I snuck out to break into your neighbors’ empty house, Reginald.
It was a little habit of mine, begun when I was a kid in Seattle and driving my parents crazy with my “sociopathic antics.” Breaking into people’s houses was easier than you’d think—a key under a pot or a window left open. I never stole anything; I just liked to see what real homes looked like.
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.
Reginald 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?” Aunt Mags asked. “Senior year. That must be exciting.”
“We hear you’re quite the intellectual,” Reginald chimed in. “In fact, the curriculum at Central might not be enough to challenge you.”
“I’ve been challenged quite enough already,” I said bitterly. “Don’t you think?”
Another unwarranted flash of guilt lanced through me at my aunt 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.