Page 45 of Fear
Then Tobias made his excuses to go to bed early, leaving Jake with a deck of cards in his hand and the stupid hope that they could put something together again. Jake had put the cards away and grabbed his coat to hit the second-closest bar. He’d gotten wasted at the closest on Friday, and he didn’t like to repeat himself too often.
But by the time he had got back to the apartment—drunk, but not shit-faced—he’d decided that it was fine if Tobias didn’t want to talk for a while. If he wanted to spend the least amount of time in Jake’s company as possible. He needed his space. Jake shouldn’t have pushed about that whole abuse thing. He should have just left Tobias the hell alone, especially when he already looked so shattered and unsteady (damn fucking goat shop). But Jake had pushed him, so the best thing he could do now was just back the fuck off and let Tobias recover. Because Tobias would recover. And if it took him not talking to Jake or being able to stand his company for a little while, that was a-okay. Jake could deal.
That plan was fine—okay, not at all, horrible and miserable and fucked-up, but the best one he could come up with.
Then Jake woke up hungover past noon on Sunday, stumbled to the kitchen, swallowed his aspirin with some orange juice, and put out the dishes for a late breakfast. He figured he’d wait for Tobias to appear—Tobias seemed to generally wait until Jake was up before leaving his room—before making anything. If meals were the only thing they would have together, the only time Tobias could bear to be near him, then that was what he would take, but he wouldn’t cheat himself of that. So he waited, drinking the orange juice against the nagging pain in his skull, trying to ignore the call of the whiskey in his cabinet.
At two-fifteen, Jake finished the last of the orange juice, got up, and put everything away. He hadn’t a clue what he wanted to do, but he opened the laptop in the living room, looking for hunts he probably wouldn’t take. He cleaned his knives. He checked the salt lines. And the door to Tobias’s room remained noiselessly, completely shut until the sun went down and it was dinnertime again. So Jake went over for one more try, another stupid attempt, because Tobias had to eat, and it was the time to eat, so it followed that Jake would see him again.
He asked at the door, trying to lock down his stress and gnawing desperation, and got nothing.
He had been ready not to see Tobias much. To give him some space, maybe just talk with him at meals, or maybe not even then. But not seeing him at all for an entire day was too fucking much. And now he wasn’t saying anything, and all Jake wanted to do was charge in there and grab him, maybe shake him until he fucking realized that Jake didn’t want to hurt him. Which Jake knew made no sense and was about the stupidest thing he could do, but it was hard to think of a better plan when his muscles itched to move and his nerves crawled at the silence, the dead accusations behind that door.
He settled for knocking on the wood again, harder. “Come on, Tobias, don’t leave me hanging here. Just tell me what you want and I’ll get the fuck out of your hair.” He knew he sounded angry, and he didn’t care. Not too much. Didn’t a guy fucking deserve to be angry once in a while?
But when the silence lasted longer than some kind of shunning or guilt trip usually would, a little voice wondered if Tobias was even in there.
Jake couldn’t imagine Tobias on his own in the world. He couldn’t see Tobias willing to go out and interact with people, but now he couldn’t shake the gut-deep fear that maybe Tobias hadn’t been able to take it anymore—whatever the fuck had happened between them—and had left.
Every day, every hour that Tobias refused to talk to him or even stay in the same room as him, the little voice inside Jake got louder. That the struggle to get Tobias out of Freak Camp, the half-nightmare, half-dream of the last three weeks, was nothing but an elaborate illusion, fantasizing the happiness and the pain together because he was that lonely and messed up.
It was a stupid idea that didn’t make sense for a second, but Jake couldn’t stop his hand from turning the doorknob, even as he reminded himself that he was just being a fucking stalker again, invading Tobias’s privacy when he clearly wanted nothing to do with Jake. Jake braced himself for the flinch, the accusing eyes, the silence. He’d open the door and take the consequences, another knife in the gut because he couldn’t accept the obvious meaning of Tobias’s silence and leave him the fuck alone.
But Jake forgot all of that when he saw Tobias hunched on the edge of the bed, supporting himself with his thin, stiff arms and shaking like a leaf.
For a second, Jake thought that he was the reason that Tobias shook. Then he saw the sweat glistening on his skin and the way his teeth clenched every time a tremor took his body—as though he was trying to fight them off.
Jake moved in without conscious thought. Tobias tried to move away from him—Of course he doesn’t want you near him, why would he?—and would have slid off the bed, but Jake was there, catching him, pulling him back up, and sitting down next to him.
This close, Tobias’s way-too-thin body in his arms, Jake could feel the shakes moving through his body and hear the rough rasp in his throat. He put a hand to Tobias’s forehead, ignoring the way Tobias flinched—of course Tobias still expected to be hit—and almost jerked away from the heat radiating from him.
“Fuck, Tobias, you’re burning up.”
Tobias dropped his head, briefly touching Jake’s shoulder before swaying away. He might have fallen over if Jake didn’t have his arm around him. He tried to speak—Jake could feel his lungs expanding, could see his throat working—but all that came out was a fit of desperate coughing. Tobias turned his mouth into his own shoulder, shuddering.
“I’m s-s-sorry,” he rasped when the coughing had subsided. “I tried not—”
“Shhhh.” Jake pulled Tobias closer. Tobias continued shaking against him, the vibrations moving from his shoulder into Jake’s chest. No damn way was he going to move away when Tobias might collapse without him, when Tobias was hot enough, if not to fry an egg, then to reheat pizza. “You hungry at all?”
Tobias shook his head, still hiding his face. He was limp in Jake’s arms, but not like he trusted Jake. It was more like whatever was going to happen, whatever Jake wanted to do to him, Tobias couldn’t work up the energy to resist. He was just a willing, empty vessel of skin and bone in Jake’s arms. Shit, had he gained any fucking weight since Jake had gotten him out of the camp?
“Come on, Tobias,” Jake said, shifting him carefully, suddenly sure he was holding something precious and breakable. “You’re soaked. You need to get into dry clothes and under the covers.”
Tobias nodded again. His hands moved to his chest, fumbling at the buttons on his shirt, until Jake braced him against his shoulder and reached for the top button. Opening a shirt was strange from that angle, both like and unlike when he worked on buttons on himself or opened a partner’s shirt from the front, but he managed it.
Undressing Tobias felt wrong and made him uncomfortable in a way he didn’t want to examine closely. Tobias didn’t need to be afraid of him, not ever, and certainly not now.
Then he saw the first scar, and it got a lot fucking easier to focus. It wasn’t much by itself: a white starburst about the size of a dime, visible on the already pale strip of skin exposed when Jake pushed back the shirt. But that scar had a partner an inch away. Beneath that was a thick, ragged furrow that trailed down the side of Tobias’s ribs. Jake followed that white trailing scar, pushing the shirt farther back on Tobias’s shoulders, baring most of his chest and his upper arms, and he realized that those ugly raised marks were only the beginning. It was as though he had followed one worm down to a nest and found hundreds.
Straight white scars forming grids, crooked scars, fat welts, thin scores, palm-sized pink plains of scarred skin and burns, layered over and over each other like the weave of an old rug: horrifying and almost beautiful if one could ignore that it had been carved into human flesh. Jake couldn’t. What he saw in Tobias’s skin was pain, so much pain, years and years of it woven into Tobias’s skin where neither of them could escape or forget it.
Jake pulled the shirt off harder than he should have and pulled Tobias around so that his face pressed against Jake’s chest and Jake could look over his shoulder, run his hands down the textured sea of old wounds.
Tobias’s back was worse than his chest. Worse than anything Jake had seen before on a human body, and all this had happened because he had not rescued Tobias sooner.
Fine, dammit, what had happened at Freak Camp was not Jake’s fault. He hadn’t held the knife, brand, whip, or whatever the hell had left those ugly little starbursts. Probably most of this damage had happened long before Jake had his ASC license. But he could have done something if he had gotten his head out of his ass long enough to actually see what was going on around him. He should have paid more attention. Fuck, he had known since the day he saw that damn smiley face scar on Tobias’s forearm that he was being hurt. He had probably been hurt every fucking day, but had Jake done anything to stop that? Had he done one damn thing to stop those bastards other than branding one of their sadistic, sneering faces? And even that had been motivated by rage more than any thought of helping Tobias.
He had failed Tobias again and again. And the worst part was that Tobias didn’t expect—had never expected—anything better of Jake than he had of the bastards who carved their marks into his skin.
