“Come here,” he murmurs against my mouth, his breath warm against my lips. He tastes like maple syrup, from the pancakes we had earlier. And I love that. I love that Aaron Fadler tastes like home and sweet things, like safety and childhood. All of that wrapped up in a boy with hard muscles, an even harder cock, and a blanket of ink … that’s why I’m waking up with wet heat at the apex of my thighs.
Aaron uses his one good hand to encourage me onto his lap. I straddle him on the sofa, like I did the day after Halloween. We’re in a very similar position here. Him, wounded. Me, on top. His hard cock pressing into my borrowed underwear.
“Why are you wearing my boxers?” he asks, eyes half-lidded and gaze thick with desire. He licks his lips. “Because it turns me on like nothing else. You, wearing my smell all over you. Like you’re mine and mine alone.”
“I was, once,” I say, and Aaron smiles. It isn’t a very pretty smile.
“No, never,” he replies, shaking his head. “You were never just mine.”
Aaron pulls me down with his fingers on my neck, kissing me again as I rock my hips against him, wet and dripping and ready to slide down the length of his cock. Fuck the foreplay.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he whispers against my mouth after a moment, right when my fingers finally find the tie on his sweatpants and begin to undo the knot. I give him a look and then glance over my shoulder. The skunk-y smell of weed drifts in through the cracked sliding glass door, and male laughter follows along behind it.
“Trying to avoid the boys?” I ask, lifting my brow and letting my mouth curve into a sardonic smile. “Good idea. I’m supposedly due a whole fuck-load of spankings.” I snort and shake my head, leaning forward and putting my fingers against Aaron’s chest, my mouth against his ear. “But you know that you’re the only one I like to spank me.”
Aaron’s one good arm tightens around my waist and he stands up, lifting me along with him. I shouldn’t be surprised at how strong he is, but I am. Pleasantly so. He looks down at me with a possessive male expression on his face.
“No. I’m not avoiding anything anymore. Not even this. I’m in love with you, Bernie, and I always have been. My mistake in the past was trying to make decisions for you without bothering to explain myself. Not anymore.”
“You mean … you won’t try to make decisions for me?”
He smirks at me.
“No, it means I’ll try to explain them.”
I’d roll my eyes at that bullshit, but I’d much rather take Aaron to bed. His fingers stop just shy of my stitches, but he must be worried about me because he sets me down and then takes my hand. Our fingers curl together as he pulls me toward the stairs. I stop him short, redirecting him toward the master bedroom.
Aaron hesitates, but only for a split-second. He must know what’ll happen if we go into this room together, but he lets me guide us there. At some point, Victor might join us … The thought thrills me as we spin into the room and Aaron slams the door behind us.
I push up against him, my breasts catching on the oversized t-shirt I’m wearing, straining as I arch my back and press them into Aaron’s chest. The move makes my side ache, but if there’s pain then that means I’m still alive.
We’re both still alive.
Nothing short of a miracle.
My fingers dig into Aaron’s hair as his one good hand drops between my legs, cupping my heat and rubbing my clit with the heel of his hand. I find myself working my pelvis against him, thrusting into his firm touch. One of his fingers sneaks forward and slides along the length of my cunt, teasing the wet fabric.
“You ruined my motherfucking boxers,” he whispers, closing his eyes as I kiss the edge of his stubbled jaw. “You owe me for that.”
“Do I?” I ask, pausing and stepping back. Getting to my knees isn’t quite as sexy as it could be; my stitches fucking hurt. But I don’t care. I shed the t-shirt, smiling as Aaron curses and runs his hand across his jaw. His gaze finds my breasts, but he’s only got one good hand and it’s on my head as I drop down. My fingers tease the waistband of Aaron’s sweatpants, curling beneath them and then dragging them down until his cock springs free.
There’s a pearl of pre-ejac on the end of his dick that I lick off while one of my fingers traces the pulsing blue of a vein beneath the smooth skin of his shaft.
“Bernie,” he whispers, and the sound is somewhere between a curse and a death wish. I grin and slide my tongue along the underside of his dick, on a place called the frenulum. Thanks to the shitty worksheet in my biology class, I know the proper name. Lucky me. I can be scientific and perverted at the same time. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he murmurs as I give him a nice, long, slow lick from balls to tip.
“You want to know what I’m … thinking?” I ask incredulously, and then laugh. My mouth takes over the head of his cock and I slide forward until the end of him hits the end of me. With a strong sucking motion, I slide back and then sit on my heels. “While I’m doing this? That’s really your question?” There’s a long pause, and then I turn my fist in a corkscrew motion, making Aaron groan, his body slumping against the door. The hard plastic of his medical boot is loud against the wood. “I’m thinking about how you put an entire clip into Kali.”
Aaron’s fingers tighten in my hair, almost to the point of pain. When I look up at him, he’s staring down at me with an expression made of ice. He did what he did for me.
I want to make up for that.
“Do what you do best: get on your knees and suck,” the ghost inside my head taunts, wearing the face of fucking Kali. I ignore her, focusing instead on the hot heat of my lover’s body. I cannot describe to him in words how it feels to have him back, like the universe, in all her strange wisdom, finally decided to grant me a second chance. So I say it with my body, with the stroke of my fist, with the wetness of my tongue, with my lips as they press kisses down the length of Aaron’s thick shaft.
There are bruises down here, around his cock, on his cock. I’m desperate to know what happened to him while he was gone, but I’m not going to push it. I know better than anyone that you can’t force someone else to relive their own trauma. My grip loosens slightly as soon as I see those marks though; the last thing I want to do is hurt him.
“Harder,” Aaron grinds out between clenched teeth, pushing his cock to the back of my throat with a deep thrust. “Harder, Bernie. As hard and fast as you can.”
I tighten my grip on the base of his dick, and then bear down on him with my mouth until he’s coming, hot and salty against my tongue. I swallow while he pants above me, still watching, gaze darker than I’ve ever seen it.
Does it make me a bad person that I’m turned on by that look?
I sit back and swipe my arm across my lips.
“It’s bothering you, isn’t it?” I ask, but Aaron shakes his head, sweat beading on his upper thigh and sliding in tantalizing rivulets down his uninjured leg until it soaks into his rumpled sweatpants. My breath catches as a matching bead of sweat slithers between my bare breasts.
“It’s only bothering me because it’s bothering you. I wish I could say Kali is the first girl I’ve ever …” Aaron pauses and sighs, reaching out a hand and helping me to my feet. We both groan a little, but being with him hurts too good. I’m not stopping, though I’ll probably hate myself in the morning. “You not killing her doesn’t prove anything.”
“I’m gutless and weak,” I say, but when Aaron tries to protest, I kiss him again, stealing the words from his lips by wielding my own as weapons. We move back until my thighs hit the edge of the mattress. We break apart briefly and I scoot back onto the bed until I’m enveloped in pillows. That’s the odd thing about Victor. He likes his bed covered in pillows, but he only sleeps with one. Aaron, on the other hand, puts one between his legs, cuddles one, and rests his head on another.
I’d love to know how all the Havoc Boys use their pillows.
“Anything but gutless or weak,” Aaron argues finally, shedding his
own shirt, slowly and carefully and with much wincing. I smile as it falls to the floor in a heap. He puts his left hand on the bed for support and drops his lips to my belly, kissing my heated flesh with reverence as I let my head fall back into Vic’s mountain of pillows. “A warrior.”
I snort.
“If I am, then I’m a failed one,” I whisper, looking up at the ceiling and finding Kali there, clinging to it like a demon in a horror movie. She stares down at me and smiles an awful, ugly sort of smile. Her face is covered in dirt, and her skin is already turning purple. You’re imagining this, Bernie, I tell myself, wondering if I’ve finally done it, snapped and gone completely mad.
I sit up suddenly, startling Aaron back. He looks at me with a question in his eyes.
“We need some weed,” I blurt, sliding out from under him and off the bed. When I open the door, I find Oscar standing there. “Peeping in on us, huh, perv?”
He just stares right back at me and then presses his forearms to either side of the doorjamb.
“You and I must exist in different realities,” Oscar says mildly, his new white glasses parked on his face as he stares down at me. “Where on earth would you get an idea as stupid as that? No, I’m actually here to let you know that your little sister was having a nightmare. She woke up screaming.” Oscar steps back before I get a chance to shove him out of the way, grabbing my arm in a hard grip at the last second and yanking me into him. “A shirt might be nice,” he purrs, and then he’s shoving one over my head and pushing me in the center of my back so that I stumble.
As soon as I have the shirt pulled on, I look back at him and find that his gaze is liquid, like molten silver. My nostrils flare and I find myself exhaling sharply. There might be demons in this house, but they aren’t Kali Rose-Kennedy.
“Go. I’ll watch over sweet, little Aaron for you while you’re gone.” Oscar stares at me until I turn and leave, pounding up the stairs to find Hael in the girls’ room. He’s stroking Heather’s hair back as she lies there with a cool compress on her forehead. She’s so enraptured by whatever it is that he’s saying that she barely notices when I come in.
“Bernie,” she finally says as I step up next to the bed and Hael lifts his head to look at me. As soon as he sees me, the genuine smile on his lips turns into something dark and wicked. “Hael was telling me about his mom’s favorite recipe. It’s got crawdads in it.”
“That’s fantastic,” I say, adjusting the sagging waistband of my borrowed boxers. I feel obscene, standing before my sister like this. Doesn’t matter. I crouch down beside her bed, pulling in a deep breath and trying my best to postpone the rush of hormones in my system. “I hear you had a nightmare?”
Hael and I look at each other, but he doesn’t say anything, leaving it to Heather to fill in the blanks.
“I miss Mom and Dad a little,” she says, but with utmost hesitancy. She’s afraid I’m going to be mad at her for that. But I’m not. I can’t be. Even when you’re supposed to hate someone, sometimes the few good memories you have get in the way. It’s not easy to despise someone you once loved. Or feel like you’re supposed to love, even. The only name left on my list is Pamela, and that terrifies me.
Of the seven people I sicced Havoc on … four of them are dead. Two of them are maimed. Only one is left standing, as whole as she was when this started. I bite my lip.
“I know you said Dad isn’t safe, but … he’s fun to be around.” He was. Sometimes. Pedophiles can be charming; it’s part of their ruse. I give her nothing but a sympathetic smile in return. “And Mom has her good days.” She sounds so much older than eight. That’s a failure on my part. I should’ve done a better job protecting her.
“Mom and … Neil,” I start, because he isn’t my dad. Never was. I can only thank the stars that Penelope and I didn’t share DNA with that monster. Glancing from Heather to Hael, I see that he has no more idea how to handle this than I do. He’s an only child, that motherfucker. Then again, despite the heartache and the worry, I wouldn’t trade having a sister for anything. There’s something special about that bond, something you can’t possibly understand unless you have a sister of your own. “We’re not going to see them for a little while. Was that what the dream was about?”
Heather shakes her head at me, curling her fingers around the edge of the blanket and sinking into the pillow just a little further. Her eyes peek out at me from beneath the old Star Wars blanket that’s so faded, it must’ve belonged to Aaron’s mom or dad as a teen.
“In my dream, you were bleeding from the mouth.” Heather pauses as my lips part in surprise. How the fuck do I respond to that one? How do I tell my sister what she needs to hear, reassure her that I’ll be okay? Even though that’s probably an awful, awful lie. “Bernie, in my dream, you were dead.”
“It’s just the dream of a stressed-out kiddo,” Hael says when I lean against the wall in the hallway, waiting for him to close the girls’ bedroom door carefully behind him. He puts his ass against it and lights up a joint. He puffs it twice and passes it my way. I stare at the damn thing in my fingers for a minute before I take a drag. “Don’t sweat it.”
“The GMP,” I start, thinking of the dead gang members back in the woods. “I want to know everything there is to know.”
Hael sighs and shakes his head.
“Not tonight, Blackbird. You need to fucking rest.” Hael pushes up off the door and comes to stand in front of me, lifting the edge of the t-shirt so he can see the stab wound in my side. It could’ve easily killed me, if Kali had moved the blade an inch in any direction. Isn’t that funny, how you can have the shittiest luck in the world until you just don’t? “It’s winter break, yeah? Try to lean into it. We’ll deal with the GMP, but you know as well as I do that you cut the head off the zombie to keep it down.”
“Ophelia,” I breathe with a sigh as Hael drops my shirt back in place and takes the joint from me again. He smokes it for a second, and then laughs in that loud, raucous way of his. His red hair looks like blood against the beige of the hallway walls and my heart constricts painfully in my chest.
“Ophelia,” Hael agrees, reaching up to play with my hair. I want to tell him that I’m going to dye it the same color as his, but then I look into his brown eyes and I’m falling so hard and so fast that I can’t even remember what I was going to say. When I swallow, I swear I can taste honey and almonds on my tongue.
The sound of Victor’s boots coming up the stairs draws both our attention.
I can always tell it’s him in the house because he’s either silent as a mouse or, when he wants you to know he’s coming, has the loudest footsteps in the Pacific Northwest.
“Heather okay?” he asks, and I nod, offering him the joint. He comes up the last two steps, towering over me with his six-foot-five frame. Many men will try to become Vic. They’ll see him and they’ll think they can copy his vibe, that they can be more vicious or more brutal and somehow they’ll encompass that very unnamable thing that is Victor Channing. It’ll never happen.
He smokes the remainder of the joint, but Hael’s already moved into the boys’ room and come out with a glass pipe. He loads up some flower and lights the bowl.
“She’s fine,” I say finally, knowing my response is incredibly delayed. I take the pipe from Hael. Everything is better when you’re high. Food. Music. Sex. I’m smoking specifically for the last reason on the list. Oh, and because I hurt. All over, heart and body and soul. So bad that I’m seeing ghosts that aren’t real.
My eyes slide over to Victor. Looking at him, I feel like I should have every confidence that life is going to work out. That’s how he stares back at me, how he reacted when Aaron was gone.
I saw his shell crack for a fraction of a second, but now … it’s like he’s doubled up on his emotional armor. I can’t get a read on him at all.
“Excuse me,” I say, heading back downstairs and finding Aaron in bed. South Park flickers on the wall-mounted TV, the volume turned down nearly all the way. I
t’s nothing but a murmur as I pad back into the room, climb onto the bed, and find myself in Aaron’s lap.
He doesn’t ask me any questions as I shed my shirt, ignoring Oscar as he turns his attention from the TV and over to us. He can either watch or get the fuck out. I couldn’t give a shit less.
“Let’s fuck this away,” I tell Aaron, rocking my hips against him. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.” What this is, exactly, I’m not sure. And maybe that’s the cause of it all? The fact that I’m not sure of anything.
“You have no idea who you really are. You thought you did, but you were wrong,” Kali hisses in my ear.
“Tie me up,” Aaron says, and I blink down at him in surprise. There are mottled bruises on his wrists and ankles. He might not want to talk about what happened with me, but even an idiot could see that he was likely restrained. “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t care.” He purses his lips together, his eyes like flinty chips in the darkness. “Do it. Handcuff me to the headboard.”
“I have to say, I’m surprised,” Oscar purrs, and when I glance back, I see that he’s sitting with an elbow on the small, round side table next to the chair, chin parked in his hand. “Sadomasochism never quite struck me as your thing, Aaron.”
I turn back to Aaron, but the expression on his face hasn’t changed.
“Are you sure about this? Your hand …” I start, but he shakes his head, resting the fingers of his left hand lightly against my hip. Even though I can’t actually see the letters of Havoc scrawled in ink across his flesh, I swear I can feel them.
“My hand will be fine; I’ve got a cast on. Just … cuff my wrists.” He looks away toward the wall, and that’s when I decide to stop arguing. Everyone manifests their trauma differently; we all have our own ways of healing.
Anarchy at Prescott High Page 10
