by Ace Gray
I liked her.
After dinner, we’d walked through Grant Park together, her too naive to realize that we shouldn’t walk through dark places late at night, and me the definition of the shadows that could eat her whole. But when the illuminated three-tiered cake that was Buckingham Fountain shone on her enrapt face, I thanked fate for her wide-eyes in more ways than one.
She studied the detail and I studied her. When she couldn’t possibly search for more figures cast in the warm yellow light, she cocked her head and smiled. I’d started to ask her why and she’d shushed me—something no Chicagoan would ever do to a MacCowan—and answered color then squeezed my hand and let the changing light dance on her features.
Her words, her stories were like that too. Different. Magic. And they spoke to the part of me I’d lost rather than the parts I’d found. She pulled me from the dark Rosalyn’s death had left me in even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.
“Dammit,” I snarled as I reached down for my hardening dick. Again.
The memory of her was driving me insane after successfully driving me to drink and to fuck my hand repeatedly.
I kept my eyes squinched shut so I didn’t see the paintings hanging on every inch of every wall in my palatial room. If I thought about her here amongst the art, that look of wonder consuming her, those delicate fingers desperate to touch the frames, the colors reflected back in her big doe eyes…
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I roared.
“Brye?” Emmett burst in the door a moment later, his handgun out, naturally sweeping the room. When he saw nothing but me fisting on my dick, he un-cocked his gun and put it back into his holster. “I heard you…”
I dropped myself and wiped my other hand over my face. “I’m fine.”
“She got under your skin.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe.
“Don’t start with me.” I stood, not caring that Emmett got a full frontal as I walked to the bar cart I kept in my room and poured a scotch.
“She’s innocent,” I said after a sip. “She’s different.”
“You want me to listen or talk?” he asked simply.
And I knew the subtext. I was in deep shit with Filly. “She loves art,” I said, a halfhearted surrender. “More than me.”
“All the better to hang her up on the wall and admire from afar.” He sighed and helped himself to a glass as well.”
Emmett had been in the family for a long time. One of the neighborhood rats that got swallowed up in the fold either because of or in order to steal cars. He’d been twelve maybe thirteen—my age—and usually found his way into the soccer games we played in the street in front of Mickey Maloney’s old house—our old house. He’d moved up in the ranks of the family, but he’d never strayed far from being my friend. He’d be my right hand when this world became mine.
“Someone like her can’t live like this.” He waved his scotch around the room. “We have money and drugs, power and sex at our fingertips in exchange for a few measly rules. It’s the only language we speak. Sometimes that has to be enough.”
I thought about my ability to snap my fingers and have any sin in the city. My dad had fought tooth and nail to gain that control after Mickey Maloney was killed. He’d brought me up in a world of made men and taught me how to make myself. He’d made an empire out of a single hand-carved money plate.
But there was a whole other part of the world that had never existed for me except for that singular glimmer of a girl. Love. And in the deepest reaches of my fucked up heart, I ached for that. Judging by the way Filly flashed across my perpetual night sky I wanted fireworks despite how badly they would burn.
“I mean, honestly, what would you change?” Emmett slid into the leather smoking chair in front of my flat screen. “What’s so bad?” He pressed his glass of scotch to his temple and watched me.
Something in the way he shifted his gaze to follow me was almost predatory. Emmett had that glint in his eyes that I recognized from the mirror but still sent shivers up my spine. And made me hold my tongue. He didn’t need to know the ins and outs of my heart, nor how Filly rippled the darkest corners of it. And I did like the darkness…
“Someday you’ll be king, Brye, and you can shape the world as you please. Until then, enjoy it. Enjoy the hedonism of it all.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do, Emmett.” I didn’t bother to turn and look at him.
“If I were telling you what to do, you’d know it. You’d know it because I’d say don’t touch her. Don’t talk to her.”
I snarled at the thought.
“She’s divine and you’re a demon,” he continued. “You don’t drag her down into the muck. She drags you out. And that ruins everything.”
I squeezed on my scotch glass, wondering exactly how hard I could grip before it splintered in my hand. How dare he talk about her like that? How dare he talk about her period?
“Get her name out of your mouth, Emmett,” I warned.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll make you.”
“Already Filly over family,” he sneered.
It was the final straw. Hours earlier I told Filly that I would not tolerate insolence. With her, the mischief made me burn for her. But with Emmett...
I held my breath until my chest felt like a thick band wound tight on it, just in case I could count to ten and let it fade. Instead I counted to thirty-seven and still felt wrath crook my fingers. He had pushed too far. My eyes fell to the floor as I blew out the deep breath. I allowed a single heartbeat before I whirled and my elbow crashed into his cheekbone. Scotch splashed onto my thigh as he dropped the glass to the floor.
Emmett’s hand moved to his jaw and held it as he worked the hinge back into place. He studied me from his hunch and I kept my chin held high. When he shook it off, his spine straightened just before he raised his fists with an off-kilter look laced with darkness.
“I can have it all Emmett. Me. Because I’m a MacCowan. I’ll take it if I have to. I’ll take her,” I roared.
“Fuck you,” he said with that same sneer as before.
And then his fist swung and I dodged it. Mine flew and crunched into his stomach. He doubled over with a wheeze, holding the bruise I knew I’d left just before as his other hand flashed toward my groin. He grabbed my balls and squeezed. I rotated at the lightning that shot through me and wheeled his heel around to crash into the back of his knee. The joint gave out and were it not for his hold on my junk, he would have crumbled. Instead, he sunk slowly toward my knees. He squeezed my junk again then let go.
My face twisted in pain as I straightened myself above Emmett. A ghost of a smile hinted at my lips as I lorded over him.
Teach you to talk about my girl.
As fast as lightning, he roundhoused his leg, sweeping mine out from under me. I crashed into the hardwood floors of my bedroom before I even realized I was falling. Small points dug into me fast and furious as the momentum of the fall and the weight of my body obliterated his discarded scotch glass. I didn’t make a sound as the glass spliced into my back. I was grateful for the pain. It was a reminder. A reminder that he was right and that I dwelt in this world, not the one of art museums, long park walks, and stolen kisses. Filly had caught my eye because she was new and shiny. Unique but not a reality. Not for me.
“I yield,” I said sharp and low.
Wordlessly Emmett reached down for my hand and helped me off the floor.
“You didn’t have to fuck me up.” I twisted to brush the glass off my back and felt the pull and sting of the fresh wound.
“The look you get when you say her name says otherwise.”
I stood, woozing to the side from the fresh cut on my back. My head spun and the assault on my balls had been enough to make me heave. I had to catch myself on the mattress, bent over and sucking in deep breaths to try and find equilibrium.
“What happened here?” My father stepped into my doorframe.
“I was written a reminder,” I
answered.
“In flesh? Good boy, Emmett.”
“Did you need something?” I let my saltiness well up and crash into my dad like the sea itself.
“Cole Ryan.” He arched his eyebrow, his question inherent.
I sighed, exasperated and when I shrugged I felt the drips if fresh blood break free of the cut on my back. “What’s with the sudden fixation? It’s been what? Twenty-one, twenty-two years.”
“I have a feeling.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. He cocked his head then walked leisurely toward me. Lightning fast, his hand darted out and he dug a finger into my bleeding back. I felt the heat of my blood trickle in small rivers down my ass cheek.
“And good things come to those who wait,” he continued as he ground his nail into my back. “And I’ve been waiting a long time.”
Without another word he turned and left the way he came. When his footsteps padded from earshot, I righted myself and mirrored him as I turned toward my bathroom. Emmett dutifully followed and shut the door behind me before flipping on the bright overhead lights.
“Brye.” He sucked in a deep breath. Just the sound told me plenty. Adrenaline was keeping me from true torment.
“Can you clean it?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it may need stitches.” His hands stroked down my back, checking different spots, different muscles, dips, and grooves. I shuddered underneath his touch.
“Good thing we’re not gay or I’d think you were caressing me like a lover.” I laughed.
“If we were gay, you couldn’t handle me.” He chuckled and ran his finger down my crack I jumped when he pressed against my asshole. Then I winced, fully bared teeth, clenched fists and all. “Fuck man. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I chastised him. “This family does not apologize. Besides, I would have done the same to you if I’d swung hardest.”
He nodded curtly then reached for a towel to sop up my blood. I flinched the moment he got close to my balls.
“I’m not gonna touch your dick unless you ask,” he chuckled.
“You just touched my asshole.”
He laughed as he tossed the towel in the sink in front of me. It was a darker crimson than I would have guessed.
“Tell me more about Filly,” he changed the subject as he went to gather the first aid kit I kept in my bathroom.
“I thought she was off-limits.” Her name did weird things to us both. Yearning and loathing and lusting and brawling, all in a matter of minutes.
“She is,” he said simply.
“But my back is that bad?” I knew his tactics too well, she was a distraction incarnate. “Do I need to go to the ER?”
“Just tell me about her,” he said as he began cleaning my wounds with icy cold alcohol wipes. I winced against the sting.
“She’s different. She sees things that others miss. Or has a different way of looking at the world altogether. She saw through me.”
“Never mind. Knock this shit off.” His words stung but not nearly as much as the shit he scraped out of my gashes.
“She likes Degas. She could be one of his dancers. And the dress she wore last night…” I whistled and only part because of the antiseptic he was using on my back. I made myself keep speaking. And about her. I was hoping to associate her with the pain. “I don’t know fashion shit, but she wore this pink silk ballerina dress.”
The way he pulled on my skin made my breath catch and tears come to the corners of my eyes.
“You would fall for a painting.”
“Fall?” I chuckled lightly even with the pain. “She was just different. An artist. And she kissed with her whole body. Imagining that kind of passion elsewhere…”
“Don’t make yourself hard. I probably need to get you ice.”
He turned from me and filled up the bath, adding three buckets of ice when it was mostly full. I sucked in a deep breath as I stepped in. The piercing cold hurt so much it sucked the air out of my lungs but not the pictures of Filly from my mind. The only salve for that wound was the merciful knowledge that she was leaving tomorrow and never coming back.
I sat on the hood of my car and watched the sunrise blaze across the lake. The way the light glinted off the barely-there roll of water was an Impressionist dream. I could see the brush strokes. And Brye painting them.
He had been my constant companion for the past eighteen hours or so. Both the light cast on my vast sea and the deep shadows cast by my sun.
And being with him last night had been just that, a study in gradient. He was dark. He said it over and over. I felt it with my fingertips just as easily as my heart. But he was light too. I mean that kiss... that flipping, freaking kiss.
Brye kissed a way I’d never known before. His lips tried to know each inch of mine, they caressed each bit as if they were trying to learn. His tongue spoke a language I could only interpret through touch, the touch of his to mine. And his hands… God, those hands pawed at me as if he wanted nothing more than to tear me to shreds.
This was what it was like to be an addict—off-kilter and a slave to that skewed reality. A slave to those kisses that threatened to devour me whole.
“Arrrgghhhh,” I grumbled and rolled back to lay on my windshield.
My hormones were making idiot decisions for me.
If my skin against his had felt like home, if kissing him was as necessary as air or water, then being with him…
“Stop, Filly. Just stop,” I said the words softly to myself and slid off the hood of the ancient Charger and into the front seat.
I snapped open my phone and dialed my parents’ number. Only two rings snapped before my mom answered.
“Filly? Are you okay?” Sleep was thick in her voice.
“Yeah, of course. I was just about to get on the road.”
“Oh, okay. Good.” My dad asked the same question in the background, pulling her away from me for a second. She’s fine, Cole, sweetheart.
The worry in their voices hung on my heart.
“So, you’re leaving Taos today?” Mom asked and I could hear her rustling against sheets, likely headed toward the kitchen for coffee.
“Yeah, it was wonderful.” I told the story I’d rehearsed about making jewelry, the imperfections of stone and the difficulty of forging. When my mom, the metal worker, laughed, I knew all those years of being observant had paid off.
“I miss having you here with me, Filly Bean but I’m so happy you’re happy.”
I was happy she could hear it in my voice.
“So are Uncle Horse and Conrad there?”
“No, it’s their anniversary. Left us to our own devices.” She giggled.
“Mom,” I drug out her name. “Gross.”
“Someday, Filly.” She laughed again. “Like when you’re thirty-five or something, you’ll meet someone who stops your world. They’ll a shelter from the chaos, they’ll hold you together.” The emotion was so thick and warm in her voice.
“You love Dad a lot, don’t you?” I smiled.
“I cannot live without him.”
Swoon.
“Are you telling me Prince Charming exists?”
“No, no one’s that perfect.” My dad’s voice was back in the background teasing her. “But, Filly, there is someone who will go to the ends of the earth to find you.” She got surprisingly serious and my heart fluttered.
But then the sounds of an intense kiss crossed the line.
“You guys are disgusting,” I screeched. “I’m still on the phone.”
“Sometimes you can’t wait. You can’t deny what your body already knows.” My mom didn’t sound like my mom at all—she was a girl, smitten.
They both laughed and love brightened up the whole Chicago sunrise. The sunrise that seemed to be made in shades of Brye even more now than it was before.
“Where to next, Fill?” My dad took the phone.
I made a snap decision with my mom’s words in mind. I didn’t think of the consequences. Again. They were slipp
ing farther and farther away, replaced by weird whispers of magic on the breeze of the Windy City.
“Denver,” I answered on the fly. “I’m going to see the museum but I’m feeling the Impressionists at the moment and I think the Aspens will be amazing.”
His tension rolled across the line, but he sighed. “My daughter that follows her heart into the dark of the forest.”
“My dad that understands how hearts cannot be contained, even by a cage.”
“I miss you, Fill.”
“To the moon,” I whispered softly.
My parents answered in their telltale way, their voices the best home I’d ever known, “And across the stars.”
I was a traitor of the worst kind. I was in Chicago and lying to stay there. I’d made the decision on the phone, but I still sat in the front seat of my car, debating whether to actually dial. This was betrayal, pure and simple.
But to never see him again? To deprive myself of that touch? Those kisses? It was a betrayal of a different type. Even my mom had said that sometimes truths and wants were only evident in the very makeup of my bones.
Before I thought too hard, I pulled out the twenty he’d written the restaurant address on and turned it over. This was the last moment to turn back. I could start the car and head for highway eighty-eight and begin putting Illinois in my rearview mirror.
Putting Brye in my rearview mirror.
Maybe my parents had never made such reckless decisions, but someone in the Ryan family had to start living. My fingers trembled as they punched in his number and I sucked in a deep breath as I listened to the dial tone.
For a split second, I doubted myself. Not whether I should call but whether he would answer. Whether he’d felt any of the same. Whether I was risking it all for a bad boy that wanted in my pants or if he could really be…more. So much more.