by Ace Gray
“I’ll kill him.” That terrifying voice of my dad’s was back on the fringes of my consciousness. I shied away from it.
“You said you wouldn’t.” Horse was there in his easy, slow tones too.
“Please, Cole.” My mom was there and her sugar sweet is what I fluttered my eyes open to.
“Mom?”
“Baby?” The bed shifted beneath her and in an instant, she was beside me, wrapped around me. “How are you?”
“Where’s Brye?”
“Are you okay?” She didn’t answer, instead, propping herself up and smoothing away my hair as she stared into my face.
“What happened? Where’s Brye?”
“Are you in pain?” Her hands fluttered around me, her eyes just as manic as my insides.
“Brye!” I called out.
“He’s alive despite my better judgment.” My dad sat down next to me and took my hand. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Pain. Serious pain. And then a white so pure it could have been a field of pristine snow.
I looked around for the first time since their voices had roused me. Some part of me had known I wasn’t on the dark sidewalk in the pouring rain anymore, but I hadn’t taken the time to look around. I was nestled in bed, wearing one of Horse’s gigantic t-shirts. Coincidentally he was the only one missing from the bedroom. Conrad was perched on the nightstand watching some sort of Real Housewives near my feet. I wiggled my toes only to have that flash of frigid white blast though me again.
“Ouch!” I winced.
“He shot you.” My dad’s hair-raising voice was back and this time I didn’t blame him.
“Brye?” I gulped.
“We’re calling him Regina George, right now.” Conrad flipped between channels during a commercial. “We all feel personally victimized.”
My mom backhanded his thigh where it peeked out of his pink satin bathrobe.
“As long as we’re calling him something.” I blew out a deep breath.
He’d shot me. He’d shot me with a bullet meant for my dad and still my worry for him made shapes on my insides.
“Filly,” my dad started as he picked up my hand and traced the bones of my fingers, “I know this is all new to you, but I think he needs to die.”
“No!” I ripped my hand away as I shot up to sitting and backed to my headboard. My leg echoed my pained word, but I managed not to cry out.
“Bean, we were wrong to shelter you completely from all of this, but your dad is right. Leaving unraveled ends like this…” My mom who had saved the earthworms from our sidewalk in the Spring rain was telling me to take Brye’s life.
I couldn’t find the words. Too many of them piled up inside me. They were monsters but then again so was he. There were two sides to his story just like there had to be two to theirs. If I could love them and be furious, then with Brye I could feel everything strong and wicked and wonderful all at once too.
They all waited patiently as I swallowed the emotion thick in my throat. As I swallowed the desire to scream.
“I want to see him,” I said softly, making sure nothing in my voice agreed or disagreed to what they were suggesting.
“Bean, what if he hurts you?” My mom reached for my unharmed calf.
“Then it’ll make your decision all the easier.”
My mom notched herself under my shoulder as we walked down the hall. Brye had grazed me for the most part, but there was a spot in my calve that screamed a little bit louder than the rest. I could walk myself, but it was a nice to have to have the support. Physically and metaphorically.
“Filly—” my mom started with that motherly and utterly worried tone.
“Mom, please. Don’t tell me that I shouldn’t do this or that I don’t know what it’s like. I just lived weeks of it. It may not be a lifetime, but I get it.” I adjusted on her shoulder, thinking about abandoning her grasp but not really wanting to.
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She sighed. “I was going to say I’m sorry.”
I stopped and pulled her up short. “What?”
“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you something. There was no way—is no way—to talk about it all.” She glanced at my dad then down at the floor. “But we should have said something so you’d know it was real. And scary. We tried so hard to keep anything bad from ever finding you, we didn’t think—”
“I’m grateful for the way you raised me, Mom,” I interrupted softly. “Please don’t ever think I wish that had been different.” And I knew in that moment it was true. I wouldn’t change it—I wouldn’t change anything about my life, my past, my present. It was the secret that had hurt. “This life, your life, blindsided me. I didn’t think there was anything hidden between us and here I find an entire world.”
“Can you ever forgive us?”
“Yes,” I answered unequivocally.
She didn’t hesitate as she pulled me into a hug, strong and fearless like my mom had always been. Like she’d been when she got her scars… My dad bent and kissed the crown of my head, wrapping around the both of us. My dad who had always chosen love…
They had to understand the complexity of this all. Of the intimate relationship between bad and good, ugly and beautiful. They lived the duality day in and day out. This was something they couldn’t question.
I gathered up my strength and straightened my shoulders between them and I schooled my voice. This wasn’t a fight, but this wasn’t a request either. It wasn’t even an ultimatum. It just was.
“And if I forgive Brye, you both will too.”
My blood had stopped dripping from what was likely a broken nose and started crusting on my upper lip. It was starting to itch where it flaked against my scruff. I ran through a list of comments that would get Horse to hit me again.
Fuck knows I deserved it.
I’d been aiming at her dad, hoping to blow his knee to bits just because he was a cocky piece of shit, and instead I’d hit her. My heart hurt so badly, the beat down I’d provoked actually felt good.
“I drugged her and made her touch another girl,” I said the words with a mirthless laugh knowing just what they would do to her uncle.
Sure enough, Horse rose from his perch on the dresser and walked with calm, calculated steps to where he had me bound to a desk chair. He was every bit of brawn and muscle and mayhem as my father’s stories made him out to be. It made the crunch of his fist into my body that much more gratifying.
Horse laid one of his huge hands on each of my wrists as though he expected them to go somewhere despite being tied brutally tight with the clothesline from two different showers then bent to look me straight in the eye.
“You think I don’t know what game you’re playing?” he snarled within an inch of my face. “I’ve carried the weight of so many wrongs on these shoulders, don’t think I don’t know you’re looking for redemption the only way you know how.”
I wished that the blood was still thick in my mouth from where my cheek had ripped open on my teeth with one of his hooks. If it was, I could spit in his face.
“If you’re so hard up for a fight, I’ll oblige, but if you think for one minute my fist pummeling your face will erase what you did—”
“Maybe you just don’t hit hard enough,” I cut him off then found the sharpest words I could find, ones that mimicked the way his cut into me. “She’s tight, and oh so responsive. Whimpered when anyone touched her.”
He growled something primal as he stepped back. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to bite, that the feeling of fear and pain for Filly was going to be the only thing resonating in my chest, but then Horse tensed and flexed. Before I realized what was coming his giant boot crash into my chest so hard I couldn’t breathe.
There was a moment of air whooshing beside me, but I couldn’t steal any of it into my lungs. The burn of my chest complimented the crash of my body and crack of my head onto the floor behind me.
“Don’t talk about Filly like that,” Hor
se said simply against the roar and rush of blood and pain in my ears.
I sucked in deep breaths as I tried to focus in on the ceiling. Spackle gave way to the crown molding of the room and it made me think of that night in the dining room with Filly. I was a monster for stealing from her. I was an even bigger asshole for exploiting it now. If I was honest, I wanted to keep my memories for myself, tucked into my pocket to unfold for a rainy day. She had murmured my name even when I’d done nothing to deserve it.
The violent and savage tears balled in my throat and put pressure on my ribs, my heart. Of all the pain I’d doled out, the only thing that made my soul ache was Filly.
“You know I think she loves you?”
“Shut up,” I snapped. I couldn’t think about her goodness any more than I already had.
“And I get it. Her dad was like you, I was like you, it makes sense she’d find a soul like that, that she’d see through the other shit.” Horse kept speaking from somewhere over top of my knees, probably leaning against the dresser as he had been.
“Shut the fuck up,” I warned louder this time.
“You don’t become worthy like this.”
“I don’t become worthy at all.” My emotion broke loose—the hurt, the fury, the pain, the tears—and I sounded every bit as tortured as he was.
“You’re right, you don’t become. You already are.” Filly’s voice blew into the room like a cool breeze. “What did you do to him?” Anger strangled her voice the next moment and my heart beat a little faster.
She gave a damn. After everything, she gave an ever-loving damn about me.
“Nothing he didn’t ask for,” Horse answered simply.
“Get out,” she commanded.
“No fucking way, Bean.”
“We’ll be just down the hall Filly,” Cole interjected. “Remember what we said though. Loose ends…”
I knew the warning in his voice without him finishing his sentence. It was the same one I’d give.
“I will, Dad. I promise.”
“We’re just going to leave her in here?” Horse asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered and the way it was a dove song just like Filly’s, I guessed Elle Laroux was here too. “She’s not a child anymore. She knows what’s at stake.”
There were no more words, just footsteps and some things likely unspoken until the hotel door clicked into place. Still the silence remained, only punctuated by Filly’s deep, practiced breaths. The quiet stretched out and went thick between us, a new weight on my chest, more painful than the last because I didn’t know what she would fucking say.
“Is what he said true?” She broke the tension with her quiet question. I wanted to bask in the sound before it got loud or mean or accusatory. When I didn’t answer, she asked again, and this time her voice wavered.
“Yes.” I had to choke out the answer.
“Why? Why would you ask for this?”
I swore I heard tears warble on her voice and it cracked what little was left inside me.
“I hurt you,” I answered without thinking it through, without calculating what my honesty would cost me, and for maybe the first time in my life.
“I’m going to be okay,” she murmured.
“I don’t care, Filly. I don’t care if you’re perfectly fine a second later, I hurt you and I deserve that back ten-fold.”
“You tried to shoot my dad.”
“Old habits die hard.”
All I wanted was to see her, to know that I could come back from this. She didn’t have to forgive me now. Maybe ever. But she had to redeem me the way only she could.
“You’re the one that sent me here. You’re the one that wanted me safe,” she countered with a deep and weepy breath. “With them. Why come back if you just wanted to hurt us?”
I felt the words bubble up in me, all my truths, all my fears. I could choke them down, shove them back behind the wall I’d so perfectly formed, or I could let her break them down for good.
“I’m a man with a death warrant, I didn’t think about you. I thought about me. And how my last wish on this godforsaken planet was to see you. Make sure you were safe.”
There was silence and all my inadequacies flared, desperate to swallow me up. But then the soft pad of her footsteps came closer. They were a little hitched but still soft and delicate.
“I’m safe,” she murmured as she crossed her legs and sat down beside me.
God, she was beautiful. Sunshine wrapped in a giant t-shirt. I wished it was mine and that I could reach out and touch her soft skin. Her hair was tossed up and her makeup had smeared, but I liked this version better than any other I’d seen before. She seemed real.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Was I really your last wish?” She reached forward and brushed against my skin.
“Always will be,” I gasped as I nuzzled into her hand.
She reached for my wrist then, unafraid of what I was, what I’d become, coated in blood and hatred. Her delicate fingers worked on the shower wire cutting into my skin. She was so concentrated threading the wire in and out then in and out again. The pinch subsided slightly, but I wasn’t free to hold her. And that’s what hurt most of all. She worked more diligently at my wrists and ankles but couldn’t get me free. Her furious howl filled the room when she gave up and just yanked.
“Why won’t it budge?” she screeched as she pulled hard on the wire and it wouldn’t give.
My insides warmed just at the idea that she wanted me. Well, wanted me free anyways.
“Filly, it’s okay. Take a breath,” I urged and her eyes met mine, warm sea glass on the sand of some perfect beach. I melted back into the chair, the carpet and wished it was her.
She managed to get me loose and all I wanted was to reach for her. But like she knew, she stood and disappeared, leaving my hands as empty as my soul. I pulled myself back inward and then up to sitting, my feet landing on the back of the chair, my ankles a little too sore to push it away.
Filly reappeared in the room with a hand towel. She walked toward me fearlessly and held up the warm white rag before touching my skin. I nodded once and she crouched beside me. Only a faint wince colored her features before concern took over.
Her steady hand came to my face and ever so gently she started to wash the blood from my face. I winced automatically.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked.
“Not you. Never you,” I answered as I placed my face back against her hand. The warm towel was was both rough and reassuring against my skin as it turned first pink then red. She cleared the caked on blood from my lip then my nose. My chin then my cheek. All the while she scooted closer to me..
“Is it too much to ask that I just hold you?” I asked when she was almost pressed against me.
“Brye,” she gasped as her warm towel fell away.
“All I want is to touch you again, Filly. Let me?”
She stared me down, her wide gaze scraping at mine, her fingers wringing at the towel. Hurting her had changed everything. This moment between us, well the last few actually, rebuilt me a little bit different. They rebuilt me with hope.
“I thought seeing you was my dying wish, but it’s not enough. With you, nothing is enough.” I poured my heart out knowing there was nothing left for me to lose. There was nothing left for me to win either. They were just the words I needed her to hear.
“How can you say that?” Her eyes watered with so much emotion. “You don’t even know me, not really.”
“I know how strong you are.” I reached up and pushed her loose hair behind her ear. “I know how beautiful you are. How you paint with your whole soul.”
“Those are reasons to like someone, Brye, not make them your dying wish.” She nestled into my hand still resting at her cheek.
“Nothing and no one has ever made me feel like you do.”
“We” —she gestured between the both of us— “haven’t been easy.”
“I know.” I
took a deep breath and raised my other hand to her opposite cheek, my thumb traced her bottom lip without thinking. “But I wouldn’t change a thing. I would take the beatings, keep the brand, and I will take the bullet because I’m taking them for you.”
The broken boy was gone. His insides weren’t the turmoil of the painting. He wasn’t the oil slick where good and wicked met. The man in front of me was strong and resolute. He was everything beautiful I’d ever wanted Brye to be.
My hands trembled as I traded the towel for his body. His thighs, muscled and strong where I slowly slid along the contours of him. His breath hitched and he tightened his hold on me but didn’t pull me.
“That time I hurt you,” I said.
“The only thing that hurts is if you don’t touch me,” he answered through gritted teeth just before ehe smiled.
I made myself keep going, my hands innocently exploring until I reached the hem of his shirt. I pulled back a little watching my hand quake as I thought through my actions.
If I lifted that soft fabric, it was forgiveness. For everything. It was admitting that I felt inexplicably the same and my soul recognized his despite the barriers we’d both worked so hard to put up between us.
If I lifted it, I’d be exploring a body that might well become a corpse.
The way that singular thought split apart my insides urged me forward. I was giving my body, my heart, my soul what it wanted, what it may never get again. And I was going to pray like hell that mixing us together, could change his fate.
I started lifting again revealing the beautiful but battered and bruised skin that had made my mouth water since the first time I laid eyes on it.
“Filly,” he barely breathed my name, “this isn’t what I meant. I…” His eyes searched mine but couldn’t find an anchor point.
“I know,” I answered. “But I wouldn’t change a thing either, because it all brought me to you.”
Something softened behind his eyes as he pulled me in for a sweet kiss, one where his lips truly tasted the shape of mine. His fingers flexed the slightest bit into me, and his body bowed forward to find mine. I felt each split of his lip and massaged them with tender presses and pulls. He did the same to the one I wore. My body shuffled toward his wanting to feel the way each inch pressed against mine. And my fingers kept peeling at his tee.