Page 5

FOUR

JAXON

What the fuck was wrong with me?

My fingers trembled as I passed the front desk and stepped into the cool evening air. It wouldn’t have chilled my burning body if the air was freezing, which it wasn’t. Despite having showered fifteen minutes ago, I was already sweating.

I had been prepared for this.

The entire summer, even since I got the green light to transfer here, I had been aware of Elio Castelli. He was like an old debt I couldn’t yet afford to settle. He was like a subject I couldn’t pass, carrying it over into the next semester. He was something I refused to think about yet needed to face.

Lately, since setting foot on the Westmont campus, the inevitability of running into Elio had made my chest tight more often than not. I found myself going there, back in time, to revisit the worst night of my life. The night that made me who I was. It was like stepping through a mirror, setting foot inside my childhood bedroom, and watching the terror in his eyes.

He would have reacted the same if I had turned into a venomous viper, slithering before him, pushing my forked tongue into his face.

Elio Castelli, the last boy I loved.

I incinerated this thought from my consciousness. Love was nothing more than a cocktail of chemicals, and eighteen-year-olds were quick to get drunk on it. That was all it was. And the older you got, the better you understood just how bad the hangovers could become. I was lucky to learn that lesson early.

But I knew I needed to see him. Sooner or later, we had to come face-to-face. And I had prepared for it. After moving into my private dorm room, even glancing out of my window made me aware of the possibility he could be passing under it. I’d had no choice but to face the reality.

So I’d told myself to be cool. What more could he do to me? And why would I even care? One embarrassing night wasn’t uncommon when you’re a teenager entering adulthood. Everyone had dirt under the carpet. Everyone’s file was marred with some damning evidence. Mine happened to be very public, but only among the people who no longer mattered. My parents were an exception to that rule. Their hearts had been broken. Their hopes had been pinned on me. They did their best not to make it obvious, but discovering what I had done that night had changed something between us.

The rest of them? I hardly remembered their names.

So I’d promised myself that I would face Elio when the time came and that I wouldn’t walk into the trap of counting grievances.

And how did that fucking go? I asked myself as I climbed the stairs to my room and unlocked the door. Fucking terrific .

The sight of his curly, brown locks, almond-shaped eyes, broad chest and imposing height, perfect lips, and never-broken nose brought out so much more than I’d realized was still in me.

I’d been sure that my feelings were like a pile of ash you might find days after someone had camped by a fire. The ground was charred, and the air smelled of the warmth and burned wood, but the fire was long gone. Poking through the charcoal only dirtied your hands. There was nothing to stoke there anymore.

Until we faced one another, and every terrible instinct of my past two years flared to life. Like the melting core of a nuclear reactor a second after a catastrophe, my heart ignited. Every faint memory of control I had promised myself was gone. Every word I had practiced saying to him all these weeks was erased. All I had was visceral rage and a burning, devastating need to step closer. To inhale his scent. To see him better. To feel him, even if the feeling was that of his fist meeting my jaw.

I wanted him to hit me. To hurt me. I couldn’t say why. Perhaps I knew he wouldn’t do anything gentle to me, so I settled for rough.

After I shut the door of my room, I peeled my clothes off, leaving a trail of folded fabric on the floor between the door and the bed. Naked and slightly slick with cool sweat, I crashed on top of my bed and wrapped my arms around the pillow, sinking my face into it.

Of all the things I should have done, taunting Elio like this was not one. If it hurt him, fine. I wasn’t particularly worried about Elio’s feelings. He was a big boy. But I couldn’t pull the stitches out of his wounds without ripping some of my own. The whole damned thing was too messy, the feelings too hot, the events too melted together to parse through and delineate them.

I fell asleep like this. A sad heap of naked flesh, partially covered by a soft blanket, the lamp still glowing from the nightstand, spilling bright red colors into my eyelids.

The shapes emerged against the redness. It was like having your nose smashed by the forehead of a very stubborn ass. When my vision cleared a little, he was there, fuming, mouth foaming with hatred and disgust.

And I wanted him anyway. Lying on the floor, pinching my nose against the blood, I wanted him. The path opened up before me, only that one, and I followed it. Moving my hand from my nose, I let the blood trickle down the Cupid’s bow and my lips. “Okay,” I whispered. “Alright.”

El didn’t move back. He stared down at what he had done. He didn’t move a hand to lift me, but he didn’t turn his back on me, either. “Everyone knows, Jaxon.”

My hand went to my chest, blood dripping from my chin. “Not much to talk about,” I said.

“You’d give them more,” El said.

Somehow, I found myself on my knees, looking up at his towering presence. The music and the party were gone, as if by the sheer force of my subconscious mind, and I reached up.

“You’re hurt,” El said, falling to his knees. He was not the same guy who’d smashed my face with his head. Someone else had done it, I could have sworn. “Let me, Jax.” And he leaned, his hand cupping the back of my head, soft palm moving over the cropped hair and making that deep, internal sound reverberate through my skull.

Elio’s lips found my nose, their heat taking away the pain. Blood? I could hardly believe there had been any. And when he lowered his head by another inch or two, his lips were on mine again, fear gone from us both. He kissed me softly, savoring every moment of it and moaning with pleasure. Clothes faded away, only existing in the dreamlike memory, and it was a late night. We needed to hurry. They were taking him away, and this was our last chance.

“El, please,” I whispered, my hands squeezing around his shoulders as he entered me with deliberate force, his hair falling and closing the sides of his face, his almond eyes focused on me. “Don’t stop,” I sighed.

The pressure grew. My body was so tight that not all of me could fit inside of it. I was going to implode. I wanted to scream with pain and pleasure and delight that after years of yearning, he was finally mine. Mine.

Mine…

I jerked, my eyes opening to the morning sunlight. They had taken him to Chicago. No. I was here, too. Awake. I inhaled deeply, groaning as my dick throbbed painfully. I rolled onto my back, swiping my hand over it just enough to tease myself with a promise I wouldn’t deliver.

What the fuck had happened? I was groggy as hell, whimpering like a pathetic puppy whose hopes of getting adopted had leaped and fallen after some unreachable human had spared me a glance.

Dreaming of Elio after all this time wasn’t a good sign. Yet he was like nicotine. The life we had shared, that carefree high-school experience, was like cigarettes. I inhaled a single cloud of it when I saw him last night, and it soaked itself deep into my body.

I covered my eyes with one folded arm and waited for this stupid hard-on to pass. I was such a fucking loser; I could barely believe it. If someone had told me half the things I’d get up to, I would have challenged them to a duel. And here I was, close to weeping an entire night after seeing him again.

He dragged the worst version of me to the surface. I couldn’t stand the sneer on his face or the judgment. He blamed me when he had no right to, yet I only had two options. I could fold, or I could attack.

And I wasn’t going to fold before him twice.

* * *

It was no accident when I walked into the gym at half past eight that evening. My day had been a miserable one, a verbal battle with an imaginary version of Elio Castelli. The one in my mind was far smarter than the one I knew, so the fight was a challenging one. And when I was sick of myself, I packed my shit and went in, half-dreading and half-hoping it would be as I anticipated.

Elio was on the treadmill, flanked by two girls on treadmills. He didn’t see me enter, but he glanced as I climbed the treadmill to the left of the girl who suddenly served the purpose of the barbed wire between the Germans and the French a hundred-some years earlier. Elio lost his footing for a moment, nearly tripping.

It amused me enough to snort and look away, but he recovered on his next step and continued to run. The speed with which his legs moved wasn’t that impressive. He ran a marathon there, but I knew I could do better. After all, his sport included a pair of skates on ice, something little kids do when their parents feel like going out. How much stamina could he have built?

I ran faster, increasing the speed steadily until it felt as though my feet merely brushed the treadmill before they were off again. I never realized the two girls had gotten off the treadmills and worked out by the cable machine until Elio’s heavy footsteps sped up.

Drops of sweat flew off my face, my calves burned, and my quads threatened to resign under these work conditions, yet I persisted. It was luck that Elio pressed the stop button first, slowing down to a trot, then a stroll, then a complete halt. He picked up his towel, water bottle, and phone before I chose to spare my legs a sudden death and killed the machine.

I hadn’t been joking. I would take this place despite him being here first. If he couldn’t live with me on campus, then I would take it all from him. If he could, then I might be able to share. I wasn’t going to crawl into my room and resign myself to the worst impulses that plagued me, that plagued my family. Not all Mercer boys had to be indulgent, self-destructive sons of bitches. One was enough for this generation.

Elio had walked away from me without another look, making himself comfortable on the incline bench with heavy weight mounted on each side of the bar. The press was up against the far wall, and straight across was a shelf with dumbbells positioned in front of a mirror. Traditionally, this was my first workout, warming up my arms and shoulders.

I positioned myself before the mirror with a twenty-five-pound dumbbell in each hand. In the reflection, just to my right, I could see him on the incline bench, dark olive shorts lifted up his thighs, knees spread wide, feet facing outward, chest heaving with each breath as he lowered his arms and falling as he pushed the bar up. When his arms trembled, he thrust the bar higher, hooking it in its place and letting his arms fall to his sides. He sat up, lifted the bottom edge of his sleeveless white T-shirt, and wiped his brow, his towel trapped on the bench under his ass.

Those abs glistened with sweat. What do you taste like? I wondered, wanting to set myself on fire or beat myself with the dumbbell that I curled upward.

When I counted off ten reps, I bent my lower back and leaned down, placing the dumbbells on the floor before my feet, my gaze locked onto the mirror.

He looked.

It was instant, gone before it had happened, but he had looked at me. And judging by the frown that creased the space between his eyebrows, he had looked at my ass rather than my face.

Straightening, I watched his reflection until he looked again. His gaze slashed the room at the level of my waist, his lips forming a pout.

This was why I had snapped last night. In the hours that had followed our encounter, I hadn’t been able to worm out the real reason, but it stared at me now. In fact, it stared at my ass. The things I’d told him about every college having a dozen of his kind weren’t only a provocation. They were rooted in truth.

And they sparked the flames of hatred in me again.

He was a liar and a hypocrite. It was the same as it had always been. At fourteen years old, going to the local swimming pool in Pittsburgh, Elio had looked at me this way.

Maybe it wouldn’t hold in the court of law, but I knew a fuck-me glance when I saw one. First, by instinct and then from experience, I knew it. His gaze lingered on me just a moment longer than it needed to. When we spoke, he looked into my eyes like he was searching for my soul. When I laughed, he looked at my lips, the front teeth that were slightly larger than the rest, the dimples emerging on each side of my face. And when I set my hand on my stomach, both feeling myself and feeling the temperature between us, his gaze followed.

In Still Water Cove, when we lay on our beds, only small lamps gave us light, and when we talked endlessly into the night, Elio’s head faced me. He would listen to me rambling, and he would watch me without breaking his attention. When the bullies rounded me with the talk of my brother’s lavish parties that left entire floors of Orbit hotels in ruin, Elio stood between them and me.

How could I not fall in love?

How could I not lose my heart to a beautiful friend who listened and cared?

And here it was again. Just like last night when I stepped out of the shower and basically served myself on a cushion for his hungry eyes, Elio was looking, minding, and undressing me.

Elio looked at his hands, folded between his legs, then shoved himself back on the bench and gripped the bar. His arms trembled as soon as he lifted the thing, thrusting it high and letting it slowly sink down to his swelling pecks.

I did my set at the same time, wondering if I would need to run over and rescue him from a self-induced choking under the bar. But I didn’t. Elio wavered around the seventh push and replaced the bar safely above, breathing deeply with his arms hanging on each side of his body, limp and exhausted.

As I lowered my dumbbells to the floor, I slowed down, leaning and watching. He didn’t look right away, holding that gaze firmly on an empty wall. He fought hard, but he lost the battle two seconds later. His eyes shifted, his gaze sliding over me, pausing on my figure as I rose, then moving down to the floor in shame and self-hatred.

Oh, I knew him. I had always known him. I just didn’t think I would find myself so tempted to let him play his games with me again.

Before even a full minute had passed, Elio furiously reached for the bar, gripping it tightly with his hands.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“Good thing you’re not the one doing it,” Elio replied. His words followed mine so quickly that I had no doubt he had been waiting for an opening.

No , I decided. We are not done yet .

“You’re weak,” I said, glad to be right and offensive at the same time.

Elio still held the bar, but he didn’t take it off the safety hooks. He knew I wasn’t shit-talking. He hesitated a few moments, then let his arms drop. With the sort of heaviness everyone who truly worked out knew well, Elio got up. He stretched his arms, pushed his shoulders out, and twisted his torso. His feet were heavy as they led him to me.

I looked at my own reflection in the mirror. The anger I found on my face surprised me. It scared me. I put my hands on my hips and turned around.

Elio stood a safe distance from me. He looked at me, torn between that signature disgust a self-hating closet case like him would have and genuine shame.

“What?” I bit off, unable to soften my voice when speaking to him.

Elio steeled himself visibly, some of the natural warmth leaving his eyes. He was deceiving like that. He was kind and sweet and lovable until you loved him. Then, he was a cold-hearted monster. But as he took another step toward me, he swallowed. “Your nose.”

“What about it?” I asked, lifting my hand and feeling the small bump in the middle of it. A guy had once told me it was cute. Seeing how I’d been with a few dozen in the last two years and none echoed the sentiment, I felt like he was an unreliable judge of aesthetics.

“Was it me?” Elio asked, voice rough as if pushing the question out required physical force.

“No,” I said, making his narrow eyes widen for an instant. “I’m in a habit of having it broken by homophobic brutes.”

Elio looked down, then turned around. He stalked back to his bench.

“Wait,” I said.

He stopped, looking over his shoulder.

“That was…uncalled for,” I said not too regretfully. “Why are you asking?”

Elio shrugged. “Needed to know for sure.” He walked the rest of the way to his bench and then sat down. His strength was back, and he began to lift the bar again.

My parents had offered to pay for the correction some three months after the farewell party. I’d come home for holidays, dreading the possibility of running into Elio while I was there. I figured the crookedness reminded my parents that neither I nor my nose was straight.

I didn’t go through with it, even if the idea had been tempting. It was a good reminder of who I was and who I needed to be. Softness only led to pain and disaster. I needed to own my flaws. I needed to wear them openly, or I would drown in them.

Since that night, after everyone had learned where my true desires lay, I never hid another day. It didn’t make things easy, but it was a hell of a lot easier than pretending.

And for all the pain it had caused me, being slammed by Elio’s forehead awakened something else in me, making Elio responsible for two awakenings of my life. The response he gave to my terrible attempt at kissing him told me that it was better to be out in the daylight, free of the burdens, than to hide like a creature of the night in some dank cavern.

At the end of the day, I pitied him.

I pitied him because I knew him. He was me from some years ago.

Few of us grew up without hating ourselves at some point in our lives. Some grew out of it. Others needed a good punch to see the truth. And yet others, the worst ones of all, never had the balls to leap.

Elio ignored me for the rest of his workout, and I didn’t tug the leash he was on. It was a small step, but a step nevertheless. God knew Ronan could never exercise a shred of self-control, and there the problems lay. If I could control myself, I could succeed.