He grinned.
“I always hated the Brady Bunch. Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” he sang in falsetto. He sobered quickly though, when he realized I was serious.
“I don’t know yet. I could move there. You could move here. Or maybe… we do something in between,” he shrugged. “All I care about is… that I haven’t felt as alive with anyone as I do with you. How about we take it one day at a time, to start. We’ll wait and see where it goes from there.”
His green eyes bored into me, seeming to chip away at the stony wall around my heart.
“Okay,” I answered. “One day at a time.”
“In the meantime,” He teased, his hand beginning to roam lower and lower on my body. “I think I have an idea on how to help with one of our challenges,” he said.
I was pretty sure what he meant by “challenges”, but the fact hesaid “our” made my heart do little flips in my chest. I tried to keep the heat from blooming on my cheeks, but I knew it was there anyway.
“I’ve noticed that when something sets you off, you seem to just kind of… go away, inside your own head,” he said, his fingers continuing to absentmindedly stroke my skin.
I nodded. “Dissociation. I called it goingbetween,after something I’d read as a kid. My therapist has been working with me on it. When I was…when things were bad, it was how I escaped. I’d go into my own head, make up stories, characters… I’d only come back to myself after it was all over.”
Lee’s arms tightened around me. I could feel the tension in his body as I spoke, anger making him tense. Part of me froze. Anger, I understood. I knew what happened with anger.
Lee must have felt me still beneath his touch, because he shook me gently, then scooted out from behind me and turned to face me.
“Mason, I’m not mad at you,” he said, concerns growing on his face. “I’m furious at all the bastards who hurt you, all the adults who turned a blind eye, but mostly I’m angry at your uncle. I’m really glad he’s not in your life anymore,” he said.
“…me, too,” I whispered, my voice small and thin. There was no way he could understand how happy. As he moved, the wonderful smell that surrounded him hit my nose again.
“Yeah, well, mine might be for different reasons. I really don’t need to go to jail for killing the son of a bitch,” he answered as he moved down on the bed, his body blocking the morning sunlight that streamed through the glass doors, creating a halo effect around his body.
I froze, the words echoing in my ears. “I really don’t need to go to jail.” That voice, thatsmell,everything clicked. My mind began playing another slide show. This time, of the person who had saved my life. His height, his walk. The walking cane in the closet. My Dark Angel. The man who had saved me from death, and worse. My Dark Angel wasLee.
“Mason?Mason, what is it?” he asked, shaking me gently, turning me around in front of him so he could see my face. “What is it?”
Flashes of breakfast yesterday when he had been such a goof. Malone. Mason Malone. He’d called me by my real last name yesterday and I hadn’t noticed.
My thoughts turned to the past. The timeline fit. It would have been about three years after Mack died. He’d been there. My Lee. He’d been a customer. The customer who had saved my life.
“You’rehim.” I said, my voice desperately thin as I shrank away from him. “You son of a bitch. You’rehim.”
Not a question, a statement. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Lee was my Angel, but he’d also been a customer, and customers were the source of my humiliation, the cause of all my pain. If it wasn’t for men like him, men who liked little boys who couldn’t fight back, there wouldn’t be thousands of kids in the world forced into prostitution.
“It wasyou. You wereoneofthem,” I growled, pulling away from him. “A customer!” I spat at him, fury growing in my chest. Part of me hoped he would deny it, say the awful certitude growing in my chest was wrong.
I saw his eyes turn from concern, to confusion, to understanding, all in a heartbeat. His eyes, his beautiful green eyes, normally so open and honest, shuttered as if someone had drawn the blinds, and I saw something cross his face I’d never expected to see there. Shame. Anger, too. Grief, as well, but a whole helluva lot of shame.
His hands dropped away from my skin like I’d burned him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. This time,hewas the one who ran.
21
Lee
I didn’t even knowhow I ended up dressed, but before I knew it, I was pulling the Jeep onto the highway, my soul sick from the look on Mason’s face.
He’d known. He knew who I was. He knew what I’d done. And he hated me for it.
I felt the tears running down my face, but I didn’t care. I deserved his hatred, deserved his contempt.Fuck. Well, what had Ithoughtwas going to happen? I knew this would happen eventually, but to figure it out on his own, without me acknowledging what happened, had to be the worst sort of way for the truth to come out.
I swiped my eyes with the back of my hand and struggled to focus on the road. There wasn’t much traffic at this time of day, but one thing I’d learned as a driver was never to underestimate the stupidity of other people. I’d seen way too many close calls or outright accidents just because people drove distracted. Food, phones, kids, fucking laptops. I’d seen a lot of distracted drivers, and that wasn’t even counting the ones I was pretty sure were drunk or high.
