“Fuck you!” shouted Allegra, crying now. She slammed the door and screeched a reverse arc while Dusty jumped from harm’s way.
“I need to talk to you!” yelled Dusty. Allegra jerked the car forward, waiting impatiently as the automated gate crawled open in slo-mo. Dusty ran up and hollered through the closed window. The driver stared ahead, ramrod and tear-streaked.
“Allegra, please! We need to talk!”
We need to talk—she was in hell again, a cheap disaster-movie, condemned to repeat a trite line ad infinitum. And she hated what she had to say next but there was no way around it, if there was any hope in assuaging:
“I am not seeing anyone else!”
The insanity, the Byzantine contortions, the absurdity of it!
Allegra rolled down the window. “I know that you’re fucking Larissa—”
“What?”
“—because I’ve been fucking her too!” It was the only weapon Allegra had and she hurled it with full force. “Who else are you fucking, and for how long?”
“I am not fucking Larissa or anyone else, goddammit!”
She peeled into the street and was gone.
—
Sometimes a boy was just a boy.
That’s what it felt like as he held the sobbing Tristen. He wasn’t a thing for sex play; he wasn’t a wickedly brilliant shit-disturber; he wasn’t a stoner orphan needing to be saved.
Nothing but a boy…
Though “sobbing” was euphemistic, for he was in the grip of a primal woundedness that was awesome to behold, a blowup of near epileptic proportions. Eyes glued shut, he clutched and windmilled, fighting and flighting for his life — Patty Duke to Jeremy’s Anne Bancroft — pounding on the door of his lover’s chest like a panicked repentant child locked out by punishing parents on a haunted forest night. The superheated bellows of his stomach pumped and furiously spasmed during the embrace yet Jeremy remained deserted by Eros. It was as if he’d become a leading man overnight, an understudy no more — a father now, fully present, seasoned and magnificent, in no need of rehearsals, dressed or undressed. The role felt so new and so old at once that its effortlessness astonished and pleased. The inconsolable boy behaved like a fugitive fresh from a first murder (one that might well have been his own), but interestingly, the details behind his misery failed to intrigue the padrone. Anyway, Tristen would have been mute if queried, he was beyond language, and of course Jeremy knew it had to do with the dad who lay in hospital, cardiac cosmonaut on the launching pad of ruined atria. Holding him now as he did, in a stuttering, slow jam boxer’s ballet, Jeremy was disgusted with himself for daring to question Tristen’s character in the last few weeks, that he’d tarred him with Larissa’s brush, when in fact the boy had done nothing but bestow inestimable gifts — he was certain Tristen had endowed him with the courage needed to have chosen the surrogate path — and was honored young Twist felt safe enough, cared-for enough, loved enough (with father-torn spirit and his own failing heart) to collapse in Jeremy’s arms just as natural as could be. He had learned so much from this boy! He’d never been so open and inspired with any of his young men.
What would never be revealed, at least not directly, to Jeremy or anyone else (though suspicions would be raised), was that Tristen had stumbled upon an email that effectively destroyed him. When his father’s girlfriend unexpectedly returned from Portland (Derek had been on a quiet campaign to get her back), she usurped his quality time with the old man, and Tristen got pissed. So he hacked Beth’s phone, archiving her banking/medical records plus the usual mix of quotidian/scandalous texts, cock&tits selfies, and lo-res videos (a four-minute one of Beth blowing his dad) — before coming across a note written some months ago, from Derek to Beth while he was stoned and unguarded. He said the boy wasn’t his, that Larissa had a one-night stand early in the marriage but for ten years had passed “bitchboy” off as theirs, and that when Rafaela was born, his wife finally confessed. it was like a fuickin grim fairey tale, he wrote. one day you go to your kids room to wake him for bgreakfast and there’s a WHOREPIG there instaead. A filhy nasty fucking WHORPIG and you justthink aboutKILLIN it and EATING it and feedint it to your family and expecially too that bitch you want to see her choke her on that bacon LOL i got a peternity test on raffi, she’s MINE & you cn tell, she got my EYES (not my tits) and she HOT like her old man USED to be but you still like riding that cock, right girl??!?!?
That was why he clung so fiercely to Jeremy — the only man who loved him, the only one who ever had or ever would. And when the anaphylactic siege was over (he self-hated for flashing that he was in Derek’s arms, not Jeremy’s), Tristen stole to the den to gather his thoughts. He swallowed a handful of pills and read the email again until he felt nothing. An hour passed and he left without Jeremy knowing.
He was on his way to kill him, Beth too if she was there, and then himself.
—
Beth needed help — Derek’s breathing was labored but he wouldn’t let her call 911.
To make matters worse, she thought he’d been doing blow. She had no idea where he would have gotten that, probably an old stash. With his heart the way it was, doing coke was the same as suicide, which is what she was beginning to think was the plan. Before Larissa rushed over, Derek had been fixating on whether the IATSE insurance hack would “hold,” and kept calling his son. When he finally got through, he said Tristen went all crazy and hung up on him.
Larissa wasn’t in such great shape herself.
A few weeks ago, while orgying with Tessa and the putative billionaire, she got a text from Allegra saying she was “uncomfortable with what we’ve been doing.” Too blazed to respond, she shut off her phone. In the morning, Larissa wondered if she’d imagined it, but no: Allegra was breaking up with her. Which probably meant she had already confronted Dusty about having betrayed her with the camera double… the earring in the bed, the this, the that… ugh and oy. A friggin’ nuclear situation. While part of Larissa was glad (she seemed to have reached an impasse over what to do with the monster she’d created), she was devastated too because one bright, euphoric morning she awoke to realize she was head over heels in love with the movie star’s old lady. She wondered how the fuck that happened, but there you have it. When Allegra blindsided her, she grew sleepless and obsessive, stalking the house on Carla Ridge. What began as an impromptu goof — an angry, nutzoid, bizarrely innovative payback for how Dusty had scorned her — had seriously backfired. She was grievously wounded and painfully alone.
She was in bed when Beth called, spooning room-temp Häagen-Dazs Rocky Road into her mouth and masturbating to the nightlight of an MSNBC Lockup marathon. She decided not to wake Rafaela because she wouldn’t be gone all that long — they’d drive Derek to the hospital and that would be that. The paramedics might get there before she did, anyway. (She called them herself when Beth said Derek had forbidden her.) Tristen was at his boyfriend’s. The idea of alerting him only occurred in light of the men’s recent détente, but she demurred; as much as it warmed her, she didn’t trust all the happyface fence-mending, at least not on Derek’s side. When Beth later mentioned something about Tristen raging on the phone at his dad, Larissa was actually heartened. It was about time he got angry.