Dark Needs

by Maris Black

  The scene began on a black screen this time, and a familiar jaunty piano melody began to play, accented by a single oscillating cello note. I recognized it immediately.

  “She’s a Rainbow?” I laughed. “Come on, Leo, that’s messed up. I just told that song basically haunts our dreams.”

  “It’s sick, though. Right?” Leo turned a smug smile in my direction. “The way it’s so happy and airy, and then the scene is so twisted. It’s the perfect contradiction.”

  “I like it,” Drake said. “I mean the song pretty much sucks, but it is the perfect contradiction.”

  Leo’s words coming out of Drake’s mouth was also the perfect contradiction. It made me want to slug the guy and tell him to have a thought of his own for once.

  Leo turned his attention back to the screen, seeming enraptured by his own work. “Watch this,” he said. “The brutality, the blood, the happy music. So perfect.” He adjusted his pants, and that was my first clue that he was getting turned on.

  I had a disturbing image of Leo watching the intro over and over as he jerked off in his attic room alone, and I turned toward Gavin to see if he had noticed Leo’s tell. What I saw rocked me to my core. Gavin’s face was ghost white, and he had taken a step back, as if contemplating a sudden bolt from the room. I reached out and took hold of his wrist.

  He turned startled eyes on me and took another step back, snatching his arm out of my grip. “I need to go back to the room for a minute. Be right back. You guys go on without me.”

  The rest of us stared after him as he hurried from the room. I thought about tearing out after him, but my confusion kept me rooted in place.

  “What’s wrong with Gavin?” Skyy asked me.

  “Girls.” Hadrian laughed and shook his head. “Don’t you know that’s code for I gotta go take a shit?”

  Leo smirked in my direction. “My guess is he had to go meet someone. Did you notice his neck? Somebody’s been a naughty boy.”

  I wanted to take a swing at him for saying that, and for dragging all of those feelings of doubt to the surface again. The bastard was so smug, so gleeful, looking directly at me as if—

  As if he knew it would bother me. As if he liked that it bothered me. As if he was the one who had done it.

  “I’m going to check on Gavin,” I heard myself say, and then I was flying down the stairs trying to catch up to my brother.

  I found him in our room just sitting on his bed. He’d gotten Powder out of the bathroom and was holding the kitten against his chest and stroking his fur.

  “He’s fucking with you, isn’t he?” I asked, sitting down on the bed next to Gavin.

  “What do you mean?” His voice was distant.

  “I mean Leo is fucking with you, and you didn’t tell me.”

  Gavin shrugged. “Yeah, he’s trying to get under my skin, but don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  “No, Gavin. You shouldn’t have to. I made this mess by going out with him, and I should be the one to handle it.”

  “He knows, Bain.” Gavin’s hand stopped moving in Powder’s fur, and he turned directly toward me, his expression grim. “He knows about us. I don’t know how he found out. He says he can hear us from his room, which apparently is directly above ours, but I don’t really believe he can hear us through the ceiling. Hell, I don’t even think his room is over ours. We’re at the end of the hall, but that attic window is in the center of the of the building. I noticed when I was looking out his window earlier that the view is different.”

  “Why would he lie?” I asked. “Wouldn’t he realize we could easily check that?”

  “Why does anybody lie? I don’t have the answer to that question. All I know is that he wants something from us, and I don’t think he’s going to chill until he gets it.”

  “What does he want?” Part of me already knew the answer.

  Gavin laughed humorlessly and lowered Powder to the floor. Then he stood up and put his back to me. “He wants both of us.”

  I gasped. “But he hates you.”

  Gavin chuckled. “Penises don’t hold grudges, Bain. He wants to sleep with twins.” He turned to face me. “With us.”

  “No. Absolutely not. I’m not sharing you with anyone. You don’t…” I worried my lip with my teeth. “You don’t want to, do you?”

  “Of course not.” He climbed onto my lap, and I scooted back on the bed to accommodate him as he brought his knees up to rest on either side of my thighs. “I would never share you with anyone else. I told you I would kill anyone who touched you. I mean that, baby.” He lowered his head and kissed me softly on the lips. “Before, it was different. I knew it was unfair of me to be jealous, and that I needed to try to let you find someone. But now… I would literally end that fucker’s life if he put his hands on you.”

  “I won’t let him touch me, Gavin,” I whispered, reaching up to unbutton his shirt, working my way down until every button was undone. Then I unbuttoned his jeans and pulled the zipper down to reveal the dark hair beneath. “You hate underwear, don’t you?”

  He kissed me. “I do. But there’s something else that makes me not want to wear them now.”

  I kissed him back. “What’s that?”

  He smiled against my lips. “That night you stuck your finger in my pants, I vowed to go without boxers as much as possible. That was the first really sexual thing you ever did to me. I had to take care of myself after you left the room that night. God, I could not quit thinking about it.”

  “Neither could I,” I admitted. “I wanted you so badly, and yet there I was going out with another guy. I wanted you to ask me not to go.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Would you have stayed if I’d asked?”

  “Yes.” I brought my lips to his and turned my head from side to side, tickling his bottom lip with my own. Then I reached into his open jeans and worked his cock up and out.

  “What are you gonna do with that?” he teased.

  I looked up at him from beneath hooded lids and began to work his cock like I would have my own, taking it gently between my thumb and two fingers and, for the moment, stimulating only the couple of inches below the head.

  I closed my eyes and imagined it was my own cock sliding between my fingers, amazed at how near real it felt. We were so attuned to each other’s bodies I could almost feel the sensations I was creating in him. I knew it could ever be that way with anyone else.

  Gavin gasped and bucked up into my loose grip, and I laughed.

  “Slow and steady wins the race,” I told him.

  He groaned. “Who told you that? Serena?”

  I giggled. “Don’t mention Serena while we’re doing this. That’s just wrong.”

  “No, what’s wrong is that my cock’s out, and yours isn’t.” He reached between us and undid my jeans, groaning with pure delight as he got his hands on me and began to mimic my movements.

  The illusion that I was touching myself was even stronger now that he was doing the same thing to me that I was to him. We closed our eyes and worked each other over, like mirror images of sensation and desire, and Gavin leaned down and took my mouth. Then we were devouring each other. Kissing and licking and sucking at each other’s lips as we worked our hands between us in unison, striving toward a mutual release that promised to be everything. The only sounds in the room were our labored breaths, the smack and suck of fevered kisses, and the whisper of flesh against flesh. That is, until someone knocked on the door.

  Gavin hopped off of me so fast I was still kissing air. He stumbled backward, nearly trampling Powder, and began trying to force his stiff cock back into his jeans. My reflexes were sluggish as I fumbled my erection back into my jeans with inept fingers that my brain seemed no longer able to control.

  “Coming,” Gavin called out, his voice hoarse and broken.

  I leaned back on the bed, trying to get a better angle to zip my jeans, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

  The door swung open, and Skyy was suddenly in the room. He
r pretty face was blank, mouth open, eyes wide and disbelieving as she looked from Gavin to me and back again. “I—” Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times like a fish gasping out of water.

  Gavin ran a hand through his hair and just stood there looking like the sex god he was, with his shirt hanging open and his pants unzipped and hanging low enough to show a teasing glimpse of the root of his hard cock. “Do you normally walk into someone’s room without being invited?” he asked Skyy, his face serious, betraying none of the awkwardness he must have felt.

  “I thought you said to come in.” Her voice was timid, and she looked like she might cry.

  Gavin kept his composure. “I said coming, not come in.”

  Even in my moment of ultimate shame, I couldn’t help laughing inwardly at his choice of words. Because when Skyy knocked on the door, we had indeed been close to coming.

  “I see that now,” she said, her voice bolder. Her expression of embarrassment was replaced by one of resolve, and possibly a bit of anger. She stepped further into the room and closed the door, clicking the lock into place. “Maybe if you had thought to lock your door, we wouldn’t all be standing here wishing the ground would swallow us up.”

  “That was my fault,” I said, as if it mattered. I flattened myself on the bed and zipped my pants the rest of the way up. Because at that point, why not? Busted was busted. No sense being coy. I sat back up and waited for the fireworks to begin.

  Gavin, cocky as ever, didn’t bother to zip his pants. I had never loved him more than when he was standing there with his cock root peeking out, just daring Skyy to call him out on it.

  I had to hand it to Skyy, too. The bitch had composure. She walked to the other side of the room, sat down on my bed, and looked Gavin straight in the eyes. “I came down here to see if you were okay. I was worried when you took off like that, especially because Bain knows you better than anyone, and he seemed worried.”

  Gavin shrugged and came to sit beside me. “I’m fine. Just a little tired of Leo fucking with me, that’s all.”

  “Fucking with you how?” she asked.

  “That song. He did that just to get under my skin, but you know what? I’m not going to let it bother me. I can be the bigger man and admit that artistically it’s a good choice. Personally, I hate it, but it’s not about me. The song works in the scene, so I’ll stifle my revulsion for the good of the project.”

  “Revulsion,” she mused. “That’s a pretty strong word.”

  Gavin took a second to finally zip his pants, to my great displeasure, and then started bouncing his knees, a nervous gesture I had never seen him exhibit before. “If you’d had to listen to that fucking song as many times as we did, you would understand. It was like mental torture. And the way that creepy little man danced around, shaking his finger and trying to get us to dance with him. It’s a wonder Bain and I are as sane as we are.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. You probably got raised by actual parents.”

  “Well, my mother was dead, so…”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Gavin said. “I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “It’s okay. I did eventually have a stepmother, and she was great. So you’re right. I can’t imagine what life was like for you, and if it’s any consolation, I’m sorry Leo did that. He can be a self-centered prick sometimes, but I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it. You shouldn’t take it personally. He just gets these ideas, and he doesn’t think about how other people might feel about them.”

  “Has he done stuff like that to other people?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, he used to piss Grayson off all the time. Those two fought like an old married couple.” Powder took that moment to poke his head out from under my bed, and Skyy squealed. “A kitten. Oh my God, it’s adorable.” She scooped him up onto her lap and giggled when he nuzzled against her belly. “Awww, what’s it’s name?”

  “His name is Powder,” I said proudly.

  Gavin wasn’t distracted by the cat. “Do you know what Leo and Grayson fought about?”

  “Not really. There were several things, and I was a freshman at the time, so I sort of kept to the shadows. I was pretty shy back then.” She crossed her legs and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs on either side of Powder. “Now. Should we address the elephant in the room?”

  “What elephant would that be?” Gavin asked.

  Skyy rolled her eyes. “Don’t play dumb with me, Gavin. I’m not blind, and I’m not stupid. There’s something going on here, and I thought maybe you’d like to talk about it.”

  It was Gavin’s turn to roll his eyes. “So we do shit together. No big deal.”

  “Well,” Skyy said. “I think it’s more than that.”

  “Like what?” I asked, as if I were a third party in the conversation. As if I didn’t know what she meant.

  “I see the way you look at each other. I notice things that the others probably don’t. For instance, I notice that you two are rarely more than a few steps away from each other. And I’ve seen how jealous you both get over each other. When I spoke to Gavin on the night of the welcome party, I thought you were going to take my head off. I knew that night there was no place for anyone else in your world. I just didn’t know how deep it went.”

  “God, are we that obvious?” Gavin asked, surprising me with his candor. Did he really trust Skyy enough to share everything?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess it could be chalked up to being a twin. None of us can really relate, so you have that on your side. Just do yourselves a favor and lock your door from now on. You’re lucky it was me who came to check on you and not one of the others.”

  “So does that mean we’re cool?” I rested my head on Gavin’s shoulder and linked my fingers with his, officially staking my claim in front of Skyy. It felt amazing to be able to do that in front of another human being.

  “We’re cool,” she said. “I’m not going to tell anyone. Just be more careful, okay? You don’t want to get on Leo’s bad side. He’s not known for his open-mindedness where gay people are concerned, and this thing between you two is a whole other level of gay.”

  Both Gavin and I stared at her, unsure of what to say. That anyone could believe Leo was a homophobe was laughable, and yet Skyy seemed sincere. I decided to press the issue.

  “What makes you think Leo doesn’t like gay people?”

  “Pretty much everyone knows it. See, Leo drinks a lot. He seems really put together, but those of us who are close to him know he drinks. Every now and then, he’ll go on a bender, and he says things. Like skinhead Nazi-type things. Have you noticed the Coven is not exactly the picture of diversity?”

  “I never noticed,” I admitted. “But now that you mention it…”

  “Twisted fucker,” Gavin mumbled under his breath.

  “Pardon me?” Skyy asked.

  “Nothing.” Gavin squeezed my fingers, then let go of my hand and stood up. “Look, Skyy, we appreciate you being understanding about our situation. It means a lot. But Bain and I have some things we need to discuss.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, standing up and transferring Powder to the bed. “No problem. Just know that your secret is safe with me, okay?”

  “Thanks,” I said. Then, on a whim, I added, “You should come join us for a movie one night. We can smuggle in some beer or something.”

  “Sounds fun. Just let me know when.” She paused and reached into her jeans pocket. “I almost forgot. Leo asked me to bring this data drive to you. It’s got the intro on it, and the other footage he and Hadrian shot last year. We’re all supposed to go over it and make suggestions. He says you’re welcome to play with it and see what you come up with.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not really wanting it. At that point, I had lost all enthusiasm for Leo and his film project.

  CHAPTER 20

  (GAVIN)

  AFTER SKYY was gone, Bain let out a big sigh of relief and leaned back on the bed, propping up on his elbows. �
�So that went well, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “It seemed a little too easy. After her initial shock, she didn’t even bat an eye. That’s strange, right?”

  “Well, yeah. But maybe Skyy is just more open minded than the average girl.”

  “Maybe. It just seems weird, that’s all. Probably just my own paranoia.”

  “You can be pretty paranoid,” Bain said with a smile, teasing me like only he could get away with doing.

  “And what about the stuff with Leo?” I sat down on Bain’s bed, since he was on mine. We had a lot to discuss, and I had no doubt we would end up doing other things if we got within two feet of each other. “Do you think that’s paranoia, too?”

  “I think Leo has issues. Not only has he been messing with you, but he probably drugged me, and I swear I saw him adjusting himself while he was watching the video intro today.”

  My eyes went wide. “Like adjusting himself?”

  “Yeah,” Bain said. “Like there was no more room in his pants. He did it right there in front of everybody. I thought maybe you saw it, and that’s why you bolted. I was pretty disturbed by it myself.”

  “No, I was too busy being pissed at his blatant dig at us. Using that song for the video was such an asshole move.”

  “It was,” Bain agreed. “I mean the song really works for the scene, like he said, but he knew it would bother us.”

  “Which is the only reason he did it,” I said. “Anything to try to mindfuck me, because I won’t let him get at you.”

  Bain cocked his head to the side, his expression curious. “Leo is the one who gave you that mark, isn’t he? The one on your neck.”

  I looked away, still not sure if I wanted to tell him everything. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because he brought it up earlier. He said you probably ran off to meet the person who had done that to you, but it was the way he looked at me when he said it that got me suspicious. I felt like he was baiting me. Like he was trying to make me jealous or something. It was him, wasn’t it?”