THE SOUND of the news welcomed my entrance as I pushed my cart into the teacher’s lounge.
I was still reeling in distress from my encounter with Henry. It was such a close call. Had I not discovered those pills, he would have taken me to Wahrmer, and I wouldn’t have been at work. I would’ve been in jail.
Whatever. It’s over.
After Henry and I had gone our separate ways, I’d returned to the clinic and collected the meds on Zack’s list. There were several combinations on the list I was able to find, so I just shoved them all in there, assuming he’d know which ones were best.
The TV fussed as I wheeled my cart alongside the counter and collected the stray napkins and debris that littered the room. I didn’t bother to turn it off. I didn’t care. After my night, it was gonna take a lot to shake me. I wasn’t turning that shit off unless they were setting curseds on fire.
“…the police raid on an East Atlanta home that was suspected in a cocaine drug ring,” a female anchor with a bowl cut said in a monotone voice.
Drug rings. Thank God. Regular shit.
“The UCIS suspects that a well-known gang of deviants, the Phoenix Resistance, is involved.”
My eye shifted to the screen.
“Police reported that they shot one armed man. Four others escaped in an unmarked truck.”
My face flashed red. Partly from humiliation. Partly from rage.
I felt a nudge at my side and went flying forward, my legs tripping over a chair. I tumbled to the floor, hitting my side.
Fuck.
Wahrmer stood over me, his eyes swelling with rage.
How did he already find out? Henry. Fucking rat. Why the fuck did I think that would work? I’m so dead.
“You think I wouldn’t notice? Think you can really get shit past me?”
I shook my head.
“Those bathrooms are disgusting.”
Bathrooms?
I remembered skipping them when I was sneaking off to the clinic. After cleaning that nasty-ass shower, I’d forgotten to head back and wash them.
He knelt down and pulled me up by my shirt collar, until we were face to face. “They smell like shit,” he said, his foul cigarette breath hitting me hard. “Finish up here and then get your lazy ass back there and do your fucking job. Do I need to write you up?”
“No, sir.”
He was being severe for some skipped bathrooms, but considering I wasn’t getting in trouble for something far worse, I wasn’t going to put up a fight.
He gave me a lecture and bolted out, leaving me imagining how much worse it could have been had he known about the clinic.
“YOU MUST have thought I was so stupid,” I said.
I shoved Zack’s door open and rushed into his shit-hole place.
It looked like an even bigger wreck than the last time I was there. Knives and plates covered in patches of brown and purple scattered across his pylon table. There had to be twice as many clothes lying around, making the actual floor only slightly visible.
Zack looked just as fucked as the room. His hair was an even bigger mess than it’d been the other times I’d seen him. One side was pressed flat against his scalp while the other looked like waves in a violent sea storm of black and brown. A cowlick stood erect at the crown of his head.
As I stepped farther into the room, I smelled the potent fragrance of rot.
“What?” he asked, shutting the door.
After finishing up with work, I’d grabbed the stuff from the clinic and hauled it to Zack’s. He was a liar, but whoever’d been shot didn’t deserve to die because of it.
“Robbing a grocery store for curseds,” I said. I giggled, a nervous reaction as I reflected on my own naïveté about the situation. “How thoughtful. How sweet. How fucking charitable!”
He avoided my gaze, which just pissed me off even more. I deserved an apology. I deserved him to give it to me straight after having put my job and freedom on the line for him.
“Do I look stupid?” I asked, my voice cracking. I was trying to sound tough, in control, but all I wanted to do was fall apart.
“Stupid?”
“I’m hideous, not an idiot!”
He looked shocked. I figured he was surprised by how mad I was.
“What? No. I just didn’t think you’d help if you knew….”
“…you were dealing coke?”
“I distribute,” he corrected.
“Whatever. You know, you might have been right that I wouldn’t have helped you. But you know why I really don’t want to help you? Because you lied about it.”
I backed up against the armchair. I needed it for support, because all I wanted to do was fall on my knees and cry. Why had Zack’s betrayal affected me like this? I knew the answer. I liked him. And I had to deal with him being a liar and a coke dealer in the same day.
Glancing around, I noticed small specks shifting through the air. Fruit flies?
“Luke, do you think I wanted to broadcast what I do? You think I’m proud of it? You were judging that I’m part of a ring of deviants. What was I supposed to think you’d say about the drugs?”
“I would’ve been more understanding than I’ll be now.”
Silence. Long, harsh silence. It was just long enough for my stomach to stir in protest against that rot stench.
“How can you do that?” I asked. My concern shifted from the lie to the moral issues I had with what he did. Zack had seemed like someone caring, thoughtful. How could someone like that participate in such a callous, destructive operation? “You’re ruining people’s lives.”
“People ruin their own lives. I just make it easier for them to do it. It’s how I survive. I do this, or I do what they want me to do. It’s not pretty. It’s not good. But it’s what keeps me and other curseds outside of their reach.”
“By being criminals?”
“Look around you, Luke!”
Now he was shouting as loud as I’d been. He stomped across the mounds of clothes till he was standing less than a foot away from me. “We are criminals. To everyone else on this awful planet, we’re the bad guys. And whether I deal drugs or work rounds at St. Augustine, that’s the way everyone’s gonna feel.”
It was hard for me to disagree with his logic. I had reservations, but I could understand how easy it was for curseds to get caught up in that shit. Still, that didn’t change how hurt I’d been by his lie. I couldn’t believe I’d ever opened up to him. Was anything he’d said true?
A part of me insisted that it had been. That surely he’d just lied about the drugs because of how I’d react. But how could I be sure? What if there were other things he’d felt the need to lie about? How could I know?
There were too many thoughts to sort through, and I couldn’t do it with him standing right in front of me. I threw the bag on the floor. “We’re even,” I said, darting for the door.
I had to get out of there and find somewhere to cry.
I reached for the knob.
Zack’s hand slipped beside me, planting firmly on the door.
“Please,” he said.
I spun back around, about to shout at him to back the fuck off.
He moved close to me, his face right before mine. Lying to me wasn’t right. Dealing drugs wasn’t right. But in that moment, those thoughts abandoned me, leaving me with a sharp impulse to lunge at him. I wanted to feel his scruff against my face. I wanted his body to warm my chilled flesh.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Not like this.”
Desperately regaining my strength, I shoved his hand off the door with my shoulder and rushed out.
“DANCE IS coming up,” Tom said.
He lay stretched out across the end of my cot, his elbows propping him up, his legs dangling off the side. A blue tee folded across his body. When he’d first sat, it’d hiked up, revealing less than an inch of skin above his belt. Thin blond strands sprinkled across the middle of his torso. At his side, the deep curve of his v line teased me. It was hard to look anywhere else, but I forced my gaze to his eyes.
When I’d returned from my confrontation with Zack, Tom’d been waiting for me in the hall adjoining my room. As I approached him, I thought he was going to say something or give me some sort of friendly greeting, but as his gaze passed me, I realized he was not acknowledging my existence at all. It wasn’t a very good feeling. Was he ignoring me? Was he worried about people knowing that we knew each other?
That wasn’t impractical. I was sure, put in his position, I would’ve done the same thing, but that didn’t make it feel any better.
This day is just gonna be shitty all around, isn’t it?
I shuffled down the hall. Slipped into my room. The sound of my door clicking shut brought me a little relief. I curled into a fetal position on my cot. A few minutes later, I heard a knock.
It was Tom. He rushed into my room and shut the door, his demeanor completely changed. He made himself at home, talking like we were good friends. Since I’d heard his story, it felt like we were. It was nice having someone who knew my story, and whose story I knew. It was nice just having someone who wanted to talk to me.
My annoyance about his ignoring me lifted as I realized he had come to see me, but he’d just been doing some sort of secret agent act so that no one would know.
While I was happy he’d come, a part of me wasn’t in the mood. Zack had just ripped apart my heart, and all I really wanted to do was cry and go to bed. I figured maybe it was better that Tom was here. Maybe he would prevent me from downward spiraling into some sort of horrible pity party. Also, it was nice to be reminded that I still wasn’t alone. In fact, I wasn’t at all alone. Tom knew more about me than Zack. And Tom hadn’t lied to me. He was a good kid. Misguided, yes, but I hoped the more he hung around me, the more he’d come to realize that he actually had a pretty good life.
“I wanted to take Kelsey Rager,” he continued. “You know her? Big tits, big mouth.”
That had to have been rhetorical. There was no reason why I should’ve known this girl, and he didn’t look to me for a response.
“Well, I made a deal with my man Josh that he had first dibs on her. We met her at a party a few months ago. He met her first, but she wasn’t really into him. She thought he was an ass. He comes off too strong. He’s the kind that’ll ask a girl if he can fuck her, like, five minutes after meeting her. Not that it doesn’t work. I mean, it does… just mainly on fugly bitches, you know?”
Another instance where I was sure I didn’t know.
“Kelsey started chatting me up. I don’t know how we started talking about it, but we both like this show. It’s this reality show where they pick some hottie model to be the next superstar. I doubt it actually makes them a superstar, because I’ve never heard of any of them going on to make it big, but that’s their thing. Anyway, it’s a chick show. I got into it when I had the flu last year. There was nothing else on. And it’s got some hot girls on it.
“She really liked it too, and we got to talking about some of the contestants. We both had been rooting for this one girl, Danielle, but the host wasn’t having any of that. Danielle was kind of a bitch. She wouldn’t take suggestions. Did her own thing. Told the judges to go fuck themselves. But that’s kind of the reason we loved her. Well, that girl had been booted the week before the party, and so me and Kelsey got really into talking about that, and she gave me her number.
“This girl was, like, really into me. You know how you can just tell if a girl’s into you? We’ve been texting the past few weeks and shit. Not really making dates. Just stupid talk. Well, I told Josh about it. I think he was worried I was gonna end up asking her to the dance. And I was planning on it. But he asked me if he could, and you know, I would’ve felt bad if I hadn’t said yes. But it really fucked me over. I didn’t have anything lined up. So far, I’m thinking it’s between Deanna Moore and Rachel Sutter.”
This wasn’t the sort of conversation I wanted to have with Tom. I liked him. Really liked him. He was hot and actually talked to me. I didn’t need much more than that. That said, I wasn’t eager to talk to him about girls he wanted to go out with. I also wasn’t eager to talk about things that were cut off to me because of my cursed status.
But I figured I should be supportive.
“Which one would you rather go with?” I asked.
“Deanna’s got a great ass.” He tossed me a wicked glare. “And she totally gave Michael Shroeder a BJ during a football game at Franklin last year. Rachel’s kind of a prude. Her parents are really religious. Presbyterian or Episcopalian. One of those that ends with an n. She’s the kind of girl that’ll punch a guy if he even mentions second base. So if I go with her, I’m pretty much shooting myself in the balls. I should just go with Deanna, shouldn’t I?”
“Are you seriously basing it on who you’re gonna fuck?”
“What? I’m not, like, the only guy doing that.”
Another thought came to mind.
“How many girls have you slept with?”
His head sunk back, his Adam’s apple protruding forward. “Let’s see. What are we counting as slept with? Hand jobs and shit?”
I figured we should count them. I was curious to know the total number of intimate experiences he’d had. Not just curious. A perverse part of me wanted to peer into his history, vicariously enjoy some sort of physical interaction through him… with him.
He muttered to himself, his eyes shifting. “Molly Jordan in middle school. She gave me a blow job. Me and Dess Miller dry humped after a concert in town freshman year. Carrie Laden was who I actually lost my virginity to, and Tara something was my first anal. What’s that? Like five?”
Considering how pussy focused he seemed, that was a lot less than I thought it’d be. It was more than anything I’d done. Anything was more than what I’d done. My intimate encounters were confined to people I brushed up against in the hall and a drunk hottie I’d dragged back to my room.
I was kind of envious. There were all these girls out there who were so eager to hook up with Tom… for obvious reasons. I wondered what it was like to be like him—wanted, desired. It was futile to think about, but I couldn’t help it.
“You weren’t worried about them seeing your mark?” I asked.
“I have to think about it all the fucking time. Gotten pretty good at keeping anyone from seeing it. I don’t even shower with the other guys in gym. That wouldn’t be good. With Carrie Laden, I didn’t even take my pants off. I mean, obviously I took them off enough to get the job done. What about you? How many you got?”
I figured he was trying to be polite. I tossed him a Really? Are you seriously asking me that? look.
His gaze fell. He sighed. It seemed little more than an attempt at preventing the awkward silence from becoming too noticeable.
“What was it like?” I asked. My dick hardened. I wanted him to describe him fucking a girl. The idea turned me on. And if I wasn’t ever going to get to fuck him, I at least wanted to be able to fantasize about it.
“Carrie had a nice pussy. Felt real good. We met at a party at my friend Blake’s parent’s place. We were up in his room, started making out. Going at it. She dropped her pants real fast.”
He repositioned himself, bringing his furthest arm around and setting it before him and tilting his pelvis. He jiggled his ass, shifting it back and forth like he was fucking someone.
Is this really happening? I thought.
“Held her hands over her head. Oh, she loved it.”
He stopped jiggling and tossed me a look. I didn’t know what it signified. There was a playful gleam in his eyes, and yet, they seemed to be probing for something. Was he on to the fact that I was getting turned on by it? If he was, he didn’t seem to be to upset about it.
“Anyway,” he continued, reassuming his previous position, “we got Deanna and Rachel. You seen ’em around school? You had to have.”
“I doubt I would have noticed. But it sounds like, if you want to get fucked, Deanna would be the one to go with.”
Or you could fuck me, I thought in a moment of playful fantasy.
“Ah. But there’s more to it. Should’ve mentioned this before. If I go with Rachel, I’m totally gonna look cooler to my friends, because I’m with such a hot girl.”
As he said that, the superficial nature of his dilemma became even more apparent, and it was hard for me to take it seriously. I’d never had to worry about looking cool or getting laid… because neither were possible.
I DIDN’T go out that night. I wasn’t in the mood. I just wanted to get some rest. I couldn’t get Zack out of my head. I’d liked him so much, thought he was such a good guy. He had saved me from those assholes, after all. Why’d he have to go and fuck it all up with that stupid fucking lie?
Had he just been using me to get the supplies? I knew that wasn’t why he’d helped me initially. There was no way he could’ve known that I worked at the school. But had that been the only reason he’d reached out to me again? Of course it was. Why else would he have come back? To be my friend? That’s what hurt the most. Not that he’d lied, but that for a moment I’d relished the idea that Zack wanted to be my friend.
Knock knock knock.
What the fuck?
Henry had already stopped by about an hour earlier, and he sure as fuck wouldn’t have knocked.
I slipped out of bed and answered the door.
Tom stood in the hall.
His elbow rested on the frame. His hand dangled just over his hair, his thumb just barely touching one of his many recklessly arranged blond locks. He wore a tight, sleeveless shirt, exposing those ripped biceps, divided into sectors by rivers of veins. His hip pushed out like he was posing to ensure that I would notice his bulky chest and trim waist—a waist I would have noticed anyway.
He had a cocky grin on his face.
He winked. “How goes it?”
The beer on his breath hit my nostrils. I cringed.
“Seriously?” I asked, peering into the hall. “Are you trying to get expelled?”
He shrugged. “You think I can’t outsmart that dumbass Henry?”
“Like you outsmarted him the other night?”
I grabbed his shirt, pulled him in, and shut the door.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
I was disappointed. What was he doing to himself? He had too good a life to be wasting it with all this fucking drinking. And really? What did he have to be so depressed about? I understood that he struggled with being secretive about his cursed status, but it couldn’t have been as bad as having to be a registered, hated cursed.
“Don’t be mad,” he said, pouting.
Despite my strong disapproval, as he stood there, leaning back against the door, his muscles glistening in the orange glow that shimmered in from my window, he was just irresistible. I wanted him more than ever. I wanted to hold him, to tell him he didn’t have to worry about the rest of the world, because I would be there for him. But what did it matter if I was there for him? Who was I to be there for anyone? Especially someone as beautiful as him.
“You need to get back to your room.”
He tilted his head. “You don’t like me?” His shoulder blades bounced off the wall. He stalked toward me.
There was a weird look in his eyes. I wanted to know what he was thinking, but the look was so strange, so unfamiliar.
I stepped back.
That didn’t discourage him. He cornered me against the wall, beside my stack of boxes.
“Um… Tom?”
He was starting to scare me. What did he want? Was he gonna hurt me? Was he mad at me?
He leaned close and whispered, “I think you like me.”
Now, I felt stupid. He wasn’t thinking about hurting me. He wanted to— No. There was no way. He’d spent the whole afternoon talking about girls and pussies and tits. And I assumed he hadn’t been lying about the girls he’d fucked.
My fingertips trailed across the drywall behind me—a nervous reaction, an attempt to distract me from my scattered thoughts about Tom’s sexuality.
“Come on, Luke. Aren’t you tired of all this bullshit?”
Is he really doing what I think he’s doing?
His chest pushed against mine. It was firm, warm. His thumbs slid up my arms. It was soft, gentle.
His eyes fixed on mine. They were vacant, like he wasn’t thinking. Just staring.
He moved closer, nuzzling his nose against mine.
He was beautiful. His thick arms. The vee under his neck, a subtle introduction to his thick, bulbous chest. My eye was drawn to the golden specks in his irises. Was I drawn to his beauty? Or did I just want to be that beautiful?
His lips, soft, trailed across my cheek, under my patch, to my ear.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” he said, his hot breath rushing against my face.
My dick tensed, filled.
I didn’t want to be alone either. But everything in me assured me that this was a terrible idea.
His lips attacked my earlobe. He sucked on it and tugged gently with his teeth. As he pulled back, he went for my neck, just under my ear.
I rolled my head against the wall, surrendering my throat to him.
No, this isn’t—
I couldn’t finish the thought. A tear rushed to my eye. Blood rushed through my body, energizing me beyond anything I’d felt before.
He kissed across my jawline till he reached my mouth, which he quickly filled with the taste of beer. It was a shitty taste, but it didn’t keep me from feeling an intense heat rushing through my cheeks, surging in my dick.
I could have disappeared, lost myself in him. And still, I wouldn’t have been invisible, because I knew I had all his attention.
He pulled back abruptly, leaving my senses reeling in disappointment.
Don’t let it stop. Another part of me continued to disapprove, to cry out Stop now!
Tom’s eyes fixed on me. Just staring.
Was he remembering my deformity? Had he changed his mind? He had to have. Once he saw that patched-up eye, that horrible reminder of what I was, how could he want me when he couldn’t look at me without being reminded of everything he had to shield from the rest of the world?
He knelt, wrapped his arms behind my thighs, and hoisted me into the air. I wrapped my arm around his neck for support as he whipped me around and carried me to the cot.
He laid me on my back, his golden irises washing me in their perfect attention.
Is this a dream?
He kissed my neck. It was soft, sweet. His nose slid down my neck, between my pecs, over the fabric of my shirt as he kissed.
He moved slowly. Every nerve in my belly twitched, shifted, as if being stirred to life for the first time, as if they hadn’t existed before they’d encountered his touch.
When he came to my belt, he started to undo it. His movements were incremental. I was glad too, because it finally gave the more rational part of my mind a moment to interrupt my delight.
I can’t do this. He’s drunk. What if he hates me tomorrow? Am I taking advantage of him?
“Tom,” I whispered. It was deliberately soft. I didn’t actually want to interrupt him, but a part of me seemed to believe I should at least try.
But how could I stop him? This might be the only time this ever happened. Who else was going to fuck me? Who else was going to touch me? I deserved it. I deserved to feel these sensations as much as anyone else. But my conscience wouldn’t leave me alone, and I knew what I had to do.
“Tom.”
Nothing. I glanced down.
His head rested on my lap, his hands at my sides.
Dumbass.
He’d fallen asleep.
My muscles longed for his touch. My dick, stiff and swelling with pain, ached with hunger. Despite the fast and cruel coming down from the incredible high he’d given me, I knew it was for the best.