Page 50 of Worse Than Wicked
“Yes, I do.”
For a second, we smirk at each other across the rippling water.
Finally, I look away. I tip my chin at him. “Gimme another cigarette.”
“Take off your glasses.”
“Why?” I ask, leaning back and resting one arm along the rim of the tub while I stroke my cock with the other. “You don’t want to pretend you’re glazing Baron’s dick instead of mine?”
“No,” he says, making a face.
He didn’t say he wasn’t glazing my dick, though.
“You sure about that?” I ask, but I take off my glasses and fold them before setting them on the ledge. “Everyone knows Baron’s the better brother. Don’t you want to dom the best of the best?”
“No one with a working brain thinks Baron is better than you.”
He takes his cigarette pack and flips it open with his thumb, then taps until a few slide out. He bites down gently on the end of one, sliding it free with his teeth so he doesn’t have to touch it with his wet hands. He closes his lips around it, picks up his lighter, and flicks it open, sucking until the tip glows bright in the blue dawn. He inhales deeply and then drops his head back on the edge of the tub, exhaling smoke into the sky like a chimney.
“I hate you,” I say.
“Atta boy.”
I sink down in the water, laying back and staring up at the last few stars with him.
“If I hadn’t done all that to you and your sister,” I say. “Would the answer be different?”
“We can’t undo the past,” he says. “What’s the point in wondering?”
“I just want to know.”
“Why? You did what you did,” he says. “You are what you are. That’s your burden to bear. We all have our own. I can’t absolve you of yours, no matter what answer I give.”
He didn’t say no.
Somehow, that’s worse. I thought I wanted him to say yes, it would all be different, and of course he’d want me. That maybe part of him does anyway. But it only makes me hate myself more. I lift my head and bang it down on the side of the tub hard enough to make pain blossom in the base of my skull. “I never see until it’s too late. Why don’t I see?”
He shakes his head. “No, Duke. There was never a chance for us. Not since the day you put me on my knees in the basement.”
“That was years ago.”
“Yeah.”
“So it was over before it began.”
“It was never over because there was never anything to end.”
At last, he takes one more drag and hands the cigarette across the water.
“So, what now?” I ask.
“So, you go home,” he says. “You sleep in the bed you made. As soon as Lo gets out, we’re leaving town.”
“Why would you leave?” I ask. “You’re the king of Faulkner again.”
The past year, I made fun of him for staying, but now I don’t like the thought of him leaving. I like the thought of him here, rotting, doing nothing with his life and going nowhere.
“Nah,” he says. “Devlin and Preston can have it. It’s too full of memories.”
