Urban Decay: Darkly Mine Season One

by Leona Windwalker

  We didn’t have long to wait. Soon, we were up in the air and Raquel was by our side once more.

  “The pilot says it’s fine to take your belts off now. What can I get you boys to drink? We have orange and grape sodas, fizzy lemonade, root beer, cucumber and lime sparkling water, blueberry cordial, and coffee.”

  “What’s fizzy lemonade?” Shannon asked.

  “It’s real lemonade only carbonated,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows at that. I had to admit that I’d never heard of anything like that before, either.

  “I’ll try that,” he decided.

  “Well, if you don’t like it, let me know, and I can get you something else.” She looked at me, expectantly.

  “Orange soda is fine.”

  “Would you boys like snacks with your drinks?”

  “Sure,” I said. Breakfast had been a little bit of nothing, really. The cafeteria had put out Danishes and small cinnamon rolls for us, and nothing else. The diner was shut as well, not to reopen until after the New Year. A snack would serve to tide us over until we were served lunch. Speaking of which, “What’s the menu for today’s lunch?” I asked.

  She smiled at me. “Crayfish and shrimp ravioli, wild rocket salad, and caramel flan. It’ll be ready at twelve on the dot.”

  Fancy, but then as River, I was supposed to be used to schmancy pants stuff. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about which fork to use. That’s when I remembered the Christmas gala dinner. Shit, shit, shit. It was a black-tie event, which not only meant dressing up like an extra from The Great Gatsby, but lots of forks and spoons, and probably some of those weird little knives as well. I closed my eyes as Raquel padded away, my mind racing as to how I was going to deal with this obstacle.

  Right, so, Shannon probably doesn’t know any of that fuckery either. I’ll just have to ask my fake mom to give us a lesson on dining etiquette for stuffy people so Shannon won’t feel embarrassed and out of place. Then we’ll both learn, and it’ll be fine. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “What’s the matter?” Shannon asked me.

  I gave him a weak smile. “Just a bit of a headache. I get them sometimes, from after.” I didn’t have to elaborate on what it was after.

  “Shit, sorry. I didn’t think. I noticed you often looked tense or upset like that but didn’t put two and two together.”

  I felt guilty now over having made him feel bad over non-existent post-traumatic head injury headaches. Truthfully, unless I was newly injured or healing from a wound, I didn’t get aches or pains. One of the perks of being a lich. We healed fast. One of Uncle Stefan’s sons, Yosef, had even once told me a story about a Made man in the extended Family who healed up right as rain from being beheaded. His head was sat back in place and stitched on like Frankenstein and he had to be fed over a dozen souls, but he healed. Took him a whole month, supposedly. Yosef swore it was true, but `I certainly didn’t want to personally ever find out. The point is, I can’t get common headaches or migraines.

  I reached across and patted his knee. “It’s okay. It’s nothing. I’m just a bit tired and I’m stressed over all the stuff my parents have scheduled.”

  He nodded but didn’t look entirely convinced. “If you’re sure. Maybe you should try to take a nap.”

  Raquel reappeared with our sodas and several bags of different types of potato chips, dried fruits, and nuts in a basket, all sat on a low cart. She pushed the cart so that it was even with my row of seats, then took the basket off of the cart and handed it to me. I placed it on the empty seat next to me.

  “Do you want yours in the bottle or a cup?” she asked Shannon. “It’s already chilled.”

  “Um, the bottle is fine,” he said, eyeing her curiously as she picked up a small glass bottle of pale yellow liquid and removed the metal cap with a bottle opener before passing it to him.

  “Bottle’s fine for me as well,” I said, eyeing the nearly identical bottle of light orange liquid. She removed the lid and handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Shannon looked abashed, quickly swallowing the mouthful he’d just tried. “Thanks,” he murmured.

  She smiled brightly at us, “You’re welcome,” she said, before pushing her cart away.

  “This is really good,” Shannon said. “Never heard of this stuff before, though.”

  I read the label on mine. Fentiman’s Botanically Brewed, huh? Made with mandarin and Seville oranges and nothing artificial, this definitely was not what I was used to. I glanced over at Shannon’s.

  “Victorian lemonade. Ingredients are all-natural, like fancy homemade from scratch lemonade, only the water’s carbonated. It’s really nice,” he said, taking another swig.

  I cautiously tasted my own. Damn. This was the soda I never knew I needed. I looked at the label again., reading the back. It was made and bottled in the U.K. Yup, schmancy, but this was one luxury I could get on board with.

  The lunch meal had sounded like an elaborate version of an ordinary meal. It was precisely that. It didn’t look like the canned Chef Boyardee stuff I was used to eating at home, but it definitely appeared the same as the stuff as Micahel’s favorite Italian restaurant had served. Just the filling was seafood and there were fresh herbs scattered over it, and the salad was fancy leafy stuff that had a black pepper bite to it. Well, that and the flan didn’t come in a little plastic tub from the supermarket’s dairy cabinet. We ate, joked around, and ended up dozing after. Raquel gently tapped us on our shoulders to wake us up so we could put our belts back on to prepare for landing.

  Disembarking was just as simple an affair as boarding. We climbed down the metal staircase they wheeled out to the cabin door, thanked Raquel and the pilot, went inside, and were met by ‘my’ mother and a man who looked as if he was the Family’s chauffeur. He grabbed our suitcases and the duffle bag full of gifts I’d ordered via my phone and had delivered to the dorm, plopped them on a luggage cart, and wordlessly began to wheel it through the airport.

  Meanwhile, ‘Mom’ was air-kissing our cheeks, gushing how lovely it was to have us home for Christmas and that it was so terribly exciting to meet the oh so handsome boyfriend her son had found.

  “Um, Mom,” I said, interrupting her. “Shouldn’t we be following him?” I pointed in the direction the driver had gone.

  “Don’t be silly. Ramon’s gone to go move the car from short term parking to the loading zone to pick us up.”

  Ramon, I told myself silently. The Family’s driver was named Ramon, mustn’t forget that.

  “Yes,” I replied smoothly, “But shouldn’t we move out of everyone’s way and wait for him out front.”

  She smiled indulgently at me. “He’s in such a hurry to get home. He was always like that, ever since he was a child.” Someone should give this lady an Academy Award. She wound her arm around my waist and said, “But, he’s right. The airport is absolutely heaving at the best of times, and during the holidays, it’s just a chore. He’ll no doubt be there vying for space among all the Ubers and Lyfts and taxis and everyone else by the time we make it through this crowd. We began to move away, her arm still around me. Shannon smiled brightly at her and walked slightly ahead of us, craning about to see if he could spot Ramon within the throng.

  Mrs. Montgomery leaned in. “I can’t get over the resemblance. Not identical by any means, but close enough. It’s like having a son again.” Then she kissed my cheek for real, let me go, and caught up to Shannon.

  Wow. Just, wow. I felt for poor River if he was so easily replaced within her affections. I expected awkwardness as his parents fought to hide their sadness while pretending to be happy their son was home. Not find that I had slipped into his place within their personal lives like a store exchange.

  “There he is!” I heard her say, pointing. “See, he’s going out the doors now.”

  The ride to the condo wasn’t any less weird. She insisted that Shannon call her Mom, ‘the same as River does’. She had Ramon
play carols and firmly pressed us into singing along. I brought up the issue with the tableware and she excitedly agreed to give us a ‘refresher’ course. Then we were finally there, Ramon stopping the car so we could get out and enter through the lobby before continuing to the underground parking lot.

  “Oh, my gosh, when I heard it was beachfront, I thought it meant you walked to the end of the road and there was the beach. Not, like, the building was actually on the beach.”

  “Oh, my, yes. They have been getting stricter about people building on the beach these days, but this was built in 1967, before all the environmental nonsense.” She sniffed. “All those people taking bottles of sand home led to erosion issues.” Shannon and I looked at each other as we realized she was serious. That was a severe problem, but it wasn’t the leading cause of coastal erosion. “And all of these timeshare places and hotels went up everywhere in the eighties, so it’s nice we have this spot without any of that spoiling the neighborhood view.”

  “You’re the penthouse, right? So I bet you get a very nice view,” Shannon said.

  “Oh, the best. And we have an infinity pool too, with a glass edge. You can see the ocean and the horizon while you swim.”

  “Holy shit,” he muttered. “My mom is gonna freak when I send her pictures. This sounds fancier than the place she cleans for.”

  Personally, I thought it was a case of more money than sense, though it did sound lush. I wasn’t the one who’d spent the money buying it, but I wasn’t going to say no to enjoying it with my man. The time we had together was too short to concern myself about things like that.

  16

  The penthouse was vast. It was even larger than Father’s house, and far more opulent. Where Father went for comfort, ease of access to the emotions he fed on, and the ability to blend in innocuously among the middle class, the Montgomerys were all about luxury.

  “This is fantastic,” Shannon said, his head swiveling around as he tried to look at everything at once.

  Mrs. Montgomery smiled at him. “We like it. It was a pain to have to store everything during the remodel, but it was definitely worth it. We had them leave the best of the original features, but updated everything else and added the jacuzzi and the pool.” She tittered. “We walked in, and I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, it looks so different yet the same!’ and the designer just looked at me like I was crazy. But it’s true. None of the walls were moved or anything, and we’ve lived here since 1967.”

  “So, you guys bought this place right after it was built?” he asked, looking impressed. “You must have been so young!”

  She stuck the tip of her tongue out from between her lips for a moment, a flash of hesitation showing briefly in her eyes as she remembered he wasn’t Family. “Well, yes, but Ronnie had the position at the firm, and we both had our trust funds, plus we managed to get in before they broke any actual ground, so it wasn’t as expensive as you might think. We got a discount by buying in advance so they could use the money as part of their building capital.”

  And no doubt it was built by someone in the Family, anyway. The money certainly went round and round. Shuffled about here and there, but never actually leaving.

  Mrs. Montgomery led us deeper into the house.

  “We redecorated your room after you called and let us know you were bringing Shannon,” she told me. “It didn’t feel right to ask him to sleep in a guest room and have you two trying to sneak private moments in after slipping into each other’s rooms, trying not to be seen.” She laughed at the expressions on our faces and waved a hand at us. “Don’t look at me like that! I know what goes on.” She waggled her eyebrows. “I used to do the same thing when I went to stay at Ronnie’s for the holidays, or he came to my parent’s. Anyway, there’s a queen-sized bed in there now, and I took out all your school trophies and your old posters. We had it repainted the same color and hung up some pictures we had blown up.” She opened the door to a room.

  The bedroom faced the beach, one window overlooking it while a set of French doors opened up onto the patio where the pool, jacuzzi, and an outdoor kitchen with a fancy gas barbecue were.

  “I could live out there and only come into sleep unless it rained,” Shannon said.

  I turned as the bedroom door opened up behind me. It was Ramon, bringing in our bags. He sat them down carefully on the bed.

  “Thank you,” I told him. He eyed me cooly, pursing his lips. I didn’t think he quite knew what to make of me, this fake River. He didn’t seem to dislike me on sight, but he sure didn’t have a case of the warm and fuzzies for me, either. His eyes flicked from me to a picture in the wall behind me, then back to me again. He gave me a nod and withdrew; I turned to look at the picture. It showed a young River, probably around age nine or ten, on the desk of a sailboat with his parents.

  “That’s a great picture,” Shannon said.

  “It was a wonderful day,” Mrs. Montgomery said. “It’s a shame River can’t remember it.”

  Shannon looked at me, pity in his eyes. “Hopefully, the holes in his memory fill back in.”

  They wouldn’t, but as I saw more pictures and listened to the stories told about River, the better I could fake it.

  Mrs. Montgomery gave a shaky smile. I felt terrible for her. She seemed to miss her son, despite the way things had appeared to me at first. I began to realize that she was latching onto me, seeking a way to fill the hole in her heart. To assuage the grief the Family would not allow her to acknowledge. She was Made and had an eternity to look forward to of pretending her son was not dead. It was exceptionally cruel, but then so was everything else about our existence. We only had the brief and all too rare respites that could be afforded to us. For me, it was getting to play at being a college-aged boy with a boyfriend and enjoy a life I’d not gotten to have while among the living. Not that if I had remained human and by some miracle found a benefactor, I could not have had openly had a boyfriend. Not in those days, no. The late teens and early Roaring Twenties was not a kind time to be in as a gay man. This happiness, though, I could grant her. I could become her surrogate son in every way that mattered to her personally.

  “I have the love in your voices as you tell me the stories and new memories to make and cherish,” I told her. She blinked, crystalline tears catching her lashes.

  “We do,” she said, her voice straining from her effort not to cry. She cleared her throat busily, blinking away the tears. “Why don’t you boys go on outside and enjoy the pool. Let me know if you get too cool; I can have Laurel bring out the patio heaters and turn them on. I’ll have her bring some floats out now, though.”

  She left us alone then, and I turned to Shannon. “Wanna go lounge in the pool? Or just chill in here?”

  “Luckily, I did pack some swim trunks,” he grins.

  I didn’t, but something tells me there will be some in my dresser drawers. I look, and I’m right, the second drawer has two pairs of trunks, the long kind they call board shorts. They look new, the tags not curled up from being worn and then washed, and the fabric still stiff. I know without even asking that everything else in the drawers and hanging in the closet will be new, too. I might be playing the part of River and doing my best to become another son in spirit to Mrs. Montgomery, but they did not seem to want nor expect me to use his things. I was grateful for that. It would have felt odd, like living in a mausoleum.

  I picked up the blue, red, and yellow pair patterned to look like a sunset with palm tree silhouettes. “Cool, I’ll wear this, then.”

  “We should put our clothes away first, shouldn’t we?”

  I considered this. Mrs. Montgomery, or rather Mom, I reminded myself, hadn’t said a word about us doing anything except going out to enjoy the pool. It might be considered odd if we put away our clothes. Then again, if we didn’t, and when we returned to the room, our bags were still packed, we could put everything away then. It’s not like we’d packed a whole lot.

  “Let’s deal with that later.” I reached back into the dr
awer and tossed him the other pair of trunks, this time a dark blue pair that looked like shorts that stopped mid-thigh. “You can put these on.”

  I knew they’d fit. We were close enough in size and they had a drawstring waist.

  “Okay, but I’m changing in the bathroom.”

  I snorted, walking over to the French doors and going outside. Shutting them and then looking in, I was satisfied to find they had one-way glass. I re-opened the door. “See, it’s that mirrored glass. You can only see in at night if the lights are on in here.”

  “Okay, so safe to change except at night. No hanky-panky except during the day, either,” he teased.

  Oh, we’d definitely have to see about that. With him in the bed next to me, I wasn’t going to make promises I couldn’t keep. It was just as well, because when we returned to my room, the luggage was put away, the gifts I’d wrapped stacked neatly on one end of the dresser. These facts only held my attention for about five whole seconds. That’s the amount of time it took Shannon to shimmy out of his wet trunks. My mouth watered at the sight of his tight bubble butt. I groaned, moving to stand behind him while I cupped his globes in my palms and squeezed.

  He sighed then, leaning back into me, his earlier hesitation forgotten.

  “There’s no one out there to see,” I murmured, snaking a hand around to stroke his rapidly filling cock.

  He whimpered in response.

  “Oh, my baby likes that?” I asked him. “What would you like me to do?”

  He could ask me anything, and I’d do it.

  “Suck me,” he begged.

  “Suck you? Where?” I placed my lips on his shoulder and kissed. “Here?”

  He whimpered again, the sound of it causing my hard cock to jump. I let go of him and stepped back. Removing my trunks, I kicked them away, then moved back, pressing my chest against his back once more.

  “Maybe here,” I breathed against his neck, reveling in his shiver as my breath ghosted against his flesh. I kissed and then sucked up a light mark just under his ear.