Chapter 15
15
GAVIN
B eck took me to the psychiatry appointment, where I told the lady I was doing just great, never been better, and she still prescribed me medication for depression anyway. She referred me to a therapist named Dr. Varu that she highly recommended, and while I didn’t want to do therapy, I also didn’t want Beck to take me back to that fucking hospital, so I’d made an appointment for a few days from now.
After the psychiatry appointment was over, Beck stopped by a pharmacy and filled the prescription and made me take the first pill.
And by made, I mean he gently told me that it wouldn’t hurt to try it, and if I really didn’t feel like it was helping, I could stop. That I was in charge of all of this, that these were only suggestions, but the first step was accepting help.
I just glared at him and took the stupid fucking pill.
Then we headed over to MMAd World , the gym I used to train at with him.
Of course this was where he worked. Beck was good enough to have gone pro—with wrestling or BJJ, although wrestling opportunities were much more scarce—but he hadn’t, and I didn’t understand why. I knew he had scouts looking at him in college.
I didn’t, and that really pissed my dad off.
The gym looked almost exactly the same as when we were kids. The floor was a huge open space split into sections that varied in size and purpose; there were mats everywhere and a small workout space with equipment and dumbbells tucked against the far wall.
It even smelled the same, and that smell brought with it a wave of memories that swept me back in time.
Memories of grappling with Beck, rolling around and trying to see who could make the other submit first. I always won, back then.
Memories of getting yelled at when we were caught goofing off. There were a lot of those.
Memories of belt ceremonies, of Beck smiling at me from the audience as I got my blue belt. My purple belt. Memories of watching him get his belts, too.
He wasn’t there to see me get my brown and black belts. After Beck and his mom moved, my dad canceled our membership here and made me switch to a different gym in the next town over. I’d hated the new one. I didn’t like the instructors, didn’t like my peers. I put all my anger and frustration into my training, needing some sort of outlet, and quickly became the top fighter in my group. In the county. In the state. Wrestling for school was a fucking breeze because of my jiu-jitsu training. They were different sports with different techniques and rules, yeah, but starting jiu-jitsu when I was seven gave me a leg up that the other athletes didn’t have. Beck, too.
“You wanna be out here or in my office?”
I glanced over at Beck. I couldn’t read his expression, but he’d seemed withdrawn and unhappy for the past few hours. I didn’t know what was bugging him so much. Probably whatever he’d been about to say this morning. He’d been quiet since then.
“Out here,” I muttered, looking around to find a place I could sit.
“We’ve got a beanbag chair, if you want to use that,” he told me, pointing toward one corner. “It’s pretty comfortable.”
How fucking stupid. What was this, daycare?
“Just go sit in the fucking chair, Gavin,” Beck snapped before I could say anything, like he’d read my mind. He walked away from me, across the floor to a hall in the back.
“Prick,” I said.
“I know, right?”
I whipped my head to the right. There was a tall, muscular guy walking around the reception desk. I guessed he’d been sitting there, and I hadn’t seen him because the front of it was so high. He was smiling at me, light blue eyes glittering with some kind of… knowing . As if he could read every thought that was passing through my mind.
Those eyes did a slow perusal of my body, and I was about to tell him to fuck off when he raised his gaze back to mine and said, “Huh. Thought you’d be smaller, with the way he talks about you.”
It took a second for his words to hit, and when they did, I took a step toward him. “What the fuck did you just?—”
“Gavin!”
Beck’s shout echoed across the open room, and I turned to find him stalking toward me.
“You fucking talking shit about me, Beck?” I said, seething.
“What?” When he reached me, he glanced at the blue-eyed asshole. “What did you just say to him? Jesus fucking Christ, Roman, what the fuck did I tell you!”
Roman—what a stupid fucking name—laughed and crossed his arms over his chest. He was probably about my height, but had a hell of a lot more muscle than I did. “I just said I thought he’d be smaller with how you’ve been talking about him, that’s all.”
Beck ran both hands through his hair and looked up at the ceiling. “Un-fucking-believable.” He fixed a mean glower on Roman. “Don’t say shit like that. In fact, don’t fucking talk to him at all, he doesn’t need that kind of bullshit so leave him the fuck alone.”
A spark of surprise had me parting my lips as I stared at Beck. Why was he coming to my defense? Why did he care if this guy harassed me?
Roman raised his hands in surrender and said, “All right, sorry, it was just an observation. He’s big and tall, is that better? Nothing small about him.” His eyes fell to my groin, and I wanted to punch him. “Well, that I can see right now, at least.”
I threw my crutches to the ground, not giving a single fuck about anything but knocking this asshole out. “You fucking piece of?—”
Beck’s arms banded around me, and he shook me. “Stop it,” he growled. “Just fucking stop, both of you! Roman, fuck off. I’m not even joking right now. I’ll deal with you later.”
Roman smiled and shoved his hands in his pockets as he walked away.
I fucking hated him. What a fucking asshole.
“Let go of me,” I snarled, jerking in his hold. He squeezed me tighter.
“Not until you calm down.” His mouth was right by my ear, and the way his voice slipped inside me, filling me up, had my blood heating. I started focusing on the hard lines of his body against mine, how his arms were crossed in front of me, his big hands wrapped around my biceps.
He was so fucking hot everywhere .
“Let go,” I said, needing to get away from him. “I’m fine, let go of me. I won’t attack your asshole friend.”
He kept holding me for a moment, and because his mouth was right beside my ear, I heard his sharp intake of breath when I squirmed against him.
He let go but kept his hand on my arm, then bent down and picked up my crutches.
“Don’t do that again. If you agitate your injury—or break your damn crutches—I’ll be really fucking pissed.” He didn’t meet my eyes, not once, and when I had my crutches in place, he said, “Go sit in the fucking beanbag,” and walked away.
I went and sat in the fucking beanbag.
Over a week passed, and every day I kept telling myself I’d leave tomorrow. Except then tomorrow would come and I stayed right where I was. I didn’t know why I hadn’t left yet. I knew the hospital only let me go because Beck had promised to take care of me. I knew that was why he was letting me stay, because he’d made a promise.
But I hadn’t made any promises, and there was no fucking reason for me to keep living with Beck.
I thought he would take me back to the shelter after that first day, but he never did. He just brought me with him to the gym every day, not saying a word about me leaving.
I didn’t say anything either, and I didn’t know why. I should’ve been trying to leave, to get the fuck away from him and his hero complex, but I wasn’t.
And if I thought that sitting around all day was going to be my new normal, I was mistaken.
Of course Beck wouldn’t let me just sit around the gym in his dumb fucking beanbag—which was actually really comfortable. Of course not. He was determined to distract me from myself with everything he could think of.
He got me a job at the gym, but because my mobility was severely limited, it was a bullshit job that had nothing to do with wrestling or BJJ. I filed paperwork, input client information into the database, and did light cleaning.
I hated it.
He told me I couldn’t just sit around all day and do nothing, which I’d been more than content to do, and I told him to fuck off.
He did not fuck off.
I didn’t tell Beck I’d never had a job before. That I’d tried to get one after getting out of jail, but no one would hire me because of my record and because of the video. My character and career choices were well and truly ruined.
Beck asked me if I had anything at the shelter that I needed to get—ID, personal belongings, clothes—and I told him no. Because I didn’t. The only ID I had was my driver’s license, and it was in my wallet that had mysteriously gone missing along with my clothes the night I got blackout drunk and ended up in some bushes. But it had expired over a year ago, so it was useless anyway. Any other important documents—birth certificate, social security card, passport—had all been at my dad’s house. Who the fuck knew if they were still there. He’d probably burned them all.
Beck took me to the DMV before work three days ago and I’d renewed my license. They made me take a new picture, and I looked like something that’d been dragged out of the bottom of a dumpster.
Roman quit bothering me, but the looks he gave me were derisive and packed with mockery. It was obvious he knew who I was, what I’d done.
I didn’t fucking care. Everybody knew. None of them could hate me more than I hated myself.
I was sitting at the reception desk, copying Beck’s schedule onto a new program they were using and listening to the sounds of grunts and shouts and praise from instructors when a sweaty Beck appeared behind me.
“How’s it going?”
He sounded slightly out of breath, like he’d just been on the floor rolling around with someone, and when I turned and looked at him, my cock jumped in my sweats—which were actually his sweats because I didn’t have any clothes. I grabbed a nearby piece of paper and set it on my lap.
His curls were damp with perspiration, drops of sweat dripping down his temples, and his eyes were lit with all the endorphins that were kicking through his system. His shirt looked two sizes too small, and when he shifted, I could clearly see the outline of his hard nipples. The veins in his arms were bulging over his muscles, and I wanted to lick it with my?—
“Gavin?”
“Fuck you, Beck,” I spat, swiveling in my chair and hunching over the keyboard.
Fuck. My palms were starting to sweat, and could he see my hands shaking?
“Hey,” he snapped, tone hard with anger now. He grabbed my chair and whipped me back around, those perfect brows of his drawn low. “What the fuck is your problem? Huh?”
I glared up at him, trying hard not to let my gaze drift to the forearm that was right by my face. He was gripping the chair right next to my head, standing way too fucking close, and I could smell the salty tang of sweat and something muskier coming from him. “I’m trying to do work here, can you leave me alone?”
“Can you not bite my head off every time I try to fucking talk to you? What the fuck happened to you, Gavin? You never used to be like this,” he said, eyes searching mine in a dizzying assessment that would excavate who the fuck knew what. “What did your dad do to you?”
My breathing picked up, and I leaned forward as his words slid inside me, cutting deep. The slow push of a dull knife. “You wanna know why I’m like this, Beck? You wanna know what he did?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said, his tone so sincere it only pushed that knife deeper. “I want to help you.”
Something vicious dug its claws into my heart, and I said, “You think he only hit me that day? You think that was the worst he did?” I scoffed. “That was fucking nothing. You will never know what it’s like to be so afraid of something you would do anything—fucking anything —to stop it from happening. Never.”
I could feel the urge to cry starting to rise, and the horror that I’d actually said that spread across my skin like frost, freezing and tightening every inch of me.
I hadn’t meant to say that. Any of that. And the look Beck was giving me, like I’d just stabbed him in the heart, was too much.
Fuck this. I wasn’t doing this shit right now. Or ever.
I tore my eyes off his and grabbed my crutches, pushing to stand. Beck didn’t move an inch, and my entire left side rubbed against his sweaty torso as I got to my feet. He was crowding me—with his body, his words, his kindness and empathy—and the antsy itch under my skin became a frenzied explosion of anger in two seconds flat.
With both crutches in one hand, I shoved hard against Beck, grunting as I pushed my shoulder into his chest and knocked him off balance.
I knocked myself off balance, too.
He fell onto the desk as I fell into him, sending a stapler flying to the floor, and when he growled and started to reach his arm under my shoulder, I dropped my crutches and turned until his arm was trapped between our bodies and I was pressing on top of him. He was half sitting, half leaning on the desk, and because of his position, my dick was level with his.
I was fucking hard, and he wasn’t.
There was no way he couldn’t feel it, and when he sucked in a breath and his eyes widened, my ultimate humiliation was complete.
With a burst of helpless desperation and raw fury, I tried to shove myself off him, but ended up just slamming my knee into the desk so hard that the stab of pain had me gasping and dropping my head forward. I was pushing my face into his chest now, and I didn’t even have the capacity to stop him when he planted his feet, stood up straight, and spun me until my back was against his chest. He gripped my forearms and pressed them into my sternum, panting in my ear.
“Calm down, Gavin. It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re safe,” he said breathlessly, his warm breath hitting my neck and making me shiver. He sounded so gentle that it scared the shit out of me.
“Let go of me,” I hissed, uselessly jerking against him.
I felt his forehead drop onto my shoulder, and my heart was hammering so hard I knew he could feel it.
“It’s okay,” he said again. “But I can’t keep doing this with you. I just don’t have the fucking energy for it.”
And then he let go of me, pushed me carefully back down into the chair, and walked away.
I sat in a stunned silence, staring at nothing. My foot was throbbing, but I didn’t have the courage to ask him for a painkiller.
I didn’t have any courage at all.