Ori wasn’t afraid of Kalani, no, but he was afraid of giving in to that strength. Losing control. He wasn’t sure he wanted this. But when he felt Kalani’s erection pressing into the upper inner curve of his thigh, skin against skin, he burned from the inside, like his bones were melting, he knew he had no choice anymore. His love and his need were too powerful.
“You’re shivering,” whispered Kalani. “God, Ori—”
“This is new.”
“Good, new?”
“Yes.” Kalani’s hips spasmed hard, almost bruising. Teeth nipped at Ori’s earlobe, then Kalani’s tongue traced a maddening curve upward along the back of his ear. No one touched him there. No one. The barriers of his self were crumbling away. His aching muscles loosened. The shivering eased.
“No lube here. I’ll use spit. Don’t want to hurt you. I won’t last long anyway, but—oh fuck, I want more time.”
“Do it.” Kalani was greedy for time, greedy for everything, and Ori loved that about him, and what was a little pain compared to everything they’d been through together?
Kalani’s weight lifted slightly, and Ori heard him spitting into his hand. This was really going to happen. Right here, right now. Ori closed his eyes and let the sensations wash over him. The intricate crosshatching of the mat pressed against his skin everywhere, slick and cool and smelling of life. Kalani’s incredible body heavy and hot against his back, and now—Godfuckdamn—the big blunt head of Kalani’s dick, barely wet, probed ruthlessly against his hole.
He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, moaning and growling as the burn wiped away everything else. The sound was so high-pitched he couldn’t even believe it was him making it, except he could feel the vibration in his throat.
He wasn’t ready. It was all right, though, because Kalani knew, and reached down, stroked into him with spit-wet fingers, just enough to partly ease open that tightly clenched ring of muscle. It helped, yes, but he felt a flash of frustration at his disobedient body, because he wanted to open more for Kalani. He wanted to give him everything.
When Kalani growled and pulled out and grabbed Ori’s wrists and pinned them down to the mat, it helped even more. He couldn’t move. He could only writhe and breathe and wordlessly beg as Kalani’s thickness breached him. A couple of tears streaked down either cheek, but he didn’t care.
Kalani shuddered, and Ori felt it as well as heard it. He felt every inch of Kalani’s cock, every twitch and every pulse and—and oh God, it felt like it was growing inside him. And then Kalani convulsed on top of him, driving them both forward. Ori’s chin bounced off the floor and bloomed with hot, fresh pain. The burn lessened, at least, now that Kalani was in his ass all the way.
He felt—no, he didn’t even know what he felt anymore, how to interpret any of this, the burning stretching fullness, the sense of wrongness at being invaded, but oh how he welcomed it.
Kalani pumped his hips again, and the wicked curve of his dick made Ori draw in a deep sobbing breath and bite his lip. A small hurt. A vast tidal pleasure clawed up and down his crushed body and flooded his trapped, tortured cock.
When the pleasure receded, it left a lovely warm wetness slipping back and forth against his stomach as Kalani fucked him into the floor. He wanted to tell Kalani you made me comebut even those four simple words were beyond him. It didn’t matter, anyway, because Kalani’s grip on his wrists tightened and twisted, and a husky laugh brushed his nape.
“I felt that.” Kalani’s voice was low, a little broken. “So who likes taking”—a gasp— “whose cock, now?” Another forceful push filled him and shoved his whole body across the floor, and Ori grunted, stomach and chest smearing through the slick of cum. He knew Kalani was trying to make a point of this, trying to make Ori remember. Because after tonight…
The words came to him, at last. He grinned—or maybe grimaced. “Hope you’re happy,” he managed to get out. “Wrecked my ass, ruined me for anybody else. Gonna be counting the days till I can have this again, taking it out on—fuck, I don’t even know.” What could even hope to compare?
Kalani laughed in between nips at Ori’s neck and shoulder. “I’ll buy you a big plug. Don’t want you losing your mind, being one of those guys who goes to the hospital with a—”
“Don’t fucking say it.” Ori’s mind deliriously supplied a whole lineup of phallic everyday objects. “Whatever you’re thinking, just forget it. I’ll just wait. I’ll wait for you.”
The sweet, honest breathlessness of that promise seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Kalani’s punishing pace came to a complete halt, his thick shaft still seated inside Ori’s body. God, the weight of him, the demand.The thrum of Ori’s muscles, racked to their limit. One of Kalani’s hands released Ori’s wrist; fingers traced the length of Ori’s arm, then shoulder, until he felt Kalani cupping his chin. He turned his face back over his shoulder, as far as his neck would allow. Kalani’s lips touched his own.
Without moving, without shifting or thrusting or circling or even twitching, Kalani came. And he was almost silent, except for a harsh note that came from the back of his throat and vibrated into Ori, a sound of pain echoing into beauty as the pain died.
Chapter Thirteen
1999 Ori’s model battleship looked like it had gone through Pearl Harbor. He fumbled at the broken pieces, blinking the tears away. Ori wasn’t good at models; his father had patiently helped build this one during an all-too-rare home stay. And now it was ruined.
“Sorry,” said José. “I thought it would float in the bathtub. But I tried to fix it! I did!” José kicked at the sidewalk, refusing to meet Ori’s gaze, his chubby face gone tight.
His little brother was getting angry just because Ori hadn’t instantly forgiven him. Well, Ori was done being a good big brother and always forgiving and always being patient. How come hecouldn’t be the little brother for once? “You’re so selfish,” Ori yelled. “You’re a selfish little jerk, and you’re a liar too. Think about someone besides yourself, huh?” Nothing ever went right for him. The world could never just leave him alone and let him be happy.
“You’re… You’re a meanie!” José was such a baby. Next, he’d start crying and run to their mom, then Ori would be the one in trouble. None of it was fair. He let the broken pieces fall to his feet and shook his hands in the air.
“Hey little braddah, no act. Want some of this?” A boy about Ori’s age, brown like him and José, walked up the sidewalk smiling like crazy, with a pack of gum in his hands and a pair of swim fins in the other.
“Is it sugar free? He’s only supposed to have sugar free,” said Ori. But José had already snatched the pack of gum and was running away. “I’m Kalani. I live about five blocks that way. Was he driving you nuts?” The boy
looked right at Ori in an honest, easy way, although there was an uncertain edge to his voice. “Yeah.” Ori glanced away a second, almost ashamed of himself, then turned back again. “Got any little brothers?”
“No, just little cousins, but I got so many, they’re like those Star Trek tribbles, you know?”
“Huh,” said Ori, not knowing at all. His mother only let them watch educational programming. “Are you going to the beach? My name’s Ori. I live right here.”
“Yeah. Wanna come with me?” The sun seemed to shine a little brighter just then, and Ori stepped out of sadness like he was born again. He didn’t even look down at the broken pieces. Just nodded, fell in with Kalani, and walked westward side by side.
* * * *
2011 A familiar tugging at his wrist slowly coaxed him back to consciousness. “Kalani?” he called out, but when he opened his eyes, it was just his mother, perched right on the edge of an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair. She looked… Oh God, she looked fucking furious.
But then she threw herself forward and covered his face in sticky dry kisses, leaving behind five women’s worth of lipstick on his face, most likely. She was talking so fast, the tirade interrupted by shrieks and sobs and wails, t
hat the only word he really caught was tanga over and over and over again. Stupid boy, so stupid, why would you be so stupid, what a stupid thing to do, where did you get such a stupid idea.He’d never heard so much condemnation from her.
“What did I do?” He’d done so many things—they were all floating back to him now, little pieces of memory, some of them awesome, some of them terrifying, some unquestionably stupid—but he didn’t know which ones had left marks in the real world.
“He’s got amnesia!” she wailed, and someone in a white coat came rushing to his side.
“Ms. Reyes, you need to step away. We’ll test him later, but you need to—”
She shook the doctor’s hands off her with a disgusted glower and looked straight at Ori, switching back to Tagalog again to tell him, “Don’t say anything, Ori! I called Teresa, she’s going to be your lawyer, and she says don’t say anything until she gets here. Don’t say a word!”
A lawyer? Why would he need a lawyer?
Kalani. I killed Kalani.
Where did he go?
“Kalani!”
The doctor, who’d been trying to hustle his mother out the door of the room,
suddenly stopped, at that.
Ori looked into his mother’s eyes, willing her to answer him straight, not to lie to him. “Is he okay? Where is he?” His mother licked her lips, and yes, her lipstick had smudged. He knew she was searching for words. “Here. Awake, God knows how. He’s moving. He’s trying to talk.” A nurse leaned in and laid hold of his mother’s arm, not grabbing. Not yet. And behind the nurse, there was another woman, dressed in severe blue. His vision was starting to blur at the edges, but he could spot the gun at her hips, the badge on her chest, the scowl on her face.
It didn’t matter. Kalani’s alive. He tried to grip the rails to climb out of bed and failed entirely; his fingers barely even twitched. A line of bright red blood flowed out of his left wrist—no, it was flowing back into him, replenishing him.
Falling back into sleep seemed like the safest, least confusing option right now. So he did. The voices faded.
* * * *
On the second day Ori was awake, an officer came to talk to him while he ate his hospital-food lunch. Saul was in police custody, even though witnesses had said Ori left with Saul willingly, agitated but with no signs of struggle. That was shortly after Kalani had coded. Ori’s injuries weren’t self-inflicted; the angle was all wrong. But no signs of struggle again. No tranquilizing drugs—the only foreign substance in his system had been the ‘awa.
“I did it myself,” he said. “Saul tried to stop me.” Then he remembered he wasn’t supposed to be talking, not unless Teresa was next to him. She was a lawyer in Las Vegas, and his mother’s cousin; his far-flung family was going to save his ass yet again.
The cop frowned. “Look, I’ve got a signed statement from a doctor that says the exact opposite. Do you think I’m stupid, kid?”
Yes. Well no. That’s not fair. You’re just doing your job.
“I want to see Kalani.” He’d said it almost a hundred times in the last two days, and it never stopped being the most urgent demand of his life.
“Feeling guilty?”
The guy was just fishing. Ori kept a tight hold on his anger. “Been feeling guilty ever since he got attacked and I wasn’t there to have his back. Please, just let me see him. I just want to see him.”
* * * *
Days passed. Ori’s requests turned to demands turned to begging, and it all fell on deaf ears. The stalemate didn’t seem like it would let up anytime soon: nobody was pressing charges against anybody, and nobody was talking. Teresa—a woman very much like his mother, but with a fondness for stiletto heels that tapped loudly across hospital corridors—held off the police.
Ori’s mother came by every day to bring him homemade food and cluck about his injuries and pass on what word she could about Kalani. Yvelise accompanied her when she could. Even Auntie Anela stopped by for a few minutes once in a while, in between work and caring for kids and overseeing Kalani’s early recovery. If she was mad about what happened to Kalani, or suspicious of Ori’s involvement in it, she never showed it. Kalani was making eye contact consistently, now, she said. It wasn’t fair they wouldn’t let Ori see him, she said.
Ori’s father never visited, but José did. It had been a couple of years since they’d seen each other, and Ori discovered that all the resentment he was expecting to feel never materialized. Instead, they just hugged and smiled at each other knowingly. Ori didn’t ask about Afghanistan. José didn’t ask about anything. They talked about surfing, or MMA, or childhood grievances that had long since faded from bitterness into warm, rueful nostalgia.
The day Saul was released from police custody, he came to visit. Ori’s mother tried to bar him at the door, but Ori told her it was okay, Saul wasn’t a bad guy. He had no powers of hypnosis. He hadn’t drugged Ori (at least, not maliciously) or made him a zombie or any of it. Eventually she stood aside, and Saul came to sit by the bed, announced in his sonorous voice: “He’s all right,” put his head in his hands, and cried like a big—if incredibly relieved—overgrown baby.
Ori lent Saul the money to get his car-home out of impound. Saul wouldn’t accept the money as a gift, but that didn’t mean Ori intended to ever let him pay it back. He may have done terrible things to Kalani, but he’d done them accidentally, and he’d fixed them in the end; more than that, he’d brought Ori and Kalani together, and you couldn’t put a price on that. Ori would owe him a greater debt for the rest of his life.
The next morning, they wheeled Ori out the front door of the hospital. He could walk just fine, but there was some irritating rule involving liability, and he didn’t really have the heart to pick a fight about it, anyway, especially that now, as a free man, he intended on walking right back in again to see Kalani.
* * * *
Ori waited in the hall, standing next to Julie, staring at her belly, running through scenarios of what to do if she went into labor. So full of life, she looked out of place here, in the wrong wing of the hospital. She noticed and rolled her eyes at him. “You never stop worrying, Ori.”
He shrugged.
The doctor ushered them in. Kalani had a semiprivate room now, one of three beds tucked away behind peach curtains. When they walked in, Anela poked her head from behind one curtain and smiled at them both. She seemed so much happier now, even though the hardships of her life hadn’t eased one bit. The weight of her decision must have been destroying her.
“Through here, you two. Oh Ori, you finally have some color back, thank heavens.” She disappeared behind the curtain again, and Ori could hear her resuming her one-sided conversation with Kalani, her voice bright and optimistic.
When Julie’s hand squeezed his shoulder, he realized he’d unconsciously hesitated. He straightened his back and gathered his courage. He had no idea what to expect behind the curtain. What state Kalani was in. Whether he would remember. Not just his time as a ghost, but anything at all. Memory loss wasn’t uncommon, the doctor had said. Would Kalani want Ori to acknowledge their relationship publicly? Was he ready to make that step? Were they even in a relationship in this world without giant lizard women (mo’o, Kalani would sternly correct) and god-eating caterpillars?
He stepped through.
The wax doll of Kalani stared into nothingness. Still ashy, still wasted. No. This can’t be him.Ori’s heart raced, and adrenaline pumped through his veins. But there was nothing to fight. The fighting was over. This was what he’d won.
“Isn’t he looking so much better?” Anela chirped. No, he didn’t, but Ori smiled mechanically at her. “Watch this!” She got up out of her chair and flicked a few drops of water from a plastic cup onto the back of his hand.
Kalani crinkled his nose, his hand pulling into a loosely curled fist. Ori’s heart fluttered. This was Kalani. Weak, but present, and Ori had promised… Ori had promised so, so much. He finally rushed to Kalani’s hand, too overtaken wi
th emotion to worry what it must look like, the way he threw himself to his knees at the bedside and gathered Kalani’s slightly chilly fingers in his own. He pressed a fervent kiss to Kalani’s knuckles. Nobody said anything, or if they did, it was drowned out by the rushing roar in his ears, the sound of his own blood.
I love you. I love you so much, and I’m here. I’m waiting for you. I’m never going to leave. Maybe it was wishful thinking, maybe he was imagining it, but he thought, just for a second, that Kalani’s hand tightened around his own.
* * * *
Three months later Ori’s palms were sweating, he was so nervous. This was it. If this weekend went well, there would be more to come, more and more and more until Kalani could be living at home full time. If it went badly… Well, Ori just didn’t want to think about it.
The apartment was impeccably clean. His mother had been by earlier that morning to make sure of it and to leave them some dinner in the fridge they could just heat up in the oven. Her way of trying to make him guilty for refusing her dinner invitation, maybe. But dammit, he wanted to be alone for a little while. Just him and Kalani. His heart pounded, and his dick twitched at the thought—but no, Kalani hadn’t said anything about being ready for that yet. They’d snuggle on his couch instead and watch a couple of slow movies while Ori ran his hands through Kalani’s long hair.
He paced into the small living room, giving it a quick once-over. Everything in its place. Lots of room for Kalani’s wheelchair to fit between the secondhand futon and the coffee table he’d picked up in a garage sale. A small stack of doctor-approved DVDs for them to watch. A neatly folded throw blanket. The whole place so clean, it looked barely lived-in. Which would be a fair assessment, honestly. Ori and José rented the place together, but José, of course, wasn’t around much to actually live in it. Ori suspected him of suggesting they be roommates purely as a favor to Ori, so he wouldn’t have to move home, although between his job working for his uncle’s repo company, training at the gym, and getting back into the rhythm and schedule of professional fighting, Ori was barely home, anyway.
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