16
The pain in Theo’s head had a kind of inverted quality like old photo negatives, darkness with an orange cast. He fought against it. Auggie. But he kept tipping into the darkness, only for sudden, sharp pain to pull him back. By the short hairs, his grandfather would have said—that thought swam up to him out of the orange-cast darkness.
“Keep your eyes open,” Imogen whisper-cried. She slapped him again. “He’s going to be so mad if you don’t keep your eyes open.”
Auggie.
Theo managed to keep his eyes open; at the moment, it was all he could do, even more than lifting his head. He was propped against one wall of the hidden room, and Imogen was clutching his jaw, forcing him against the plaster so that his eyes were aligned with the small hole in the wall. On a tripod next to him, a camera was pointed toward the same hole, the red RECORD light illuminated. Through the opening in the wall, Theo could see into the bedroom on the other side of the closet. Auggie and Trace were talking, but the words buzzed and flew away. Auggie crawled backward on the bed, trying to keep his distance from Trace, until Trace said something with whip-crack emphasis, and Auggie froze. Theo stirred, trying to get up, but he was still cuffed, and that deep well of darkness was waiting for him. Imogen pressed him against the wall again, slapping him on the side of the head with her other hand, crying harder now. For a moment, he tipped over and was lost.
When he swam out of the darkness, he could smell blood—some of it his own, some Andre’s—and fear—some of it his own, and some Imogen’s. His eyes were having trouble focusing, but he could see that Auggie was manacled—chains had been hidden under the bed, and now they came up from under the mattress, securing Auggie’s arms. His legs, for the moment, were free, and Theo tried not to think about what that meant.
“—a son of a bitch. Did you know that? He’s dead, and everybody talks about him like he was a saint now, but the truth is Harley Gilmore was a genuine piece of shit. You know what he did, letting his players rape those girls, blackmailing them into silence, frightening professors and admins and potential recruits and anybody else who didn’t do what he wanted. Honestly, I was doing the world a favor, taking him down a peg or two.”
Auggie said something that Theo couldn’t hear.
Trace laughed. “I figured you’d see it that way. That’s, I don’t know what you’d call it—conditioning, expectation, assumption, bias. People see these big, tough football players, or they see a guy like Harley, and it’s not hard for them to believe that these are the guys with all the power. They fuck a girl whether she wants it or not, and if she tries to make trouble, they find a way to keep her quiet. That’s what everybody thinks about college athletes now, right? Everybody’s heard the stories about whole teams getting involved, gang rape, that kind of thing. Everybody knows how it goes. That’s part of what made it so easy. Nobody looks at Chev, all three hundred pounds of him, and thinks, ‘Hey, that guy’s getting cornholed against his will.’”
Auggie said something else that Theo couldn’t hear. Imogen was breathing harder now, close to hyperventilating. Her fingers bit into Theo’s jaw.
“You’re not normally what I go for,” Trace was saying as he unbuttoned his shirt. “It’s the fight, you know? It’s fucking with their head, even if they can’t remember it. A cute little gay boy like you, well, that’s not really my thing, but I’m willing to make an exception.” He leaned forward as he finished the last button, and the gold FCA cross hanging around his neck swung out, spinning and glittering as it caught the light. Then he shrugged out of the shirt, and it fluttered to the floor. He was bigger than he looked when he was all dressed up. Not as big as Chev, for sure, but maybe bigger than Andre—although that was an unfair comparison because Andre was lying on the floor, dead, and the dead always took up less room than the living. “Besides,” Trace added as he went to work on his belt, “it’s not just—how did you put it? A struggle fuck?” He smiled, the boy next door, as he dropped his trousers. He was hard, and he gave himself a light stroke. “Part of the fun is seeing how loud I can make you scream.”
Theo couldn’t help it. He shifted, the chain of the cuffs rattling as he tried to stand, his elbow bumping the video camera and rocking it on its tripod. Imogen cried out wordlessly. She shoved the pistol into his side, and Theo grunted. He was still trying to get his feet under him, not caring about the steel digging into his flesh, when he caught a glimpse of Auggie.
Imogen’s cry must have been loud enough for Trace and Auggie to hear because both of them were staring at the closet. Trace had frozen halfway through the process of stepping out of his boxers. He crouched and groped for the pistol he’d set down. “Im?”
“Imogen,” Auggie shouted, “you don’t have to do this! You don’t have to help him!”
Smirking, Trace said, “She doesn’t have to do anything. Im and I have an understanding: she keeps her mouth shut—and, in a pinch, helps out when I need her. Like tonight. In exchange, she gets the family name, the family money. Hell, she gets a family. And that’s what Im wants. You know her dad killed her mom, right?” Trace laughed. “Talk about a fucked-up family. Im, babe, everything ok?”
Auggie was staring at the closet. The mirrored doors meant he couldn’t see Theo, but his face was fixed so intently that Theo felt like they were matching gazes. Then, unmistakably, Auggie mouthed, Wait.
Theo took a deep breath. Then another. Imogen dug the pistol in deeper, and Theo gave a weary nod. She propped him against the wall again, and Theo closed his eyes. They stung with a rush of tears. He heard the sound of flies. He remembered the texture of hay in the loft, the loose pieces he had picked out of Luke’s hair. The swerve of the semi. The spin of their little car. The crunch and squeal and weightless moment of impact.
“We’re ok,” Imogen called. Then, squeezing his jaw with her hand and wagging his head back and forth, she whispered, “You have to watch. He said you have to watch!”
Theo opened his eyes and blinked them clear. “You don’t have to do this.”
She laughed—a thin, high, disbelieving sound—and forced his head forward.
Naked now, Trace, was working on Auggie’s chinos, laughing as Auggie tried to kick him. Auggie landed one solid blow on Trace’s shoulder, spinning Trace halfway around, and Trace laughed harder. Once the waistband was undone, he stepped out of range, caught the chinos, and yanked them off—one, two three. Auggie lay there, still dressed in his check shirt and jacket and tie, naked from the waist down except for the dark trunks. He kicked again when Trace stepped between his legs, but Trace caught him by the ankles, forced his legs apart, and moved in closer. Then he was inside Auggie’s reach. He released his grip on one ankle and used his forearm to keep Auggie’s leg angled away as he reached down and groped Auggie through the trunks.
“Really?” Trace asked. “Nothing?”
“Get the fuck off me!”
“Do you know what my favorite part might be? My favorite part might be when they start to get hard. They can’t even pretend they don’t like it. I turn their little cunts inside out, and they’re asking me to stop, but their dicks are begging for more. Chev nuts sometimes. God, the look on his face.” Trace rubbed himself against Auggie’s thigh. “I’m going to make you ask me for more while your boyfriend watches. How do you think that’s going to feel? How do you think he’s going to feel?”
“You’re a fucking coward!” Auggie shouted. He tried to kick again, but Trace was still forcing his legs apart, and he had all the leverage. “You drug guys. That’s the only way you can do this. Harley would have knocked you on your ass if you’d tried this when he was sober. Chev too. You probably can’t even get a boner unless you’ve got somebody tied up.”
Trace rested one knee on the mattress. He was still using his forearms to force Auggie’s legs apart, but now his hands were moving on Auggie’s thighs, across his trunks, stroking, caressing, while Trace humped Auggie—at first, high on his thigh, and then, slowly, moving to the vee of his legs, thrusting with nothing but the tight fabric of the trunks separating him from his target. When he spoke, his voice was tight with excitement.
“You really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you? You’ve got no clue. They want it. They don’t know they do, but they do. That’s what I was talking about. Dicks don’t lie. And they come back. They don’t have to. They come back because they need a man to take charge. They want a real man to give them what they need. Their heads are all fucked up by society—don’t do this, don’t like that. But they still want it. They want to fight. They want to lose. They want to be held down and fucked by someone stronger. It’s the only time in their lives that their brains and their dicks are in sync.”
Auggie laughed. He’d stopped trying to kick, but he was still trying to squirm away from Trace’s touch. Every time he moved more than a few inches, Trace would hook him under the thighs, grinning, and pull him back. “You’re delusional,” Auggie said. “You realize that, right? You’re sadistic.”
“The first time with Harley, you want to know how it went?” Trace slipped the elastic band of Auggie’s trunks under Auggie’s dick and balls. He took Auggie’s dick in hand, rubbing the head with his thumb, squeezing, pulling. “It was after a spring scrimmage. Both sides had played for shit, and Harley was pissed. Gave us hell. Gave me hell.” Trace flashed a smile. “I told you, I’m not that good. Anyway, I was sick of him riding me. I was going to get on Grindr, blow off some steam. You know there are guys on there who want it rough, even if they tell you they don’t. I was halfway home when I realized I’d left my wallet in my locker.
“When I got back, the Pocket was empty; everybody had showered and gone home. Only not quite everybody. I was in the locker room, getting my wallet out of the safe, when Harley comes out of his office. He’s drunk; I can smell the booze on him all the way across the room. He starts giving me hell, coming across the room, getting in my face. He’s so far gone, I can’t even tell what he’s saying. Later, I learned that’s part of the carisoprodol; I did a lot of reading, and one of the side effects of overdoing it with that stuff is what they call ‘inappropriate behavior,’ meaning some guys get violent on that shit. You saw it yourself that night in the Pocket, when Chev went after you with that foam roller. It’s nice for what I want—they get real fiery, but they’re still so fucked up that I can do whatever I want with them. And, of course, total amnesia.” Another of those boyish smiles. “Well, not always total.”
“What does that mean? Dude, get off.” He bucked his hips, trying to get Trace’s hand off him. Auggie’s breathing accelerated, and his voice was thin, a bad copy of normal, when he asked, “Harley started to remember?”
Trace held on, rubbing Auggie’s dick as he continued. “That first time, drunk and high on carisoprodol, he took a swing at me. I knocked him on his ass. I mean, he’s this old fuck, and he’s wasted, and I was pissed and sick of his shit. I stood there, and it felt really fucking good, and all of a sudden, I’d had it. I flipped him over. He was moaning, trying to crawl away. I tied his hands with laces from my cleats. I pulled down his pants. And I fucked him. Jesus Christ, I swear to you, I have never come that hard in my entire life.” Trace shivered. “The sounds he made.”
Horror crept into Auggie’s features. Theo watched him, his own breathing ragged. He thought about Dylan. He thought about the last year, how this would sound to Auggie after everything he had been through.
Ignoring the way Auggie bucked and thrashed, Trace gripped the trunks and pulled them off. “That was how it started. I checked his meds because of course I wanted to know what had fucked up his head so bad. And then I did a little research. You know what’s nice about carisoprodol? Aside from getting them amped up, putting some fight in them, and the fact that they don’t remember any of it? It doesn’t show up on standard drug testing screens. Hell, even if it did, he had a scrip for it. Bad back. Old football injury. Pretty soon, I had the whole thing planned out. I’d show up on the weekend with a bottle of gin, and I’d tell him I needed help, I’d fucked up, could we talk. That always worked; Harley took care of his boys. I kept some of his pills, and I crushed them up and put them in the drinks.”
“But he started to remember. Is that what you meant? He didn’t forget all of it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. He started acting weird. The last few times, he tried to avoid me. I had to be persistent.” Trace shrugged. “Chev has an idea of what’s going on, but he likes it too much to stop. Andre was the real problem, always talking to Jenice, sticking his nose where it didn’t fucking belong. He tried talking to Chev once, and Chev just about broke his jaw. But I had a handle on all of it until that bitch walked in on us.”
“Sue. Suemarie.”
“She was supposed to be out of town for a girls’ weekend. Then there she was, standing right in the fucking doorway, screaming while I took her dad’s pussy apart. I couldn’t let her leave, not like that. When I caught up with her, she was already texting Jenice. I grabbed her, and she shoved me. I shoved back. She hit her head on the corner of the table, real sharp corner, and she didn’t get up again.” For a moment, Trace was still. “Then I knew I had to get rid of Harley too, so I set it up to look like she’d done him in. She liked having pictures of herself; Andre had told me she kept them in her room, and sure enough, I found a stack of them. Those and a few sex toys, that was all I needed, shoved that big old dildo right up his ass. Daddy diddles his daughter, daughter finally snaps. Everybody’s heard that story before too. He’d told me about the cabin when he was drunk, and I knew that would make him harder to find, slow everyone down. I got Sue in here and left the laptop with her, and I figured that would tell the rest of the story—she came back here, where something bad had happened to her, and killed herself. The laptop had all of Harley’s fucking home videos for background. And I made sure when I shot her that I got the bullet right where she’d hit the table. To make it harder for them to tell what had happened. I did it all perfectly.”
“You can stop now, Trace,” Auggie said. “You’ll go to prison, probably for the rest of your life, but you can stop now, and things will go better for you.”
“You still don’t get it.” He moved in, forcing Auggie’s legs wider, exposing him. He ran his thumb down Auggie’s crack, stopping at his hole, applying pressure. Theo knew Auggie’s body. He’d touched him there too—this was like some horrible, nightmare version of those touches—and he recognized the way Auggie’s body tightened, every muscle contracting, joints locking, the old threat response: freeze. “Everything was fine until you came along, asking questions, sticking your nose in. I tried to make it clean that night in January, and I got your dumbass roommate instead. I tried to make it clean that night after you caught me with Chev in the pocket. Im fucked that one up; she should have timed it better when she pushed you into traffic. So now we have to do it this way. What I’m going to do to you, I’m going to do it slow, and I’m going to have a lot of fun, and when I’m done, you’re not going to be able to tell anyone anything.”
Part of Theo was screaming for him to move, to try something, do anything, even if it got him shot. And part of him, a tiny part of him that still held the reins, remembered Auggie’s face as he mouthed, Please trust me and Wait. How long am I supposed to wait, Theo screamed silently. How long am I supposed to watch while the thing you’re most afraid of is happening to you?
“You’re such a freak,” Auggie said. The words sounded strange, shaky and stiff, like he couldn’t get his mouth to form them correctly. “You say you want a fight, but what you really want is somebody drugged, somebody who can’t do anything. That’s why you’ve got me chained up. You’re just a scared piece of shit, and you can’t stick your dick in anything unless you know it can’t hurt you.”
“What did you say to me?” Trace pressed in, towering over Auggie. Theo could see when Trace twisted his hand, and his thumb forced its way inside. Auggie made a choked noise, and his whole body started to shake. In spite of his best efforts, Theo yanked on the cuffs, trying to get his hands free, and Imogen dug the pistol deeper between his ribs. “You little faggot. You little cunt. I’m going to take a long time with you. I’m going to make you beg. I’m going to show you how a real man fucks.”
“Limp-dicked freak,” Auggie said. His voice was shaking so badly that Theo barely understood the words. One leg was moving reflexively, as though Auggie couldn’t control most of his body anymore. “I bet you want it up the ass so bad you beg Imogen to peg you.”
Trace froze. Then he did something with his thumb inside Auggie that made Auggie arch his back, rising off the mattress in a scream. Trace tore his hand free, and Auggie screamed again. Then Trace came around the side of the bed. He slapped Auggie twice, and Auggie fell silent. Theo watched Auggie’s head roll on the mattress, expression wiped away. Trace reached under the mattress and did something. Then he pulled on the chains that held Auggie’s arms. They stretched farther now; whatever Trace had done had extended their length. He moved back between Auggie’s legs and climbed up onto the mattress.
“There,” he said, grabbing Auggie’s hips and pulling their bodies together. He racked Auggie’s ankles over his shoulders. “Fight, you little faggot. Do your fucking worst. And when you’re done, I’m still going to be breeding your pussy, and you’re going to tell me how much you want it, how much you need it, how grateful you are. I’m going to wreck this pussy while you scream my name.”
Trace leaned forward, bending Auggie in half so that Trace’s upper body was positioned above him, and then he reached down and guided his dick toward Auggie’s hole.
Auggie’s face transformed. The dazed look dropped away, and fury and terror blazed like lightning. He reached up, grabbed the FCA cross around Trace’s neck, and yanked. Trace lurched forward, pulled down by the sudden movement. The chain snapped. Still off balance from the unexpected pull, Trace continued to move down toward Auggie, stretching out his free hand toward the mattress to steady himself.
Auggie brought his hand up. The gold cross glinted. Then it passed into the shadow of Trace’s body, and Theo couldn’t see it anymore. But he heard the moment that Auggie drove it into Trace’s eye.
Trace squealed. He was tangled up with Auggie, bodies laced together for the fuck, but he arched his back, trying to get away. Auggie crossed his ankles behind Trace, pulling him down and trapping him. He continued to twist the cross in Trace’s eye.
The squeal turned into a full-throated scream, pain and fear and disbelief echoing in the tiny suite. Trace lifted the hand he’d planted on the mattress, trying to grab Auggie, but without the hand to steady himself, he rocked forward, pulled by Auggie’s legs, forced deeper onto the gold shaft transfixing his eye. He scrabbled for the mattress, trying to catch himself, and brought up his other hand—the one that had been guiding his dick. He caught Auggie’s wrist and wrenched, and Auggie cried out, but he didn’t release the cross. Trace made another of those savage movements, and Auggie bellowed in pain.
Both Theo and Imogen watched, frozen, in disbelief. Then Imogen pulled the gun away from Theo, turning toward the opening that led out of the hidden room. Theo threw himself on top of her, the weight of his body forcing her to the floor. When she rolled under him, shouting, he waited until she was face up and then brought his forehead down. The headbutt caught her on the bridge of the nose. She didn’t even make a sound; Theo felt the crack of bone as her nose broke, and Imogen went limp under him. Theo rolled onto his back. It was harder than he liked to bring his cuffed hands down and around his feet, but after a few moments of struggle, he managed to get his cuffed hands in front of him. He grabbed Imogen’s pistol and scrambled toward the exit.
He reached the bedroom as Trace brought his clasped hands down on Auggie’s head. The two-handed blow knocked Auggie’s head to the side, and the light in Auggie’s eyes snuffed out. Trace slid off the bed. He was sobbing, and as he disentangled himself from Auggie, he brought one hand up to cover his eye—but not before Theo saw the gory ruin left in the socket. Trace crawled across the floor, crying and sniffling and whimpering. He pawed through the clothes.
“Down,” Theo shouted. He didn’t recognize his own voice. His arm came up. It was like swimming, the movement slow, graceful, buoyant. It was like the gun was carrying him toward the surface. “Get down and don’t move!”
“My eye!” Trace shrieked. “My eye! My eye! I’m going to kill you—”
He came up with the pistol, spinning toward the bed.
Theo shot him.
The impact made Trace shake as though he’d been punched. Red began to run from the wound in his shoulder down the tight vee of his back. His arm sagged, and his hand opened, seemingly against his will, and the pistol tumbled onto the carpet.
“Down,” Theo said, stepping closer. “Or I put you down.”
Trace went for the gun with his off hand.
Theo brought Imogen’s pistol down, clubbing Trace on the crown of the head. Trace flopped forward, limp, blood running from his back and shoulder onto the carpet now. Theo kicked Trace’s gun away from him. Then he squatted, collected it, and shoved it into his waistband. He watched Trace for another moment, and then he kicked through the clothes until he found Trace’s phone. He used the phone’s emergency services feature to call 911, and he threw it on the bed, on speakerphone, as he crawled up next to Auggie.
As he unfastened the wrist restraints, he said, “Auggie, can you hear me? Auggie? Auggie!”
Auggie made a muzzy noise. His eyes flickered, and then he seemed to see Theo, although it was clear he was having trouble focusing.
“Oh my God,” Theo said. His chest seized. “Oh thank God. You’re ok. You’re ok, you’re safe, you’re ok.”
Auggie’s smile was lopsided, and his eyes started to drift shut. He murmured something.
“What? Open your eyes, Auggie. Hey. Stay with me, please. You’re doing so well, but I need you to open your eyes. Talk to me. Good, good, yep, look at me. Talk to me. Tell me something.”
Auggie mumbled something again, obviously fighting to keep his eyes open.
“What’s that? Tell me again, sweetheart. Keep talking.”
On the phone, the 911 dispatcher was talking, but Theo ignored her for a moment.
“Street queens,” Auggie said, a little more clearly this time, the lopsided smile shining. “Fer is going to be un-fucking-bearable.”
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