by Rhys Ford
“Hellion?” Ruan itched to trace the cat’s fiery mane with his mouth but knew he would be crossing more than a few lines if he tried it. Tonight wasn’t about anything other than comfort, and as much as he desired Ivo, he needed more than to satiate his needs. He wanted to know the man who faced the world with a snarl and dangerously high heels. And as he learned earlier, tattoos usually had a story, and he wanted to be told about every single bit of ink on Ivo’s body. “Hell lion? Is it supposed to be a pun?”
“No, well sort of, but mostly it’s what Bear called me when I first came into the house,” Ivo said, padding over to the king-size bed only to stare at the monstrous cat sprawled out across the middle of the mattress. “I was definitely a pain in the ass when CPS finally gave up and gave me to my brothers. Are we supposed to just get in around him, or is he going to move? Earl usually moves, but he’s a dog, and if I move around too much, he just gets up and finds another bed to sleep in.”
“He’ll move or he’ll move and then come back,” Ruan said with a grunt, trying to maneuver Spot to the end of the bed. “Tell me about the star on your shoulder.”
“That is a nautical star each one of us drew a point for. Put them all together and you’ve got 415 Ink.” Ivo waited until Ruan pulled back the covers, then slid in under the sheets. Propped up on one elbow, he watched Ruan go through the nightly rituals of ensuring his gun was secured and pulling out clothes for the next day. “A nautical star used to represent the North Star originally. It comes from the belief the North Star will always guide a sailor home. So that’s what our star means. It’s what we use to guide ourselves home if we stray too far. It’s so we can find each other.”
The only brotherhood Ruan ever found was behind the badge, and there were times when those relations were strained, tested by bad policies and even worse cops. As fraternal as the blue line was, Ivo was speaking about something deeper, something primitive forging a bond between five boys, really, set adrift on stormy seas without anyone else to guide them to safety except for their oldest brother, who had a dream of building them a home. The star was patchy in spots, a couple of its points uneven, but it glistened darkly on Ivo’s skin, a beacon of black on a sea of golden ivory.
Spot rolled over, squaring his way up the bed until he lay against Ivo’s side, his legs up in the air in the hopes of getting a belly rub. Ivo granted the cat’s wish, ruffling at the lush fur along his stomach. Ruan was reluctant to turn off the lights, but he was tired and there were shadows beneath Ivo’s eyes. The darkness was instant once he flicked the switch, but a bit of light from the street crept in through the crack in the curtains and pushed the deepened shadow back enough for him to find the bed without too much stumbling.
Getting in under the covers next to Ivo was sublime, the sheets warmed by his heat, and the erotic sensation of Ivo’s bare skin against his nearly drove Ruan’s thoughts over the edge into madness. Chuckling slightly, he pulled Ivo close. The cat didn’t like the shift in their positions, grumbling as he was squeezed in between them, but eventually Spot oozed his way over their legs. With the feline’s heavy weight pinning them down, they got comfortable in the nest of pillows Ruan stacked against his headboard.
“What time do you have to wake up tomorrow?” Ivo asked, his whisper a warm brush of air over Ruan’s chest. “What time does Truth, Justice, and the American Way have to be at the police station?”
“At least by eight,” Ruan chuckled. “Maite’s coming in a little bit late. She’s got a family thing she has to take care of, and then we’ve got interviews set up for the whole day. What about you?”
“I open. We’re down a couple of artists and the schedule’s crazy.” Ivo laughed, snuggling in closer, his hair tickling Ruan’s nose. “This is kind of weird. I’ve never had a sleepover before. Or least not one like this. Wasn’t I supposed to braid your hair first or something?”
“My hair’s kind of short for that. And somehow I don’t think painted nails really work with this whole badass detective thing I was trying to pull off at work,” he replied, grinning in the darkness. “And it’s not like I can try on your shoes. I think my feet are bigger than yours.”
“I would pay serious money to see you in heels.” Again laughter, a hot gust across Ruan’s already warmed skin. “Took me a while to learn how to walk in them. And my legs are too fucking long. Swear to God, first time I tried, I was like a drunk llama on ice—a blind drunk llama.”
He asked as gently as he could, but Ruan heard the harsh rasp in his voice break over his words. “How old were you?”
They were straying into shaky territory, as private and intimate as the tattoos on Ivo’s body. There was a story behind those heels, something that drove a young man to put them on the first time, then totter out of the door. Ruan burned to know, scraping back secret layers and plunging past the desire for the man, searching to understand him, to glean a bit of knowledge about what made Ivo who he was.
“I think I was twelve.” Ivo turned, twisting away from Ruan’s chest, his shoulders lodged against Ruan’s arm. He took some small consolation in Ivo remaining in a loose embrace, and Ruan shifted as well, moving Spot off of his legs while he rested more on his side, unwilling to let Ivo go. “I was probably closer to thirteen? I don’t really know. It was all kind of a blur back then, CPS jerking me in and out of the house, and things get kind of tangled up in my head.”
As if Ivo knew what Ruan’s question would be, he went still and quiet, barely breathing as he lay in Ruan’s arms. The cat returned to his perch, then squirmed up Ivo’s belly, resting his enormous head on Ivo’s chest. Spot let out a purring storm when Ivo stroked at his tufted ears, the glow coming through the curtains turning the cat’s narrowed eyes into golden mirrors. Ruan never felt more envious about his cat’s pleasure than he did right then, but Spot was a good distraction, a comforting weight of affection against the storm of pain Ruan was going to bring down upon them.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Ruan ventured, stroking strands of black hair out of Ivo’s lashes. “But I’d really like it if you would tell me about those shoes.”
Fourteen
A LIGHT rain fell outside. The faint shush of water hitting the street and the house slipped into the room, with the occasional cars going through puddles adding the sounds of small waves crashing onto the sidewalk. The two-story house was old, but its roof was solid, its shingles muting the falling drops, channeling them into the metal gutters hanging on the eaves. The tick-tick-tick of water grew louder as the downpour thickened, carrying a small stream away from the bedroom’s street-facing window.
It was ironic in a way for it to be raining while Ivo bared his heart and soul to a man he’d dreamed about off and on for years. The cop holding him wasn’t the perfect illusion of manhood he’d sculpted out of his fevered teenaged brain. He was as solid as the roof protecting them from the storm, holding back not just the rain but the filth it washed from the skies.
Ruan’s heartbeat thumped beneath Ivo’s hand, keeping sync with the flashes of panic and anxiety curling up through Ivo’s thoughts. His worry came in waves, easily breaching the walls he’d put up to keep it back, and it was odd to discover the hammering tide didn’t seem to hurt as much as it had in the past. There was no reason to keep secrets, not from Ruan. And despite the short time they’d spent together, the cop—his cop—stepped up to the line every single time Ivo needed something.
Not only that, he also had a massive orange cat the size of a VW Bug, and Ivo was beginning to think he was falling in love with the cat as much as he was the man. There were things Ruan would have to know—those secrets Ivo was sometimes tired of holding. He’d lost friends and the occasional lover whenever he spoke about who he was and what he was carrying with him. He could only hope he wouldn’t lose Ruan as well.
Ruan cleared his throat, his fingers pressing on Ivo’s upper arm. “You don’t have to—”
“I just need to figure out where to start,” Iv
o confessed, wishing he could find the beginning point in the Mobius strip of his thoughts. “There’s just so much crap behind me, and I’m not even really sure where I begin in it. I think a lot of it—the big part of who I am—came out of this watery soup I grew up in. Because that’s what it feels like when you’re really young and in the system. Like I can’t even explain to you how it felt when I found out the woman caring for me wasn’t my mother, because I was really little and the other kids called her Mom, but I didn’t. I don’t know how old I was, but I wasn’t going to school yet. I just remember being angry and hurt because I tried to make her my mom, calling her that, and she would put me aside and tell me no, call me… I can’t even remember her name, but I remember her face a little bit, and she had a lot of hair, very frizzy hair she dyed red.”
“How old were you when you were taken from your mom? Your real mom?” Ruan asked. “And why? Do you know?”
“Yeah, I was really young, and the why was because she was a shitty mother. She took Bear in because she thought having him around would mean more money. His parents died, and she thought she would get money from a lawsuit and their insurance, but that went into trust for Bear, so she couldn’t touch it. She did a lot of drugs. I think she cleaned up when she got pregnant—I don’t know—but I do know one night, Gus’s twin, Puck, tried to kill me, and the shit hit the fan,” Ivo murmured, grinning at Ruan’s slight intake of shocked breath. “Puck was… I don’t know how to describe him because they kept him away from me—social services—and then our mom ended up murdering him and killing herself, so that’s a bunch of fuckup hanging around. It’s why Gus is kind of messed up in the head. Because she was just a really shitty person.”
“Do you remember her at all?”
“Not much, because she wasn’t allowed to see us without supervision. She grabbed Gus and Puck from school. That’s why they ended up—that’s not where I am—that’s something for Gus to tell you if he wants to. I didn’t really know her. And mostly I remember being angry because I didn’t have anything to hold on to. I think me wanting to call that woman Mom is why they took me out of her house, because I started punching people—the other kids—because they were allowed to be closer than I was. I remember that much,” Ivo confessed, his stomach tightening and his breath turning hot. Spot shifted on his chest, angling for a more intense scratching at his ears, and Ivo gave in to the feline’s demands.
“It was really confusing, and then I was about seven or eight when Bear showed up. He kept pushing CPS to let him see me and Gus. He felt like the first person to give a damn about me. The first one who was there all the time, because they kept moving us around. But he would always find me, and he kept promising me he would take me home one day. I just had to be patient. You know me. How patient do you think I am?”
“Probably a lot more than you give yourself credit for.” Ruan’s deep voice rumbled through his chest, sending vibrations through Ivo’s ribs where their sides touched. “I’m guessing Bear lived up to his promise.”
“He did. It just took a while for CPS to let me go, and even then, they weren’t very understanding. Gus and Mace were already there, and Luke was trying to get loose of the system. And as you can imagine, I was still kind of pissed off at the world. Every time Gus got into a fight or I got into trouble at school, they pulled me away, took me from my family, and put me with people who really didn’t give a shit.” The ceiling began to ripple, its surface wavering behind the tears Ivo felt creeping into his eyes. He refused to give his past any sorrow. Nothing he lived through deserved it. Instead, his tears were mostly for regrets and frustration at being helpless during a time when he needed to be strong. “You asked about the shoes? It’s all because of a guy named Jeremy, and when I realized I wasn’t the only freak in the world.”
Ivo was thankful Ruan stayed silent. Most of the time when he tried to share how he felt, people believed they needed to reassure him he was okay. Or worse yet, he’d sat through an army of social workers and psychologists dismissing his perspective as being dramatic or attention-seeking. He’d just wanted to be. He longed to explore things and situations just to see how they felt on him, searching to find what fit around who he was rather than shove himself into a box somebody else made.
“I’m not saying that all foster homes are shitty, because a lot of the times you get people who take in other people’s kids—kids who are really fucked up—and they just try to give them a little bit of normal to live in. Problem is, we don’t have normal. We don’t know how normal works. It’s like trying to take a dog and show it how to live in a tree. Because that’s what it feels like. Like everyone around you is a bird and you’re this mutt dragged up onto the branches where everyone else lives.” Ivo took a long shuddering breath, plunging back into the memory he usually only visited in his nightmares. “I think I was about twelve. Like I said, time gets kind of blurry. They had me on some medication—and God knows I hated that shit—but things were really more rough in my head than they are now. They took me away from Bear again and wouldn’t let me see my family. I was put in a foster home with another kid, named Jeremy, older than me, and he was probably the most out-of-the-closet kid I’d ever known.
“Problem was, our foster father hated fairies. That’s the word he used. Every single day when Jeremy got home, this asshole would say, ‘Look, the fucking fairy is back.’ Everything that came out of the man’s mouth was poison, but we were stuck there because there was nowhere else for us to go.” He blinked, surprised to find his eyes were as dry as sand and hurting. “Jeremy didn’t care. Or least he wouldn’t let anyone see him care, but in our room, he would cry a lot—these really ugly cries, and he wasn’t the prettiest kid. He was probably about seventeen and covered in acne, but he would put on makeup every morning and sometimes wear these red-sequined high heels. He taught me how to put on eyeliner, and he told me I could one day maybe wear his heels to see what they felt like if I wanted.”
“What happened? To Jeremy?” Ruan whispered, stroking at Spot’s back.
“He got beat up a lot. Our foster father would punch him sometimes when he got drunk. Nobody said anything about the bruises on his face, and he would act like nothing ever happened, but… I can’t tell you when he stopped crying. I keep telling myself I should’ve known something was weird because he used to be really passionate about things, about clothes, makeup, and art. We would lie in the dark and talk about shit for hours when we should’ve gone to bed. I would tell him Bear would come for us, because I was still enough of a kid to believe if you just waited long enough, someone would come and save you.” He swallowed, feeling the muscles in his throat tighten. “I would tell him about Bear and the others. I don’t know what he really thought, but he used to tell me he couldn’t wait to meet them. Then one day, all of that… all of those promises… went away.
“I don’t remember exactly why we were late coming back home one night. I think it was something with school, but it was just me and our foster parents who went out. Jeremy stayed home. I think it was something stupid like a science fair and I won something. I remember being excited about showing him something stupid and coming into our room. But it was dark. It wasn’t late enough for him to have gone to bed, but the room was dark.” Ivo closed his eyes, wishing he could unsee the scene burned into his brain, but it would never go away. And never was a very long time to carry the image of what he walked into.
“Our room was kind of at the end of the upstairs hall. You had to turn to the left a little bit, so the hall light didn’t quite make it into the room, but I remember seeing the red sparkle of Jeremy’s high heels swinging back and forth in the darkness. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, because they were floating, like about at my waist. It wasn’t until I turned on the light and I saw him.
“I don’t think the rope he used is what choked him. I think it was the world. It was all of the words people used to hurt him and all of the times he swallowed down his pain.” Ivo jerke
d when Ruan’s fingers brushed away the tears running down his cheek, flinching at the gentle touch. “I took his shoes. I took them off of him, and I hid them away in my stuff before I told anyone about him. I don’t know why. I just did. And when CPS came to take me away again, I shoved them into the bottom of the trash bag they gave me to put my stuff into and I took them with me.”
The worst of it was still to come, and Ivo didn’t know if he had enough strength left to tell Ruan the rest of the darkness he’d fed for so long. The helplessness he’d felt rose back up, stretching its razored wings through his soul. He was barely aware of Ruan gathering him up close. Not until he heard the cat mutter a throaty feline profanity at being nudged off their bodies and felt Ruan wrapping himself around his shivering body did it dawn on Ivo he was being held. There was a gentle kiss on his mouth and another at his temple. A simple caress but one that eased the ache in his heart.
“It got worse before it got better,” he confessed, hating how a strangled sob grabbed at his words. “By the time I finally got back to Bear and the rest of the guys, my head was all turned around and I was trying so hard to be the perfect little boy. Everything I did was a struggle to be normal. But every second felt like someone was dragging sharp nails through my brain, and one day, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Talk to me. Explain to me what you mean,” Ruan whispered. “What was going on?”
He didn’t know how to explain to a man who wore his masculinity as easily as a leopard wore its spots. Trying to explain to Bear how he felt back then was frustrating, trapped in the labyrinth of confusion and unsure about which way to go. Even as good as it was now, Ivo had no idea if he could truly share with Ruan what it felt like to move through life as if he were trapped in a mirror he could see through but touch no one.
