Page 10

TEN

JACE

With Ivan’s connections and a little bit of skill, I spent occasional evenings in smoke-filled basements where Hold ’Em had people sweating and trembling. Most notably, quite a few of them were losing their money. These weren’t the riches a stock broken might waste on a brief Vegas trip for a bachelor’s party, but it covered my ass and left me some.

After Sunday night’s game, Ivan picked me up and took a symbolic share. “This only works while you can keep a low profile, Jace,” he told me.

Part of me wanted to pull a fistful of glitter out of my pocket and toss it between us. “I’d never attract attention,” I said.

“Just so you remember,” Ivan said gravely. The money was sweet, and like all sweet things, you wanted more after a little taste. He would happily slip me into gaming dens whenever he deemed it appropriate. I lost plenty of games and plenty of Ivan’s advance that I carried on me. But my luck turned around just as the other players turned hazy with smoke and booze.

Ivan dropped me off a block away from Easton’s place. “Home sweet home,” he said, his mood increasingly better as minutes ticked by.

“It’s good enough,” I said. “Easton’s a little tease, but I don’t mind.”

“No. You like a flirt,” Ivan said.

“Did you talk to DJ?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Ivan said. “He’s keeping low. Some mess with a few friends of ours from the west side.”

“Right,” I said, opening the door to step out of the car. “See if you can find something out about that thing.”

“Have I ever left you hanging, Jace?” Ivan asked. “It’ll take time. My guy won’t get in touch until things quiet down.”

I winked at him in thanks, then shut the door. My trust in DJ’s abilities was wavering, but he was all I had. The short walk around the block put my mind at peace about anyone lurking or suspiciously lingering near Easton’s place. He would never have thought himself important enough for someone to scout him from the shadows. Then again, he’d never seen those thugs coming, either. But I knew one thing for sure. That Kyle fuck was not done with Easton. And Easton was not going to get hurt. Not on my watch.

I approached the building and looked up. The lights were on in Easton’s living room. When I entered the apartment, light pop music was playing from a portable speaker in the bathroom. I wanted to laugh at his bland music choices, but the laughter was cut off when I stepped deeper into the living room and glanced into the bathroom through the open door. A towel was tied around his waist, light brown hair wet and darkened, hands making massaging circles on his cheeks as he looked into the mirror and moisturized his skin.

His upper back was fairly broad, his waist narrow, and his muscles defined to perfection. What I’d imagined as a useless aesthetic was proving to have plenty of uses outside the fighting circle. In my fantasies, for example. I wondered what it was like to run my fingers over those hills and valleys. I wondered how tense they were when Easton neared his orgasm. I wondered if the same pleading look painted his eyes when he begged to be allowed to come.

He resisted, but that was of little consequence. He didn’t resist because he wasn’t attracted to me. He resisted because he believed he should.

“Howdy, Cowboy,” I said from the living room.

“’Sup,” he said. The informal greeting was an improvement, I decided.

Easton finished his facial routine and stepped out, letting me feast my eyes on his smooth, round pecs and his chiseled abs. He knew exactly what he was doing, but he scowled when I dragged my gaze over his torso. “You’re such an eye candy,” I said, my voice low and amused as it always was. “I could eat you up.”

“Shut up, Jace,” Easton said.

He still didn’t believe me. He expected enemies in everyone and closed off at the first sign that someone knew more about him than what he’d allowed them to see.

“Take the compliment, Easton,” I said, matching his tone.

Easton rolled his eyes. “Do you have any plans for tomorrow?”

“If you’re asking me out on a date, I’ll make time in my busy schedule,” I said, tucking my hands into my pockets. The waist of my pants hung low, partly because I liked it that way, partly because I didn’t have a belt. My hand wrapped around the wad of cash in my right pocket.

Easton’s cheeks reddened. There was no hiding the effects those thoughts had on him. His walls would crumble, and I would make him mine sooner or later. It hadn’t been my sole objective, but crossing his path a few times and seeing how easily and quickly he folded under my gaze was too attractive to resist. “Dad is coming. Remember?”

“How could I forget? I prepared a little song for the welcoming procession,” I said.

“You’re going to be out,” Easton said. “Until I tell you to come back.”

“Which will be at least an hour after he’d left,” I recited. We’d gone over this once already today. “Do you wait that long to fool around with yourself? Just to make sure the air is clear.”

“What?” The frown exploding on his face hinted I’d gone too far. Good. Too far was exactly where I liked to be most of the time. “I need cash, Jace. Dad’s paid the rent in advance. He’ll want it back.”

I pulled out the money from my pocket and counted to the agreed amount. “Can’t believe I’m filling up that fucker’s gas tank,” I muttered.

“And I can’t believe I have to live with you again,” Easton said.

I touched my chest. “You wound me, little brother.”

“Don’t call me that,” he snapped.

“Afraid it’ll turn you on?” I asked, stepping closer and giving him the money. Our hands touched briefly. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that towel drop, Easton.”

He snatched his hand and the money away. “Keep dreaming.”

“That, I will.”

We parted there. Easton returned to the bathroom and shut the door, breaking my heart as always when he undressed outside my field of vision. Pursuing Easton like this was far from a smart idea, but two bored gay boys in one small apartment were usually a barrel of gunpowder awaiting the fateful spark. The dangers were tenfold when every time we looked into each other’s eyes, sparks flew like we were sparring swords.

I dropped my clothes on a wooden chair by the empty desk. I rolled myself a light bedtime joint, opened the window in my little bedroom, and hooked up my phone to the portable speaker with built-in atmospheric lights. Pink Floyd’s tracks paired well with the swirling colors when the weed did its magic.

My bed was a single one, unlike Easton’s big bed, and it sat under the window. The smoke and smell of my joint swirled and wafted outside, the music building up slowly to its climactic ending.

When I woke up, it was to the furious knocking on my door. “Get the fuck up, Jace,” Easton hissed.

The day was bright, and my heart sped up as I realized I had slept in. How had I fallen asleep so hard? The joint must have knocked me out. My phone was dead, the window open, the heat of the late-August day already concentrating inside my room.

I got up and opened the door. “Is the place on fire?”

Easton fell silent with shock. I hadn’t meant it as a taunt, but it shut him up just fine. And when he collected himself, he spoke in a viciously cold tone. “Dad’s downstairs.”

My fists clenched with an abrupt wave of fear. Why? I had nothing to be scared of. Kevin Harper couldn’t do shit to me. But he can still do things to Easton , I thought and decided that I needed to detach myself from Easton someday soon. I couldn’t go on caring about Easton if I knew what was good for me.

“I need to go help him bring in my stuff,” Easton said. “And he will come inside.”

“I’m leaving,” I said.

Easton put his hand flat on the middle of my bare chest. His palm was warm and clammy with sweat. “You can’t. He could see you leaving the building.”

“Is there a roof?” I asked.

“I don’t have the key,” Easton said. He moved his hand away from my chest and pointed to the built-in closet. “There.”

“I’m not going back in there for Kevin Harper,” I said.

“Jace,” he snapped, not finding my joke amusing in the slightest.

I rolled my eyes and nodded. “Fine.” Turning away, I marched into the closet, and Easton shut the doors. It was good that I had very few clothes to worry about. The closet was empty. The few things scattered around the room wouldn’t give Kev a clue who the new roommate was. As I stood quietly inside the closet, I could see through the narrow space between the little wooden planks designed to let the air move in and out, keeping your clothes from going stale.

In the dead silence of the small, dark space, I could hear each breath I drew and each beat of my heart. The hum of blood passing through my neck deafened me. Until I heard the click of the front door and the heavy footsteps of two people carrying something heavy.

“Where do you want it?” the raspy voice that had once haunted my childhood asked.

“There is okay,” Easton replied in a much more servile tone, nothing like the sulky tone he used with me. I preferred him sulky, feisty, rebellious. This Easton was submitting to a man who was the center of his own universe, and everyone else was just a background character.

“I don’t know why you want the damn thing,” Kevin said. It was the sort of thing that encapsulated his entire existence. If he didn’t want it, everyone wanting it had to be crazy. He was a man whose views were small and simple, but he could apply them to every aspect of the world and be bewildered—angry, even—that others had something else in mind. He was confident that he could solve the crisis in the Middle East over several beers in a bar and that all this diversity bullshit was a grand conspiracy to make him look away from the things he called “the real problems,” but he’d never succeeded in defining what those problems were.

And yet, the sound of his raspy, slightly nasal voice sent chills down my spine.

“That roommate,” Kevin said. “He around?”

“No,” Easton said. “He’s out.”

“It’s not right I can’t meet him, Easton,” Kevin said. “I’d like to know who you’re sharing your place with.”

“Next time, Dad,” Easton said.

Kevin hesitated for a time. He was far enough that I couldn’t hear everything he said, but when he spoke of the fine young man, I knew he was referring to Kyle. “Shame,” Kevin said. “It was good for you to be around a guy like that.”

“I don’t know, Dad,” Easton said quietly.

Moving through the apartment, Kevin Harper appeared for the shortest of heartbeats in the crack between the wooden pieces of the door. He stepped in and out of my sight, and the moment kicked me in the stomach.

The punch sent me spiraling back through time. The fire in the attic of our house. Kevin’s hand on my neck. Being dragged by the scruff of my neck through the charred remains of the house. The smell of charcoal and smoke thick in the air.

I grabbed for the edge of the closet to hold myself up on my feet. My breaths were shallow. The slap across my face when I was twelve landed all over again. I’d broken Easton’s truck by accident, but I’d acted like it had been intentional because they all thought it was. What was the point in protesting? Nobody would have believed me. Easton was in tears, and Kevin was sick of hearing his little boy crying. All he wanted was to have his beer and watch the goddamn game in peace. And the little piece of shit wouldn’t give him that. He worked so hard. Didn’t he deserve a fucking break? Surging to his feet, he crossed the living room and sent me falling backward before I even knew the slap had landed.

The relief on his face on the day he gave me up. The glee that he finally had a reason good enough to do so without judgment. His house had almost burned down. He was fucking done with this shit.

Holding on to the wooden side of the closet’s interior, I held my breath. The man who had once been my father looked into my room, his hands tucked into the pockets on the seat of his pants. He was leaning forward, like the weight of the thing he and Easton had carried made his lower back ache. His hair was much more salt than pepper, and his beard covered the coarse skin of the lower half of his face. He raised one hand and rubbed his chin.

I saw myself opening the closet door, stepping out, and looking into his pale eyes. I saw a timeline in which I revealed myself to him and made him understand that he would never be free of me.

But before my body could do that, I tightened my fists and stiffened my muscles, holding still in the little closet. Easton would hate me forever if I did something like that. Not that Easton hating me could get much worse.

I watched as Kevin asked Easton for the other half of the rent he’d paid. I watched my cash change hands.

As a very little boy, I’d lived in fear of Kevin Harper. That fear had switched into daring as years had gone by. There was very little he could have done to me. He’d already struck me more times than I could count, and I had learned that being slapped across my face or spanked with his belt couldn’t get worse. Instead of discouraging me, his punishments had become a bargain. I would weigh my odds, as young as seven, and decide an act of mischief was worth the punishment. In fact, my outbursts had only grown more spectacular. If I was getting my ass belted, I had to make it worth it.

I exhaled slowly as Kevin and Easton moved out of my view and back into the living room. Easton offered Kevin a cup of coffee, and I wanted to strangle him. But when my former Dad refused, a sigh of relief escaped my lips.

I could hear every beat of my heart. I could hear the hairs rising along my neck. But the minutes passed, and Kevin fetched some more things from the car, offered his help to assemble something in the living room, and finally said goodbye.

“You be good, Easton,” he said on his way out. Coming from his lips, it sounded more like a threat than an encouragement.

Some more time passed before Easton walked into my room. “Come out, now. He’s gone.”

I pushed the small door of the closet and stepped out. The obvious jokes passed through my head, but Easton’s trembling fingers and deep frown made me reconsider speaking them. “That went well,” I said.

Easton didn’t move. His mossy green eyes were fixed on me. “That was too close, Jace,” he said.

I acknowledged his worry with a single nod. “And nothing went wrong.”

“But what if…”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s over now.”

“If he’d seen you in here, Jace,” Easton said and hesitated, shaking his head. “You don’t understand. Your name was erased from that place. It was like you’d never existed. And that’s the only way they can live with what happened. If he saw you here, he would have…I don’t know.” He surrendered at the end, looking at the floor between us.

What I heard didn’t surprise me. “Easton,” I said slowly, stepping closer to him. His gaze flicked to my underwear, then away. I noted it but did nothing about it. “The only reason I stayed in that closet was because of you. I didn’t want you in the middle of it. Had it been just him and me, things would have gone differently.”

“That’s not reassuring,” Easton said.

I scoffed in frustration.

“You don’t get it,” he accused me. “I don’t want to know that you’re still holding a grudge against them. I don’t want to know that you would have gladly punched him in the face.”

I sucked my teeth and turned away from him. “Coward.”

“Sure,” Easton agreed. “I am. I’m a coward because I’m sick of living through the worst time of our lives.” He paused for a heartbeat, then changed his tone. “You know what, Jace? Thank you. Thanks for hiding to keep me happy. It makes everything so much better.”

I didn’t love his sarcasm, but I let it go. I found my pants, pulled them on, and sniffed a couple of T-shirts. One passed the check, and I pulled it on. “Whatever, dude,” I said, passing by him and walking out.

He was unbearable and infuriating, and the only things I could think of were to fight him or to stun him into silence with a sudden kiss. A third option had crossed my mind. I could combine the two by spanking him, but I wasn’t sure Easton would be thrilled. So I walked away.

Yet even as I did that, something tugged me to return and bring down this invisible barrier between us. I hadn’t anticipated just how badly his presence would make me want him. I didn’t think I could hold back much longer. And I didn’t know if I wanted to punish him, make him submit to me, or give him the time of his life.

But it all came down to the same thing. Keeping my hands off Easton was not even an option. It was only a matter of time.