Torn

by T. N. King

  “It’s not a B, thanks- I just wanted to talk to you that’s all. Since when can I not cook you something?” Granted, she didn’t do it often, but that was usually because of his own preferences or plans that she wasn’t given information regarding. Or her mother cooking before anyone could even get off work. Or even the whole family’s propensity towards picking up takeout on a whim to try and spare someone else the effort of having to cook for everyone.

  Her defense was met with silence, and one that she wasn’t keen on breaking right at the moment, with the way his fanning had stopped, his over large body coming up too close in proximity to her own. He was intimidating her, intentionally or not, and she wasn’t even sure if she had the wherewithal to withstand it currently. She was in too frazzled of a state with too little comfort being provided her from any avenue in her life.

  “You want to talk about the boy then.” Dangerously devoid of emotion, that faint mocking undertone to his words the only inflection he put into them at all.

  It was all she could do not to turn on the spot and throw her hands at his chest to tell him to leave. ‘The boy’ as if he were some ingrate or child being brought into his life. She knew he didn’t like him, but to be fair he hadn’t given him any sort of chance, all of those preconceived notions and the inability to look past them when he had actually met Aaron for the first time…

  “My boyfriend,” her words were curt, that hurt masked instead with the irritation that also grew alongside it, knife chopping down through that chicken and near into the cutting board itself with the force she put behind it. “I think you meant to say my boyfriend. The man I am in a relationship with. Or Aaron even, any of those work in place of ‘the boy’.” Any of them, all of them. He wasn’t just some stray that she had brought to the door, he wasn’t even new any longer. He was her boyfriend and her future, and she was getting tired of trying to defend it to the one person that should have been backing both her and Aaron both the most.

  “Relationship,” he said it like he was mocking the word itself, or her for using it…

  She couldn’t tell and her eyes were beginning to cross, knife slammed down on the countertop and her eyes squeezing to a close.

  “Man? You’re using a lot of words there Nicole and I’m not quite sure you actually grasp the meaning of them.”

  Oh, he was being mean, that condescending note to his voice, like he was playing, only he wasn’t. He wasn’t joking, he wasn’t saying anything funny, it was just mean- and the way that he presented it made her feel like she was half an inch tall. Something which always, when it came to Mason, reacted wrongly within her. Set up shop like a rapid fire, that hurt and irritation all morphing into one, it brought out the ugly in her. Unfailingly he always managed to do so when he resorted to that.

  “Oh, how would you even know what a relationship is Mason?” Quick and cutting, her own words spanning that distance between them before she’d even made that full turn around to face him. “To have a relationship you’d have to actually be capable of human emotion you know, or getting to know someone on any level that allowed you to have one.” Which meant talking to someone, or actually caring about any one, singular human being beyond what purpose they served him right then.

  His snort was more derisive than even his words had been, one half step from his long legs closing that distance until he was almost in her face, his blue eyes narrowed and that honeyed brown hair near brushing against her forehead when he bent himself in half like that to get eye level with her. He didn’t even look mean any longer, didn’t look like he was darkly amused with the conversation, he just looked livid, his features shuttered, and maybe later she would regret causing them to shut off like that, but for now she was too angry to adequately address it.

  “How can you even tell emotion from someone trying to fuck you Nicole, when that’s all you’ve ever attracted?” Soft, like velvet over the dagger, his words had the exact intended effect, slicing through her more effectively than any shouted sentence could have managed. “Maybe…” the word drawn out, his eyes going from her own and down, travelling her body with a sneer that froze her insides entirely. “…that’s what you attract because it’s all that you put out. How you present yourself.” He didn’t use the word, any form of it. He didn’t call her a slut, hadn’t called her a whore, didn’t even use any word within the sentence that could be synonymous to it, but the intent was the same and she reacted too quickly.

  She didn’t even give herself time to think about it, arm cocking back and the flat of her palm aimed for his face so close to her own. Only she’d forgotten who it was she was talking to, forgotten how quickly he moved when he chose to, his hand coming up to intercept her wrist, fingers closing about it in a way that would have made her all the more angry before. But with that mottled purple and black flesh beneath the hem of her sleeve like it was already instead she winced, sharp hiss of pain expelled through her suddenly clenched teeth. Another mistake, she was just piling them one on top of another now, his fingers loosening and her trying to jerk her arm back to her own person before he …

  Before he tried doing exactly what he was now, fingers pushing that sleeve up her arm to reveal the hand shaped bruise decorating her forearm, green tinge about the edges that hadn’t been there before when she’d found the shirt to cover it making her pause for a whole half of a moment. He wasn’t even asking her any questions, his thumb hovering just over that mangled flesh, more air than skin brushing against it as if to verify it was really there.

  “It was an accident,” immediately out of her lips, still tugging on her arm in an attempt to reclaim it. “It wasn’t on purpose,” not that her words were having any effect. If she had thought his face was shuttered before it was encased in pure stone now, every single muscle and angle held so stiffly that it seemed as if breathing on him would shatter them. “Mason he didn’t mean to.” He’d just lost his temper, which she had caused herself- only the blue eyes cutting up to her were scarier than Aaron’s had been even while he was screaming at her, fire flickering within the depths and making her blood run cold. “It was my fault, I pushed him-”

  She’d barely gotten the last syllable out before he dropped her arm, body backing away from hers slowly and then resuming speed all at once to turn himself out of the kitchen. “MASON!” She didn’t like that look on his face, didn’t like the way that he was leaving her here in the kitchen, or the way he was grabbing from his keys off of the coat rack by the front door. She wasn’t dressed, she’d changed into pajama shorts the moment she had come home. “MASON STOP!” Not even kind of pausing those steps he was taking to exit the house. “MASON LET ME EXPLAIN!” Or try to, anything at all but leave without her. They could go together even, she could show him what happened and explain and then Aaron could explain, maybe he could even help them, he just needed to calm down first.

  “MASON!” She didn’t even know if the jeans she was trying to jump into were clean or dirty, or even if they were right side out, buttoned and zipped as quickly as she could managed to no avail, the sound of Mason’s tires peeling out of the driveway echoing through the whole neighborhood and into the house from the door he’d left opened behind him. She needed to go, hands frantically trying to move her keys from the rack as well but her fingers kept fumbling, dropping them and cursing over and over under her breath as she tried to follow. She shouldn’t have let him see, she should have hidden it better.

  There was no way that this could end well, or even okay. There was no way one or the other of them were going to hold onto their tempers, and she’d been working so hard to get them to like one another… The tears fell freely down her face, obscuring her vision and making her desperate fight for her keys all the more impossible. She just needed to get to them before either one of them did anything stupid, fingers finally finding purchase and her feet scrambling into the house shoes that she had left by the door. She didn’t have time to look for tennis shoes or something more appropriate, didn’t even have t
ime to leave a note just in case either of her parents got home from work early enough to discover the abandoned meal still on the stove top, flying out of the door and to her own car with skidding feet.

  He was going to go to Aaron’s. She knew it. He was going to go to Aaron’s and she was going to catch it from either end, making two such big mistakes in one day and altering that already fragile truce between the two of them. She just needed to move faster, but her feet didn’t seem to want to fit beneath the steering column and her keys wouldn’t fit into the ignition right- fingers still fumbling until the engine roared to life beneath her. She was going to get a ticket, the speed with which she took off out of that driveway… but any ticket would be worth stopping that disaster before it happened.

  It was just a mistake, her eyes blurring the lines in the road in front of her and her foot pushing that pedal all the way down into the car’s floorboard. The bruises on her wrist would have been there regardless, there was no helping that, but she had liked Aaron putting those there. Those had been … of her own choosing, to an extent. Not that she could explain that to Mason, not that she could explain that part of the reason that she liked her relationship as much as she did, that his violence was so excusable was how she enjoyed how rough Aaron’s hands could turn on her…

  It had been exactly how she’d wanted it, his body hovering just over hers and twisting the both of her wrists up inside of his one hand, fingers digging into the skin while his teeth did the same to her neck. She’d barely been able to breathe by that point, the lack of contact he’d been allowing her with him up to that point, restraining her as hard as he had been, only just barely pressing his body down into hers and alternating between soft presses of his lips into her pressure points and surprising her alternately with the sharp scrape of his teeth. The words falling out of her lips hadn’t even been legible at that point, hadn’t even made sense- a stuttering, half moaned exhalation of breath and pleading. They didn’t have to be careful at his house like they did hers, they didn’t have to worry about anyone interrupting them.

  His hips had barely been resting above hers, poised just enough to where he was hovering just on the edge of fully pushing into her, soft circling movements of his thighs only just teasing her. His teeth and hands had been the roughest points on her body, those fingers pressing into the skin of her wrists until she felt like she was going to implode from the need for him to be that hard everywhere, to be that rough inside of her as well as out. Only he wasn’t complying and she didn’t have it in her to beg any more audibly than she had been doing- her already hoarse voice only just barely getting out the sound that it was.

  She had been begging him to escalate it for what felt like hours when he finally did, his hips slamming down into hers and forcing that guttural, inhuman noise out of her despite her breathlessness. It had been exactly what she had been asking for, even when he had to release his hold on her wrist to move his hands down to the mattress on either side of her shoulders for leverage. Her thighs hadn’t felt stable, hadn’t felt physically able to open the way they needed to to accommodate that pressure of his hips beating down into her own, but she had opened them anyways- head falling back against that pillow far enough to have almost slid off. She could still, even now only thinking back on it, remember that sensation shifting when his hand had shifted from the mattress to her torso, fingers rolling only just the edge of her nipple between this thumb and forefinger causing her to nearly arch completely off of that bed.

  It had been too much and not enough, his thigh stretching to push her one down parallel to the bed, rough voice in her ear promising all of the ways that he was going to break her body to accommodate him- and it hadn’t been a lie, that tearing within her body from the angle shifting. Pleasure-pain that had nearly forced a scream from the back of her throat, but it was good, it was better than good, her eyes having rolled back into her head, the pit of her stomach tightening and spiraling near instantly. It was only when his hips changed angle yet again, when their pace picked up to such an extent that the pain began to outride the pleasure that she had any complaint at all, and even that hadn’t been asking him to stop, hadn’t been asking him to quit, she had only wanted to slow him down, to readjust himself.

  She just hadn’t asked right, that ‘no’ falling from her lips after a pained moan seemingly lost on his ears, her hand coming down from where it had been left stretched above her head to try and coax his hips into a different or slower angle. Fingertips pushing against the protruding hip there, but he hadn’t felt it, or couldn’t stop- she didn’t know, all she knew was that one minute she was on the edge of the abyss and the next she was trying to close her thighs around him. Her hand moving to push against his abdomen from the sharp twist of pain that had distracted her so fully. Only her hand slipped with that next push of his hand- and her nails caught the edge of his skin, red marks blooming from where her hand skidded across his flesh, and it had been a mistake, it had been an accident, his whole body seizing like it had. His hand closing around her forearm even more forcefully than he’d been holding her wrist before to jerk her hand away from him- violent curse leaving his lips and his fingers squeezing until tears had actually sprung to her eyes.

  She had hurt him first, even if just on accident, and he hadn’t been able to temper his reaction. He hadn’t been able to separate the two in that split second, and so he had reacted. Violently, angrily, but not on purpose.

  Her thought process was brought back to the present abruptly by the sound of a car horn just behind her. Her eyes focusing with difficulty just in time to see the light turn red in front of her, her foot lifting off of the gas and slamming into the brake pedal instead. Her car jerking to a stop hard enough to throw her torso forward against the seat belt. It’d been a mistake, and one she couldn’t have even tried to explain to Mason—and now something was happening because of it and it was all beyond her control. Those bodies she was trying to get to the only thing that she could focus on once more, her foot moving back to the gas pedal before the light had even fully turned green.

  Chapter Five

  There wasn’t anyone outside, not that Mason had expected there to be, when he pulled up too sharply to that curb. He shouldn’t have even known the address for the place, it wasn’t as if he’d had any reason to, and Nicole certainly hadn’t been providing it. He had just… happened to look it up before, just like he’d happened to drive by it that one night that Nicole was out past curfew last week to ensure that they weren’t there. He was checking up on her. Only right at that particular moment he wasn’t at the house to check up on her. He wasn’t even there to check up on Aaron, not with the multitude of violent flashes playing through his head like a kaleidoscope on crack.

  All he could see was that discolored skin that had been on Nicole’s forearm, in the shape that it had been. All he could imagine was how it could have gotten there, how hard he must have grabbed her for it to bruise like that so quickly, and what he wanted to do in return for Aaron having done so. He couldn’t even breathe, that car door opening hard enough for the hinges to squeak their own protest out before being slammed behind him, the noise reverberating through the otherwise quiet neighborhood.

  He wanted to kill him. It wasn’t even exaggerated, the amount of pain that he wanted to put that little boy in, the various ways in which he wanted to draw it out- he’d never felt more like his father’s son than he did in that moment. He wanted to watch him scream and he wanted to make him beg for it to end just as much as he wanted to just inflict the pain period on Aaron at all. He wanted to end him, but he wasn’t even sure he could go up to that door, wasn’t sure that if he made it and someone else answered that he wouldn’t react. That his fist wouldn’t fly despite the fact that they’d played no part in the marring of Nicole’s arm like that… he’d worked too hard for too many years to suppress that violence, or at least maintain it in levels that were more easily covered. He’d worked too hard, but right in that moment he didn’t care
who ii was under his fists so long as he got to Aaron through doing it.

  So he was pacing, short jerky steps in a small line back and forth in front of that mailbox.

  Rounded just that much shorter through each pass. He didn’t even hear the door to the house open behind him, or see the figure that had come outside until his obnoxious tone penetrated the air. “Mason, everything alright?” Overly friendly, contrived and just as fake as that grin covering his face when it was Mason could make himself stomach turning to fully face him. “Nicky isn’t here you know. I thought she was supposed to be having dinner with you and her parents.” Nicky. No one called her that, she didn’t like the nickname, she’d been sent home in first grade for blacking the girl who refused to stop doing its eye. Which was something he should have known, if he’d even attempted getting to know her at all, if he’d even listened when she spoke. He’d heard her tell Aaron the last time he’d been over at the house that she didn’t like being called that. But then he supposed a boy who had no problem bruising her skin to such a degree cared one way or another what her preferences were.

  “Not here to find Nicole.” The very muscles in his neck cracked with the tension, the effort it took to get the words out without clenching his teeth around them. He knew where Nicole was, he knew she’d be on her way here after him, he knew Nicole. He knew everything about Nicole. What she preferred and didn’t prefer, the way she took her ice cream, the games she liked playing. He knew what each subtle twitch and change in expression meant, how her voice changed and what her tones were meant to convey, he knew Nicole, Aaron did not. He didn’t need to find her, he needed to save her. Again. Like he’d been doing since he was twelve, he needed to remove the threat that she was too damn blind to see.