Behind me, Haven whispers, “Filthy fucking liar.” I reach behind me and push her out of sight behind my back. The way she trusts me to shield her from him makes my chest tight with something that feels dangerously like affection.
“Are you injured?”
His head is still down. He shakes it. “No, Sir.”
“So that’s someone else’s blood on your face? Are the police going to show up at my house?”
Kai holds out his arms, head bobbing as he scans himself. “It’s paint, Sir.”
I step out onto the porch and drag my finger over Kai’s jaw. He lifts his head, eyes flickering away before settling on me. Then my finger, as I hold it up for him to see.
“Fuck.” He swipes at his face with a hand. Looks at his palm. Swipes with the other hand. Could just be the fall of the light or some more ‘paint’, but it looks the knuckles on this one are bloody and bruised. “Fuck,fuck.”
My mind goes to the ambulance we passed on the way over here.
Melissa hadn’t said who had padlocked Haven’s collar. I’d assumed it was Kai.
Maybe it wasn’t.
I sincerely doubt the two incidents aren’t related. Which means he was trying to protect her.
Kai flinches when I grab his shoulder, but doesn’t resist when I draw him inside my home. “I think you need to take a shower, Kai.”
When I turn, Haven is left exposed, and she freezes up when Kai steps closer to her. They stare at each other like strange cats, Haven’s hands curling into fists, Kai’s hands opening into stiff blades.
Two kids who used to love each other, now broken by circumstance and drugs, and I’m the puppet master who gets to decide how this plays out.
“Haven, turn on the fireplace.”
She starts, turning wide eyes to me.
“Now.”
Kai throws me a quizzical look, but I seize the back of his neck and steer him to my bathroom, not giving him time to ask whatever question is brewing in his drug-addled mind.
“Why is she here?” he asks, sounding so forlorn and confused that I almost pity him.
“More importantly, why areyouhere, Kai?”
I walk him into the shower cubicle like I had Haven. Unlike her, he turns to face me, frowning. “You took her.”
“I didn’ttakeher,” I say, my eyes dropping to his trash bag. I start ripping it apart with my fingers, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. “Ihelpedher. She’s just gone through something very traumatic. I’m simply giving her a safe place to decompress.”
“Safe,” he murmurs, looking down as I tear the last shreds of plastic off his skin. He scrapes his nails over his chest like he’s trying to get rid of the paint. I flip him around, reach past him, and turn on the faucet.
He immediately turns his head up to the spray, and it’s like I cease to exist.
“I’ll go fetch you some clean clothes.”
Kai ignores me, his hands sliding over his face as he washes off the blood and the paint.
I find a pair of sweats and a t-shirt that will fit him, and go back into the bathroom to put it on the counter.
When I look over at Kai, I get the feeling he’s staying in that shower until the warm water runs out. He’s taken off his boxers, lathering soap over himself with long, lazy strokes, swiveling his head around in the spray.
He’s so zoned out, he doesn’t even know I’m here. Just like Haven, completely vulnerable, mine to do with as I please. I stay to watch for a few minutes, my dick getting hard at the sheer second-hand ecstasy he’s so blatantly experiencing.
Two beautiful broken students in my house, both high and defenseless. Either it’s Christmas morning, or I’ve just stumbled onto the road to perdition.
