“Are you close with your grandmother?” Wyatt countered, uncomfortable with the direction of their conversation.
“My grandparents are all dead.”
Wyatt probably should have stopped prying there, but he didn’t. “What about your mom? When you talked about her, the one time you said was… is she…” He trailed off.
He felt Linc nod above him. “Yeah. She died of a drug overdose when I was seventeen.”
“Jeez. I’m sorry. That sucks.”
Linc rarely talked about himself or his family. Wyatt didn’t have that luxury since Linc had a front-row ticket to all of Wyatt’s family drama. “Growing up with a drug-addicted mentally ill mom couldn’t have been easy.”
Wyatt’s mom was cold, but she wasn’t an abusive drug addict.
“I had my sister. Ellie did what she could to shield me. She took the brunt of my mom’s reign of terror.”
Wyatt curled his hand over Linc’s hip, nestling closer. He didn’t know what to say about that. “Tell me about Ellie.”
“She’s amazing. She’s a costume designer in Los Angeles. Or she was, anyway. She was just getting some recognition for her work when she reconnected with my dad and learned how sick he was. She left a great job to come to Orlando and take care of him.”
Wyatt pulled back to look at Linc. “Why?”
Linc frowned in the shadows. “Why what?”
“Why sacrifice her own dreams to take care of somebody who left her behind?”
Linc’s hand cupped the side of Wyatt’s face, brushing over his mouth with the rough pad of his thumb. “I imagine for the same reason you hide your sexuality and your makeup for the sake of a man who would never do the same for you. Because he’s our father and deep down, it means something to her.”
The words weren’t said with any malice, but they felt like gravel under Wyatt’s skin and he wanted to pick at it to get it out. Linc was right. Wyatt was no better than Linc and his sister. He hid away for his father’s comfort, his father’s career, knowing full well his father wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.I can’t believe you’re the one who lived.His father would have exchanged Wyatt’s life for Landon’s. Wyatt had a scar on his hip to prove it. Deep down, his father still blamed him for Landon’s transplant failing as if Wyatt had willed his cells not to work, had somehow murdered his own brother.
Wyatt suddenly felt trapped, suffocated. The reassuring heat of Linc’s body was now a furnace setting Wyatt ablaze. “I’ll be right back,” he muttered, disentangling himself from Linc’s body and shutting himself in the bathroom.
Once the lock clicked into place, he paced, fisting his hands until the blunt edges of his nails made half-moons in his palms, trying to use the pain to distract from the insects crawling under his skin and the cold sweat making him shiver, but nothing quelled his shaking insides. He couldn’t stay in there forever. Linc would come to make sure he was okay. He wasn’t okay, not by a long shot, but he couldn’t do the thing that made it better. He’d promised.
He glanced toward the locked door before slipping his hand between the medicine cabinet and the wall. He slipped free the tiny paper taped there and hopped onto the counter to stare at it. He just needed to look, to hold it in his hand. Maybe that would be enough. He opened the packet, palming the shiny new razor blade. Something shuddered within him and the compulsion to press the blade to his skin became a living thing inside him, a demon whispering in his head that only the slicing of his flesh would make it all better.
But he couldn’t. Linc had made him promise. He’d said he’d end it if Wyatt hurt himself. Linc had never commented on the hash-mark scars on each of Wyatt’s inner thighs, but he’d licked over them, pressed his lips against them, he’d made it clear he knew what Wyatt was capable of. He let the back of his head thud against the mirror, closing his eyes and trying to picture the blade against his skin, cutting him open, relieving the pressure, letting all the pain and anxiety flow down the drain, easing the lead weight in his stomach.
It didn’t work. Nothing in Wyatt’s imagination felt the way cutting did. Nothing relieved the pressure the way a sharp edge did. But he couldn’t disobey Linc. If he did, he’d lose him. If he lost Linc, he wasn’t sure he could get through the minefield of the next five months. He bit down on the inside of his cheek until it bled, letting his tongue play with the jagged cut, finding some solace in the taste of copper flooding his mouth. He wrapped the razor blade back in its paper but couldn’t salvage the tape, so he slipped it on top of the medicine cabinet and went back to the bedroom.
Linc’s concerned look made Wyatt flush, something withering inside him. He’d almost betrayed him. He still wanted to, even now. His stomach churned, his brain firing like he’d had too much caffeine and not enough sleep. He needed a distraction, something to ward off the voice in his head telling him that nothing would be okay again until he gave in and pressed the blade to his skin.
“You okay?” Linc asked as Wyatt crawled in beside him.
Wyatt didn’t answer, just shoved at Linc until he rolled onto his back and Wyatt could straddle his hips, capturing his mouth in a dirty kiss.
Linc tore his mouth away, narrowing his eyes at Wyatt. “Why do you taste like blood?”
“I bit my cheek,” Wyatt said, hooking his mouth with his finger to show Linc the gash on the inside of his cheek.
“Be more careful,” Linc admonished, pulling Wyatt back down.
“Okay, Daddy,” Wyatt sighed into Linc’s open mouth.
Linc groaned, gripping Wyatt’s hips, pulling down as he thrust upward, grinding their cocks together. “Oh, it’s Daddy now, is it? You trying to tell me something?”
“I want you,” Wyatt said between kisses. He wasn’t lying. He wanted Linc. He wanted Linc almost more than he wanted to cut, maybe more.
“What do you want, sweet boy?”
