5. Theo
THEO
The only person who fucks Theo is me.
That's the sentence that ate the bar.
It came out of Maddox Creed's mouth about four seconds ago and it's still in the air like smoke in a room where somebody just burned toast. It'll be in the air forever.
I'm sitting on a stool at a high table against the wall. My hands are on the table. I put them there before Maddox said what he said. I was drinking a beer Jax pushed at me. The beer is still there. My hands are still there. Nobody in the bar is moving, except Jax. Jax is on the chair where Maddox put him, moving his jaw like he’s deciding if it’s broken or not. Blood on his shirt.
Breathe in. Four.
Hold. Seven.
Out. Eight.
The trouble with the breathing is that it works for any normal thing, and this isn't a normal thing. There's no four-seven-eight version of Maddox Creed announcing ownership of you in a bar on a Thursday night.
Around me the team is starting to remember how to talk.
I catch fragments. Grayson is standing in the middle of the floor with his arms out as if he can hold back the rest of the room by gesture.
Magnus is laughing. Magnus thinks this is funny.
Magnus would think a house fire was funny if the house was on someone he disliked.
Maddox was at the end of the bar. Then Phoenix went to him. Then they went outside. The outside swallowed them. Now Maddox is gone and I'm still here and my hands are still on the table and the beer is still there.
If I stand up, everyone will look.
If I don't stand up, everyone will look.
I don't stand up.
Here's what I notice, because there's nothing to do with my body and noticing is what my body does when there's nothing else to do.
The bar is called Vigil. The letters are etched into the mirror behind the bottles.
Somebody etched them who meant it. Every bottle has a price tag I can read if I squint.
There's a woman two tables over who hasn't looked up from her phone through any of this.
Green cardigan. I hate that I noticed the cardigan.
I'm afraid of what kind of person I become later tonight if I'm still noticing cardigans.
My heart is going too fast.
My mouth tastes like the beer I had one sip of.
My hands are on the table.
There's a spot on my jeans just above the knee where I rubbed a thumb too hard during the part where Jax was flirting with me.
The spot is slightly damp where my thumb sweat through the denim.
I see it now and I put my other hand over it because I don't want any trace of me visible that was there when it happened.
My face is hot.
My face is so hot I can feel my own pulse in my ears. I can feel my own pulse in other places too. I'm not going to list those places. There's a line between observation and something worse than observation and I'm going to sit on the right side of that line tonight if I do nothing else.
The team is still not talking to me.
Grayson comes to the table.
“Hey, Laurent.”
I nod. I can't find a word yet.
“You good?”
I nod again. It's a lie, but it's the lie the situation calls for.
Grayson looks at me like I'm a dog he isn't sure he's allowed to pet. Sympathetic but unwilling to reach in. He scans past me to the door where Phoenix and Maddox went, then back to me.
“Sit tight, yeah?”
I nod a third time.
He walks away.
I sit tight.
And then Maddox is back.
I don't see him come in. I feel him come in. The bar pressure drops the way it dropped when he walked out the first time. Conversations get quieter. Jax, upright on a stool now with a bar towel to his face, sees Maddox and flinches in a way that's going to make him embarrassed about himself later.
Phoenix told him to go home. I don't know that, but my body knows it the way my body has known everything tonight. Maddox didn't go home.
He's crossing the bar. He's coming to me.
My hands are on the table.
I can't move my hands.
He stops in front of the table. He puts a hand on the table next to my hand. Not on top of my hand. Next to it. Close enough that I can feel the heat of his knuckles. His shirt cuff has a spot of blood on it the size of a small coin. I think it's Jax's blood. I'm not sure whose blood.
“Sweetheart.”
I look up.
His face is a thing I've been avoiding for two days.
It's not a safer thing to look at now. The dark blue eyes.
The stubble. The corner of his mouth that doesn't smile so much as pull back on one side.
The scar above his eyebrow that was there when he walked into practice on day one and that he hasn't explained to anyone.
“We're going outside.”
I hear my own voice before I know I'm going to say anything.
“Coach.”
It comes out quiet. I don't know why that's the word I said.
There's no coach here. My coach is somewhere in this city thinking I'm on a team bonding night and not in a bar getting claimed by the enforcer my coach has benched twice this week.
The word coach came out of me because the inside of my head is a closed circuit and the only authority in the circuit is my father.
Maddox hears it. His mouth does a thing. Not a smile. A registration.
“Yeah,” he says. “Outside.”
He doesn't grab me. He doesn't have to. He tilts his head toward the back of the bar, toward a door I hadn't noticed, and pushes off away from the table. My body stands up after him like a thing I'm only renting.
Phoenix catches my eye as I pass. His face is the face of a man watching a car crash he can't look away from. He doesn't reach for me. He doesn't say anything. I think he wants to. I think he knows better.
Grayson is at the front of the bar near the main door, scanning the street through the window. I wonder what he's looking for. I don't wonder long. There isn't enough of me left to wonder long about anything that isn't moving in front of me.
Maddox pushes through the back door.
I follow him.
The alley behind Vigil smells like old beer, bleach, something rotting in a dumpster.
There's a security light over the door that turns Maddox into a silhouette with a bright edge.
The bricks are painted black. A bike is chained to a pipe.
Somewhere a car passes on the street at the far end. Its headlights sweep the wall and go.
He turns.
He puts a hand on my chest.
He walks me back until my shoulders hit the brick.
The brick is cold through my shirt. My shirt is new.
My shirt was new this morning when I put it on in the apartment I share with Paul and thought, this is fine, a team night is fine, I can do a team night.
I can feel every point where the brick presses my shoulder blades.
I can feel where his palm is open on the middle of my chest. I can feel, underneath his palm, my own heart going like it's trying to get past his hand.
He doesn't say anything for a second.
He's looking at me in a way that makes the looking into a separate act. It's a thing he's doing. It's a thing being done to me.
“Breathe,” he says.
I didn't know I had stopped.
I breathe.
I suck it in too fast and it stutters. I have to do it again. This time it goes down better. My face is wet. I hadn't noticed. Not crying. Just the eyes doing the thing they do when the body has been holding too many things and can't hold them all and picks one to leak.
“Look at me.”
I look at him.
“You heard me say it.”
I nod.
“Say it back.”
My mouth opens.
My mouth has never said the thing he wants me to say.
I don't have a version of myself that can say it.
I'm twenty years old and I've said yes sir to my father a hundred thousand times, and I've never said the only person who fucks me is you to anyone, because nobody has ever fucked me, and nobody has ever asked.
“I…” I say.
“Yeah.”
“I heard you.”
His hand is still on my chest.
His other hand comes up and he fits it under my jaw. He doesn't grip. He sets it there. His thumb is at the corner of my mouth. His fingers are on the side of my neck where the pulse is. He can't help but feel the pulse. My pulse is a seismograph. My pulse is giving him everything.
“I'm gonna do it in this alley,” he says. “You understand me?”
I don't answer because I can't speak.
He leans in. His mouth is at my ear. Close enough that when he breathes out, I can feel the heat of it down the side of my throat.
“I'm gonna take you apart against this wall, sweetheart. Your coach can come looking. I don't give a single solitary fuck. He can come looking and he can find you with my hand down your jeans.”
Something goes off in me like a flare.
I'm not here. But at the same time, I’m completely here. I'm in my own body. I'm watching my own body from above. The body is shaking. The body is hard in its jeans. The body is crying silently. The body is trying to climb into the hand on its face.
I make a sound. I don't know what the sound is. It's small.
“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”
His hand moves down from my chest. Down the middle of me. Over my stomach. Past my belt. I'm going to come. I'm not being touched yet. I'm going to come before I'm touched. I'm a thing that has been wound up for two days. The winding has a finite capacity. The capacity is right now. He hasn't even—
The back door bangs open.
“Creed.”
Grayson. Out of breath. One hand on the door.
Maddox doesn't turn. His hand stays where it is. I can feel it through layers of denim and cotton, and the heat is like a hand made of something other than skin.
“What,” Maddox says. Flat.
“Coach. Inside. He's inside, Creed, he just came in the front.”
I make a noise.
It isn't a word. It's the noise an animal makes when an animal is cornered. I hate it. I hate the noise coming out of me. It's a little noise and it's mine.
Maddox's hand stops.
His eyes are still on me.
For one long second, his eyes stay on me and his hand stays on me and the alley stays cold and the brick stays against my shoulder blades and the security light stays buzzing over our heads.
Then he steps back.