“How?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“They sent me to conversion therapy in Alaska for six months,” he said, all in one breath.
“Conversion therapy,” I murmured, feeling sick. “That shit still happens?”
He nodded. The song playing through the house sang of living through tidal waves, parishes, and biblical floods.
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“Christ.”
Holden carefully set the airplane down. “After the Great Alaskan Experiment, they expected me to make a triumphant return to the world as a straight boy. Instead, I was ready to check out.”
My skin went cold all over. “Check out?”
“I locked myself in my room with my notebooks, pens, and liters of booze, ready to drink myself into oblivion. This wasn’t in Mom and Dad’s plans. I mean, think of the bad press! So they hustled me off to a year’s stay in a Swiss sanitarium.”
My stomach felt as if I’d swallowed a boulder of ice. “The conversion therapy was so bad you needed a year in an institution to recover?”
“In a nutshell.”
He said it lightly, but I remembered how he’d dared Frankie to stab him in the heart at Chance’s party. Holden had laughed it off, but it hadn’t been a game. In that moment it had been real. A crazy desire washed over me to protect him from something that had already happened.
“What the fuck did they do to you in Alaska?”
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 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 being-ness 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 blowjob 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-sized 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 timeout. 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’s 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
