Chapter 8

Louis

On Monday, I’m off work for once, and I spend the evening tinkering with my vintage Harley Davidson while I let Sparrow use the TV. He seems fascinated with it, switching between all kinds of different channels and staring incessantly at the screen. When a nature documentary comes on, he slides off the couch to sit on the carpet right in front of it.

“Didn’t have a TV back home?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer right away, instead too fascinated by the weird dance of some kind of bird on the screen, narrated by a quirky, calm male voice.

“Sparrow?”

He shakes out of his trance but doesn’t rip his gaze from the screen. “Uh, Madame had one in her room, but she wouldn’t let us watch. Aaron and I used to sneak inside when she was gone at work, and he’d let me—” He stops talking, suddenly shy, as if he said too much.

“So you and Aaron lived together?” I ask with a weird sense of unease.

“We were foster brothers,” Sparrow says, voice so low I can barely hear it over the chirping of birds.

I sigh, wipe my hands off with a rag, and grab the remote control from his hands.

“But…you said I could watch!” he whines.

“Come here.” I sit on the couch and pat the seat beside me.

Sparrow hesitates, a sullen pout to his lips as he crawls off the floor and comes to sit where I indicated, feet planted on the seat and arms wrapped around his legs.

“Sit up straight,” I say, voice firm. Sparrow obeys, but his hesitation shows when I put two knuckles under his chin to make him meet my eyes. “What’s wrong?”

Maybe I shouldn’t care so much about this tantrum of his, but he’s piqued my curiosity in more ways than one, and I’m losing the battle of trying to convince myself I don’t give a shit about him. He’s hurt, I can tell that much, and part of me doesn’t want him to feel like he’s unwanted. That Lilith girl said he’s been through enough, and I’m beginning to feel like she’s right.

“You don’t think it’s weird?” Sparrow asks finally, and when his eyes meet mine, they’re glazed over with tears. “That Aaron and I were foster brothers, and at the same time, we were…”

“How old were you,” I ask, “when you got together?”

“I was fourteen, and he was sixteen.”

I grimace. My uneasy feeling grows stronger with every passing second and every fleeting look of Sparrow as he winds his hands into the sleeves of his sweater. He looks so cute yet so broken.

“How did it happen?” I ask.

“Happen?”

“How did you two get together?”

“Oh,” he says, a flush rising to his cheeks. “He liked me, and I liked him, and…we started sleeping together.”

“Sleeping together as in…?”

“Having sex.”

“Fourteen is quite young for that,” I grumble, bringing a hand up to scratch my beard. Sparrow follows the motion of my hand. He seems quite fixated on it, the same way he was fixated on the TV just now. He’s…passionate. Attentive. And way, way too emotional. “Did you have sex, or did he have sex with you?”

He looks up at me, confusion in his big blue eyes. “What’s the difference?”

I scratch an itch on my jaw, too taken aback by his answer to muster a reply.

“How old were you the first time, then?” Sparrow asks.

“Does it matter?”

“Well, since you say I was young, I want to know what’s more common. I don’t know these things.”

“Seems like there’s a lot of things you don’t know,” I say in jest, but Sparrow appears to take it as an insult. He presses his lips into a tight line and folds his feet up to the seat again. “Didn’t I tell you to sit up straight?”

Sparrow makes a frustrated noise and kicks his legs back down. He seems annoyed, and I find I kind of like annoying him, but I like seeing his fascinated stare even more. I guess that’s why I tell him.

“I was seventeen. With my boyfriend at the time, in my bedroom. That day, my dad happened to come home from work early for once.”

“He was bad? Your father?”

“Bad? Yes, my father was bad, all right. What’s that saying?” I flash a wolfish, joyless grin. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“But you’re not bad,” Sparrow says, and his words hit my chest with a weird pang.

He’s known me all of, what, a couple of days? He barely knows anything about me, and besides, he’s a gullible kid who wouldn’t recognize danger if it slapped him in the face.

“Louis?” Sparrow asks, and his knuckles brush over my thigh. Doesn’t seem like he’s conscious of it, but his touch makes my dick twitch with interest.

“Anyway,” I grunt, shifting away from him. “He busted into my bedroom and found us there.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened? He threw my boyfriend out and beat the living shit out of me. He never laid hands on me again though. He took his anger out on my mom instead, as was his preference. Blamed her for making me the way I was.” I go quiet for a moment, remembering his booming voice from downstairs. Happy now? You’ve turned him into a sissy little faggot. It’s time I teach him what it means to be a man.

That weekend, he took me out into the woods with his hunting rifle over the shoulder and a flask in his pocket. We spotted a deer and a few rabbits, all of which my father scared away with the shots he missed. He blasted the rifle into the sky, roaring with his frustration, while I stood and watched. “Let me try, Dad,” I said, and when he handed me the rifle and I shot a rabbit on the first try, his eyes lit up as if he’d never seen me before.

He saw I could be ruthless. He saw I could be efficient. And he was right.

Turning away from Sparrow’s concerned gaze, I put the TV back on. This time, there are wolves hunting what looks like a caribou. As the pack closes in on their prey, Sparrow starts biting his nails, his whole body buzzing with dread and excitement. He lets out little squeaks of “no!” and “hurry!” each time the wolves nip at the caribou’s heels, and when they finally tear into its hind leg, he whines and hides his face in his hands.

We watch another episode. And another. Sparrow never seems to get enough, and likewise, I find myself unable to get enough of his enthusiasm. He’s so focused on what he’s watching, so affected by it. Next to him, I feel like a stone statue, and I wonder what it’s like to absorb the world and cradle it so close to your heart as Sparrow does.

It must be nice, I guess. Myself, I feel numb most of the time. Numb or angry.

Sometime around the fourth episode, Sparrow’s eyes begin to droop, and he lies down on the couch with his head next to my thighs. It’s not the most comfortable couch, to be fair; I haven’t bothered to get any decorative pillows, and the pillow used by Sparrow when he’s sleeping is stuffed into a compartment inside the seat.

He looks up at me with sweet, sleepy eyes, as if asking for permission.

I sigh and say, “Fine.”

Carefully, slowly, he rests his head on my lap. Heart pounding, I clench my hands into fists by my sides. After a while, I lift a hand and slide my fingers into his hair, just resting them there by his temple. His body shifts as his breathing grows heavier, and I stare straight ahead at the TV, getting nothing from what’s happening on the screen, focused only on my hand sliding into Sparrow’s hair, and his small body resting lightly against mine.

We stay like this for the rest of the episode. When the credits roll and the countdown starts for the next episode, I reach for the remote and turn the TV off. Sparrow stirs but doesn’t wake up, so I nudge him gently. When his eyes still don’t open, I scoop him up and lift him into the bedroom.

There, I tuck him into the covers, and I have to stop myself from kissing his forehead good night. I also have to stop myself from crawling into bed next to him. Instead, I retreat into the living room and make the sofa bed for myself, and when I fall asleep, I think of his sweet little mouth slightly parted as he sleeps and the mumbled words I might have imagined when I pulled back from him. Thank you .

I fall into a restless sleep, the residual ache in my heart my only companion, as it should be, as it’s always been, night after night after night.