Day 10

Danny sat smiling in the back of the car the rest of the way home, unaccountably pleased to have made a public display, however small and forgiving the audience, of his relationship with Jeremy. The thing he most missed about dating girls was the openness of it, the social acceptance of the couple, the ability to be affectionate with someone in front of others.

With boys, everything was clandestine and secretive, and while this allowed him a level of promiscuity that he wouldn't be able to manage in a public sphere, he chafed at the restrictions on his actions -- he wanted to hold Jeremy on his lap in the lunchroom as he'd been able to do with Sandra and Felicia the previous year, to kiss him in the hallways whenever he liked, to lay claim to the boy in front of the whole school.

"I hope I didn't embarrass you earlier, Oscar," Danny said as he slid out of the car in the high-school parking lot, "With that display."

"Not at all, Master Marcus," the old butler smiled at him, his tiny black eyes dancing in their nests of wrinkles, "I am a Fellow Traveller, as we used to say in my day."

"Well, wonders never cease!" Danny grinned at the old man; he wanted to hug him, but didn't think that would be allowed, "Thank you, Oscar."

"Good evening, Master Marcus," the old man bowed and shuffled back to the front of the car, and Danny slid into his SUV and headed home with Janis Joplin on the stereo.

It never ceased to amaze him, how many gay men there were in Vandervere; he had once thought himself alone in the world, the only gay boy in town. It's one of the reasons he'd started dating girls, he'd been lonely and completely ignorant of the existence of others like himself.

It also amazed him that the instrument of introducing him to this hidden world was a girl, the young woman who took his virginity in June. Her name was Natalie, she was nineteen years old and a sophomore in college, visiting from Portland with her father; and since her father was gay, and her first boyfriend had turned out to be gay, and a number of her best friends were gay, she pegged him pretty quickly -- though he enjoyed sex with women, he vastly preferred males, and Natalie could tell that just by the way he looked at her. Afterward, she was an absolute fountain of information, ideas, slang, and code-words that opened up a whole new world right in his own backyard.

The most important thing Natalie taught him was how to identify The Look, that easy-to-miss variety of physical clues that let Danny know when someone desired him. That once piece of knowledge was the source of Danny's greatest happiness: knowing that he was wanted by an awful lot of people. He no longer felt lonely, no longer a bird in a gilded cage: he could connect to people.

But as cages go, the Lake House was fairly nicely gilded. It's a long, rambling structure, rustically elegant in the Art & Crafts manner, with wide eaves and screened sleeping porches, small diamond-paned windows and vine-covered pergolas, raddled brick chimneys and fieldstone columns supporting odd-angled porches and portes-cocheres, covered in old pine shingles and roofed with tin plating, in the cracks of which grasses and wildflowers grew.

Danny's bedroom was at the narrow end of the attic floor, as far from everyone else as one could get and still be indoors; but it was large and airy, with a south-facing sleeping porch and dormer windows on either side overlooking the woods and the lake, deep slope-roofed closets and its own large white-tiled bathroom; it was sparely furnished, little more than a spindle-turned oak suite with double bed, desk, chair, and bureau, but there were window-seats built into the dormers, where Danny liked to lounge and read, four built-in bookcases, and a tiny brick fireplace on the inside wall.
_____________________
661 Words
10746 Total Words