The divorce had been done and over with six months ago, and Morgan had finally moved out of her bitter stage. Or at least, she had moved out of her man-hating stage well enough to venture out to a bar and seek some male company. She hadn’t counted on running into Kenneth.
As soon as she looked at him she knew he was too young to even be in the bar, let alone be sipping at the glass of red wine as casually as he was, sprawled in a velvet chair with one polished black shoe resting on the edge of the coffee table. Why there was a coffee table covered with magazines in the back alcove of a bar was beyond Morgan, but she didn’t care. She was too busy being shocked at the sight of this boy. He raised his glass at her, vivid eyes smirking behind his glasses, and deliberately took a sip. Morgan’s fierce grip on her shot glass loosened, and she gazed at him in disgusted curiosity. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen; the pale skin of his face was utterly flawless, and he looked as if he’d never shaved a day in his life. His legs were long and coltish, as if his body was just beginning to strive for its adult height, but his shoulders were still narrow. All of him was skinny and gangly and awkward growing angles, the perception of such not helped by the fact that he was wearing a disheveled school uniform.
Completely derailed from her examination of the potential male companions in the bar, Morgan stood up. He watched her boldly as she crossed the room, and this time she saw his too-red mouth smirk behind the glass when she came to stand over him, hands on her hips.
“What the hell are you doing in a bar and how did you get that alcohol?”
She noticed that his eyes were wide and green behind his glasses, and filled with the wisdom of an ageless man.
“I’m doing what most people do in bars: enjoying an alcoholic beverage and perusing a selection of possible bed partners for the evening. As for how I got the alcohol – ” He flicked a glance at the bar where the bartender looked away. “They know me around here.”
“Do they?” Morgan demanded. Suddenly she felt the thirty-three that she was, as if this boy were her teenage son – and he was young enough to be – and she was telling him off. “They know you well so they give you alcohol?”
“They know me well so they give me my favorite vintage,” he said, and she was startled.
No fifteen-year-old boy spoke like that, with such unwavering confidence and sureness of self. True, some boys who were bigger than this one and more athletically inclined could pretend at the same sort of self-esteem, but this thin, almost pretty child had nothing to be confident about.
“You’re here looking for sex,” Morgan said, skepticism making her tone heavy.
He arched an eyebrow and settled back against the velvet cushions. “Is that an offer?”
That shouldn’t have happened. Morgan would have fallen back a step, but an unexpected shock of heat shot through her. His tone was low and sultry, and his eyes – no boy should have eyes like those, knowing too much in too young a face.
“N-no!” she stuttered when she was able to find her voice again.
He shrugged those narrow shoulders. “That’s too bad.”
Morgan stepped back this time. She was well and truly disturbed. Only a handful of men had been able to make her feel like that with their eyes, with their voice, fully grown men completely secure in their virility and sexuality.
This kid wasn’t even halfway through puberty and the raw lust in his eyes was heart-stopping.
“My name is Kenneth, by the way,” he said, and sipped some more wine.
His piercing stare was beginning to send sparks of electricity down her spine. Morgan decided that moral indignation would make a good escape. It worked on men as well as boys. “Where are your parents, Kenneth?”
“Rolling over in their graves every time I do this.” He set the glass down and stood up, and Morgan was faintly surprised when he was exactly her height. He moved to stand before her, and never before had she truly looked at someone eye-to-eye. The effect was unsettling. He twined his long fingers in her curls and tugged her close, almost roughly, and kissed her.
His mouth on hers was soft and warm and his tongue was slick and quick, and her whole body was growing too hot, and was his arm around her waist really enough to support her weight when the spicy shock of arousal disrupted her balance?
He pulled back abruptly, leaving her panting and dazed.
“Care to rethink that offer?” he asked. For a young tenor his voice was low and husky.
Morgan wasn’t sure when she nodded, but suddenly he was swinging his blazer over one shoulder and leading her to the door.
“I’m older than I seem. My parents have been dead a long time, and I am quite capable of living on my own,” he was saying.
He didn’t drive a car. As predicted by the elite private school badge on the breast pocket of his blazer, he was wealthy, and his car was expensive, but it was driven by a man Morgan’s own age wearing a chauffeur’s uniform like she’d seen in Vegas outside of fancy hotels.
Kenneth’s house was outside the city, a large manor set far back behind the wrought iron gates, overlooking a vast green garden that was worthy of an English country estate. Everything inside was expensive, worth more money than Karen would ever make in her entire career. Kenneth led her up the stairs to the master bedroom, not bothering with a tour, and tossed his blazer on one of the high-backed chairs. He was loosening his tie when Morgan decided to ask what was going on.
“Why am I here again?”
“You rethought your offer for sex,” he said simply, and was shrugging off his wrinkled Oxford shirt.
Morgan glimpsed his chest, smooth and pale and soft-lined without the hard angles of manhood and thought to protest, but he pulled her in for another of those kisses and derailed her entire train of thought. When she pulled back to catch her breath she glimpsed a painting over his shoulder, hanging on the wall. The subject’s green eyes seemed to pierce her. She must have made a questioning noise, for Kenneth said,
“He’s an ancestor. Oil painting’s about a hundred and fifty years old. Looks like me, doesn’t he?”
Later Morgan would realize that, taking into account the painting style and the fashions of the time, the subject looked exactly like Kenneth.
Those kisses really were thought-derailing.
The first thing Morgan comprehended beneath her haze of lust, and one of the things she remembered most vividly years later, was the way Kenneth made love. He undressed her possessively, mapping her skin with his fingers and mouth, learning every inch of her so he could own her, completely sure of a woman’s body in a way no fifteen-year-old had the right to be. He seemed to understand every nuance of pleasure, pain, and everything in between and would leave her mindless, drawing orgasms from her very soul with his mouth and lithe, young body.
One night, after hours of languid sex, Morgan asked him where he learnt it all.
“You’re only fifteen, Kenneth. Most men three times your age aren’t half as good at this as you are.”
He smirked, and though his eyes were old he looked even younger without his glasses. “Not all men are completely obsessed with sex, day in and day out. It just takes experience, love.”
Running a fingertip down that perfectly smooth cheek, Morgan wondered exactly how much experience he had. Later the next day she wondered at how he had called himself a man as easily as if he were a man and it had never occurred to him that he was nothing more than a boy.
And he was a boy, really, in that school uniform, with textbooks lying around the house. It was definitely an expensive school he went to, for she had seen rare, probably priceless editions of Greek and Latin texts tossed carelessly on the nightstand or on the chair that was the perpetual home for his blazer. Morgan had never known him to be on his way to school or just home from school or involved in homework in any fashion, because she always met him in the bar at night, after hours, when other boys his age would be in bed in preparation for school the next day. She was always out of his house before dawn, knowing that he needed at least some sleep so he could stay awake in classes.
At work, in the light of day, she wondered why she kept going to him.
Perhaps it was because he was so utterly brilliant.
“This place is called The Book of Dead Names,” Morgan said one night, joining him in his velvet alcove of the bar.
“You just noticed? You’ve only been coming here for – ” and she didn’t really remember how long she had been seeing him. She just knew that she burned for him and that her body craved him and for some reason she couldn’t let him go.
“I think that’s a creepy name for a bar,” she said.
He had sipped his wine – for he always seemed to drink a deep, red wine – and then told her, “It’s actually the name of a pub. From an H. P. Lovecraft town called Innsmouth. This place isn’t anything like said pub, though. It’s not dingy enough and there isn’t the requisite pair of chess fiends right by the bar itself.”
Morgan was rather surprised that a boy his age read Lovecraft, or read any of that sort of fiction at all considering the books she always found lying around his place. She told him so, then waved him aside when he opened his mouth to tell her that he wasn’t as young as she thought. Those were the only moments when she saw him agitated.
One night she had risen before him, which was a vastly unusual occurrence, for when she woke after a languid post-coital nap he was usually awake and gazing at her in the darkness with a fondness that reminded her again exactly how young he was. She gazed at him, and he looked the same in sleep. Most people looked troubled or more innocent in sleep than when awake, but he looked the same, fifteen and content, more content than any other teenager ever had been. She pulled on the silk dressing gown someone always provided in the middle of her unconsciousness and drew it around her to ward off the chill. After a last glance at Kenneth’s sleeping form, she slipped out of the master bedroom to wander the house.
The second story was all fancy bedrooms, expensively decorated but impersonal; she guessed they were guest rooms, though Kenneth never seemed to speak of family, friends, or visitors.
He spoke of Morgan and Morgan alone and dazzled her with the intensity in his green eyes. The first floor had a grand foyer, a drawing room and a large, almost industrial-looking kitchen, as if it fed an army. Judging by the size of this house Kenneth’s parents – or whoever was his guardian – probably needed an army of staff to keep it running. The only member of staff she had seen was the chauffeur. She didn’t know his name. There was a study that was more like a miniature library, and it seemed to be the source of Kenneth’s rare books. Most of them were in foreign languages of the European persuasion, but Morgan hadn’t been good enough at French or Spanish in high school to understand any of their titles. They were well cared for, some worn more than others, as if whoever owned the study read often. Morgan wondered when a schoolboy like Kenneth would have the time to read the thick volume called Hypnerotamachia (she didn’t dare try to pronounce that aloud) between school and the undoubtedly heavy homework load his prestigious private school would foist on him. The desk was large and made of a heavy, dark wood. The inkwell and fountain pen leant the room an air of antique that Morgan associated with a young Victorian man, perhaps like the one in that eerie painting in Kenneth’s room. A leather binder lay on the desk. It looked very business-like, the type a billionaire CEO would carry to a board meeting, and was embossed with an elaborate gold illuminated capital G. Morgan was tempted to open it, as she was a financial analyst and would probably understand its contents, but decided to ignore it. She gave up trying to read any more titles on spines of books and left the study.
She didn’t know how long she had been exploring, but suddenly all that was left was the heavy double doors on the other side of the foyer. Morgan pushed one of them open and stepped into a giant marble-floored ballroom.
It was large and breathtaking, a circular dance floor ringed with classic Greek columns – Morgan wasn’t sure which kind – and high glass windows. It seemed so vast and empty in the stillness of night, and Morgan wished desperately for a moment that it was filled with people, women in flowing gowns and full skirts and men in suits with tails, dancing to the strains of a string quartet, all polished manners and lots of money earned in the railroad boom or the burgeoning steel industry.
There was a picture on one wall, opposite the high windows. Morgan noticed it suddenly, and was ashamed that she hadn’t seen it upon entering. Moonlight spilled directly onto the picture, a medieval-looking giant tree filled with exotic flowers and animals and fruits, limbs twining in strange ways. Morgan stepped closer to the painting and tried to understand it, but her eye couldn’t trace the coil of a vine or that curl of a leaf. Dazzled, her gaze leapt from detail to detail, from color to line to texture to text until she realized that it was in fact a family tree disguised as an artistic wonder. There were names and dates, some dates so old that this must have been a reproduction even though paintings from the Renaissance and before had survived. No one in America was old enough to warrant this sort of artifact. She thought she glimpsed the name Medici in a tangle of wild roses, but when she went to look for it again she couldn’t find it. Most of the names were Italian, and she began to recognize the stylized insignia of the family Giovanni from the leather binder in the study. The Giovanni names stretched down endlessly, so they must have had a lot of sons, though the way some leaves and vines twisted back on each other hinted darkly at something that made Morgan shudder. On a whim she decided to search for Kenneth’s name, but after a while it seemed clear that she wouldn’t find it among the Giovanni, who kept very traditional or at least Italian names – Belladonna, Maria, Antonia, Giuseppe, Matteo – for their children. Partway down the tree another name took hold alongside Giovanni, the name Milliner. She would probably have better luck finding Kenneth’s name there, so she searched, and she suddenly found it, but it must have been a trick of the light that the single date beneath his name read 1839. It was probably the combination of moonlight and thick impasto oils; 1939 was equally improbable and 1989 seemed like a much more reasonable date.
Morgan had almost completely convinced herself of this when a voice whispered in her ear,
“So I see you’ve met the family.”
Kenneth slid his arms around her waist and tugged her back against his body. Despite the soft lines of his chest he was firmly-muscled, a fact that surprised Morgan every time he embraced her but thrilled her just the same.
“Your name is Kenneth Milliner,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Your family is old and wealthy.”
He smiled against her throat. “Bankers, almost every generation. Rumor has it that we’re related to the Medici on the Italian side, and my mother often complained that I have the darkness of the Italians rather than the paleness of the Milliners, but I don’t mind. Now come on. Back to bed with you.”
Morgan tried to tug away to search for the Medici name again. “No. I want to stay here.”
He smirked against her skin again, and in her mind’s eye she could see his blood-red mouth. His mouth was always red, as if he had just kissed someone very thoroughly or just come down from an orgasm that explained his languid, predatory grace, and when he kissed her she lost all senses.
“Making love on the ballroom floor. That’s kinky.”
It was, and it was wonderful.
During the day it seemed as if Morgan’s life hadn’t changed at all. She went to work with the other power women at her financial firm and was as dogged and hardworking as she had been before and after the divorce. She drank designer espresso in the Starbucks at the bottom of the building with the other women from her office. They sat together and bemoaned their singleness due to their careers, bashed on men and laughed at their pathetic lives. Morgan never told them of Kenneth. It never occurred to her confess, during one woman’s retelling of her wild tryst with one of the accountants who worked down on the tenth floor, that she spent her nights in the arms of a fifteen-year-old boy who was a man behind his eyes and between the sheets. Memories of a pair of ageless green eyes seemed to fade to infrequency with the dawn, and yet grow stronger as night approached. She knew it would be madness to tell them of this man-child she had taken as a lover.
Or had he taken her as a lover?
It was madness to tell them about him, the way they would sit for hours in the bar and talk about history and literature, music and philosophy (although it seemed no matter how long they stayed in the bar they could go back to his house for hours of mind-blowing sex and she still had time to nap and get home before the sun rose. It never occurred to either of them to take things to her place even though it was definitely closer), how he was so confident and intelligent in ways even men her age couldn’t display.
There was no way she could tell them about the whimsical way in which he would talk about death, about watching a soul leave a body or a soldier taking a last breath. There was no way she could describe Kenneth when he was talking about death, his face pale and solemn and his eyes serious, but his mouth eternally amused.
Morgan herself barely understood it when he brooded to himself on some nights, somehow understanding that she was tired and just wanted to drink, and he would entertain himself, cutting off a single shiny black hair from his own head and feeding it into the flame of a black candle. He’d tip his head to one side and fall into a daze, eyes unfocused, listening to something only he heard. He held the candle in one hand as the single hair burned, and he seemed uncaring about the hot wax that dripped onto his long fingers and undoubtedly burned. Once he had said that the fact he came away from his encounters with the hot wax completely unscathed was proof of mind over matter and therefore the mind’s triumph over pain. When the hair was all burnt – and he never seemed to cut them the same length – he would snap out of his daze, amused or confused or sometimes even a little angry. Morgan had been drinking vodka one night, and she was sure he had looked sad, but she had never held her vodka well anyway.
Morgan didn’t know how to tell her coworkers how intense this boy was, the way he looked at her and touched her, kissed her, made love to her, spoke in her ear as if he were telling her the deepest, darkest secrets of the universe. Sometimes he leaned over and murmured in Italian, words she didn’t understand but made goose bumps prickle over her skin. Kenneth was intense and passionate and focused on only her. More and more he was invading her days, and Morgan was starting to wonder if she wasn’t a single, shiny black hair slowly being devoured in his flame.
She didn’t dare tell her coworkers, but after a while – and she still isn’t clear on how long – she didn’t have to, because they seemed to notice for themselves. Brenda noticed how she always seemed tired, and were those bruises around her eyes? Catherine saw how she was often distracted and tried to cajole her into confessing what was on her mind, and even though the rest of the ladies were convinced she was still stuck on her ex-husband Will it was Shelley who knew she was involved with a man.
Morgan tried to explain it to them, tried to pretend she didn’t see the stark horror and disgust on their faces when she told them about Kenneth, about how he devoured her and consumed her and how he loved her.
“I love you,” he said.
Morgan had been about to fall asleep in the warm afterglow of passionate sex. Her eyes snapped open and she rolled over to face him.
He gazed at her, expression solemn and utterly serious. “It’s true. I love you.” She opened her mouth to protest, but he hushed her gently, and when he kissed her it was soft for once, and the only time she kept her wits about her as he did it. The brush of his mouth over hers was gentle and tender, and for once she wished his kiss made her mindless because then she wouldn’t be aware of the fear and tentative passion he was giving her with just a simple kiss.
“I know you think I’m too young to know what love is, that I’m too young for all that we do, but believe me when I say I’m older than I seem, and that it’s entirely possible that I love you.”
“Kenneth,” Morgan began, and realized just how infrequently they used each other’s names. When they were together they were the only two people in the world, cameos from his chauffeur aside.
“Morgan,” he breathed, and kissed her again, and this time she willingly surrendered her senses.
The looks on their faces were enough to shock her out of whatever dream she had been living in for however long the past while.
“Morgan, I hope you’re kidding me,” Brenda said slowly, “but if you’re not, you should break it off with this kid straight away and never see him again.”
Morgan nodded, a strange sort of dread building in her, and knew she would do it.
It wasn’t a dream, because that night Kenneth was at the bar, exactly as she had first seen him, sprawled in a velvet chair wearing his rumpled school uniform and drinking that blood-red wine. They talked about foreign politics and the philosophy of teaching, and Morgan realized rather starkly that it was odd how smart Kenneth was. All he knew, all he could say, the way in which he could express himself – maybe the school uniform was just a ruse and he was a genius who studied alone at home.
It was the first time Morgan had ever doubted the truth of him. She went home with him
anyway, and was surprised when she realized she knew that his chauffeur’s name was Steve. She followed him upstairs. They were in the master bedroom, and his parents must have been dead because this was clearly a master bedroom and if they were alive where would they sleep? She was going to tell him then, break it off, but he kissed her and she lost all logic and sense and let him take her as he had the first night.
Afterwards she lay, basking in golden warmth, when Brenda’s voice returned to her. Abruptly she rolled out of bed and began pulling on her clothes.
Kenneth sat up immediately, a single, smooth motion that revealed a hidden strength she hadn’t known was in his thin frame. “Where are you going?” His voice was sharp, his eyes bright and startled.
This was the second instance in which she’d seen him lose any composure. In fact, he looked angry.
“I’m leaving,” she said, and her voice came out much steadier than she thought it would. “I had meant to tell you earlier, but then you kissed me, and you know your kisses make me crazy.”
He flinched at her accusing tone. “You like my kisses.”
“Yes, I did, but I’ve come to my senses. You say you love me, Kenneth, but both of us know you’re too young to know what love is. You’re too young for everything we do despite your insistence to the contrary, and I am leaving. I came out of my divorce looking for a man and somehow ended up with a boy.” She pulled her jacket on and buttoned it up smartly. “It was fun, but I have to go.”
He was out of the bed and had caught her wrist when she was at the door. His skin was even paler than usual, and his eyes were wide. His smirking mouth was pressed into a thin line. “I love you, Morgan, don’t you understand that?”
“Sure you and I had great sex, but you’re just a kid, Kenneth,” she said.
He flinched at her nonchalant tone. “It wasn’t just sex, it was making love! And I’m not just a kid. How many times have I told you that?”
She ran a hand down his bare chest, telling herself that she wasn’t doing it to memorize the soft lines of his boyish body one last time. “Your words say one thing, and yet your body says another.”
His expression hardened. “I thought that I, out of anyone, would have taught you that age isn’t in one’s body but one’s mind.”
Morgan patted his head condescendingly. “That’s a sweet ideal, but it’s not a reality.”
His eyes widened again, filled with an acute pain that would have made Morgan wince. “Please, Morgan, I do love you. I promise I do. I’ve given my soul and my heart to you, I’ve given everything I am to you. I’ll love you until the day you die, and every day after – ”
She broke out of his grip – which took more effort than she would have expected – and hurried down the stairs, trying to ignore the itch of his wounded gaze on her back. She walked out of the foyer, and for the first time headed for the gates on foot. They loomed above her, dark and sinister in the moonlight, and for an irrational moment she thought he was going to keep her trapped there. She whirled around, and she saw him standing in one of the upper windows, saw him more clearly than she should have been able to at that distance. He was staring down at her through the glass, one pale hand pressed to the barrier, and his eyes were full of a deep, soul-wrenching pain that seemed to have spanned a century.
She saw his pale lips move, and for once she could read his words.
“I’m not too young, I’m not. You just don’t see…”
And then the gates opened, and she fled. She didn’t see him bow his head, tears as red as the wine he drank staining his pale cheeks.