gentler Fritz, Michael thought. “Come on.”
Fritz ran across the street toward the alley, and Penry and Michael followed like Pavlovian dogs. They didn’t think about what they were doing; they just knew they had to do it. Luckily, they were all wearing sneakers, so they didn’t make too much noise on the cobblestones, but if either Hawksbry or his companion turned around, the three of them would have been seen. There was simply nowhere to hide. Halfway down the alley, Michael realized that if the man with his arm wrapped around Hawksbry’s waist did turn around, he wouldn’t just be seen, he’d be recognized. “That guy’s my father’s driver,” Michael whispered.
“You and your father’s driver are both gay?” Fritz asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michael asked.
“Nothing,” Fritz said. “But you gotta admit, it is a little queer, you know, two gays in one family.”
“He’s not part of my family!”
“Mates!” Penry interrupted. “Looks like our boys have disappeared.”
They all turned to look down the alleyway and saw that Penry was right; it was empty. “Where’d they go?” Fritz asked rhetorically and then started walking down the cobbled path. When they walked a bit farther, they realized the alley led to a dead end. Fritz was astounded. “The poofs just poofed into thin air.”
“Or they’re on the other side of this door,” Michael suggested.
Fritz couldn’t be blamed too harshly for missing the door; it was made to blend into the surrounding wall. The only clues that there was a door in the stone wall were a small metal horizontal plate that looked as if it could only be opened from the inside, and two feet below and a few inches to the right was a keyhole without any kind of doorknob. “Bet it’s one of those secret gay bars,” Fritz surmised.
“In Eden?” Penry asked. “I can’t imagine that kind of bar here, you know, in the middle of nowhere.”
“Nebraska, what’s the code to get in?”
Michael was dumbfounded. First, the headmaster and his father’s driver were a couple; second, there was a secret gay bar in an alleyway in this little country town; and third, Fritz thought he knew some secret code that would get them inside. “Fritz, you’ve lost your mind. I don’t know any code.”
“I do,” Penry announced, and proceeded to knock on the door.
“Have you lost your mind too?” Michael asked. “What if somebody answers?”
What was Michael talking about? Penry thought. “That’s the whole point.”
When the metal plate slid open, both Michael and Fritz jumped back. Penry was the only one who appeared calm and stood his ground. But once he realized the man behind the door was wearing sunglasses, he became excited and forgot that he was going to ask if they could enter. “Blimey! Is the sun bothering your eyes too? Just yesterday I felt the same way.” Penry turned to his friends to ask, “Could something be going around?” By the time he turned back, the metal plate was back in its original position, closed. Immediately, Penry knocked on the door again. “Hey, mister, do you mind letting us in?”
“Do you mind if we got out of here?” Michael asked. “Gay, straight, or whatever, I don’t think this is the kind of place for us.”
“I’m with Nebraska,” Fritz said. “Let’s go!”
As they dragged a reluctant Penry away from the door and back to the main street, they had no idea that the people on the other side of the door were as nervous and agitated as they were. “Are you an absolute idiot?! You’re not supposed to open the door unless you hear the password!” Brania waited a moment and then slapped the man so hard across his face, his sunglasses were knocked off. “That could’ve been one of them and not just a bunch of stupid kids from the academy.”
Alistair stirred in his chair. “The academy?” When he spoke, his lips barely moved and his eyes remained shut. When Jeremiah pushed his shoulder to remind him to keep quiet, he almost tumbled to the floor, but swayed back at the last second, his head falling backward. If Michael and the others gained entry into the room or saw their headmaster’s face outside, they would have been startled, frightened even. Once healthy-looking, vigorous, he now appeared ashen and gray, his skin colored only by the black circles beneath his eyes. The cleft on the left side of his chin was now so pronounced it looked like a groove, a deep etching. He was alive, but only barely.
“Careful, Jeremiah,” Brania chided. “Or I’ll take back your gift.”
Vaughan’s driver turned to face the voluptuous girl who looked so incredibly out of place in such dreary surroundings. “My gift?”
“As a thank-you for handling the situation with Alistair so well.” Done with the club’s bodyguard, Brania walked over to Jeremiah, her heels clicking loudly on the cement floor and echoing throughout the windowless, tomblike room. “I left it in your apartment upstairs. It’s a marble planter filled with the most extraordinary white roses.”
“Flowers?” Jeremiah asked, his puzzlement understandable. Even before he became a vampire, Jeremiah was not the kind of man who would receive flowers as a gift.
Brania detested ingrates, but since the gift was from her father and not her, she didn’t have the power to take it back. All she could do was gather her patience and explain its worth. “Not flowers, white roses. Keep them watered and protected and they will thrive and bring you nothing but joy.”
Jeremiah still didn’t understand why Brania was giving him flowers, but he was grateful that someone of her stature felt compelled to give him a gift. “Thank you, Brania, really.”
Turning on Jeremiah to address the bodyguard one last time, Brania said, “And I’ll thank you to wear your contacts from now on. Do I have to remind everyone that we are trying to blend in?” Suddenly disgusted to be among such fools, Brania decided it was time for her to go. Thanks to the bodyguard’s carelessness, she would have to take the long way; she couldn’t risk being seen by people who might recognize her. Before she opened the trapdoor that led to an underground passageway, she reminded Jeremiah of his final instructions. “Help him with his feeding and then bring him home. It’s time he got back to work.”
Jeremiah nodded dutifully and then said, “Thanks again.”
But Brania didn’t hear him; she was already underground.
At the top of the stairs, Michael watched Ronan leave, his kiss still moist on his lips. What an eventful day. Even though their hand holding was cut short, it was another step in the right direction, a step forward toward the man Michael longed to become and away from the child he was. And then finding out that Alistair and Jeremiah were a couple. That was a shock. The group was split on whether they actually believed it, but Michael did. There was something distrustful about Jeremiah that led Michael to believe he was hiding something; his sexual preference could easily be that something, but Ronan wasn’t too sure. “Not everything is always as it seems,” he had said. Ciaran seemed to agree with him.
“You never really know what’s going on inside a bloke’s head,” Ciaran remarked, already in his pajamas and sitting on his bed.
“It’s not what we saw on the inside, but what was going on outside,” Michael explained. “My father’s driver had his arm around Hawksbry’s waist, for heaven’s sake. They were, like, on a date or something.”
Ciaran shrugged and flipped through some celebrity magazine. “I don’t know. It’s like Ronan. You look at him and think he’s like us, but …” Ciaran flipped the pages faster and prayed Michael didn’t pick up on what he just said, what just slipped past his lips.
“What do you mean ’not like us’?”
“Bloody hell, look how fat she is!” Ciaran turned the magazine so Michael could see a photograph of a once-svelte Hollywood starlet who now looked like she was in desperate need of a fat farm.
“Answer me, Ciaran,” Michael demanded. “What do you mean Ronan’s not like us?”
Sighing, Ciaran put down the magazine. Think fast, mate, so it doesn’t blow up in your face. “We’re the outsiders, you and I; we have to try and fit in. But Ronan’s already at the center of everything. Yet when you look at him, all quiet, pensive, it can look as if he’s the one stuck on the outside looking in.” Ciaran went back to glancing at the pages of the magazine, hoping what he just said made some sort of sense.
“Do you even know your brother?”
By the incredulous tone of Michael’s voice, he guessed that he wasn’t buying his explanation. “Feel free to disagree with me.”
Michael felt his cheeks redden and he couldn’t control the impulse to come to his boyfriend’s defense. “Are you trying to say that he’s acting? That he doesn’t feel out of touch, like he doesn’t belong? Because if you are, I have to say you really have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Even though Ciaran knew that he’d made up that story to cover a slip of the tongue and he was still angry
