by Cameron Dane
If they knew Marek had caused their best friend the worst pain and fear in his life.
Traitor. Fool. Coward.
All worthy titles Marek bestowed on himself.
He kept talking, though, all the while, guilt strangled him inside.
* * * * *
Marek opened the front door and headed right for the kitchen. Christ, he needed a drink. Being the designated driver, he'd only had fruit juice and water during lunch. With the way his nerves had jumped under the constant, watchful eyes of Jordan and Tag, Marek constantly found his gaze drifting to Colin's glass of wine, wishing for a sip. Or a gulp. Or the entire bottle.
He pulled open the fridge door, grabbed a beer, and twisted off the cap, taking a fast swig of the dark lager before tossing the top into the trash. Marek had the bottle midway to his mouth for another drink when his attention snagged on Colin across the room. His beer forgotten, Marek couldn't tear his gaze away from the sexy, windblown man.
Colin held at the entrance to the kitchen. He slipped his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the dark wood frame. Watching Marek from his position, Colin's eyes were so open and goddamned guileless Marek almost couldn't bear to see it.
“Thank you for coming with me,” Colin said, his voice a near hush. “I know it can be awkward to sit down with people you don't really know.”
Marek cleared his throat with a drag on his beer. “No problem. Your friends are good people.” He forced a tight smile to his lips. “You're very funny with Jordan.”
“Yeah, she's great. They both are.” Colin pushed off the doorjamb and moved into the kitchen with a slow, steady grace, pausing some four feet away at the butcher island. He ran his finger along the edge of the wood, but kept his head tilted, watching Marek the whole time. “Do you know what I was thinking about half the time during lunch?”
Colin's seductive, probing stare raised more hairs on the back of Marek's neck than Jordan and Tag's scrutiny had done combined. “That you wished you'd brought Beatrice's journals with you so you could keep reading them?”
Chuckling, Colin said, “Yeah, I suppose that was the second half of what I was thinking about.” He turned and stalked right up to Marek, and Marek automatically pushed backward, jamming his lower back into the counter. Colin planted his hands on either side of Marek and leaned in, stopping with barely a sliver of breathing space between their mouths. “But the other half”—Colin's nostrils flared and his pupils dilated, nearly eclipsing the green—“was spent wondering how fast I'd get arrested if I took out your cock, sat on your lap, and rode your thick prick right in that wicker chair, in front of everybody, until we both screamed and came.”
“Jesus, Colin.” Marek's throat convulsed, and his cock pushed against his jeans, leaking already. This man turned him on and twisted his insides upside down faster than anyone he had ever known. “The way your mind works…”
“No.” Colin dipped his tongue out, licked Marek's lips, and darted back inside. “What you provoke in me.” He rubbed his groin into Marek and scraped their mouths together, barely hinting at a kiss. Pulling back, he looked into Marek's eyes, and the depth and heat stole Marek's breath away. “I want you.”
Falling fast, dangerously so, Marek whispered gutturally, “Then take me.” He closed the inches between them and opened his mouth over Colin's, diving headfirst into a kiss mired in need. Colin moaned and tangled his tongue wildly with Marek's, lending a frantic, even violent bent, with fingers digging into hair and scratching scalp as he yanked Marek closer. Marek welcomed the heightened passion and grabbed Colin's hips, grinding their cocks together and losing himself in the sheer joy of this man. He nipped Colin's lower lip and skated the flat of his palm around to the small of his back. Slipping under the hem of his shirt, Marek rubbed the curvature, pushed his fingers down to caress the cleft of Colin's ass, and drew forth a tremble.
“God, Marek.” Colin separated their mouths just a hair and touched the tips of his fingers over Marek's sensitized lips. His eyes shone bright in the first shadows of evening, and Marek swore he could see right into Colin's soul. “I am so in love with you.”
Marek jerked and felt stabbed in the gut. No. Not yet. Not right now. He pushed away from Colin and made it the few feet to the center island on shaky legs. “You're not in love with me.” He leaned his weight on the butcher-block surface, his back to Colin, and tried to control his racing heart and uneven breathing. “You don't know me.”
“Shit.” Out of the corner of his eye, Marek saw Colin tunnel his fingers through his hair. “I didn't plan to blurt that out right then. I'm sorry if it freaked you out. But you have to understand, I do know you, and I know how I feel.” Marek sensed Colin step in behind him, and the man's warmth rubbed Marek's open wounds raw. “I have been with you in my dreams for two years,” he said. “I may not have known your face, but I know your pain and I know your heart. You've only known me again for a week, but I've felt your presence for such a long time that it's different for me.”
Colin placed his hand on Marek's shoulder, burning him with the lie still standing between them. The craziness and half stories that had been pushing at Marek from the second he laid eyes on Colin again erupted, and he spun around, knocking Colin's hand off him.
“Do you want to know what you've 'felt' for two goddamn years?” Marek raged, and barely held on to the frayed edges of rope keeping him from drowning. “You felt my fucking guilt, Colin. That's what you felt.”
Sympathy replaced desire in Colin's eyes. “I know, baby. What happened to Payton—”
Marek laughed, and it sounded a little hysterical to his ears. “Oh, yeah, that's right; let's not forget about Payton. There's a shitload of my mistakes to go around, and plenty of my guilt is for not being there for Pay when he needed me most.” Every fiber in Marek's being coiled with panic and fear, and his throat constricted so much he could barely form audible sentences. “But that's not what I'm talking about. You want your answer as to why this house chose you, if it really did? It picked you because my guilt about you eats at me every day, and it only got worse when Payton died and I came here.”
Colin took a step back, his brow furrowing. “I don't understand.” His voice wobbled, and the new fear in him cut Marek up inside.
I can't run from it anymore. His heart cracking, Marek finally spoke the words that would lose him everything. “I'm the one who told those guys you were gay all those years ago. I caused your assault.”
Marek's words sucked the air right out of Colin's world. “What?” No. No way. Colin wrapped his arms around himself, feeling the pain of his attack like it was yesterday. “What do you mean you caused my beating? You barely knew me.” All these years, Colin had been so certain the one person he'd told of his feelings for other boys—Jenna Fuller—had let it slip out, surely by accident, even though she always denied having done so. “How did you even know?”
“I'm so sorry.” Marek reached out and curled his hand around Colin's neck, tugging him in. “Colin… Please.”
“No.” Colin spun away and put up the stop sign with his hands. “Don't touch me.” He felt like he and Marek were in a carnival mirror, and everything around them pulled backward and mutated into strange, unnatural proportions. Colin's stomach churned, but he swallowed the bile and forced himself to look at Marek. “Tell me what you did. Tell me how you even knew I was gay.”
Marek heaved a deep breath and put his hand to his chest. “That's what makes it worse, if that's possible.” Wetness rimmed Marek's eyes, and Colin steeled himself not to care. “I didn't know. I threw you under the bus without any real proof. Not that proof would have made it okay.”
“That doesn't make any sense.”
“It happened that day you remembered earlier, where we walked home from the Sumters together. Up to that point in my life, that was probably the best half hour I ever experienced, talking with you, for some reason saying stuff I never would have said to another person. By the time we parted ways at t
he end of my block, we were having a good time, remember?”
Colin nodded with a sharp jerk. “Yeah.”
“Right.” Marek attempted a smile, but it didn't quite happen. “I was doing some stuff on purpose, you know? Leaning into you, touching my shoulder to you, just because I liked the way I felt with you, and I wanted to be closer to you. I was covering it by laughing so hard, making you think I was falling over at your jokes, but I was really trying to make it seem like touching your shoulder and arm was natural.”
His gaze dropping, Colin stared at Marek's fingers splayed against the counter, and, for a moment, slipped back to being sixteen. “I did the same. I wanted to feel your skin, and I couldn't stop looking at your hands.” Long fingers, tan skin, blunt, chewed-down fingernails, calluses… All that time ago, Colin had wondered what those hands would feel like running over his body. Now he knew. Amazing.
Shaking his head, Colin cleared out the fog of undeniable attraction and hardened his stare and heart. “Make your point. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. Except when we separated at the end of the street, we weren't alone. You kept walking to your house to get ready for work; I headed down my street, and what's the first thing I see? Tiggs, Street, and Morales”—Marek mentioned three other guys who lived within the half dozen blocks of their neighborhood—“hanging right outside my house, waiting, and looking right at me. At us, just a second before.”
“So?” Colin still couldn't see the connection.
Marek paused and wiped his hand down his mouth and jaw to his throat. He turned and paced to the table, holding there silently for a long moment. Abruptly, he turned around and strode back to Colin, his blue eyes still unnaturally bright. “Shit, Colin, I didn't even like those guys that much, but I grew up around them, and sometimes you hang out and shoot hoops if there isn't anything else happening, just because. That afternoon, I walked up to them sick as hell inside. I thought I was going to throw up because I knew I was attempting to flirt with you, even if you didn't know it, and I thought for sure they saw and figured me out. First thing Tiggs says when I reach them is 'Saw your little boyfriend there. Sure looked like you were having a good time.' Then Morales gets in a few with, 'Think he'll let you fuck him if you buy him a burger? Or maybe he has already, and that's why you were smiling.' Street's getting his shots in too, and I'm just getting more and more paranoid with every word they say.”
Marek locked his hands behind his neck, his eyes bleak. “Looking back now, I can see they were yanking my chain and harassing me a little bit just to have something to do. Straight guys call other straight guys gay all the time when they're trying to needle them and get a reaction, figuring it's a pretty effective insult. They didn't know anything; they were just being dicks. But at the time, Christ, Colin, I was so panicked and scared they saw the truth I had tried so hard to hide. After all, I did want what they were teasing me about. I fantasized every night about kissing another guy or touching his cock or him touching mine. Shit, Morales was an asshole, but he was so fucking hot I'd thought about him naked and imagined myself giving him a blowjob more than once. And there he was, standing there with his buddies, hinting at things that, deep down, I really did want. I thought for sure they saw something in me, and I was so terrified it would get back to my brother or parents, and that I would be dead, so I unloaded every bit of homophobic shit I could on you.”
Colin's head spun dizzily. “Why would you do that?” He could not wrap his brain around what Marek shared.
“To cover my own ass!” Marek looked off balance, as if he slipped back to reliving the fear and emotions of that day right in this kitchen. “To shift the focus off me; I didn't care how. It didn't even make any sense, but all I could hear in my head was the word 'boyfriend' from them, about me, and I knew I had to get the stink of it away from me.” Marek shook, and his face paled with every layer of confession. “I said you were the queer, and that I was just being a good guy by talking to you because we crossed paths on the way home. I told them you wouldn't stop talking, though, and making jokes, and that I thought you were trying to hit on me, and I was pretending I didn't notice until I could get away from you.”
Night edged deeper and deeper into the kitchen, but neither man moved to switch on a light.
“I even embellished more and said I thought I'd caught you staring at me before, and now I knew why, and now that I was thinking about it, I think you might have been waiting for me so it wouldn't look like a big deal if you asked to walk home together. I'm so sorry.” Marek's voice was thick and raw. “I loved that walk, but less than five minutes later, I twisted it and mutilated it and turned it into the start of something brutal and ugly. I'm so sorry I got you hurt.”
Colin swiped an answering tear from the corner of his eye, but at the same time fought a growing ball of anger edging its way into his core. “Don't tell me you're sorry. Tell me the rest.”
“Right.” Straightening, Marek's jaw ticked, but he kept going. “I told the guys I was going to steer clear of you from then on, because I didn't want to worry about some fag trying to kiss me, and that if you didn't leave me alone, I would have to do something to take care of you.”
Hands curling into fists, Colin rumbled an animal noise and took a menacing step forward into Marek's space. “You told them you were going to beat me up?”
“As good as.” Marek nodded. “Then, because I had to get away from them, I said I couldn't hang out and shoot hoops because I had a date with Jennifer Beecher.” He shook his head and looked up to the ceiling, and his Adam's apple bobbed in overtime. “I didn't even have a date set up with her, but I knew she liked me, and I needed to show I was with a girl. The second I got inside, I called her, and she was happy to pick me up.” Each sentence Marek spoke etched a haunting line on his face. “She was a nice person, and I used her to cover myself. I dated her until I moved away when I graduated a few months later. I made sure people—Tiggs, Street, and Morales, for sure—saw me making out with her.”
“Oh my God.” Reeling, Colin slammed his fist into the counter, making both him and Marek jump. “You set the whole goddamn fucking thing in motion, and I never even put the two together. After we walked home together, the next day was when I started getting the whispers and name calling between classes and during lunch at school. I thought it was because of something Jenna said, but it was you.” Even as rage coiled in Colin, he still put his hand over his mouth and worked with every bit of willpower in him to keep the flood of emotion from pushing more tears to the surface. He couldn't let himself cry in front of this man anymore, so he yanked up his shirt and let the anger run free instead. “You did this to me!” He slapped his hand against his scar.
Marek doubled over as if he'd been shot. “I know! I as good as knifed you myself.” Stripped bare of his secret, Marek's voice was raspy and raw. “I called you out on being gay a couple more times behind your back that week when the three of them kept up the comments. I gave them the ammunition to attack you.” Marek wiped his nose and red-rimmed eyes. “It was my fault.”
“So you knew Tiggs, Street, and Morales were the ones who attacked me?” Colin almost couldn't breathe through the tumult of revelations. “And you did nothing to stop it?”
Marek shot upright with new life and rushed to Colin, grabbing his hands. “No no no. Please.” He squeezed, crushing Colin's fingers. “I didn't know anything about the assault beforehand. I had no idea what was going on in their heads.”
“But you had to know what you were planting there!”
“I didn't think what I was saying through,” Marek cried with a ragged voice. “I just thought about myself and knew I needed to save myself from my parents figuring out the truth about me.” He looked like he battled throwing up right now. “When I heard about what happened to you, I was horrified and sick, and even though they didn't say anything about a hate crime in the papers right away, I knew what it was. I figured it must be Tiggs, Street, and Morales. I aske
d them about it, and they said they didn't know anything and were innocent, but the way they looked, I knew they were behind it.”
Colin wrenched his hands out of Marek's grip and strode to the archway, needing space to breathe. “But you never told anybody what you knew. You never backed me up; you never went to the cops to help when I was getting nothing but a half-assed runaround investigation of my assault.”
“I didn't have any proof, and I didn't know how to help you without turning a light on me. I was still too terrified about my parents and brother, and that scared the shit out of me more than anything else. Even more than making things right with you.”
Lifting his attention from the floor, Colin met Marek's gaze. Sadness seeped out of every line and pore of Colin's body, overtaking the boiling rage. “I am such a fool. I thought you cared about me; I thought you liked me. Hell, I at least thought you respected me.”
“I do.” Marek reached out and took a step forward. Colin stiffened, and Marek stopped in place. “I care about you so much. More than I ever thought possible for me again.”
“No.” Colin shook his head, and the tears he had been trying to hold in so valiantly started to fall. “You would have said something before now, if you did. You've watched me struggle to figure out these dreams, to find answers, and you had this huge piece to them all along. Fucking hell, I admitted to you, with full embarrassment, that I have control issues, and that I've lost relationships in the past because I don't like to be in a situation where I'm unsure or uncertain about what is going to happen next. Yet all this week, you've had this knowledge inside you, while I slept with you and fell in love with you, completely unaware, and you never said anything.” Colin's voice broke. “How could you do that to me?”
