Their eyes swung to Shep at his sharp statement.
Molly balked. “Excuse me?”
“I said no. No more questions. I don’t know what you hoped to glean from this talk, but you can’t just explain away our feelings and you can’t scare us out of being together. You can just accept that this is a thing and leave it be or you cannot accept it and we’ll just be on our way. But this ends now. You’ve already hurt him once. Never again.”
There was no malice in his voice, no threat, just a tone that said Shep wouldn’t tolerate any response other than the one he wanted. It was the sexiest thing Elijah had ever witnessed in his life and he couldn’t evenmuster up the slightest hard-on, which was good, all things considered.
His mother gave a slight nod and cupped Shep’s cheek. “Alright, Jaynie. We’re done here. Why don’t you take Elijah back to the guest house to rest for a bit? That pill will knock him out and I imagine you’ll want to have some alone time to talk before lunch.”
Shep gave a single nod and pulled Elijah to his feet. “Can you walk?”
Elijah gave a weak laugh. “Yes, I think I can make it the fifty feet to our room.”
It wasn’t a lie. Elijah was sleepy and dizzy, but not faint. Still, Shep sweeping him up into his arms and carrying him to the guest house sounded amazing. He wanted to feel the tight grip of his arms around him, the reassuring heaviness of his weight pressing him down into the mattress. He wanted to lose himself in Shep just for a while. The rest of the world could wait.
Shep’s mother gave them one last lingering look before escaping to parts unknown. Elijah stood on his toes to press a kiss to Shep’s lips. “Take me to bed, Sam. I think I need to sleep.”
Shep gazed down at him. “Okay, rabbit. You sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
Elijah laughed, lids heavy. “Keep me safe from the wolves?”
Shep grinned, but his words dripped with malice. “I told you, rabbit. I am the wolf.”
Most people might have found the implied threat terrifying, but Elijah wrapped it around himself like a warm blanket. Elijah didn’t know many things, but he knew that Shep would let nobody hurt him, not even Dr. Molly Shepherd, and that was more comforting than any lock or weapon, no matter how fucked up it might seem.
Shep watched Elijah sleep, his body half flung over Shep’s, their legs entangled, Elijah drooling onto Shep’s t-shirt. The boy had been in no shape to talk when they returned to their room in the guest house. He was pale beneath his tan and the pill his mother gave Elijah dulled the light in his eyes. Shep had tried to tuck him in, but Elijah had shaken his head, tugging Shep towards him. “I don’t want to be alone,” he’d mumbled, his tone almost timid like he still thought Shep might refuse him.
Shep had replayed their conversation with his mother on repeat a thousand times since Elijah had dozed off and while he didn’t know the details, Shep felt certain Elijah’s lack of sexual experience seemed tied to one person, the person who hurt him, the one he’d mentioned on the phone what seemed like a lifetime ago. Knowing somebody had harmed Elijah, that someone had made such a grave impact on his psyche, ignited a quiet rage in Shep. He wanted to hunt them down and peel the skin from their body one strip at a time, but to do that Shep needed to find him, and Elijah’s tormentor remained a mystery. Shep knew nothing. He’d found nothing. Webster had found nothing. Whoever had hurt Elijah had hidden their tracks very well.
Elijah stirred against him sucking in a sharp breath and half sitting up, looking around, groggy. The hair on one side of his head stuck up like a baby bird’s anddrool dried on his cheek but he was still the most beautiful thing Shep had ever seen. Elijah noted the wet spot on Shep’s shirt, cheeks pinking as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ew, sorry,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.
“I don’t mind,” Shep said.
Elijah started to smile, but it died as if remembering something. He lay back down, turning away but still using Shep’s bicep as a pillow. He rolled, curving his body around Elijah’s like armor, his arm going around his waist and pulling him close. Elijah gave a shuddery sigh but remained quiet.
After a time, Shep asked, “Can you tell me what happened back there?”
“I thought you would have pieced it together by now.”
It wasn’t as if Shep didn’t have a good idea, but that wasn’t the same thing as knowing. “It would only be speculation on my part. It’s your story. You should tell it. If you feel up to it.”
Elijah was silent for so long, Shep figured the matter done. Elijah wasn’t ready, and that was okay. Shep would wait.
But then Elijah spoke, his tone lifeless. “I was twelve. He was an acting coach. I had already been in so many movies by the time Lucifer enrolled me in his private lessons that it seemed dumb, but she was so insistent that I knew she had an ulterior motive. She said I was being a snob. That there was always room to better myself. This coach, she said, was a steppingstone to getting those coveted lead roles I wanted, which would be important when I hit my teen years. I went along with it because going along with Lucifer was always easier than going against her.”
Shep slid his hand under Elijah’s shirt, pressing his palm over Elijah’s heart. He placed his hand over Shep’s on top of the fabric, his voice catching, “At first it was normal acting class drills. Improv scenes, prop work, accents, stuff that was fun but seemed pointless. But then things got… weird. He started asking me questions about whether I liked girls, whether I had a girlfriend. If I’d ever kissed anybody. He told me about his wife, told me how great sex was, offered me magazines. Tried to give me alcohol or pills. Whenever I got uncomfortable, he’d laugh and drop it.”
Elijah sniffled, his voice wet as he said, “I figured out pretty quickly that my mom hadn’t sent me for acting lessons, at least not ones that occurred in front of the camera. He started talking to me about gender roles and sayinghow Hollywood was about appearances and that the only place we could be ourselves was when we were around people who were ‘like us’. I didn’t know what he meant, at first. But then he said my mother was concerned because people were talking about me. They said my face was too pretty, that they’d seen me wearing nail polish and one time even lip gloss. He said I had a feminine demeanor, and my voice was too soft and my mom was concerned I was gay.”
Elijah gave a bitter laugh. “Score one for Lucifer because she was right. I was. So was he. He said being gay was fine, but if I wanted to play the leading roles in Hollywood, I had to appear straight on camera and off, at least until I’d made it. Then, I could be whoever I wanted. He’d said even Elton John had to marry a woman once.”
Elijah fell silent once more and Shep tried to pull it together. So far, the boy had revealed nothing to explain his attack in the kitchen, but he told the story like every word he forced past his lips took effort, like it was work, so Shep didn’t push just tried to rein in the rage building beneath his rib cage.
“His lessons became about how to appear more masculine, the way I stood, the way I talked, even the way I held my hands. In between lessons, he would say he was the only person I should trust, the only person I could be myself around. At first, I didn’t even notice how… handsy he was. Touching me, positioning me, finding excuses to put his hands on me. And the compliments… telling me I was funny and smart and talented, saying all the things my mother never did.”
Elijah’s nails dug into the back of Shep’s hand through the thin t-shirt fabric. “The first time he kissed me, he said it was just an acting exercise. I thought it was gross because he was way older than me, like older than my mom, but he said as an actor we have to kiss people no matter how we feel about them and make it convincing. It was true. So, I let him.”
There was an undercurrent to Elijah’s words, a casual self-loathing Shep had heard before when questioning former child soldiers and prisoners of war. People forced to do unthinkable things to survive. Elijah blamed himself for what happened. Shep dropped a kiss onto the top of his head because he just didn’t know what else to do.
