by Gregory Ashe
That heat in my stomach, in my lungs, in my crotch, it made me think of the night Kaden had jimmied the lock on his dad’s liquor cabinet and had played mixologist. He’d lined up shots. And he’d lined up more shots. And the third row of shots, when he was just drunk enough to really think he was a mixologist, he’d poured something that he called afterburners, and it had gone through me like this. Like fire. And I felt drunk now, too, with cinders swimming through my belly. The room canted; I couldn’t have fallen because I was holding on to Emmett’s shirt so tightly, but I felt like I might slide across the tile like it was the deck of a sinking ship. A burning ship.
I could do all those things to him—strip him, hurt him, humiliate him, fuck him, and feel good about myself for fifteen seconds—and if I did, I’d hate myself for the rest of my life. Even with the vertigo, even with an intoxicating warmth between my legs, that part was clear. Maybe not today. Maybe not next week. But I would eventually. Because I knew abuse spun like a goddamn merry-go-round, and I didn’t want to be the kid who kept spinning.
“It’s my birthday.”
The shock of the words steadied him. He blew out a snot bubble and ran his arm under his nose. “What?”
“It’s my birthday, and I want a present.”
He pulled the savaged, ruined lip between his teeth. He was trying so hard to smile for me. Not a smirk. A smile. “Vie—”
“I want to unwrap my present.” I pried at the placket. Force. Just enough force that if I twisted, just a little, the button would slip through its hole. But only if I twisted.
“Vie—”
“It’s my birthday, Em. And I want to unwrap my present.” I gave him the kind of smile he was always giving me: that kind of boiling-over sex that could melt steel. It wasn’t my natural expression like it was for Emmett, but tonight, with that fire in my gut, I came pretty damn close. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”
He was crying again, but softer now. No racking sobs. No heavy breathing. Just streams of tears, and he mopped at them with the heels of his hands, and they just came harder, two clear rills breaking on the sharp lines of his cheekbones.
“Austin—”
“—broke up with me. Today. You heard him. It’s over.”
“It’s not over. Don’t be stupid; not right now. Not when it matters. You know it’s not over. He loves you. You love him. And as soon as he’s done being mad at you, you two will be back together.”
I was shaking my head. I still hadn’t twisted. I still hadn’t taken that last step, forcing the button through its hole. “It’s over between us.”
“Christ, you’re just so dumb sometimes.” He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes again; a long, buzzing moment passed. Then he lowered them and said, “I’m dumb too, I guess, because I don’t care. I know you’ll go back to him, but I don’t care. Not tonight. I’ll—I’ll do this, all right?” He closed his eyes and shuddered. He was like a leaf in my hands. Like a leaf driven before the Wyoming wind. “But you’ve got to say it first. Then it’ll hurt less.”
I stepped forward. He stepped back. His butt caught on the lip of the vanity, my legs straddled his, and there was barely enough room between us for my hands to clench his shirt. He shuddered again when my breath touched his cheek, and he bucked into me, his hips flexing against the vanity to add leverage as he ground his crotch against me. The kid was going to pop one off before I ever got him out of his shirt, I thought, and then I realized maybe that was the plan.
“Say what?”
Another shudder, and he twisted his face away as though my breath had burned him, displaying the unmarked side. Panting, his chest dropping after every breath like he had an anvil on it, he said, “Say you know it. Say you know he still loves you.”
I brought his face back toward me. He was still rocking against the vanity, slamming his hard dick against me, breathing like he was in a one-man sprint. His eyes fluttered beneath closed lids, the way kids look when they’re dreaming their biggest dreams. Everything about him was breaking my heart.
“Say it,” Emmett whispered, eyes still closed, and he moaned and thrust against me. “Say it, Vie, just fucking say it. If I—” Another huge, animal pant, his chest dropping a mile, and he managed to say, “If I weren’t such a fucking coward, I’d ask you to tell me you loved him too, but . . .”
My thumb found his lip. The scar tissue was thicker, rougher than I expected, but his lip was still as warm and wet as I remembered, and when his tongue flicked out against my thumb, lightning ran to the end of my dick, and I whimpered.
His eyes flicked open. “Say it.”
“Maybe. Maybe he still loves me.”
Dry, dry, Sahara eyes.
“But he’s better off without me. You said it yourself, Em: we’re both fucked up.” I leaned into him, in the hardness of his dick, my whole body sizzling like a spark down a short fuse. “You’re mine, Em. You said it.”
He blinked away the tears that were coming again, and I ran my thumb along his lower lip. That whiskey-fire burned in my gut again.
“I want you to tell me again.”
“I’m yours.”
“Louder.”
“I’m yours.”
“Like you mean it.”
“I’m yours, Vie. I’m yours. A hundred percent. Everything. All of me. Oh Christ, Vie, please—” His hand found my wrist, clutching at me like a man hanging off a cliff.
“Em.”
“Please don’t.”
“Em, it’s my birthday.” My fingers rolled the button back and forth, working the tortoiseshell edge toward the slit in the placket. “And I want to unwrap my present.”
His chin dropped to his chest; his lids shuttered. For a moment, he wasn’t even breathing, and I thought this was as far as I could take him with words. After this, I’d have to take him by force. And although the thought bothered me, it didn’t bother me as much as it had a few minutes before. I was too hard. The spark was shrieking its way down that short fuse.
Then he nodded.
With a simple twist of my wrist, the button came loose. And the next. And the next. I took my time; no buttons popping free, not this go-around. The fire in my belly whooshed and winked out, and all of the sudden I was the one who was shaking, and the shakes grew harder, stronger, as I worked my way down the line of buttons, until I was surprised when Emmett’s hand carded my hair, drawing the long, loose blond locks together, and I realized he was shushing me. Calming me.
Then I reached the last button. I palmed the bulge in his jeans. Hot. Sahara hot, and that word felt right with the dryness in his eyes back again, with the grit and burn of the denim against my palm. He rocked into my touch, but the noises he made were still soothing, and his gestures were calming, and I was still shaking.
I took the flannel in each hand and looked up. Emmett blinked; bone-dry eyes, but he still blinked. He was working on a smirk again, and it touched the corners of his mouth, and he gave my head a little push, and I dropped.
“I always knew I’d have you on your knees when we started.”
My fingers curled under the flannel; the scant dark hairs under his belly button tickled the back of my hand. I was still looking into those dark, dry eyes.
He nodded.
When I peeled the shirt back, Emmett rolled out of it with his usual leonine grace. I ground my teeth to keep from letting out a sharp breath. The disfigurement on his torso followed the same even line, covering one half of his torso in the same rigid strips and whorls of keloid tissue. It followed his arm to the wrist; my fingers traced his hip and found more of the wounds on his back. Someone had done this to him. Someone had hurt him, again and again, and hurt him and hurt him and hurt him, and the rage whited out my mind like snowglare. Emmett was still watching me, waiting, his whole body taut, and so I leaned forward and kissed his stomach. The scars first. Then, on the other side, the smooth ridges of muscle.
He let out a breath; tear
tracks glistened fresh on his face again. “It’s worse, twea—It’s worse, Vie. Down there. She did it. I don’t want you to—”
But now the protests were mechanical; we had already gone past the real barriers. Another twist of my fingers undid the button on his jeans, and they slid easily over his flat belly, exposing inches of golden skin, and then thick, dark bush. His hand caught me then.
I kissed just below his navel.
He let go, and I slid his pants to his ankles.
I had to still myself again. I had to be very, very much inside myself, in the icy snowglare of fury that someone had done this to Emmett, so that I didn’t let my pain and anger show on my face.
“If you change your mind,” he said, trying to make his voice dry and light, “just shuffle on out and I won’t—”
I kissed him again, an inch below my last kiss.
His breathing hoarsened. “I won’t even hold it against—”
I kissed again. Lower.
“I won’t hold it against—”
Lower.
No words this time. Just his rough breathing, and his fingers coiling in my hair.
Lower.
He cried out.
And after that, neither of us needed to say anything.
AFTERGLOW WAS THE WRONG word; even after we were both spent, sweating, tangled in each other on my bed, I was on fire. My skin flushed pink, and when Emmett noticed, he laughed and trailed his fingers across my chest. He laughed again when I flinched because every inch of me was raw, so sensitive to his touch that pleasure bordered on pain.
Even when I flinched—damn that boy; my nips could only take so much tweaking—I kept one hand splayed across Emmett’s belly. Under half of my touch, rough keloid tissue rasped my palm. Under the other half, my fingers found smooth, knitted muscle. I kept my hand there because Emmett kept laughing, because his eyes kept roving, because his whole body was coiled, and I had the sense that if I eased up, if I removed even the slightest pressure from my touch, he’d spring up and run away. And, of course, I kept my hand there because I liked touching him. Because I liked the velvet softness of his muscles. And I liked the way the scars made him even more beautiful.
I slid my hand to rest between his pecs; I kept the weight of my hand heavy. Not enough to bother him, but enough that he’d take me seriously. He was mine. He was going to have to start learning what that meant. When my hand rested on the chiseled curves of his chest, his heart hammered up, as though pounding against my touch. He wasn’t laughing anymore. His eyes flicked: the door, the window, the door.
It was hard not to compare everything to Austin. Austin and I had long since gotten past the awkward fumbles: Austin knew what I liked, and I knew what he liked. With Emmett, however, everything was new. Everything had a kind of breathy hesitation, as though afraid he might hurt me. Or afraid I might hurt him.
Some of that had gotten better, though, once I’d taken charge. In every other situation, this boy with the bottomless eyes wanted to be in charge. Here, though, with me, he liked to be told what to do. He needed it, I think. When he came, he looked like he was breaking and the only thing holding him together was my voice coaxing him, coaching him, controlling him. He needed me; he needed me when he was being bossy, and he needed me even more when he finally gave himself up to me. The truth of it was so simple and so suddenly, shockingly clear. Not just to fuck. Emmett needed me in ways Austin never had. Fucking just made his need a lot more fun.
His eyes flicked: door-window-door.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
He tried for his usual steaming-hot-sex pose: he spread his legs, sprawled across the quilt, ran his hair into a shaggier mess with his hands, and smirked, every inch of him a loose, cool line of unconcern. Everything except for the floor that had dropped out of his eyes, and the feeling I had in my stomach when I looked there of falling, disorientation, the thrill of knowing that no matter how much I liked telling myself I was in control, there was something about this boy that stole the ground out from under me.
“I can keep you here all day if I want. All week. All year.”
He plucked at my thumb, pretending to wrestle it off his chest, and I let him enjoy the fantasy. But when he let go, my thumb snapped back down. Hard. So he wouldn’t start getting ideas.
“My mom and dad might wonder if you kept me here all year.”
“Not before then?”
I was trying to joke, but his chin came up, and he stared at a spot over my head.
“Sorry. That was a shitty joke.”
“My dad’s in too deep with Lawayne.”
I raised my head to look into his eyes. “That’s why your parents were gone.”
His eyes were still studying that spot above my head.
“Why were you still here?”
He was trying his hardest. A nervous tremor was running through him, his foot running restlessly over the quilt, his fingers curling in. He wanted to draw himself into a ball. But he wanted to protect himself more, so he was trying his hardest to remain loose and sprawled and give-no-fucks casual. And—as always—watching this damaged boy try to armor up just made me want him even more. Maybe that’s why we fit together so well. He was determined not to let anybody see the weakness; I was determined to sneak past every defense, to break through that armor until I got to the boy inside. With Austin, it had been love. Just love. Graham-cracker, vanilla love. With Emmett, I wasn’t sure that love was even the right word. It was like glass. Or coke. Or blow. Em was the way my brain was wired. Love—and everything else—was just a shadow.
“Ok,” I said, letting my mind work through events. Things Emmett had said to me filtered into my consciousness. I rolled his arm over, pressing down on scar tissue and track marks inside his elbow with my thumb. The skin whitened with pressure; the lean muscle tensed. His breathing was strong, but they weren’t even, they weren’t steady, they weren’t sure. “Becca and Austin asked you to help protect me. That’s bullshit, by the way. I can take care of myself, and three people without any abilities shouldn’t be getting into the middle of a firefight.”
He looped my hair around his hand and tugged hard enough that my eyes stung. “You’re trying to say thank you, tweaker. But you’re getting it all wrong and sounding like an asshole.” He tugged harder. “Try again.”
“You said you could do something nobody else could. No, that’s not right. You said Becca pointed out that you could do something nobody else could.” The skin darkened around my thumb, the track marks on Emmett’s flesh white like snakebites. I knew I was hurting him, but he hadn’t made a sound. I relaxed my grip, watching blood rush into the spot my thumb had left, and the words just kept coming. “I knew your dad was involved with Lawayne. I’ve known it for a long time; I’ve seen Lawayne in your house before. And Austin told me you’re dealing. He said you tried to sell to him. And you told me—” My lips had a kind of mentholated, peppermint numbness, tingling and hot and cold. “You told me you weren’t sleeping, and the inside of your arms look like you’ve been carrying baby porcupines. And you didn’t tell me, Emmett. You didn’t tell me you couldn’t even get out of the shower some days. And I asked you if you were ok. I begged you to tell me.
“And now you’re shooting up with, what? Heroin? That’s what you’re doing? You’re some kind of fucking junkie, just like—”
My dad. I had to hold my breath to keep the words from getting out.
Emmett traced my face with his index finger; his touch felt cool against the lingering sex fever, and when he pulled his finger away to rub it against his thumb, it glistened wetly. “Vie, it’s not always about you.”
“You don’t get to make those kinds of decisions. Where you’re involved, when it comes to you, it is about me. It’s completely about me.”
“You still don’t understand,” he said from behind those fallaway eyes, and the brief illusion of control I’d had—the visceral knowledge from fucking that a part of
him needed me, needed me more than he needed anything else in the world—shattered against this other part of him. The cold, calculating part of him that had known, from the very beginning, that I was too much of a risk for a boyfriend. That part doing another version of the same icy calculus as he watched me right then. “I get to do whatever I want, tweaker. And you’ll let me. If I want to shoot up, you can shout and rant and slap me around and stick your dick in me. But when you’re done, I’ll go out and find a needle.” Those fallaway eyes shut and opened again. “Nobody can take our shit away, Vie. You know that as well as I do.”
I was panting such wild, savage breaths, that a part of my brain waited for an animal to show itself, to explain those noises. Then I hit him, and his face rolled against the comforter, and then it rolled back and he looked up at me from dark, dry eyes.
“Don’t make me do that again,” I said.
He pulled the ruined corner of his mouth between his teeth again. He looked like a kid trying not to laugh. Or cry. “Nobody, tweaker. Nobody can take our shit away.”
I slid off the bed and padded barefoot to the window; I would have hit him again if I hadn’t moved. It was late. It was dark. The high prairies had vanished into the dark, and the only thing that still existed was the wind rattling the pane in the frame. Cold pimpled my belly, my chest, my arms. The last of the sex flush died into an ash heap.
“I was already using,” Emmett said from the bed. I couldn’t help looking at him, and he had one hand to his cheek where the red print lingered. He didn’t even seem to know he was doing it. “If that makes any difference to you, I didn’t start shooting up because of you. I didn’t start so I could spy on Lawayne. I was already buying from him. I was already using. I just . . . sometimes I just needed a few minutes when Makayla wasn’t there in my head. And sometimes I needed to sleep. It . . . got away from me.” His laugh sounded like it was torn from inside him. “Fast.”