The Heathen
“This is bullshit!” I kick the chair across Saint’s spacious, well-lit penthouse suite. It crashes into his desk, where his big, fancy Mac is set up. I don’t care if I break it. I hope I do. I want to break him too, and her, and Angel’s smug face while I’m at it.
“It’s not bullshit,” Saint growls, righting the chair. “We have to wait until the Master—”
“Why?” I demand, wheeling on him. “He chose her. We all drill the fuck out of the sacrifice—all twelve of us. Why is she special?”
“Because she is,” Angel says.
“Because she’s my sister,” Saint says at the same moment.
They stare at each other.
“You better stop that shit,” I yell, grabbing the edge of a painting on the wall. I lift it down, almost toppling backwards when the weight shifts towards me. I tip it forwards before it can and hurl it sideways across the floor. Saint takes a step back, so it doesn’t take him out at the knees, and stumbles over Angel’s legs. Angel steadies him.
“Calm the fuck down,” Saint snaps, striding toward me.
“You calm the fuck down,” I bellow, charging him. I barrel into him, tackling him around the middle. Instead of falling, he hooks his strong hands under my arms, dragging me back. When his legs hit the edge of his bed, he lets me plow him down at last, and we wind up in a tangle on his neatly made bed, courtesy of a goddamn maid who comes to clean his room every day like he’s a fucking king.
“Don’t tell me to fucking calm down,” I rage at Saint, pummeling him with my fists. “You have no fucking idea what it was like in there. Cocksucking rich bastard, they never laid a finger on you!”
“Come on, cuz,” Angel says, trying to wrestle me off our friend, our brother.
“Fuck you too,” I scream at him, wheeling around and whaling on his shoulder. “You don’t know either. You have Frederick and the whole organization behind you. Then you want to sit here and look at each other like I’m fucking crazy for wanting to get one goddamn thing? One fucking time, I want to be first.”
“Damn,” he says, gripping his shoulder and giving me a wounded look, which is funny, since the guy is twice my size and could snap my neck with his bare hands if he wanted. “You don’t have to hit me. I looked out for you, bro.”
“When you were there,” I seethe. “And even then, you were a fucking prince among thieves, so don’t act like you were some asshole guards’ little bitch just because you got sent to juvie.”
Saint wraps his legs around mine, trapping them, and flips me onto my back, looming over me. “You’re no one’s little bitch, so stop acting like one,” he snaps. “Got it?”
I wrestle to free myself until I tire myself out. There’s no way I can ever overpower him or Angel the way they can me, the way the guards did. But then, I wasn’t armed. Now I flail and twist sideways, yanking the blade from my boot in a second flat. I hold it at Saint’s throat, staring up at him as he holds me pinned.
“What now, pretty boy?” I taunt. “Should I give you a nice big Joker smile to match mine?”
I grin wide, showing all my teeth, and turn the blade so the sharp side presses into his skin, just shy of hard enough to draw blood.
“Fucking psycho,” he growls, but he doesn’t move away. His amber eyes flame with a strange heat, and I stop straining. For a second, we only gaze into each other, some flicker of understanding too deep for words moving between us. I drag the sharp edge of the blade down his skin, scraping his stubble, and his Adam’s apple bobs. My breath comes quicker, and the rage burning inside me turns into a different kind of burn.
After what happened to me, I should want to murder any guy who comes within two feet of me, but because I’m a fucking psycho, that’s not what happened. My body has other expectations, like it knows something it can’t forget, something that should have stayed a question forever.
“Hot as this is, if you’re not going to fuck and get it out of your systems, can we figure this shit out, so he stops acting like a heathen and you stop acting like a caveman every time Mercy comes up?” Angel asks, lounging back on the pillows beside us with one arm folded behind his head.
Saint grabs my throat, shoving up off me and forcing me deeper into the soft mattress at the same time. He rolls up and shrugs his shirt straight on his broad shoulders.
“No one fucks her until the Master gives the okay.”
“You mean until you give the okay,” I mutter, pushing myself up on my elbows.
Saint swallows, his gaze raking down my body and then away, toward the window. He frowns. “Yes,” he grumbles. “Until I give the okay. She’s my sister.”
He doesn’t say the other part, that I had to give the okay for my sister. That I knew what they were doing, and that’s why I was up on the road with Mercy while they went under the bridge, to the bank of the river. I couldn’t watch.
But this is different. Mercy’s not his blood.
“What does it matter?” I snarl, pissed at the reminder of my failure, the one that started everything. “Are you going to fuck her?”
“No,” Saint says, scowling at me.
“Then why can’t I?” I demand. I remember the way she shrank away when he asked if she wanted me to punish her. It should make me hard, but it only twists the blade deeper in, one I’ve carried around in my back since the day she told the judge what I did to her on Eternity’s floor. “Angel already went down on her. Today he got to finger her. I’ve barely touched her, and I’m the one who deserves to punish her.”
“Hey,” Angel protests lazily. “Trust, when I go down on a girl, it ain’t a punishment.”
“Exactly,” I snap, jumping up and pacing the room again. “Why are we suddenly getting her off and eating her out? I thought we were supposed to be making her pay and then leave campus in shame.”
“She’s paying,” Saint says. “You can scare her if you want. But no one takes her virginity.”
I scoff. “Why? You think she’s pure? You saw the Master fuck her with that statue of the Virgin Mary. She came all over it. Hell, she squirted us all in the face.”
“That was hot,” Angel says, lazily rubbing his dick through his jeans.
I throw an arm out in his direction. “Today she came in front of the whole school at the thought of a priest busting her cunt wide open. She’s not your innocent little sister anymore, Saint. She’s a fucking nympho slut who’s probably getting herself off to the thought of all twelve of us running a train on her, starting with her very own brother. I think we should make her dream come true. Except I go first.”
“That’s what you want?” Saint asks. “You want to give her to all the guys?”
As much as she deserves that punishment, I have to admit the thought of anyone touching her besides us makes me feral, and not in the good way.
“No,” I grumble, flicking my tongue against my lip ring in irritation. “They don’t deserve her tears. I’m the one she fucked over. I want revenge. I want to be the one who punishes her—the only one. I want to know she’s lying in bed quaking in fear every night, wondering when I’m coming for her, if I’m coming for her. I want to hear her scream when rip into her. I want to hear her whimper with every step she takes, every fucking day, because I’ve fucked her bloody the night before.”
The others stare at me a second, and I realize maybe I went too far, said too much. Sometimes even they get freaked out by the dark places my mind goes.
“No,” Saint says quietly, simply.
“Fuck you,” I say, punching a stupid ceramic vase off his desk. It flies across the room and hits the wall, shattering into a million pieces, white and blue shards raining down on the hardwood like junkie needles.
“Cut it out,” he snaps. “You’re not so fucking special. Everyone feels like an outsider.”
I snort with laughter. “That’s a good joke, a great joke even,” I manage. “The golden boy on campus, who every girl wants to fuck, and every guy wants to be, feels like an outsider. Outside what, Saint? You’re not just the norm in every single fucking way, you’re the goddamn standard it’s all based on, the prototype we’re all supposed to aspire to be.”
“And you don’t think that makes me feel like an outsider?” he demands. “Yeah, my dad’s a rich prick, big fucking deal. I hate him. I hate all of it. It doesn’t mean shit. What you two have—” He gestures between me and Angel. “That means something.”
“Can y’all go back to almost fucking?” Angel asks. “That was hotter than watching two privileged assholes compete in the trauma games.”
“Fuck off,” I say. “Your family’s loaded too.”
“Speaking of money, I’m off to work,” he says, rolling up from Saint’s bed. “I’ve got a shift at the club tonight. Come by if you want to see Magic Mike.” He winks and starts for the door before calling back over his shoulder. “That’s my dick, in case you were wondering.”
When the door closes behind him, there’s a beat of tense silence while Saint and I adjust to the new dynamic.
“I’m going to the gym,” I mutter. “Sorry about the mess.”
He shrugs. “The maid will clean it up. I’ll come with.”
I wish he wouldn’t, but I don’t own the fucking gym, so I shut my mouth all the way there.
When we walk in, we stand there a second before I nod to the treadmills. “I’m doing cardio.”
“Weights,” he grunts, turning and heading that way without looking back.
I jump on, turn up the speed as high as I can handle, then keep pushing it further until I’m drenched in sweat and my muscles are on fire and my heart threatens to explode.
No matter how fast I run, though, it’s not fast enough to outrun all my demons.
*
“Hey, kiddo,” Charlie says, looking up from under the hood of a ’93 Hilux when I stroll into the open bay of the best garage in all of Faulkner. “How’s it hangin’?”
“Hey,” I say, heading for the fridge in the corner. I pull out a couple Buds and return to the truck. “What you workin’ on?”
“Sexy beast that someone treated like a piece of shit.”
“Fuck off.”
Straightening up with a grin, she grabs a towel on her way around the front end. I hand over a can, and she pops the top. “Don’t tell on me,” she says, tipping her beer toward me before taking a swig.
“Hey, I’m twenty-one. Mom can’t give you hell anymore.”
“Anymore,” she says, shaking her head. “You little shit.”
“Not my fault you snuck me beer when I was underage.”
“What are favorite aunts for?” she asks, sinking down on the bumper of my truck. “Besides, if she accuses us of day drinkin,’ you can tell her it’s like the old song goes. It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
I scoot my ass onto the bumper next to hers. “Pretty sure no one has said that in at least three decades.”
“Oh, right,” she says. “What is it you kids are saying these days? YOLO?”
“Fuck no,” I say, holding up a hand to stop her. “That’s worse.”
She grins and rubs a strand of hair off her cheek with the back of her hand, leaving a smudge of grease behind. “What brings you to this neck of the woods, kiddo?”
“You got the mods done on that Trans Am?”
She sighs. “Sure did. You know that was your aunt’s car back in the day. She okay with you tricking it out like this?”
“She gave it to me,” I point out. What I don’t point out is that Scarlet is not my aunt. She’s my sister. People get weird about that, even people who are related to us and know the whole story, including what relation we are to each other. It’s more comfortable for Charlie to refer to Scar as my aunt, so I let her. She’s my favorite aunt, the only person on earth who can make my southern accent come out, even though I swear I don’t have one.
I fuck with her, because she’s the only adult who I could always shoot the shit with like we were equals, even when I was a kid. She never treated me as anything less. She’s the one who took me to get my ears pierced, and later, my first tattoo. If I asked her to keep a secret, she did it, even if it meant I was doing some dumb shit that might put me in danger. She trusted me to learn my own lessons, and she’d come bail me out instead of calling my mom if I got busted by the cops.
“Come on back,” she says, standing and waving a hand for me to follow. She ambles deeper into the garage, her dark hair hanging halfway out the back of her ballcap in a messy loop, her Docs scuffing the cement floor, grease rag hanging from a back pocket of her Levi’s. In the far corner, she pulls the cover off our latest project—my half-sister’s 1994 white 25 th Anniversary Pontiac with blue trim. It was her daily driver for years, and once she upgraded, it sat rotting in Dad’s garage for over a decade before they wanted to get rid of it. They were happy to let me take it off their hands, and if they don’t know what I did with it, well, that’s probably for the best. Charlie might be cool, but it didn’t rub off on the other adults in my life.
“Your mama’s gonna kill me double if you get hurt in this thing,” she says.
“I know how to drive,” I say, though I’ve never driven what she just got done putting under the hood of this beast. It may have been garage kept all those years, so it looks pretty damn good for its age, but besides the exterior, not much is original. That’s just another excuse to take her out tonight, though, get her on the road and test her before I race her against other cars. Most of the guys in the circuit are rich assholes like Royal Dolce who can afford a shiny new Lambo if they wreck. Only a few old heads remain, and they come to reminisce and ogle the cars, not drive.
“You gonna watch me take her out next time there’s a race?” I ask.
“I never miss,” Charlie says, reaching into the car to snag the keys. “Take care, kiddo.”
She tosses them to me, and I catch them in my fist while she hits the button to open the back door of the garage so I can pull out. I slide behind the wheel, start her up, and wave to Charlie before I tip my seat back, shift, and gun the engine a few times. She stands in the open door, fists planted on her hips, squinting into the sun. Whenever I start to wonder how the fuck I came from my lame-ass parents, how Eternity did, I think about Charlie in her garage, and I think maybe I belong in this family after all.
I take off before that thought can really take root, and this time, I don’t have to rely on my feet to carry me away. This time, I’m not limited by my own body. I have Charlie’s beast purring, then whining, and finally roaring as I let her go on the open road. Behind the wheel of the car that belongs to the sister who’s old enough to be my mother, I’m finally fast enough to outrun the family name, the family shame.
That’s why I race.
Not for the money or the title; not for the thrill or the girls or the glory. For this.
So for an hour now and then, everyone can forget that I’m the son of a scandal, the brother who raped his own sister.
And I do it for her.
So we can both be winners again, no matter our name. So that I can pretend she’s beside me like when I was sixteen and I’d hotwire a car and sneak out with her to meet our friends; that if I look over, she’ll be in the passenger seat, flattened from the acceleration, her mouth stretched into a grin of pure deviousness and delight. So that for a moment, she’s still with me, and that moment is all of eternity.