“Lots of forest and old cabins to hide in?” Makai made an educated guess. It had been surprising how many choices he’d had when trying to find a place to live around here, but most of them were in poor condition.
Emil nodded, petting Mouse. “I guess Dad got close. It wasn’t his job, really. The police department in Mercer was handling it, or so they said. Anyway, one day I was in Mercer after school, and someone….” Emil stopped and licked his lips. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the purring feline on his lap. “There was a van, suddenly, and someone pushed me inside and….”
Makai groaned. He’d done fucked up, hadn’t he? Looming right next to Emil, giving the illusion that he’d pushed him.
Emil swallowed hard, and his knobby fingers started to twiddle with Mouse’s ears. She let him do whatever he pleased, it seemed. Makai wondered if it was possible she knew how hard this was for Emil.
“It was one of the henchmen, I guess. They knocked me out in the van, so I wouldn’t scream. They… they had me for ten days. Before the FBI found me.”
“Kidnapped minor?”
“Oh yeah. It was a whole mess of FBI and DEA by then, with all the local forces and townspeople from here and Mercer trying to find me.” Emil smiled in a self-deprecating way that made Makai’s heart hurt.
“Do you want anything to drink?” Makai needed to have something in his hands to fiddle with. The label of a beer bottle seemed like a good option right then.
“Uh….”
“I’m having a beer. If I’m gonna talk about this stuff, I need a drink.” Makai hoped his tone sounded better to Emil than it did to himself. Fucking PTSD.
“Can I get one too?”
“Sure.”
He brought the bottle to Emil who still couldn’t meet his eyes, and went back to his chair. Maybe it was the hiss of the bottle or the smell, but Mouse decided she’d had enough and abandoned Emil on the couch. She walked pointedly back toward the bedroom.
Because Emil didn’t seem to be wanting to talk just then, Makai started to tell his own story. He basically went through what he’d told Mr. Miller, but with greater detail where it mattered.
He’d gotten to the point where he’d gone into the first prison and had to stop there. He also went to grab them both new drinks, because it seemed like they needed them.
“So, I was seventeen,” Emil said after accepting the full bottle. “I’d kissed this boy a couple of times at house parties and stuff, but there weren’t that many queer kids around, and being the sheriff’s son basically means no social life.”
“Nobody wants to invite the snitch?” Makai grinned wryly and got a snort and a nod from Emil.
“Right. So, when the… the people took me, I was basically a virgin in all accounts.”
Makai already didn’t like where this was going, but he couldn’t help but nod encouragingly. They needed to talk about all of this, after all.
“I…. First it wasn’t too bad. The first couple of days they gave me food and just kept me tied up. But then the… the woman came in and….” Emil downed half of his beer in one long gulp. “She was the boss, I think. The details are hazy. I didn’t want to know afterward. One of the men was her boyfriend. She…. Evy, my therapist, she says the woman was sadistic.”
Makai felt a weird protective rage rise from somewhere within, and he tamped it down quickly.
“She decided they didn’t need to feed me as much because she liked it when I got weaker. She… the last couple of days….”
Makai shook his head when he saw how difficult this was for Emil. “My turn.”
Emil nodded and curled up tightly again as if to protect himself from the discussion.
“In the first prison, I…. See, I went there as a tall skinny kid,” Makai explained.
Emil’s gaze snapped to him, looking incredulous. “What?”
“Yeah,” Makai said, then snorted. “I mean, I was pretty much as tall as I am now, but I was lanky. No muscle to speak of.”
“Wow….”
“Yeah, so, certain prisoners there, they saw me as an easy mark. It was….” He took a sip of his beer and leaned back in the chair, forcing his body to open up instead of close down. If he went that route, he’d be a sobbing mess in no time. “It was the usual gang-related shit first. The word was I’d been in the gang when I hadn’t, and they beat me up a couple of times. I spent some time in isolation just to calm the situation down after I’d healed. But then someone… a few guys, they cornered me one day in the laundry room where I was working, and….” His limbs jerked at the memory, the tremor trying to make its way into his body. He could’ve sworn the smell of linen drifted to him from somewhere. “They raped me. And when they got away with it, the next time they did it, it was much worse.”
He hazarded a look at Emil, and saw huge tears roll down his cheeks.
