22. R #2
Asher pressed the knife harder and Levi flinched, the thin skin of his throat splitting enough to drip blood down his collar. “Sit down,” Asher snapped at Jasper. “If your foot leaves the floor, I’ll take his fucking eye out. Do you want to pick which one, or should I choose?”
Jasper sat.
“Say you love me,” Asher whispered, his quivering lips returning to Levi’s ear. “Please. Levi, please, I need to hear you say it.”
“No.” Levi blinked rapidly, blood and tears in his eyes blurring the room.
Part of him was thankful for that. He wasn’t going to cave this time.
He couldn’t. If he did, they would just end up doing this again.
More pain. More death. More fucking monsters made from his memories by a god damn headset that was creeping through his mind.
“Then say you’re mine.”
“No.”
“LEVI —” The knife trembled at his neck. Asher’s breathing was wrong — panicked-fast, ragged, like the sound of something running out.
“I said no!” Levi shouted as the knife pressed deeper into his skin, the serrated teeth catching the edge of the wound and tearing the skin open.
“Fine.” Asher stabbed the knife into the table.
“You won’t say you love me. You won’t say you’re mine.
” In one sharp yank, Asher pulled Levi’s pants down to his thighs, and it wasn’t until the cool air of the room hit his bare skin that Levi realized what he did.
There was a sharp, high shriek from somewhere in the room—Maddie or Zoe, he couldn’t tell.
“If they’re not real, and I’m not real, then none of what I do matters, right?
Nothing I do to you in front of them matters, because this is all a fucking game to you. ”
“Don’t —” Levi’s voice broke for the first time as Asher’s bloody palm stroked up one leg, the glass shard catching the sensitive skin on his inner thigh. “Asher, don’t do this—”.
Asher said nothing as he squeezed Levi’s thigh once, digging the glass deeper into both of them, before he pulled back. Levi’s blood turned to ice at the sound of the metallic clink of Asher’s belt buckle, louder than anything else in the room.
“Please don’t do this,” Levi whimpered, his face burning as the fact settled over him that Asher wasn’t bluffing. “Asher —”
“Say you want me to fuck you. Right now,” Asher snarled.
“No!” The defiance was back, smaller now, running on fumes. “I’m not going to humiliate myself for you anymore.”
“”I will do it, Levi, I will do it right here on this table and they will watch me do it and you will let me because you — you said I’m not REAL, you said it, you said it in front of all of them and if I’m not real then NOTHING I DO MATTERS —”
Asher’s whole body shook like the frame of him was coming apart.
Levi could feel, through all of it — the blood, the pain, the bare skin, the hand with the glass — Asher’s heart hammering against his back.
If I don’t give him something he’s going to do it.
He will do it. He’s past the place where he won’t.
Levi closed his eyes. “I want you to fuck me.”
Asher yanked his head back harder. “Louder.”
“I want you to fuck me,” Levi said the words louder, his breath catching on a sob he didn’t know was building in his throat. “Please. Just…j-just take me to the room. Not here. Please.”
“Tell them.”
He opened his eyes. The lounge was blurred through the tears and the blood but he could see them — Maddie’s face in her hands, Jasper’s arms around her, Owen’s back, Zoe’s white knuckles on the bar, Tyler’s face red as Elliot held him down in a chair.
“I want him to fuck me.” Each word felt like it tore from the center of him, bloody and raw, and each one took with it something he wasn’t going to get back.
Asher pulled Levi up from the table, forcing his face into his chest as his arms crushed them together. “Good boy. That’s…that’s good,” he murmured into Levi’s hair. “Thank you, baby. Thank you.”
Asher walked him toward the doorway, and Levi’s feet moved because his feet moved.
His whole body felt strangely disconnected from the rest of him as they left the lounge.
Asher kept whispering to him, his arms still locked so tightly around Levi it felt like he couldn’t draw a full breath, but none of the words made it past his eardrums. All he could do was stare at the growing wet spot of tears and snot and blood on Asher’s shirt where his face pressed.
And then they were back in the room.
Asher was on him before Levi registered the sound of the chain lock sliding into place on the door.
Both hands dug into Levi’s face, the bloody one smearing red across his jaw, and his mouth was on Levi’s.
Asher kissed him and Levi felt tears that were not his own on his skin as a thumb pushed against the hinge of his jaw to force his mouth open.
“Kiss me back,” Asher gasped against him. “Baby, kiss me back. You have to kiss me back.”
“No.”
Asher made a frustrated sound at the back of his throat and the sound turned into another kiss, rougher, his hand in Levi’s hair, his body pressing Levi back against the door.
His knee came up between Levi’s thighs, pinning him against the wood, his bloody hand trailing down to Levi’s neck, his chest, his waist, scraping the glass and squeezing everywhere in a sequence of touches that had no order to them.
It was like he was checking every inch of Levi to make sure he was still there.
“Asher, stop!” Levi snapped, pressing against Asher’s shoulders.
“I need you to kiss me back.”
Levi shoved with both hands and Asher stumbled half a step backward. “Enough!”
Asher’s hand closed on Levi’s arm and yanked, pulling him off the door hard, his feet catching on the rug, and pulled him toward the bed.
Levi pushed against him with his free hand and got nowhere, because Asher’s whole body was committed to the direction of the mattress.
The back of Levi’s knees hit the mattress and Asher shoved him down.
“I thought we were happy, Levi,” he whispered.
“Why can’t you be happy here with me? Why? ”
Levi swung. His right hand caught Asher across the jaw, the angle wrong and with not enough force, but Asher’s head still snapped to the side. He pressed down on Levi’s shoulders.
“I don’t want to do this, but you keep making me!” Asher’s voice climbed past desperation and into something absolute. “I’ll tie you down if I have to. I’ll make you understand. You’re mine, Levi. You’ve always been mine and you’re not allowed to leave me!”
Levi bucked against his weight. He cleared maybe an inch of space and tried to swing again, but Asher caught his wrists, holding both with one hand as he hauled Levi up the bed and towards the headboard. “Let me go!”
“I don’t care if it takes another reset.
I don’t care if it takes one hundred years of resets, I’ll make you understand,” Asher said, shaking his head as he pulled his belt free, his face a ruin of splotchy cheeks and tears.
“I am not letting you get killed for things that don’t matter. The only thing is this. Us. Together.”
I believe him. He’s terrified. He’ll keep me here until I forget about being a person too…
Levi’s chest heaved against Asher’s weight, his wrists screaming from the awkward angle Asher held them, and when he opened his mouth to tell Asher to let go, words poured out of him from the place where the true things lived: “I love you.”
Asher froze.
“I love you, Asher.” He said it again because the first one had been true and the second one was also true, but he also knew it would make Asher stop. “And I’m a fucking idiot, because I want to love you outside of here.”
“Levi —” Asher’s jaw dropped open, then the corners of his mouth twitched up as the full force of Levi’s words hit him. His grip loosened.
“But I’m not doing this anymore,” Levi said softly. “And if you won’t leave with me, then fine. I’ll stay. That’s what you want, right? I’ll stay. But you’re going to watch me die forever.”
Levi yanked his right hand free and found a glass by the clock, barely processing the sound of shattering as he smashed it against the edge of the nightstand.
He kept his eyes on Asher’s face, the tentative smile dropping, his eyes widening as confusion washed over him.
The shard of glass he held was warm, already slick with blood from a wound he couldn’t feel, and Asher froze for just a moment, and a moment was all Levi needed.
The glass went into his neck where the steak knife had already opened the shallow cuts and went deeper.
The cold of it came first, then warm, the inside of his throat warming the glass to his body temperature.
Asher tried to pull his wrist back, but he just tore the glass deeper, ripping a line through skin and muscle.
“NO! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS AGAIN?” Asher screamed, jamming his palm over the wound.
Levi’s hand went loose. The shard fell somewhere.
Asher was trying to say something and Levi couldn’t hear it over the respirator, which had gotten very loud, louder than it had ever been, cycling in his ears the way it had cycled in Ethan’s room.
He felt Asher’s weight on him, pressing down with shaking hands.
His vision was going…
I love you, Levi thought. Small and clean and true. I can’t do this anymore.
The dark came in from the edges. Levi just closed his eyes and let it take him.