Page 89 of Strange Lad

Please don’t call my brother.

He’ll be soangry.

He’ll takehisside.

He’ll never believe me. Never.

Never.

Never.

Never.

Jorge

Paralyzed

“Where is he?” Phoenix asks as I open the front door.

“Under my bed,” I say with a wince. “He’s completely checked out. I don’t know what to do.”

Phoenix ispissed.

Telling him over the phone that his brother went into some trauma-induced childlike state of panic because I asked to touch him wasnothow this was supposed to go. I could hear the hurt in my best friend’s voice andfeelthe betrayal splitting us in two, but I needed help. For once, I’m not the hero. I’m the goddamn villain. I’ve never seen Oli like this before. I don’t have the tools to fix whatever I did. And it’s breaking my heart.

Just pulverizing it.

“Before I go in there,” he starts, pinning me with a hard glare, “I need to know what you did.”

“Well,” I swallow. “We…we were kissing and…”

He sucks in a breath. “Spit it out, Jorge,” he growls.

“I asked if I could touch him. We—he hasn’t let me touch him.”

“Why the fuck would you ask to touch him if he didn’t offer?” Phoenix demands, then shakes his head. “Forget it.”

He stalks down my hall, peers into my bedroom, and deflates. All his anger towards me falls off his shoulders as he sees Oli’s feet sticking out from under my bed. I tiptoe over, wanting to be there because what if I’m needed, but Phoenix shakes his head.

“Leave him be,” he grunts and shuts the door in my face.

I hadn’t even noticed that Eli was with Phoenix when I opened my front door. As I slide down the wall beside my room, hauling my knees to my chest, he walks over and does the same on the opposite wall. His dark blue eyes pin me with something like concern, but he doesn’t say anything. Palming my face, I feel the weight of a thousand tons crushing me into rubble. What have I done?

We were talking, flirting,kissing—it was all so good.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out what I did. What went wrong?

I replay the movie of our make-out session repeatedly in my brain. I didn’t touch his ears. I wasn’t even dry-humping him. I was waiting for permission, and I got impatient when it didn’t come.

It wasme, wasn’t it? My neediness broke him. Every inch of me crawls with repulsion.

The mental movie keeps rolling, though. I relive being shoved off, relive him hyperventilating and shaking. I see his hand grip his throat like he was going to rip it out. And then…

“LEAVE ME ALONE, MORGAN!”

“Oh my god,” I gasp, the air vanishing from my house.

There is only one Morgan he could possibly be talking about. Michael’s twin. A surge of untethered rage consumes me whole as I ball my fists, my heart thundering against my rib cage. Eli watches my features twist into murderous anguish. His eyebrow arches, a silent invitation to clue him in, but I can’t speak. Can’t get past the watermelon-sized ball clogging my throat.

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