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- 11/23/2016
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Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Predator Prey - 9. Morning Light
The morning was hardly more pleasant than the night before.
He heard kitchen noises faintly through the closed door as he woke. The morning sun leaked in through the blinds. He sat up. For the first time in days, his neck and shoulders felt fine. No stiffness or soreness from sleeping on a library couch or in the car.
When he appeared in the kitchen, though, Marc was no less inimical than eight hours earlier, while Lee seemed much more wary, much more cautious around him. They must have talked about him in the night; Lee had been warned.
"Sit down," ordered Marc. No cheerful 'good morning' today. Not that he remembered Marc ever being a morning person, anyhow. Not that he'd ever given Marc much of a chance. When Marc was wasted, he'd slept pretty much all day. And he'd made sure Marc could get wasted.
He sat. Lee furtively placed a heavy mug of coffee in front of him.
"So. Talk. What has you on my doorstep begging for my help at midnight?" Marc's hard voice had no trace of pity in it.
He sat there, staring at the black coffee, vapor rising from its surface like smoke from a dark lava pool. Why had he come? Marc owed him nothing. Nobody, least of all Marc, would have the slightest reason to take him in. He'd played the thin, sandy blond boy like a cheap violin; played Marc until something else had stirred inside his frozen soul that frightened him more than poverty; more than violence. Compassion. Love, maybe. But then, he'd thrown it all away, clinging to his business. His plan.
He reflected bitterly on all the rotten decisions he'd made. Too late to take them back. And now Marc had someone else. There was absolutely nothing left. Not really.
"I'm screwed," he began, staring into the black liquid in front of him. "I'm screwed and I have no place to go." It was a start. He told them everything. He told them everything, about everything, in every detail.
To Marc's credit, there was no sarcastic interruption.
"Go get your computer," he told his audience desperately toward the end of his narrative, wanting them to believe, "you can find it on at least a dozen websites. They got part of it on video."
Silence greeted this. There was no move to prove the statement.
He continued. He hadn’t stopped staring at the mug even though the wisps of steam had long since stopped forming. "The worst thing is I know I deserved it. I know it's my fault. I did bad shit to other people. I did it to you…fuck…and I'm not sure I can live with myself…" he trailed off.
He knew he sounded melodramatic. Nobody would take any of this at face value. But it was all true. Too late for real emotions, real kindness. When had he shown any?
More silence.
"Are you hurt? Hurt anywhere physically, I mean?" Marc asked, businesslike, but his voice had lost some of its hard edge.
"No, I'm okay. I had some bruises, but they healed, pretty much." He didn't mention the lingering red rings around his wrists and ankles where his bonds had held him fast to the bed. These lay hidden beneath the long sleeves of his hoodie.
He looked up at Marc. The stony, unyielding expression was still there, but there were traces of something else there, too. Concern, maybe? He didn’t deserve it, whatever it was.
"Your coffee's cold," he heard Lee say. The mug was removed.
He hung his head again. "Look, I'm sorry I bothered you. I just needed a bed for a night. I'll probably…" Again, he couldn’t find a way to finish his sentence. Was it always going to be like this?
Then again, what was he going to do?
He couldn't go home. He could move on, drive off to someplace else, but what would he do wherever he landed? Start the business over? He doubted if he had the stomach to do that. All those people he'd hurt. Lives damaged. He'd been on the receiving end. He knew what it was like, and how it felt. He could harden his heart and steel himself – sneer and laugh it all off – but he'd never have what Marc and Lee clearly enjoyed.
And that knowledge was twisting his heart in knots.
"Keep up your shit, you'll probably end up dead of an overdose," Marc said harshly, returning to the conversation. "Oh, wait. You never used the product, did you?"
Ouch. That hurt. Worse still, Marc was pretty much right.
"Marc, stop." Lee speaking again.
He couldn't bear to look at the boy. He kept his eyes focused on the table.
"Why? When did he ever learn to stop?" Marc again.
He sensed movement in the room. Lee wrapping his arms around his boyfriend. The tiny sound of a kiss. He couldn't bear to watch them being tender. Caring. Anchors for each other. The ache in his heart was surely about to break him.
"We're better than that," Lee spoke softly, not to him, but to Marc. "We don't have to kick someone who's hurt, no matter who they are. Remember? If forgiveness is hard, try mercy."
The sound of another kiss, then quiet.
"You go see a doctor?" Marc again, his voice less bitter.
He nodded numbly. "Yeah. Went to the clinic on campus after."
"What about those marks on your wrists?"
He shuddered. So Marc had seen the angry red skin anyway. He shrugged. "No biggie. It'll heal."
"Want someone to take a look at them?" Marc pressed.
"No. They'll be okay." He didn't want to have anyone asking about the injury.
Marc rose from the table abruptly, turning to Lee. "I'm going to get a shower. We can take off in about half an hour, do you think?"
He didn't hear what Lee said in reply. His eyes hadn’t left the space on the table in front of him. Marc departed, kissing Lee on his way out. He heard Lee open a cupboard, get out a plate. In a few moments, it appeared in front of him, with a banana and a croissant. A second later, jam and juice joined the food in his field of vision.
"Eat. You have to be hungry" Lee's soft voice filled the silence.
He shook himself out of his torpor. He looked up at Lee. Pale arms extended from a maroon t-shirt, which set off the boy's unreal blue eyes. He realized he was hungry.
"Thanks. You didn't have to do that," he said.
"Bullshit," Marc's partner said firmly, sitting down across from him. "You're here in our house. We're not going to let you starve. I'm sorry it's not more than that, but we were going to the grocery…"
"No, really, this is fine," he protested. And it was. He ate, and the boy watched him eat.
He tried to rally, tried to make conversation. It wasn't his usual, smooth approach, but he didn't think he could ever do that again, anyhow. "So how did you meet Marc?"
"We met in the hospital," Lee told him simply.
His face must have asked the question on the tip of his tongue, because Lee continued.
"Marc was in rehab. I was in the…psychiatric unit."
It was at that moment he noticed the long, straight scars on Lee's left wrist. It wasn’t the kind of thing he often missed. He was an expert at spotting weakness, at ferreting out vulnerabilities.
"What...I mean, how…" he seemed unsure of himself, unable to ask his question. Not long ago, he'd have found a way to learn the story and take full advantage of it. He felt a little ill at the thought.
Lee supplied the missing information. "It was stupid. My boyfriend dumped me. Wouldn’t talk to me, cut me off completely. He wasn't out, and someone spotted us together, kissing. He was ashamed of me. Of us."
He nodded. He understood that completely.
Lee went on, without emotion. "But my being gay got back to my parents, who freaked out. When they weren't trying to cure me, they were crying to their friends about how they'd gone wrong, and how could I have done this to them, and a trainload of other crap. The worst thing is that I bought it – every word." Lee paused. "It took them eighteen years to raise me to think they loved me, that I could survive in the world, maybe find acceptance. It took them three weeks to convince me I was evil, broken, and a terrible mistake. It took three weeks to make me decide my life was over."
He blinked at the raw truth, hanging there in the air of the sunlit kitchen. A story so like his own, yet unlike, too.
"Marc found me in the game room of the hospital facility. My parents hoped the shrinks would cure me of my 'condition,' as they called it while they worked on my suicidal tendencies. We bonded over Monopoly."
And here Lee smiled a little for the first time.
He could see that. In his mind's eye, he could imagine the two of them, leaning on each other for support, learning to live again, rebuilding themselves into wholeness, bit by bit, day by day.
But he had a hard time adjusting to the idea that Marc and Lee were here, in a house they either leased or owned, living in more or less contented domesticity. He distinctly recalled how Marc argued one alcohol-soaked night against monogamous gay relationships as – he searched for the memory of how Marc had said it – "an anti-Queerian construct foisted upon gays by their straight oppressors."
Marc knew how to rant.
"So what happened? Did you and Marc get out of the hospital together, or…?" he left the question hanging.
"Pretty much," Lee admitted. "His parents are fantastic people – incredibly supportive. They helped us set up here and start over. We're part time students, so we have time for rebuilding, and for each other. Marc insists on working a job to pay for some of this, but his parents have really made this happen."
That was startling news. When he and Marc had first gotten together – when he had first tried to break the blond athlete – Marc had dreaded what his parents would say. Apparently, his fears had been misplaced.
Marc reentered the room, showered and dressed for errands out of the house.
"Change of plan. Come on, get your coat," Marc said tersely, looking pointedly at the guest, "we're going to do some errands."
"Marc, he doesn't have to…" Lee began, but Marc cut him off with a kiss.
"Sorry, baby, but he comes with me. You have a paper to write, and you don't need the distractions."
In a minute, they were out the door.
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