by Quil Carter
Julian’s shoulders were slumped, his eyes on the ground and his hands clasped over his knees. I was standing over him, my chest heaving from the impact of my own words. I felt so frustrated in that moment, as helpless as I was accusing Julian of being.
“I never thought you were weak,” Julian said. He slowly wiped his eyes. “Just because I wanted to help you… to make someone depressed and suicidal have some support in his life, doesn’t mean I see you as a weaker person. That’s not it at all. And… I know you’re stuck in your life and that he’ll find you wherever you go… I understand.” Julian looked up at me, his eyes drowning in tears. He drew a hand to his head and ripped off the band aid he had on his forehead.
Behind the band aid was an inflamed cut, surrounded by sore red skin, it had stitches in it. “I know it’s probably peanuts compared to your shitty existence but… I don’t have it easy either, which is why I wanted to help you so much. I can’t afford to move out and even if I could… I can’t leave my mom alone. I’m stuck with a shithead father who takes his anger out on me, and there I’ll be until my mom eventually dies or is old enough to go to Greygardens.”
“Your dad… he really hurts you that bad? Bad enough for stitches?” The anger I was feeling dripped away, replaced by guilt. I knelt down in front of him and brushed his dark hair away from the sore wound.
“We both go for walks for the same reason,” Julian said with a half-shoulder shrug. “I don’t want to go home either. That’s why I made this place.” He winced when my hand brushed too close to the wound, hot to the touch and painful-looking. I made my touch cold and rested my hand on top of it so the wound itself was in between my thumb and index finger.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I was just… embarrassed and I took it out on you.”
“Embarrassed? Why?” Julian asked.
“What Silas did to me last night and tonight… it’s humiliating to have it happen,” I admitted quietly. “And when you’re feeling that emasculated… having some scrawny seventeen-year-old mothering me doesn’t make it any better.” I smiled thinly as I said this, Julian only looked back at me pitifully. “I’m the one who wants to take care of you.” I rubbed my hand slowly over the stitched wound to try and soothe it. “I’m the prince chimera after all.”
Julian returned my sad smile, and to my surprise… he slipped his hand into mine. “We’ve lived such different lives and yet… we’re a lot alike. Two men with shitty existences we can’t escape, being smacked around by a domineering asshole. How lucky are we to have found someone to help us through it?”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. I squeezed his hand, then slowly brushed the hand I had on his forehead back to smooth back his hair. “I think I am pretty lucky.”
Suddenly Julian leaned into me. I didn’t even realize just what he was doing until his hand slipped behind my neck… and he pulled my face towards his.
Our lips locked. I stared at his closed eyes with shock, my heart going from normal to acceleration in mere seconds. My mind told me to pull away, just from it being so unexpected, but my body refused the order. It paralyzed me, as if I’d gazed upon a male Medusa, then I found my own eyes closing and my lips opening.
And down I fell into the rabbit hole. As the hand on my neck stroked the nape gently, our lips moved and took each other in deeply. The taste of him turned my blood to lava, and the acceleration from my heart beat that hot liquid all throughout my body, drowning this willing victim and surrendering him to all the sensations it brought.
It was fireworks, chemical reactions that exploded every cell in my body. It was magic. I’d never felt this way before…
No. I had.
Ryan.
Silas will kill him Elish. What are you doing?
‘Please! PLEASE! NO!’
‘Butter, salt, a few herbs… only the best for my lovely. Cut off a nice piece of us, Perish.’
Ryan’s screams shot through my head with such clarity, I physically jumped and gasped. I pulled away from Julian, my body heaving and my breathing ragged, and as I stared at him, I swear I saw Ryan staring right back at me.
“Elish? What’s wrong?” Julian said. His hand was placed on my back as I gasped for breath.
The fear hit me and it hit me hard. Swiftly, without notice, and carrying with it such vividness it scared me, I was transported back to that floor. I was terrified, my heart being physically ripped from my chest as I heard Ryan screaming, screaming and begging for me to help him as Perish sprayed him with butter and herbs.
And the smell… I could smell it. I could smell the frying flesh.
Suddenly, my entire body heaved, and as I fell forward, my hands hitting the floor to stop me from face planting. I heard Julian cry my name as I gagged, but his frightened voice was only background music to the alarmingly clear images I was seeing with my inner mind’s eye. They were all around me, choking the breath from my lungs and making this lit apartment whirl around like I was trapped inside a vortex. I was spinning, faster and faster, and the room was spinning with me.
Then Cristo.
The chanting, the jeering as he died in front of me.
And tonight I learned Julian had been watching.
A blanket was thrown over my body, I was trembling with such a force I thought perhaps I was having a seizure. I tried to tell Julian to leave me, but found myself only babbling incoherently.
What was I doing? I can’t be here. I can’t be here right now with him, and with Silas not knowing where I was. Silas was going to kill him.
Horrible thoughts ran through my mind one after the other, chasing each other like they were playing tag, competing for the chance to fill my mind with more devastating possibilities and flashes of the terrible things I’d seen. When they finally began to subside, I was sitting with my back against the couch and Julian was holding my hand and speaking in low comforting tones.
“You have PTSD, don’t you?” he whispered. “Fucking of course you do…”
“I can’t see you again,” I rasped, my throat raw and scratchy. “He’ll kill you. Please, it’s for your own good. Stop following me, forget this night, yesterday, forget it happened.” I staggered to my feet; I needed to leave here as quickly as possible.
“Hell no!” Julian said, his voice raised and angrily. The first time I’d heard such a tone. “I’m not going to just leave you now. Didn’t you feel that when we kissed?”
“That kiss never happened!” I cried. I pulled my hand away from his. “He kills everyone he sees as a threat and he’ll kill you. You saw what he did to Cristo. And he fucking fried my professor alive! I can’t handle a third man fucking dying with their blood on my hands.”
“Elish, calm down!” Julian grabbed my arm and clenched it tightly. “It’s just a kiss…” He looked into my eyes and returning his gaze made the anxiety in me slowly start to vanish.
“It’s just a kiss…” Julian leaned into me again and slowly he kissed me a second time. I closed my eyes and pressed back, my lips laced with the salt from my tears, and the taste of him.
He pulled away, and as my eyes opened, I saw that he was smiling at me. “We can take it as slow as you need.”
“I barely know you,” I whispered, fighting the growing warmth in my chest and the pull I was feeling towards him. Those lips, and that touch, it was as if he was affixing magnets to my body, and now I felt helplessly pulled towards him.
“Then get to know me,” Julian said back, his voice matching the hushed tones of my own. “And let me get to know you.”
My body was still trembling from the flashes I’d seen, the images of Cristo and Ryan. But his presence beside me was acting like an antidote to a disease I thought I’d never find the cure for. Look at what he was doing to me now… he was chasing these dark shadows away with nothing more than a kiss.
I felt lighter with him, as if my body had shed an outer shell that weighed hundreds of pounds. This man had held out his hand, and had helped me step out of something that had been
bogging me down, drowning me and cutting off the very breath I needed to live.
Julian’s fingertips traced my collarbone, gentle light strokes that made my chest shiver and quake. Then those fingers brushed against my lips and took my chin. He held it in place and leaned forward, and we kissed again.
Each kiss was its own shot of alcohol. I felt dizzy when he pulled away that third time but oh was it so invigorating. I liked it, and even though my self-preservation wanted dearly to deny it… I wanted more of it.
“Don’t you feel that?” Julian whispered. His face so close to mine I could feel his breath against my slightly parted lips.
“I do,” I whispered back. My hand rose and I laid it against his cheek, it slipped down to his jaw, then his neck. I slid my hand to his nape as he had done mine, and then I myself pulled him to me, and we kissed again.
Our lips separated, and this time his tongue slipped into my mouth. The breath was stolen from my lungs when I realized what he was doing, and I only indulged him for a moment before I pulled away. “Slow,” I said to him in a hushed tone. My eyes opened and I saw Julian, the avidity strong in his glassy eyes. “If we’re going to do this… you need to let me do this my way.”
He nodded, his hand still on my cheek and mine feeling the heat of the back of his neck on my palm. “Okay,” he said. “It’s just… difficult with you.” His hand dropped and he let out a breath. “Wow, okay let’s… want to – want to watch a movie?”
We spent the next several hours on the couch together, curled up with a blanket being shared between us. I was half-lying on the couch, and he was lying between my legs (and my feet which eventually did get bandaged), with his head on my chest. I stroked his hair back as the movie played, the room dark but for the electric fireplace, and the blue green flashes on the ceiling from the television.
I think those hours we spent lying together on that couch were better than those initial kisses. The silence between us allowed us to just enjoy each other’s presence and get to know each other in a non-organic way. I feel like those hours were amongst the first ones where I began to get to know this stranger, a man who had known of me for as long as he could remember. Yes, one can ask a thousand questions, from what their favourite song was, to their family history, but the way you truly find out about someone is just spending time alone with them in silence, figuring out their body language, their movements, tones, and whispers. I cherished that time with Julian, and when I returned home that early morning… I walked to Alegria with my feet sore but my face smiling.
And when I walked into my bedroom and smelled Old Spice, and saw the mussed up sheets that I knew held blood underneath them, there was only a faint feeling of unease, one that Julian’s lingering presence banished quickly. I changed the sheets, and sprayed Febreeze all over my bedroom, then I crawled into my bed with my cat, and let quivers of excitement rush through me as I counted down the hours to when I would see Julian again.
CHAPTER 32
“Good morning,” I said to my siblings as I entered the dining room area of our apartment. Nero, Garrett, Ellis, and baby Ceph were gathered around the dining room table with blueberry pancakes, bacon, over-easy and scrambled eggs, and fresh coffee laid out on the table. The smell of the aromatic food had gotten stronger with every stair I had climbed, as had the buzzing of breakfast conversation, and the cheerful babblings of Ceph in his highchair, practising his motor skills by picking up and eating blueberries.
Every head at that table turned to me, and every head at that table, save the baby’s, gave me a startled look. A look that suggested that a werewolf had said good morning to them, not myself.
It was such a hilarious reaction from my family that I chuckled. This brought on even more confused and alarmed looks all of which amused me greatly. I swear they appeared on the verge of a heart attack.
“He’s smiling,” Nero said in a subdued, and rather perplexed, tone, “and laughing. I think we have some sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing going on here.”
I sat down in my usual spot and picked up my fork. I put two pancakes onto my plate and grabbed the butter, my knife was halfway to my pancake when I realized no one had answered Nero. Actually, no one was speaking at all.
I looked up and saw that they were still staring at me.
“What?” I said defensively. I put the butter on the pancake and started grabbing the other food I wanted with my fork. “Go back to eating. No need to stare at me like I’ve grown extra eyes.”
“You… you’re happy,” Garrett said confused. He tilted his head, not sure of what to make of me. My brother was wearing his black hair into long spikes today, half of those spikes dyed dark red, and he had black eye makeup made to drip down his pale cheeks like he was attempting to be The Crow. “Why… are you happy?”
Ellis, dressed similarly which included a black dress covered in lace and netting, blinked as she tried to make sense of me. “Do you think we should call Liam?”
I rolled my eyes. “Just enjoy it and let me eat.”
But then Nero grinned. He leaned forward with his shiteater smile and raised his eyebrows. “What’s his name?”
My heart jumped, his forward accusation taking me off-guard. Unfortunately, even though I managed to hide the surprise on my face, my heart gave me away, and my three chimera siblings heard it.
They all gasped and made noises of shock. Garrett put a hand over his mouth and bounced up and down in his chair, Nero guffawed and slammed his hands down onto the table, and Ellis’s mouth dropped open and she exchanged grins with the other two.
Even the baby squealed and smacked his hands down on the blueberries.
“He’s not fifty, is he?” Nero asked. My brother never one to dance around sensitive topics, more like stomp and dance on their corpses.
“It’s not anyone!” I said exasperated. There was no way in hell that I was going to tell them about Julian, no way in a thousand hells. Julian was my secret and until I was ready, which wouldn’t be for a ridiculously long time, no one was going to know about him. “Just eat. Unless you wish for me to go back to being miserable and suicidal I’d leave it be. Please just… let me be happy and don’t read into it.”
My siblings all looked like they were in physical pain, the request of not harassing me for more information obviously a difficult thing for them. They relented with three sighs and various showings of discontentment, but relented and went back to their food.
“Oh, I know, Cephy. You want the bacon, don’t you?” I looked up, several minutes after my appeal, and saw Nero with a piece of bacon on his fork. It was halfway to his mouth and Ceph had a chubby arm outstretched, a desperate look on his face.
“Not for babies!” Nero teased. He ate the piece of bacon right in front of the boy’s face. “You shouldn’t even be eating food, tard. You’re still too little.” Ceph’s face scrunched up tight and began to turn a deep red. He was about to lose it and start crying.
“Just give him the bacon,” Garrett said. And as he said this Ceph let out a wail. He then threw his head back and began to cry. The little three-month-old baby had a calm temperament, but if he was hungry you better watch out. He screamed like he was being murdered when he woke up for his 3 am feeding, and if he only received one bottle in that time it was as if his world was ending. Ceph ate and he ate a lot, and it was only to keep him from screaming did Silas allow him certain regular food for the boy to munch on.
Which made what Nero was doing not only rather cruel, but annoying to everyone else who was enjoying not hearing a baby scream so early in the morning.
“I just think it’s funny how quickly he shuts up when you give him the food. He’s fucking playing us all for idiots, I swear. He’s fake crying.” Nero patted the wailing baby’s cheek to get him to open his eyes. Ceph did and when he saw that Nero was offering him the bacon the tears immediately stopped and he took the bacon with several hics and sniffs.
And once he started gumming on it, he cooed and looked at
us all contently.
“It’s going to be interesting when Apollo and Artemis come home,” Garrett said. “I’m just happy we’ll be getting reinforcements.”
“Reinforcements?” I asked. That could only mean one thing. “We’re getting the sengils soon?”
Nero, Garrett, and Ellis all nodded at once. “If you left your cave you’d hear what’s going on with the family and not just Elish’s World,” Nero said, with an edge to his words that I didn’t appreciate. “All three boys are getting sengils and Silas too. They’re fifteen years old and ready to go, trained in childcare as well so they can help with tard boy and the silver twins.” As he said tard boy, he handed Ceph another small piece of bacon.
“Me?” I said surprised. I’d… I mean I had been hearing about us getting sengils but it was always something that would be happening in the future. And now it was soon? “Like… within the week? When are the twins coming home?”
“Um.” Nero glanced around the room, Garrett and Ellis both shifted around in their seats. “It was supposed to be today but Kingy left last night and he hasn’t come home.”
Last night… I’d left as quickly as I could without shoes or proper clothing so I could get away from him. I’d left him seemingly devastated because he… he was in denial over what had happened the night he’d forced himself on me.
So he left after I did, and he hadn’t come home? Obviously he’d said nothing to my brothers and sister over where he was going.
I pushed it aside forcefully, and I found that it was a lot easier to do now that I had Julian to brighten those cold and dark areas of my mind. I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with Silas, or whether being in denial was easier than accepting what he’d done. Either way, it was his problem and his problem to deal with. I’d never let him forget what he’d done and the thought of tormenting him with the fact soothed the wounds he’d inflicted on me. A lot actually. If Silas did feel guilty for it, enough to flat on deny that it happened, and show agony when I confronted him… this was an intriguing development.
