Lair of Dreams (The Diviners 2)

“Why do all the things I love gotta leave me?” Louis whispered.

“I’m not gonna leave you,” Henry said.

“How you gonna get your father to let you stay?”

Henry chewed his lip and stared at the freshly tilled earth. “I’ll think of something.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Henry said, but he had no idea how.

Late August settled in, bringing a bank of hazy clouds that promised but did not deliver rain. After a day of stifling heat, Henry and Louis sat on a blanket beside a cascading vine of morning glories, their mood tense. There’d been a cable: Henry’s father was returning from Atlanta the next day. School would start the week after Labor Day. Henry would be miles away from Louis.

“Why don’t you just tell your father you don’t want to go?”

Henry laughed bitterly. “No one says no to my father.” He yanked a morning glory from the vine and crushed it between his fingers.

“What that plant ever do to you?”

But Henry wouldn’t be joked out of his misery. At boarding school, Henry would be stuck in a regimented, colorless life of morning chapel, Latin, bullying upperclassmen, and innuendo about the way Henry walked and talked. There’d be no jazz or crawfish boils or fishing from the pier. There’d be none of the eccentric characters they knew from their haunts in the Quarter, men and women who looked after the two boys as if they were delightful nephews. There would be no Louis. Henry felt it as a physical ache.

In the dirt, Louis scratched a heart. Inside, he wrote L + H. Henry went to erase it before someone saw. Louis stayed his hand. “Don’t.”

“But—”

“Don’t,” he said again.

That night, they’d lain together in the narrow bed, listening to the swooshing tide of Lake Pontchartrain eddying about the pilings beneath the cabin. Louis’s stubble rubbed Henry’s cheeks raw, but he wouldn’t have stopped kissing him for anything. There were hands and mouths and tongues. They were sweaty with exploration and pleasure. Afterward, they lay entwined, Henry falling asleep to the soft warmth of Louis’s breath on his shoulder, while out on the streets of the West End, the party raged on.

Henry’s father returned on a Friday in August as the summer was dwindling to a close. From his chair in the library, he appraised his bronzed and freckled son. “You seem to have recovered your health, Hal.”

“Yes, Father,” Henry said.

“The school will be pleased to hear it.”

Henry’s heart beat so quickly he wondered if his father could hear it from across the broad expanse of Persian carpet. “I was thinking that perhaps I could finish school here. In New Orleans.”

His father peered around the edge of his open newspaper. “Why?”

“I could help with Mother,” he lied.

“We have servants and a doctor for that.” The newspaper barrier went back up.

“I’d like to stay,” Henry tried. He willed himself not to cry. “Please.”

“I’ve posted the check for your tuition already.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I will! I’ll take on whatever work I can. I’ll—”

“The subject is closed, the matter settled.” His father gave him one last, curious look. “Where do you go evenings?”

“I go for a long walk. Dr. Blake advised it. For my health,” Henry lied, feeling, for once, power in the secrecy of his other life.

His father had continued squinting at him for only a moment more. “Well,” he said, returning to his paper, “I suppose Dr. Blake knows best.”