Emil felt grateful to have his hands empty, and for the fact that Makai didn’t seem to want him to stop. It would’ve been easier, but Makai knew enough about trauma to know that if Emil stopped, he couldn’t talk about it again in a while. It needed to come out at once.
“She had them tie me down and she… she used my hands, my fingers to… to touch herself.” He flashed back to the moment when he’d known she could do whatever she wanted to him. That nobody cared if he screamed, and he couldn’t move his arms, tied to his sides as they were. He’d tried to resist, but she’d punched him and laughed when he’d cried. “She got off on it, literally.” He sobbed out the words. “She was talking about how she wanted to sit on my face but how she bet I was a biter, when her boyfriend walked in.”
Makai had somehow faded into the distance, as if everything, including him, was out of focus somehow. Emil could feel the emotions rolling off Makai, though. The way he wanted to come closer and comfort him physically but knew not to try.
“I went into my head then. I don’t know what happened. But the next day, she wasn’t there, and the boyfriend broke my fingers, one by one.” He shook hard enough to have trouble sitting down. “They tried to get me to eat with them once, but I… even if I could’ve held something, my hands… they smelled like h-her.” He managed to get the words out and stumble off the rock and into the bushes before he threw up.
His ears were ringing, and his stomach clenched violently until nothing came out but bile. He could feel someone behind him, and he stumbled sideways, falling on the rocks.
“No! Don’t touch me!” he yelled, gripped by the fact that someone was in his space, someone’s body heat was right there.
“I’m not touching you, Emil.”
Makai.Shit.“S-sor—”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Makai rumbled, and backed to where he’d sat before. “You’re safe. They’ll never touch you again.”
Everything came back into focus, and he came to on the ground, sitting on some rocks, the water lapping against the shore only a few feet away.
Slowly he got up and winced when his stomach contracted again.
Makai held out his glass. “Here, use it to rinse your mouth, but don’t drink any.”
Emil did as told, gagging at the taste of what he’d just thrown up. He poured the rest of the drink on the rocks as Makai did the same to his drink.
“Well, that was fun,” Emil murmured as he moved to his boulder.
“I’m sorry you had to talk about it,” Makai said, looking contrite.
“Hey, you need to know.”
“So, hands are….” It seemed like Makai didn’t know how to form the thought or the question, at least.
“I can jerk off sometimes, but occasionally I just… can’t. I don’t know how it’d be touching someone else.” Sometimes he couldn’t stay hard, and he had weird sense memories of how the woman’s sex had smelled on him. He would’ve liked to try fingering himself, he’d tried it enough in his teens to know he enjoyed it, but he just couldn’t physically make himself do it.
Makai seemed to notice he was lost in his head and just waited it out with him. Eventually, when he could talk again, Emil said, “I have no idea how we’d work. With all the issues between us.”
Smiling sadly, Makai nodded. “Maybe we don’t. But there’s no way of knowing that, and there’s no rush.”
“Well given that we’ve known each other for less than a week….” Emil ducked his head and chuckled.
“True. But I’m glad we talked about this. I… I think it’s important. Less fucking up when we know things like this.”
“Yeah….” Emil looked at Makai until their gazes locked. “I will never talk to anyone about what we shared today. Not even to Evy.”
“I won’t tell a soul, I promise.” Makai looked serious, but then humor entered his eyes and he held a hand toward Emil. “Pinky promise.”
Laughing, even through the occasional wooziness in his stomach, Emil reached to hook his pinky through Makai’s.
They got up soon after and started toward the house.
“You’re the only person I’ve talked about this except Evy,” Emil said thoughtfully. “I couldn’t talk about it to the shrinks they made me see. The woman, she didn’t admit to anything, and all they knew was that they’d tied me up, starved me, and someone had ruined my hands, because that was obvious when they found me.”
Makai hummed. “How long did it take for you to come home?”
“I was in the regular hospital for two months, and then at the psychiatric one for three more.” He opened the door because Makai had the glasses. “By the time I got home, people didn’t know what to do. The few friends I had from school didn’t know how to deal. I couldn’t be in the same room with anyone, and even my parents couldn’t touch me at all. Not that they do much now, but back then, I would scream and flip out and….” He didn’t like talking about it.
Makai took the glasses into the kitchen and came back with bottles of water for both of them.
