Blackmail (Skeleton Key Book 1)

by Anna James Watson

  “Which truths?” Julian quietly asks. His voice is again clinical and calm, like that of a seasoned psychologist. I wonder how many times the two of them have done this.

  “Us, Father, all the things I don’t even know that might come out. There is everything to be afraid of.”

  “That is because you are attached to a certain perception of yourself by others,” Julian comments. “What is the root of that attachment?”

  “Don’t psychoanalyze me. I don’t want to know the answer to any questions. If I can’t see the answers then I can’t accidentally show them to others.”

  “You took the ’shrooms to clean yourself out, right? So that the secrets you want to keep wouldn’t be targeted by the ayahuasca? You have to explore them in order to be free of them.”

  “I am exploring them,” Tristan says, a hint of the drawl I’m so familiar with buried deep beneath the twisted mystic whispers.

  “Do you think that Skeleton Key won’t accept you if they know you’re bi?” I ask, too tired to be subtle or play beat-around-the-bush games. I get that Julian is trying to coax Tristan’s subconscious and his conscious into meeting, but coaxing could take forever. “Is that who you were really afraid of me showing the video of you and Julian to?”

  “Not now,” Tristan replies.

  “Because you have blackmail on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen if you don’t get tapped by the Keys? Is your family going to cut you out of the will or something?”

  Tristan turns his whole body toward me as his face twists into the most earnest honest frown, his eyes so poignantly open even under his angry brow. The veil of disinterest and superiority has lifted; I think he is actually showing his true feelings on his face.

  “Among other things,” he answers darkly. “Things you’re too ignorant to know you’re lucky not to have to know.”

  I purse my lips and remind myself of what Julian’s note said—projection. “Please,” I say, trying to curb my sarcasm, “enlighten me.”

  “You’re such a know-it-all bitch,” he says observantly, without venom, almost amused. “You think you know things about me, you sound so judgmental, on your high horse, thinking you’d never be on drugs or care about joining a club, or whatever else you think about me. But I bet you grew up in a happy little run-down shack with a mommy and daddy who loved you unconditionally and have been proud of everything you’ve ever done. My parents don’t love; they invest. And when an investment is determined to be more of a loss than a gain, it gets dropped. I have to always be a worthwhile investment. There is no security for me. There is no love. Love is for people who are poor and stupid, with no ambition. So go ahead and act like you’re better than me because you have no reason to care what other people think. I do.”

  I wish he’d said it with venom. I wish that he was being a nasty bastard like he usually is. But he isn’t. The hints of his facade are there, but they are impotent in this state, the truth easily shines through. I can see to the root of his hardness. I can see the fracture lines, marking the path that took him away from the innocence we’re all born with and led instead to the angry, alone adult he has become.

  “It was a mistake trusting you,” he says, something raw bubbling up in his voice. “You can’t actually understand.”

  Hurt. That’s it. That’s what he didn’t want the Keymen to see. Deep underneath his hard exterior there is part of him that is still hurt. Hurt means an open wound. It means vulnerable. He’s afraid they will see where he is vulnerable, and think him weak for it.

  He stands on shaky legs and takes step after step out of the kitchen. Julian remains still and silent. An instinct I didn’t really know I had takes me over and I follow him.

  I reach out for his hand and catch it right as he crosses into the living room. He freezes at my touch, but doesn’t turn around or say anything. I gently press my head against his back. His muscles tense, but he doesn’t move away. So I slowly wind my arms under his and pull us close, like somehow, just the closeness could soothe him. Or maybe I’m the one projecting now, and I’m doing it to soothe myself.

  His whole body seems to melt and then go tense and melt again. He doesn’t try to step away, nor does he turn around. I, too, am frozen. I feel my heartbeat thud against his spine, and I think maybe I can somehow feel his heart beat back. I am wrong though, eventually what I think is a heartbeat becomes stronger and more erratic. It originates in his lower ribs, not his chest, and it is jerky.

  “Tristan…” Are you crying? is what I’m thinking, but I know that’s the wrong thing to say. I am again filled with that bizarre sensation of being the third party observer, watching someone inhabit my body and react to Tristan in a way I never thought I would. “You’re right,” I whisper, “I don’t really know you, but that’s only because you’re such an asshole all the time, not because I’m not willing to know you. I can’t know things about you if you don’t tell me, and you can tell me. I will listen. I won’t make fun of you or use what you say to hurt you. I don’t want anything from you. You don’t have to earn anything.”

  Thump, thump, thump, goes my heart.

  I can feel Julian’s eyes on us, I can feel his calm. It’s almost like he is helping to create and hold this place. Like it is safer to be this version of me with Julian here, like she knows how to exist better with him watching. I can’t tell if she is wiser or more foolish than I usually am, but I know I want to learn more about her. It seems I’ve consented to “find out what’s on the other side,” as Tristan put it.

  Tristan doesn’t respond with words. His elbows slowly move apart, breaking contact with my arms. His hands move inward and fall over mine. Gently, he pulls my hands away from his body and steps forward. I let out a deep breath and feel…sad, disappointed, something…Whatever just happened, and I don’t even know what it is, he’s going to walk away.

  I let my hands drop back to my sides and shift my eyes to Julian, like maybe he will know how to say whatever I don’t. But then hands slide over my waist and around my back. I turn my head and Tristan’s lips push onto mine. I push back automatically.

  This kiss is different than the few kisses we’ve shared before. It is slow and deep. I can feel every square millimeter of my lips meld into his. I can feel every tiny drop of pressure as they add up and turn me into a puddle of compassion.

  I wrap my arms around his neck and wind my fingers into his hair, as I have before, but this time I feel tender and soft. This time, I run my fingers slow and strong up his neck and over his head, like I might push away the invisible demons that eat at him. This time, I press my body into the contours of his and I don’t feel reluctantly consumed by lust, instead I willingly surrender to the instinct to protect and heal.

  He pulls away just enough to come back, to meld our lips together again, to re-create the tender, intimate something that I’m pretty sure he would run away from sober.

  Why am I doing this, surrendering to the flow of this moment, when I really do know better? Why did I that day in the philosophy lounge, or when they cornered me in the piano-practicing room? Maybe Tristan is right…maybe part of me does just want to see what happens on the other side.

  This is not like those days, though. This is not because I saw them practically already having sex and accidentally found myself turned on. Or because I couldn’t get it out of my head afterward, and I was curious and confused and intrigued and thought one more time might answer a question I didn’t exactly know how to ask. Or because I’m drunk.

  This time, I’m much more aware of the full reality of what it means to kiss Tristan in Julian’s apartment at five a.m.—emotionally, mentally, physically. This time, I’m sober in more ways than one. This time, I’m not denying that I’m feeling all kinds of things, and none of those things are romantic and girly and wistful…I don’t know what they are, but I know they promise complication and confusion and things without clean definitions to lean back on. T
his time, I won’t be able to play logic games to absolve myself of responsibility.

  But, even knowing this, I keep kissing him. Slow, soft, yet hard, kisses, packed with all those complicated, confusing things. Kisses that tell me he doesn’t really understand either.

  So I run my tongue along the line of his lips, and let my conscious mind slip away as I surrender to the flow.

  — Tristan —

  I can’t believe I’m crying. I kiss Mia like she is my lifeline because I don’t want her to look at me crying. I don’t want to be crying. I guess taking the ’shrooms was a good move because I wouldn’t want all of this to come out in front of the Brotherhood. But I don’t want to think about it now either. I just want to kiss Mia until I become a creature of pure sensation, lost in physicality, unaware of the cerebral.

  Mia runs her hands up my chest, up my neck, weaves her fingers into my hair, and pulls me down. I open my mouth and pull her bottom lip in, sucking it between my teeth. I could suck on it forever.

  I slide my hands around her waist and down to her hips. I pull them into me. I want to feel her whole body pressed against mine. She is telling me things with her body, and I need to hear all of it. I am afraid to hear it, but right now fear isn’t in control, and I can’t stop listening.

  She pushes herself up onto her toes and my body rocks as her weight shifts. Her elbows are on my shoulders, her perfectly firm tits are against my chest, her outer ankles brush my inner ankles. I open my mouth to devour her tongue, but it slips past my lips and traces the roof of my mouth. Warm, gooey electricity travels straight down to my core.

  I slip my fingers under her giant sweatshirt. The skin of her hips is soft, it curves and dips and I follow it all the way up to the sides of her ribs. She isn’t wearing a bra, but I am lost in feeling her ribs right now. They are perfect ribs. My fingers fall into the dips between them and they fit like they’ve been custom sized. Julian’s ribs feel perfect too, but in such a different way; Mia’s are so tiny.

  I coax her sweatshirt up. She raises her hands and only breaks our kiss at the very last second. I toss her sweatshirt to the ground and her hands land on my waist. Her thumbs gently press into the soft sensitive skin between my hips and abs. I groan as our lips recapture each other’s.

  That tells me things. Things I didn’t let myself hear before. The tenderness, the honesty. She is telling me that she doesn’t have much experience with this, but she is a natural speaker of body language. She is sensitive to the nuances and phrases in my dialect because she is observant. When her hands trace down to the lines of my pants and her thumbs dip just below their threshold, they tell me that she isn’t just horny. They tell me that she cares.

  I don’t know why she cares. And I can feel in the way her confused lips coax mine into deeper and deeper kisses that she doesn’t know why she cares either. All this caring scares me. But right now Fear is not in control.

  I took ’shrooms to clean myself out. She is clean. Clean in a way I don’t know how to be. And right now, because she is so clean that caring comes naturally to her, she is making me clean with her kisses and touches and the way her body rocks close to mine.

  I hear Julian’s footsteps come around, and then he is behind me. I feel his hot breath on my neck right before his teeth gently lock onto the spot where my neck and ear and hairline meet. He knows what that spot does to me, and in this state it is intensified. My legs shake and I lean back into him.

  His hands travel down the sides of my body and slip into my jeans right next to hers, and then hers travel back up my abs, my ribs, my chest. She bites my lower lip oh so perfectly. Together they are telling me things that should have been obvious. How much alike they are. How good and pure and loving they are.

  Julian is always willing to bend to be what I need him to be when I am falling apart and Mia, well, she’s here, which means she has those instincts too. Is that what love is? I wouldn’t know. It’s not a language that is native to my land.

  I think I’ve always loved Julian as much as I could love, but I’ve known Julian for so long that he is safe to let in. No one else is safe. People don’t get lucky enough to have more than one person who can love them.

  Yet, here is Mia, who I’ve been nothing but varying degrees of shitty to since we met, willing to save me from myself in the middle of the night, even if it costs her sleep and time and peace of mind.

  I said that she came with me because she wanted to know what was on the other side, but maybe I was the one who wanted to know. I wanted to know if she would come. I wanted to know what it would mean if she did. I really was so fucked up by the time I knocked on her door that I wasn’t thinking any of this stuff…But I did knock on her door. What does that tell me about me?

  Shut up, my good familiar logic tells me. This will just make things complicated. Just fuck them, go to sleep, and go back to normal tomorrow.

  But that part of me is far away and sounds weak, feeble, even pathetic, in my current state. That is Fear. That is my demon. These are not comfortable thoughts because these thoughts open the door to change, and change is never welcomed by Fear.

  So I did…I did want to see what was on the other side—the side where I trust Mia Winters. I wanted to see what would happen and now I’m finding out.

  I took ’shrooms to become clean, in hopes that the ayahuasca wouldn’t swallow me alive—but it’s not the ’shrooms cleaning me. They opened me up to the possibility of cleansing, and then I went to Mia, and Mia brought me here, and now I’ve got both of their arms around me and both of their bodies against mine and I feel clean.

  My fingers slip from Mia’s hips into her sweatpants and I grab onto her pert ass, pulling her with me as I fall into the familiar surface of Julian’s chest. She lets me grab on just long enough for my dick to go from hard to completely solid. I groan into her lips as she slowly pulls them away.

  Her fingers go from being sprawled across my chest to running down my arm, to sliding into my palm and hooking themselves through mine. She takes a step away, but our fingers are still joined and my feet instantly follow her. Julian, ever aware, has pulled his hands away from the gentle teasing circles he’s been slowly climbing down my groin with, and wraps them around my other hand. Soon he’s fallen into step in front of me, beside her. Together they slowly lead me across the dim pulsating living room, into the hall where the paintings on the walls dance.

  The bedroom door seems to float open, and I seem to float through it. As I do, I can hear the frame whisper that I do not need to be afraid of the change they will lead me into together. I know that I won’t believe it tomorrow, but right now I can feel it, so right now it is real.

  — Julian —

  I hadn’t given up hope that Mia would stop being upset and Tristan would stop being such a moron, but I certainly didn’t think anything like this would happen again for months, let alone in just over three weeks. Tristan really is an idiot for what he did, and I haven’t forgotten the horrible fear that gripped me when they first arrived, when I thought that he really might have gone too far, but I can’t say I’m sorry this is happening.

  Mia, her lithe figure half naked, her hair spilling over her shoulders, steps up onto my tall king-sized bed. She pushes herself back to the center and Tristan, my beautiful, stupid, wonderful, terrible lover crawls after her. His movements are liquid and heavy, they lack their usual grace and precision, but in their place are honesty and openness. I follow them up and don’t stop until both of them are beneath me.

  My lips find Tristan’s first because they have things to tell him—how grateful I am that he is alive, how incredibly stupid he is, how unreasonably attached I am to continuing to have him as a core component of my reality. Then, once my lips are swollen and hot from trying to kiss the stupid away, once I’ve gripped his jaw between my hands and placed fresh hickeys just inside the line of his collar, I turn to Mia.

  Her hands are sprawled above her head. She is tilted at just the right angle for one breas
t to lie perfectly flat across her chest cavity while the other rests on my blanket. Her soft, flat stomach rises and falls, begging my eyes to follow the movements all the way down to what her pants conceal. Her eyes are deep, thoughtful, receptive, and brimming with desire as she looks from the point where Tristan and I met lips only a second ago to my mouth, traveling toward hers.

  I have wanted to kiss her since the last time I kissed her, and it has been so hard not to. I haven’t felt attracted to a woman with this much intensity…ever. Tristan and I have been doing this since we were closer to boys than men, so we sort of shaped each other’s sexuality; I don’t know if it’s possible for me to be attracted to another man with the same intensity I am attracted to Tristan. Women, though…I’ve been with women, but I’ve never felt this aggressive, insane pull in my gut that tells me to claim a woman.

  Mia’s fingers trace their way up my shirt and then glide around. I feel tugs on buttons. She presses her tongue against mine, slowly, sensually, no self-consciousness, and as I fall deeper and deeper into our kisses she unbuttons my shirt from the bottom up.

  Her lips move with mine, our tongues entwine the same way our minds do when lost in conversation. I want to be lost anywhere with her. She tastes like mouthwash and honey sweet tea and Tristan. I swear I can taste Tristan’s tongue inside of her mouth. I like the taste of them together.

  I feel Tristan shift beneath me, rolling and curling until his head is between our stomachs. One of his hands snakes between my legs, rubbing my balls through my pants, while the other cups Mia’s breast, pulling it to meet his lips. Her tongue presses soft gasps into mine; clearly, whatever he is doing turns her on.

  She tugs at my shirt, trying to force it over my shoulders. I kiss her hard, then pull away from her. On my knees, I watch her stare up at me as I yank my shirt off, and I watch Tristan readjust himself so that he fully captures one of her nipples in his mouth and the other between his fingers. He slides himself half onto her and she weaves her fingers through his hair, welcoming him.