by Gregory Ashe
He sucked in huge breaths. The hand holding the razor was trembling. He shook his hand twice, as though he couldn’t quite get his fingers to let go, and then the blade clanged against the cement, and the saw was still buzzing, and I was still screaming, and the blood forked and twined along the lengths of Emmett’s arms until it reached his fingers and dripped in steady drops, huge red-black dots marking an exclamation point on the ground between us.
He didn’t say anything; his breathing was still ragged, and his face was green. He sagged, and then he dropped to sit on Austin’s weight bench. The barrier vanished, and I staggered, caught myself, and froze.
“Go ahead,” he said, head down, his shoulders starting to shake. “Cut off your fucking arm so you can find those kids. Or pick up another blade and add another pretty scar to all the ones you’ve got. But now you’ve got an idea what you’re doing to—” He dragged his head up; it looked like it cost him just about everything he had left. I saw the old wariness hardening his eyes again, the shine of steel armor, the way he always protected himself from me, from himself, from the world. I could hear the words before he spoke them. What you’re doing to Austin. What you’re doing to Becca. What you’re doing to Sara. Maybe, if he was really feeling daring, he might say, What you’re doing to the people who care about you. That would be as close as he came to saying it outright. Whatever window had opened between us, it had slammed shut again, and I was face to face with the old Emmett again.
And then some seismic emotion rippled through him, twisting his face, and he shuddered and dropped his gaze. “What you’re doing to me, tweaker. At least you know what you’re doing to me.”
I felt weightless. I felt like my bones had been hollowed out and the next drift of air would spin me, shatter me. I dropped onto my knees and stared up at him. His blood pattered the ground next to me.
Something in my mind was unwinding, some terrible knot that I’d kept tied for all these years. Something to do with the black hole at the back of my head. Something to do with the nights I slipped out of Austin’s arms and wandered the house, trying to breathe. Something to do with the white buzz of the saw that, even after everything that I’d just witnessed, still sounded like the sweetest thing in the world.
I didn’t even realize I was crying until Emmett cupped my cheek, and my tears swirled with the blood on his fingers.
“Em, something’s wrong with me.” I was crying harder. I choked on the words. The only thing in the world holding me up was Emmett’s bloody hand on my cheek. “Something’s really fucking wrong with me.”
He bent over me, his voice weary and thrilling and full of a tenderness I’d never heard before. “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. His blood ran down my jaw, my neck, my chest. It was hot and then it was cold. I could smell it like iron. I was shaking, almost falling, and his muscles might as well have been bronze because he didn’t even waver. “Yeah, sweetheart, you’re really fucked up.” His fingers tightened, slick and slipping over my skin, and he cupped the back of my head and cradled me against his knees, bending low, as though shielding me. He spoke softly into my ear. “We both are.”
IT WAS THE SOFT RAIN of his blood that finally made me move. I staggered upstairs, leaving a trail of bloody prints—half a hand here, a smudged finger there, the toe of my sneaker on the living room rug—on my way to get the first-aid kit and bring it back. When I got to the basement, Emmett had slung his arms over the barbell on the weight bench, and blood wreathed his hands.
As I knelt next to him, I opened the kit and began taking out supplies—antiseptic wipes, gauze, medical tape. That ancient condom was still in there, its foil dull and wrinkled. The snippers were still in there, glittering, like a sterile escape key that I could pick up and use whenever I wanted. Nobody had turned off the saw, and in the background, it still whined; when I glanced toward it, Emmett caught my chin and pulled my head back.
“Eyes on me, tweaker.”
He looked awful. Underneath, he was a sickly shade of green. Thick shadows blanketed the wounded side of his face, and I wondered again how much the wounds still hurt him. Ripping open one of the wipes, I studied the cuts on his arms and hesitated.
“Em, these are bad. Worse than—worse than I usually do.”
“That’s because you act tough, but you’re really a big pussy.”
“You need stitches. You need a hospital.”
He shook his head.
“You’re bleeding. A lot. And you look terrible—”
“No hospital. No doctor. No stitches, not unless you want to do them. Clean them as best you can and then wrap them up. They’ll stop bleeding eventually.”
I caught his wrist in one hand and began to clean; Emmett hissed, but he didn’t jerk away. “You’re not in good shape,” I said. “It looks like you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Two cuts on my arms, tweaker. I made sure I didn’t get any veins or arteries.”
“You’re really pale; you look like you might be sick.”
“Jesus. I forgot that you don’t know how to take a clue.” He chewed his savaged lip again, and then he gave an odd little laugh, and his hand caressed my chin again. “I don’t like knives, tweaker. Blades. Things that can cut. I really don’t . . . I really don’t like them near me.” He bit his lip, tucking the ruined corner of his mouth beneath his teeth, and then he gave a little shake as though trying to throw off a memory. “A million things can change, and you’re still dense as a bag of rocks.”
“What happened?”
“I kept you from cutting off your arm. That’s what happened.”
“You know what I mean.”
Emmett didn’t answer, and I kept working. The gauze was feathery in my touch as I began to wind it around his arm. His skin was warm; the blood, slick in some places and tacky-dry in others, was cool. The thin cotton soaked up the blood instantly, and red wicked along the threads. I set to work on Emmett’s other arm, cleaning and bandaging it in the same way, and then I sat back on my heels and stared at the red-stained cotton, at the drip-trails on the cement, at the red on Emmett’s shirt and jeans and sneakers. So much blood. His blood, blood that he’d given for me. My stomach flopped, and sweat flashed out along my forehead. Inside, I was still trying to process everything from the last two days: the fight with Emmett at his house, the way he had treated me in front of Lawayne, how much I had hated Emmett in the hours after and how much I had hated myself for not being able to stop loving him too. I rubbed the back of my hand across my mouth, and the skin there was slick with sweat too. Just the aftershocks of the adrenaline, I told myself. Just the shakes. That was all.
“Are you ok?” He turned me by the chin again. His eyes were deep, and that glittering, brittle shine was gone. “Jesus, you look like you’re going to puke.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Tweaker.”
“Really. It’s just hot down here.”
“It’s hot? In a basement? In April?”
“And I haven’t eaten—” Since the day before? Twenty-four hours? The thought shocked me; for the last day, I’d been running on a kind of nervous energy, wired together with snatches of sleep and adrenaline and caffeine. And all of a sudden, there was a short somewhere down the line, and the power went out. It was like somebody had flipped off all the lights, and all I could do was sag against Emmett, my body finally overloaded from the past two days. The thought of food darted through my mind again, and my stomach rolled. Christ, had it been since Sara’s fried chicken? The thought of the fried food, the breading popping with oil when I bit into it, sent me over the edge. I had just enough time to turn, knee-walk two steps, and I lost the contents of my stomach, what little I had in there. It still managed to catch me by surprise, somehow, and it went straight down the front of my clothes.
Thank God Sara hadn’t finished the basement, I thought. The sick was mostly just the thin, mucusy slime of stomach acid and bile; no real food to speak of. Thank God. Thank Go
d.
And then I groaned because I’d just puked myself right in front of the hottest boy I’d ever known.
His hand was cool on my neck. “Are you going to do that again?”
“God, please, no.”
He laughed, and for a moment, he sounded like the old Emmett. “I’m not God, tweaker, although I can probably make you see him.” His fingers gathered the long hair hanging over my neck and pulled it across my shoulder, and he raked his nails along the sensitive skin below my hairline, the touch somewhere between a scratch and a caress.
To my surprise, it did soothe the worst of the jangling inside me. It took me a moment to realize what I was hearing over the whine of the saw, but then it clicked: Emmett was humming. And I recognized the song. He’d played it for me once on his guitar, while I’d watched the wind comb the buffalo grass from his bedroom window.
“This is a lot for you,” he said, his fingers still fretting the back of my neck. “You’re exhausted, right?”
I wiped my mouth; the acidic stink of puke made my eyes sting, but I was so tired I just wanted to stay here, unmoving, and let Emmett touch me. I’d wanted him to touch me for so long. I made some sort of noise and shook my head.
He laughed again, kneeling to get an arm around my waist, and said, “Well, you haven’t told me to fuck off yet, so I’d say that’s a pretty good sign you’re exhausted. Come on, tweaker. Let’s get you upstairs.”
He helped me upstairs, and he got me water and crackers in the kitchen. After a few minutes, I felt steady enough to try something more solid, but Emmett limited me to white bread. Toasted.
After I’d eaten, we went to the second floor. Instead of leading me into the bedroom, Emmett paused on the landing and nudged the bathroom door open with his hip. He grabbed the hem of my sweater and pulled it over my head. Cold air prickled my skin; even exhausted, I felt my nipples stiffen, felt the dusting of golden hair on my chest needle out. I stared at Emmett; the scars that masked half his face hadn’t taken away any of his beauty. If anything, they’d given him an edge, a kind of intoxicating bitterness that only made the rest of his perfection sweeter. I grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward me.
“Not tonight, tweaker.” His hands found my wrists, but he didn’t pull my hands away. Or, he didn’t try very hard. “You’re exhausted, you’re totally worn out, you’re not thinking—”
I kissed him. Puke-mouth and all, I kissed him. I was beyond any of that. His hands tightened around my wrists like he was holding on for dear life, and then he kissed me back. It was like my brain imploded. All the charges had been planted and primed last fall. Those first few stolen kisses, the teasing, the months of growing to know the broken boy that I held in front of me—those had been leading up to this. And tonight, that kiss in the bathroom doorway, that turned the rest of my world to rubble. It was the first perfect kiss of my whole life. Even with puke-mouth. Even with a broken nose throbbing between my eyes.
When I broke for air, he tried to pull away again; I didn’t let go.
“Vie, don’t—we can’t. Austin—”
I kissed him again.
He was blushing when I pulled away, his cheeks vibrant and dusky pink. “You’ve got a boyfriend—”
I kissed him again, harder, meaner, taking his mouth because I wanted it. I’d let him get away because I’d told myself I had self-respect—I wasn’t going to fuck around with a guy who didn’t think I was worth dating. I’d let him get away because I loved Austin. I’d let him get away because he was broken, but I was even more broken, and I didn’t want to hurt him more than he’d already been hurt. None of that mattered anymore. He was here. He was mine. Tonight, at least, he was mine.
When Emmett twisted away, panting, I moved my grip up to his collar. “Austin broke up with me. Tonight. You heard him.”
“He was mad. He was scared. He was hurting, Vie, and you can’t—”
I kissed him, and his knees went out, and I had to catch him. I carried him, pinned him against the wall, grinding against him and feeling the hardness under denim. He mewled in my ear when I broke the kiss; he breathed like he’d been underwater for seventeen years. I worked at the buttons on his shirt; one of them snagged, and I just yanked on the fabric hard enough that the button popped free. I pushed aside enough of the shirt to see the left half of Emmett’s chest. He was clutching at the other half of the shirt, pinning it in place, but it didn’t matter; I could get what I wanted from here.
“He didn’t mean it, Vie. You’ve got to—you’ve got to—oh Christ, oh Christ, you’ve got to—”
Bathing one nipple with my tongue, I took little nips, and Emmett’s back arched until his head cracked against the wall. His nails dug into my shoulders. He screamed, an honest-to-God scream, and the electricity off his skin, the crackle of my touch, made it feel like we were both virgins, like seventeen years of pent-up drive were finally manifesting in a thunderstorm that could have started forest fires throughout the whole of the western United States.
I tugged at his shirt. I wanted it off him. I never wanted him in a shirt again, if I had anything to say about it.
He wiggled out of my grip, backed away until he hit the vanity, and stopped. The mirror showed the mussed hair at the back of his head, the red marks of my hand on the back of his neck, the popped collar that had come undone as I ripped at his shirt. The mirror showed me, my hair wild and fanned across broad shoulders, my eyes blown open with desire, my chest rising and falling like a berserker charging into battle, every muscle taut and defined in my chest and abdomen.
Then I stopped looking at the mirror, and I looked at Emmett, and I saw that he was crying and buttoning his shirt again, his hands like hummingbirds.
When I took a step, he angled his body away from me, and his hands shot away from the buttons to ward me off. “No.” The word had a million frayed edges.
I stopped.
“Please, no.”
“Em.”
“Please, Vie. Please just let me walk out of here, ok? I—” He was crying harder; the ruined side of his face, with its insane symmetry of scars, contorted with the force of his emotion. “Please don’t do this to me.”
“Em.”
He looked at the tiled floor. He looked at my feet. He looked at the rug. His hands played with the collar, trying to fold it back into place. He was crying so hard I didn’t think he could see three inches past his nose.
When he took a wobbly step toward the door, I moved into his path. He cut left, and I hooked him with one arm.
“No, tweaker. Get the fuck off me.” He rained blows on my shoulder, on my back, hammering down with his fists as I pulled him into my arms. “What the fuck don’t you understand about no? Get off me. Get the fuck off me!”
Wrapping him against me, I settled my chin on his shoulder and held him while he continued to whale on my back. The blows slowed to a steady, softer rhythm. Then they stopped. And then he started crying for real, slumping into me. If I hadn’t been holding him, he would have fallen. His tears were hot; they stung my shoulder, traced a blistering line around my scapula.
I felt sorry for him; I did. But I also felt a white-hot surge of triumph. He could have left. He could have used his ability to lock me in place. He could have gotten past me if he’d really wanted to.
Mine. The thought rang out like a million Christmas bells. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
He was mine.
I didn’t realize I was saying it out loud until his wet nose ran along my neck and he mumbled, “Yes. Yes, I’m yours. Yes. I’m yours, Vie. I’m yours.”
Then, planting one trembling hand on my chest, he pushed himself back and met my eyes. “Please don’t do this,” he said. “Please, Vie. What she did to me.” He shuddered, and I locked my arms around his waist to keep him from backpedaling. “It’s not just my face, Vie. Please don’t—I don’t want you to see me like this. You deserve better than this. I wanted you to have me, the real me, not—” He m
ade a furious gesture that took him in from head to toe. “Not some fucking monster.”
I took hold of his shirt’s placket, my fingers stiff, my grip numb, almost arthritic. It would be an easy thing to pull—once, hard, finally. And the buttons would fly off. And the shirt would open. And whatever he was hiding from me, more scars—burns, I thought, and my mind flicked like slides in an ancient projector: the birthday candles, the iron, the cigarettes—would be visible.
Just like Lawayne had done to me at Emmett’s house.
My hands froze.
Emmett was still crying. Little spasms contracted parts of his face—his eyes, his mouth, a tic drawing back his cheek—and the rest of his body trembled like he’d never heard of solid ground. But he wasn’t running. He wasn’t shunting me aside with his power. He wasn’t fighting, not anymore. And with a surge of heat in my belly, I realized that I had won. Emmett was going to let me do whatever I wanted. The heat spread down into my crotch, up into my lungs. I was in charge. Me. In that moment, for an instant, I had all the power.
Under my fingers, the soft-brushed flannel of his shirt felt like sandpaper. I focused on the sensation, running my thumbs up the rumble of the stitching on the placket, the chill of the tortoiseshell plastic buttons, the friction of the wool heating to a soft burn. I could do to him what he had done to me. I could rip off his shirt. I could stare at every wound. I could make him feel what I had felt, naked, vulnerable, humiliated. I could make up for every night of heartache. Fuck heartache. I could make up for every night he’d left me blue-balled because he was a tease who didn’t think a tweaker was good enough for a boyfriend. I could do all of that, and I could still fuck him, could still get every inch of his body, could have him to a degree I’d never had Austin because Austin wasn’t broken like this.