Dangerous Savior

by Wulff, Carson

  A wave of regret washes over him at the missed opportunities he’s snuck past his whole life.

  The opportunity to experience the acceptance of family and friends.

  The opportunity to be who he really is, unapologetically.

  Is it possible that he could ever make up for the lost time? Will he even, realistically, make it out of this situation alive to have a second chance?

  Beth leads Ethan outside into the bright daylight.

  Ethan almost recoils at the harsh glare of the sun, the sudden wave of heat. It’s only been days, but it feels like an eternity since he’s seen light that bright. The heat of the day caresses his skin to gooseflesh. It reminds him too much of the heat of being beneath Tom’s body.

  They keep walking until they reach a burn pit behind the house. Ethan watches as Beth tosses new wood into the pit from a pile nearby. It’s not long before she has a crackling fire going. The sight and smell of the fire is suffocating in addition to the hot breeze.

  Ethan stares at the tree line in the distance. The urge to flee scratches at his insides like a whining animal trapped behind a latched door. He should run. Will this be his last chance to run?

  Would Beth be able to catch him? Tackle him to the ground? If she did, it would all be over. She would kill him right there with the knife on her belt. And then she would make Tom clean up the mess of his ruined corpse.

  He can't run.

  He's too weak right now, sore all over from the biker's beating.

  He tears his gaze away from the tree line.

  He can't run.

  He has to survive.

  “Toss it in, go on,” Beth orders, indicating the luggage. “One thing at a time. Don’t wanna smother the fire.”

  Oh. Right. Ethan should have seen this coming. Ethan does as he’s told without question, ripping the zipper open and tossing one piece of clothing in the fire at a time. He watches dazed as each bit of evidence of his normal life curls and burns in the fire.

  It’s a slow process to burn everything one by one. He’d packed several changes of clothes. The suitcase itself gets tossed in last and produces the worst smell by far, with all its melting plastic.

  “Those too,” Beth says with the most pointed stare.

  “What?” Ethan asks, confused.

  Beth responds only with a slow drag of her eyes from Ethan’s head to his feet and then back up again.

  Oh.

  Fuck.

  “The clothes I’m wearing?” Ethan asks, already knowing the answer. It’s a feeble attempt at resistance. At stalling.

  Beth’s eyes narrow, sensing his hesitance. “Now.”

  Ethan sucks in a breath and pulls off his shirt. He tosses it into the fire quickly before he can convince himself to change his mind. His sneakers go next. It hurts the most to kick those into the fire. He can replace his clothes easily with Tom’s clothes—he’s sure Tom would spare one of his large shirts for him. But there are probably no shoes in the entire farmhouse that will fit him.

  The shoes were his size. They were his. And now they’re being licked to ash by the flames.

  And he was wrong—the burning rubber of the sneaker's soles are definitely the worst smell.

  His jeans go next, and Ethan can’t help but scowl as he hops out of them, Beth watching the whole time.

  He hesitates before shedding his underwear too—but the sharp look Beth is appraising him with tells him he should do it without question.

  Ethan stands there, fully naked, the last of his clothes burning, trying his best to cover his groin with his hands.

  It’s humiliating. Fury makes his jaw clench. He can’t manage to keep the disgusted look off his face as he waits for his next order.

  Most of all, he’s ashamed. Ashamed that he’s obeying instead of fighting back. Ashamed that he’s come too far to take the risk of trying to fight back.

  Beth whistles, low and impressed, eyes viciously scanning his bruised body without permission. “My brother sure was rough with you.”

  Ethan says nothing. Bites his tongue hard to keep any ill-conceived retort at bay.

  “You’re a good liar,” Beth admits, grinning. “You expect me to believe you didn’t put up a fight the first time he had you?”

  That.

  Ethan has to use every ounce of his restraint to keep his mouth shut.

  She can say what she wants about him, but Ethan can’t fucking stand the way she treats her own flesh and blood. How long has Tom endured this kind of emotional abuse? Has he been subject to the same brand of humiliation Ethan is facing now?

  “Question is,” Beth says, slow and considering, “Did Tommy convert you with his cock, or are you just faking your feelings for him?”

  Ethan sees red. The words fly out of his mouth in a flash: “I wish. I fucking wish I was faking it. Reality is much, much worse.”

  “The fuck does that mean?”

  “What’s worse?” Ethan shoots, grimacing, “If I’m faking it to save my own skin, or if I’m telling the truth—if I actually did fucking like him the moment I saw him?”

  Something about his expression must be serious enough that Beth is taken aback.

  She grins. “God, least I can go to my grave knowing I ain’t as fucked up as you.”

  Ethan snorts at that, disgusted and disturbingly amused. Because—yeah. Yeah, that’s how he’s been feeling.

  That wanting to fuck his captor, a man who both scares and arouses him, is more fucked up than murder. Actual fucking murder.

  He feels so ashamed of himself and his budding feelings for Tom, as if they're worse than all the fucked up shit he's witnessed Tom and his family do.

  Would anyone agree with that? Agree that Ethan's feelings are more disturbing than violence?

  Ethan can’t imagine his friends and family responding to his feelings for Tom with anything other than disdain and disgust.

  “Better get you some new clothes,” Beth says, like this is a totally normal subject change. Like Ethan isn’t standing completely naked in broad daylight, watching the remainder of his possessions burn to ash.

  Still, Ethan follows Beth back into the house without protest, even though he’s frantically praying in his head that Daisy won’t be around to bear witness to his unclothed state.

  Thankfully, he doesn’t see her around.

  “Ain’t nothing of Tommy’s is gonna fit a scrawny thing like you. Guess I gotta find something for you in Sally’s closet.”

  Ethan’s stomach churns at that, not because he particularly minds the notion of wearing women’s clothes—but at the fact that this is another attempt to further humiliate and degrade him.

  Beth leads Ethan upstairs to the second floor of the house. It’s all peeling floral wallpaper and dusty, crooked picture frames—all of which contain pictures of the women in the house. None of Tom. Just like the photo albums Ethan found buried in junk in the basement.

  Just as Ethan thought, there are at least five rooms up here branching off from the hallway. Plenty of space for each member of the family to have their own room, including Tom. In fact, they pass one open room that appears to be used completely for storage, filled to the brim with boxes.

  So. They do keep Tom in the basement just to be cruel.

  To hide him away like something to be ashamed of.

  To punish him for existing.

  For being born at all.

  Ethan grinds his teeth to keep himself from commenting on this particular observation.

  Beth leads him into what must be Sally’s room. It’s messy, filled with personal possessions and hearty wooden furniture that looks expensive and new. Did Tom make it?

  Ethan’s seen Sally dressed in normal pants and T-shirts that would easily pass as unisex clothing, but when Beth digs through Sally’s closet, she pulls out a long, old-fashioned dress.

  It’s simple and white. Flowing, with no shape to it.

  The closet is full of simple T-shirts and pants that would definitely fit Ethan.<
br />
  But sure enough, Beth shoves the dress at him and says, “This’ll do for now.”

  She’s… fuck, she’s not just trying to humiliate him, is she? She’s intentionally trying to provoke him, to push his buttons, to see how far he’ll let her subtle sadistic orders go.

  Ethan takes the dress. It’s just clothes. It’s just fucking clothes, and he won’t let her get under his skin. He refuses to feel emasculated by this, refuses to be ashamed as he gratefully slips the dress over his naked body, genuinely glad to be able to cover his bruised, vulnerable skin.

  The dress is soft and light-weight. Linen, probably. It hangs from his shoulders on straps, neckline shaped like a tank top. The shapelessness of it doesn’t give his body the appearance of breasts or even accentuate his hips. He’s glad for this. It simply hangs straight down his body like a long shirt, the only feminine part of it is the flowing skirt that reaches his knees.

  It’s not bad at all. He genuinely isn’t humiliated by it, though he’s offended by Beth’s clear attempt at humiliation. He wonders if maybe he should pretend to be more embarrassed than he is just to appease her, satisfy whatever rush of superiority she’s looking for. In the end, he can’t even bring himself to fake emasculation.

  The next thing Beth shoves at him is a pair of bikini-cut women’s underwear. Simple, with only slight frills around the openings and a small pink ribbon bow on the front hem.

  Ethan almost rolls his eyes.

  He steps into them and slips them up beneath the skirt without question, thankful that the skirt obscures his body beneath as he does so.

  They fit okay around his hips, but the shape of them is not designed for someone with a penis, and they’re vaguely uncomfortable in that department.

  But. He’ll live.

  Beth gives him a once-over and Ethan drops his gaze to the floor, cheeks pink from just the embarrassment of having been nude moments before. Beth snickers, seeming to mistake this for a victory.

  “Okay,” she says. “C’mon, now you’re ready to be put to work.”

  Ethan nods and follows, dreading the rest of Tom’s family’s reaction to the dress flowing around his knees.

  What else can he do?

  18

  Household chores soak up the rest of Ethan’s day—all under Beth’s scrutinizing watch. There is no shortage of belittling comments as he scrubs a sink full of dishes, piling them up on the drying rack until it’s overflowing. He spends the whole time wondering if any of these dishes were used for cooking human meat for the pigs. Are the scraps of soft something he’s washing off the frying pans human flesh?

  Ethan’s not sure what reaction he expected to the dress, but his face heats in shock when the matriarch of the family simply laughs herself into a coughing fit. Sally’s angry at first, seeing her closet has been ransacked without permission. But then Sally’s gaze turns lecherous enough to have Beth shooing her away from Ethan, as if Beth is the only one allowed to lay claim on his psychological torture.

  The family doesn’t own a washing machine, probably because the home seems to be powered solely by a thrumming generator outside. So Ethan washes several baskets of laundry by hand with a bucket and wooden washboard. Beth laughs heartily at his first attempts to figure out how to use the washboard, but soon he gets the hang of it, arms quickly sore from the scrubbing. Afterwards, Ethan hangs the laundry to dry on the clotheslines outside, pinching each sopping item in place with wooden pins. From the side of the yard the clotheslines are in, Ethan catches glimpses of Tom working across the field, shirt off and clearly sweat-slick.

  With Beth looming nearby, Ethan can’t allow himself to be distracted too much by Tom. But still, Ethan spots the exact moment Tom notices him hanging the clothes in the distance—Tom jerks to a stop mid-motion as he bends to haul a slab of wood over his shoulder. Tom stares and then turns away as if caught doing something illicit.

  Ethan wonders if Tom registers the dress from this distance, or if he notices the water from the clothes dripping down Ethan’s arms. Or his white dress clinging half-translucent to his skin in several spots where the soapy water from the bucket sloshed over the rim.

  Ethan’s heart sinks when he finishes with the clothes and is ushered back inside. Just being able to see Tom from afar had lifted his mood exponentially. He’d much rather be in the barn with Tom, watching him work, twitching with the restraint it takes to keep his hands off of the much larger man.

  The remainder of the afternoon is spent on his hands and knees scrubbing the hardwood floors with a threadbare towel, which tears further every time he wrings it out. It’s excruciating—the situation, the burning pain in his limbs from the sudden overload of physical work—but most excruciating of all is the way Beth looms over him, sometimes bored, sometimes much too interested in critiquing his work. With her watching him, he can’t slow his pace for even a moment, can’t stop to breathe or rest his arms. She hasn’t even given him a break to eat or drink water, his head is pulsing with what’s sure to be dehydration.

  Is every single day going to be like this, or will Beth lose interest in playing proctor eventually?

  Ma, Sally, and Daisy seem to mostly steer clear of him, either because they see him as an eyesore, or because they want to avoid Beth’s control and scrutiny being hurled in their direction.

  Ethan spends the entire day reminding himself that eventually Tom will return from his own work on the farm and then, hopefully, Ethan will be free to return to the basement with him.

  The thought of getting to deposit his exhausted body into Tom’s arms at the end of the day is so, so alluring. It’s the only thing keeping him going.

  Eventually, the creaky screen door swings open and the familiar sound of Tom’s boots hit the freshly mopped floor.

  “Guess you’re finished for the day,” Beth says, grabbing Ethan by the arm and hauling him to stand, as if knowing she’d worked him so hard today that he would scarcely be able to stand on his own.

  It’s this sudden facade of kindness that makes Ethan realize there’s another reason she must have kept him alive—to retain control over Tom. Ethan’s another thing to leverage against her brother, to keep him in line. To keep him from any sign of breaking free from the family.

  Beth’s smart, in her own way.

  She knows her brother won’t be happy if he thinks Ethan’s been treated poorly all day, worked to the bone without breaks or food.

  Tom stops at a conversational distance, silent and waiting for some sort of indication from Beth for how the rest of the night is supposed to go.

  “Ma! Bring the boys some food to take down with them!” Beth shouts towards the kitchen where Ma has been cooking dinner, making another load of dishes for Ethan to do tomorrow, surely.

  After a few moments, Ma appears with one plate of food, handing it off to Tom without looking at Ethan.

  “It ain’t decent, the two of them alone in the basement together,” Ma grumbles at Beth, voice sour with distaste.

  “Where the hell else we gonna put him?” Beth shoots back. “Who cares if it’s decent? Tommy’s already fucked the boy.”

  The boy, the boy, the boy. It’s as if Ethan isn’t an adult, a human being with his own identity. He’s twenty-three years old for god’s sake. It’s been a whole day, and not one of Tom’s family members has even bothered to sarcastically ask for his name. They don’t know it. They don’t even know his name. They don’t care. He’s not a person to them.

  “I always known that boy was gonna be depraved just like his daddy,” Ma mutters under her breath as she shuffles back into the kitchen.

  As if Tom’s sudden soft spot for Ethan somehow justifies the lifetime of abuse and neglect Tom’s mother put him through. It’s absurd and infuriating, but Ethan clenches his teeth but holds his tongue.

  When Beth escorts Ethan and Tom back into the basement, she snaps the door shut behind them, deadbolt clicking loudly as she locks them inside.

  It’s heaven to be alone with Tom ag
ain. Even though Ethan’s sure Tom will share his plate of food with him, eating is the last thing on Ethan’s mind. He’s not sure he even has the energy to eat. The strong scent of gasoline from the cans under the stairs don’t help his appetite, either.

  And besides, Tom discards the plate on top of a pile of boxes anyway, and turns his full attention to Ethan.

  Ethan stands, shoulders slumped, suddenly aware of exactly what he’s wearing. The dress Beth forced him into.

  Tom is staring. So intense. Like it’s the first time he’s ever laid eyes on Ethan.

  Ethan spares a quick glance towards the middle of the basement, where Jed is awake and staring too, eyes incredulous at the sight of Ethan’s dress. He must be wondering what the hell happened to Ethan today.

  Ethan wonders the same.

  Tom fists his hands into the dress, yanking Ethan forward. Ethan collapses against Tom’s wide chest, still bare from whenever he shed his shirt in the heat.

  A rush of relief, the tingling thrall of safety, crashes through Ethan like fresh lungfuls of air after too long underwater. He lets all his weight lean against Tom, lets himself be held upright by strong arms coiling around him, holding him protectively close.

  He feels rootless. Felled.

  He needs this man to take care of him now, sand him down, craft him into something new.

  Ethan couldn’t care less that they’re in plain view of Jed. Fuck him.

  Fuck everyone but this man standing before him now, keeping him afloat.

  “Sorry about the dress,” Ethan murmurs against Tom’s chest. “Your sister made me burn my clothes.”

  “Saw that,” Tom says against Ethan’s hair.

  “She said this is the only thing that would fit. I think she just wants to humiliate me.”

  Tom grunts in agreement.

  “Being in a dress is far less humiliating than being a prisoner here in the first place.”

  Tom stills at that, his fingers halting their slow vertical caress of Ethan’s back.