Gonzalo was at his desk, looking for something to watch as Damien lay on his front on the bed, elbows propped up as he tried to eat the popsicle they had bought when an ice cream van stopped right outside. It was melting quicker than Damien could eat it though, the saturated red dripping down his hand and wrist. Damien tried to catch the drops, his tongue licking broad strokes over his skin.
“Man, this thing…” Damien trailed off as he looked at Gonzalo. The other boy was looking at him with a flush high on his cheeks. Damien had never seen that look directed at him before, but there was no mistaking it. “Dude…do you have a boner right now?” Damien blurted out.
The flush on Gonzalo’s face turned deeper and he turned away to face his laptop. “Shut up.”
“Oh. My God.”
“Shut up! You’re on my bed doing…that, like. Give me a break!”
“Doing what?”
“Oh, God. God. You are so clueless. You are so—”
“Hey! I’m just eating! I—wait,” Damien slurped loudly at the popsicle to stop it from dripping on the bedspread. Gonzalo banged his elbows onto the desk, covering his ears with his hands.
“Can you please stop doing that and eat like a normal human being!”
“I feel like you’re legit victim-blaming me right now. You’re blaming me for my red dress.”
“Oh my God,” Gonzalo said, thumping his head against the table.
He stayed there until Damien finished the ice pop and threw the stick into the trash. Damien’s heart was thumping in his chest.
“All done,” Damien said, trying to project false confidence.
Gonzalo stayed hunched into himself for a while before slowly uncurling and turning his wheeled chair to face Damien, who was sitting crossed-legged on the bed. Gonzalo’s face was still flushed. The heat of the summer air was everywhere. Damien could feel it on his own cheeks too.
They looked at each other. Somebody walked down the sidewalk outside, talking on their phone. The fan whirred its head from side to side. Every time the air hit Gonzalo, his black hair would flutter.
There was a tension in Damien’s stomach he hadn’t ever really felt before. A strange, hot anticipation.
Gonzalo got out of his chair. Damien watched him, not moving a muscle, as he approached the bed. Gonzalo paused at its edge. His knee bent, pressing against the mattress, lowering himself towards Damien. He came close. Closer. He was an open parenthesis over Damien, about to reveal a hidden thought.
Damien tilted his chin up. His mind was blank and filled with noise. His eyes closed. The last thing he saw was Gonzalo. Then, in the darkness, a press of lips.
He was seventeen, and this was his first kiss. The one in the past didn’t count. It had been distorted by humiliation into a foreign shape.
The lips disappeared. When they reappeared they were softer, a little more open. He could feel the suggestion of breath.
Damien’s body uncurled itself. His knees unbent, his legs stretched. He was falling backwards slowly until his back hit the bed. His body was guided by instincts it had learnt before birth. Damien was grateful. He didn’t have enough space in his head for anything else.
Damien watched as Gonzalo moved over him. His knees were pressed to either side of Damien’s hips. Gonzalo had closed the parenthesis. Damien was caught in a thought.
The warmth of Gonzalo joined the summer heat. The next kiss was longer. Wetter. Uncoordinated. Damien’s body was trying to figure things out. It was trying to relearn what all its limbs were for. What this new movement of tongue meant. Why there was so much blood rushing around, so much heartbeat and breath. The world was trying to teach him something new about itself, and Damien’s body was trying to catch up.
The heat evaporated all of Damien’s thoughts. They created a thin, wet mist. He tried to squint past it, sometimes, but it was too thick.
Damien’s hands pressed lightly against Gonzalo’s clothed ribs. Everything was soft and rushing past.
When they parted, Gonzalo’s lips looked red and wet. Damien had never seen lips look like that, not in real life, so close. Curiously, he brushed his fingers over them. Gonzalo’s breath stuttered. Damien lowered his hand.
“Um…” Damien didn’t know what to say. Things were suddenly a little too much.
Gonzalo leaned away and then off Damien. He was breathing a little unevenly. Damien couldn’t quite believe he’d done that to another person. That Gonzalo’s flush and breath were for him.
“Um…is this, like…do you, like…like me, like me or is this, you know, like…casual?” Damien’s mouth was mounting a rebellion. It had tasted freedom and wanted more. It had usurped control over talking.
“It would be pretty sucky for me if I liked you, liked you. Seeing as you’re totally into Hakan,” Gonzalo said.
Few things could have shocked Damien more. To bring Hakan into that misty room, to cover his skin in the condensation of it, mixing what was and wasn’t there.
“How…I don’t…”
“It’s cool. I mean…it’s casual. If you want. Yeah?”
“Um…but how did you know? About…”
“Hakan? I guess I was just looking in the right places.” Which made no sense to Damien. “So. What do you say? If you want to keep doing this, casual…I’m down.”
Damien thought about the heat and the thrill and Gonzalo’s body instead of Hakan’s.
“Yeah. Yeah,” he said, a grin spreading across his face. Excitement buzzed in his chest.
“Okay,” Gonzalo said.
On impulse, Damien leaned forwards and placed a soft kiss on Gonzalo’s cheek. When he sat back, Gonzalo’s eyes were closed, his eyebrows slightly furrowed.
Damien tensed. “Sorry. Am I not supposed to—”
Gonzalo’s eyes opened. His expression cleared. “No. No, no, it’s fine.” He smiled.
Damien smiled back. “Movie?” Damien prompted after a few seconds of Gonzalo just watching him.
Gonzalo blinked before shaking his head. “Yeah. Let’s watch a movie.”
*****
Mia and Cameron had converted one of the offices that wasn’t being used into a ramshackle game room. It was equipped with a TV, comfortable seating and beanbags, gaming consoles, and posters on the wall. There was a low table cluttered with things and drink rings. It was a space they were all supposed to clean, and therefore was appropriately dusty.
Damien was lured by the slightly open door and the videogame sounds coming from within. He opened the door the rest of the way. Immediately, Koko and Hakan whipped around to look at him. Damien froze. Hakan’s face was completely blank, but Koko’s was split in a shit-eating grin.
“Shut up,” Damien told Koko, already knowing where this was going.
“I knew it!”
“Shut up!” He should have showered before entering the room.
“Dude, you smell like you rolled around with him. Eau de Gonzalo. Ooh la, la! Smells good on you, playah,” Koko teased.
“Shut up,” Damien repeated, sitting next to Hakan to avoid the ribbing. Hakan was still looking at him, nose wrinkled. Damien threw his hands in the air. “What! Come on! Surely I must smell like other people all the time!”
“Not like that. Arousal smells different. Very…distinctive,” Koko said. Hakan remained completely silent, his shoulders a tense line.
“Oh my God…”
“Well, good news is you turned him on. Must have done something right. Though it doesn’t smell like you finished…”
“Jesus, Koko,” Hakan said, snapping out of it. “Out of line.”
“Whatever, loser. Damien and I have talked about worse.”
Hakan looked at Damien. Damien shrugged.
“Still,” Damien said. “Please shut up.”
“Okay, Boner City. Whatever you want.”
“Screw this, I’m going to shower.”
“Have fun!” Koko called after him. Damien stuck his tongue out at her before he closed the door. He covered his face wi
th his hands.
Werewolves were the worst.
**********
As a teenage boy, it was more a confirmation than a discovery that Damien liked sex. They never went all the way, as Damien called it and Gonzalo laughed at, but that summer was filled with another type of heat, with new, awkward, thrilling experiences.
In a way, it helped Damien distance himself from his attraction to Hakan. He was still in love with him, but it was dormant and abstract, shadowed by the actual experiences of his daily life. It felt like something in him finally settled. The love didn’t burn anymore. It only warmed him.
Damien walked carefully downstairs for a drink late one night, the house quiet and filled with moonlight. He stepped softly on the landing and saw a beam of light stretch from the kitchen. As he opened the door, he saw Hakan already inside, eating the leftovers from the day before as a midnight snack.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Hakan watched Damien carefully as he poured himself a drink and then took a chair near Hakan.
“Nightmare?” Hakan asked. Damien snorted a little at Hakan’s knee-jerk concern.
“Nah, just caught up reading,” he said. Hakan nodded and turned back to the food.
A soft silence settled. Damien watched him for a moment.
“I never thanked you,” Damien said. Hakan looked up. “For finding me, that day. When I, you know, took those pills. No, not for finding me—for looking for me. And the day I found out your parents wanted to foster me. I might not be here if you hadn’t talked to me. Or. You know. Searched for me that day.”
Hakan looked at him. His expression was deep, fathomless. “You’re welcome,” he said eventually, simply. “You…you’re doing okay, right? You’re happy? With school and, you know, Gonzalo and everything?”
“Gonzalo?” Damien laughed. “Yeah, Hakan. I’m happy.”
Hakan looked at him for a moment before smiling at him. In that moment, for the first time in months, Damien wanted to kiss him. Not as a prelude to sex but simply to show him how deep and wonderful the feeling he held for Hakan was.
Instead, Damien leaned forwards and pressed his forehead to Hakan’s bare bicep for a moment. He rubbed slightly, scent marking him, before pulling away.
Hakan’s eyes were so deep they were almost black.
“Okay,” Damien said. “Mushy time over. I’m going to bed.”
Hakan smiled. “Okay.”
“Goodnight, Hakan.”
“Sleep tight.”
**********
The next school year did not pause.
Fooling around with Gonzalo burned out with summer as they entered their last year of high school. Damien was determined to get into Eketon University. Anxiety was a constant companion, that old hiss of inadequacy, but the world around him didn’t let Damien linger. He had to move forwards, whether he believed that he could or not.
Damien spent a lot of his spare time studying with Nova and Mia. Despite the activity being so similar to schoolwork, there was something so thrilling about exploring a world he never thought existed that it could keep him engaged for hours.
It was a constant amazement to him what Mia, as Kephalē, had to deal with to keep such a large and well-established pack going peacefully. It was a strange side effect of approaching adulthood to be able to peek behind the curtain. He got to witness how the dynamics of the pack affected its structure internally, and how they were constantly dealing with outside issues, be it shifters crossing their lands, negotiations with creatures who lived in the forest and surrounding areas, mishaps with witches, or a particularly gruesome account of one of the visiting necromancers getting lost when he visited the Nunn, land of the dead, without a guide.
He spent hours out in the forest with Nova. At his suggestion, they had been systematically collecting detailed information of the flora and fauna of the Salgado lands. Damien presented what they had so far to Mia and Cameron during Christmas as a surprise and Mia had been struck dumb with amazement.
“This was your idea?” she asked.
Damien had shrugged. “Yeah, well, I mean, without Nova—”
“This is amazing. You never stop amazing me, Damien.”
Damien hadn’t been able to tamp down the blush.
He went out with Gonzalo, Olive, and Koko when they could make the time. Even Olive stopped truanting as often, determined to graduate despite not wanting to go into further education. At least, not just after getting out of the straightjacket of high school.
April arrived not only with Damien’s eighteenth birthday but with his acceptance into Eketon University. He almost cried when he read the email alone in his room, hand shaking around the mouse.
He’d stumbled out of his room and Mia had immediately come upstairs to check on him, concerned about the pounding of his heart.
“What—”
“I got in. Into Eketon.”
The smile she had given him could have lit up a new moon night.
Life got swallowed by sorting out scholarships and dorms. Mia, Cameron, and Damien almost had their first real fight when Mia and Cameron insisted on paying what the scholarship Damien had obtained didn’t cover. Damien was immediately overwhelmed by the responsibility that would mean, the guilt at taking advantage of them. It had taken a long night of calming Damien down and laying out all the facts to finally convince Damien to accept money for at least the course fees and textbooks. The argument ended with Damien winning custody over dorm and personal expenses, but something told him this was a war the Salgados might not be willing to lose.
The day after his eighteenth birthday, Damien went out with Nicola for one last time. As a legal adult, he was taken out of her care, not that it had been necessary for her to have any real involvement apart from supervisory for the previous few years.
“Thanks for everything, Nicola,” Damien told her, wrapping her in a hug. She hugged him tightly back.
“I’m so proud of you. I’m just…I’m so happy everything worked out, Damien. There’s no person that deserves it more.”
As the school year ended, Damien lay on his bed and watched the landscape of the previous years go past. The changing terrain, from arid sands to lush forests. He watched the spinning reel project over his head. It rattled and got stuck on that day. The empty pill packet, the sweat and nausea of the forest. He’d been desperate, then. There had been nothing else. The future didn’t exist. Not like this. It had been a mirror to the monsters of the past. An endless, repeating pattern that he couldn’t imagine would be broken.
But it had. God, it had.
As much as the film got stuck in that one spot, it always moved past.
Damien closed his eyes and thanked the earth for being forgiving.
**********
The summer dwindled to a close with a celebration. The Salgados held a barbecue outside in the still-warm air as a goodbye party for both Koko, who had gotten into the same college as Nadie, and Damien. It was filled with people Damien was now familiar with. Adults that knew to ask about graphic novels and psychology, who sought him out to share anecdotes and newly gained knowledge about plants. He knew which members avoided each other and who to go to for the family gossip. They spoke to him as if he were going to be part of them forever. Next Christmas…and I have a friend you can shadow in the summer…and When you start working…
Mia had been completely and utterly unmovable in the fact that Damien would return to the Salgados’ during holidays. Damien rarely saw that side of her. Something told him that she was more lenient in giving in to him than with others, but the Kephalē had been almost agitated at the suggestion that Damien wouldn’t be coming back. It had been that, more than anything, that had Damien capitulating.
Damien was a little overwhelmed with attention when Mia called him into the library at the end of the night. They sat together, two cups of their handmade, nighttime iced tea on the low table in front of them. Mia’s eyes were as soft as gibbous moonlight.
&n
bsp; “Before you start, Mia,” Damien said. Mia looked at him attentively. “I wanted to thank you. For…for everything. For so much that, honestly, I don’t even know where to begin. For taking me in and giving me a home. I hadn’t thought that was possible after my parents died. And it…it’s so much. I owe you such a debt. I owe you so much. If there’s anything…I mean, I know there’s not much I can do, but I feel like I can’t take any more of your kindness without giving something in return,” he said almost formally.
Damien had been thinking of the natural balance of Ousía, and if he was unsettling the peace by taking so much and giving nothing in return.
“Damien, you owe us absolutely nothing!” Mia started, but Damien was already shaking his head.
“I know you think that, but…you’re not going to change my mind on this. I’d do anything for you. I owe you and everybody in this family my life.”
Mia looked at him. She did not look honoured or humbled or glad. She looked sad.
She closed her eyes after a moment, shaking her head lightly. When she opened them, she lifted her hand to rub her thumb on Damien’s cheek.
“One day, you’ll see. You’ll be able to accept what I really can offer,” she said quietly. Damien frowned, but she leaned forwards to kiss him on the forehead. “I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of you, Damien. How very, very proud I am. Not just of what you have achieved, but of who you are. You think you owe us, but it is we who owe you. I hope you see that one day.
“This is your home. It will always be your home. It will always be open to you, whether you believe you deserve it or not. As Kephalē, that is my decision to make. So, go out into the world. But come back.”
Damien looked at her. He nodded. He had told her he’d do anything for her after all.
Mia wrapped him up in a hug.
“I love you very much,” she said. Damien closed his eyes. It still rattled him to hear that, but it was becoming difficult to deny.
In This Iron Ground (Natural Magic) Page 18