by Sidney Bell
“Thank you,” Brogan whispered. “And look, no lightning. Maybe the fates don’t mind.”
“Maybe you’re the only one who heard me.”
“Then we’ll keep it that way,” Brogan promised. “Just between us.”
Relief stole the bones from Embry’s body and he lay there pretending he wasn’t crying. He sniffled and shook and made pathetic noises, all of which was embarrassing, but it was hard to mind when it had Brogan murmuring fondly in his ear and stroking his back and buttocks with those big, gentle hands.
Embry was unlocked.
He began to breathe again.
* * * * *
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Chapter One
2011
It felt good to hit.
After the day he’d had, or rather, after the week—oh, hell, after the life he’d had—it was a jolt of pure electric pleasure up his arm and down his spine to punch this bastard in the face. To watch as his cheeks rippled under the force of the blow.
The guy hadn’t gotten three hits in. Church was demolishing him.
For the first time since he took off (and don’t think about that, not yet, maybe not ever), he could feel his burden lightening. It’d been so long since he’d done anything but put one foot in front of the other that fighting back was sweet and heady, sex and candy.
He was a week and a half past his seventeenth birthday, he hadn’t eaten in two days, and he was going to be sleeping in a moldy refrigerator box under a bridge, but for now, this moment?
He was winning.
The guy staggered up, and Church only had to bump him to send him down again, a beached whale on the alley gravel.
The glee hadn’t begun to fade yet, but his anger had. The sky had been spitting rain since that morning and his clothes were damp and heavy, cooling his temper further. He took a look around to figure out where he was. The neon of the 24-hour liquor store blazed a couple blocks down. That was where the guy had started following Church down the street to deliver a blistering—and drunken—tirade about Church’s personality and chances in life just because he’d asked the dude to buy him some beer.
So they hadn’t gone far, which was a relief. When Church got pissed, his brain pretty much shut off. They could’ve swum to China and he might not have noticed from beneath the adrenaline haze narrowing his vision.
Tired now, Church waited for the guy to get up. When he didn’t move, Church wandered closer, ready to kick in case it was a trick, and saw the blood spreading out in a pool beneath the guy’s head.
That was when Church knew he’d finally fucked up beyond fixing. He’d reached the end of the line, and this time there wouldn’t be anyone arguing that he was a mixed-up kid who had a shot if he could get away from his family. This was all on him, and he was fucked.
As if he could already feel their eyes and hands upon him, he hunched his shoulders. The pressure built, and all he could think was oh shit oh shit oh shit.
Blue, wet nighttime asphalt beneath his pounding sneakers. Murky water splashed and dampened his socks and pant legs. He left the main thoroughfare—which was empty at this time of night anyway—and entered a residential zone. The houses along both sides of the road—cramped and old, a couple with junked up cars on their lawns—all had dark windows.
Church was alone.
He made it about thirty more feet before he realized that if no one was chasing him, then no one had seen.
No one would help.
He stopped, panting, and kicked the post of a bank of gray mailboxes hard enough that his toes sang. The need to get lost burned through his veins like heroin. Instead, he swallowed hard and walked up the sidewalk to the nearest house. He rang the bell until someone answered.
“Call an ambulance,” he told the wary old guy through the closed screen door.
Then Church sat down to wait.
* * *
2012
On his eighteenth birthday, Church was transferred from Roseburg Juvenile Detention Facility to Woodbury Residential Treatment Center, where he would serve the rest of his sentence. The sprawling campus hosted eleven cottages, a cafeteria, and a school serving grades eight through twelve as well as offering online college credit to the older guys. The buildings were chipped red brick, the sidewalks cracked, the walls so thick with their annual coats of paint that they might’ve been load bearing even without their beams.
None of it—not the cramped rooms or mismatched furniture or the long, solemn lines of marching boys—bothered Church much. According to the brochure they’d given him, Woodbury was supposed to divert first time juvenile offenders from serving time in prison, offering life skills and therapy to help at-risk youth forge new lives while still holding them accountable for their actions.
Sounded good to him. Church would talk about his feelings from dawn to dusk if it meant the last of the razor wire and orange jumpsuits.
He’d been assigned to Monarch cottage—housing behavioral cases ages fifteen and up—and as the female staff member at the desk explained the schedule and rules, he studied the walls behind her: alarm boxes, shelves laden with boxes of blue nitrile gloves and thick binders with labels like Crisis Intervention Plans and Resident Treatment Plans. There was a padlocked bin marked Confiscated in the corner. A whiteboard listed various names alphabetically, with details printed beside them—status within the program, any health problems and any risks posed.
He found his own entry: Edgar-Allen Church, New Admission, None, Aggression.
He supposed that was fair.
When the staff lady was done, she sent him down a long hallway lined with bedrooms rather than cells—improvement number gazillion over lockdown, behind the lack of strip search (currently in first place) but ahead of the street clothes. There were alarms on the windows, he’d been told, but the doors didn’t even lock.
He wasn’t an inmate any longer. He was a resident.
In the last bedroom on the left, he found two sets of bunk beds and a boy about his age sprawled on one, reading. He was handsome in an earnest, wholesome way, though his ears stuck out a little. He had a thick mop of light brown curls tumbling over his forehead almost to his strong jaw, and he had the aura of a curious puppy as his blue eyes ran over Church.
Church wasn’t expecting to impress the kid. It wasn’t that he was ugly, exactly. It was more that he had some things working against him that people had a hard time getting past. He was tall and lanky-skinny, with overgrown dark hair that stuck out all over, heavy black eyebrows—no unibrow, so maybe God didn’t hate him so much as strongly dislike him—and a big, honking roman nose.
A guy in school who’d wanted to kiss him had called him exotic once, though, so he had that shit going for him.
For the record, Church did not kiss the jerk. Even at fifteen, he hadn’t been that hard up.
With a nod of greeting, Church claimed one of the naked mattresses and started putting on the sheets he’d been given.
“Hello. I’m Tobias Benton,” the other boy said, sitting up and straightening his collar.
“Church.”
“Nice to meet you.”
When he was done with the bed, Church sat, eying his new roommate. He’d learned in Roseburg that there were a wide variety of guys who got in trouble—some were fuckups, some were stupid, some were mean, some were psychos. This one—Tobias—didn’t give off the usual cues for any of the above, and he didn’t have that beaten-down manner that long-term victims gave off, either. His jeans and shirt fit well, his haircut was good,
and his shoes were brand name—he wasn’t a system kid. He looked like he should be on a sitcom, where problems came bite-sized and always got fixed by the end.
“Guess we’d better get the important stuff out of the way if we’re gonna be living together,” Church said. “Do you snore?”
“I don’t think so. At least, my old roommates never complained.”
“Good. Me neither. You got any pet peeves?”
“Pet peeves?”
“As a roommate. If there’s something likely to set you off, better to mention it now, yeah?”
“Oh. I like my stuff really neat? Is that one? I’d appreciate it if you didn’t, um, move my things. Or touch them. It’s nothing about you, I promise. I’m just picky about where they go. What about you?”
“Don’t steal anything.”
“I wouldn’t,” Tobias said, his eyes widening. “I mean, I don’t...that’s not my issue.”
“All right.” And now the delicate one. “Are the bathrooms communal here?”
Tobias’s brow creased for a second. It cleared at roughly the same time that his face flooded bright red. “Ah, no. You can take care of that, um, in the shower.”
“Cool,” Church said, and relaxed a bit. He wasn’t a prude by any stretch, but one of the creepiest things about living in lockdown had been getting used to the nightly not-so-furtive sounds of near-strangers jerking off five feet away.
“So what is your issue?” Church asked. “Unless you don’t like to talk about it.”
“Wayward,” Tobias said, as if that explained everything. It did, sort of—it was a catch-all term that meant regular teenage hijinks taken to extremes, and it covered everything from drinking to joy riding to refusing to go to school. Church couldn’t imagine how this Beaver Cleaver-wannabe had ended up in a place like this. “You?”
“Assault. Here from Roseburg.”
Tobias chewed on his bottom lip. He wasn’t as tall as Church, maybe five-eleven, and though he was built sturdier and no doubt stronger, he lacked that sharp edge that meant he knew how to use it, and that was worth more than all the muscle in the world.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Church said. “Unless you start something.”
Tobias took a deep breath. “How do you feel about gay people? Is that—is that starting something?”
Church blinked at him. “No. I mean, I’m gay, dude.”
“Oh.” Tobias’s shoulders relaxed so fast Church was surprised he didn’t fall over. “Oh, okay.”
“Do you think they put us in here together because of that? The whole keep the gay away thing?”
“Nah. This is the only room with open beds.”
“Huh.” Church fumbled with his entry paperwork. “There’s a lot of crap here.”
Tobias put his book aside and tentatively got up. “I could help. If you want.”
“What’s this job trade thing?” Church picked up a pamphlet. There was a staged photo of a happy teenager on the cover holding a cake. Tobias peered at it.
“Oh, you have to pick a skill to learn. The idea is that when you finish your program you’ll have something to fall back on besides crime.”
Church frowned. The options were limited: cooking, janitorial, auto maintenance, computers and carpentry.
“Janitorial? Anybody really pick that?”
“Hardly.” Tobias’s brow wrinkled. “Are you interested?”
“No. Didn’t anyone tell you?” Church said. “Having brown skin means I was born already knowing how to clean a white dude’s bathroom.”
Of course, that made him think of his mother, who’d been a maid back in Puerto Rico as she put herself through school, back before she’d moved to Oregon and married a man who’d found everything about her culture about as valuable as the dirt under his heel.
Quietly, Tobias said, “I don’t think that.” His gaze was steady on Church’s, and there was zero bullshit there, only a simple honesty that Church found hard to doubt.
He grunted and waved the pamphlet as a distraction. “Any suggestions?”
“Don’t pick computers,” Tobias told him. “All the computers are ancient, so unless you want to learn how to use AOL, it’s useless. If you go with cooking, you get to eat anything you make.”
But Church’s eyes lingered on the carpentry option. For a moment he could smell wood stain and shavings and metal. He remembered the heaviness of the plane clutched tight in his fingers, remembered the feel of hands bigger than his own directing his movements as he scraped the tool across the oak board while strips curled up and dropped to the floor. Remembered Miller’s quiet, steady voice giving directions and later, the way he’d gently smoothed ointment on the blisters on Church’s palms. Church’s stomach tightened with an echo of the thrill he’d felt then, the way his skin had hummed, just from that simple touch.
It was gonna hurt every single day, but he checked the box for carpentry all the same, then rubbed at the dull ache in his chest with the heel of one hand. His calluses were long gone.
By nightfall, Church was exhausted. Tomorrow he had school and his first session with his therapist, neither of which he was looking forward to, but he had a couple of classes with Tobias, so it’d be manageable. Actually, after he took a shower and jerked off all by his lonesome, he headed back to his room feeling pretty damn good. He hadn’t been this relaxed in over a year, not since—no, he couldn’t. That brief memory earlier had been enough for one day. Church might be self-destructive at times, but he wasn’t a masochist.
Tobias was cool with leaving the window open, and once the lights were out, Church closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The air reeked of pine and hot summer earth and—more faintly—the nearby dumpsters, and it might’ve been the best thing he’d ever smelled.
“Hey, Church,” Tobias whispered. “Happy birthday.”
Church sighed into the darkness. “Thanks.”
* * *
Church had never had anything as normal as a best friend before. Fortunately, Tobias balanced this out, because he was so normal he was almost a parody of himself—he said things like “ma’am” and “if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it” and “I apologize, it wasn’t my intention to hurt your feelings.”
That last one actually got him beat up a little, because guys who ended up in places like Woodbury didn’t get their feelings hurt. They didn’t have feelings, even. They were concentrated bloodlust and ego, packing race car engines in their chests where their hearts should be.
Tobias had a black eye by the time Church got there, but by the time Church was done, people knew to leave Tobias alone.
Of course, they were gunning for Church by then, but that was all right. Church could take it.
He still liked to hit, even if he felt stupider about it afterwards than he used to. The fighting screwed up his program, and it wasn’t fun having to be on his guard anytime he stepped out of his room, but once the blood was flowing, he didn’t much mind.
But anyway, the whole point was that Tobias was a unicorn in human form. Feather-light and wincing, he touched Church’s bruised cheek after that first fight, and said for the millionth time he wished Church hadn’t gotten in trouble for him.
“They deserved an ass kicking,” Church said.
“We should feel sorry for them,” Tobias said, handing him an ice pack. “We can get away from them and go back to being happy. They’re stuck with themselves forever. That’s a long time to feel that hateful. It’s a pity, really.”
Like, what was that, even?
Tobias’s favorite superhero was Superman, for crying out loud. No one liked Superman the best.
Jason Todd after he became the Red Hood. That was the way to go.
* * *
When he’d been in Woodbury for eight months, he and Tobias were in the great roo
m (which wasn’t that great, since most of the furniture was built in the fifties and smelled like you’d expect), supposedly doing homework but actually talking about comic books, when the front door opened.
One of the intake staff walked in with a new kid at his heels, and Church broke off midsentence to stare. Obviously the kid was a boy, since Woodbury didn’t take girls, but his features were so delicate that at first Church was sure he was female. The broad shoulders and narrow hips registered at that point, and Church decided the kid was a boy after all. Then he decided that this was the most gorgeous boy he’d ever seen. He had thick, tumbled golden waves that fell to his shoulders, a startling contrast to his flawless porcelain skin. His cheekbones were high and graceful and his mouth was pink and pretty. Everything about him straddled that line between genders, and even though he was beautiful, it was an uncanny sort of beauty, almost disorienting, and Church sort of wanted to touch him and push him away all at the same time.
“Huh. Ghost is back again,” Tobias said. He gave Church a look. “He’s not a bad guy, but watch your step around him, especially until he gets to know you. He’s got a rep for a reason.”
Church doubted this, because Ghost didn’t look particularly tough. He wore tight black jeans, janky black boots with the laces untied, and a holey T-shirt that’d seen better days, and he was too skinny by half. Then he glanced over, catching Church and Tobias watching him, and smiled slowly. His teeth were very white and seemed very sharp, and for all his beauty, he gave off an air of being half-rabid, like he’d be more than happy to strip flesh from bones. One of the staff members said something to him and his expression became sweet once more before he turned back.
“We’re the only room with open beds,” Church said. He wasn’t sure how he felt about having that tricky kid for a roommate.
“He won’t bug you if you leave him alone,” Tobias said, biting on his thumbnail. “But seriously, don’t start trouble.”
Ghost didn’t come to dinner with the rest of them. He vanished with a staff member into the cottage office instead, which left everyone else free to gossip about him in the cafeteria. The guys who knew him took great pride in being able to pass stories along, which basically amounted to: no one fucked with Ghost.
