Thirteen

“PUCK WAS an asshole,” Gus murmured, his voice hardly audible over the wind’s whistling cries. Rey leaned in, tucking Gus against him, and Gus’s throat convulsed around his words, cracking with emotion…. “I mean we were kids, but Puck was… such an asshole.”

Tumbling a green plastic army man over his knuckles, Gus stared out into the encroaching fog, waiting for it to consume them both in its frosty tendrils. There seemed to be little warm left in him and he shivered, even as Rey pressed against his lean length to impart some heat into him.

“Kids are assholes. I spent an afternoon with a few about a week ago, remember?” Rey teased lightly, his lush mouth lifting at the corners. “Trust me, asshole is most kids’ default setting.”

“Puck didn’t used to be. Not at the beginning, but as we got older and my mom…. God, she’d do some fucked things and drag him along with her. She liked having a partner in crime, and he was it.” Gus shook his head, hating the drowning sensation cresting over him. “She’d take him to the strip club with her when it was amateur night because she’d sign up to dance, then send him around to grab tips off the table or see what he could get out of people’s pockets. He didn’t know any better, you know?”

Leading Gus along his story, Rey asked softly, “Where were you?”

“Ivo and I were usually in the car if Bear was doing a school thing. I watched him while they went inside.” He shrugged when Rey grumbled at Melanie’s neglect. “Better me than Puck. He… hated Bear and Ivo. Hated there was a baby. He needed to be the center of attention. It was better when Bear moved in, because he’d shut Puck down and she’d leave us in the apartment with Bear. First time she did that, I was like… thank fucking God because he was safe. You were… are… safe with Bear.”

They’d never really talked about Puck, or rather Gus always refused to. It felt safer that way. He wasn’t risking his heart if he kept his demons and nightmares locked up behind a wall of flippant sarcasm and feinting smiles. Stripping himself of any defenses, he was raw and open. Rey’s focus—his dark, soulful eyes—burned Gus, nearly as biting as the chill in the air. He hated seeing the sympathy in Rey’s gaze, knowing pity brewed beneath it.

“Bear’s a good guy,” Rey agreed. “Well, he did pull my mom out of a burning building, so… I guess I’ve always known that. You’re not so bad either, you know.”

“I wasn’t a saint when I was a kid,” Gus snorted. “That’s Luke. I did anything my mom told me to do. I just wasn’t good at picking pockets. Wanted a steak? Not a problem. I could shoplift the fuck out of anything but didn’t do so hot at grab and go. And I wouldn’t hurt people. Puck liked hurting people. She loved when she’d get into a slapping fight with someone and he’d jump in, kicking at them. Women she thought were moving in on someone she liked or a guy she thought cut in front of her at the grocery store. She couldn’t hold a job because she’d pick fights with her coworkers, so we were always moving around until social services got us a place to live. I think that was more because of Bear than anything else. Things were so much damned better when Bear was around. Then Puck….”

The wind stole his tears, catching them and folding them into icy spikes along his lashes and cheeks. Then Rey stole his breath away with a gentle brush of his lips across Gus’s chilled mouth.

“You tell me what you feel like you need to tell me, okay, babe?” Rey murmured, wrapping his arms around Gus’s waist.

They stood hip to hip, and for a moment, Gus let himself be held, a bit of peace in the storm before pulling back. He told himself it was so he could talk, so he could breathe, but it was a lie. He was about to shatter into pieces, and he couldn’t trust himself to finish with Rey holding him. It was too nice. Even in the damned wind, Rey’s arms around his body felt too nice. He didn’t deserve nice, not now. Not until he got everything out so Rey would see who he was and what he’d done.

Puffing out his cheeks, Gus exhaled hard, then said, “Ivo doesn’t remember this, so don’t… don’t tell him, okay?”

Rey’s mouth thinned; then he nodded. “Sure. Not a damned word.”

“Child Protective Services always had Mom on their radar, but she conned them. I mean she worked them hard to get Bear because she thought he’d bring in some money. But when they finally let her have him, people kept coming over to poke at us or her, and one of the social workers was already talking about taking Bear out because—how’d she put it?—he didn’t deserve to have his life fucked up like ours was.” A shudder rocked Gus’s shoulders, and he bent forward, distancing himself from Rey. Leaning on the railing, he closed his eyes, tilting his face up toward the rushing wind. “I don’t know where Mom went the night Ivo got hurt. It was hot, that sticky, still hot in the summer, and it was so hard to sleep. I was so damned tired, and Bear told me to crash in the bedroom where the fan was. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up to Ivo screaming his head off in the living room, and Bear started yelling my name, then telling Puck to get back. He was so fucking angry. I’d never heard him… angry… before that.”

“What happened?” Rey asked, his fingers pressed into the small of Gus’s back, rubbing enough for Gus to feel through the coat’s thick fabric.

“He stabbed the baby. Puck’d stabbed Ivo with one of the steak knives. He was still holding it when I came in. And God, Rey, there was fucking blood everywhere. It coated the walls. Just everywhere. Bear was pressing down on Ivo’s chest, and he started yelling at me to help him. When I went over to Ivo, Puck….” Gus rubbed at his ribs where he still wore a scar from that night, a thin white line Rey’d seen and kissed after swallowing a lie about a broken vase and Gus falling badly when the twins were horsing around. “He sliced my side. Puck did. It was like… he was drunk. I got to Ivo, and Bear told me what to do; then he called 911, and Puck… he stood there, laughing his ass off like it was something funny.

“Then the cops came, and Ivo was gone with CPS before my mom crawled home. They waited for her, just a bunch of suits and uniforms sitting on the couch, staring at us like we were wild animals. Puck stood there, lying through his teeth. It was an accident. He fell. He didn’t mean to, and Bear… the social worker wasn’t going to let him stay there,” Gus murmured, then blinked, caught in the memory of stone-cold faces and judging eyes. “They came for Bear the next day, but they kept taking Puck in to talk to him, and then they’d talk to me, but they always brought us back. It took CPS a while to yank me and Puck, and that’s only because my mom got busted carrying for her dealer.”

“Why? They should have pulled all of you that night. I’ve been in on calls where we’ve had the cops come in because we get to a house and some guy’s waling on his partner because the toast is burnt.” Rey hissed, breathing through his teeth. “Yeah, I get it was twenty years ago but… you were children. Why the hell didn’t anyone—you should have been safe.”

“They’d pull us now, but back then, they didn’t. It’s still bad sometimes. If it wasn’t, Luke’d be out of a job,” Gus reminded him. “No one gave a shit, Rey. No one. Not back then and sure as fuck not now. You’ve got people like Luke and, hell, Jules’s mom fighting to get something accomplished, but they’re fighting apathy, not malevolence. It’s not that people want to do harm, they just don’t care. If they had, maybe I wouldn’t be standing on this bridge with you right now. I don’t know.

“See, after it was just me and Puck, it was like living in hell. Ivo and Bear were… income. Just like us. The state paid out good money for us, and she lost half her benefits when they were pulled out of the house. She was pissed. Puck was golden. Me? Not so much.” He turned back to the water, his anger suddenly fresh and hot in his belly. “They’d stitched me up in the ambulance and handed me right back to her that night, then left me there for days until… well, I attacked one of my teachers with a chair ’cause I was so damned desperate to get out of there, I didn’t care if they put me in jail so long as I wasn’t there.”

“Baby, I didn’t know.” Horror simmered in his eyes, hesitant and unsure. His hands reached for Gus, then dropped back to his sides. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Jesus—”

“Puck was the reason they took Ivo away, but she blamed me. I should have stopped Bear from calling the cops. Should have stopped Ivo from crying because the neighbors heard him all the time.” Gus spared Rey a quick glance, focusing on his face. Rey’s expression softened, filling with pain, and Gus looked away, hating to see his own anguish reflected back at him in Rey’s eyes…. “My mom loved him. She always used to say Puck was too awesome so a piece of him broke off and that’s where I came from.”

“That’s—Dear God.”

“That was my mother. She didn’t have a filter. You think I’m bad? She was a hell of a lot worse. There was always something wrong with me. I found a wallet one time and turned it in. Guy gave me a twenty to thank me, and when we got home, she beat the shit out of me because I should have kept the wallet.” Gus flinched when Rey tightened his arm around his waist. “She liked taking a lit cigarette to my arms or back if I did something to piss her off, telling Puck he needed to hold on to my wrist or shoulders while she did it. She made him… mean, and I loved him because he’s… was… my brother, but I think if Bear hadn’t been there, he’d have killed Ivo.”

The plastic toy in his palm dug into Gus’s flesh, a sensatory provocation he’d always associated with a faint sickeningly sweet coating on his tongue and a creeping numbness across his face. His ankle hurt. It always hurt in the cold, the scars tightening his skin. Standing on the jut, he could easily see the railing he’d been caught on and the small span of metal where he’d last seen his mother. There’d always been something off about that moment. Not the killing part. He’d accepted she’d come to murder them, but now he wasn’t so sure.

He shivered hard enough to make his teeth chatter, and Rey reached up, brushing strands of hair from Gus’s chilled face, and he angled in to block Gus from the shifting wind again. Pinching the toy between his fingers, Gus held it up for Rey to look at. Its dark-green body was ill-formed, a cheap disposable toy he’d purchased from a dollar store down the street from Luke’s work. “He loved these. I mean, really fucking loved them. He always had one on him, but I wasn’t feeling good that day. I’d thrown up at school, and I didn’t like the juice Mom gave me in the car. I mean, now I know she’d put something in it, but then I just knew it made my face tingly.”

“Did they do blood work afterwards? To see what she’d given you?” Rey was gentle, pulling Gus’s hands toward him, then rubbing at them. “Or no one thought about it?”

“They didn’t know. Not until a lot later, and well, by the time they got me into surgery, it probably was out of my system. I only took a couple of sips, but Puck drank the whole thing. He gave me an army man for it.” Gus laughed, the bitter irony in his thoughts connecting pieces he hadn’t reasoned out before. “I was holding it when Mom stopped the car. Puck passed out on the back seat, and I was all fuzzy. Everything was kind of in a haze, but she pulled him out and… it was the first time I’d heard her swear at him.”

“What do you mean? Why was she swearing at him?”

“Because she had to carry him down the walk.” Gus turned, straining to see the lookout point at the end of the bridge. “She parked over there. On the other side. Where the tourists take pictures, and walked us over to here. Nearly all the way across. She was swearing the whole time, calling him useless and pathetic because she had to carry him. And she wasn’t careful about it. His head would hit the railing, or sometimes someone passing by would smack him with an elbow, but she’d keep going. We got to here… right here, Rey… and she just threw him over.”

His sick hit hard, doubling him over. Rey’s voice faded, a bit of white noise rolled into the roaring rush of blood to Gus’s head. His skin prickled and stung, and Gus clutched at his torso, but it was too late—his body reacted to the poisons lingering in his mind, his stomach purging the boiling acids it’d begun brewing the moment his foot touched the bridge’s walk.

Nothing came up, and Gus swallowed, washing the burn from the back of his throat.

He’d thrown up that day too. His throat raw from screaming Puck’s name, then his ears nearly bursting from the pain of his mother’s soul-shattering cries. She’d clawed at him, nails digging deep into his throat, tearing at his chest and back, but he’d been too broken to notice. Puck was under the water, somewhere under the rippled splash he’d made going in, a white-laced circle now washed away in the rolling Bay.

Her face’d gone from gleeful to… he’d never found a word to describe the catastrophic loss in her expression. She’d glanced down to the army man he held in his hand, then back up to his face. He’d pushed past her, desperate to do something—to save his twin—but his brother was gone.

His world turned then, folding him inside out, and the violence of his mother’s grief struck him before her fists did. Torn apart, he’d climbed up, the bridge railing digging into his stomach and screaming at the water, begging it to somehow give Puck back.

She stopped beating on his back, or perhaps he simply no longer felt her blows. Other shouts came from around them, but Gus couldn’t find Puck’s voice among them. Hooking a leg over the railing, he’d been inconsolable, distraught beyond reason. Then his mother laid her hands on his shoulders and shoved, tipping him over. The fall was quick, and so was the stop. The pain, however, seemed to continue on forever, and he’d flinched at the blinding white explosion of his ankle snapping when his foot slid through a gap between the bridge’s support railings, and he’d hung there, twisting back and forth above the churning waters that already claimed his brother.

Then a moment later, his mother tumbled past him, her flailing arms striking the ledge and slicing her skin open, splattering her blood over his face. She smacked the water, landing on her side, and the Bay sucked her in, pulling her down to join her son. He was overwhelmed and unable to stop crying. Gus’s voice broke, and the pain swept him under, wrapping a darkness around him as neatly as the water had his family.

“She’d thought I was Puck. We were identical,” Gus explained. He gripped the toy tighter, anchoring himself with its presence. It cut him, shredding his skin with its uneven, sharp edges, and his palm grew damp with sweat and probably a bit of blood. “Right down to how our hair parted, but he liked his short and I left mine long. My foster father hated it, and he’d shaved me with clippers in the backyard almost as soon as I got into his house. She couldn’t tell us apart. Jesus, she’d given him a can of soda, Rey, but she gave me a bottle of fruit juice. Puck drank that too because I didn’t want it. It’s why he was passed out and she had to carry him. It’s why she swore at him. She thought Puck was me. It should have been me but… she killed the wrong twin.

“I watched her face when she figured it out, and it was—she was a monster—she’d gotten off on killing me. I’d seen her having sex. Hell, she fucked guys on the bed while we slept on the floor next to her. I knew that face. And… when she figured it wasn’t me she’d….” He gasped, sucking in a brace of cold air, needing to take down the heat building inside of him. “A fucking toy, Rey. This damned toy and Puck’s… greed… kept me alive. It should have been me. It should have—”

“It shouldn’t have been either of you.” Rey pulled him in, shoving the sickness his mother left inside of him away. “You weren’t to blame for Puck’s death. She did that to him… to both of you.”

Rey cupped his face, chasing away the cold. The wind was still there, beating at them, hounding them, stealing their breath, but Rey held it back. Their mouths touched, a kiss flavored with salt, regret, and pain, but underneath it simmered a heat Gus longed for, ached for. He dreamed of Rey, holding pockets of memories alive in his soul and taking them out when his loneliness crept up on him to steal bits of his sanity.

He dropped the toy. It fell, but he didn’t hear it strike the bridge. For all he knew, it joined Puck in the water. Gus wasn’t even sure it was the same type he’d held that day or if it even mattered. A deep rolling thunder of a horn sounded off somewhere in the fog, echoing across the water, and Gus felt its sound hit them, swamping the chatter of a couple walking by and the tick-tick of their dog’s nails as it trotted behind them.

None of that mattered anymore. None of it. Not strangers. Not the echoes of his mother’s heartbroken cries or the raging shrieks she shoved under Gus’s skin as she tried to murder him a second time. Not even the memory he couldn’t erase of her too-bright golden hair, tanned limbs, and red floral dress falling past him, a spinning pinwheel swallowed up by the deadly waters below.

He’d come to the bridge to deal with death or at least face it down, but Rey demanded something more.

Gus didn’t care who saw him put his arms around the young man he’d fallen in lust with the very first time he’d seen him, lying on a lawn, covered in grime and coughing up smoke. Gus hooked his fingers into Rey’s belt loops and pulled him closer, angling his head so he could drink from Rey’s mouth, revel in the fading sweetness of iced tea on his tongue and stoke up the fire they’d let fall to embers.

Their kiss turned savage, lust and something more… complicated… deepening in the space between their pressed-in bodies. There was no mistaking his arousal. Gus’s cock ached nearly as much as his heart did, and the skin on his back tickled, his brain reminding him of how good Rey’s teeth felt when they sank into the space between his shoulder blades.

They broke, more for air than because they wanted to stop. There was no gentleness in their kiss. Gus’s mouth tingled from the contact, bruised from Rey’s ferocity, and as he struggled to get some sense of grounding, someone passing by broke into a laugh, then shouted, “Get a room.”

“Not a bad idea,” Rey murmured, resting his forehead against Gus’s. “Well, mostly not a bad idea.”

“It’s a very bad idea.” Gus shifted, but he was pinned against the railing by Rey’s hard, muscled body, and Gus became very aware of the hard length of Rey’s dick pressing into his thigh. “You promised not to fuck me, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.” A dangerous glint sparkled in Rey’s dark eyes, a scintillating, sensual promise echoed in the wicked grin he shot Gus. “But I also sometimes lie.”