Chapter 8 River #3
Holden frowned as if my concern unnerved him. Or confused him. He reached for his flask and took a long pull before answering.
“You don’t want to hear it. Suffice it to say, it didn’t work.
My already fragile grasp of sanity took a hit, but the conversion therapy failed.
Because of course it failed. It’s not possible to change the fundamental beingness of a person.
You can only try to beat it down with shame and guilt.
Or try to drown it in cruelty. But I won.
Who I am stayed. Unfortunately, the cold did too. ”
“Goddamn.”
Holden frowned again at my reaction and looked away. “But that’s all icy water under the bridge. I survived, schemed my way out of the sanitarium, and here I am.”
There he was. In my school, in my space, in my thoughts. An intruder in my perfectly ordered world of make-believe, sauntering through its imaginary walls to show how flimsy they could be…if I let him.
“How did you scheme your way out of the sanitarium?” I asked as we moved on down the hallway.
“The aforementioned blow job with a married therapist. It’s funny how blackmailing an institution with a little sex scandal miraculously improves one’s prognosis.”
I laughed despite the crazy absurdity of it all.
“Cheers,” I said. “That’s probably the best—or worst—thing I’ve ever heard.”
We clinked bottle to flask, and I drained my beer. We’d come to the master bedroom. Holden flopped onto the king-size bed. Cage the Elephant asked if we were for real or just pretending. If we’d burn out by morning.
I stood, not knowing what to do with myself.
Holden grinned his sly grin. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you put that empty bottle under someone’s pillow.”
“No chance,” I said, venturing to sit at the edge of the bed while Holden lay sprawled out.
Christ, what am I doing?
But I was tired of asking that question. Tired of the answer being nothing.
“Let me try some of that vodka.”
He arched a brow. “Getting adventurous?”
“I feel like I’ve come this far, sitting in a stranger’s house, drinking their beer…”
“Spilling your guts to another, better-looking stranger?”
“You don’t feel like a stranger anymore.”
Holden’s knowing grin faltered. He offered me his flask. “Then don’t stop now.”
“Ah, shit. I have to drive.”
“I’ll call James to take you home. You can pick your truck up in the morning.”
My old walls and protections battled with the heated recklessness of the night. Of the secrets Holden and I had divulged and the private pain we shared.
It’s not real life. It’s a time-out. Tomorrow, I have to go back, but tonight…
I took the flask and tilted it back. The vodka burned a path down my throat, and I coughed, my eyes watering.
“Smooth,” I croaked, and Holden laughed.
The liquor warmed me from the inside out, loosening my rules and regulations. The part of me I kept shut down was waking up, coming back to life.
Holden Parish sat beside me on the bed, beautiful and dangerous, his green eyes glittering in the moonlight.
Be careful.
I drained the flask and handed it back.
Fuck being careful.
Holden tipped his empty flask upside down and arched a brow at me. “Do you have something to say for yourself, Whitmore?”
“Yeah,” I said, grinning. “Let’s get wasted.”
***
Laughing and stumbling into each other, we refilled the flask, this time with the Sridhars’ hundred-year-old whiskey. Holden said it was primo, but it burned just as badly going down as the vodka. Holden messed with the stereo again, and Prince’s “When Doves Cry” filtered through the warm night.
We went back to the patio where my discarded tux jacket lay in a heap on the ground. A strange exhilaration flooded me, making me warm all over. Though drunk as shit, I felt awake. More awake than I had in years.
I stood up and tore off my tie, then began unbuttoning my shirt. Holden watched me from his lounger, his eyes widening.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” I took off my shirt and yanked off my pants. “No, fuck that, I do know. I’m going to swim.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“Good for you,” Holden said. “Better for me.”
I felt his eyes on me as I stripped down to my boxer briefs, and instead of it stopping me, knowing he was watching spurred me on.
The sensation of being alive and free intensified.
I dove headfirst into the deep end. My lungs constricted at the cold bite of water that mellowed, slipping over my skin like cool silk.
I broke the surface and swam to the edge, rested my arms on the concrete. “You coming in?”
The booze was making me reckless. Holden, in the pool with me, stripped down to his underwear, was a bad idea.
Or maybe it’s the best bad idea ever.
“I don’t swim,” he said.
“You don’t know how?”
“I know how. I choose not to.”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t been in so much as a bathtub in years. Not since Alaska.”
My chest ached, and the anger at those who’d hurt him returned with a vengeance, sobering me slightly.
“What happened? Don’t give me the PG-rated version. Tell me everything.”
His lips curled in a faint smile. “I like drunk River. Drunk River is direct.”
“It helped me to tell you my shit. I want to help you.”
“You can’t help me,” he said sadly. “But it’s nice that you want to try.”
“Tell me,” I said gruffly. “If you’re up to it.”
He thought about it and finally nodded. “Fine. But you’re too far away.”
Swaying unsteadily on his feet, Holden got up from the lounger and lay down on his back, his head at the edge of the pool near where I rested my arms.
“In Alaska,” Holden said, staring at the sky, “there is a lake. Copper Lake. The counselors—and I use this word facetiously—would strip us naked and drag us to the water, submerging us for a few seconds, and then drag us back out. We were there late fall through winter. I don’t have to tell you the water was a few degrees above freezing. ”
The pool water around me suddenly felt ten degrees cooler. “Fucking hell. Why?”
“Punishment, mostly. For inappropriate behavior. Inappropriate thoughts they suspected us of having. In my case, they suspected right.”
I didn’t smile. Prince sang about being left in a world so cold.
“It was part of our rehabilitation. To drown unwanted urges. To kill our desire. To destroy the want and attraction and love we might one day give to someone who also happened to be a boy.” He turned his head to look at me, pain swimming in the depths of his green eyes.
“Instead, they killed any love we had for ourselves. Shame. Guilt… They beat us with it as surely as they beat us with fists and clubs. They drowned us in it with every trip to the water’s edge. ”
I clenched my jaw. Beatings. Submersions. Hundreds of miles away from home.
I couldn’t fathom it.
I hated that he’d endured it.
Holden witnessed my reaction and faced the sky again. “I’m ruining your swim.”
“You’re not.”
“And you’re a good person, River Whitmore.” He rolled over onto his stomach, seemingly unconcerned that his expensive clothes were getting dirty and wet. His fingers skimmed the water. “It’s too bad, really. Feels nice.”
Tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. I submerged myself to wash them away and resurfaced in front of Holden, our faces inches apart. My heart clanged madly in my chest, but the alcohol broke my thoughts apart so they couldn’t talk their usual bullshit. Nothing guided me but instinct.
Our gazes locked, my hand came up slowly, like an out-of-body experience, to cup Holden’s jaw. Tentative at first, then my hand slipped farther to palm his cheek, leaving a glaze of water on his smooth skin.
“I hate they did that to you,” I said gruffly, my throat thick. “I’d kill them…anyone…who tried to do it again…”
The words tumbled out of my drunken mouth. Holden’s eyes widened, that shocked expression coming over him again. As if no one had defended him before, wanting to protect him instead of hurt him.
With my blood thrashing in my ears, my thumb moved over his chin, feeling the curve and cleft, then brushed over his lips wetly. They were soft where his jaw was hard and unyielding, and I wondered what he would taste like.
Holden released a small gasp. It gusted hotly over my thumb that I was now slowly moving back and forth over his full lips. He kissed it, and then those lips parted, his tongue venturing out with a soft lick.
I sucked in a breath, and he did it again—a flick of his tongue that sent shards of white heat coursing down my arm, my back, to an intense ache between my legs, and my stiffening cock.
Holden’s relentless gaze trapped me as he swirled his tongue around my thumb—wet and soft and warm—before taking it into his mouth with a long, slow suck.
My eyes fell shut, and a groan rumbled out of my chest. Touch if you will my stomach, Prince sang, and beneath the water, my erection was hard as steel and begging for release.
I let go of my white-knuckled grip on the edge of the pool and slipped my hand into my underwear, stroking myself in conjunction with the sucking pull of Holden’s perfect mouth.
He watched my arm’s motion and ground his own hips into the cement once slowly, his eyes hooded and dark.
His teeth grazed my thumb, then bit it hard enough that I felt it in my cock, which wanted his touch instead of mine.
I fought the urge to haul him into the water, to get at his skin under all that clothing and…
Do what?
My eyes flared open, and reality slammed into me. I was jacking myself in a pool with my thumb in a guy’s mouth. No caution. No control. Years of discipline falling apart in an instant.
Holden watched the conflict sweep across my face and released me a split second before I pushed back from the wall, surging backward in the water.
“I…shit. I’m drunk. I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t…I can’t do this.”
His eyes fell shut in a pained grimace, and then he rolled onto his back, letting his arms and legs go limp. “It’s my fault,” he said softly to the sky. “I shouldn’t have taken it so far. Too far.”
Regret and pain seeped into the cracks between his words, but I was swimming to the other end of the pool.
I climbed out in a deluge of water and gathered my tuxedo.
A small pool house stood off to the right side of the yard.
I hurried toward it, holding the bundle of clothes over my erection.
Inside, I struggled to get dressed, the clothes sticking to my wet skin.
“Fucking pathetic.”
My dick softened with humiliation as the feeling of freedom fled, revealing the stark, suffocating responsibilities I’d been trying to escape.
I emerged from the pool house to find Holden sitting on the lounger, smoking a clove cigarette.
“Look, man. I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” he said stiffly. “Things got a little intense. I blame Prince.”
“It was a mistake.” I cringed at the word, and Holden flinched when I said it. “I just… I’ve never…”
“I know you haven’t. It’s my fault. I should’ve been more…not me.” Holden stood up from the lounger, moving like an old man, arms tucked and his back hunched. He used his thumb and middle finger to flick the cigarette into the pool. “Let’s go.”
We moved through the huge silent house to the street, where amber cones of light stood at intervals. Unspent need hovered thickly between us, while the intimacy we’d shared all night was on the verge of disintegrating.
“I’ll call James,” Holden said, reaching for his cell.
“No, I’ll walk. I need to clear my head. I’ll get my truck tomorrow.” I glanced up and down the street. “Which is yours?”
He pointed to a huge craftsman a few doors down. “That one.”
“No bullshitting?”
“No bullshitting.”
I stood with my hands in the pockets of my rumpled, damp tux, the tie slung loosely around my neck. “Okay, so…”
“You don’t have to say anything,” Holden said, sounding and looking more deflated than I’d ever seen him. “Just go home. Go back to your life.” He smiled faintly, his green eyes heavy. Sad. “They need you.”
“Yeah, they do.” My gaze danced around from the ground to the house, then to him. “Okay, so…good night, Holden.”
“Good night, River.”
I hated how my name sounded in his mouth. Like goodbye. Because it had to be. I was ruining something that could never happen in the first place.
When I didn’t move, annoyance flashed over Holden’s features.
“Well?” he demanded.
“I’m waiting for you to go home.”
“Why?”
“To make sure you get in safe.”
Holden gaped, then he scowled. “Don’t do that. I’m not asking you for anything,” he said, defiant. “I never have, and I never will.”
“Okay. Fine.”
“Fine.”
The silence thickened, waiting for one of us to do or say something that we couldn’t take back.
Finally, with a muttered curse, Holden trudged back down the street, shoulders hunched. The part of me that had been brave and tasted real life wanted him to turn around. A smaller, weaker part was glad he didn’t.
I waited until he was safely inside and went home.