Page 54 of My Revenant
From the very first moment I’d seen Dex in the diner, something had been building between us. It was something I didn’t understand, and every time we saw each other, touched each other, it grew. Bigger and bigger, like a balloon about to burst. That’s where we were now. At the breaking point. I didn’t know what would come after this; I only hoped it wouldn’t break me right along with it.
“What do I do?” I asked him, and I didn’t even try to mask the fear in my voice, the pain that came from not knowing.
“Well, that one’s easy, Rabbit. Just let yourself be mine.”
“Easy,” he said. There was nothing easy about this. It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. But he wanted me, all of me, and I wanted to be wanted. More than that. If I was honest with myself, completely truly honest, I wanted to be wanted byhim. Because I wanted him too. I had from the very first moment.
“Okay,” I told him, letting my body still beneath him. Letting myself surrender.
“Okay?” he asked, his brow furrowing, like he expected it to be a trick, that I’d run away again the moment he released me.
“Okay.” Such a simple word to change everything. “I’ll be yours.”
I watched as Dex’s brows twitched again, and he swallowed heavily. Those eyes that matched the sky darkened like a storm, and then it rained. Droplets falling from him to me. Water on fire. His tears extinguishing me. His pain soothing me.
He wanted me so deeply that when I finally accepted him, his relief hurt more than my rejection ever could, and I understoodthat. I saw him now. I saw him, and I wondered how I’d been so blind to him before this point. He was just like me.
“Will you please kiss me?” I phrased it like a question, but it was a demand. Because I needed to feel him. I’d thought too much, and whatever this was now, we would figure it out together like he’d said… but later. Right now, I was tired. Right now, I wanted nothing else but to taste the lips of the man I belonged to. The man who belonged to me.
Dex fell into me. We’d kissed before, so many times, and each time it felt bigger than the last. This one was no different. He tasted like the cigarette I’d dropped somewhere in the grass around us when I’d tried to fight against this so futilely. More than that, he tasted like a comfort I’d never known. He tasted like hope.
twenty-two
Dex - Past
HIS FIRST, HIS ONLY.
HELL BENT. The letters inked across my knuckles. I was never the type to worry about my tattoos having meaning. If I liked the look of something, I’d get it put on my skin. Or with some of them, I’d just let Bull do whatever he wanted. When he’d told me to fuck off, I’d bought myself a tattoo gun and started doing my own ink, like the skull and wings on my neck. It didn’t have any meaning apart from looking cool. However, the letters on my knuckles were accurate in describing the way I dealt with most things in life—stubbornly and recklessly determined.
I’d been hell-bent on getting Jonah to be mine.
Now that he’d agreed, I couldn’t quite believe I’d done it.
I’d meant it when I told him I was fine with him hating me. Of course, I’d prefer it if he loved me, but if he couldn’t, then hatred was the next best option. Love would give me his heart, but hate gave me his mind, and I would take whatever I could from him.
Lately, however, whenever Jonah told me he hated me, it felt different. It felt like maybe he meant something else instead.
While we’d evolved from sporadically meeting up at parties to meeting at the Meadow Park field on a semi-regular basis, I had yet to show Jonah where I lived. Showing him my mother’s house felt like exposing a rotting wound, but it was a wound that had formed who I was. And with him accepting me, and finally being mine, it felt like it was time to expose that partof myself.
The house was deceptively ordinary from the outside. Two stories that had once been painted white, now faded and peeling like most in this area. The front deck was sagged, its rotten wood scenting the air, and it was concealed from the road by the piles of junk in the front yard that my mother kept around for purposes I could never understand.
Jonah was many things, but subtle wasn’t one of them. I saw the judgment on his stunning features as I led him from the footpath to the front door, and I didn’t fault him for it.
My mother hadn’t been home for months. Maybe this time she wouldn’t come back at all. She’d probably found some new piece of shit to feed her drugs and decided to live with him instead, like a parasite. Or maybe she’d died. Maybe I wouldn’t ever know, but enough time had passed that I was confident bringing my rabbit to this place wouldn’t put him in any danger.
The inside of the house was aged, damaged, from angry fists and the things she’d thrown at the walls over the years. But it was clean. All the evidence of the terrible things that had happened here were scrubbed away.
My honey-eyed inferno took it all in, his thoughts loud enough to hear even though his mouth was silent.
“So… where are your parents?” Jonah asked eventually as I led him up the stairs.
“My mom hasn’t been home for a couple of months. She’s probably living with a new boyfriend or something,” I told him, heading past the closed door of her room, then the bathroom, to get to mine.
“Oh… and your dad?” Jonah’s voice was uncertain, like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to ask, or maybe he just wasn’t used to expressing an interest in other people.
“He’s dead.”
He didn’t seem surprised by that, honey eyes casting down as he no doubt struggled with what to say in response.
