Larry Benjamin - What Binds Us by Larry Benjamin

Author:Larry Benjamin [Benjamin, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

We stayed with my parents for a week. We made love in the mornings after they left for work. He tasted of butterscotch. I called him my butterscotch prince. He snuck across the street and stole peonies from Mrs. Chang’s garden and presented me with a contraband bouquet. He told me I was his world.

We explored the woods that ran behind the houses in our neighborhood. I showed him the tree under which I’d received my first kiss. He kissed me and carved our initials into the tree’s trunk. I took him to the mall and showed him the pizza parlor where the kids, the cool kids, the straight kids, had hung out on Saturday nights, sipping Cokes and scarfing down pizza. Afterwards they would make out in the backseat of their parents’ Pontiacs.

I took him to my old high school.

“What was school like for you?” he asked me. I remembered high school as an agony, a blur of flushed, angry faces, pursed lips erupting in vile, hateful words: sissy, faggot, queer. I remembered bruises and falling blood, not always mine.

Sensing my mood, he said, “You don’t have to tell me. I don’t really care about your past. I only care about your future. And that I’m a part of it.”

“My future? You’re all of it.”

*** Matthew watched the news with my father, played Stratego with him after dinner, cut the grass one day without being asked—all things I never did. One night, as I watched him and my father playing Stratego, drinking beer, my mother said, “You know he’s good for your father. And he seems good for you.”

“So you’re okay with this? With us?” “I am,” she said, standing to clear the table, kissing the top of my head. “Besides, this way you’ll always be mine. No woman will ever take you away from me.”

*** We were walking in the woods when I asked, “What about Dondi? Do you suppose he’s all right?”

“Sure,” he assured me, putting an arm across my shoulders and pulling me close so that we walked shoulder-to-shoulder. I slipped my arm around his waist.

“What if he doesn’t have any money? I mean, Mrs. Whyte was so mad she might cancel his credit cards or cut off his allowance. Shit! She might do that to you too!”

He squeezed my shoulder. “She can’t do any of that to either of us.”

“Why not?”

He sighed. “When we each turned a year old, our father placed twenty-five million dollars into an irrevocable trust for each of us. When we turned eighteen, the trust was dissolved and we got our money. Principal and interest in one lump sum.”

“You’re joking.”

He shook his head. “Dad said he did it that way because he wanted to avoid the temptation to try and control us through money. Or course, it’s just as well that he did that. He is, as you know, in no condition to control anyone.”

I was astonished. When Dondi had told me he was rich, I’d always assumed he’d meant his parents.

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