Memphis Camden hissed at the sharp sting of alcohol over raw skin, biting down on his lip to keep from screaming. Sweat poured over him, burning his eyes and pooling in the dip of his lower back. His long blond hair stuck to his neck and forehead, and his skin stuck to the clear plastic cover on the ugly floral couch in his friend Gemma’s fancy airstream trailer, but he hurt way too much to move.
The aftermath of his father, Tennessee’s, explosive temper never got any easier. If anything, it worsened with every single beating. This time, he’d whipped Memphis so violently he snapped the strap he’d used, which had only pissed him off further. He’d stomped on Memphis twice and kicked him in the ribs before Rita had come in with Knox and distracted the man long enough for Memphis to crawl away.
Memphis didn’t even know what he’d done to set his old man off this time. It could have been nothing. Hell, it could have been anything. It was hard to say with him. Tennessee was a large man, over six and a half feet tall and weighing in at close to three hundred pounds. He liked to throw his weight around, got off on people being afraid. Everybody but his children.
Tennessee wanted his kids to be tough. He didn’t raise his boys to be pussies. It was one of several life lessons the Camden boys had beaten into them from a young age. “Don’t be a sissy. Don’t be a pussy. Act like a man. Stop crying before I give you something to cry about.” It had worked for a time. His older brother, Nashville, was just like his dad, tall as a city building and half as wide, mean as a snake.
But not Memphis.
Memphis was barely five-foot-ten and favored his mother. He had fair skin, bright blue eyes, and his mother’s wide plush mouth. He couldn’t grow facial hair, and at sixteen, he was still lanky while his father and brother were bearded and muscled. It made his father hate him. Just looking at Memphis seemed to infuriate the man, regardless of how much Memphis had tried to conform. After a while, he just quit crying, no matter how brutal his father got, no matter how vile his words were.
“I put you in front of the finest pieces of ass this town has to offer and you still can’t get it up. Maybe I’ll put you in a dress and pass you around to the boys. I bet, after a few rounds, being a queer will stop looking so good to you.”
The words just sort of slid off him now. The scar tissue on his body had turned him into teflon. But the blows still hurt, the pain in what were certainly broken ribs still felt like a knife when he breathed in and out.
“You need to tell somebody about this, M,” Gemma said before dabbing at his fresh wounds with another cotton ball.
“Who?” Memphis asked, craning his head to look over his shoulder. “Who am I going to tell? Who in this town isn’t being held hostage by him? He owns the cops. Everybody else is just as afraid as I am.”
Gemma bit down on her plump lower lip, pushing a strand of bubblegum pink hair behind her ear. “My mom? My mom doesn’t give a fuck about your dad and his gang. She’s in the medical field. She’d know how to help you.”
“Your mom works for a vet clinic. Besides, if she came after my dad, she’d turn up dead within a week and I would, too,” Memphis said. “Tennessee owns this town, and when he dies, my brother, Nash, will take his place. That’s just the way things go around here.”
“Your father doesn’t do this to Nash or even Knox. This isn’t right.”
Gemma was right. Nash was one of his father’s chief enforcers and Knox was just a baby, but neither of them had ever stirred their father’s rage like Memphis did. He closed his eyes as her fingertips danced along the scars on his lower back, her caress stopping just before they disappeared below the waistband of his jeans. It was rare to have anybody touch him with anything but anger, and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t long to lean into the touch.
“Tennessee doesn’t do this to Nash because he’s a neanderthal just like him, and he doesn’t hurt Knox ‘cause he’s still a baby. I’m the only one who infuriates him.”
Her hand disappeared for a long moment. Memphis jumped when she suddenly pressed a bit too hard with a Betadine swab. It felt like the end had barbs, digging into his flesh and clinging as she moved it along the gashes on his back. Tennessee had a flair for the dramatic, Memphis would give him that. He’d long ago given up taking a belt to him in lieu of a whip he’d made himself in his leather shop.
Memphis had never seen the thing up close, but he suspected it had glass or razors worked into it somehow. In addition to the inch-wide welts and abrasions that accompanied his father’s beatings, there were now thousands of tiny gashes that made it feel like fire ants lived under his skin. It was far more painful than a belt, but it would never have the effect Tennessee wanted.
“You need to get out of there. If you don’t, he’s going to end up killing you,” Gemma said, popping her gum loudly as she worked.
“I wish he’d just go ahead and do it already. He’ll never beat the gay out of me. I’ll never look straight enough, talk tough enough, look masculine enough. Dying would be a whole lot easier.”
Memphis didn’t even remember the first time Tennessee had beat him senseless. Maybe it was the time he’d gotten into his mother’s makeup at four. Maybe it was earlier than that. He had seemed to sense Memphis liked boys long before Memphis had liked anything at all.
“You should just stay with us tonight,” she said, the plastic crinkling as she plopped down beside him in her Wonder Woman panties and electric blue tank top. He turned his head to look into her icy blue eyes. Gemma was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful girl Memphis had ever seen. She had fair skin and freckles covering her nose and cheeks and a body most guys would have gone crazy over. But it did nothing for him. Girls did nothing for him, and his father hated him for it.
“I can’t. If I don’t go home, he’ll just accuse me of sucking dick at the drive-in or hooking in the alley behind the liquor store.”
“Your dad spends a lot of time thinking about you having gay sex,” Gemma said, wrinkling her nose.
“Like anybody in this town would touch me,” Memphis said, tone bitter. “Any guy anyway.”
He closed his eyes, trying to shut down the memories threatening to overwhelm him. Plenty of women in this town had touched him. Several, in fact. Starting when he was barely twelve. Whatever his father had hoped to accomplish by forcing them on him had failed miserably.
He couldn’t make himself respond to their touch just because his father loomed over them, screaming at him. If he could have responded to any girl, it would be Gemma. But she wasn’t any more interested in boys than he was in girls. Gemma wasn’t interested in anybody at all, much to the dismay of every man who courted her where she danced at G’s Lounge.
Gemma pushed a lock of hair from Memphis’s eyes. “There’s nobody in this town worthy of touching you, M. They’re all cowards. They let your father get away with murder. Even the fucking sheriff. I just don’t understand it. There has to be somebody who will stand up to him.”
“It won’t matter. If my father dropped dead tomorrow, his whole operation would just go to Nash, and he would be just as bad as my father. He’s got the whole MC watching his back. All I can do is make a run for it and hope he doesn’t care enough to come find me.”
“Where are you gonna go?” Gemma asked.
“Los Angeles? Hollywood? Some place where nobody cares if I’m gay,” he said offhand, having no real plan other than just running as far and fast as he could from the podunk Southern California town of barely six hundred people.
