Chapter 20 Mason #2
I sighed, looking up at him. His eyes had turned thoughtful and sad.
I didn’t like seeing sad Lee. I reached my hand up and traced the skin on his face, across his upper lip, his nose, his eyebrows.
I felt like I was memorizing his face with my fingers.
I brushed my fingertips across his eyelashes, feeling the spindly weight of them, resilient and protective. Kind of like the man himself.
“What?” he asked, looking down at me, a suspicious look on his face.
“What, what?” I asked.
“You’re smiling,” he said, as if that was sufficient explanation.
“So? Can’t a guy smile when he’s looking at his…
” I paused, unsure how to finish the sentence.
What did I call him? We hadn’t really talked about this.
I was going back to Seattle in a few days, and Lee would go back to his life.
There was no way a long-distance relationship could work.
We hadn’t known each other long enough to just say “friend”, “lover” seemed too intense.
Fuck. Where was my Word Boy persona when I needed him?
I thought Lee sensed my confusion, but he decided to tease me anyway.
“…When he’s looking at his… antelope?” Lee suggested.
“No,” I laughed.
“…polar bear?” He teased, and I laughed some more.
“No, asshat. What is it with you and animals? I just… I don’t know what to call… this,” I said, gesturing between us.
“Hmmm, okay. I understand your confusion. I know we haven’t really talked about this,” Lee began, sitting up and leaning against the headboard, but pulling me up to rest against his chest.
“But I was kind of hoping that at some point you’d maybe feel comfortable calling me your… boyfriend,” he whispered. “If that’s not too, um, grade school-ish.”
I could feel the tension in him as he said the magic words I'd been wanting to hear but had been too afraid to hope for.
“You know I’m a mess, right?” I asked, looking up at him. As if the last few days hadn’t been enough to make him realize. I had to go into full disclosure mode, because I couldn’t handle him ever feeling like I hadn’t prepared him for the fuckedupedness that was me.
“Yeah, I noticed,” he whispered down at me, his hand stroking across my chest. “I’m no catch, either, when it comes to that.”
“Riiiiight. In what world was that exactly?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “Is this like, Bizarro World, or something? Are we suddenly sporting mustaches and goatees, so everyone can tell we’re evil?”
“I think that was Star Trek, not Bizarro World. But, no, I promise. No facial hair,” he teased, the backs of his fingers stroked over my cheek and over my top lip. “Other than morning scruff, that is,” he smiled.
“What about the fact that I live, oh, a few thousand miles away? And that you have an extended family that makes the Brady Bunch look like a traditional nuclear family?”
He grinned.
“I always hated the Brady Bunch. Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” he sang in falsetto. He sobered quickly though, when he realized I was serious.
“I don’t know yet. I could move there. You could move here. Or maybe… we do something in between,” he shrugged. “All I care about is… that I haven’t felt as alive with anyone as I do with you. How about we take it one day at a time, to start. We’ll wait and see where it goes from there.”
His green eyes bored into me, seeming to chip away at the stony wall around my heart.
“Okay,” I answered. “One day at a time.”
“In the meantime,” He teased, his hand beginning to roam lower and lower on my body. “I think I have an idea on how to help with one of our challenges,” he said.
I was pretty sure what he meant by “challenges”, but the fact he said “our” made my heart do little flips in my chest. I tried to keep the heat from blooming on my cheeks, but I knew it was there anyway.
“I’ve noticed that when something sets you off, you seem to just kind of… go away, inside your own head,” he said, his fingers continuing to absentmindedly stroke my skin.
I nodded. “Dissociation. I called it going between, after something I’d read as a kid. My therapist has been working with me on it. When I was…when things were bad, it was how I escaped. I’d go into my own head, make up stories, characters… I’d only come back to myself after it was all over.”
Lee’s arms tightened around me. I could feel the tension in his body as I spoke, anger making him tense. Part of me froze. Anger, I understood. I knew what happened with anger.
Lee must have felt me still beneath his touch, because he shook me gently, then scooted out from behind me and turned to face me.
“Mason, I’m not mad at you,” he said, concerns growing on his face. “I’m furious at all the bastards who hurt you, all the adults who turned a blind eye, but mostly I’m angry at your uncle. I’m really glad he’s not in your life anymore,” he said.
“…me, too,” I whispered, my voice small and thin. There was no way he could understand how happy. As he moved, the wonderful smell that surrounded him hit my nose again.
“Yeah, well, mine might be for different reasons. I really don’t need to go to jail for killing the son of a bitch,” he answered as he moved down on the bed, his body blocking the morning sunlight that streamed through the glass doors, creating a halo effect around his body.
I froze, the words echoing in my ears. “I really don’t need to go to jail.
” That voice, that smell, everything clicked.
My mind began playing another slide show.
This time, of the person who had saved my life.
His height, his walk. The walking cane in the closet.
My Dark Angel. The man who had saved me from death, and worse. My Dark Angel was Lee.
“Mason? Mason, what is it?” he asked, shaking me gently, turning me around in front of him so he could see my face. “What is it?”
Flashes of breakfast yesterday when he had been such a goof. Malone. Mason Malone. He’d called me by my real last name yesterday and I hadn’t noticed.
My thoughts turned to the past. The timeline fit. It would have been about three years after Mack died. He’d been there. My Lee. He’d been a customer. The customer who had saved my life.
“You’re him.” I said, my voice desperately thin as I shrank away from him. “You son of a bitch. You’re him.”
Not a question, a statement. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Lee was my Angel, but he’d also been a customer, and customers were the source of my humiliation, the cause of all my pain.
If it wasn’t for men like him, men who liked little boys who couldn’t fight back, there wouldn’t be thousands of kids in the world forced into prostitution.
“It was you. You were one of them,” I growled, pulling away from him. “A customer!” I spat at him, fury growing in my chest. Part of me hoped he would deny it, say the awful certitude growing in my chest was wrong.
I saw his eyes turn from concern, to confusion, to understanding, all in a heartbeat.
His eyes, his beautiful green eyes, normally so open and honest, shuttered as if someone had drawn the blinds, and I saw something cross his face I’d never expected to see there.
Shame. Anger, too. Grief, as well, but a whole helluva lot of shame.
His hands dropped away from my skin like I’d burned him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. This time, he was the one who ran.