Infuriating, p.14
Infuriating, page 14
Jackson gave a hoarse shout, biting down on Day’s shoulder hard enough to pull a cry from his lips as Jackson spilled his release inside him. Jackson draped himself over Day, both of them fighting to suck air back into their lungs. Just when Day was sure Jackson was about to tell him this was a goodbye fuck, Jackson kissed the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his spine.
“You know you had that coming, right?” he asked, his voice no longer devoid of emotion.
Day hated the feeling of relief, the way his insides untwisted knowing Jackson wasn’t ready to throw him away yet. “Yes, Daddy.”
Jackson placed another gentle kiss on Day’s shoulder, right where he had bit him. “Good. Let’s go take a shower. If you’re a good boy, maybe I’ll let you come tomorrow.”
Day looked down at his painfully swollen erection. “Tomorrow?” he pouted.
Jackson side-eyed him. “You’re lucky I didn’t say next week. Is that what you want?”
Day’s heart felt like it was floating, orgasm or no. “No, Daddy.”
Jackson slung a heavy arm over Day’s shoulders. “Good. Now, let’s go take a shower.”
Day had been quiet since his punishment. Quiet, but not upset. He seemed dazed or maybe just contemplative. He’d let Jackson wash him in the shower and he’d eaten the food Jackson brought to the bedroom without a word. When they laid down in bed and Jackson had rolled onto his side to wrap his arms around Day, he didn’t put up a fight. If anything, he snuggled deeper, resting his head on Jackson’s bicep, interlocking their fingers in a death grip.
Jackson didn’t know what was happening in Day’s head, but whatever it was seemed to be eating at him in a way he wasn’t ready to share with Jackson yet. Maybe he regretted what happened at Jackson’s mother’s house. Part of that was on Jackson. He should have known better than to spring his whole family on Day like that. He clearly had no experience with that level of socialization. Jackson wasn’t even entirely sure why he’d done it other than maybe to see if his mom saw in Day what he did.
“What’s it going to take?” Day asked, his voice a step above a whisper.
Jackson frowned. “For what?”
“For you to see I’m not worth all this effort you're making?” There was a thickness to Day’s words that nearly broke Jackson.
“Is that what you’ve been thinking about for the last two hours? What you can do to get me to run?” Jackson asked, holding Day tighter.
“You have to see by now that I’m not worth all this. My brain is broken. My heart is broken. That’s never going to change,” he said.
“I don’t care,” Jackson said, pressing his lips to Day’s hair. “I don’t care if you never learn to read. I don’t care that you make your living in sex work. I don’t care that you yell at old ladies in grocery stores or you try to come out swinging even when nobody's looking to fight you. I don’t care.”
“Why?”
“Because my instincts tell me you’re the one for me.”
Day wiggled until Jackson loosened his grip enough to turn in his arms and look at him. Jackson used his thumbs to wipe Day’s tears even as he said, “You’re crazy. We’ve only known each other a week. I could be a serial killer. I could be somebody who knocks ice cream out of a toddler's hand.” Jackson smiled at that, earning a frown from Day. “I could be a horrible, selfish person who only cares about myself.”
“But you’re not,” Jackson murmured.
“You don’t know that,” Day said, his voice persistent, his tears still breaking free to slide down his nose and onto the pillow.
“I’ve trusted my gut for thirty-eight years, and it’s never once been wrong. I’m not wrong about you.”
Day’s distress was tearing at Jackson’s heart. “I have a gut, too.”
“And what’s it saying?”
Day shook his head. “It’s telling me to run!”
Jackson tilted his head. “Is that your gut talking or your fear?”
“You think I’m afraid of you?” Day asked.
“I think you’re afraid to think I could be right and we could be meant for each other.”
Day scoffed, sniffling. “Why would that scare me?”
“I’m not a psychic or a therapist.” Jackson ran his thumb along Day’s lip. “But, if I had to take a guess, I’d say it’s because you’re afraid of letting yourself feel something for me and then it being taken away from you. Which is a valid fear, but not worth never trying.”
Day just shook his head, bewildered. “I’m not a good person, Jackson.”
“You’ll never convince me of that, Dayton.”
Day took a deep breath and looked Jackson in the eye. “I killed my best friend.”
Jackson blinked at Day, processing his words. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell Day that even murder wasn’t enough to keep Jackson away from him. His hands weren’t exactly clean, either. He’d made his fair share of kills both on and off the battlefield. “Explain.”
“It’s a long story, but she’s dead and it’s my fault. Just trust me.”
“You have to trust me first. I’ve got nothing but time as far as you’re concerned. Tell me what happened.”
Day rolled back over, facing away from Jackson, and, for a minute, he thought maybe Day was done with the conversation. But then he said, “Her name was Sarah. We grew up together. Her family owned this restaurant, and Sarah would always sneak me food.”
Jackson’s stomach churned at Day’s simple statement. Sneak him food? “Was your grandmother strict about your diet?”
“My grandma hated me. To be fair, she hated my mother, and I was just an extension of her, and she never let me forget it. My mom was a stripper, and my grandma used to say, ‘At least your mother could shake her ass to make a living. What are you gonna do, Dayton?’ Guess I showed her,” he said, giving a hollow laugh.
Jackson pressed his hand over Day’s heart, but he didn’t interrupt, no matter how badly he wanted to tell Day that his grandmother was clearly a damaged person, who took out her own insecurities on him. But maybe she was right about Day’s mother. Who runs and leaves their child behind with a woman like that?
“Grandma liked to go next door and get drunk and high with the guy in the next trailer over. Nothing heavy at first. Just weed, sometimes pills. I never liked him. I hated the way he looked at me. He was always touching me, pinching me, looking at me in ways that made my stomach sick. She thought it was funny. So, any chance I got, I would go stay with Sarah in her tree house. When we were older, she would do my homework for me, so I didn’t get any notes sent home. Those always set my grandma off, and believe me, nobody wanted my grandma pissed off.”
Day shuddered, like he was right back there in his past. Jackson wanted more than anything to make it better somehow, but he knew Day had to get this off his chest. Whatever this was that was eating a hole through him.
“Sarah had a disease. Cystic fibrosis. She needed new lungs. She was on oxygen almost for as long as I could remember us being kids, but she never let it stop her from doing anything. She was always the first to audition for plays, even musicals. They never gave her singing parts, but they always gave her a role. She said it was because they felt sorry for her, but I think they just saw what I saw. She was this…I don’t know…radiant light. She was just always happy and positive, and she would tell me that, as soon as she got her new lungs, we were going to move to LA and she would be a star and I would be her agent.”
Jackson could feel Day’s dread. He spoke each word like it was being pulled from him, like a splinter buried deep. Nothing could convince Jackson that Day had killed this girl, a girl he described as radiant, but he’d let Day pull the splinters out. It was the only way for him to heal.
“My grandma started doing heavy drugs when I turned thirteen. That’s when things got real bad. She didn’t care about whether I ate or whether we had power or water. She only cared about heroin and then the meth. When she started hinting about selling me to get her drugs, when she started making jokes about how I might be more useful than she first thought, Sarah threatened to tell her parents.”
Good. Somebody should’ve told an actual adult, somebody who could’ve saved Day from that woman. But obviously nobody had or Day wouldn’t be lying in Jackson’s arms bearing his soul to him.
“But before Sarah could tell, she became really sick to the point where she couldn’t leave the hospital anymore. That became our new playground. There were toys and video games there. Puzzles, coloring books, even a dog that would come once a week. The hospital became my escape. I stayed there for hours every single day. I think the staff felt sorry for me. They would bring me meal trays when they brought hers. They would bring us cookies and ginger ale. When I showered in her room, they pretended not to notice. It felt like a vacation to me, even with my best friend hooked up to so many machines. There were always cupcakes and even superheroes showing up to entertain. And then one day, she got the call. She was getting her transplant.
“She thought that would make her free, but getting the transplant meant she had to take a ton of drugs to keep her body from rejecting her new lungs, and they made her feel really sick, so she wouldn’t eat and when she did eat, she’d vomit for hours. She was wasting away, and we all thought she’d die before she ever got to enjoy her new lungs.
“But then she got better. By the time we were fourteen, it was almost like she was a different person. By then, I was sleeping in the treehouse in her backyard to avoid my grandma’s house. I didn’t want to turn tricks so she could pay for her meth. And then she died. Just like that. They found her behind the tire store… OD’d.” Day said it with no feeling. No joy or sorrow, no anything. Just the facts.
“Jesus,” Jackson whispered. Day’s grandmother had overdosed behind a tire store and that’s not even the part that had broken him.
“I told Sarah I was leaving. I wouldn’t let them put me in foster care. Everybody knew what went down in those places. I told her I was running away to LA, and that she could meet me there when she graduated. I imagined by then, I would have a place to live and a real job. I was so fucking stupid,” he said, so disgusted with himself. “I packed my bag and the food Sarah stole for me, and I hopped on a bus and took it all the way to LA. That’s where Carl found me. At the bus station. That’s where they all go to hunt for their fresh meat. Stupid kids like me who don’t know any better.
“He said I was pretty. Prettier than any girl he’d ever met. He said I was so pretty that I was sure to be somebody’s new meal within a week, but he could help. Carl owned this disgusting pay by the hour motel, riddled with every infestation imaginable. It was all junkies and pimps and girls and boys working to feed their drug habits. There was one room Carl kept for himself. He didn’t live there or anything, he just said he couldn’t rent it out. I never thought to ask why. So, he let me stay there. All I had to do was blow him whenever he wanted.”
Rage poured over Jackson like warm water, his nostrils flaring. What kind of piece of shit scumbag forced a fourteen-year-old to trade oral sex for a roof over his head?
“Ow,” Day muttered.
Jackson realized he was gripping Day tighter, fingers digging into Day’s hip. “Sorry.”
“It wasn’t so bad. It was better than getting fucked. Most of my money would have gone to whatever pimp decided I was his to turn out and they would have gotten me hooked on drugs, just like my grandma. Carl was the lesser of two evils. Instead of doing drugs, I ran them. It wasn’t exactly a financial windfall, but it was enough where I could get food and necessities from the bodega. I was too young for a real job, and I didn’t have a birth certificate or a social security number anyway. I would write letters to Sarah and tell her how great I was doing, but I think she knew it wasn’t true.”
Jackson had imagined Day’s childhood had sucked. Nobody as prickly as Day had come from a happy place. That level of self-protection usually came from years of emotionally insulating yourself from the next disappointment or heart break. But Jackson still hurt for Day. Life had been kicking him in the face pretty much since birth and Day still hadn’t gotten to the part where he’d supposedly killed his best friend. Jackson wasn’t even sure if Day knew he was just vomiting up his entire past to him. Maybe he thought Jackson would see his ugly past as a reflection of himself. He was wrong.
“She showed up on my doorstep one day. She had her bags with her. By then, I’d been there for almost two years, just treading water. I could tell she was shocked at how bad I looked, but she just smiled and dropped her bags and acted like we were staying at the Ritz and not in some disgusting motel with mold on the ceiling and stains on the mattress. I tried to convince her to leave, to go home. But she said there was nothing left for her in Idaho, and she couldn’t handle her parents and their constant babying of her. She said she had enough meds to last her six months, and if she hadn’t made it by then, she’d go home. I should have tried harder to make her go back, but I was just so fucking lonely, and it felt so good to have her there with me, to have somebody sleeping next to me every night. She made everything better.”
Jackson wished there was something he could do or say to lessen the anguish in Day’s words. The guilt was clearly weighing on him in ways Jackson would never understand. He had his own burdens to bear, his own wounds that hadn’t healed, just closed. Whatever Day was about to confess, it couldn’t be worse than the things Jackson had been forced to do in the name of fighting a war he hadn’t even believed in. But none of that mattered. Day was all Jackson cared about. He just needed Day to be okay.
“For a while, we were fine. Sarah even managed to get work as an extra from time to time. Then she started getting plays in small theatre productions. Nothing that paid, but good experience. We would eat pizza and go bowling with her theatre friends. That’s when I learned about camming. I was too young, but nobody knew that. Her friend, Lola, told me all about the money she made and how even guys, especially gay guys, could make good money, too. Sarah said it was illegal. That we could get in trouble for child porn, so I just let it go. But then Sarah got sick. Really sick. It happened so fast. We thought it was just the flu. Maybe bronchitis. But we didn’t have insurance. Sarah was a runaway and I was underage. She was afraid if she went to the hospital, she’d get sent home and I’d go into foster care. She was always looking out for me.
“One day, after a visit with Carl, I came back to the apartment to find Sarah struggling to breathe. She was so pale and her lips were blue and she wasn’t responding to me. I was so scared I called 911. But there was nothing they could do for her. She had a horrible infection throughout her whole body. A fungus had destroyed her new lungs because her anti-rejection meds had left her too immuno-compromised to fight it. She was only in LA for five months and she’d managed to live more than I had in the two years I’d been there…and it killed her. I killed her. She’d come out there to be with me because she knew I was miserable and lonely. That’s what her mother told me at her funeral. Right before she told me she was sorry I’d ever met Sarah and that she regretted ever letting me into their home and that I was no better than my good for nothing trailer trash family. And she was right.”
Jackson shifted until Day was on his back. “She was not. She was angry and hurting because she lost her child, but she wasn’t right. No matter the reason your friend came to LA, she chose to stay. Even if it was a bad decision, she chose it. Not you. You were doing everything you could to survive while adults were taking advantage of you at every turn. Sarah wasn’t your fault. Carl wasn’t your fault. The fact that you managed to find a way to crawl out of that life is amazing, no matter how you had to do it. Do you know how many people never manage to do what you did?”
“It was the room,” Day said, his cheeks flushed, his eyes dull and bloodshot. “The room was full of mold called aspergillus. It was growing on our carpet. It’s why the room was empty. Carl wasn’t allowed to rent it out because it could potentially cause people to get sick. It’s why he let me stay there. There wasn’t any payment exchanging hands, so he figured he wasn’t doing anything wrong.”
“It’s a miracle you didn’t get sick.”
“I wish I had. By the time the health inspector made it out to figure out how a sixteen-year-old girl had gotten so sick, I’d managed to buy a fake ID. I went to Sarah’s theatre friend and asked her to help me get set up. It took a long time to figure out what worked, but it kept food on the table and a roof over my head. Carl moved me to a room, once I could afford to pay, but he still expected to be serviced whenever he asked. Luckily, once I could get online and Carl helped me find a way around not being able to read, I realized that I could order my birth certificate online. When I turned eighteen and was legal, I found better sites and other ways to hustle guys out of their money. I’ve been doing it ever since. And that’s it. That’s my whole life story.”
Day was staring at Jackson’s chest, so he just kissed his temple. “It didn’t work.”
Day flicked his gaze to Jackson’s, his confusion obvious. “What?”
“You didn’t chase me off. I’m still here. If anything, I am honestly just upset that not a single person tried to help you without wanting something to gain for themselves. And that Carl guy is a pedophile and ought to be put in jail for his crimes.”
Day shrugged. “Without him, I’d have been doing things a lot worse than blow jobs.”
Jackson shook his head. “That doesn’t make him a hero, Day. He took advantage of you. He hurt you. He put you in a dangerous situation, and it cost your friend her life. It could have cost you yours.”
Day looked up at him. “You really don’t care, do you?”
This time, it was Jackson who was confused. “What?”
“You really don’t care about my past.”
“We all have a past. You’re not the only person with regrets and things they feel the need to atone for,” Jackson said with a sigh before he reached up and switched off the lamp.
