Strings Attached (21 page)

“We’ve got to.”

“But what if they see us?”

“So let’s go somewhere else. This is a big place.”

“I can’t…” Jeremy’s head hung suddenly with the weight of his shame. As much as he hungered for completion of their act, he hadn’t the guts to carry it off and he knew it. He felt the familiar flames of self-hatred spark, then leap skyward once again, fanned by the certainty that he would never be a real man no matter how many muscles he grew. He was paralyzed now, the invisible strings yanking every part of him in opposite directions.

And then:
“…in order to be a real man, you must be three things: courageous, honest, and…”
echoed a familiar voice in his head, his father’s voice from that crazy dream. He could hear it! But what came after
and
?

Like a flicker of lightning, he remembered
“…selfish.”

He threw both arms around Coby’s neck and pulled his face to his own, then sucked in the slippery warmth of his mouth while inhaling the dizzying musk that emanated from his hot, holy skin. His open hands palmed the young man’s chest. He broke his mouth away and bent to lick the jutting underside of the other’s hard pectoral ridge, then gently bit his nipple. Coby whistled low, and in a single movement pushed the other’s robe off his shoulders. Both young men gleamed shirtless, breathing crazily.

“Jesus, you’re a beautiful guy,” Coby stated, looking down to admire the twisting muscles of Jeremy’s torso, while running the flat of his hand across his smooth, hard chest.

“I’m nothing compared to you,” Jeremy replied, his own hands tracing lovingly the ridges of Coby’s abdomen and the sculpted jut of his hip bones.

I am touching him. I am finally touching Coby.

With their lips locked once more together, their arms and hands explored each other’s backs, then shoulders, then descended finally toward their pajamas. Coby slipped a hand inside the back of Jeremy’s pants and kneaded his naked buttocks, all the while sensuously thrusting his crotch against the other. Jeremy nearly fainted from pleasure. His shaking hand descended in between their bodies and moved carefully to where he knew Coby’s rigid sex stood underneath the silk. His hand made contact, and they both moaned.

“Hey, Tyler,” he gasped. “Let’s get naked.”

“We’ve gotta go somewhere else,” he whispered.

“Upstairs I saw some other bedrooms at the end of the hallway.”

“Let’s go.” He grabbed Coby’s hand and led him toward the dimly lit staircase that curved into cavelike darkness at the top. They took the stairs two at a time on tiptoe.

Halfway up, Coby yanked Jeremy’s hand. They stopped and opened their mouths to each other, and their bodies met once again.

“Hey, Jeremy,” he whispered. “If I tell you I love you, will you let me fuck you?” He stuck his tongue into his ear and slid his hand teasingly down the cleft of his backside. “I’ve got some condoms with me.” He dug a shiny packet out of his pajamas and flashed it in his palm.

Jeremy’s heart thumped wildly. He opened his mouth to moan an answer, but before he could get the words out, a third voice cut through the air like a whistling missile.

“If I tell you I love you both, can I watch?”

They looked up. Ellie sat comfortably wrapped in an old Ballena Beach High sweatshirt at the top of the staircase with her back propped against the wall, her feet cozy in bumpy woolen socks. “I’m serious guys,” she continued, yawning. “I love watching gay porn, except for that rimming stuff.
Yuck.
But I’ve got a feeling Reed would want to be in on this too…you know how much she
hates
being left out.” She sprang up, then turned and began sauntering down the hallway. “Let’s go wake her!”

The first crooked banners of fuchsia clouds unfurled themselves above Ballena Beach, as the sand’s sleeping carpet of seagulls unfolded their snowy wings and rose to circle, in unison, over the waves. Paying no mind to the screeching swarm, Arthur plodded insistently through the wet sand, his heart heavy with grief, the wood-smoke from a campfire nearby reminding him of their ancient life together, the fireplace they used to make love in front of, and next to that their Christmas tree. He hadn’t any interest in having one since; their ornaments had been the one possession he’d left behind for the apartment’s next tenants. They belonged there. Were the new occupants enjoying them at this very moment, or had they thrown them out? It didn’t matter. The happy peephole reflections in the crimson glass balls would never be right again.

Merry Fucking Christmas.

And above the beach, Bill had taken the opportunity Katharine’s absence afforded him to conduct an all-nighter inside his shadowy office, hunched within the wings of an ebony leather armchair, his features Frankenstein-green from the reflected glow of the triple monitors atop his desk. While she was rubbing noses with the Eskimos, he’d been hunkered down, scrutinizing the cleverly reconfigured profit-and-loss statement his accountants had fabricated for the upcoming board meeting.

They’d reassigned insurance premiums and deflated employees’ bonuses, attorneys’ fees, mortgages, taxes, even office supplies—anything to maximize the quarterly profits so the board of directors, which was headed by his dear wife, would be ignorant of the lackluster profit Helikon’s software division had yielded, thanks to his ongoing and prodigious embezzling. He’d run the new figures through numerous times, delighted and amused by the airtight manner in which his team had been able to dissolve, on paper, millions of dollars of the company’s operating costs. He just needed to stall the board until the latest infusion of cash poured in to settle the year’s books, as they were having a record-breaking final quarter.

Millions and more millions for Katharine and Jeremy, he huffed, all thanks to his genius. Nearly a year ago, he’d had the brilliant idea to build software based on a suggestion of Arthur’s, and six months later, his development team had a working version of CaterToo, a revolutionary program that contained thousands of nearly foolproof recipes, graded for difficulty from kid-friendly to gourmet. It enabled the user to create a meal for any occasion by combining compatible appetizers, soups, main courses, and desserts, as well as appropriate wine suggestions, while customizing the quantity of ingredients for the guest list and any dietary allergies or restrictions.

And as a final stroke of genius, he had included a prompt that linked the user’s computer with a corporation that owned a dozen differently named supermarket chains across the nation, so hordes of hungry consumers could have their groceries ordered from the local supermarket, either to go or delivered, even precooked and ready to serve. The market chains had eagerly contracted to buy his software and stock it on their shelves, as well as pay Helikon a per-use fee. Thanksgiving, as well as the imminent Christmas season, was exceeding even his own grandiose projections. And as for the coming year, well, outer space was the limit.

He congratulated himself. Over the past thirty-odd years, he’d done a world of good for the owners of Tyler, Inc. He smirked while recalling how pathetic Katharine’s life had been before he’d married her.

1973. Her valiant brother had gone down in a helicopter in Vietnam, and then her father, the chain-smoking heart surgeon, fell over dead a month later. She’d inherited the family’s rotting Cape Cod that listed atop their quadruple-acre stretch of cliffside oceanfront, a handful of parking lots downtown, and something shy of a million dollars in cash. Hardly a fortune, even back then, but adequate for him to begin working with.

The young, grief-stricken Katharine was educated and pretty, but unglamorously obese and terrified of spinsterhood, having passed her twenty-ninth birthday unattached. He was in town from Cambridge interviewing for a position at a marketing firm when mutual friends introduced them. They were married three months later, in spite of his insistent objection to her keeping her last name and the stingy prenuptial he had reluctantly signed.

And just look at her now: one of the richest women on the West Coast, thanks to him, flying around the world in search of her passion—laughably simple indigenous wood carvings. And graceful and thin as a debutante, to boot. Of course, it had taken Dr. John’s, then John Jr.’s, and finally Jonathan’s death and the accumulated years of grief to whittle her down from a bulging size eighteen to the svelte eight she now maintained, with his assistance of course. For if he noticed her putting on a few pounds, he would speculate mournfully as to the heights of success Jonathan might have achieved by now, or how the late scion would love to see his handsome son maturing so nicely, and
presto
! she would eat nothing but a little yogurt for a few days at a stretch.

So what about his mysterious great-nephew? He had arrived home from Lake Estrella three days early, sullen and mute, hibernating in his room or disappearing to wander the beach alone. What had caused his much-ballyhooed trip to truncate so abruptly? Even busybody Arthur had only shrugged his shoulders when questioned.

He should check the boy’s e-mail. With a swirl and click, the screen to his left blinked from numbered ledgers to a scant paragraph of text:

Carlo—

We need to talk as soon as you get back. Something really bad happened at the lake, and Reed and I broke up.

I hope at least you’re having fun in Mexico.

No matter where I live, Christmas still officially sucks ass.

Jeremy

PS—You were right.

So he wasn’t dating that pretty mulatto girl anymore; that mountain house seemed to have an unfortunate jinx on it. But it was probably just as well, considering the racial issue: as his West Virginian mother used to say,
“Half-white’s never right, likes to drink, loves to fight.”
And how clever of him to have not disclosed the details of whatever incident occurred at the chalet! He scrolled back, disappointed to find no other messages.

Hmmm.
Jeremy couldn’t suspect that his e-mail also fed into Bill’s; no one but Benny, his most trusted technician, knew about that. But whatever had happened, he would surely find out sooner or later. No one held secrets from him.

He tapped his fingertips together thoughtfully. Jeremy’s graduation was fast approaching, and it was clear that Katharine intended for her nephew to replace him someday at the helm of their enterprises—after finishing college, of course. He had recently overheard their conversations swirling with admission requirements, grade point averages, and SAT scores. But when pushed for specifics, it had seemed that Jeremy was being purposefully evasive as to his academic history; in fact, the boy couldn’t recall whether or not he had taken any Advanced Placement classes and had even stumbled outright when asked what GPA he’d been earning in Fresno. Instead, he’d swiftly changed the subject by declaring his intention to major in business and finance—and with this announcement Katharine had clapped her hands with glee and rattled off the names of half a dozen business schools she believed to be suitable. The maneuver indicated that Jeremy could think on his feet, while demonstrating once again how easy it was for his trusting wife to be duped.

So he was hiding something.
Good.
But how unfortunate if he couldn’t muster the grades for a top-notch education, as they could use a crafty professional in the family, especially one with youthful energy and enthusiasm.

Yes, that’s what he needed: his very own
apprentice.

For Bill was getting to the age now when he’d like to have someone help him take charge of a business that had become as schizophrenic as the old two-faced Roman god Janus, all benevolence and good cheer as the front-man for the evil, backward-scowling twin. Jonathan had been too repulsively honest for the task, but this new one had his mother’s inglorious genes. Jeremy’s proposed participation in their financial dealings could be either fortunate or not, depending on the molding of his character.

Of this he had an inkling already—he knew the drunken sculptor.

Hypothetical situations sprang to mind. For instance, how would his nephew react if he discovered that mountains of Helikon’s business software were being quietly shipped around the world on the gray market in order to skim profits away from their stockholders while undercutting his greedy retailers? For that matter, how would he react if and when he found out the truth about the sparkling yachts their now defunct shipbuilding company used to produce, and how each hull had been built to conceal a multimillion-dollar stash of cocaine and heroin? Would he go straight to the FBI upon discovery that the lion’s share of the present-day Tyler fortune hadn’t been built from judicious real estate investments and clever stock manipulation, as his trusting wife still believed, but from the South American drug and gun trafficking he’d helped orchestrate in the ’70s and ’80s?

Or like any cunning businessman, would he simply renegotiate his cut?

So was Jeremy his manipulative mother’s calculating schemer or his foolhardy father’s shining star? He should conduct a simple test to find out—some way to tempt his nephew with something he wanted very badly but didn’t deserve to have. But now that everything material was within his grasp, what might that be?

Of course!
He could hack into the school district’s database and verify his suspicions, then bestow his nephew with a sparkling GPA. As a result, Jeremy would be accepted to the college of Katharine’s desire while subjecting himself to the moral dilemma of a lifetime: if he actually disclosed that his academic records had been altered, he would be the crime’s prime suspect and not even the local community colleges would take him. But if he went along with the opportunity, it could send him on his Ivy Leagued way and, more important, it would prove that he could be bought.

He cracked his knuckles. It might cost him some valuable time to figure out how to accomplish his task cleanly, but by God, when school reopened in January, his nephew would be staring wide-eyed at the fabled
Lady and the Tiger
dilemma, courtesy of Bill Mortson. And the beauty of his plan was that the boy’s moral backbone would guide him to chase either his uncle’s brilliant footsteps over one threshold, or his dead father’s beyond the other.

He couldn’t imagine a more exciting Christmas present.

“Open the bigger one first. It’s from your aunt,” he panted. “The small one’s from me.” Grinning, Arthur sidled through his doorway carrying two colorfully wrapped boxes. Jeremy figured the man was still breathing heavily from his morning jog by the look of his sand-splattered workout pants, the darkened collar of his sweatshirt, and the flush reddening his cheeks. He saw that his shoes, probably caked with sand, had been discarded elsewhere.

Jeremy peered up at him vacantly from behind his computer, where he’d been hunched all morning perusing the glossy, albeit humdrum, websites of various California universities. From his monitor, each looked remarkably like a giant hospital with clean-cut youngsters milling about and smiling blandly. “I didn’t get you anything,” he mumbled apologetically. “Aunt Katharine said we’d celebrate Christmas when she got back. Sorry.”

“Hey, don’t give it another thought. You’re the kid around here, at least for a few more months. Brats are what this holiday is about, anyhow.” Arthur winked and placed the packages on the unmade bed. “Like I said, you should open the big one first. It’s from your aunt. I think there’s a card.” He pointed.

The boy made his way from the desk to the side of his bed to sit, then yanked the green envelope from under the ribbon and tore it open.

Jeremy,

Merry Christmas, my dear nephew. I’m so sorry I can’t be here to celebrate this special day with you, and I hope you will please accept my apology for having run out at such an unfortunate time. I’ll make it up to you when I get back, I promise. Enclosed is a little something I’ve been saving for years. I’ve dreamed of the day when I could see it put to good use again.

With much love,

Aunt Katharine

He tore at the Rudolph-the-Red-Nosed-Reindeer wrapping paper, lifted the flimsy cardboard lid from its base, then parted the thick white tissue.

A red vintage letterman’s jacket, with white leather arms, lay before him.

Could it be?

“I took it to the best dry cleaner in town and had them restore it,” Arthur told him proudly. “It’s in remarkable condition, in spite of its being wool. Your aunt must’ve kept it buried in mothballs all these years. The cleaner had a hell of a time getting the stink out; said he’d been to urinals that smelled better.”

He pulled the hefty garment from the box and held it up.
BALLENA BEACH HIGH SCHOOL ORCAS
was embroidered on the right side of the chest, while the logo of a swimmer, frozen in mid-stroke, was sewn on the left.

“Arthur, I can’t believe it.”

“Look at the back.”

He turned it around.
TYLER
, in huge white letters, was stitched across the shoulders.

He jumped up and slipped his arms through the sleeves, then pulled the zipper halfway closed. He jogged across the room to the mirror to examine his reflection.

The sleeves met his wrists perfectly, but the shoulders drooped ever so slightly.