Day 27

The first person Danny saw when he walked into the school building, his arm around Jeremy's shoulder, was Ash; the boy was coming out of the administration office with a huge cardboard portfolio under his arm.

"Hi, Ash!" Danny greeted him with a sunny smile, wondering how he was going to take Jeremy's presence.

"Hey," Ash answered, his voice impossible to gauge, his face closed down behind his curtain of hair.

"You remember Jeremy?" Danny reintroduced them.

"We met at your house," Ash responded, putting out his free hand to shake.

"Hey, Ash," Jeremy smiled and shook his hand.

"Are those your submissions for the Art Show?" Danny indicated the portfolio.

"The rejects, actually," Ash looked down at the folio and shook his head, "The committee thought these were too 'disturbing.'"

"What's disturbing about them?" Jeremy wondred, hoping Ash would show them what was in the portfolio.

"Dunno," the boy shrugged.

"My Aunt Claudia is on the committee, so it could be anything," Danny said soothingly, "Complementary colors frighten her. Have you shown them the portrait?"

"Yeah, it was accepted."

"What portrait?" Jeremy asked.

"Ash painted a portrait of me for the Art Show," Danny told him simply, wondering how Jeremy would take it.

"Cool," Jeremy smiled, pushing gently at Danny's back to encourage him to end the conversation and move on.

"I'll see you guys later," Ash said, stepping past the couple and heading for the front door.

"Did it take a long time? The portrait?" Jeremy asked him when they were moving again.

"Four or five hours a day, just about every day of break," Danny answered.

"That's a lot of time alone," Jeremy looked at him sideways.

"Yeah, we got close."

"Did you fuck him?" Jeremy's voice didn't sound angry, it sounded simply curious.

"Yes," Danny said, unable to lie.

"Do you love him?"

"Yes, I think I do."

"As much as you love me?" Jeremy turned and faced him.

"Differently," Danny was a little worried by this line of questioning.

"What am I going to do with you?" Jeremy grinned indulgently, reaching up and slapping Danny lightly, wrapping his hand around Danny's chin and shaking his head back and forth.

"Whatever you want," Danny grabbed Jeremy's hand and kissed the palm.

*****

The first week of the new semester, Danny felt a little disoriented: the play was over, his relationship with Jeremy had changed, he wasn't fucking around all the time with a dozen people, but what fucking he did now was important and complicated and fraught with emotions.

He felt like he had very little control over his life, and it was scary and satisfying, terrifically interesting but also deeply unsettling. He wondered if this is what love felt like, or if it felt weird because it was just pretending to be love.

Every day was different, but also routine. He and Jeremy were together all of the time, meeting in the parking lot first thing in the morning, meeting again in between classes, having lunch together with The Gays, then tea at the Aunt Ems', quick and very quiet sex in Danny's room at the Pine Street house, and then finally separating when Oscar brought them back to their cars at the high school parking lot.

He saw Ash very seldom; he'd phoned Ash immediately when he got home on that first day after meeting him with Jeremy, but Ash had seemed completely uninterested in the news that Danny and Jeremy were together again; he seemed not only to not care but to even wish them well, which Danny hadn't been expecting after their three weeks together -- though what he had been expecting, he couldn't say.

When the weekend came, Danny and Jeremy spent the time apart, though they were in frequent telephone contact; but Danny hadn't done a lick of homework all week, and felt that he and Jeremy needed to spend some time away from each other, lest every other part of their lives fall to pieces.

On Monday evening after dinner, Danny changed into his riding things and headed out to the stables as usual; but when he got there, instead of Tenorino saddled up and waiting for him, he found the paddock empty. He peeked into the stable, wondering where Kevin was, and heard him moving around inside. Stepping into the dimly lit stable hall, he saw that Kevin was inside Tenorino's stall, forking the hay out.

"What are you doing?" Danny frowned, bemused.

"Cleaning," Kevin said quietly, not looking up.

"Where's Tenorino?"

"Gone."

"Gone?!" Danny was alarmed, "What happened? Is he sick?"

"He's gone," Kevin stopped working and leaned against the pitchfork handle wearily, then looked up at Danny, tears in his eyes, "Someone came this afternoon and took him away."

"What? How?" Danny was completely shocked, unable to understand what the man was saying, "Was he stolen?"

"No, not stolen."

"Where is he?" Danny shouted.

"I don't know," the stablehand wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, "You'd better ask your father."

"My father," Danny repeated, stunned.

He turned and left the stable, his mind reeling in confusion, and walked as fast as he could back to the house, slapping his riding crop against his leg in his agitation; something happened to Tenorino, and his father hadn't said anything at all about it during dinner.

He entered the house by the kitchen and went through the dining room into the den, which was empty; he wondered if they'd gone to bed already, or if they were just spending the evening in different parts of the house; he went out into the wide hall and then to the room next door, his father's study.

"Where is Tenorino?" Danny demanded, walking up to his father's desk.

"You didn't knock," Taylor Vandervere said, not looking up from the blue-backed legal papers he was reading.

"Where is my horse?" the boy demanded, slapping the crop against his leg in impatience.

"I think you'll find," his father still didn't look up, "if you examine Tenorino's papers, that he was my horse."

"What do you mean, 'was'? Where is he?" Danny was terrified that something horrible had happened to the horse.

"On his way to Pasadena," Taylor answered simply, though Danny could hear a tone of smugness in his voice, "I sold him to a riding school."

Danny gaped at his father, shocked into momentary silence as he tried to wrap his mind around this news: his beautiful horse, his most prized possession and beloved pet, was gone -- in a trailer on his way to a riding school at the other end of the state.

"But... why?" Danny finally asked, tears welling up in his eyes.

"Because, Marc-Daniel," Taylor set down his papers neatly and finally looked directly at Danny, "I do not wish to pay good money to stable, feed, and insure an expensive horse for the use and privelege of a filthy little faggot."

Danny blinked a few times in surprise, the venom in the man's voice shocking him like a splash of ice-water; and before he knew what he was doing, he'd reached out and slapped his father across the face with the riding crop. Taylor flinched at the pain and stared at Danny in outrage; but Danny didn't see the outrage, all he knew was that slapping the man had felt incredibly good -- but it wasn't enough. He slashed at him again, harder this time and backhand, drawing blood on the other cheek.

"You dare!" his father hissed in that same venomous voice, and Danny launched himself across the desk, his hands at his father's throat, knocking him out of the chair and bearing him to the floor with the momentum of his leap; he swung again and again, with the crop at first but then with his bare hands, sometimes curled in a fist and sometimes flat, left and then right and then left again, screaming and howling like a furious child.

Danny kept swinging at his father's head, caught up in the catharsis of punishing the man, pushing the man's arms out of the way when he raised them to protect himself. But then suddenly, all the fight went out of him, and he just collapsed on top of his father, weeping brokenly, then rolled away and crawled into the corner, putting his back to the wall and pulling his knees up in front of his chest, rocking back and forth.

"Why can't you love me?" Danny finally wailed, looking at his father huddled up in a heap by the desk, staring back at him like a wild animal.

"I'll have you arrested," Taylor Vandervere recovered himself sufficiently to stand up and move around to the other side of his desk, sitting in one of the visitor's chairs and pulling the telephone towards him.

Danny found that incredibly funny, though he couldn't say exactly why: only that the idea of a Vandervere writing out an official charge against another Vandervere, a family fight out in public where everyone could see, was so out of keeping with the family tradition.

"You think it's funny?" Taylor thundered, hitting the hang-up button and restarting his dialing, having lost track in his confusion, "You'll go to prison."

"Oh, sure," Danny shook his head, calmed by the laughter, emboldened by the power he felt after the attack, "I can just see you telling the police chief that a sixteen-year-old faggot cleaned your clock."

That struck Taylor silent, and he replaced the phone in its cradle and regarded his son narrowly.

"You think you can get away with attacking me, boy?" the man stood up and stared down at Danny in a pose calculated to awe any opponent.

"You think you can get away with treating me like a piece of shit?" Danny countered.

"I won't have a faggot in my house," the man said threateningly, thrusting out his chin, which was bleeding.

"But it's not your house, is it?" Danny stood up and dusted off his knees, then pushed his hair back out of his eyes, "It's the Trust's house. And you don't have any choice who lives here. I am your son, like it or not, and the Trust doesn't allow you to kick me out."

"You think you know the Trust better than me?" Taylor challenged him.

"'Better than I,'" Danny corrected, stooping down to pick up the fallen desk chair and seating himself in it, reeling with a sense of power that he'd never felt before, "And no, I'm sure you're as well-versed as I. You are a lawyer, after all. So naturally you are aware that the Trust explicitly forbids such melodramatic gestures as disowning and/or evicting your children. It simply can't be done."

"Disowning isn't all there is," the man spat blood into an ashtray, "As I said, I can have you arrested and tried for assault."

"You could," Danny conceded, "But you won't. There would be a scandal, a Vandervere in Juvie; and not just any Vandervere, but the Mayor's own son. You would be seen publically as a bad father. And it's only a step from thinking you a bad father to thinking you a bad Mayor."

"Nobody would ever run against me," Taylor stated as if he believed it, but Danny could see the doubts.

"Aunt Mathilda would, if she ever took it into her head to so do. And if I asked her to, she'd be on it like a shot. Send me to jail and she'll be out for your blood. Election year next year, isn't it?"

"Are you blackmailing me?" Taylor looked genuinely shocked.

"Just a little," Danny laughed, and tilted his head to look at his father thoughtfully, "I'm really surprised at you, I thought you were a better strategist than this. That you'd use up the only hold you had over me for something as trivial as my sexuality. Tenorino was the only thing you could take away from me, and you played your only ace this early in the game."

"I could take your car," Taylor reminded him, "That's my property as well."

"Yes, you could," Danny smiled at him, "But since you went out of your way to buy me that big black hulk instead of the red roadster that you knew I wanted, you rather pulled your own claws on that one. Take my car, I can get my own. You don't pay me an allowance, all I get is what the Trust gives me, so you can't take that away, either. You've shot your only bullet, and we haven't even properly started the war."

"What war?" his father was starting to look worried.

"Well, for one thing, I'm not going to Harvard, I'm going to Stanford. I've already been accepted."

"I won't pay for Stanford," Taylor crossed his arms.

"You don't have to," Danny pointed out reasonably, "The Trust will. I already checked: Harvard is traditional, but not required. The Trust will pay for my education, wherever I choose to be educated. Sure, I'll have to do without you subsidizing my education with a flashy apartment and extra pocket-money, as you did for my brothers; but really, Dad, were you planning to do that for me, anyway? I somehow doubt it."

"Get out of my study," Taylor wanted desperately to be alone so he could evaluate all of what Danny had said. It was the longest conversation they'd ever had, and he could tell that something inside of Danny had broken: his meekness and sweetness was gone, replaced with hard steel that he might have admired if it weren't aimed at his own throat.

"As you wish," Danny stood up and sauntered toward the door, "Have a pleasant evening."
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