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“Theirs is disposable because…?”
“Because fuck them.”
With smooth power, he drove the stick into the white cue ball. It struck with a clack that shattered the relative quiet. Balls ricocheted around the table, two dropping into pockets.
“They care more about money than they do about my happiness,” Holden said, his perfect face fierce and cold. “I spend it as fast as I can, but there’s always more.”
He sank another ball with precision and offered me the pool cue. I waved it off.
“Not a fan of the game?” he asked.
“I don’t want to leave fingerprints.”
He chuckled and I was glad to see some of the anger drain out of him as we left the game room.
“When you say there’s always more, you mean like…millions?” I asked, feeling slightly tacky, but the beer had loosened my curiosity.
“Billions.” Holden peeked into a guest bathroom and a linen closet before starting up the stairs. “The Parish family is the last of the old money dynasties, like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller. You ever seen Titanic?”
“Sure.”
“My parents are the first-class assholes sitting in lifeboats while the people from steerage freeze to death in the icy water.” Holden’s eyes looked distant for a moment, and then he gave his head a shake and kept walking. “They were born old. I’m positive they fucked only once to create an heir for their legacy—me. Which is ridiculous. Even if I hadn’t failed spectacularly, there is no legacy. They’re not building or making anything worthwhile. They do nothing but sit around being rich.”
“Wait, what do you mean, you failed?”
Holden stopped at the top of the stairs. “They thought being straight was my default setting too.”
A moment of silent commiseration passed between us in the dark. Understanding that heated quickly. For a crazy, heart-pounding second, I had a vision of him grabbing me—or maybe I’d grab him—and we’d crush our mouths together…
I blinked and gave myself a shake. Jesus…
Holden’s green eyes glittered in the dark as if they held the same thoughts, and then he tore his gaze away and continued down the hallway.
I followed him into a bedroom that belonged to a little boy, with a racecar-shaped bed, video game console, and flat screen TV. Holden toyed with a model airplane from the kid’s dresser as if it were a relic from a world he didn’t understand.
“It was clear early on that I wasn’t going to quietly settle down and marry a nice girl to carry on the family line. I was a Tasmanian devil born in a glass factory. They tried to do everything to ‘cure’ me, sending me to psychiatrists, reform school… Threats to disown me, which I never took seriously. Then they got desperate.”
“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?”
