Lonely Hearts (11 page)

Baz considered his mother. “It's true. But I wouldn't tell her so in those words exactly.”

He gave a mental fist bump when a smile quirked over Elijah's lips.

Baz nodded at the radio. “So. RuPaul really is your favorite artist.”

Elijah shrugged. “Hangover from when I was younger. Found a copy of his Christmas album at Target and stole it. For whatever reason that got him under my skin, and when shit got too real, he became a kind of lighthouse. I can't tell you why, because I'm not trans, and I have no desire to do drag. There's something transportive about listening to him. Watching YouTube videos. Now I watch
Drag Race
. Probably something about authenticity. Or maybe hiding in plain sight. I don't know. Also, I guess, an escape I could squirrel onto an mp3 player.”

“I was more movies and TV shows, and manga.”

Elijah ashed out the window again. “Manga. Is that why you have
Howl's Moving Castle
?”

“There are a lot of reasons I have the movie. So much better than the book, to start.”

“I like the book.”

Baz shrugged. “It's okay.” It wasn't, but he didn't want to fight. Which was why he hadn't corrected him that Miyazaki's
Howl's Moving Castle
was anime, not manga. “I can't tell you why manga is my escape either. There's some seriously fun and fucked-up stuff there, though. Also it's a nice reminder that other cultures make contemporary art, and often better.”

Elijah shifted lanes in deference to the navigation system's direction in preparation for their exit into Barrington Hills. “So tell me what the storyline is. For this boyfriend bullshit.”

“No story. She thinks you are, and that's about it.”

“Yes, but how do I say we met? When did we get together?”

“She knows how we met—well, the Saint Timothy part. We got together at the wedding. Don't you remember?”

“That was a hook-up, not a meet cute.”

“Pretend it was, and you're all set.”

Elijah pushed his cigarette butt out the window and fumbled for a new one as he exited the freeway. “So we started dating in early June, and then you didn't talk to me until yesterday.”

“Fine. Insert some outings for dinner and a movie.” Baz anchored his elbow in the window. “You're thinking she's Liz, wanting all the details. She's not. She'll smile, ask you some benign questions, then shoo us away to go play. You'll hardly see her all weekend.”

“What, she won't be at the house?”

“It's a big house.”

Elijah sighed and held up his hands as they settled in at a stoplight. “Fine.”

The music shifted, the dashboard readout telling Baz it was “Fly Tonight”. He cranked the music up, lit his own cigarette and swam in the indulgence of blaring a drag queen's album through the streets of his uptight hometown.

Elijah had himself believing he could pull the weekend off until he saw Baz's house.

For one thing,
house
seemed a ridiculous word to apply to the epic beast perched like a jewel at the end of a long, curved driveway. Trees and shrubs dotted the quaintly bricked ribbon leading the Tesla to an imposing front facade. This was also brick, a kind of limestone and stucco around a gentle circle of flowers. And a fountain. A big-ass one, gently spurting artful
glubs
of water over three stone tiers. To the right of the wide
Are you sure you belong here?
imposing front door stood a clock. The kind you'd find in an old-fashioned town square, standing about fifteen feet high, proclaiming the time to be five past seven. A pair of bronze figures, boy and girl, sat demurely on a mini bench beneath it, sunning their metal selves as the female read a book and the male stared pensively across the lawn.

“Park in the circle.” Baz gestured to the far side, away from the clock. “Leave your stuff. Someone will bring it in later and park the car.”

Someone.
“So you have servants?”

“Not…exactly. There's a housekeeper who comes in every day, and a gardening service comes three times a week, and a cleaning service. Mostly there's staff. My mother's staff is usually in residence in her wing on the first floor, and the blue bedroom is practically Stephan's at this point. My dad sends interns out to fetch things for his downtown apartment or the office. If Mom has an event, she hires catering.”

Sounded like servants to Elijah.

If he'd thought the outside of the house was imposing, it was nothing on what waited for him inside. They entered a huge foyer with almost nothing in it, a few chairs and urns of flowers along the edges, but mostly it was entryways, a balcony around the perimeter of the second floor, and stairs. Huge-ass
Mommie Dearest
showplace stairs, the kind that went halfway up then split in two to finish the rest of the way. They were double-sided too, so you could stand on the landing at the top and could go toward the front door or to the other living-room thing in the other direction.

Great room.
The term drifted into Elijah's brain, spoken in the affected tones of the older gentleman who'd plucked him from the street for a night of fun and taken him to a McMansion in the Minneapolis burbs. Before they'd fucked, the guy gave Elijah an unnecessary tour of his house, with particular emphasis on the great room, which as far as Elijah could tell was a living room with high ceilings. Baz's great room could fit about four of the pompous trick's, and it didn't look like a glorified living room. It could be part of a mansion in England. Not only vaulted ceilings but
beamed
vaulted ceilings, in front of a wall of window, with a huge fireplace on one wall and a stately hutch on the other. More plants, less statuary and a lot of paintings decorated these walls, and in front of the fireplace some tasteful yet elegant sofas and chairs suggested it was possible to sit, so long as you were polite about it. In front of the window was a baby grand piano that made Fred, the much-loved instrument at the White House, seem like something somebody dragged out of a barn.

Baz led Elijah into this room, but before they got far a woman Elijah vaguely remembered as Mrs. Acker appeared from an archway, beaming as she gave Baz a kind of half-embrace and an air kiss.

“Darling.” She released Baz and regarded Elijah with a knowing but polite smile. “And Elijah. Welcome to our home.”

Elijah wasn't sure if he should bow or offer his hand or what. He did a kind of awkward lean and inclined his head. “Thank you, Mrs. Acker.”

She grinned a Baz grin and swatted her son's shoulder gently. “Listen to him. Do you deserve someone with such good manners?” She came forward and treated Elijah to the same embrace she'd given Baz. “Call me Gloria, please.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Elijah replied.

She laughed. “Why don't the two of you relax downstairs while I finish up? I'll join you for a cocktail in about a half hour. I arranged for a light dinner in the solarium around eight thirty. Does that work with your plans?”

“It'll be fine,” Baz assured her.

Elijah, who'd had nothing but cookies and nuts all day, wished they'd stopped for a meal.

Gloria called over her shoulder as she retreated through the archway. “I think it's lobster bisque and those delicious herbed popovers. But if you have any allergies, Elijah, let Baz know, and we'll send out for something else.”

Baz took Elijah's arm with a genteel gesture and led him to a side of the double stairs, where
more
double stairs led down into a full-on lower level too fancy to call a basement. The room they entered was slightly friendlier, its sectional sofa less imposing but not by much, its television still dwarfed by a fireplace which could have housed a small boar on a spit. Across from the hearth was a bar, a full-on
bar
with a zillion bottles and glasses and a long countertop with eight chairs lined along it.

It was here Baz led Elijah, pulling out a stool and plunking him into it before slipping behind the bar and collecting a pair of glasses. He poured a healthy amount of Oban and pushed it toward Elijah. Elijah didn't toss the scotch straight down, but he did take a few healthy gulps before settling into a more refined sipping pattern. He'd looked it up after Walter and Kelly's wedding. The stuff cost anywhere from sixty to five hundred dollars a bottle.

He was pretty sure he was the cheapest thing in the whole goddamned house.

Baz crouched below the bar for a minute, rooted around and emerged with a gourmet bag of nuts and two of chips, one with cinnamon and nutmeg and another with some kind of salt scraped from the tears of a nun or something equally whack. Elijah resisted the urge to pour them into his mouth like a heathen, but he did pretty much dive in as soon as Baz had them cracked open.

“So.” Baz leaned against the bar as he sipped his scotch. “How pissed at me are you? Because Mom will probably put us in the best guestroom, but I can ask to be in the suite instead so we have two beds.”

“You leave me alone in this house for more than ten minutes and you're a dead man,” Elijah said around a mouthful of chips. He started to brush the sugar off his palm, then stopped and reached for a napkin—thick, cream with gilded edging—from a wooden stand. “You seriously grew up here. In this house.”

“Yep. Lost my virginity right over there by the fireplace to a pair of varsity lacrosse players.”

Elijah couldn't imagine sex anywhere in this house without a plastic tarp laid out first. “Why aren't we staying in your room?”

“Don't have one anymore. She redecorated five years ago, and it became the guest suite. Some of my stuff is in storage behind the garage, and one closet has spare clothes, but most of it is at the White House.”

It seemed weird, to have a house this big and erase your college-aged son's space because it didn't fit the pattern you wanted. Elijah didn't make this comment aloud, however, only downed more scotch.

Baz kept watching him. “You want a tour?”

How about a map?
“Sure. Why not.”

Baz started with the lower level, which had a family room—what they were in, with the bar—a sunroom, a billiards room and an exercise room bigger than anything Baz would guess a single family needed. There was a wine room, whatever that was, and a second kitchen. There was a theater too—an honest-to-God theater, with fat recliners and studio seating. They took service stairs to the main kitchen, which was huge. A cheerful woman with some kind of European accent greeted them from the stove then went dutifully back to her work. A breakfast nook, big enough to be a formal dining room, stood off to one side, and yet another fireplace decorated the wall. Baz opened a door to the five-car garage, which had three luxury cars in it plus the Tesla. Down a hall from the kitchen was the formal dining room, which Elijah was so goddamned glad they weren't eating in. Crossing the foyer, Baz showed Elijah the living room, which while slightly cozier than the great room didn't seem much more inviting.

They skipped the area where Gloria had retreated, but Baz explained as they went up the stairs that it featured two offices, a bedroom, sitting room and a large bath complete with steam room and sauna. Up the stairs there were two wings, the west and the east. The west was a suite of two bedrooms and a shared bath. This had been Baz's suite growing up—one room was his bedroom, the other his lounge.

Lounge. Elijah tried to wrap his mind around the idea of having a lounge off his bedroom, then gave up.

The east wing of the second floor housed two smaller bedrooms with their own baths, and the main guest bedroom, which was huge. It had a fireplace, which wasn't remarkable at this point because most of the rooms did. This one was large, though, like the ones downstairs, and the bathroom—bigger than Liz's living room—had a fireplace too. The bathroom had a huge glass-walled shower with five heads and a tub standing in the center of the room on a dais.

Their suitcases had been magicked into the main room of the suite, parked discreetly by the closet door. Elijah hovered in the corner beside them as Baz wrapped up the tour.

Baz, standing by the four-poster bed, frowned at Elijah. “Why are you so wigged out? Is it the boyfriend thing still?”

Elijah would have gladly decked him, but he couldn't risk losing his only guide in this clusterfuck. “Are you shitting me? No. It's not the boyfriend thing, though that's fucking funny now.” He gestured angrily at the room. “I can't believe you're for real with this. If your mom hadn't walked out of her room—
suite
, whatever the fuck—I'd have thought this was some kind of joke, that you arranged to have us walk through this fancy joint as if it were yours so you could laugh. But no, this is really your goddamned house.”

“Yes, it's my house. Why is it a problem? Why is it a joke?”

“Because
I'm
a joke here. This is so beyond a goddamned fork. I couldn't get a job as part of your staff.”

Baz pursed his lips and waved this away. “You're making too much of this. Yes, it's fancy, but Mom entertains. A lot. And now she—well, she'll be entertaining more, so yeah. It's got a bit of spit-shine. Plus she's here on her own mostly, so it's fussier than when I was growing up. Realize the only part of the house truly lived in is her suite, unless she's having guests.”

Guests who were nothing like Elijah. But it was clear this wouldn't permeate Baz's consciousness anytime soon, so he rolled his eyes and turned away, hugging his arms tighter to his belly.

Baz sighed. “We need to go to the family room and wait for her. Unless you want to stay here? You can say you're tired, and I'll send a pizza up.”

“No,” Elijah bit off. “I'm staying with you.”

Baz looked as if he wanted to push on that, the
Why are you afraid to be alone?
all but written on his face even with the glasses, but he only held out his arm and led Elijah down the hall, the stairs and back to the bar.