Page 141 of Hurt

Then the darkness swallowed her.

25

SOMEONE LOVED ME, SOMEONE FUCKING LOVED ME

Blood dribbled from swollen lips. They were parted just enough to let a trickle of airflow in and out of battered lungs. Ribs just recently healed were pushed to their limit—a fragile cage surrounding lungs that couldn’t expand enough to get a breath of oxygen. He couldn’t lift his head. Pain was everywhere. When he breathed. When he opened his eyes. When he closed his eyes. There was so much pain he didn’t know where it was coming from.

Dried gore crusted over chapped lips. He thought he licked them, but the taste of coppery blood coated his tongue, and it was impossible to know what was fresh. One of his teeth was loose. It wobbled against his gums with every shaky breath.

He opened his eyes. Well, eye. The left one was swollen closed. Viscous fluid coated his cheek, and he didn’t know if it was blood or something worse.

Kurt didn’t want to find out.

There was so much blood staining his clothes it was impossible to see where it was the worst. He had lost count of the blows. He supposed he should be grateful Ezra preferred his hands to a weapon—guns and knives were too fast for his tastes.

A mangled hand entered his vision, and dimly he knew it was his. The middle finger was crooked, and the knuckles on the first and second fingers were crushed. He remembered that one. He had shielded his face from Ezra’s onslaught, and the man had slammed his boot down on Kurt’s hand in retaliation.

He must have been unconscious. The longer he stared at his hands, the more memories came back to him. It had to have only been a few hours, but it felt like days. Days of endless pain. Ezra had vented his anger at first. Rage had made him sloppy and blunt. The hits were obtuse and frenzied. It was only when he calmed and became clinical that the real pain began.

Soft snores came from off to his right. Kurt couldn’t lift his head to look. His neck was mere decoration at this point. Ezra had strangled him to the brink of unconsciousness so many times that Kurt couldn’t feel it anymore.

Ezra had brought him to his bedroom. It was as ugly and sparse as the man who inhabited it. Made of concrete, the only light that entered the room came from a set of double doors with small windows set into them. Nothing lined the walls. The only decoration in the room was a hideous fur carpet that might have been a bear at some point, but Kurt couldn’t be sure. A massive four-poster bed took up most of the room. Ostentatious as it was massive, it looked to weigh a ton.

Ezra was sprawled out over the bed. The man had gone to bed after Kurt passed out. It was no fun to play with someone who couldn’t scream.

And Kurt had screamed. He screamed even when he didn’t want to. His cries of pain were ripped from his throat. Every noise he made only inflamed Ezra’s excitement. Kurt hated himself for screaming. He hated that he wasn’t strong enough to defy him.

He hated that he wasn’t strong enough to die.

There were many moments when he tried to let go. To slip into the void that looked so welcoming. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? Just…stop. Just stop breathing. Stop bleeding. What could be easier?

But he couldn’t.

Every time he tried, he pictured Grant’s home tucked away in the back of the Weaver Estate. He thought about the man murmuring to himself as he debated having chicken two nights in a row. Or the way his eyebrows furrowed when he watched garbage reality tv shows. The seriousness in which he watched paid actors pretend tonotbe paid actors was far more entertaining than the show itself.

Then he would think about sitting beside the window of the loft. Soft light would filter through the trees, and mottled sunlight would paint the worn wood floors. Grant would have his eyes half closed, his hair soft and falling over his eyes. He would be wearing that stupid oversized shirt he liked so much. The one with the large neck hole that slid over far enough to expose his sharp collarbone.

That’s the look he would have if he ever watched Kurt play. He was sure of it. Despite his relaxed state, he would be taking in every strum, every chord change. Grant’s keen ears would pick up every mistake, but his soft nature would forgive it. Maybe even like it. Grant seemed to like mistakes.

He liked Kurt.

These were the images that would keep Kurt alive. Like lifesaving defibrillation, they would restart his heart, and his eyes would open. The cycle would begin again.

Somewhere along the way, Ezra caught wise to Kurt’s attempts to immerse himself in his fantasies.

He was not pleased.

Kurt thought that might have been when he ripped the fingernail out of his left thumb, but the events of the last few hours had all blurred together, so he couldn’t be sure.

He flexed his hand, and his mother’s ring caught his attention. Purple and silver, it was a gaudy thing. It didn’t suit her style, but she wore it every day. Kurt used to watch it flash in the stage lights as her fingers floated over the piano keys. When he was young, he believed the ring was magic. That his mother’s hands moved so fast, they created sparks of electricity on the ivory keys. Each punctuating sound of music was akin to the thunder that always came with lightning.

When she died, all Kurt could think about was the music that went with her. The silence that would permeate the Beckett home. As twisted and cruel as that home could be, it was never silent. Music filled the spaces that their words would not.

A week after the crash, two NTSB agents brought them a box of belongings. The only things to have survived the crash were a partially burned notebook of illegible handwriting that had belonged to his father, a garishly gold-plated gun that belonged to Michael Elliott, and his mother’s ring.

What possessed Kurt to put that ring on his finger, he will never know. Perhaps it was a misguided attempt to harness the power over music his mother had, or maybe he naively thought it would posthumously heal their fissured relationship.

Either way, he had not taken it off since that day.