These Violent Delights

by Whitecroft, Jess

  “Milos, no,” I say. God, no. Simon probably just took a jolt to the brain as well. He does not need to be punched in the head, no matter how much he deserves it right now. I have a brief, ugly vision of Milos’s career ending in manslaughter and I grab the back of his shirt. He spins round and almost lands a swing at me. “Milos, for fuck’s sake…”

  “He tried to fucking kill me!” He yanks himself free and goes in for another shot. “You goddamn fucking bunny boiler – I will rip your fucking legs off!”

  Absurdly I’m thinking of what the neighbors will say. Especially Mr. Jefferies. I throw myself between Simon and Milos, yell at them to stop. Milos accidentally lands a fist in my – probably broken – ribs and my scream of pain seems to sober him. Good. “Jesus Christ,” I say, my chest burning. “You’re trying to get everyone killed? What the fuck, Simon?”

  Simon wipes his nose on his sleeve. “He’ll hurt you,” he says, breathing hard as he points at Milos. “We need to talk, Tom, because you can’t be with that.”

  “That?” Milos lunges forward again. His eyes are a crazy shade of topaz and his lips are far too white. There’s a fleck of blood on his cheek. I hold him at bay, but barely; it’s only the sound of approaching sirens that pulls him up sharp.

  “I’m sorry,” says Simon. “I fucked up, Tom. I know I did, but you have to believe me – I still love you. We can fix this.”

  “Fix this? You’ve turned the back end of my fucking car into a concertina, you maniac! You could have killed Milos! You’re insane! That or you’re so stupid you should be put in a goddamn cage and studied.”

  The sirens are louder now, but the first car is a familiar black Hyundai. It stops just shy of the driveway and Otter gets out. “Oh my God,” he says, seeing the damage. “Oh, what the fuck?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Simon keeps yelling, as the police pull up. “We went wrong. I went wrong. But we can go back. We can fix this. We can put things back the way they were supposed to be, before you met this…this fucking camwhore.”

  Milos goes flying at him again, but this thing has escalated. Two cops come running – one black, one white – and grab Milos and Simon respectively. Cuffs. Rights. Oh my God. What the hell has happened to my life?

  “He didn’t tell you, did he?” says Simon, jerking his head towards Milos as he’s led towards the squad car. “Little Mr. Gay For Pay, here? Did you know he was a goddamn hooker?”

  I turn to look at Milos, who is standing stunned with his hands cuffed behind him. The look on his face is all wrong. He should be sneering at this. He should be denying it or calling Simon crazy.

  But he’s not.

  “Milos?”

  He meets my eyes briefly, gives me an almost imperceptible headshake, one that says don’t ask. “Call my Mom,” he says, and he’s led away.

  12

  Milos

  You know shit’s bad when your dad shows up.

  We were never one of those ‘just you wait until your father gets home’ sort of families, but there’s always a balance of power when it comes to parents. One is usually softer than the other, and that’s how you know you’re in serious trouble. When the soft touch shows up, instead of the parent you expect to come raining down a shitstorm on your head.

  Dad frowns at my bleeding elbow, but when he sees my bruised knuckles his eyes kind of bounce off them, like he’s not ready to look too long and hard at them just yet. I expect he thought he was done with this sort of shit years ago. I’m almost twenty-one. I’m not supposed to be pulling this crap anymore.

  And when you get into fights at my age you wind up somewhere far worse than the principal’s office.

  “Where’s Mom?” I ask, like a baby. Like the stupid little chicken I really am. I’ve been fingerprinted and photographed and it’s only by virtue of some superhuman effort on my part that it didn’t start crying for my Mommy a whole lot sooner.

  “She’s at home,” says Dad, leading me out to the car.

  “Why?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because you’re here,” I say. “Which means she’s probably too pissed to even look at me right now.” I catch his eye across the roof of the car and I know by his expression that I’ve nailed it. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Get in the car, Milos.”

  It’s starting to rain. I hear it spattering over my head as I pull the door closed. I haven’t seen or heard from Tom; the last I saw of him was him staring after me as they put me in the police car, and I haven’t dared think about him until now, because I knew that remembering the look on his face would set me off. And that’s just remembering, never mind attempting to analyze that awful mix of hurt, fear, bewilderment and – oh yeah, that’s done it – betrayal.

  Little Mr. Gay For Pay. There’s no way to sugar coat that shit.

  My eyes spill over as the rain comes down, so hard and so fast that I can’t tell if it’s the windshield that’s wet or my eyes. The dashboard lights blur and I’m sobbing and coughing, jarring a rib that’s probably cracked. My elbow throbs and I know both it and my knee should have been iced long ago; if that sonofabitch makes me lose Tybalt as well as Tom I’m going to go round to his house and cut out his heart with a rusty knife.

  “It’s okay,” Dad says, putting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing, but it’s not. Everything is fucked. I can’t see a single bright spot in the whole damn world right now. “Come on, it’s okay.”

  I get a grip of myself for all of two seconds, but then I go to wipe my eyes and see the ink still staining my fingers. Cameras. Flash. Turn. To the side, to the front. A fresh wave of self-pity rolls over me. Dad sits stiffly beside me, his hand kneading at my shoulder like he’s trying to make pizza dough. I want him to hold me tight and tell me everything’s going to be okay, but he doesn’t, because we’re two men sitting in a parked car and men – at least straight ones – don’t do that shit, even if they’re father and son.

  “Come on,” he says, reaching out in the only way he can. “Let’s get you home.”

  Yeah. Let’s get me home, where Mom is waiting to rip me a new one. He starts the car and I sit quiet for a while, swallowing down the last snotty sobs and trying not to think about the way my knee throbs. The tires hiss on the wet roads as we go, and it occurs to me – the way trivial things often do in the middle of a disaster – that it’s hardly rained all spring until now. I’ve run round to Tom’s place on sunny evenings and found him warm from the outdoors, the hairs on his arms almost white against his fresh tan.

  Oh God. Everything is so very broken.

  “So,” says Dad. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on with you these days?”

  I swallow again, my throat burning. “I guess.”

  “As far as I can make out you got into a fight over some…” He hesitates, and I can’t blame him for that. Not entirely. “Some guy?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m kinda gay these days. You did warn me that could happen if I did ballet.”

  Dad gives me a sidelong look, a frown. “What? When did I say anything like that?”

  “I don’t know. I was, like, six or something. And you said if I danced everyone would say I was a fag. And here we are.”

  He pauses for a moment. “I said that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “Well, I remember you saying it.”

  Another pause. He keeps his eyes on the road this time. The streetlight catches the white threads in the front of his curly dark hair, showing me where I’m going to go gray when my time comes. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he says. “If I did. And I’m sorry if I did. Times have changed since then. I’m just…I’m just surprised is all, Milos. You’ve had so many girlfriends.”

  “And now I have a boyfriend.” I won’t cry again. I won’t. “Had. I don’t know.”

  “Honey, I don’t give a shit who you love, just so long as they make you happy. But this?” He waves a hand
at me, all my tears and bruises. “This doesn’t look like happy.”

  “He does make me happy. And he didn’t do this to me. This was his fucking psycho ex-boyfriend, who is a cancer survivor, by the way. I punched a cancer survivor. Have you any idea how shitty that feels?”

  Dad shakes his head. “And the whoring?” he says, blunt as a blow to the back of the head. “Was that your boyfriend’s idea?”

  “No. God, no. He didn’t even know about it. And I’m not a whore, Dad. It’s just something I do on the side.”

  “For money.”

  “Yes, for money. It’s not a big deal. Everyone does it these days.”

  He pulls into the driveway and kills the engine. “No, Milos. No, they don’t. They go apply for a job at the 7/11 or make shit on Etsy like your sister does.” He looks properly fucking horrified and I wish he didn’t, because it just makes me realize how big this is all is. How big, and how messy. “They don’t take one look at their bank balance and go ‘Welp, better go sell my ass right now.’”

  “I was not selling my ass. I was just…I was providing company to people. People who were lonely.”

  “Yeah, you’re a regular good Samaritan,” says Dad. “How does that even work, anyway? You talk dirty to them or something?”

  I did, at first. But then I got really bad at it, because every time I tried it would make me think about the way Tom loved to light me on fire by whispering tender, dirty things in my ear while he fucked me slowly with two long fingers. And I couldn’t drag those words out of our bed and into the world, not even if my life depended on it, because they were precious and beautiful and nobody’s business but ours.

  “Yeah,” I say, because it’s easier just to cop to that. I talked dirty on a webcam. Big fucking deal.

  “And that’s it? That’s all there is to it?”

  “No, there’s…” God, stop. “Look, it doesn’t even matter right now, Dad.”

  “Right. You were just providing company, but you don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Yeah, because you’re getting all fucking Lifetime movie on me,” I say, opening the car door. I don’t want to go inside, but I don’t want to be here either. “Just because your generation has all these weird hang-ups about sex-work…God.”

  “Sure. My generation. It’s a generational thing. You keep telling yourself that, son.”

  I walk away, because I can, but I’ve walked into a bear trap. Mom is sitting at the kitchen table; she’s been lying in wait this whole time.

  “Here he is,” says Dad, closing the back door behind me. “Our juvenile delinquent.”

  She doesn’t smile, and he kind of recedes into the next room, the way he often does when she has that look in her eye. She hasn’t been crying, and that’s a bad sign, because Mom is one of those people who reserves her tears for when her meringues fail to rise or when the dog comes in filthy and leaps straight on top of the clean laundry. She never cries at funerals.

  “You hurt?” she says.

  “A little. I dinged my elbow when I fell. Knee hurts.”

  She gets up from the table and opens the icebox. Of course she has an ice-pack ready to go. “Here,” she says. “Ice that knee.”

  “Thanks.” There’s a long, cold silence, and I figure we may as well just get into this. “I dropped English,” I say.

  Mom arches an eyebrow. “Really? You’re going to offload this now, on top of everything else?”

  “I had to. It was a drag on my GPA.” Okay, let’s just fucking do this. “Also I’m sleeping with my English teacher.”

  She doesn’t speak. She opens her mouth but no sound comes out, so she shuts it again.

  “That’s what all this is about,” I say, because I can’t seem to stop myself now that I’ve told her one thing. “His ex is a goddamn lunatic who tried to run me down in his driveway.”

  “Mmhm.” She nods.

  “And the same ex told him some things about me doing gay porn.” Here we go. “Which were…kind of true.”

  Mom sighs. “Okay, then,” she says, in a tight, high voice that says I am in so much trouble that screaming is not even an option. She walks the handful of steps back to the door and opens it, her back to me, her face to the dark and the rain. She breathes deeply a couple of times and I lower my head, bracing for impact. I hear a drawer open, then the rasp of a match. It’s only when I smell the smoke that I realize what she’s done and I look up in horror. She was supposed to have quit at New Year.

  “Mom, I’m really sorry.”

  She exhales smoke into the rain. “Porn,” she says, still too quiet for comfort. “What are we talking about here? Dirty magazines?”

  “In 2017?” Goddamn, why does the mention of sex work or porn send my parents back to the 1950’s? “No. It was a cam thing. And it was…solo. I wasn’t sucking cock on camera or anything. I was just…jerking off. Just me.”

  Her back stiffens. “Jesus, Milos.”

  “I needed money. You were going to cut me off because I was failing English.”

  Mom snorts and tosses her cigarette out the back door. “Was this before or after you started fucking your teacher?” she says, kicking the door shut. It’s like a slap. I can’t remember her ever saying fuck before.

  “Before. And I wasn’t doing it to get my grades up. It wasn’t like that. We have a connection. It’s special.” It sounds so childish, now I’m saying it in a room that’s seen me through all of it; the growth spurts, the sprouting hair, the sneaking downstairs to the sink to rinse my sheets in the middle of the night. “We’re in love.”

  “And how old is this person?”

  “Thirty-two. Eleven years. It’s not that much.”

  She sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “It is, Milos. Trust me, it is. Most people change a lot in those particular eleven years.”

  “I know that, but–”

  “–but what? Thirty-two dating twenty-one screams ‘creep’ to me. Someone who’s looking for someone who doesn’t know any better.”

  “He’s not like that, Mom. Actually he was the one who said we ought to stop. If anything I chased him, not the other way around.”

  She frowns, because we haven’t got into that yet. “I don’t understand. You always–”

  “–liked girls. Yeah, I’ve done this with Dad and Ed and it’s already getting old. Obviously I like boys, too; I guess just never met one who really did it for me until now. Can we move past this, please? It just happened. It’s not like I set out to have an affair with a man.”

  “An affair? Is that what you’re having now? I thought you were in love?”

  “Don’t, Mom. Just don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t dissect everything the way you do.”

  “I’m not dissecting,” she says, infuriating me still further. “I’m just trying to understand–”

  “–no. No, you’re not. You’re not listening. You’re doing that thing you always do, where you’re constantly trying to make me second guess myself, like I don’t know my own mind.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I slam the ice pack down on the table in frustration. “You know what I’m talking about, Mom. I tell you I’m in love and you act like it’s a whim. Eight years ago I tell you I want to dance again and you still don’t take it seriously. You keep talking about accountancy and English and back-ups, like I haven’t worked my ass off. You make everything so fucking cold-blooded, and I’m not like that. I’m not like you.”

  She doesn’t say anything at first, but I know I’ve gone too far. Her blue eyes turn flinty and there’s this tension in her upper lip that tugs at the corners of her nostrils, an expression I’ve seen maybe twice in my life. And both times I got slapped.

  “Cold-blooded,” she says, when I’m starting to think she might make it a third time. “Is that what you think?”

  “No, I was just…”

  She shakes her head, not buying my feeble attempts at ass-covering. “No,
I know what you meant,” she says, and sits down stiffly on the chair beside me. She hands me back the ice pack and I return it to my knee, knowing well enough to do as I’m told.

  “I’m sorry.”

  There’s nothing else I can say, so I don’t. The rain is coming down harder, spattering against the kitchen window. I wonder where Tom is right now.

  Mom sighs and touches the inside of my elbow. “Let me see,” she says, her fingers on the edge of the dressing.

  “No. It’s not that bad. Honestly. I can bend it. See?”

  She watches me flex my arm. “You really remember that?” she says, touching my tree tattoo. “When you were a tree?”

  “Sure. The Sleeping Beauty. I remember it well.”

  “You were so little,” she says, her voice softening enough to make me think she might forgive me. “Six? Seven?”

  “Six.”

  “You have a better memory than me.”

  “That’s because I have less to remember.”

  “I remember the things you don’t,” she says. “Like how I’d throw you in the car seat and drag you to the dance studio when I used to teach. You don’t remember that, do you?”

  “How could I? Was I even potty trained?”

  “Nope. You’d sit in that car seat and watch, and thrash your little legs around to Tchaikovsky. Everyone said it back then – that boy’s gonna be a dancer.” She smiles. “Then when you were old enough you’d break the sofa springs trying to grand jete around the living room. You remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Scared the piss out of me.”

  “Oh, I was fine,” I say. “Kids that age. They practically bounce when you drop them.”

  “No, honey,” she says, and sobers. “That wasn’t what I was afraid of. I saw how much you loved ballet, and I was so scared for you. I was so proud, but I knew you were going to get into a world of shit when you got to school, because you were a boy and you loved ballet. That’s why I arranged all your classes to be several towns away, so you’d stand less chance of running into someone from school. I knew it would make you stand out.”