Dirty Laundry

by Rhys Ford

  His kitchen area was a long counter against the wall facing the alley, with a microwave, hot plate, and a double-wide industrial sink. The current owner left the concrete floor as he’d found it, sealing it with a thick urethane. The place was a dismal gray, even illuminated by the soft white lights Jae installed everywhere and the thin sunlight struggling through the high windows, but it was his, and Jae wasn’t going to give it up so he could set up house with me.

  I still had his cat, and my bed was more comfortable, so I figured I had enough incentive for him to come sleep with me every night. So far, it seemed to be working.

  The smell of popcorn came from the microwave, and Jae stood with his back to me, shaking the popped kernels into a bowl. A red and gray striped beanie was pulled down over his head, and an oversized Oakland Raiders shirt hung from his slender shoulders, probably stolen from my dresser. I lost a lot of clothes to Jae-Min, but I liked seeing them on him.

  He said it was like wearing me around him. I couldn’t imagine anything that could make me happier… except maybe having him wrapped around me and screaming my name.

  I came up behind him, staying as quiet as I could. Intent on the popcorn, he’d not heard me come in, and I thought I’d surprise him. I wrapped my arms around his chest, pulled him against me, and raked my teeth up the side of his neck in a biting kiss.

  “Hey, Jae baby,” I murmured. “I have missed you so fucking much today, it hurts. Let’s go home so we can try to break another bed.”

  Several things happened at once, nearly too quickly for me to wrap my tiny little brain around them, but my dick sure as hell felt the fist slamming up into it, and then my ear sang from a follow-up blow.

  A high-pitched screaming took up residence in my rattled hearing, and I blinked furiously, trying to wipe away the sight of Jae’s face on the young woman in front of me. A popcorn bowl flew at my head, too quick for me to duck. It was a thick Fiesta ware mixing bowl Jae’d bought at a garage sale, and it thunked my forehead hard enough for me to see stars. Holding my hands up in surrender, I stepped back quickly to get away.

  That apparently wasn’t good enough, because what little Jae had for dishes came flying at me in a hail of vengeance.

  Dodging ceramics and utensils didn’t stop my brain from short-circuiting. My Jae wasn’t actually Jae. And she had breasts, round, soft curves I’d pressed up against my arms when I’d hugged her from behind.

  I was ducking away from a coffee cup when Jae came running from the back room. He let the mug fly past us both but stood in front of me to ward off anything else she decided to throw. They both stood a few feet from each other, screaming loudly in a fast Korean I had not a snowflake’s chance in hell of understanding, but the one thing I did see was the color drain from Jae-Min’s face when she spat at my feet.

  There are times in life when a person can only stand still and let the raging rivers pour over them. This was one of those times for me. Jae would have had to be blind to miss the evidence of my rubbing up against the young woman who looked so much like him. Her neck boasted a red scrape from my teeth and the shallow scruff of my unshaven jaw. It was obscene to see an intimate visual of what I’d meant to do to my lover marbling the skin of a woman.

  She was only a few inches shorter than he was, apparently not enough of a difference for me to notice in my need to put my arms around Jae. The beauty of Jae’s face seemed oddly strong on a woman’s features, and her black hair was razor-chopped around her face and neck, much like his.

  The clothes were definitely ours. I’d peeled them off of him enough times to know them intimately, even down to the small tear under the right sleeve where my tongue fit perfectly to tease his upper arm. The sight of her breasts beneath the fabric was disconcerting, nearly as disturbing as the thought of me sliding my hands over her stomach when I leaned over to kiss who I’d thought was my lover.

  “You… kissed me.” Her nostrils flared, and the realization of who I’d meant to kiss finally sunk in. Her eyes widened, and she paled to an ashen gray. “Oppa… you meant to kiss… Jae oppa.”

  “Fuck, you’re his sister.” There was nothing else I could do, other than maybe find a corner to noisily throw up in. “Fucking hell. Shit, Jae, I’m sorry. I didn’t know….”

  I’d just outed Jae to a member of his family, and she was less than happy about the discovery.

  “Kuieo! Faggot!” It was a hard word to hear, especially coming from a mouth so close to Jae’s in shape. The sting of her words burrowed in deep, striking fears I thought I’d spackled over. “Don’t come near my brother! Oppa, how can you… be this? With him?”

  Jae’s scowl tightened, and his Korean took on a pleading tone, as he gestured with his hands between us. She returned his beseeching words with a stream of words so laden with disgust I could feel my stomach turn. The look she gave me should have withered me to an ashen pile if not for Jae standing in front of me to take the brunt of it.

  “Agi—” I touched his shoulder, and Jae flinched, pulling away from my hand.

  It hurt. More than the bullets Ben ripped through me and Rick turning cold in my arms. Even more than Claudia’s blood spilling from her body and leaking out from between my fingers. Jae taking that tiny step away from me opened up a chasm between us I couldn’t kiss away.

  My face went numb, and my limbs were stiff, unwieldy lumps of clay unwilling to budge me from my spot. They continued to fight, a maelstrom of words cutting deep down into my bones, even though I didn’t understand a single thing either of them said. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Nothing but the devastated, broken look on Jae’s face and the achingly harsh curses coming from his sister’s mouth.

  “Jae… baby… don’t—”

  “Hyung.” Jae turned to me, murmuring. “Please.”

  “Hyung? This ibanin, and you call him hyung?” She was off on another tear, and the gap between them closed. Her hands, small and delicate, were curled into tight fists, and she struck out with them, catching Jae across his cheek. The sound of flesh hitting skin seemed to shock her, and his sister suddenly stilled, then burst out crying.

  “Tiff-ah, listen to me.” My lover tentatively clasped his sister’s shoulders, pulling her into a tight hug. She fought him, refusing to be comforted, and he reluctantly let her go, steering her toward the back of the studio. “Go wash up. I… we can talk more. Please, let me talk to Cole. I need to… say a few things.”

  It was a struggle, with warring emotions playing over her face and her taut body. After a searing few seconds, Tiffany walked away, looking over her shoulder at me. When she reached the end of the bookcase wall, Tiffany stopped and bit her lip. It was a gesture I’d seen Jae do so many times, and it ached when I thought I might not ever again be able to kiss away the dimples his teeth made.

  “You did this to him,” Tiffany spat. “You made him like this. Why? Why did you do this? How could you take him away from us?”

  “He didn’t take me away—” Jae protested, but I cut him off, not thinking before I spoke.

  “I love him.” The words slithered from me and wrapped around her before I could stop them. “I just… love him.”

  She visibly looked sickened and took a step toward her brother, perhaps to pull him away from me… to yank him back to the safety of their family and their beliefs. Shaking her head, Tiffany replied, “No, you can’t love him. Men can’t love other men. Not really. What you do is sick. You need to leave my brother alone.”

  “Let me deal with this, Tiff,” Jae urged. “Go take a shower. I need to talk to Cole.”

  Tiffany disappeared behind the shelves, and the sound of the bathroom door slamming put a final stab wound into the corpse of my heart. Jae stood in front of me, a brittle, lithe statue of ivory, jet, and pain.

  “Jae—” My fingers nearly skimmed his mouth before he stepped back.

  “Don’t.” He shook his head. “If you touch me, I think… I will break. Don’t—”

  “I didn’t mean to do this.” I
drew close enough for him to feel my heat. “I never wanted this. Not… Jae, you’ve got to believe me. I never wanted to do this to you. I thought she was you. From behind, she looks—”

  “Just go, Cole.” He put his hands up to push me away but didn’t trust himself to make contact. “Just please, go.”

  “So this is it? Between us?” This time I refused to be shoved aside by his anger and pain. I wrapped my arms around him and held him as close as I could. My heart broke with every straining push he gave me to get away. “Jae, I can’t lose you. Not like this. Not over something like this.”

  “You’re not losing me. Maybe. I don’t know. I need time to… I don’t know what I need, but right now, it is not you.” He took a small step back, putting a bit of distance between us. It was the length of a knife, and the space thrust into me, cutting at my guts and severing a burning line through my heart.

  “Cole, you don’t know how hard it is for me to love you,” he murmured, tilting his head to the side so I couldn’t see his expression. “I can’t… give you everything.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” My pain crumbled under a wave of anger. He wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know. “There’s always a part of you I can’t touch. I thought I’d wait it out, that you’d give me enough time to touch every part of you… everything inside of you, but even when I’m inside of you, you’re holding back. Don’t do that now. Don’t pull back from me when I can help you… when I can be with you.”

  “Be with me? How? When your kisses burn my skin? Have I told you that? What I’m doing is wrong, and I keep hoping inside of me that something will happen to make it feel right. I need this to feel right, Cole-ah.” Jae turned and stared me down. “Everything you do to me is like a poison I need inside of me… something sweet that peels me apart until my bones ache from the cold air around me. Every time you touch me, when your hands are on me, I want to cry and pull away because I want it so much.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying, baby.” I couldn’t touch him. It would shatter what little hold I had on myself.

  “You are an addiction I can’t fall into, Cole-ah.” His accent curled around his words, softening their tones but sharpening the blows to my soul. “You wanted the truth? The truth is that I cannot love you as much as you love me. I can’t rip myself open for you to feed on. As much as I want to, I know that if I do, I’ll be lost. I begged you to make love to me without anything between us because I thought maybe if we did, I’d finally be able to break away. The feel of you filling me might be enough for me to finally satisfy what I want from you.

  “But I know, deep in my heart, that it would just make me want you more.”

  “Don’t do this to us, Jae.” Shock ran through me, sucking the marrow from my bones.

  “Don’t you see, agi?” Jae whispered. “There is no us. There is you and then there is me. We are so different… we want different things. Maybe it was stupid for me to dream that we could be an us. Where will it leave me? Like Scarlet nuna? Alone and unwanted when she’s older? I don’t want that. I don’t know if I love you enough to make it worth a lonely death. You need to walk away from me now, Cole-ah. You need to walk out the door and not come back. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.”

  In that moment, I knew what love was. It was walking away from the man in front of me. It was turning my back on the man I’d made cry out my name and beg for more of me inside of him. I needed to turn away because he asked it of me. Whether I wanted to or not, because I loved him, I was supposed to step back into the shadows and fade from his view.

  “If that’s what you need, baby. I’ll give you anything you need.”

  “I need to think, Cole. Please, give me some time. Let me talk to her. I need to figure things out.” He wiggled free from my arms, putting distance between us. “Can you keep Neko? I don’t think she’d be happy here—”

  “I’ll keep the damned cat!” He winced at the volume of my voice. I was too close to breaking. “I’m going to keep you, damn it. I’m not letting you go.”

  “You have to. Even if it’s just for right now, ne?” He moved quickly to the door and opened it up to the bright sunshine that refused to chase off the cold inside me. “I will call you. I promise. I don’t know when, but I will. Please, go. Before Tiffany calls my mother and makes things worse.”

  Brushing past him, I stole a quick kiss, lingering for a moment on his mouth before he could push me away again. “I love you, Jae. If you have to choose, please choose to let me love you. I’ll wait. As long as you need me to, I’ll wait.”

  “I don’t know if you should, but I’m glad you’re going to.” He closed his eyes, shutting them against the anguish I’d put there. Pushing me out the door, he whispered, “Saranghae, Cole-ah.”

  Then the door shut behind me, a solid sound firm enough to shatter my heart into a thousand pieces.

  Chapter 7

  I DIDN’T remember driving home. The road was a blur and the city around me a mosaic of colored squares and grayed-out faces. I blinked and found myself in the carport, the Rover’s engine still running. The car lights caught on the green dumpster, and I turned them off, but bright orbs remained in my vision when I blinked. Evening had fallen, sucking all the light from the day sky.

  I knew exactly how the sky felt.

  The cat didn’t greet me at the door and there was no black shadow on the stairs, but I could feel her presence in the house. From the faint whiff of tuna in the air and a mostly empty bowl on the kitchen floor, she’d eaten the offering I’d laid out for her earlier and was now probably sleeping it off in a deep food coma. That was fine with me. I had other things on my mind besides coddling Jae’s damned cat.

  A full bottle of Jack Daniel’s sat waiting for me in the cupboard, a leftover from a party we’d thrown. I pulled it out and stumbled to the couch. The seal barely cracked when I twisted the cap, so I scraped it open until it tore. The cap flew off someplace near the apothecary chest we used as a coffee table, and I left it where it fell.

  After dragging my phone from my pocket, I tossed it onto the chest’s flat top and stared at the screen. There was an ache in me, a burgeoning need to hear his voice, even if he was only going to tell me to fuck off.

  Anything to ease the growing empty hunger that seemed to be eating me from the inside out.

  I picked up the whiskey and began my journey to the bottom of the bottle.

  THE world was sideways, skewing the ceiling to the right of me. The fireplace sat cockeyed on the wall, and whoever turned the sun on was definitely a Spinal Tap fan because it was dialed up to eleven. At some point, I wasn’t sure when, my stomach had crawled out of my body and rolled around in dog vomit. Loyal to a fault, it then flopped its way back. Sliding over my lips to return to where it came from, the damned thing left its foul trail on my tongue and throat. Regardless of when, I could still taste its foul journey and burped up the remains of its night out.

  Strangely enough, the room was also jiggling, and something was grabbing me by the armpits.

  “Come on, Princess. Let’s get you in a shower.”

  I knew that voice and hated it instantly. It taunted me often enough in my daily life, usually at the expense of my legs while running or face when we were in a boxing ring. I’m sure my brain formed something intellectual and scathing, but the message got garbled on its way to my mouth, and instead of the withering, sarcastic reply I knew I could deliver, I croaked.

  “Fuck you.”

  The trip upstairs to my bedroom was akin to following a white rabbit down a hole. Things grew larger, then smaller again with each jarring stumble against a step. My shins were singing a lament by the time we reached the landing, and my head began its own chorus, complete with pounding hammers and a full range of percussion. The last time I’d heard a bass line this deep, it’d been while working patrol in the Fashion District, where there was a free hip-hop concert with every passing car.

  “Why are you here?” I’m sure th
at was what I said, but the confusion on Bobby’s face would have been priceless if I could have seen it clearly. I tried again, enunciating carefully. It didn’t make much of a difference. For all of my trying, it still sounded like I was playing the kazoo under fifty feet of water.

  “Come on, dude, give me a break,” Bobby pleaded with me. “Let’s get you into a shower. Then we can see if I’ve got to take you to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.”

  I opened my mouth to object vehemently to the idea that I was drunk, but my belly had other ideas. Probably overfull from its midnight crawl, it began to gurgle, warning me of its impending discourse. Bobby’s arms tightened around my midsection, and I suddenly found myself staring down into a bowl of bluish water, the stink of chemicals burning my nose. I didn’t have much of a chance to object. Within seconds of being flung toward the toilet, my belly emptied itself of its foul mess, turning the bowl water a sickly green.

  The liquid deserved to be regarded until I could find the exact phrase to describe its distinct color. This task was made difficult because my innards continued to add to its hue, diluting the crayon blue to varying shades of chartreuse and whiskey. Behind me, the shower blasted on, and I winced at the pain upon hearing the spray hitting the tiles.

  My clothes were disappearing at a rapid rate, and the bathroom floor was fucking cold under my bare ass. Trying to change position didn’t help because it only brought the damned tile into contact with my sac. I made a dignified noise to protest this icy assault, but Bobby only heard a whimpering moan.

  If I thought the tile was cold, nothing prepared me for the shock of glacial proportions when he picked me up and threw me into the shower. With all the faucet heads turned on, I couldn’t escape the frigid blasting, and the glass door refused to budge when I pushed against it. Blinking, I saw Bobby had knotted one of my ties around the handle and a nearby towel ring, effectively trapping me inside.