Chapter 39
Add a Hunger Die
Player One
Asher was trying to be patient and understanding.
He really was. He knew how sensitive and soft Levi was; he knew Levi was adjusting, and he was okay with that…
mostly. He could wait for Levi to return physical affection this time.
But Levi’s stomach was growling loudly, and if he heard it growl again, he was going to lose his fucking mind.
Three times his body had told him it was hungry, and three times Levi had ignored it.
Why won’t you eat?
He’d been trying for two days. Eggs, soup, broth, bread.
Different textures, different temperatures, different times of day.
The broth stayed down for one sip. Everything else came back up.
The tube was keeping Levi alive, but the tube wasn’t eating, and it was pissing him off, because Levi was treating his body like a machine to be maintained.
Levi was perfect and beautiful and everything Asher never knew he wanted, and he was treating himself like a thing.
Asher wanted to grab that tube and rip it out of his face, because a piece of plastic shouldn’t be feeding Levi.
He should. That tube was another piece of wall between them.
How could Levi ever need him the right way if he relied on fucking plastic to feed himself?
Something is wrong with you, and it’s not your throat, and it’s not the food. I’m going to figure out what it is.
Asher got out of bed, but Levi didn’t turn over.
He went through the freezer — he’d looked at it two days ago, he knew what was in it.
A bag of frozen vegetables. Two ice cube trays.
A frost-burned pizza he wasn’t going to try.
And behind the pizza, a pint of unopened vanilla ice cream, the cheap one with the cardboard lid. He grabbed it and a spoon.
Levi had turned over. He watched Asher come back from the kitchen with a pint of vanilla ice cream, and his face twisted up all cute, the same way it got whenever Asher surprised him with something new.
Asher really wanted to grab his face and kiss him, but he reminded himself that he could do that later.
He had never really been one for physical affection, but everything about Levi made his mind go wobbly and want pointless things and wastes of time.
“It’s six in the morning,” Levi croaked.
“I know.” Asher sat on the edge of the bed. He held the pint between his knees and let it soften. “We’re going to try something different.”
“I don’t want to throw up ice cream at six in the morning, Asher,” Levi said, rolling his eyes.
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” He dug the spoon in and let the ice cream sit on it, softening. “I want to tell you something while it melts. You don’t have to eat it yet. Just let me talk.”
Levi looked at the spoon. He looked at Asher. He pulled the blanket higher on his chest and didn’t say no, which was the closest thing to yes Asher was going to get.
“When I was eleven,” Asher began, running his fingers along Levi’s side and trying very hard not to smile when Levi didn’t flinch, “Marianne got a call from my father. He left when I was three to start over with someone else. Marianne hadn’t talked to him in years, and he just called out of the blue because his new kid — my half-brother — was turning eight and he wanted Marianne to know.
I don’t know why. Maybe he wanted to hurt her. Maybe he just wanted someone to tell.”
“That seems cruel,” Levi said softly.
Asher just shrugged.
“Marianne came into my room and said, ‘it’s probably a good thing your father left. At least one of his children gets to be normal.’”
Levi gasped, grabbing Asher’s hand at his side. For a moment, Asher thought Levi was trying to make him stop touching him, but he just held Asher’s hand, his eyebrows upturned, and his lower lip sucked between his teeth. He looked…sad?
That’s not the right way to react to this…
“I didn’t say anything,” Asher continued. “I didn’t cry. I don’t think I felt anything about it, really. But I knew it was wrong. I knew she wasn’t allowed to say that to me. So I stopped eating to teach her a lesson.”
He scooped a spoonful of ice cream, watching it melt at the edges.
“The hunger strike lasted nine days. Marianne didn’t notice for the first three, because she wasn’t paying attention.
She noticed on day four because I passed out at school.
By day seven, she was scared. By day nine, I was in the hospital with an IV in my arm.
She was sitting in the chair next to the bed, and her hands were shaking.
She asked me why. I told her very clearly,” He looked at Levi.
“‘I don’t care if you like me. But you’re not allowed to talk to me like that. ’”
The apartment was quiet, but Levi’s eyes were huge. Asher wasn’t sure if it was surprise, or awe, or just Levi being in love with him. It was probably all three.
“When I was hungry,” Asher continued, tilting the spoon and watching the dollop of ice cream slide around on it, “when my stomach was growling, and I was dizzy, and I could have eaten — I had a thought. The thought was this: she needs to see what happens when she tries to hurt me. She needs to feel it. The hunger wasn’t about food.
It was about making her understand that I was a person she couldn’t say things to without consequence. ”
He held the spoon toward Levi’s mouth.
“Your stomach’s been growling all morning. You haven’t moved. I need to know what you’re thinking when your stomach growls and you still don’t eat.”
Levi looked at the spoon. The vanilla dripped onto the sheet near his face, a wet circle spreading into the cotton, and Asher watched it spread, wanting to put his thumb in it.
“I don’t know,” Levi said.
“You’re lying.” He pushed the spoon closer. “You know exactly what you’re thinking when your stomach growls. There’s a thought in your head telling you not to swallow, and I need to know what it is, and you’re going to tell me.”
Something shifted in Levi’s face. What came up under the sadness was harder, older — the stubbornness Asher had seen in the game when Levi decided he wasn’t going to do something, and no amount of threat was going to move him.
“No,” Levi said.
Asher’s chest unlocked.
There you are.
He’d been working with this mostly deflated version of Levi for two days, but this was the other one. The one Asher knew. The one who looked at Asher while barricaded in a room he knew he had no chance of escape from, and threw a lamp at him anyway.
“Open,” Asher said.
Levi didn’t. He pursed his lips and glared at him, and Asher’s mouth went dry the way it had in the sanitarium, the way it always did when Levi decided to make him work for it.
He popped the ice cream in his own mouth, set the spoon and the carton aside, and moved.
His knees came down on either side of Levi’s hips, and his weight settled on the mattress before Levi had time to flinch. Levi yelped, a small sound, and Asher kept his mouth closed around the cold as his weak hands pushed at Asher’s chest.
His fingers wrapped the sides of Levi’s neck, his palm settled against the windpipe, and he squeezed.
Levi tried to pry his fingers loose first, then he clawed at Asher’s wrist instead. His legs kicked under the blanket.
Open it. Open your mouth, baby.
Levi’s face went red and then violet at the edges.
His eyes were wet. His pulse hammered under Asher’s fingers, and each beat went up his arm, landed somewhere behind his ribcage, all while Asher held him there and watched and felt every single one.
His own breath was loud. His own heart was big.
Levi’s legs stopped kicking and started shifting — hips arching, his body trying to find an angle that would buck Asher off, and not finding it, and not stopping.
His mouth opened finally, begging for air, and Asher sealed his mouth over Levi’s.
Vanilla. Cold. Levi’s nails were still on his wrist, and his other hand found the back of Asher’s neck, holding on.
Levi kissed him back like he hungered for the air and the kiss in equal measure, gasping where he could, his throat moving beneath Asher’s palm as he swallowed and kept kissing him anyway.
Yes.
He pulled back an inch. Levi was looking up at him with his eyes streaming and his mouth open and his chest heaving, and what Asher saw in his face wasn’t fear. It was exhaustion.
The ice cream stayed down.
“What do you think,” Asher asked, his thumb moving across Levi’s pulse, “when your stomach growls and you don’t eat?”
Levi’s jaw worked. “Fuck you.”
Asher’s chest did the warm thing again. He scooped another spoonful and held it out. Levi’s mouth was a line.
His hand went back to Levi’s throat. The cartilage shifted under his palm — that small, undeniably painful give of a windpipe under pressure, but now it felt different, because under his hand right now was a person he was not going to kill. He was going to feed him.
Levi’s mouth opened on the gasp that couldn’t come. Asher slid the spoon in and kissed him.
Levi kissed him back harder this time. His hand came off Asher’s wrist, threaded through his hair, and pulled.
He swallowed against Asher’s mouth, let out half a sob, and didn’t stop the kiss.
Asher’s whole body was hot. His cock pressed hard against the front of his pants, and he was so far from ashamed of it that he almost laughed.
This was working. Levi was eating. Levi was kissing him.
Levi’s body was telling him the truth his mouth wouldn’t.
He pulled back. His hand stayed on Levi’s throat — resting now, not squeezing. “Tell me. What’s the thought?”
Levi’s face crumpled, and what was underneath was raw and young and hurt, and Asher’s stomach dropped because that face had always been the face that broke him.
“That it doesn’t matter,” Levi whispered.
“That none of it — that she was right. That it was a game…or maybe it still is a game, and I mean nothing…all of it means nothing, and I—I’m sitting in my apartment with a tube in my face, and no one is coming, and it doesn’t matter if I eat because it doesn’t matter if I —”
He stopped.
It doesn’t matter if I’m here.
She did this. Marianne. She told him it was just a game, and he believed her, stopped eating, and Asher had not been there. The not-being-there was the part Asher could not forgive himself for.
He was here now.
He held out another scoop.
Levi looked at the spoon, then at Asher, his chin trembling.
Then he opened his mouth.
Asher’s chest cracked open like a door. He put the ice cream on Levi’s tongue, slowly, and watched as Levi’s mouth closed around the spoon. His eyes closed, and he swallowed, tears tracking down the sides of his face into his hair; Asher watched them go and wanted to lick every one of them off.
“This is real. This isn’t the game. Your body wants to be here, Levi — it’s been telling me so this whole time. It’s just waiting for the rest of you to believe it,” he said softly. “I love you, Levi. I’m not going to let you disappear.”
He’d say it again tomorrow. He’d say it the day after that, and every day going forward until it stuck.
You’re not allowed to leave me.
He kept that one behind his teeth. There would be time for it later. For now, there was the spoon and the mouth and the swallow, the slow melting carton on the bed, and Asher’s free hand still on Levi’s throat, because letting go of the throat felt like letting go of the proof that Levi was here.
Levi cried through ten more spoonfuls.
He took his hand off Levi’s throat and set the carton and the spoon on the ground and lay down, pulling Levi against his chest. Levi came willingly — boneless in the way that meant he was done fighting for the day, and Asher would take that.
Levi’s face was on his sternum, his hands clutching at Asher’s shirt.
His chest was so full he could barely breathe.
“Tomorrow,” he said into Levi’s hair, “we try something real. Eggs again. If your throat closes, I’ll open it. If you gag, I’ll hold you. If you cry — “ he kissed the top of Levi’s head — “I’ll hold you for that too.”
Levi didn’t answer. His fingers just tightened in Asher’s shirt.
Asher closed his eyes and held him, and with every breath Levi let out against him, he felt the aches in his body vanish.
His heart hurt a little all the time now, mostly because he worried about Levi in a way he had never worried about anything before, but his physical discomfort?
The soreness in his muscles and the burning in his thigh?
Those meant nothing when Levi was near and close and his.
He was going to feed Levi every day for the rest of their lives.
He was going to be very good at it.