The Tennis Player

Chapter 5

He wiggled again. If he wished me to remain sedate, he needed to stop that.

“My grandmother was furious. She got Virginia to sign a non-disclosure agreement, paid her a fortune, and sent her to live in another state, never to be heard of again. I have no recollection of her, but then, I was only with her long enough to be born and have a couple of feedings. Then she was gone.”

“You were put up for adoption? No, you couldn’t have been; you’re living here.”

I couldn’t see Clark’s face as it was turned away from me, but I could feel him shudder. “My grandmother is devious and cruel and manipulative. She can also be kind when it suits her ends but never loving. I think she’s probably a psychopath. I’ve looked that up, a sociopath, too, but I think she’s the former. Anyway, there was no way, in the overly religious, biblically- ubiquitous world she inhabited, that she could have a bastard son living under her roof. Yet, she still wanted one to raise, to mold. I’d be a play toy for her, someone to grow up having her fingerprints all over him. I think her long-term plan was that I’d be someone to take over her company when she was no longer able; my father certainly wouldn’t be able to do that; he was much too weak. I was someone she could dominate and indoctrinate, two things which she loved doing.

“As for my father, having me under her thumb and not his would be a continuing message to him how much power she had over him and how little influence or effectiveness he had.

“She didn’t raise me as his son, however. He couldn’t have a son because he was never married. No marriage, no sex, so no son; impossible with her job for her to be part of anything so wicked as out-of-wedlock sex or an illegitimate child. She got around that by declaring to the world that I was my father’s ward. That he hadn’t married but wanted to help deprived children in the world to have better lives, and so he took me, an unwanted baby, to be his ward. This helped with his image in her companies and made giving him his elevated position more acceptable and expected.”

“So you’re not his son?”

“I am, but I can’t tell anyone. Grandmother’s last name, and my dad’s, is Tellison. My name is Gleason; Clark Gleason. Actually, on my birth certificate, it’s listed as Clark Gleason-Tellison. But on any public record, like when I enrolled in school, it’s just Gleason.”

He fell silent then. He was probably talking about things he didn’t like remembering and had never spoken about before. But there was still too much I didn’t understand, and so I wiggled a little reminding him I was there. I said, “And then . . . ?”

He sighed. “She raised me. What she actually did was brainwash me. She wanted me totally dependent on her. I didn’t know any better. She emasculated me of all ego and any personality that was my own. As for my independence in action or thought? I had none. I grew up with no idea of anything original; everything was her doing, her opinions, her putting her brain into me. She made every decision. I became something of an automaton. Actually, a mini-her.”

“Hey. Wait a minute.” Something didn’t make sense. “You were told your name was Gleason. That you were his ward. If that’s so, how do you know all this? She certainly didn’t tell you. She didn’t want you to know.”

He nodded against his pillow. “I was wondering if you’d think of that. The thing is, my mother wasn’t going to interfere in my life. She was paid off not to and told that if she ever did, she’d be sued and have to return the money, and she had no way of doing that. But, as time passed, she wondered if I’d been told about her, told anything about it her. She thought I should know.

“But she couldn’t do it openly. It had to be kept silent, or she’d be in trouble. But she really did want to tell me about her. So, to avoid Grandmother finding out, she wrote all this stuff I’ve been telling you about, my father and the name and everything, and mailed it to the maid who works for the family next door. They’d been friends when Virginia lived here. She asked that maid to give me the letter in private and tell me it had to be kept a secret.

“The thing was, she’d never been able to do that before I went to school. Someone was always with me when I was out of the house before that. Even giving it to me at school was hard because Robert was always waiting for me there. What she did was, she got a school secretary she knew who went to the same church she did to give me the letter. That’s how I found out about my past. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it, so I snooped in Grandmother’s office. That’s when I saw my birth certificate, and it verified my name.

“Anyway, back to me and Grandmother. She spent almost all her time with me those first few, indelible years. I had no privacy; I had no concept of it as she was with me, clothed or naked, from the time I was a baby. She was the one who washed me in the bathtub. She cleaned me on the toilet. This continued as I grew older. I never knew this wasn’t the way things worked. I had no one to ask anything of but her. Isolated and brainwashed. From birth. That was me.”

“My god! But you grew older. When did she stop, well, any of this?”

“She hasn’t stopped, mostly. I can’t say no to her. She had a lever she used, starting when I was young. If I’d get even slightly resistant to anything she said or did, she reminded me that I am not a member of the family. I am a ward, that I was brought to live with them in order to make the man who lives with us, her son Charles, look good. And, if I didn’t remain entirely obedient and grateful, they’d send me away.

“They can do that, she told me, as I was only a ward with no rights as far as the Tellison family went. She said they’d send me to an orphanage that knew how to deal with disobedient children. How to treat them so they’d never be disobedient again, and in any case, I’d never see them again.

“This was the only home I knew, and I was terrified to be abandoned like that.”

In a smaller voice, he said, “I’ve been threatened with that my entire life.”

“But you’re 14 now. You’ve grown; you’re going through puberty. She has to have relented some.”

“Things weren’t always awful. Yeah, I’m telling it like it was, but remember, I had no idea that this was all a scam, a trick she was playing to have total control over me. She wanted me to be devoted to her. She knew better than to make my life so unpleasant I’d not mind running away or being sent away. She wanted me to not only adopt her ideas and perspectives, she wanted me to idolize her and adore the life I had as I grew up. She wanted me to never want to leave her.

“I didn’t realize till recently how I’d been brainwashed. She tried hard to make me happy while at the same time she was brainwashing me. She made me entirely reliant on her. And it worked; I was. I didn’t want to leave. Still, I was scared if I didn’t do what she wanted, it might happen.

“But she did want me happy. That’s why I had tennis lessons. Swimming lesson. Billiards and pool instructions. Electric trains to build sets for and play with. A horse of my own. All sorts of toys and activities. There were many things that kept me active and happy.”

He paused again, remembering those times. Then, “I only realized later that even with those things, she was being devious. She was always thinking of the future. Of me replacing her when that was necessary and I was able to take the reins of her company.

“One of her fears, and it grew with time, was I’d become unsuitable for that role. There could be several reasons for that, but the main one that concerned her was, of course, the one that she’d have no control over, couldn’t fix.”

“What was that?” I asked. I didn’t want him to forget I was there. That I was participating in this. He was totally into his story, and I wanted him to remember I was his audience.

“What would have made me completely unsuitable for taking over her company would have been if I was gay. Even while her company preached that being a homosexual was a choice weak males made, she knew that wasn’t true. But she was scared I might be gay because my father had always been fluid about his sexuality. So she wanted to do all she could to make sure I wasn’t gay. By the time I was ten, the people who were giving me lessons in swimming and tennis, even pool, had all become females. Not only that, but young and pretty females. She knew I’d be getting crushes at my age. She wanted any crushes I got to be on females. She wanted to do what she could so that my only sexual urges would be directed toward females.”

He shook his head as well as was possible with it on a pillow. “I found out that she told these coaches that if I showed any interest in anything involving sex as I grew into puberty, she’d like them to encourage it. She’d pay them extra in fact. No intercourse, but anything else.”

I had to wonder, had that actually happened? But, talking about crushes, talking about sexual urges, thinking that maybe he’d actually done things with those girls, all that got my motor running again. I started to get hard. He felt it. Even deep into his memories as he was, he felt it.

“You want me to continue talking?” he asked. I could hear a hint of humor in his voice.

“Soon,” I said. I think he could hear the randy in me. “I haven’t heard yet about you in school, why you never spoke to anyone, and why now you’re talking to me.”

He wasn’t going to do that right then. He was aware that I was excited. “I’m tired of talking,” he said. “I’ll tell you, but after.”

“After what?”

“This,” he said, and rolled out of my arms so he was facing me.

Two 14-year-olds, neither with any sexual experience, both gay, both liking each other a lot. But even more, we were in bed together, not a stitch on either of us, and, now, both as hard as we could be.

I’d been feeling overwhelmed with doubts about him. I still hadn’t heard all of why he’d experienced such a major transformation, but I’d heard enough to be sure that, when he finally got around to telling me, it would make sense. I no longer felt he was just using me for his own purposes. Well, in a way, he was; he was using me to get out from under the thick cloud that had darkened his life. But there was more to it, and I now knew that. He liked me and wanted me to be the one to help him climb out of the pit he’d been in. But it was me he wanted to do that with because he liked me. He also trusted me; he was trusting me with the secrets he’d held his entire life.

I’d wanted us to feel like equals in this great adventure we were on. And now I did.

I’d seen some gay porn. Not much and a lot of what I had seen turned me off. But I’d seen some young-looking twinks in action, so I knew some of the things boys did that were exciting. A lot of them were ugh! But not all.

He hadn’t seen any gay porn. He was sure he’d be deported to Bangladesh or North Korea and into sex slavery if he was found watching that. His grandmother wasn’t only anti-gay. She was also vindictive and cruel. He knew gay sites existed because he’d overheard us talking at school, but no way was he going to risk going there. His grandmother checked his computer.

So I knew more than he did! Finally, something I could be better at than he was. Something where I could take the lead.

First, I kissed him. Just a short kiss, but lips to lips, and my eyes were on his when I did it.

“Ohhh,” he said, rather breathlessly. And the quality of the sound he made, the wonder in his eyes—I suddenly understood better why I’d been so reluctant to do anything with him till he’d told me why he was acting like he was now compared to how he’d been for as many years as I’d known him. That’s why this new outgoing and alive Clark with a Tigger-like bounce hadn’t seemed real to me. It hadn’t been. It had been an act!

That’s why I’d felt so unsure of myself, unsure how to act, how to accept him. He hadn’t seemed real to me, this bigger than life personality he suddenly had. And then talking to me, he’d made the quiet-boy version of himself seem unreal, too. But now, this ‘Ohhh’, which he’d drawn out and said softly with his eyes full of understanding of what he was feeling, this, THIS, was real. This was a boy of 14 experiencing sex for the first time, and in doing so, learning who he was.

He wasn’t acting a role now. This was him, and there was nothing phony about him. Now he was a kid with doubts showing, with anxieties like we all had. It was apparent in the sound of his voice, in his body language. This was a boy I wanted to know.

I kissed him again, and we held it for a long time, panting hard when we finally broke free. Then I took charge. He lay on his back and I had my way with him. Well, I let my fingers do that, all over him. Light touch and firm. Full hand and fingertips. His skin was alive and he was wriggling and moaning, and often, when I was through with one patch of skin, I bathed it with my tongue. He was so sensitive! So wriggly. So alive.

After my fingers and tongue had left one spot and moved to another, I tried lightly puffing air on the previous spot. His breathing was heavy, raspy, and I had to hold him down or I think he’d either have bounced or floated off the bed.

I moved slowly, top to bottom, missing the middle the first time, then not missing it on my way back up. He was ready, more than ready, and I wasn’t surprised when he exploded as soon as I touched the tip of his erection with my tongue. Spasm after spasm. I took him in my hand as that began, and simply held on till he finished. I had the impression, from the writhing and grunting that his heart might have exploded if I’d done more than just held on.

When he was done, I lay on top of him and kissed him again. This time we used tongues. When he was rested, we rolled over. It was my turn. And I got to experience the effects of sensory overload just as he had. It was my first time, too.

There was no more talking at that point. We were both wiped out, and we both wanted sleep. This time, he spooned me. I’d never felt so comfortable and loved in my entire life while being held like that. It was wonderful.

Over breakfast, which we ate sitting side by side with our knees touching, I asked for the rest of his story. “Why all those years of silence at school?”

No more holding back. He was able to talk now. “My grandmother’s fear about my going to school was that some of her control over me would be lessened. I’d be in contact with other kids. Especially boys. I might get crushes on them. I might start questioning my sexuality. And if that happened, certainly her control over me would start to slip. She’d been strengthening it for years. She didn’t want that hold to weaken now.

“She needed to make sure that close contact with other kids didn’t happen. The way she did that was to talk to my teachers, but talk to me first. She told me I wasn’t to talk to any of the kids at school. She told me if I did, sooner or later they’d learn that I was a ward. They’d be talking about their parents as all kids do, and I’d mention I didn’t have any, I’d be unable to keep that to myself, and that would mean sooner or later I’d be taken away from them. That was what happened to wards. Much as she would want me to stay with them, they couldn’t prevent the state from doing what it did. The state didn’t want them growing dependent on one family. The only way I could be safe, she said, was to have nothing to do with any of the kids at school.

“You have to remember, she began doing this when I was four and talking about eventually going to school. Four, and then five. Five years old, and accepting everything she said to me was true. She always represented the truth I had in my upbringing. You don’t know how naive a kid is, and who only hears one message all his life. She had total control over everything in my life. Why wouldn’t I believe what she said?

“But she didn’t trust me to not get involved with the other kids all by myself, so she engaged the teachers to keep me separated from the others. She bribed them! Well, she called it something else, but they were paid, and paid a lot, to see I had as little contact as possible with the other kids.

“By the time I was older, third and fourth grades, I was used to avoiding the other kids. It was now normal. It began to seem like a game Grandmother and I were playing. I was asked every day I came home if I’d talked to anyone, and I was rewarded when I said I hadn’t. I went along with it. It wasn’t until I started puberty and the other kids all looked a lot more interesting to me that I started to wonder why I had to be so insular. I saw what I had been missing.”

I thought about all this. It couldn’t have worked without it having been started when he was very young, but he had been. I thought any child being handled the way he had been would have followed the same path. I could still remember my own childish fears that somehow my parents might abandon me or die. That was a real fear many kids had. It had been exacerbated with him.

But then I had another thought. “When we were assigned to work together, your behavior changed from the reclusive way you’d been to something completely different. You became outgoing, almost bigger than life when we were together. And you became, well, sexy and almost seductive. What was that all about? Why such a sudden change?”

He grinned at me, then leaned over to kiss me. It wasn’t far to lean. “I had to know. I thought you might be gay. But I had to know. My secret, that I’m gay, has to remain a secret, or I’m totally screwed. If you were gay, and keeping it secret from the world, I thought you’d be able to keep mine, too. Especially if you were as attracted to me as I was to you. If you weren’t gay, I couldn’t let you know any of this because, at our age, it’s so hard to keep any secrets. But, I don’t know—I might have come on a little strong.”

He laughed. This time I was the one to lean in. After the kiss, I said, “But what happens now?”

“Now, we enjoy today and tomorrow. Till my grandmother returns on Monday. She’s the Chairman of the Board of Tellison Corporation. This year’s Board of Director’s meeting is in Paris where they’re opening a new branch. Stockholders are less likely to attend there, which is what she wants because the entire board gets voted on by shareholders that attend the meetings. No proxies; proxies are how most corporations do it. She expects the other board members and she will have enough shares of stock to vote themselves in again to their positions. She doesn’t expect enough other shareholders to attend the meeting.

“But she’ll be home the day after tomorrow. We have till then. We should probably do some work on the project so we’ll have hard evidence that we’re working on it. But we still will have time to do what we did last night.”

“Yeah, for two days! But what about when she’s home?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I do know I want us to be together. How we’ll manage that, I have no idea.”

NEXT CHAPTER