Beneath the Burn

by Pam Godwin

  “Since you inked the first outline freehand, I’m confident you could make even a black square look like art. Can’t wait to see what you do with a stencil.” He turned his head away, and the muscles in his back loosened under the rub of the towel.

  It had been a huge risk inking him without a stencil the night she met him, but she’d had little choice in her sneaky offense to defy his wishes.

  She squirted a dollop of stencil gel at the top of his spine. “Here come my hands.” She waited for his deep breath and eventually let out her own when his tension never came.

  With hesitant fingertips, she spread the gel over the nearest cluster of scars. His back rose and fell with steady breaths, his trigger quiet.

  She worked the gel lower, and his skin took on a tougher, more wrinkled texture across a horizontal line from armpit to armpit. Was his back curved and chest tucked in when the burns were inflicted? The bubbles weren’t raised enough to be noticeable, but the discoloration made them impossible to miss. A motley of reds blended into browns and pinks. The damage covered his upper back from just below his neck to under his armpits.

  Once the gel covered the areas to be inked, she positioned the stencil on his back and adjusted the ohms on the machine. “You know, I don’t know your full name.”

  He twisted his neck to face her, cheek resting on the mattress, eyelids heavy. “James Kristopher Mayard.”

  “James? Really?” She removed the stencil and blew on his back.

  The arm he dangled off the bed shifted and his hand curled around the back of her bare calf. “I changed it to Jay when I started The Burn.”

  She tested the machine with a few pulses of the needle. Jay. Laz. Rio. Wil. “All your proportioned names would make charming tattoos. You could wear each other’s names in a matching design.” A smile tugged her lips as she touched the machine to his skin and began the first stroke.

  He chuckled. “I love those guys, but not that much.”

  She followed the stenciled lines, dwelling on three-lettered names. One in particular tried to scorch her mood. She would not allow Roy to taint this moment. “What are their real names?”

  “Lazarus Bromwell.” One dark eyebrow arched.

  “Of course.” She moved to the most disfigured section, where a nickel-sized patch of skin had twisted as it melted. Watching his face for distress, she inked a line over it. “And the others?”

  “Richard.” A gentle fondness intoned his voice.

  “Rio? Richard Ketch?” She laughed. “Catchy. And Wil must be William.”

  He shook his head, creasing his smile against the bedding. “Bruce Sima.”

  The machine went still as she tried to pair that name with Wil’s young, surfer-boy face. “No way.”

  “It’s probably no surprise it was his idea to change our names. I guess Bruce the bassist didn’t have the right ring.”

  His scars blazed red beneath the stab of her needle, prompting her next question. “The band’s name was your idea?”

  He nodded. “You’re the only one who knows what led to the name.”

  Hopefully, sometime soon, she would know what led to the burns. Lulled by the buzz of the machine, she drifted into a Fugazi song, humming the in-your-face chords with abandon.

  “Waiting Room.” He sighed. “You’re subtle.”

  She snorted. “It’s a good song.”

  “Especially in your adorable tonality.” His eyes danced.

  “Hey.” She held the needle away and pinched the tender skin under his arm. “You’re not paying me to sing well.”

  He jerked back from the sting of her pinch, lips crooked up. “I’m not paying you at all.”

  She wiped Vaseline over a finished flame and shifted to outline the next one. “Laz paid me twenty grand for a rainbow.”

  “Laz got ripped off.” His voice broke with laughter.

  “So true.”

  They fell quiet for a time, sharing glances and smiles as she worked. Her mind raced to the final design, mentally shading between the bold lines, trying to predict his reaction. It would be primarily black. Red and brown ink would be used sparingly to blend the drawn scars into the existing ones.

  She took her time, following the outline with a steady hand. Working over the scar tissue, she must have hit a sensitive area because his body shuddered. “Sorry. You okay?”

  “Wasn’t you, Charlee.” A ragged exhale. “I was thinking about my parents’ death, of the burns that occurred over the year that followed.”

  78

  The machine jumped in Charlee’s hand. She held it midair, hovering, her heart thundering.

  “Keep going.” Jay’s palm rubbed up and down her leg. “I need the distraction.”

  She swallowed and brushed out another rivet in the steel plate beneath the outline of charred skin.

  “We lived in Canada, a rural area near the Boundary Waters, and the land is only accessible by plane. They were on one of their supply runs when their plane went down.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “A malfunction. My father was a pilot, owned an old plane. I usually joined them on those errands—so I’ve been told—but they’d left me with the closest neighbor that day. Some family that lived a few miles away.” A pause. “I was an only child.”

  He’d carried his loneliness his entire life. Her chest ached and her stomach tumbled as the machine vibrated in her hand. “Abandoned and alone.”

  “You, more than anyone, can sympathize with that. Makes this next part easier to talk about.”

  Brown eyes scrutinized the wall behind her with more interest than it warranted. “My father inherited the land and a great deal of money before I was born. His sister didn’t receive a crumb.”

  “Aunt El?” Her brain scrambled to put the pieces together. Bitter aunt. Traumatic childhood. Acid seethed through her gut.

  “I’ve said her name?” His face tightened with wide eyes. “When I…flashback?”

  “Yeah.” She kissed his shoulder beyond the reach of the ink.

  He relaxed beneath her lips. “Elena Mayard. Something was wrong with her. I always thought of it as unexamined viciousness. She was manic, I think. I don’t know. Before my parents died, she’d kept herself isolated from the family, so much so my grandparents cut her out of their will.”

  “Did she…Is that who raised you when you lost your parents?”

  He nodded. “My parents didn’t have the foresight to prepare a trust. I was left with my only blood relation. She got me, the money, the house, and the land.” He glanced away, eyes hard. “She moved in for one year.”

  Why just a year? What had gone wrong? She was terrified to push. “Is she…”

  “Dead.” The brawn in his back flexed beneath the needle. “Died in prison.”

  Prison? A fury of nausea flooded her. What had the woman done? Was she responsible for his scars?

  Charlee circled fingers around the damage, mesmerized by the strength of the man beneath. Unwilling to drown him with the questions piling up in her throat, she pressed her lips together and finalized the last curve of the outline.

  Finished, she disassembled the liner machine, plugged in the shader, and mixed a thimble of black ink with distilled water for blending. She added two more thimbles of red and brown.

  For the next hour, the buzz of the machine overlaid the quiet between them. Sketched shreds of skin emerged from the real scars, curling away, and giving the image a three-dimensional effect. She kept her mind on the design, unable to justify the urge to ply him to talk. If she pushed him, he might shut down completely.

  Midway through the shadowing on the final steel plate, he raised his head. “Take a break.”

  In a jumble of anxiousness, she swiped the freshly inked area with Vaseline, clicked off the power supply, and set the machine aside. Then she looked at him expectantly.

  His gaze, exposed and patient, burned through her, singeing away any lust she’d built up while touching the defined muscles on his back.
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  “Please put your hands on me.”

  Whatever was pouring from his expression welled up from deep inside him and had nothing to do with her. She climbed over him, straddled one of his legs, and ran her hands over his middle back, careful to avoid the fresh ink.

  “I don’t remember my parents. My earliest memory begins with Aunt El in a shed. It was an old ramshackle building behind the main house. One room, one window, one door. I think it had held my father’s tools at one time, but after he died, everything was cleared out.” He propped his chin on his joined hands and stared across the room. “Everything was gone except an old mattress and a Bolo oven.”

  Saliva pooled in her mouth and blood surged through her veins. Were his burns connected to the oven? He’d whispered Bolo a few times during the worst of his nightmares. Had he crawled in it? Maybe he fell asleep and someone turned it on? She gripped her stomach.

  “Please don’t take your touch away.”

  Her hand flew to his bicep, caressed the sinews of muscle. Her other traced his lower back along the waistband. She leaned to the side, put his strong profile in view.

  He closed his eyes, a tic bouncing in his jaw. “That first time, I’d done something my aunt disapproved of. I don’t know. The memories are just snapshots. Feelings are clearer. I remember her anger. It warped her face when she locked me in the shed.”

  Biting back the comforting words that sprang forward, she massaged his arms and shoulders and pressed kisses through the short strands of hair behind his ear. She knew he wanted her to listen and touch. Not blather on with useless reassurances.

  “The film over the window blocked the light and the darkness seemed to freeze time in there. In the beginning, I think the punishments were just short stays. The feelings that remain with me though, the endless hunger and the cold…I was probably in there through the night. Maybe several nights. Toward the end, I wasn’t allowed out at all.” His throat worked, and a quiver twitched along his back. “That’s where they found me.”

  Grief and fury swelled in her throat and seared her sinuses. “How old were you?” Her voice broke.

  “Six.”

  The image of a six-year-old Jay, locked in a shed in freezing nowhere Canada threatened to shatter her outward composure. Why was his tone so indifferent when she was seconds from exploding?

  Climbing off his leg, she crawled to a better position to examine his expression. Stretched alongside him, her chest to his side, her hand on his arm, she lay her cheek on the mattress.

  Face-to-face, he watched her watching him. “I’ve tried to make sense of my memories, to fit them into the reports the detectives filed…after.” He raised his arm and hooked it around her back, pulling her close.

  “Watch your ink. Don’t roll over—”

  “She put me in the oven.”

  His words echoed between them. Horror numbed her limbs. Her heart pounded. The constriction in her lungs spread through her body. “How…how could…” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t ask how a little boy could fit in an oven. Or the question that wouldn’t have an answer. Why?

  “It was an enlarged modification of a vintage single-door Bolo used for roasting flanks of wild game, deer, moose, whatever my father hunted. I was nineteen when I returned. It was still there.” His nostrils flared. “It was barely visible amongst the charred debris when I burned down the shed.” His gaze turned inward, cloudy. “She forced me to squat on a pillow inside, warned me not to touch the walls. The thermostat must have been set to warm. I remember the…burn, but I don’t think it was hot enough to singe my skin.”

  The scars on his back rebuked that. Her veins boiled with the lethal hammer of her pulse and her eyes ached, blurring her vision.

  “I must have grown taller over that year,” he said softly. “I couldn’t keep my back from touching the wall anymore.”

  “The burns accumulated over time.” Layer upon layer over his young skin. She choked back bile.

  He jerked his chin, up, down. “The scars might not have been so terrible if she’d cleaned them, treated them. Infection set in. I got sick. I guess she phoned a doctor, asked questions, made him suspicious.” His chest heaved and his hand fisted, digging into her spine.

  “And the doctor reported it? That’s how they found you?”

  He squeezed her tight, trapping the air in her lungs. “She was taken away in handcuffs. Never saw her again. I spent the next thirteen years in foster care, and the land became mine when I was nineteen…because she died from a heart condition. Everything went to me.”

  “She’d have to own a heart to have a heart condition. How could anyone put a little boy in a…” She choked, fought the tears from her voice. He’d said she was manic. Fuck, manic didn’t touch that kind of sickness. Unexamined viciousness? Pure evil was the only explanation.

  “She put me in the oven because she said I was cold when she…” His body shook in violent waves around her. He jerked away and shoved off the bed. His fists flexed, his eyes on fire.

  She scooted off the bed and followed him at a distance, dread weighting her feet.

  He paced to the bathroom, picking up speed, hands in his hair, ripping at the short ends. The sheen of Vaseline accentuated the tension rippling his back.

  At the vanity, he splashed water on his face and stared at the drain. “I hated the darkness, the loneliness smothering that shed. More than that, I hated when she visited me, when she made me lay on the mattress.” His knuckles blanched across his grip on the counter.

  No. Oh God, no. She recognized that hate. It spawned from the terror of imminent visitations. She wedged in front of him and cupped his face. “You don’t have to tell me the rest.”

  “Charlee. I do. I need—” His jaw clamped and his eyes pinched shut beneath his rubbing fingers. “I hated that I liked how she made me feel. I don’t remember what she did to me, what she made me do, but I know that I liked it.”

  His whisper crushed her heart. She blinked back tears, but they escaped anyway. Pulling his face into her neck, she stroked his hair and kissed the side of his head. “Maybe she didn’t—”

  “I remember the dread, the embarrassment, the… anticipation.” He pushed away, glaring at her, his gorgeous face twisted in anguish. “Those feelings are as unchangeable as the fucking dark. I feared her. I hated her. But I fucking liked her touching me!” His roar cleaved through the room, slamming into her and tightening her tear-drenched face.

  He bent away, launching at the toilet, and retched violently through incoherent shouts.

  Her heart vaulted to her throat as she battled her own nausea and squatted behind him. With his hips between her thighs, she wrapped her arms around his torso and held him as he purged his grief. She stroked the strained muscles in his chest and biceps, and restricted her pain to silent sobs.

  When his stomach was empty and his head hung, she handed him a towel and flushed the toilet.

  Stone-faced and mute, he moved to the sink and brushed his teeth with mechanical movements, the silence thick between them.

  Perched on the counter’s edge, she gathered her words, her desperate emotions based on her own experiences. “You didn’t like it. It was rape, Jay.”

  He froze, glared at the toothpaste foaming in the sink, and resumed brushing.

  “Your body betrayed you.” She touched his arm, his muscles pressing against skin, tense and restrained. “It wasn’t your fault.” With Roy, her orgasms were forced. Her body had writhed in pleasure, treacherous and unwanted as it was.

  He looked up, eyes tapered as if penetrating her thoughts. He dropped his toothbrush and pulled her against his chest. “I love you. Fuck, I love you so much. You and me…this—” He crushed her body against his. “This is why we’ll win.”

  His declaration electrified her, much like his grip on her soul. “We’ve already won. We escaped with our hearts intact. This—” she returned his unyielding embrace “—proves it.”

  He clutched her hips, pivoted her toward the
vanity, and met her eyes in the mirror. “I want you, Charlee. No games. No Roy. Just you and me.”

  She nodded rapidly, pulse sprinting, and yanked her shirt over her head.

  The strings on her hips dug in as he gripped the back of her thong and ripped it off. His belt buckle rattled. The sound of the zipper followed. His smoldering eyes reflected in the mirror and the nudge of his cock between her legs stole her breath. A few strokes through her folds moistened his entry. He pushed, working in and out, delaying the fullness.

  She pushed her hips back, chasing his length. He sprawled a hand over her heart, the other crossed her belly and wrapped around her hip. Seizing her eyes in the mirror, he crashed his hips into her, fully buried.

  The reflection of his parted lips and soundless gasp mimicked hers. They inhaled as one, absorbing the stimulation of their union.

  “Best feeling in the world,” he breathed, stroking his length, hands enveloping her breasts. “You are my world.”

  He pulled out, scooped her up, and laid her face up on the floor. She didn’t have time to question him. In the next breath, he was on her, in her, and kissing her with ferocity.

  She responded with equaled ardor, bucking her hips and deepening the kiss. His hands burned over her thighs, squeezed her ass and caressed her clit with talented fingers.

  Dragging her nails up his arms, mindful to avoid his back, she raked her hands through his hair. With an upward flex of her hips, she clenched her inner muscles and watched with happiness as his head fell back and the tendons in his throat strained.

  Her flesh tingled, her nerve endings alive with arousal. His legs rubbed and twined with hers as he pumped in and out.

  She raised her hips, meeting his thrusts, the urgency building with each heady stroke. Her cunt stretched, swollen, primed, ready.

  “Charlee. Charlee, baby. Oh God, I’m—”

  “Don’t stop. Shit, shit, I’m coming,” she screamed, and the sound surprised her, the pleasure spiraling through her body.

  His shout followed on the heels of hers, and he ground to a halting collapse of limbs. He released a ragged breath and rolled to her side, half-draping her, his thigh between hers. “You came? Just like that?”