by Rhys Ford
If there was one thing Mace learned that afternoon, it was that Rob was a stubborn, hardheaded fucking asshole who didn’t take go away seriously. Or at least that’s how he felt once his ass hit the bed and the warm air of his apartment started him shivering again.
“I’m going to help you get undressed,” Rob muttered. He crouched down in front of Mace and parted Mace’s knees with his shoulders to get at his shoelaces. “You’re turning into a snowman in front of my eyes, and I didn’t even get to sing a song about it.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Mace struggled to find a connection to Rob’s words. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Oh, I forget Chris is new to the family. I used to babysit for my neighbors’ daughters. There’s no such thing as watching a cartoon movie just once. It has to be on repeat for five to six weeks until you start hearing it in your sleep. Then you realize that you’re not crazy, because the walls are thin and the damned television is on the other side, wailing away about snowmen or rats that can cook pasta.” Rob shuddered, evidently unable to forget his first reaction to the idea of a rodent handling his spaghetti. “While you’re in the shower, I’ll make you some tea. Or coffee. Something to warm you up.”
The apartment was eerily silent and draped in a milky dimness much too familiar for Mace’s liking. He leaned over to turn on the bedside lamp, but Rob was in his way, tugging at his shirt. The neck grabbed at his ear, rubbing his lobe raw, and Mace swore and slapped his right hand over the burning skin. His fingers brushed the pull chain of the bedside lamp, the bulb flared on with a bright flash, and the darkness receded.
Or at least it had in Mace’s mind, but a piece of it was lodged on his shoulder, and he heard Rob draw in a sharp breath.
“What the fuck happened to you?” Rob’s whisper was a thread of white noise in the rush of blood that carried Mace’s panic through his veins. He brushed his fingers over one of the larger keloids under Mace’s skin, and Mace flinched at the memories of hot knives and sharp fingers ripping at his flesh. “Seriously, dude, who did this to you?”
He was naked in more ways than one. Stripped of his T-shirt and his dignity, Mace’s humiliation only grew with every inch of skin Rob explored with his fingertips. His stomach, wrung dry of everything but the tears he’d swallowed on the ride over, threatened to turn itself inside out. There was too much silence and way too many shadows, and the bedroom door swinging partially closed on its well-oiled hinges ratcheted up his anxiety. He would take the damned thing off its frame if he could, but Rey occupied the other bedroom—however infrequently now that he and Gus were back together—and he still needed a bit of privacy.
There was no simple way to explain the terrors that lurked at the edges of every room, the nightmares of every door latch that clicked into place. Normal people weren’t supposed to be afraid of silence. They outgrew their fear of darkness and the imaginary monsters living there, but Mace didn’t think he ever would. Those monsters wore the faces of ordinary men, including his own father, and as hard as he searched through the world’s whisperings, he never heard his mother calling out for him. He had been consigned to his fate.
When Rob’s hand ghosted across the massive scar over his shoulder blade, Mace closed his eyes and once again wished for something to take away the pain that lived in his tangled tissues.
“Did your dad do this?” Rob rasped. Emotion ran hot through his voice, and Mace couldn’t bear to look at the judgment he knew would be in Rob’s gaze. “Dude, I get that you probably don’t want to talk about this, but what happened today was pretty fucked-up, and right now you’re scaring me, because… as long as I’ve known you, you and your brothers have been tight, so talk to me. Tell me why you don’t want me to call one of them.”
Mace closed his eyes and then dug the heels of his hands into them and scrubbed out the crust of salt on his lashes. He’d handed Rob the keys and somehow mumbled directions or maybe an address, but he didn’t remember being driven home or even the elevator ride up to his place. There’d been tears. Mace was sure of it because his eyes hurt and his nose was stuffy, slightly swollen, and hurting from the ugliness of his afternoon. He wanted nothing more than to crawl under his blankets and hide away from the world, maybe even drag Rob in with him so he could pretend someone cared about his broken heart and torn-up soul.
He knew better. Seeing his father in the stairwell brought everything back in full living color. And as he stared out across the spartan bedroom he slept in between shifts, Mace finally saw that Rob was standing in front of him, waiting for an explanation Mace didn’t know if he had it in him to give.
“That’s it, I’m calling Bear,” Rob muttered, and Mace grabbed at his wrist and captured him before he could slide away. “Dude, you need help. And if it’s not going to be me—”
“Let me… take a shower and… I don’t know,” Mace stumbled around his own tongue. “I don’t know if I can talk to them right now, because… my father… the things he did to me were evil, but the things he had me do were… far fucking worse, and if I tell my brothers about them… about what I’ve done, they’ll throw me out of the family and….” He screwed his eyes shut and willed away the fear choking him, but it wouldn’t dislodge from his throat. “They’re all I’ve got. I can’t lose them. And that’s exactly what will happen if they ever found out about… everything.”
THE SHOWER turned lukewarm, but Mace was reluctant to get out. Slipping out from behind the glass door meant having to face Rob and scrape off every scab he had inside of him. But no matter how much hot water poured over him, Mace couldn’t warm up the chill in the center of his chest. He’d run from the truth of himself for far too long, and it didn’t seem like the marathon was going to be over anytime soon.
He was too tired and too sick to keep pushing himself past all of the walls he’d built up to keep his nightmares at bay. No matter how many bricks he ordered into place, they kept crumbling beneath him, and his memories slithered and wove out to find him, sink their poisonous fangs into his psyche, and suck him dry of any confidence he had.
It was all he could do to get dressed in a pair of sweats, but he gave one last longing glance at his bed, put on a T-shirt, and headed out to the living room to face his fate.
And as he expected, there was Rob, waiting for him with a large cup of tea, concern written all over a face Mace had kissed only a few hours before. What he didn’t expect was the lights on low and the sound of the muted thunderstorm rolling out of his stereo speakers. The tea was probably one of the breakfast blends Ivo kept stashed in the kitchen for the mornings when he couldn’t make it home and crashed on Mace’s couch. Somewhere Rob had found a tray and arranged it neatly on the coffee table. A bowl of sugar cubes and a plate of lemon wedges kept company with a pair of mugs, and the teakettle was wrapped in a towel for warmth.
It was oddly domestic and unexpected from a man who was just now drying his hair and marbling an old beach towel with streaks of cast-off blue dye. There was even a stack of cheap paper napkins, folded in half and held down by one of the spoons, to complete the tray’s oddly delicate arrangement of old cutlery and utilitarian mugs.
“Sit down and tell me what you want in your tea.” Rob tossed the towel onto the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. He sat down, reached for the kettle, and lifted it from its nest to pour hot water over the teabags in each mug. “I can never keep track of how you like coffee. You’re like Gus. His shit changes up with his mood.”
“Sugar’s fine. I like my tea sweet. What did you tell Ivo about leaving the shop?” Mace grabbed the mug when Rob held it out and put his hand underneath it to support its weight. “Do I need to call him and tell him it’s okay?”
He could maybe talk to Ivo, but Mace wasn’t going to bet on it. Ivo liked to pick apart things and dig into any sign of weakness or trouble, intent on rooting out its cause. One wrong word and Ivo would be charging up the hill, ready to do battle against any of Mason’s demons.
Problem was, the phantoms Mace carried with him were real, and the last person in the world Mace wanted his father to interact with was Ivo. It was bad enough the man spoke once with the baby of the family. Luckily—and as much as Mace hated to say it—it was on a day when Ivo looked relatively normal.
Mace didn’t want his father to ever see Ivo in stilettos and a kilt. He knew what happened to people—to men—who crossed the societal lines his father had drawn in the sand. Any deviation from the norm was an affront to him and God, and in his sick mind, he would be forgiven any violence he used to bring the world back into order.
He was scared shitless and numb with fright, and the cold solidified in Mace’s gut. Burning buildings and explosive fires fed by gas lines were nothing compared to the damage his father could do to Mace’s life. He would probably start with Ivo or Gus, snatch them off the street or lure them into an alley, where he and a few of his friends could work them over. He did it with a sense of perverted justice, or at least that’s what he’d always told Mace, but there was sexual sadism beneath it all, and Mace knew where that sometimes led.
Suddenly Luke’s horrific offer—even if given in jest—seemed like a good idea.
“He knew I was chasing after you, actually left me a text asking if I was still alive, because he was pretty sure you killed me when I didn’t come back. I told him you weren’t feeling well, so I wanted to make sure you came home, but he said that was bullshit because there’s no way you’d ever admit to being sick. So he thinks we got into it.” Rob paused, probably because he caught Mace’s wince. “Then he told me there was enough coverage if you and I need to hash out a few things, because Bear’s not going to put up with any shit and to remind us to work it out. For some reason, he thinks you hate me, and to be honest, despite you fucking my brains out today, I’m not sure he’s wrong.”
“Jesus, you have no fucking idea how wrong he is,” Mace ground out between his clenched teeth. “I’m okay. You can go—”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Rob pursed his lips and blew at the steam coming up from his cup. “I think I’ve got you figured out now. You’ve got crap going on in your head, and it scares you, so you shove everybody away, including your brothers. But I’m not going to let you do that to me, because for some damned reason, while I was making tea, I found out I actually gave a shit about what happened to you. So fuck me, right?
“Tell me what I walked into today. This afternoon was a scary as all hell, and I didn’t know what to do,” he confessed softly. Then he took a sip of his tea and let his gaze slide up to Mace’s face. “If you won’t talk to your brothers, then talk to me. You’re insane if you believe they’ll turn their backs on you. I mean, shit, Gus went out and came home with a surprise baby and no one blinked an eye. You don’t think they’d be willing to kick your racist father’s ass?”
Mace turned the cup around in his hands. His knuckles were swollen, the skin raw from punching his father. It’d been a reflex, but the guilt lingered. His thoughts were muddied, too thick to see sense through, but Mace understood that he couldn’t wallow in the filth he’d been dragged through, not anymore. Ignoring who he’d been only worked if the man who shaped him sat behind concrete walls and iron bars. There was no running from the truth anymore, no hiding in the light to keep the shadows from wrapping around him, and no amount of street noise and loud stereos could drown out the subaural murmuring of his awakened consciousness, the sly whispers that dredged up every little memory of his time before Bear called him brother.
He was just so sick of running.
“It’s not my father’s racism I’m worried about.” Mace put his mug down and flexed his hand, welcoming the stretch of skin and the faint pain it brought. “It’s going to come out anyway. What I’ve done, what I helped my father do, and what I let him do to me. And you’re wrong about what it takes to get people to walk away from you.
“My mom did.” Closing his eyes didn’t stop the tears, but oddly enough, it helped to fold in, keep his head down, and let his tears fall into his lap. He didn’t have to look at Rob that way, didn’t have to see the disgust that would eventually be on his face, much like his brothers would look at him. “When they got me away from my dad… he took me from her, and once they told her about… everything, she left me there. She couldn’t even look at me. I’m her kid. She’s supposed to love me. But in the end, what I was… who I am… she couldn’t love.”
“Weren’t you a kid?” Rob slid across the couch, his cup left on the table so he could cover Mace’s hands with his own. They were nearly burning with heat, and Mace flinched, shocked by the need to bury his face into the crook of Rob’s neck and hug him until the world stopped spinning out of control. Rob ducked his head, his cheek nearly against Mace’s, and he whispered, “No matter what happened, you were just a little boy. Nobody can blame you for what happened.”
“I blame myself,” he confessed around the rush of sick threatening at the back of his throat. Mace swallowed and surrendered to the growing burden of truth pressing down on him. “I might’ve been a kid, but we were doing wrong. I was maybe seven the first time and I was scared and sick as hell afterwards, but I still did it because he was my dad and I loved him. Or at least I thought I loved him. It got worse, so much fucking worse. He was my whole fucking world, Rob, and a couple of years later, he told me to help them beat a man almost to death with a baseball bat. So I did.”
Ten
OF ALL the regrets Mace had, the worst was the one he carried with him in a cracked case of memories he wasn’t even sure were real. It’d been nearly twenty years since he’d been given a baseball bat and told what to do, but his hands still burned with the echo of the wood against his chafed palms, and he woke up in the middle of the night trying to wipe away the hot smears of blood off his face.
His face never felt clean, and he’d never picked up a baseball bat again. That night became a long, filthy string of rusted metal links, anchoring Mace down to drown in the sewage of his actions, and he didn’t know how to sever himself from the chain, especially since he seemed to be forging new links every time he closed his eyes to sleep.
And now Rob sat next to him, asking Mace to tear down the flimsy membrane he pulled up over his mind every morning to protect himself from the past that lurked in the darkness.
He didn’t dare look at Rob. He didn’t deserve any sympathy or empathy, but even knowing his life would be over once he spoke the truth about what happened to him and what he’d done, Mace knew the time had come to put his lies down. The burden was too great, and he just couldn’t do it anymore. So he hunkered forward on the couch cushion, stared at his hands, and picked at his thumbnail while he tore his world down.
“I was playing with my dog in the field behind my house when my dad took me. I was six… maybe almost seven, I think. He’d just won the court case to get visitation rights, but my mom was still fighting him. I knew who he was. My grandmother—his mom—would come visit me and tell me about my dad because the court said she could have contact with me.” Mace snorted. He tried to dredge up the face of the woman who’d smelled like lavender and who pinched his thigh every time his attention drifted away from the photos she shoved at him. “He told me he was going to take me to see my mom because she’d been in an accident. But I wasn’t that far from the house, so I began running home, and he grabbed my dog and screamed at me to stop, but I was too scared.
“I don’t know where he got the knife or even if it was in his hand the whole time, but all I remember was how much blood there was, and then my dog went limp and silent. That’s when he told me if I didn’t listen to him, he would do the same thing to me.” He didn’t have anything left in his belly but a few sips of tea, but it felt like a quarry of rocks was lodged in his gut. “The stupid thing is I don’t even remember my dog’s name. I was just so fucking overwhelmed and scared. And I never stopped being scared.”
Rob moved closer, and the sour churn in Mace’s stomach began anew. When Rob slid his ar
m around his back, Mace wanted to scream that he didn’t deserve to be touched and held, not with as filthy as he was inside. But then Rob leaned into him and rested his cheek on Mace’s shoulder, and the simple, intimate touch chased off the cold in Mace’s spine that the hot tea hadn’t even touched.
“Whatever you tell me stays between us.” Rob slid his hand down to rest on Mace’s thigh. There was nothing sexual in the contact, simply a connection of one person to another, but it was more than enough to bring a new sting of tears to Mace’s eyes. “But I really hope you’ve talked to somebody about this, or at least you’re thinking about telling someone about what this does to you.”
“Talking to someone about this made it too… everything, and by the time I could even look at it, Bear had taken me in, and I didn’t want him to know about it because… it’s that fucking ugly.”
Rob murmured a soothing sound into Mace’s ear and then asked, “How long did he have you?”
“He had me for… I was eleven… maybe about five years. He had to hide me from anyone who’d come over, because he’d stolen me. I figured that out later, but at the time he told me… first he took me to keep me safe, and then it was because my mother really didn’t want me. The story kept changing, but every time it did, he would convince me it was because he didn’t want to hurt me so he would lie,” Mace mumbled and kept his head down. Then he choked back his disgust as Rob ghosted his fingers over the scar on his shoulder blade. “Don’t… touch me there. That’s where he—Jesus, I don’t even know where to start.”
“What is it?” Rob ignored Mace’s rebuke, but as much as he wanted to pull Rob’s hand away, it was the first time he’d been touched there for a long time. A fingertip trace along the edges of the scar knotted Mace’s nerves, and he exhaled hard to force the hot air in his lungs out. “I can’t tell what this is.”
“It’s… it was supposed to be some Viking rune they use to….” Mace couldn’t bring himself to admit what his father was. “It didn’t go well, and it scarred funny, which I’m glad for but… I know what they were trying to do, and every time I think about it… about him…. I spent so much of my life trying to forget what happened when I was with him. Then he shows back up and it starts all over again.”